A Quick Look at Building Backlinks in 2015

A Quick Look at Building Backlinks in 2015

Since backlinks are proving to still be a large part of ranking well in Google, it makes sense to use what amounts to the best practices for acquiring backlinks that not only count with Google, but are sure to withstand scrutiny.
These days, knowing what you can and can't do with backlinks can be totally confusing, and lead to mistakes and sometimes even penalties.
To help avoid that scenario, let's have a look into some of the best practices for building backlinks going forward in 2015, and how you can benefit from them.

5 Best practices of link building in 2015

Vary your anchor text - When Google sees a link profile containing 95% of one particular keyword, it is a sure sign to them that some fairly heavy link engineering has been going on, and you will be penalized. Instead, vary your anchor text to include text that occurs naturally, together with a few naked URLs and "Click Here's", etc.
Go after social links - One of the most effective ways to garner new and relevant backlinks is through your social channels. This works for you in two ways, also showing that your pages are socially engaged.
Natural growth is the ticket - When you get large numbers of links for no clear reason, such as a launch or event, then Google is going to wonder why, and may take action.
Don't purchase backlinks - Steer clear of buying backlinks. Even if you are very careful, too much is out of your control for it to be a safe practice in any way. Those seemingly fantastic deals you see on Fiverr and some of the Black Hat forums can really get you in trouble fast.
Avoid private blog networks - One technique people have been using to engineer lots of relevant backlinks is through the use of private blog networks. Google's recent updates have uncovered many of these, and you need to be a very smart operator to have that tactic work today, which most of us aren't or have time to become. Build links gradually and naturally: you'll win in the long run!

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How to Turn a Negative Review into a Positive

How to Turn a Negative Review into a Positive

It happens to the best of businesses. Once in a while a customer will post a negative review that is going to influence potential customers about your business, products or service. It can't be helped.
What can be helped is the way you deal with an unhappy customer. Having a clear plan to manage the occasional negative review is essential for any business seriously interested in its long-term survival. Let's have a look at several ways you can minimize the impact of poor reviews, and indeed, turn them into a positive for all involved.

5 Tips for turning a negative review into a positive

1. Don't fight back! - However much you want to defend yourself and your company, be sure you suppress the desire. It never works. You'll never be seen in a positive light. Preferably instead, take responsibility and use this opportunity to show awesome customer service.
2. Answer promptly - Nothing is worse than simply ignoring a complaint or taking forever to get back to them. It indicates a basic lack of concern on your part in regards to the customer. Make sure you have some way to monitor mentions of your business, such as Google Alerts, to help you deal with these things quickly.
3. Apologize and make amends - Nobody wants to hear a bunch of lame excuses, or even genuine ones. Offer a sincere apology for their experience, and generously offer a way to make it up to them. Doing so with sincerity can go a long way toward turning them around in your direction.
4. Be transparent - Standing up and taking responsibility for your mistakes makes you look very good in the eyes of other customers who are watching. And they are watching!
5. Ask for more reviews - The very best way to counteract the effect of negative reviews of your business is to generate more positive ones. Continually ask your customers to leave feedback for you, and chances are, if you are doing well, you'll get a majority of very good reviews. If not, you'll at least have a blueprint on how to fix what is wrong!

Great Tips for Creating a Video Marketing Strategy

Great Tips for Creating a Video Marketing Strategy

Since there's no longer any doubt that video rules this day and age of online marketing, it's high time to kick your video marketing strategy into overdrive and start harvesting some of the windfall that is coming to marketers that are.
The average internet user watches 206 videos each month, and you need to get your share of that, since videos are 4X more engaging than static content, and are proven to convert far better.
Let's look at 5 quick tips to help you come up with a video marketing strategy singularly crafted for your business.
5 Items you need in your video marketing strategy

1. Understand your audience - You first and foremost need to understand who your audience is and what they are interested in. After you know this, all else will follow. Good ways to uncover this crucial information are with surveys, polls and bribes!
2. Decide what types of videos to make - This is somewhat dependent on the talents you already possess, together with those around you, and your budget. Since you can easily make effective videos now with little more than a smartphone, the barrier of equipment is largely done away with. If you are uncomfortable shooting live action videos, consider making screencast videos, or slideshow videos, where you simply narrate the screen or slides. Both can usually get the message across well.
3. Set some objectives and goals - Understanding what the goals are not only of your video marketing overall but of a specific video is very helpful, both in producing content and marketing it. Know what you want to accomplish with each video before you make it!
4. Use a calendar - Placing someone in charge of this task as well as scheduling your videos makes them far more likely to actually get done. Using a production or editorial calendar is an excellent way to keep an eye on your overall strategy and marketing.
5. Don't forget to market your videos - Just making the videos isn't good enough. Millions are made everyday, and you have to have your videos stand out amongst a sea of competing videos, you need to do some basic marketing to at least get them to show up well in YouTube. Not hard to do, but definitely necessary!

See these 5 Reasons Why People Buy Online

See these 5 Reasons Why People Buy Online

If you sell anything online, it's imperative for you to understand why people shop and ultimately buy online. This kind of information can go a long way toward helping you design your sales pages, ads and more.
You may think that the reasons people give for buying online are the same; predominantly price. But you would be wrong. In fact price is far down the list. It's a given that the online prices are generally lower, given that there isn't any visible overhead. Even so, there are some very specific and sometimes surprising reasons people give for purchasing online.
Let's look at 5 of the top ones.

5 Reasons people give for buying online

1. Generally a far wider selection and choice - Most online shops are apt to carry a far wider selection of goods for sale than a brick and mortar store is able to display within their walls.
2. People like to read reviews from other buyers - Absent having a friend who's purchased the item in question, people will seek out whomever they can find for an opinion on the product, as long as it's not from the company itself.
3. It's a major time saver - In a day and age when none of us have a spare moment to call our own, the ability to shop from you're your desk or your phone while vegging out on the couch is a blessing. Not only does this save us from having to venture out in the our cars, burn gas, and drive all over town, the very idea of doing it all form home and having it delivered to our door is appealing.
4. Can you say "Free shipping" - This is one of the top reasons people give for buying online, which at first glance makes little sense. I mean, if you went out and got it, there's be NO shipping! But still this ranks as a top reason for buying online.
5. Easy return process - Admit it, you might not like it. If one trip outside the house was too much, imagine how much you'll hate two! Having a rock solid guarantee and easy return process is a major factor for people choosing to buy online.

Want to See How Other Small Businesses are Using Social Media?

Want to See How Other Small Businesses are Using Social Media?

It wasn't that long ago that small business deemed social media nothing more than a time-sucking distraction; something to keep your employees from whiling away their days upon. Not any longer. Now you'd give your brother's 401k for someone social media savvy enough to take your business to the next level.
The truth is, you probably have employees spending their work time on social media. What you may not have is a plan for how to best utilize their talents.

What are small businesses doing with social media

Now some 74.5 percent of small businesses report using social media to promote their companies, and they're throwing money into it as well, as 21.4 percent count this as their highest media spend of all. Clearly, social media has gone from a waste of time to a viable marketing channel.
55 percent of these companies have a Facebook business page, and another 20 percent are using Facebook Ads to promote posts on that page.
There are other players, naturally, and some of these include LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest and Instagram. You can also have Google+ in this group, even as they transform yet again into what's is known as Google My Business, an all-encompassing amalgam of Google+, Places, Local and Maps. (and probably something else by now!)

What can you do to get your business working with social media?

First of all dive right in! Make a Facebook Page, get accounts at the social sites that make sense for you, and above all, don't spread yourself too thin. You'll want to be posting content to these sites, not merely quotes from dead guys and pictures of cute kittens.
Start with only a few social properties, like Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn and possibly Twitter. If you have a lot of products that you can showcase, consider adding Pinterest and Instagram. The key here though is to make sure you don't take on more than you can reasonably manage.
Make videos, and always endeavor to point people to where you want them to go, preferably your blog or site. Engage with anyone who wants to strike up a conversation, and be generous with your comments and knowledge. You'll find that before long you'll have more of a following than you expected!

See How to Easily Manage your Local Business Listings

See How to Easily Manage your Local Business Listings

One critical yet sometimes unappetizing part of running a local business is managing your local listings. The hours involved are probably not exactly what you had in mind, nevertheless, making sure your listings are not only correct but aiding your business are many times the difference between local success or failure.
If you have multiple locations for your business this work might be even more unsavory, but steel yourself with the fact that getting this part right can unlock the door to a better business in numerous ways. Let's check out some of what you need to do to achieve good local listing management.

The basics: getting your local listings in order

Here are some of the things you'll need to get in order from the beginning.

• Make sure your business information is consistent across and all platforms you presently have. One mistake here can ruin everything. This means business names, addresses, phone number, websites and social media.
• Be sure you are reachable. A phone number is a must-have for a local business, even if it only leads to a voicemail. (please don't)
• Completely fill out any profiles you have on sites that have your local listings. There is very little that creates mistrust more than a business who doesn't want to tell you anything about themselves.

Taking local listings a step beyond

After you've got your business listings on your sites and local directories finished, it's time to look into what you can reap from the many and varied local business sites designed to help you get noticed. Many of these won't charge a fee, but there are a few that are worth spending a few bucks on. What follows is a few ideas to get you moving.

• Make sure you are indexed in the major search engines, Google, Yahoo and Bing.
• Take a peek at sites like Infogroup, Acxiom, Localeze, and Factual. These aggregators provide data to mobile companies and search engines alike, and are very useful in extending your reach and visibility.
• Yelp, Yext, Foursquare, Facebook have a lot of authority when it comes to local business. Good reviews on these can boost your business in a short time.
• Tools like Bright Local, Moz Local, Whitespark or Local Buzz are extremely handy when it comes to monitoring citations and tracking your progress. You'll need to enlist one of these to help garner more and better citations that will give your business a boost.

Check Out These Awesome Visual Content Management Tips

Check Out These Awesome Visual Content Management Tips

These days businesses are creation visual content at an astounding rate, and the question soon arises, how and where to manage these assets? The sheer numbers of images, infographics, videos and creative web art bring into play the need for a cohesive strategy for keeping it all organized should and when you need it. Assets they are, good for use down the road and as part of your company's intellectual property. If you ever wanted to sell the company at some point, it would be smart to have your visual content assets managed well.

The time savings alone that will occur if you didn't have to search high and low for that particular image or video can be worth it. Let alone the need to ensure you have proof of your ownership of these images should a copyright infringement action come against you. That could be an expensive mistake, and one that is totally preventable. Let's have a quick look at how you can get a better handle on your company's visual assets.

5 Tips for managing your visual content

1. Create or purchase a system - If you have someone on your team who can establish a system for you, fantastic. If not, there are a number of solutions available, including off site cloud solutions. A company called North Plains is a leader in digital asset management.
2. Name your files appropriately - Naming your files with a filename that can actually identify the content is a must-do. There's nothing worse than having to open dozens of files that are named IMG457723760 looking for one particular picture.
3. Limit access and establish guidelines - Be sure that you have some control over who accesses your files. This can change as time passes, but keeping up on it is preferable to having problems down the road.
4. Store your content in one central location - Make it easy on everyone by storing your visual content in one location, assuming you have appropriate backups enabled. This obviously saves time and expense, and if they are stored in a cloud, there is minimal risk of data loss.
5. Have a protocol for how it is used - Ensure that no one uses images or videos in a fashion or manner that isn't what you want. Eager and over-zealous employees can wreak havoc with well-meaning but misguided adventures.

How Does Google Use Keywords to Determine Relevance on Your Pages

How Does Google Use Keywords to Determine Relevance on Your Pages

All of us want to rank our pages high in Google's search results, and as time goes on, the factors that determine where your pages rank is constantly changing.
There are at this count more than 200 items that play a part in the Google search algorithm, and keyword relevance is one that we'd like to focus on here. We feel that keywords, while only a factor, influence the remainder of the ranking in many ways. In a sense, it's where everything starts.
In a search world not so long ago and far away, you could get top-notch rankings by just stuffing as many of your primary keywords into your content as you could reasonable fit. Not any more. Google's search algorithm has gotten smarter, and is able to discern a lot more intent, and recognizes keyword stuffing instantly.
This is not to say you can't do well by strategically inserting keywords in all of the right places. Indeed, you need to do this. You just have to do it naturally.

How to use keywords to lift your search rankings

There are specific ways to use your keywords to help your search ranking. These include things like making sure they are in the title tag, page titles, page URL, H1-5 tags, and within the content itself.
Today having the keyword in your URL, title tag, H1-5 headings and sprinkled judiciously throughout the content is the best way you can help your cause.

What keyword tactics can hurt you

Try to stuff keywords in this day and age, or use cloaked content, and you'll find yourself on the wrong end of a Google penalty.
Another way is through the improper use of anchor text in your site's backlinks. Having all the backlinks that appear for a particular page show up with the same anchor text, and all be followed links, is a sure red flag in this current algorithm. Strive for as natural a link profile as you can build, and vary your anchor text with natural phrases that would occur, such as a few "click here" and the like.

Want to Generate More Content? Get a Content Marketing Plan!

Want to Generate More Content? Get a Content Marketing Plan!

The lifeblood of all businesses on the internet is content. It's what your readers come to look at and study, and without having fresh, innovative compelling content, your business really has nothing to say.
And it's not simply words. It's a lot of them, authoritative and compelling, original and unique that drive both search engine rankings and traffic. It's also many other types of content, particularly visual that gets the job done.
But how do we make this happen? The simplest and best way is by the creation of a content marketing plan, which enables you to keep a steady stream of content pouring into your site, and increasing your search rankings at the same time. Let's take a look at four steps toward creating a workable content marketing plan.

Creating your content marketing plan

Determine who your audience is and what they want - Each and every business is unique in that it has a demographic singular unto itself. You've got a set of customers and people interested in what you do that is yours and yours alone. Identifying this audience and getting an idea of what it is they want to know, and dovetailing that with your business goals is your task here.
Decide on types of content - There are many types of content you can utilize, from simple blog posts to whitepapers, videos, infographics and much more. Decide what you are best able to produce and get on it!
Post new content regularly - If you post once per month, or even once a week, you might as well not do it at all. Statistics indicate that companies that create 15 blog posts each month average 1,200 new leads per month. And that's just blog posts; not even counting all of those other types of content you'll be creating.
Promote your content - Once you've created this wonderful new content, don't make the fatal mistake of doing nothing about it. Get out there and tell the world about it, promoting it on your social media channels and any place else you can. There is simply too much competition to be heard on the Web otherwise.