by Marelise da Silva | Nov 8, 2013 | SEO
This has been a busy week on social media with news developments from all the major players. If you haven’t heard, Twitter listed yesterday after months of speculation. In case you haven’t been keeping up with developments in the digital marketing world, here are our top stories of the week:
1. Google Analytics ads a Speed Suggestions report
Google is trying to speed up the internet, and they are taking it seriously. Google Analytics is now offering a speed suggestions report to help you identify the slowest web pages on your website for desktop and mobile browsing.
Google will give your pages a score out of 100 to show potential improvement – the closer your page is to 100, the better. Speed Suggestion reports together with their PageSpeed Insights tool are meant to help web-masters to optimise their most visited pages.
2. Facebook refreshes the like button
The Like button is synonymous with Facebook, so when the social network decides to re-design a button that is seen 22 billion times a day it is a big deal. The Like button has been the same since it was introduced in 2010. Take a look at the old and new Like buttons and let us know what you think!
3. Twitter’s IPO listing finally happened and the market loved it
Yesterday, Twitter listed on the New York Stock Exchange yesterday selling 70 million shares priced at $26 each, making the company worth an estimated $18 billion (including restricted shares). Unlike Facebook, Twitter timed their listing well as the year on year, the market is up 25% and November is historically a strong month for trading.
Buyers responded well with stock prices seeing a high of $50.09 and closing at $44.90 a share by the end of the day. We will have to see what the long term trends will be, but if you would like a good comparison between the Twitter and Facebook’s listing, this article on Forbes is a good read.
4. Pinterest makes a big push towards monetization with a big hire?
This week Pinterest hired Joanne Bradford as Head of Partnerships, showing their commitment to developing commercial and content partnerships. Pinterest introduced promoted pins in October as a first attempt at monetizing Pinterest.
According to TechCrunch, Bradford will oversee partnership strategies and sales organisation. Pinterest wants her to work on product development for advertising products. As the former chief revenue and marketing officer at social media company, Demand Media and president at the San Francisco Chronicle, she is seen as a big hire and it will be interesting to see what Pinterest plans for the future.
This has been an interesting week in social media. For more social media news, follow us @wsioms or contact WSI OMS for social media services.
by Francois Muscat | Oct 21, 2013 | SEO
Google’s AdWords Enhanced Campaigns offer some amazing new tools that can help your company’s online marketing campaign. However, SEO experts agree that not making use of these tools or using them incorrectly could result in your competitors gaining the upper hand.
At the end of the day, to make sure you stay a step ahead of your competitors, it’s always better to enlist the help of a reputable internet marketing company like WSI OMS, but for those of you who want to make sure you personally understand all the options and know which questions to ask, read on.
Here are the most important features of AdWords Enhanced Campaigns:
- Geo-bidding. This is without a doubt the best new feature. It makes it possible for you to see how many people have been looking you up in specific regions and then allows you to bid on these regions in certain percentages and so enhance your search engine optimisation. You can also reduce your SEO in the regions that have shown little interest in your product and/or service and so ensure you don’t waste money unnecessarily.
- Call conversion tracking. This function makes it easy to see how many people called you after visiting your website.
- The new and enhanced AdWords Keyword tool. Now it is even easier to find the right keywords for your online marketing campaign. Apart from giving you keyword ratings, optimal keywords are now also suggested.
- New ad formats. Make sure you make use of the amazing new ad formats that have been made available and as soon as possible. The one to go for is the mega-sized site link, which is sure to make your ad stand out and will give people easy access to your site.
For more information, contact us today. Or, better still, enlist our help to make sure you get the most out of AdWords Enhanced Campaigns.
by Francois Muscat | Oct 14, 2013 | Community Management, SEO
There is no denying that Google’s AdWords Enhanced Campaigns offers some of the best new SEO tools available for online marketing purposes, but if you are not an IT genius that keeps up to date with the latest developments, understanding what they are and how to utilize them correctly can be tricky.
It is therefore advisable to get in contact with experts like WSI who know all there is to know when it comes to AdWords Enhanced Campaigns. They will ensure that all aspects are considered and that you don’t end up wasting your time and money. However, for those of you who still like to know what’s going on or want to get a head start, here is a little information on the best new features:
One of the best new features of the Enhanced Campaigns is a function called geo-bidding. This function makes it possible for you to see how many people have been looking you up in specific regions over the past months or years and allows you to edit the location info for your AdWords account to focus on those regions.
The enhanced AdWords Keyword Tool now also makes it easier to find the right keywords you should utilise. It even goes as far as suggesting keywords best suited for your campaign.
It has also become easier to keep an eye on your conversion rates and a new function called ‘call conversion tracking’ makes it easy to identify just how many of your clients’ or potential clients’ website visits were converted into calls.
There are also new ad formats to be considered if you don’t want your account to look like it’s old and forgotten and waiting to be deleted.
It is probably a good idea in any case to enlist the help of experts and so ensure your company gets the most out of these Enhanced Campaigns.
So contact us today if you need our help or if you want more info our SEO services and AdWords Enhanced Campaigns.
by Francois Muscat | Sep 19, 2013 | SEO
When it comes to Search Engine Optimisation, the game is always changing. Search engines like Google, Yahoo! and Bing are always updating their algorithms, which means that digital marketers need to continuously innovate and find new ways to get (and maintain) their clients’ search engine rankings.
We’ve gathered some useful tools that you will need for your SEO strategy:
Research tools
There’s no way your SEO strategy will work if you’re not spending time researching the various keyword options. Here are a few research tools you need to know about:
- Google Adwords
- KeywordSpy (to track what your competitors are doing)
- Market Samurai (to find niche long tail keywords)
PageSpeed
People don’t like waiting for pages to load and Google knows this. If you want to improve your search results, your pages need to load quickly. Use Google PageSpeed to find out where you can improve the loading time of your pages.
Internal Linking
Internal linking (the keywords used to link various pages within a website) is also very important for SEO purposes – and it also makes your website more ‘sticky’ because it increases the likelihood of users staying on your website for longer. Use SEO Powersuite-Website Auditor to help you with internal linking.
External linking
You’ve probably guessed that external linking is just as important as internal link building. Make sure link prospects (the sites you’re considering exchanging links with) are high quality by using Ontolo.
Always improve and expand your SEO strategy
The most important thing is to never stagnate. Stay on top of new trends and improve your SEO strategy by reading the right blogs and following the right digital marketers on Twitter.
by Marelise da Silva | Jun 3, 2013 | SEO, Website Design
One of the top priorities of every web designer should be that their website design will impact positively on SEO rankings. It’s not enough to build a functional and attractive website and then sit and wait for people to find your company – you have to know how your target audience is going to search for you and then make sure that you’ll be there in the top ranking spots when the look for your products or services.
By creating a website that combines the structural elements of functionality and aesthetics with SEO friendly practises, you’ll be able to effectively drive traffic to your client’s website.
5 ways to improve SEO in your website design
- Add a blog to your design.
This gives you and your client the ability to add fresh, targeted content to the website as often as they’d like. This gives you an SEO advantage because consistent, quality content attracts search engine traffic. If you choose to make your blog interactive, this adds extra value as customers can ask questions and get useful feedback, making them more likely to use and recommend the site.
- Attach analytics tools.
Analytics programmes like Google Analytics allow you to track the activity on your website, showing you where SEO is working and what elements may need more help. You can use this to show your client how the SEO techniques are improving the traffic on their website – and there’s nothing clients like more than to be able to see and measure how well their website is working!
- Make sure your titles are keyword-rich.
This means lots of research, but it’s invaluable to the creation of an SEO optimised web design. These are the words and phrases that potential clients are typing into search engines to find the products and services that your client’s company offers. By using these keywords strategically, you increase your website’s visibility on the search engines, making it easier for customers to find you.
- Use meta tags.
Meta tags are the brief descriptions below the search results that give the user an overview of the website. These are a great opportunity to market the content to the user, convincing them to click on your content rather than your competitor’s.
- Make the content on each page unique.
Google and other search engines penalise websites that repeat content too often, so try to build unique content for each page. You can do this through the use of different keywords and aspects of your client’s business (like different products). Search engines prioritise content that is different – not just from other content on the web, but other content on your page – so make sure each page is as unique as possible to increase your website’s SEO.
WSI is a digital marketing company that specialises in creating website designs that maximise their client’s SEO rankings. For more information, contact us today.
by Marelise da Silva | May 29, 2013 | SEO, Google
Search Engine Optimisation is a very important aspect of any digital marketing strategy. On 22 May Google announced their latest Penguin update. This update to the Google search algorithm is aimed at penalising websites using black hat tactics to improve their SEO. It is estimated that 2.3% of English-US search queries are affected by Penguin 2.0. This might seem like a small percentage, but there are over 5 billion searches per day (making it a rather large number).
If you are worried that your website has been affected, take a look at the tell tale signs and find out how you can fix it.
Has your website been penalised by Penguin 2.0?
- Keyword rankings: If your keyword rankings have declined drastically since the 22nd of May it could be that your website has been affected by the update
- Link Building: Go over all the pages on your website that have received the most link building focus. If your website traffic has declined sharply this is another sign that you have been penalised by the Penguin update.
- Organic Traffic: Measure your organic traffic before and after 22 May. Has your traffic decreased from the 22nd? Check your traffic across major pages.
What to do if you see a sharp decline in traffic since Penguin 2.0
- Spam: Remove any pages that are spammy from your site. If the page can be improved, edit it so that it truly provides value to viewers of your website. If not, remove it entirely.
- Audit your inbound links: Remove any low quality inbound links. You can also make use of Google’s Disavow Links Yool for web-masters.
- Build trustworthy links: To prove to Google that your website is worthy of being ranked near the top, you need to get credible links from third parties. Start an inbound link building campaign targeting websites that rank well.
Google is making it harder for websites to rank using unethical SEO tricks. This cleans up search results ensuring that when searches are conducted only the most valuable results rank at the top of Google. If you are worried that you may have been affected by Penguin 2.0 or if you would like to launch a SEO campaign, contact WSI OMS for more information.
