The Battle for Traffic: Organic SEO vs. Social Media Marketing

SEO and SMM are like pizza and cheese: you can get one without the other, but, believe me, it isn’t worth it.

Nowadays SEO cannot be effective without well-executed content curation. And that’s where social media kicks in — it helps you unlock untapped potential. Compared to other marketing channels, social media benefits SEO in unexpected ways. It’s not surprising that SEO and SMM have slowly become closely intertwined activities that all businesses want to take advantage of. But how exactly can SEO and SMM work together? Do social media signals affect your site’s visibility in Google? I’ve been investigating this topic for quite a long time and here's what I’ve learned so far:

• Social media signals don’t influence site rankings
• SEO isn’t effective without harnessing social media channels

In this post, I want to highlight the following idea: When you share content on SMM channels you’re not only getting engagement, but also bringing visitors to your site. This in turn helps you boost your site’s visibility: SMM corresponds to SEO and indirectly influences website performance in Google. My analysis shows that SMM impacts SEO much more than you might think. The truth is that, paradoxically, organic channels bring more traffic to SMM-focused blogs than to SEO-focused ones.

WHAT IS GOOGLE REMARKETING AND HOW IT WORKS

Remarketing is a clever way to connect with visitors to your website who may not have made an immediate purchase or enquiry. It allows you to position targeted ads in front of a defined audience that had previously visited your website - as they browse elsewhere around the internet.

The remarketing ads can be delivered in either or both text and image display formats. The ads are managed in Google AdWords and are shown on web pages visited by your target audience that accept Google advertising placements.

Google remarketing is an ideal tactic especially where the sales process is long and considered and competitive. Executed in the right way it can be a powerful tool to improve sales conversions and to raise your brand profile.

How does Google remarketing work?
It's quite simple really. Remarketing works by placing cookies on your website visitors machine when they meet your criteria. Their cookie ID is added to your remarketing list. You can have multiple lists with a range of different criteria.

For example you may wish to target visitors that viewed a particular page or section on your website but didn't make a purchase or complete and enquiry form.

There are a number of advertising controls including the period of time that a cookie ID stays on your remarketing list, impression caps on how many ads per day are shown to an individual and the ability to block ads on certain websites.

The Google remarketing feature has recently been through a revision and Google has added more features and controls for advertisers. The remarketing feature now allows more flexibility through using upgraded Google Analytics code. This allows for lists to be created and managed without the need to place specific code on the website.

What do I need to be aware of?
There is a minimum threshold of 100 cookie ID's on each remarketing list before a campaign can become active.

To be successful it's important to a) make sure your ad is highly relevant to what you know visitors are looking for and b) contains some form of enticement to encourage them back to your website. For example you could display a special discounted offer on that item.

If your aim is raise brand awareness then you can create ads that achieve exactly that by displaying your brand to visitors over a period of days, weeks or months. And as remarketing is part of Google AdWords you will be able to track outcomes through normal conversion tracking.

Why aren’t all my xml sitemap pages indexed in Webmaster Tools?

In the last few days I’ve encountered a surprising number of clients and even SEOs who don’t fully understand XML sitemaps, so I’m here to clear up some things.

Let’s say you half read a blog post somewhere that said “if your site doesn’t have an XML sitemap, your site will never be indexed and you will be poor, miserable and die lonely”.  So, you got your developer or SEO to make an XML sitemap for your website, or maybe you did it yourself with a free tool (because you’re cheap).  All giddy and excited, you submit your sitemap through Google Webmaster Tools and wait for the magical day for Google to crawl it.  Like Xmas morning, you creep down the stairs, log into GWT and start to cry because you see a report that looks like this:

Google Webmaster Tools Sitemap Report

“Only 262 pages indexed!” you scream.  “Why does Googlez hate me?  Imma fire my SEO and kick a baby!”

In a fevered response, you (or your SEO) goes line by line through your sitemap.xml file to make sure there are no broken links, or malformed URLs (good for you!), but you can’t find anything.  So instead, you resign yourself to being poor, miserable and dying lonely.

Well..  here’s something you may not have considered..

All URLs in a sitemap.xml file must return a 200 OK response

I find myself constantly amused by the number of XML Sitemaps I come across that have URLs that either 404 or redirect with a 301 or 302.  What’s even more amusing, is when I find URLs that have been disallowed via robots.txt.

So, to help you all understand why the URLs in your XML sitemap may not be indexing fully, I’ve made some easy-to-follow pictures!  Why?  Because I know how much you hate reading.

Here is not index reason:

URLs in XML Sitemap returning 404 Not Found responses

URLs in XML Sitemap returning 301 or 302 redirect responses

URLs in XML Sitemap disallowed via Robots.txt

URLs in XML Sitemap returning 200 OK responses

URL With Duplicate content.

MAy different version of your domain name.


Now, before you start looking… no, this site doesn’t have an XML sitemap file.  Why?  Because they’re not necessary!  An XML sitemap is only a tool to help crawlers discover pages they might not normally find, usually because you have a crappy, unspiderable javascript menu that plays a Megadeth song every time you hover over it with your mouse, because your usability expert told you that was the future of the web.

What is the average CTR on Facebook ads?

What is the average CTR on Facebook ads?

This is a simple question with a complex answer. I'll break down my answer in a few parts:

Can you take CTR to the Bank?
Why You'd Want to Intentionally Want a Low CTR (sometimes).
CTR is Relative to Your Competition.
Some General Rules of Thumb for Ad Engagement

1. Can You Take CTR to the Bank?

No, you can't. I often hear people bragging about incredible CTR's, low CPC's, or other simply wonderful non-commercial aspects of their ads. Welcome my friend to the world of: Vanity Metrics. A vanity metric is something that may make your ads look good, but actually have only indirect relationship to actual commercial success.

You can't go to the bank with a great CTR. I can write the most juicy, engaging, and seductive ad in the universe, achieving a Zeus-Like CTR of 100%, but if no one buys anything: It would be more Achilles' Heel than Lightning Bolt. My time spent optimize just for CTR would be a poor investment of my time.

ROAS: Return on Ad Spend: the only metric you need.

In the world of PPC metrics, only one matters: How much money you made from your ads, and how much they cost. This can be represented by ROAS (Return on ad spend), which is (Revenue from ads - cost) / cost. Or cost over revenue (cost / revenue). Or revenue over cost (revenue / cost). In any discussion of any metric, make sure you are optimizing for ROAS, not CTR. Chasing CTR without attention to ROAS is a fool's errand, because CTR has only an indirect link to ROAS.

2. Why You'd Want to Tank Your CTR Sometimes.

When you pay for ads in an oCPM or CPM manner, a high CTR is fantastic. It means you're getting more clicks, for less money. If you pay 1 dollar for 1,000 impressions, you absolutely want as many clicks with those 1,000 impressions, because your cost doesn't change if 1,000 people click or 1 person clicks. That's great, but what about the bottom line?

What's better, bidding oCPM and getting a 5% CTR with a ROAS of 200%, or bidding CPC, getting a 1% CTR with an ROAS of 400%. Hopefully you know the answer here.

Let's say you're targeting dentists with FB Ads. You offer marketing services and want new clients. You could write a really great ad about a story of a dentist who gets 100 new patients a month. You get a huge CTR, but you realize you're getting a lot of low quality leads, maybe from dental students, or dental hygienists who can't make the executive decisions the actual head of practice can make. It's fine if your goal is branding and awareness, it's not great if you're trying to convert sales. High CTR, potentially bad ROAS.

Alternatively, what if we included the terms: "Attention Dentists" or "Running a Dental Practice?" As long as you are obeying FB ad guidelines, you can pre-qualify anyone from clicking on your ad in the first place. Leaving all the non-dentsits from being interested in your ad. Low CTR, high ROAS.

The classic example of this is including price, to prevent those people who aren't willing to spend that much on a product from converting.

3. CTR is Very Relative.

Let's start with very real situations:

I got a CTR of 10% one time. Is that good? Not if my competition was getting 15%.
I got a CTR of 5% on my retargeting ads, and 1% on my interests campaign. Is that bad? Let's discuss!

On FB, there are so many different layers.

Interest targeting
Interest + friends of fan targeting
Interest + friends of fan + behavioral (like home value over 500,000)
Retargeting
Retargeting users who have visited your checkout page
Lookalikes to visitors
lookalike to customers
Email list
Top of sales funnel lead generation
Bottom of Sales Funnel "Close" ads
the list goes on...

What's my point? If you expect the same CTR across all your ads and campaigns,....well, don't. Just like I wouldn't expect my AdWords branded CTR to be the same as a one word competitive term, don't expect the same CTR across the board.

4. Some Rules of Thumb for FB CTR (Since you asked).

Again, a suitable CTR is an indirect measure of success. assuming you have a healthy ROAS, you'll want to attract more people to your landing page.

This is where CTR is useful, when you are trying to use it to increase your ROAS, not using it to start obtaining an ROAS.

If you have a CTR of less than 1% on the newsfeed, it's time to work on your ad.
If you have a CTR of less than 0.5% on the Right-Hand-Side (RHS), it's time to work on your ad.
If you have a CTR of less than 3% with a multi-product ad, it's time to work on your ad.
In my experience, an average CTR on the newsfeed is 2%, and average CTR on the RHS is about 0.75%, average CTR of a multi-product ad is about 5%.
When you increase the relationship (interest to lookalike to retargeting) You should expect an CTR increase of at least one. i.e. If i get a 1% CTR from same ad being served to cold traffic in an interest campaign, I should try to see 2% from a lookalike campaign, and a 3% in a retargeting campaign. That said, what are you doing running the same ad to all these different people?

Bonus: #5: What you start with, shouldn't be what you end with.

If your starting CTR on day 1 is the same as your CTR on the 5th day of running the ad is the same, you're doing it wrong. Everyday, you should be going in there and pausing poor performing ad copy, images, headlines, etc. Because PPC isn't about perfection, it's about improvement.

HOW CAN I GET MORE TRAFFIC ON WEBSITE?.

Depending on your budget, competition, and ability to capitalize on that traffic, you might need to spend anywhere from 5k-25k per month on those activities alone to achieve parity with the others in your market.

Also, depending on what kind of traffic you need, SEO and PPC specifically might not even pay for themselves. They're really only useful for people who don't know your URL or business/product name.
If you've got a nice database, customer list, partner's customer list, or active community then spending money on those programs will take money out of investing in programs that capitalize on extremely valuable assets you already have.

‪#‎traffic‬ ‪#‎website‬ ‪#‎seo‬, ‪#‎ppc‬, ‪#‎marketing‬

Top 10 Best Social Media Marketing and Content marketing Strategy in 2015

Leveraging the power of content and social media marketing can help elevate your audience and customer base in a dramatic way. But getting started without any previous experience or insight could be challenging.

It is vital that you understand social media marketing fundamentals. From maximizing quality to increasing your online entry points, abiding by these 10 laws will help build a foundation that will serve your customers, your brand and - perhaps most importantly - your bottom line.

1. The Strategy of Listening


Success with social media and content marketing requires more listening and less talking. Read your target audience's online content and join discussions to learn what is important to them. Only then can you create content and spark conversations that add value rather than clutter to their lives.


2. The Strategy of Focus

It is better to specialize than to be a jack-of-all-trades. A highly-focused social media and content marketing strategy intended to build a strong brand has a better chance for success than a broad strategy that attempts to be all things to all people.


3. The Strategy of Quality


Quality trumps quantity. It is better to have 1,000 online connections who read, share and talk about your content with their own audiences than 10,000 connections who disappear after connecting with you the first time.

4. The Strategy of Patience


Social media and content marketing success does not happen overnight. While it is possible to catch lightning in a bottle, it is far more likely that you will need to commit to the long haul to achieve results.



5. The Strategy of Compounding



If you publish amazing, quality content and work to build your online audience of quality followers, they will share it with their own audiences on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, their own blogs and more.



6. The Strategy of Influence



Spend time finding the online influencers in your market who have quality audiences and are likely to be interested in your products, services and business. Connect with those people and work to build relationships with them.


If you get on their radar as an authoritative, interesting source of useful information, they might share your content with their own followers, which could put you and your business in front of a huge new audience.

7. The Strategy of Value


If you spend all your time on the social Web directly promoting your products and services, people will stop listening. You must add value to the conversation. Focus less on conversions and more on creating amazing content and developing relationships with online influencers. In time, those people will become a powerful catalyst for word-of-mouth marketing for your business.



8. The Strategy of Acknowledgment

You would not ignore someone who reaches out to you in person so don't ignore them online. Building relationships is one of the most important parts of social media marketing success, so always acknowledge every person who reaches out to you.



9. The Strategy of Accessibility


Do not publish your content and then disappear. Be available to your audience. That means you need to consistently publish content and participate in conversations. Followers online can be fickle and they would not hesitate to replace you if you disappear for weeks or months.

10. The Strategy of Reciprocity


You can not expect others to share your content and talk about you if you do not do the same for them. So, a portion of the time you spend on social media should be focused on sharing and talking about content published by others.







Source :  Thanks to jabalpurdirectory and google for pics.

SEO and SMO Strategy in 2015

                    SEO & SMO Strategy / Checklist / Recommendations


On Page SEO Optimization


SEO Initial

 Follow Google Webmaster guidelines -  http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35769

 Get the strategy from Google SEO Starter Guide -  http://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrusted_dlcp/www.google.com/e  n/us/webmasters/docs/search-engine-optimization-starter-guide.pdf

 Maintain the website in silo architecture (tree like hierarchy)

 Competitor analysis (Analyze for their services, keywords, UI, navigation etc,)

 Maintain structured markup language



SEO URL Recommendations

 Redirect non-WWW version to WWW version URL

 URL optimization - Choose hyphen instead of underscores between keywords, avoid stop words(the, that, is, was)

 Not case sensitive (But, better to use lower case letters or else redirect upper case to corresponding lower case using .htaccess server file)

 URL character length - 115 (Not a thumb rule, keep short as much as possible)

 Always best practice to use absolute URL



SEO METAs

 Title optimization - Less than 70 characters (Keep branding at end of the content)

 META keywords - Less than 250 characters

o Avoid unrelated keywords

o Use Keyword Research tool -  Google Adwords Keyword Tool

 META Description - Lest than 160 characters (Have call-to-action words like subscribe, free quote, grab today etc,)

 To avoid showing the directory listing in SERP for the branding (Recommended)

o Use <meta name="robots" content="noodp" > if the site is listed in DMOZ - ODP

o Use <meta name="robots" content=" noydir" > if the site is listed in Yahoo! Directory

 By default use <meta name="robots" content="index, follow"/> to index the page and to follow the links in the page

 To block individual page insert <meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow"> in the corresponding page

 Avoid META refresh for less than 5 seconds


Content for SEO

 H1 - Insert the primary keyword (Use only one H1)

 H2-H6 optimization (Insert all primary & sec keywords)

 Avoid linking in header tags (H1 - H6) unnecessarily

 Avoid duplicate title, description and content as well

 Keyword Density - Max 3%

 Keep keyword prominence and proximity

 Better maintain less than 100 links in a page (Not a thumb rule)

 Use rel="nofollow" in AHREF tags for external(outbound) links (Avoid linking if it is low quality, dodgy or link farm site)

 Add blog feed to show up to 3 posts in homepage (Which updates homepage frequently)

 Create and update both the HTML & XML sitemaps

 Sitemap should not exceed more 50,000 links and 10 MB of file size. If it exceeds create multiple sitemaps and use sitemap index file

 Create robots.txt file to block the folders in the site (Eg: contact form pages) • Also give the sitemap link at the end

 Use social sharing buttons for resources, articles, especially blogs



Image Optimization Recommendations

1. Image optimization

• File name optimization (eg: oursource.jpg)

• ALT tag (Insert keywords)

• Title tag (Insert keywords)

• Insert image dimension

2. Use CSS sprites (background images) if the image has more text

3. Add favicon



Site Navigation

1. Ensure for Text Navigation and avoid JavaScript or Flash navigation, where search engine bots can’t crawl

2. Use proper breadcrumb navigation

3. Avoid 404 or broken pages

4. Contextualization (Linking in the content)

5. Give link to the required resources, case study or articles in site navigation (left, right, bottom)

6. Insert website search button ( prefer top right corner)

7. Have a customized 404 page to avoid losing traffic




• List out all services / products in the body area

• Give social media profile links (Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Google+...)

• Provide a physical contact address as well

8. Add a quick contact form in all the pages



SEO Blogging Recommendations

1. Instead of archives in the blog navigation, better differentiate with categories or cloud tagging

2. Tag each post based on its keywords

3. Provide author name for the blog posts with linking his / her G + profile

4. Add pagination to navigate to inner pages at end of the blog landing page, like “2,3…10, next”

5. Use Facebook like button, Twitter follow button, Google + Add to circles, RSS feed, newsletter subscription, YouTube channel, Pinterest Follow buttons to build social reputation

6. Use social sharing buttons - Facebook, Twitter, Google +1, Linkedin etc,

7. Add “Email to friend”

8. Add Twitter widget to show up to 2 - 3 tweets in navigation

9. Add Facebook “Recommendations bar” - Improves traffic (At end of the article, pops to read another post based on FB likes for the particular post)

10. Show popular posts and recent comments in right navigation



Recommendation Website Speed

 Code / HTML optimization

 Minimize HTTP Requests

 Minify CSS, flash, frames

 Make JavaScript/CSS external

 Enable compression - Using Gzip

 Use server side caching

 Minimize DNS lookups

 Reduce # of 301 redirects

 Maintain web page size less than100k (Not a thumb rule)

 Two ways to boost site speed automatically from Google -

o https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/psol

o https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/service

 Tocheck page speed online -  https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights

 Page Speed Insights Rules -  https://developers.google.com/speed/docs/insights/rules


Trustworthy / Authority

1. Quality content (Rich content)

2. Content Uniqueness

3. The quality & quantity of websites linking (inbound links)

4. The quality & quantity of websites we are linking to

5. The overall usability experience on your website

6. The validity of information about the website

• Add a physical contact address

• Author name for blog posts

7. DMOZ listing, profiles in Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, YouTube etc,

8. Linking website in Google + page and linking G + page in the website (vice versa)

9. Additional SERP info. - Having maps, breadcrumbs, date, search box etc,  (Rich Snippet)

10. Google Webmaster verification

11. Fresh content update

12. Analytics - tracking website



Avoid Spamming

1. Better keep the links less than 100 (Page should be readable to the users)

2. Avoid Keyword Cannibalization (Don’t target same keywords in multiple pages)

3. Avoid hidden text or hidden links (Eg: Both text & background in same color)

4. Don't use cloaking or sneaky redirects (Showing different content for crawlers and users)

5. Don't load pages with irrelevant keywords

6. Avoid keyword stuffing

7. Don't create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content. (Avoid duplication by canonical tag or 301 or 302 redirection)

8. Don't create pages with malicious behavior, such as phishing or installing viruses, trojans, or other badware (Also ensure no one hacked intentionally)

9. Avoid "doorway" pages (Spamdexing, Gateway) created just for search engines, with little or original content



Issues Fixing

Fix all issues noticing in Google webmaster tool especially messages, crawl errors, malwares and duplicated content, long, short & missing title, description.


Web page Testing

1. HTML & W3C validation

2. Check whether the site works in text browsers such as Lynx

3. Is compatible and rendering in different browser versions



Off Page (Link Building) Optimization

1. Competitor Analysis (analyze competitor backlink strategy)

2. Always build links in this format  (http://www.)

3. Check qualify of the page with factors like Page Rank (PR), Google cache date, no. of inbound & outbound links, domain age, relevancy, IP address, DA, PA, etc,

4. Link Building Types

• Search Engine Submission

• Directory Submission:  limited with Good DA, PA, Dofollow

• Social Bookmarking (Recommended)

• Forum Posting

• Question & Answering (Eg: Yahoo Answers,, Flixya)

• Blog Commenting

• Article Submission

• Press Release

• Video posting (E.g.: YouTube)

• RSS feed submission

• Local Optimization (Business Listing)

• Mapping - Google, Bing

• Social Sharing - Facebook, Twitter, Google +, Linkedin, Pinterst, (Recommended)

• Guest Blogging


5. Claim accounts on the following pages for reputation,


• Dmoz.com

• YouTube.com

• Yelp.com

• Maps.Google.com

• Local.Yahoo.com

• WordPress.com

• BlogSpot.com

• Tumblr.com

• Squidoo.com




• HubPages.com

• Flickr.com

• Wikipedia.org

• .edu

• .gov

• .org

6. Avoid link exchange (reciprocal)

7. Avoid paid links

8. Avoid links from link farms (page having only links)



SEO Tools & Resources

 Xenu Link Sleuth - To check broken links, redirected pages, orphan files, HTML sitemap creation and complete site statistics

 Copyscape  - Duplicate content checker

 Google Trends - Shows the trend for a particular keyword in Country & City basis

 Blekko - Search Engine which provide complete backlinks with backlinks stats

 SEOBook for Firefox,  Google Toolbar - Addon which provides complete SEO info

 List of Search Engines Add URL or submit URL

 SEO Browser -  http://www.seo-browser.com/

 RichSnippetTesting Tool -  http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets

 HTTP Status Checker -  http://tools.seobook.com/server-header-checker/

 SEOmoz Blog - Blog to know all SEO updates and queries

 SEO Powersuite

Social Media

• Posting something interesting to get viral and to engage (For branding)

• Free giveaways tactic

• Share all blog posts and new service / products pages in all social media and social bookmarking sites

• Use  UTM parameter to track the links (CTR, Referral Campaign)

• URL Shorten Matter (Bitly, Google URL Shortner)

• Set Up Social Segments for Tracking in Analytics




1. Facebook

o Tag peoples and pages in posts

o Ask like, comment & share for posts

o Post at least twice or thrice a daily

 Post interesting topics
 Use #hashtag for content engage


1. Twitter


• Tweet 2 to 3 a day

• Re-tweet and make favorite whichever inspires

• Mention(@) others and engage

• Post fun and interesting

• Use # (hash tag) to trend for keywords

• Follow 10 relevant peoples or companies a week


2. Linkedin

• Ask 1 to 2 recommendations a week

• Connect to 30 - 50 peoples a week

• Follow 10-15  new companies a week

• Post relevant blog posts in groups



3. Google +


• Share twice a day in profile & company page

• Make sure posts are public to reach

• Add 50 to 70 new peoples a week

• Create events to publicize

• Try making hangouts


4. Pinterest


• Pin 6 images a week  (1 per day)

• Use keywords in title, description

• Pin products and services work flow images

• Follow 35+ interesting boards a week relevant to us



    6. YouTube

• Subscribe 3 channels a week

• Share 3 videos a week in Facebook, Twitter, Google +, etc

• Post videos of company hosts