What I Learned From My Google+ Experiment
About a month ago, I decided to put Google+ to the test. I’d been hearing tons of mixed messages about the platform, ranging from “Google+ is a ghost town!” to “Google+ is the best thing that ever happened to online marketing!”
I signed up for Google+ with a healthy dose of skepticism. Well, I didn’t really sign up. Google automatically signs up its Gmail members for Google+, so I already had a profile. I just didn’t have a pretty-looking page.
I figured I’d spruce my profile up with a custom header, then post something to Google+ once a day. After thirty days, I hoped to have a sense of whether it was worth the time I’d invested. Continue reading
7 Little-Known Factors That Affect Your Search Engine Ranking
Chris Martin is a freelance writer for a wide variety of websites, including Business.com, GutterHelmet.com, and SafeAuto.com.
Just because you’ve assembled an impressive website doesn’t mean the cyberworld will beat a path to your door. You also have to optimize your site for search engines by using strategies such as keyword placement and backlinks.
But SEO is more complex than that. In fact, there are several factors that will affect your search engine ranking that you may not be aware of. Here are seven of them:
- Content freshness. Unfortunately, it’s not enough to simply build your website and leave it alone – at least, not if you want it to place high on search engine pages. SEO algorithms put a strong emphasis on newer content. An easy way to accomplish this is to maintain a blog or oversee a forum on your site. Continue reading
How to Evaluate Your Online Marketing Strategy
This is a guest blog post by Charles Mburugu, a technology enthusiast who is currently writing for web design library.
Many small business owners and solo entrepreneurs use tactics such as pay-per-click advertising, search engine optimization and social media to promote their products or services. But having an online marketing strategy is not enough. You also need to evaluate that strategy and alter it from time to time.
The following ideas will help you evaluate your online marketing strategies for best results.
1. Measure your stats using Google Analytics
When it comes to Google Analytics, you should not just look at how much traffic you are attracting, but also its conversion rate. Other stats to consider are:
• Time on site – This refers to the amount of time a visitor spends on your site. You will be able to establish which sources bring in visitors who stay longer on your site.
• URL destination – This refers to the number of people visiting a particular page of your site.
• Page/visit – This refers to the number of pages a single person visits during one session. The higher, the better.
• Event – This refers to actions such as clicking on the play button, an outbound link or a download link. Continue reading
Article Spinning 101: How to Protect Your Blog Content
When your blog ranks highly for a competitive phrase, people steal your content. It comes with the territory.
I get that, and I try not to let it bother me. But when someone takes my blog content, replaces a few of my phrases with words of her own, and then has the guts to slap her real name on it and use it to promote her so-called “marketing expertise” – consider me bothered.
This is called “article spinning,” and it’s one of the sleaziest form of online marketing.
Article Spinning? Why Would Anyone Want to Do That?
People spin articles for two reasons:
1. Search engines often identify “spun” content as original, so there’s no duplicate content penalty. You can spend five minutes changing a few words in an article that took someone else three hours to write, and Google will see your version as original.
In case five minutes is too much time, you can also buy software that will “spin” an article for you.
2. Rephrasing someone else’s words makes it harder to pursue legal claims of copyright infringement. I know because I’ve tried.
It can be hard to catch article spinning in the act. And once you do, the offender will often claim that they wrote the work, pointing out the parts of the content that they “spun.” Continue reading
