SEO: What to expect in 2014

Improved Webmaster Communications

First and foremost with Google constantly looking at Link Devaluation and more Penguin updates expected this year, I’m hoping that Google start to help webmasters out a little more by providing a tool that can quickly detect poor linking patterns and allow you to simply Disavow links that you don’t want to be associated with anymore.

On the subject of Disavowing links I’d like to see Google working towards helping webmasters by providing an easy way to send a request the webmasters of external links by using the Google Webmaster Tool inbox. The advantage here is that Google will be able to see clearly when a webmaster is trying to clean up their act.

Content, content, content

Quality content creation will become the watch word for all SEO practitioners during 2014 (if it isn't already!) as Google will tighten the noose around the neck of thin sites.

Content needs to be seen as a valuable business resource that can be reused or reworked for web pages, social media, audio and video etc

The technical aspect of SEO

SEO will become more technical, so that we can deal with the likes of schema, authorship, crawlability, etc.

KISS – Kall It Sales Stupid!

I see more of us focusing on real lead generation, conversions and sales rather than simply how are our keywords doing in SERPS!  We need to move to really help businesses with the bottom line.

Personalisation

If nothing else then the personalisation of search results will change what SEO means; when I search for “Dolphins” I expect Google in the future to provide more personal results for me and supply more Miami Dolphin sites; if my eldest daughter (who wants to be a Marine Biologist) conducts the same search I would expect her results to show more instances for the marine mammal.

Other stuff

I see further strengthening in AuthorRank and now we have Hummingbird, more natural language capabilities.

Finally I see lots of ‘SEO’ people around the globe complaining that Google updates have ruined their ranking simple because they failed to follow good practice!

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Social Media for Ranking

Top retailers will tell you that Social Media isn’t very good for generating traffic direct from the links that you put in your Twitter feeds, Facebook pages or Pinterest boards; but what it is good for is providing the big search engines with suggestions on your engagement with the social sphere.

If you post lots and people engage with you more than others in your market, then that alone is a good indicator that your pages might need to rank higher than your competitors. That is the REAL value of social media to businesses today.

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Your Search Engine Profile

SEO (Optimising your site for search engines) is a balancing act and its becoming much clearer to more and more SEO professionals that this balancing act can be a very delicate one when looking at activities needed to help a webpage move up the rankings; and these activities go towards developing a Search Engine Profile for a particular page or site.

There are numerous factors that you can spend your time on, some of the more basic ones being:

On Site Factors

• Is the HTML coding clean and correct?
• Can search engines easily see all of your webpages within a couple of ’clicks’?
• Is your navigational structure working in favour of visitors and search engines?
• Are all your internal pages linked to from other internal pages?
• Do you have a good robot.txt file on your site?
• Etc etc

Off Site Factors

• Are you Followed and Liked on key social media channels?
• Is your site mentioned often on social channels?
• Do you have a good number of backlinks to your site?
• Are ALL backlinks of a good quality?

Do too much of one element and not enough of another (i.e. too much time with social media without building fresh new content on your site) and you’ll find it difficult to rank well, you need a good blend of a number of different factors (social, on site elements and quality link building etc).

But to what degree you do each of these (your Search Engine Profile) differs from sector to sector and website to website, the important element is to work out what your key competitors are doing and what their likely Search Engine Profile is, then attempt to get somewhere close to that.

It is unfortunately a long, manual job, but it’s a job worth doing and will pay you dividends in the long term.

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Optimise your LinkedIn pages

Whether it’s your person page and you want the next great job offer, or it’s your company page, a well optimise page will do you a world of good.

Think Visually
Use bold images to provide a real world glimpse into you or your business.

Think Digitally
Whatever you say, keep it brief. Remember that online, attention span is shorter.

Think Video
Showcase with real stories or examples to engage members more deeply.

Think Customised
Adapt your content to viewers based on their LinkedIn profiles. Target based on geography, job title, industry that you want to attract etc.

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Lost rankings due to Hummingbird?

Impossible. Googles major overhaul of their algo that was recently announced, but unlike their previous Penguin and Panda updates, Hummingbird is not a penalty-based update (i.e. aimed at cleaning their SERPs from low-quality content), instead their changes is in response to the way that we are starting to query their search database.  Google now better understands the meaning behind our searches rather than understanding the ‘search terms’ that we might actually use. 

This is needed as more of us generate conversational queries, these are longer more complex questions and are growing as we use mobile and in particular voice searches more. 

If for example you are using a mobile device and you talk about Starbucks then Google knows that there is a good chance that you want the location of your nearest coffee shop, so it is more likely to serve the stores location results to you rather than information about the chain – Google is starting to better understand context. 

So a quick tip to help Google provide better search results would be to understand what your users might actually be asking of your products or solutions and use those keyphrases in your pages; questions like “how do I ….”, “where can I ….”, “what is the ….” etc etc This will help future proof your rankings. 

So Hummingbird didn't hit my rankings! 

You haven’t been hit by Hummingbird but your rankings have been hit (as many have), what is the reason?

Just prior to Hummingbird, Google did release a number of updates to Penguin and Panda, and it is highly likely that one of these has hit your site. 

Let’s consider what Google wants to achieve for its users. It wants to be able to provide the best search results. How will it know when it has achieved this? 

Quite simply is a search user visits and interacts with a page that was served in search results, then Google can pretty much accept that its ranking for that particular page must have been right. 

But what indicators can Google take that a visitor is happy with the page that they found? Well in really simple terms, ANY interaction with a site is likely to equate to longer time on the page (and site), this means longer average time on page AND lower bounce rates. 

So I would look at the pages on your site that have the highest & exit and check their bounce rate and average visit duration; if they look wrong, then that would be a good indicator for me as to why Google has slapped you in their SERPs. 

If visitors are leaving your site quickly, why would that be? What are they expecting to see that they are not? What information is missing? What expectation isn’t being satisfied? Fix these page problems and your rankings will slowly improve. 

Now I realise that this isn’t a perfect science. IF like many site you have contact details for example on all pages and that’s all the visitor wants then you will tend to get a higher than average bounce rate and a lower than average duration time, but the figures must stack up in Googles mind.

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What’s the Purpose of Business Development?

You have a business with a great marketing plan, an absolutely brilliant brand image, you’re growing brand equity, have a constant supply of successful campaigns going out, through social media channels you are increasing your Fans, Followers, Pins etc and engaging with your market.

Are you booking the right kind of (profitable) work with the clients you pursued, or are you a hapless bystander who took whatever projects (and price) that came your way?

So what’s next, how do you take your business to the next level?

Answering these questions is where business development comes in.

Business Development Role

A supreme understanding of all media (both online and offline) is just the start, the key role of business development is to understand to the nth degree customer relationships, how to build brand advocates, and how to cultivate strong brand equity through customer service.

Business development must involves an evaluation of customer feedback and some form of sentiment analysis to determine if current the marketing strategies and tactical outputs are indeed as effective as originally planned.

Only by working through this analysis can it be determined if there are any missed opportunities or refinement to existing strategies or campaigns.

Where Businesses Fail

We are all seen businesses and business owners start off with the very best of intentions. They go big (often punching above their weight), as they should, they employ the perfect marketing strategies designed to target their perfect audience (and customers), and slowly they start to build their brand equity. However, if their marketing plan is not evaluated and re-evaluated how can they be sure that their plan is continuing to be effective (or are they simply wasting time, money and energy!).

As technology changes, trends change, and the target audience responds differently to marketing messages, so much the marketing plan needs to change. Consider the following questions when re-evaluating marketing plan:

• Have the core demographic changed?
• Is there any new technology been employed by the market? (apps, mobile devices, web platforms, media etc) 
• Have the trends changed? How have changing trends altered your audience’s behaviour or attention?
• Are you still making the best of your company’s available resources? 
• Have there been any legal, political, social or major economic changes since the marketing strategy was devised?
• Is every aspect of the business on track with the marketing plan? Is every department remaining consistent? 
• Is every aspect of your marketing and advertising still remaining true to your brand message?

The Purpose of Business Development

As already mentioned, Business Development should understand completely customer relationships and how the market and customer behaviour changes, how the interations you have within your business alter those customer relationships.

With this knowledge, business development teams are able to refine marketing plans and improve your overall business plan.

They should be in a position to be able to:

• Identify gaps within your marketing strategy
• Recognise unused internal resources and missed opportunities
• Cultivate and grow current customer/partner relationships
• Attract new customers and partners
• Brand advocates

The more you can let ‘business development’ into the marketing planning process, the more you can tie activity to desired results, the more leverage you have in driving client development behaviour.

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TOP 5 Important Rules in Website Design

When it comes to designing your website, extra attention should be paid to every tiny detail to make sure it performs the best that it can do in serving its purpose. Here are five vitally important rules of thumb to observe to make sure your website performs well.

Rule 1: Do not use splash pages
A splash page is the first page that you see when you arrive at a website. They normally have a very beautiful image with words like "welcome" or "click here to enter", and that's it!  They are just pretty doors with no real substance.  All websites have one purpose and that's to get people in looking at your content - don't make your visitors come to a door first and don't give your visitors have a reason to click on the "Back" button!
Give them the value of your site up front without the splash page.

Rule 2: Have a simple and clear navigation
You MUST provide a simple and very straightforward navigation menu so that even a young child would know how to use your site.
Definitely stay away from complicated Flash based menus or complex multi-tiered dropdown menus. If your visitors don't know how to navigate, they will leave your site.

Rule 3: Have a clear indication of where the user is
When visitors are deeply engrossed in browsing your site, you will want to ensure that they know which part of the site they are in at that moment. That way, they will be able to browse relevant information or navigate to any section of the site with the utmost of ease. Don't confuse your visitors because confusion usually leads to "abandon ship"!

Rule 4: Avoid using audio on your site
If your visitor is going to stay a long time at your site, reading your content, you will want to make sure they're not annoyed by some audio looping on and on on your website. If you insist on adding audio, make sure they have some control over it -- volume or muting controls would work fine, better still if you like the idea of using audio place a 'Play Music' option/link/button somewhere prominent so that they can play it of they want to.  Similarly with video, there is nothing more annoying that video starting before I've clicked the 'Play' button!.

Rule 5: Do not use excessive banner advertisements
Some form of advertising is perfectly fine and is acceptable to most browsers and visitors; anyway, most net savvy people have trained themselves to ignore banner advertisements so you will be wasting valuable website real estate.
A different approach would be to provide easy access to your most valuable content and weave relevant affiliate links into your content, and let your visitors feel that they want to buy instead of being pushed to buy.

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Advertise, Don't Spam

There is a really fine line between advertising and spam and unfortunately many business owners and new marketeers do not understand the difference between the two.
This is really important because while a clever, well designed and executed internet marketing campaign can help to attract new business and keep existing customers loyal, spam is highly likely to alienate both new customers and existing customers alike, resulting in damage to your profit margin.

During this post will take a good look at just three basic online marketing strategies such as email campaign, banner ads and message board posts and describe how each can quickly cross this fine line from great advertising to spam.

Email Campaigns
These can also be very useful tools to internet marketers, but again, they must be done correctly.
These campaigns may involve sending periodic e-newsletters filled with information as well as advertisements, short, informative email courses or emails offering discounts on products and services.
Loyal customers who opt into your email list (and you MUST get opt-in addresses to ensure the success of your campaigns) will likely not view these emails as spam as they may know your business or have dealt with you in the past, and therefore may purchase additional products and services from your business as a result of this marketing strategy or at the very least you will remain 'front of mind' when they decide they need to purchase solutions that you offer. Additionally, potential customers who have specifically requested additional information on your products and services will also find this type of marketing to be useful.

However, email recipients who did not request information are likely to view your emails as spam and unlikely to result in a sale or goodwill, further more if the recipients of spam email decide to take action against you then you could find a fine coming your way.
Harvesting email addresses in a deceptive manner and using these addresses to send out mass emails will likely always be considered to be spam.

It's also worth noting that sending an email to someone you did business with too long ago may be inappropriate too; so remove anyone on your list who you haven't have any dealings or contact within the past 2 years.

Banner Ads
These were once one of the most popular strategies accompany an internet marketing plan, and they still have their place in modern online marketing tactics.
These ads are usually the ones that appear at the top of websites and they tend to take up the full width of the site; its is from this appearance that they earned the name banner ads but actually banner ads can refer to a variety of different sizes and shapes which appear in an array of different locations on a website.

In many cases the business owner purchases advertising space on these websites but the banner ad could also be placed as part of an exchange or an affiliate marketing campaign. Exchanges are situations in which one business owner or marketeer is granted permission to place a banner ad on someones website, in exchange for this other business owner is allowed to post a banner ad on his site.
These are great agreements and are usually made made between individual business owners with complementary businesses or as part of exchanges facilitated by a third party. In the case of affiliate marketing, an affiliate posts and advertisement for your business in exchange for compensation when the banner ad produces a desired effect such as generating website traffic or generating a sale. The terms of these agreements are determined beforehand and are generally based on a scale of pay per impression, pay per click or pay per sale or lead.

Now that you understand what banner ads are, it is also important to understand how they can be easily overused and appear to be 'spammy'.
Expertly placing your banner ad on a few websites which are highly likely to attract an audience similar to your target audience is very smart marketing, placing your banner ad on any website which will display the ad regardless of the target audience can be construed as spam. Internet browsers who feel as though your banner ads are everywhere could take an instance disliking to your business and may become extremely unlikely to purchase products or services from you as a result of your banner ads.

Message Boards
Finally, message boards provide an excellent opportunity for business owners to obtain some free advertising where it will be noticed by members of the target audience.
If the products and services you offer appeal to a specific niche, it is worthwhile to join message boards and online forums related to your industry of choice.

Here you will find a large population of internet users who may have an interest in your products. You might consider including a link to your business in your signature or posting the link when it is applicable to the conversation. However, care should be taken to carefully review the message board guidelines to ensure you are not doing anything inappropriate. This is smart marketing. Conversely, replying to every message with a link to your website when it is not relevant to the conversation is likely to be construed as spam by other members. Once they begin to view your posts as spam, they are not likely to visit your website via the links you post.

Some forums attach various rules to their posting guidelines (i.e. you can only post a link after a certain amount of time or after you post a certain number of helpful posts for example).

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