SEO for 2014 : Get Used to Structured Data Markup

How Structured Data Markup Will Play a Role  in 2014 SEO Strategy

Google has changed it's method of displaying results in last couple of updates, whether it's been Humming Bird update or Knowledge Graph. 

Humming is completely related to kind of queries which user can speak or think and Knowledge Graph is all about displaying most relevant complete information about the search query.

To start with Google was always focused on matching search queries with the content present on respective webpage, article, news or any other medium. Based on relevancy and match, it used to provide ranking for different websites. 

Semantic Markup

Now Google's has become more and more smart by shifting it's focus from just content relevancy to semantic markup or structured data markup. SEO experts started implementing this technique from 2012 onward and saw a jump in their clicks and conversions as user prefer to see more and more information about the products or services being offered by the providers.  

In 2014, Structured Data Markup will be an essential part of all the SEO Strategies being planned.  Google has also included different tools for structured data markup in Google webmaster tool

1. Structured Data Testing Tool
2. Structured Data Markup Helper

Here are few common questions which are being asked by all the website owners before going with Structured Data Markup:

Does Structured Markup Data Help in Improving Ranking?

Well for this query answer is "it may or it may not". As per the some online trends or audits it is clear that having structured data does not really guarantee for top ranking but it definitely works well for increasing clicks and conversions. 

Structured Data Markup helps users to take actions, as almost every information which they are looking for will be present in-front of them.

For example: 

If searched for "Chocolate Cake Recipe" we get 

 

Here Structured Data Markup is implemented for Addapinch.com but not implemented for BBC.co.uk which is ranking higher. As user see more information on Addapinch.com like ratings and reviews by other users, there will be more click and consideration for that link.

Does Structured Data Markup Increases User Consideration?

Since there are additional information provided with the product like product image, ratings, reviews, offers, author name and etc, users will be more interested to know about that. 

User always trust on ratings and reviews provided by other users based on their experience as it helps them in considering the product. 

Is Structured Data Markup Next Big Thing in SEO?

Well up to a certain level yes, structured markup data is being considered by most of the search engines to provide ranking as it is one of the easiest way to provide more and more information to users. 

Google has already made great progress in improving the ordered list format from one based on just keyword matches to one that accounts for diversity of opinion and sentiment, freshness, personalization, localization and other factors.

Structured data is used basically to provide all the information to users without doing many clicks to get the right and desired information. Google’s knowledge graph, instant answers, and Google Now are great examples of the future of the searching experience.With these technologies, relevant information is available based on the implicit (behaviorally- or environmentally-based) or explicit (a typed or voice search) query.

By using structured markup, you can help the search engines better understand how your content provides a solution to a query now and as it evolves in the future.

Will I be Benefited By Using Structured Data Markup?

Yes, you will be. Recent market trends and reports shows that user clicks on those links where every information is present upfront and other users have given some reviews about product. 

It is clearly experienced by many website owners that after implementing Structured Data Markup, their click through rate has significantly increased.

Is Structured Data markup Enough to Get More Clicks and Conversions?

No, it is not enough to have Structured Data Markup only and get higher ranking along with increased clicks and conversions. You need to do proper On-Page SEO and Off-Page SEO for your website to get higher search engine rankings. Also you will have to be actively present on Social Media Platforms to reach to your targeted audience.

Top 7 Effective Social Media Platforms for Online Business

Which are the best Social Media Platform for an online business or new start-up?

If you have a website or planning to start a new business/website online, then Social Media is one platform which can not be ignored at all. Social Media is the easiest way to reach out your targeted audience, perfect platform to communicate with users online, product or service promotion to increase brand awareness and revenue for your business.

Social Media Marketing for Business

Social Media has become an essential part of online marketing for every business online, but there are few doubts which bother every webmaster

• On what channel exactly your targeted audience is present?
• Which channel will work best for you?
•  How should you start on different channel?
• How can you best utilize the channels?
• Which of your competitor is present on that channel?

Now after solving all these queries, we need to know the step by step process of bringing business on a Social Media platform and get success.

Below is a step-by-step guide to establishing business accounts on the top eight social networks. 

Facebook

One of the best social media channel present online. Millions of users are present on facebook and many big brands or small business are using this channel to reach their targeted audience.

• Create a Facebook page for your business.
• Claim a username for your page so customers can easily find you at Facebook.com/YourBusiness instead of Facebook.com/pages/you/123456. (Note: Once set, your username cannot be changed — so pick wisely!)
• Upload a profile image that will still be “readable” in a tiny thumbnail form around the site. Logos or brand stamps work well and allow users to easily identify your content throughout the site.
• Upload a cover image that expands beyond a logo to visually represent your brand. This is the largest piece of real estate you will own on the site and your best opportunity to establish a tone for the profile.
• Ensure all applicable contact and “About” information is completed on the profile, and ensure that the most applicable “Category” is chosen.
  
• Use your page’s “Short Description” (Settings > Page Info > Short Description) to display your tagline or a one-sentence summary of why your business is great. This description can be automatically displayed when other people share the link to your page, so make sure it’s a good description.
• Authorize page administrators at appropriate access levels so multiple people can contribute content to the page.
• If appropriate, upload historical “milestones” for your company, industry or products by backdating posts. Prevent these posts from flooding the news feed of any existing followers by checking the “Hide from news feed” option.
• Start interacting with your audience. Post some relevant content. 
• Always replay back to query.
• Give some offer or discount to attract more users.
• Always remember that you should not try to sell your services or products, try and tell the benefits and advantages to your users.

Twitter

Another very popular and effective social media channel to promote your business online. 

• Create a Twitter account. (There’s no distinction between personal and business accounts here.)
• Claim a username for the account, which will also become part of your profile URL (twitter.com/username).
• Upload a profile image, header image, and background, ideally all with coordinating color schemes and messaging. Remember that your profile image will display sitewide in a tiny thumbnail, so it should be visually concise.
• Include your website URL in your profile content for easy access.
• Familiarize yourself with Twitter 101 (made by Twitter specifically for businesses!) to learn more about hashtags, @ replies and other network best practices.

Google Plus

Google also has joined the social media platform by introducing Google+. Now Google gives more preference to the links which are shared on Google+. Also Google authorship plays an important role in search engine ranking.

• Visit google.com/+/business/ and click “Create a Google+ page” in the top-right corner.
• Sign in with a Google account that you control, and choose the category that best describes your business.
• List your business’s name and website, and confirm whether your content is appropriate for all age groups.
• Under “Settings,” add a phone number to the page, and confirm that number via an immediate text message or phone call.
• Click on the “Profile” item in the left navigation, then the “About” tab at the top. In the “Links” block below, you should see a “Link website” button. Click this to produce a snippet of code that should be placed on your website in order to link your profile and your website.
• Ensure that all location and contact information on this profile stay up-to-date, as Google uses your profile here to provide your address, phone number and more in local search results.
• Once you have established the page, go to plus.google.com/dashboard and click “Manage this page,” then “Verify this business” underneath your address. Confirm the business’s mailing address, and a postcard containing a unique PIN will be mailed to you. When the postcard arrives, follow the verification instructions on it to complete the process.

You Tube

Another popular social media channel by Google. This is one of the best channel to promote your video content.

• Go to YouTube.com and click on “Sign In” in the top-right corner.
• Sign in with an existing Google account (make sure you’ll be comfortable sharing these credentials with anyone else who may need to contribute to YouTube work), or click “Create an Account” and follow the prompts.
• Once signed in, click on the user icon in the top-right corner and from the drop-down menu select “My Channel.” In the next pop-up, click the link at the bottom that reads “To use a business or other name, click here.” In the “Name your channel” field, input your business’s name, or a branded username that people can use to find you.
• In the “About” tab of your new Channel, list “custom links” to your website or other online properties, as well as “social links” to other networks.
• Also in the “About” tab, provide a Channel description, and upload channel artwork to brand your page.

LinkedIn

This platform is for professionals. So if your targeted audience is professional people this is the best platform to work on.

• Log into a personal LinkedIn profile and in the main menu navigate to Interests > Companies. Then, in the top-right corner, click on “Add a Company.”
• Enter your company name and your business email address. (Note: LinkedIn will only allow you to activate a new company name if you have a company email address like me@companyname.com. If your LinkedIn account was set up with a personal email address, you will need to first add a business email to your profile before moving on.)
• Populate the following fields of LinkedIn’s prompts with general company details and products or services.
• Upload a version of your logo as the page’s profile image. You will need three separate versions sized at 100×60 (displayed on the company page) and 50×50 (displayed throughout the network) pixels to complete the profile.
• Upload a page banner (themed similarly to Facebook cover photo) sized at 646×220 pixels.
• Create unique banners and thumbnail images to highlight your top products and services. Feel free to use these labels liberally if your business has less traditional offerings.

Pinterest

This is best platform if you have your content in form of images. This is a growing channel and user base is increasing on a regular basis.

• Use http://business.pinterest.com/ to sign up as a business page. (If needed, this page also provides a link to convert a formerly “personal” account to a business one.)
• Provide contact information and establish a username for your profile.
• Upload a 165×165 pixel version of your logo or brand stamp.
• Connect other existing social networks to your profile if you want to push out Pinterest activity to those platforms.
• In your profile settings, enter your website’s URL. Verify your ownership of the site by uploading an HTML snippet.

Instagram

This is a platform to promote visual content. So if you have amazing visual content which you want to share with your audience, this is the place for you.

• Download Instagram from the App Store or from Google Play to a mobile device.
• Sign up to create a new account.
• Upload a 110×110 pixel logo as the profile image.
• Include your site’s URL in the profile settings.
• Use the “bio” area to provide an overview of your value propositions.
• Review the Instagram for Business blog for tips, trends, and examples of successful brands.

Above platform are very effective to promote your business or new start-up and to create a brand in user mind.

NOTE: Source of the article is Social Media Check List.

How to Do Competitor Analysis?

Competitor Analysis Strategy to Boost Your Search Ranking

Competitor analysis always had been an integral part of any marketing strategy either online or offline. In online marketing a competitor analysis differs from a competitor analysis to offline marketing.

In online industry all the digital experts have to keep an eye on competitor's activities and changes happening around the industry so that they can also bring required changes in their strategy and planning to boost their ranking. 

Simple and Beneficial Competitive Competitor Analysis Strategies

To avail the maximum benefit for the website you are working on, you just don't need to use best digital marketing practices for SEO, PPC or Social Media but also need to keep an eye on your competitor's activity.This way you can get an idea if your strategy is going in the right direction or not, do you have to bring some changes in your strategy planning or if there is any trend in market which you are not aware of.

There are three simple and effective ways to do competitor analysis:

• Know exactly who is your competitor?
• Brain storming to know what people think about your industry?
• Review competitor's content strategy and way of presenting it?

Know Your Exact Competitor

This is one of the common mistakes which is done by many digital marketing experts. Most of them consider top ranking websites as their competitors. This is true that our main focus always remain on ranking high, so top ranking sites will be our competitor's but our prime focus should always be on the top players of our business industry.

For example if take a keyword "Cricket Bats" , we get some search results for Wikipedia, Ask Laila, Just Dial which can not be a direct competitor for any cricket bat selling website. But other search results like Cricketers Shop, Flip Cart can be a direct competitor as they them selves are selling cricket bats online.

So this is very much important to figure our who your actual competitor is? After finalizing the competitor's webmasters should do a detailed analysis for competitor's on-page seo and off-page seo. 

Webmasters should look for the competitor's market share, keywords used by competitor, back link analysis, competitor website architecture and other functions used by them on website.Based on a detailed analysis you should plan for your SEO Strategy. Same way for PPC you need to know which competitor add is on top position, how well his landing page is optimized, how well he has written his ad copies and all.

Brain Storming to Know What People Think About Your Industry?

Brain storming is also important from strategy planning point of view. Webmasters should always discuss with other team members as well that 

• What difference they see in your website and competitor website
• How your website can be made more effective
• Why they do consider competitor's website
• Which are the best keywords by using them they entered on competitor's website 
• What keywords or terms come to their mind if they want to do some search in your business industry
• What all places they visit to find services or products related to your industry

Analyze Your Competitor's Web Content and Way of Presentation

We all know that good quality content plays a major role in getting higher search ranking. Webmasters should also pay detailed attention to the content written by competitor's on their website as well as content distributed on other third party network.

A quality, interactive and informative content always attracts users and they prefer to share it with their network as well. So, it is important to know what and how web content should be planned for your website. 

After analyzing the content, you should also consider the way of content presentation done by competitor's. You can also do some market analysis for the best content presentation style for users and plan for your web content.

Only thing which need to be taken care while writing content for your website or for syndication is that there should not be hard push to sell your product or services, it should be more from information prospective.

Conclusion: You need to pay attention to improve your website performance in search results and for that you need to out beat your competitors. That's why a detailed and proper time should be allocated in doing competitor analysis and market analysis to come up with proper strategy. 

Top Local Search Ranking Factors: A Guide to Optimize your Local Listing

How to Rank High in Local Search

Yesterday read one very good article on MOZ about amazing local search engine ranking factors. Here i am writing about some of the take away from that post by Miriam Ellis.

Initially David Mihm came up with his list of Local Search Ranking Factors. He came up with a list of around 100 local search ranking factors after doing an industry survey and research.

After brushing up all those ranking factors Miriam Ellis came up with a refined list of search ranking factors.

Proper Category Associations :

Listing your local business against proper business category is very important from users and search engine point of view. Both users and search engine crawlers look for relevant business under a relevant business category.

To get your business listed in Google Local Business center you will have to select one of the listed business category among several local business categories over there.

Physical Address in City of Search

As a local business owner or to get your business listed for a particular city, you need to provide a physical address of your office. Google shows your local listings based on the location you have provided.

Consistency of Structured Citations

As per the Wikipedia "Citation is a reference to a published or unpublished source (not always the original source). More precisely, a citation is an abbreviated alphanumeric expression embedded in the body of an intellectual work that denotes an entry in the bibliographic references section of the work for the purpose of acknowledging the relevance of the works of others to the topic of discussion at the spot where the citation appears. Generally the combination of both the in-body citation and the bibliographic entry constitutes what is commonly thought of as a citation (whereas bibliographic entries by themselves are not). References to single, machine-readable assertions in electronic scientific articles are known as nano-publications, a form of micro-attribution."

      Inconsistent citations might involve:

• A difference in the business name (i.e. Smile Dentistry vs. Smile Dental Clinic)
• A wrong street address, a typo in street address numbers, or a missing suite number
• A wrong or different phone number, a toll free or call tracking number
• A different or wrong website URL

Quality/Authority of Structured Citations

We all know that having a business listed in high authority and quality website will always get more exposure in comparison to a business listed in low quality or authority website. So our prime focus should be to target high authority websites. 

Some of the high authority local business listing websites are:

• Google Places
• Google+
• Yahoo Local 
• Yelp
• Bing
• Merchant Circle
• Local.com
• Express Update USA(Info USA)
• Map Quest
• Insider Pages
• Four Square

HTML NAP Matching Place Page NAP

Google always does a cross check for your business listing by matching your listed details with the web page URL you have provided. If you have provided all the correct details then your listing is good or else you might not get visibility for your business listing.

You can always re-work on your business listing if you find some issues or want to make some changes  in your listings.

Quantity of Structured Citations

There are multiple citations like business name, address, contact details, about business and others which a business owner has to put in while creating a local listing. But to be competitive with other competitors and get higher visibility in search results every business owner have to include extra citations.

So quantity and quality of structured citations also plays major role in search local listings.

Domain Authority of Website

Domain authority of any website also plays a major role in higher ranking in local searches. You can check for your domain authority using Moz Bar. For different factors contributing in Domain Authority check Domain Authority Factors.

Individual Owner Verified Local Plus Page

For every business owner, to get their business listed in Google Places they need to verify their listing. Usual method used for verifying listing is through post card where Google sends a verification code through post to your listed physical address.

City, States in Places Landing Page Title

You should have your city, state and other local information in your page title of the web page which will be linked with your local listing. 

This way your proximity of getting higher local search ranking will increase. 

Proximity of Address to Centroid

Traditionally, the centroid in Local Search has been defined as the city center identified by Google in its Maps product. You can go to maps.google.com, type in a city and state and get a result that looks like this, with Google putting a red pin on the presumed city centroid.

Quality and Authority of Inbound Links to Domain

High quality and authority incoming links also play a major role in getting higher local search ranking. Remember one thing always focus on Quality and not on Quantity. 

With latest changes happening in Google Algorithm, Google now look for quality links only to provide ranking. 

Quantity of Ratings and Review for your Listings

It is currently felt that the number of reviews your business earns on its Google Places Local page influences rank more than reviews you might earn on other review platforms. You can easily see how many reviews you have by clicking either on the "reviews" link on your Google Places Local link in the main search engine results, or by visiting your listing  page directly.

NOTE: Only things to remember here is that you should not try and write review by your self as this may be considered as self promotional thing, which is not liked by Google.

Product/Services in Business Title

The business title of your business is its legal name or DBA. It is believed that having the name of a core product or service in your business name may give you some advantage over competitors who lack this.

Quantity of Citations from Locally Relevant Domains

Having your business NAP (name, address, phone number) mentioned on a website that relates specifically to your geographic community acts as a locally-relevant citation. This type of citation reinforces Google's trust in your relevance to your locale.

Proximity of Business Physical Address from the Point of Search

Google prefers to display most relevant and near by results in Local Search, from the location of search. If Google feels that your search term has a local intent, they will automatically detect your physical location and show you local results.

This phenomenon of proximity demonstrates Google's bias towards businesses with a physical location within a specific geographic area. If your business is physically near to the searcher, your chances are good of showing up in the local results, but if it's too far away, it is unlikely to be included in the results.  

Quantity of Citations from Industry Relevant Domains

Just as it can be helpful to earn to have your name, address and phone number listed on locally-relevant websites, being included on industry-relevant sites can improve your authority and rankings, too.

  

Local Area Code on Local Plus Page

Using your local area code phone number as your primary phone number on your Google+ Local page is considered a best practice. The area code of the phone number should match the area code/codes traditionally associated with your city of location.

Remaining three points are almost covered in previously discussed points.

For more details on Local Search Ranking Factors, please follow original source @ Top 20 Local Search Ranking Factors

Responsive Design and Mobile SEO

Impact of Responsive Design on Mobile SEO

As per one of the latest videos from Matt Cutts, webmasters should not be worried about negative impact of responsive web design on SEO for mobile.

This has been a long time discussion in SEO industry that whether having a responsive design for website is a good option for mobile SEO or there should be a separate website all-together for mobile. Some webmaster says creating a separate website for mobile makes more sense as user expectations and experience on mobile is different from desktop or laptop.

Responsive Web Design

Matt Cutts in his recent video says that "you don’t have to worry about there being a down side, related to SEO, when using a responsive design approach for mobile web sites."

What exactly Responsive Web Design means?

As per Wikipedia "Responsive web design (RWD) is a web design approach aimed at crafting sites to provide an optimal viewing experience—easy reading and navigation with a minimum of re-sizing  panning, and scrolling—across a wide range of devices (from mobile phones to desktop computer monitors)." 

"A site designed with RWD adapts the layout to the viewing environment by using fluid, proportion-based grids, flexible images, and CSS3 media queries, an extension of the media rule."

Benefits of having Responsive Web Design

• No issue of duplication of efforts in creating a separate website 
• No additional efforts required for on-page seo
• No additional efforts required for off-page seo
• Advantage of same domain authority 
• Same PR transfer for mobile and desktop version of website

Conclusion

There is no harm in having a responsive webdesign for your website. There is no negative impact of it and in terms of benefits, you will have to put all your SEO efforts for one set of web URL's not for two (mobile and desktop version)