The age of SEO being simple is over. A new year means another chance to improve your rankings. So try out new marketing strategies and take advantage of the areas where the search engines are looking to expand and place new importance.

Here are some latest SEO trends that will change the way of users’ search.

Social media plays an important role in your website’s ranking. Google has defined several algorithms to rank a website and it takes your social media presence and links into consideration while assigns rankings to your site. No doubt social media is the best technique to check the popularity of your website. In 2012 SEO must focus on the inclusion of interaction with the most popular social media websites to improve their digital presence and popularity.

Search results will continue to display more paid results

Search engines generate revenue from paid searches, ads and promotions. Search engines will prefer to add more paid searches in the search engine results. They are going to add more paid sections like ads, shopping, product reviews, registration forms, coupons or anything to generate revenue from there.

Search engines will deliver more quality and relevant results

Search algorithm has provided Google Panda Updates which act as an anti-spam, promises in a hope that it would improve the search engine listings, filtering out low quality websites and allow genuine, organic searches. In 2012 Google will become more powerful with its advanced features to prevent spamming.

SEO is enlarging their competitive skills

In 2012 competition would become tougher for SEO. As so many companies come online which result into increasing the SEO marketing. Smart SEO’s are able to measure their efforts effectively. And on other hand weak SEO’s will not be able to give satisfying results.

Keep an eye on your SEO strategies, how it is working and what you should need to add in it for its improvement. In the above trends you will find out how these new trends can help in making your SEO strategy stronger.  Also help   to improve your rankings.

Social media marketing has become a very popular strategy to hold the customers who have visited your business website. Through social media sites, you can continue to communicate with your customers who have left your website without making any acquisition. Your business website can encourage communication between the customers and your products by giving links to your social media sites on your website.

The main aim of social media marketing is to drive visitors to your website and to take them from conversation to conversion. There are many tools of social media which helps in marketing of your products.  Here are three basic tips that you can keep in mind while making your website social media friendly.

1. Check different publishing tools like Hootsuite and many others before using them as a publishing tool for your website. When you share your website through these tools, some of the website content seems off the page. So before choosing any publishing tool, try them and see how your website is looking while shared on social media sites.

1. Do not forget to label the “share” and “follow” button clearly. It is very important to have both the buttons in your website. Make sure you keep them clear at a visible place. You can put “share” buttons below your copy. You can put “follow” buttons in a fixed place throughout your website. You can label “follow us,” “like us,” and “friend” buttons.

1. Do not use icons that take your visitors off the page. This way you may not only lose your visitors but also distract them by opening pages. There are many icons available that you can use for following and sharing your content/website. These icons open in a new screen and disappear and your visitors will not leave your website.

Some websites make it difficult to share their content and information. It is relatively simple to make some changes to your company’s website by keeping above points in mind. These points will be helpful in making your website social media friendly. You can attract many customers and encourage them to follow you on different social media profiles.

Google Alerts

With Google Alerts you can monitor what’s being said about you and your business on social media sites, blogs, and search engine results. Every time your name appears in news, blogs or comments you get email alerts from Google. It is one of most helpful tools to monitor track comments about you on the Internet.

Yahoo! Site Explorer

With Yahoo! Site Explorer you can explore all webpages indexed by Yahoo! Search engine. This helps you monitor external links to your blogs and website. If someone writes negative comments about your business, he’ll probably leave a link of your website. With Yahoo! Site Explorer you can monitor negative external links.

Technorati

Technorati is a well known search engine for blogs. You can easily monitor conversations of bloggers. If someone writes a negative comment on your blog, with Technorati you can monitor negative comments. All you need to do is, subscribe to Technorati and you can track negative comments about your blog posts.

Del.ic.ious

Del.ic.ious is a social bookmarking web service. It is helpful for sharing, storing and discovering web bookmarks. You can monitor your online reputation by your name, business and services that you offer using Del.ic.ious.

Twitter

Twitter is the most popular microblogging site where you get 140 characters to Tweet. With Twitter you can monitor what people are talking about you and your business.

Versionista

Versionista is helpful for the businesses that are facing troubles with their online status. It monitors specific webpages and sends email notifications about your most popular webpages.

SocialMention

socialMention is a social media search platform that collects comments and reviews from all over the world at one place. With SocialMention you can check what is being said about you and your business on social media sites.

SamePoint

With SamePoint you can monitor millions of comments and conversations on various social media sites. You can easily make out whether these comments and conversations are negative or positive.

KnowEm

With KnowEm you can protect your brand from social media identity stealing. You can monitor your username, brand name or personal name over 400 social media sites with KnowEm.

In today’s competitive market having an up and running website is not enough. You have to keep monitoring your digital presence and your competitors. It’s very important to know what users, businesses, and clients are talking about. What do they expect from you? With these tools you can monitor your online reputation and track your competitors.

Keyword Position Monitoring Report Services (KPMRS.com) is another tool  that helps you monitor your website’s ranking as well as your competitors’ ranking for target keywords. They provide quick and instant results. Other exciting features include, Rank checker widget, Social popularity tool, Website ranking tool, Backlinks tracker and much more. For details please visit www.kpmrs.com.

Website content

Content is one of the most important elements of your website. Internet always provides meaningful and fresh content to users and that’s why Google has brought its Panda updates to avoid duplicate and low quality content. Sometimes intending to achieve higher rankings with competitive keywords, website owners generate loads of useless content. There are software programs available on the web that generates automated content. This leads website into spam entries and lowers website ranking.

Tip: Create content that is useful for users. Users look for informative and useful content, also implement targeted keywords in your content.

Link Building

Often website owners make mistakes when it comes to link building. Most companies focus on the huge number of links coming to their sites. Google considers high quality links instead of a huge number of low quality incoming links. If your website has thousands of links coming from less trusted and unauthorized sources, Google may not consider it and it can lead towards lower rankings and give low authority to your website.

Tip: Focus on getting incoming links from trusted and authorized sources. You can ask for links from your stakeholders or other businesses that comes under your industry niche.

Social media sites

Social media sites are now one of the most effective ways that are being used for brand promotion and product endorsement. Social media sites can influence your search engine rankings, but sometimes receiving lots of “Likes” and “Fans” can result into spam. Instead of focusing on several “Likes” and followers, prefer to make best customer relationships. While using social media platforms your emphasis should be on turning your fans into your core customers, not to increase number of “likes” and fans.

Tip: Build relationship with your customers. It can bring more referrals and you can connect with more people on social media sites.

Blogging

Blogging is a great way to inform users and to get back links. But sometimes website owners post useless and bulk content to promote their brands through blogs. Publishing low quality content can be harmful for your website’s rankings. Sometimes website owners create random blogging domains to promote their business. And they post spam entries and invaluable content as guest blog posts.

Sometimes users leave invaluable comments in comment box in blog post and it can mislead other readers who are following your blogs.

Tip: Avoid paid content in blogs. Guest blogging is a great way to promote your business and to get back links.

Keeping patience with your SEO associate will bring quality results for your website’s rankings. Don’t be over-enthusiastic to achieve high rankings. SEO is an on-going process and it takes time to build search engine’s trust and rankings. Follow a complete ethical approach with search engine optimization procedure and also focus on delivering quality and useful information to users.

We at Galaxy Weblinks offer a complete SEO program which includes on-page and off-page optimization, link building and keyword research. We also provide ranking reports on various search engines. For more information visit our SEO portfolio

When keyword search fails to bring the desired results, you can change the slow traffic scenario with other optimization methods like blogging, email, social media, content marketing, public relations and more.

Proxy terms: There are many website brands or products that cannot be directly optimized, but indirect marketing is possible. Keyword targeted using the terms similar or related to the existing merchandise. Keywords that can be substituted for the product in question improve traffic to a level.

For example take china clay decorative has no competition but when fused with term antiques, it gains more searchablity.

If the company has an efficiently functioning website, why would they come to you? When you write articles and blogs related to the more popular keywords that are distantly related to your company keyword the substitution can bring some attention.

Comparative: There are brands and products which has no relative terms or search keyword. Query that is more familiar can be used to give the results page. The term spa jet may not have many hits but when used with aromatherapy treatment or skin enhancing spa treatment can change the scenario completely. Applying these ideas to your day to day business can be bit tricky but bound to give results.

It may not be suitable for all terms but popularity can be raised with the use of right keywords.

Client focus is primary: There are multiple brands and sites that are not comparable with other products. Demographic advertising comes into picture when there is no direct path to generate organic traffic. Advertisements that have demographics can lure the audiences that have slight interest in the product, but regular promotions miss them out due to factors like gender, age, personal traits and income factors. SEO is no less effective and you can conquer the market with some strategic steps.

Find out all about your audience to be targeted. The queries regularly searched by your target are also important. When we know sports are the regular part of a specific group of clients, you can come up with a blog or discussion forum featuring the main search fused with your relevant topics based advertisements. The brand can be portrayed as essential part of sport like a timer or protein supplement for interested customers to see and gradually visit.

We regularly relate content and sell them to potential customers. SEO and user based knowledge can take your website to heights of popularity with organic traffic.

Branding: The days without computers took years or even decades for a brand to build reputation in the market. The tactic of creating curiosity in the minds of customers works far better than we have explored. With frequent advertising, contests, campaigns and sponsorship big industries have achieved success. Building brand is not so popular in the current market as optimization and advertising.

You can use the potential of popular and existing toppers of the sales chart and direct success towards your site. With viral videos, ads and contests you can get the users to search the related content and come across your product and brand online.

Marketing and optimization are two separate entities but they can be linked to each other and used. Low keyword popularity is not the end of your website. There are many applications of the web that must be utilized to the optimum level for getting large number of customers.

Rack your brains and be a bit inventive to get more organic traffic as you strive to optimize your website.

1. Install Google analytics

Track every single page of your website and ensure that they are perfect. Install Google analytics or any other analytics system in a template that is present in every page and is placed at the bottom of the page to help users with the page load time.

2. Create Google and Bing webmaster tool accounts

Google and Bing, both the search engines have a range of webmaster tools that closely monitors every single activity of your website and provides it back to you as an online report. Having these two set ups for your computer is really worthy, as they can really help you boost your website’s online value.

3. Process a crawl simulation for your website

You may be spending hours for your website’s development, but problems like improper redirects, broken links, missing titles, etc. always creep up during the launch. As a result, it is better to check your website’s accessibility with crawl test tools like, Xenu, Custom Crawl, GSiteCrawler, etc.

4. Test website design with Browser Emulators

Testing the website’s design, graphics, layout, etc. in the various browsers is also an important step towards a successful website launch.

5. RSS Feed Analytics

On the web, every single website has a structured data that is taken up by the RSS Feeds. Similarly, you can also analyze your feed quality using software like Feedburner. As an initial trick, don’t use the counter Chicklet in your website content as it is very depressing to see no users in the feeds.

6. Tag important actions

Every website has a basic list of steps that users follow. These include, tweeting, subscribing to email, leaving a comment post, etc. Each of these actions is important and also recorded by the analytics. Hence, it is vital that you tag these major actions in your article.

7. Perform online branding and usability test

Getting a brief about your website, on how it appears and functions on the web is important to enhance the website’s impact on the web. A raw testing of your website can hence provide your users a better online experience.

8. Create KPI dashboard

Your website services and products are important, but not as much as their metrics. The numbers of RSS subscribers, pageviews, social stats, unique visits, etc. are metrics that help you keep an overall view of the website’s consistency and future graphs.

9. Create a list for business contacts and friends

Creating online business contacts and friends list can greatly help you make a huge start. Make a list of your friends who owe a favor to you or can be trusted with their work and then make a simple email asking for a pure feedback on your services. Use BCC and also become a recipient.

10. Create a list of bloggers, Target press and also Industry people

Once you have selected your niche, list down the names of your industry personalities, media outlets, bloggers, offline sources, etc. with their full contact information. This contact information can help you reach out to these industry personalities during your website launch for a better promotion.

11. Select your Google Alerts

Having alert updates is always good for your website. They help you keep a watch on your system and its scores. These alerts sometimes however show wrong figures and hence, it is better to follow the next recommendation.

12. Bookmark your brand tracking methods

Keeping a track of the various sites that link back to yours is quite difficult and requires a list of methods and queries being followed on a regular basis. You can include automated systems like Twitter, Google, Backtype, etc. However, these queries should make use of your brand name.

13. Make your subscription and email signup system

Get access of your potential customers for promoting your new services, products, etc. However, you should carefully consider when and how you should offer your services to your potential customers. You can also take help of services like EXactTarget, iContact, ExactTarget, etc.

14. Build your brand’s social accounts

The most powerful marketing strategy, Social media sites can help you create a strong network. Create accounts in Twitter, Facebook, Google Profiles, YouTube, Flickr, Linkedln, Stumbleupon, Reddit, etc. Also, don’t simply use the same bio in each of the accounts, rather spend time in making them look authenticate and genuine.

15. Link these social networking accounts

Now that you have social accounts in the major social networking sites, add your reference site to these accounts. Make sure that they link back to your to be launched website.

16. Create a list of selected keywords for targeting Search Engines

Select the best keywords for your niche after a thorough analysis. The best selection of keywords will help your site top the SERP.

17. Create targets for 12 months

Success is not achieved without a goal or target. Hence, it is important that you select goals and targets for your website for at least the first 12 months.

18. Sign in with KPMRS apps

KPMRS offers a list of applications that help you monitor your website traffic and features.
Hence, make sure that you sign yourself to KPMRS.

So, now that you are aware about the various important factors that you should consider for ensuring success to your website, follow them and enjoy a successful website.

But what exactly is Blended Search?

As the name suggests, Blended search is the process of blending or mixing content from multiple sources and displaying them together on one page. When the idea was launched around two and a half years ago, the main sources of the content were – news websites, videos, images, local and books which are still independent vertical search engines. But today, we have started seeing more results from social networks like facebook & twitter and press release website which are updated more frequently than any other online media.

Universal Search is also known as Blended Search. Click on image to expand

And how is it changing the SEO industry?

Earlier, website owners used to optimize their website with only focus on relevant content so that search engines can rank their websites on top of search results. It doesn’t work the same these days now since search engines do not only rely on your website content. Instead, they have started looking for varied sources of information where they can find more relevant and updated content.  News websites like CNN & Reuters; Social networking sites like Facebook & twitter; and Press release website like prweb.com etc are some of the sources that search engines rely heavily on for their content.

Please note that this doesn’t mean you should stop optimizing your website content. On the contrary, you need to start updating your website content more frequently now since search engines love new, updated & relevant content. This is probably why many company blogs and press releases have become so popular these days.

But is it really changing the SEO industry?

Yes, it is. Because people have really started publishing their content on all the types of online media which has slight chance of being crawled by search engines and get ranked on first page. Here are the few examples -

1. Image results – All the search engines already have image search as an independent search engine which drives more than 10% of traffic for website owners. People have been focusing on optiming their images by using alt tags and more proper image names for quite some time now.
2. Videos & Slideshows- YouTube, owned by Google has the highest number of videos uploaded on the web. People have started publishing a video presentation of their company or products demo. They, then promote it on YouTube by writing comments, adding ratings and sharing with more people so that it gets enough popularity to get ranked on first page of search results. Then these videos or presentations are pushed on to other popular aggregator sites like Vimeo, Slideshare etc.
3. News Results – Press & news websites are the most hit upon source by website owners. There has been an evident surge in press releases published in last few years by website owners. The only reason being the importance given to such sites by Google.
4. Local business listings – Google, Bing and Yahoo show their respective maps to show local business listings. Hence, every website owner makes it a point that their business is submitted in local business listing directory. They strive hard to promote it by adding more ratings, comments and sharing with friends & existing clients.
5. Three blogs a week has become a reality. Website owners do not miss a single news however trivial it is, just to have something new up on their company blog. [Don't worry this post is not one of those ]
6. Social media marketing (SMM) – SEO Companies have started offering a new service called ‘Social media marketing’ wherein they promote their brand on social networking websites like – Facebook, Twitter, Delicious, Digg, Myspace etc. They do it by submitting their brand name, linking it to their website, building network of friends and by commenting on other blogs.
7. Google Product search – Online shop owners are utilizing this feature to promote their products on increase sales from Google organic search result.  Google offers merchants a separate place to submit their products individually with prices and description. Google then shows their products on top of search results for the relevant query.

Clearly, the focus on just your website’s content is the thing of the past. In order to maximize your chances to be on the top of the search engine rankings and drive more traffic, you have to be on your toes all the time and exploit every source of data that major search engines scour today for their search results.

Let us know what you think of today’s post. We look forward to your comments on the latest trends being used in the SEO world. If you liked reading this post on The KPMRS Blog, do subscribe to our feed now!

About 33 % of consumers are not connecting with brands on social networks, according to a new report by interactive marketing firm Razorfish.

Razorfish surveyed 1,000 consumers who reported both social media and ecommerce activity with the goal to find out how social media influences their purchasing decisions. 80 % were members of at least one social network and 40 % were active in two.

“Social media has quickly become one of the most talked-about topics in marketing. We didn’t want this report to just be more of the same, so instead we took a different, more scientific approach to evaluating this phenomena and measuring its effects,” said Shiv Singh, VP and Global Social Media Lead at Razorfish.

“Today, a brand’s actions speak louder than its words and pushing out messages is no longer enough to excite and engage consumers.”
The question is now: How about you the small businesses and your social media activities?

More than brand companies, small and medium business should step into social media marketing to expand your message and spread the word to the potential client, to make him informed, to make him interested and to make him a paid customer.

To bother your targeted audience with outbound advertising messages is not enough in today’s times. The user out there has established some kind of personal advertising filter. Moreover he wants to find valuable information when he decides that he needs them, not when you decide to send him message through email marketing, radio or TV commercials, or call him by phone and disturb his daily doing.

You need to build your credibility to address your marketing message. You need to be personal and authentic and to avoid sounding like an advertisement.

Be helpful and be valuable offer relevant content. This is the way how you as a small business can gain customer loyalty.

– Be the flame not the moth! –

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Social media is the buzzword today and everyone is spending a considerable amount of money in SMM (Social Media Marketing to the lesser known) as a part of their Internet Marketing budget. When we started KPMRS, the idea was to help SEO consultants, internet marketers or any website owner by monitoring their website rankings on 3 major search engines – Google, Yahoo & Bing. But this idea was not unique and we are still not the only providers who is tracking your search engine rankings.

But we also wanted to provide something extra, something different and unique from what others are providing. Sticking to that principal, we thought of providing a report of how popular are your websites on the social networking & bookmarking websites like – Delicious, Twitter, Flickr, Technocrati, Digg etc. I personally found it very interesting and useful to find my website’s social activities along with its rankings on search engines – all at one place.

Social popularity report for your website

Unfortunately, the numbers are not very great right now, but we were not expecting a lot in just a month anyway Although it does tell me that more than 80 people have bookmarked our websites on Delicious and 30 people have talked about us on Technorati. So far, so good!

Check your website’s social popularity with this tool. Sign up now, submit your website and see how popular are you in social media industry!

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