Are you a fan of social networking media? It is not a surprise to know that almost all people in all parts of the world are avid fans of the social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter and now the Google Plus which has only been available in the past months. Social networking sites definitely help in a lot of ways to its users.

However, there are also some drawbacks on being so much into these sites. Evident to this are the growing numbers of crime being linked or associated with the use of social networking sites. Hence, the people behind these social media are constantly emphasizing their continuous drive to tighten whatever safety and security measures they have towards their users.

One of the hottest topics that have ever been talked about in Facebook, Twitter and Google+ is whether to allow its users to use pseudonyms. In any online social networking site you patronize, determining whether the people behind a certain profile is true or not would definitely be just like finding a needle in a haystack. What more if these people are only using nicknames and not their true names?

In line with this, Google+ move to allow pseudonyms online has garnered a lot more issues as this move is contradicting to their original policy.

Here’s the catch…

People could stop worrying about security or safety issues tagged on the recent permission of Google+ to its users to use pseudonyms as Google would not be too easy on people who want to use pseudonyms. According to Horowitz from Google, they would allow users to use maiden names, nicknames and pseudonyms only if he or she could substantiate that the name that will be use has already been used to other social networking sites. This way Google can assure that there is a real person behind this pseudonym or nickname and this pseudonym is not being used for scam.

In line with this, Horowitz assured the public that Google employees will review the name changes made by its user manually. Moreover, for security purposes Google will ask for legal documents from its user like driver’s license or published material and link to social networking sites before approving.

Do pseudonyms help or not?

People differ when it comes to their preferences. It goes the same about names. Some people just don’t want to represent themselves using their own name and is fonder of using nicknames and pseudonyms. But the question is do pseudonyms help or not? The answer is its case to case basis. Like for instance, pseudonyms can definitely help those who are victims of abuse since they need to hide their identity while scammers can use fake names to fool people.

In spite of all the intrigues about this issue, there’s one thing that Google+ users can definitely be assured of. It is that Google has only good intentions for its decision to permit pseudonyms.

Today, social media plays a major role in SEO. With this in mind, why not tweak your social media profiles for search engines? Believe me, it’s a must. Search engines utilized links from social media sites, including Facebook, Google+1 and Twitter for ranking purposes. Moreover, Twitter streams are also being indexed by search engines in real-time. So here are 5 easy-to-do steps to use one of the social media giants—Twitter, for SEO.

1. Regard Your Twitter Username as a Domain Address


Do you still remember the rules for choosing an effective domain name? Let’s do a recap. Avoid using underscores between words. Make your domain address short and easy to remember. These rules also apply to choosing a good Twitter username.

Additionally, Twitter username must not exceed 15 characters but you know, it’s best to actually not exceed 10 characters, if possible. Now, if you want to use your company name for your brand name, abbreviate and combine it with keywords. For instance, let’s say your company, Prime Movers Corporation, provides shipping services, you may use @PMCShipping as your Twitter username.

2. Do not Use URL shorteners. Link to Your Real URL


If you make use of URL shorteners on your Twitter profile URL section, your profile visitors are more likely to doubt your account. Build up the credibility of your profile and further the trust of your profile visitors in your brand by using your real site or blog URL. This will encourage them to visit your actual website.

3. Optimized Your Twitter Bio


Your Twitter Bio content also functions as the meta-description of your Twitter profile on Google search results. With regard to this, you have to maximize the 160 characters limit to craft a keyword-rich Twitter bio. Always make use of good content and keywords that represent your field of expertise or industry. This is a perfect recipe to rank high in search results. Good content means compelling, relevant, informative and catchy.

4. Optimized Your Twitter Profile Photo


In order to have a keyword-based name for your Twitter profile photo, separate the filename using dashes before uploading. For example: paris-clothing.jpg. Keep your image limited to 250×250 pixels for best page loading speed.

5. Use Keyword Phrases and Hastags on Your Tweets

This will assure better visibility on search results. In fact, many studies have shown that including keywords in tweets regularly can significantly increase search engine rankings. Moreover, save the important tweets in category favorites.

You can also boost your social authority by receiving numerous retweets, hence will help give your ranking a kick.

6. Link Your Twitter Profile from Every Source Possible


You name it, you can link your Twitter profile from your Facebook page, Newsletter, Blog posts, Forums, LinkedIn profile, etc. Popular Twitter directories like WeFollow, TwitterHolic, TrackingTwitter, and more will also improve visibility and link building.

Trust is essential when it comes to online business. The first and oftentimes the only means of contact for customers with you is your website. There is no face-to-face communication so trust is a little more difficult and customers are considerably more sceptical. Will they receive their order on time and without damage? This is only one of the major questions that will come across your customer’s mind affecting the decision to purchase or not. Since trust is absolutely critical, here are some ways you can build customer trust online:

Security in Transactions

You should be able to show your clients that their data is protected. Communication should be secured as a way to gain their trust. This will take some investment in your part in securing your communication with potential and current clients. You basically need to show visitors to your website that they can trust you with their valuable information. You should also be able to show them that they can trust your company and the products you are selling.

Personal Correspondence

This is very important especially when it comes to suggestions and comments from your customers. They need to know that someone is listening and there is a possibility that you will implement changes based on their feedback. Oftentimes, companies send automatic correspondence which is not from a person. This is definitely a turn-off for most clients who will usually feel unimportant.

Social Media Presence

Social media is one of the top ways you can be more accessible to your customers. This is also a good way to put your company out there and make it easier for potential customers to find you. Being very easy to find will instil a sense of trust in the mind of your customer. This will also make it easier for them to give feedback which is very helpful in building trust. Of course, a quick reply on your part is very important to let them know that you are listening.

Don’t Lie

Make sure that you avoid advertisement that is based on lies. An example is claiming to be the number 1 selling product which is not true. A simple online search or some fact checking will expose your lie and negatively affect the trust of your potential customers. The best solution is to only give your visitors the truth. This will be a good start for building trust and creating a good relationship with your customers.

The internet has become a very important part of every company’s marketing strategy. Obviously, this is because of the potential business it can bring. However, because of stiff competition for rankings, it is very important to learn the right way of creating content that will have high rankings with the top search engines. This is called SEO content writing which has evolved considerably in the last few years. A few years ago, content quality was the only thing that mattered. Sadly, the current situation revolves mostly around SEO tactics that result to high rankings. Here are the most effective tips for SEO content writing that can help you achieve top rankings.

Stay Ahead by Using the Latest Data

It is very important to always stay ahead of your competition. You can do this by being updated with the latest news, trends, information, events, etc. The best solution is to use real time data on and off your site. This is why SEO is a never-ending job that entails you to invest a considerable amount of time daily in order to succeed. For example, you need to take note of the certain amount of visits from specific keywords and use this information to increase the number of visits to your website.

Optimize for Search AND for Social

Social media is one of the biggest things today. This is surely an opportunity that SEO practitioners should take advantage. Social media will make your content easy to share and a lot more discoverable. This means that there will be a higher possibility that your potential customers will find you. A good tip is to focus on the top social sharing options like tweets, likes and shares.

Target the Right Personas

Creating a search persona is one of the most effective practices of marketers today because it is very useful in understanding how an ideal customer searches on the internet. Once you have a good understanding of how your target customers search online, you will be able to come up with a strategy that will make it easier for them to find you. Of course, the most important part is creating an accurate persona.

Summary

A few traditional writing rules are still applicable. However, you also have to learn the new rules of SEO content writing in order to have some competitive edge. By learning the new rules and combining these with some traditional rules, you will be able to come up with content that is informative, easy to understand, easy to share and most importantly fits what your target audience is looking for online.

Controlling your brand’s message is one of the most important aspects of business that is crucial in achieving success. For online businesses, this can be done several ways including website optimization, using social media, releasing videos, etc. The main point is to ensure that your target audience hears what you want to say. The internet has revolved in recent years and one of the results is that controlling your brand’s message is now more important than ever particularly because of the popularity of social media.

Site Audit: How do You Use Social Media?
Before starting to optimize a site, the first action of a seasoned SEO practitioner is to perform a thorough technical dive with the intention of discovering the major and minor problems. Once these problems are established, it is time to make a plan on what actions need to be taken. Prioritization is also important in order to solve the bigger problems first and have faster results.

One of the most important parts of any site in terms of optimization is title tags. This is because it is one of the most important signals that search engines check when determining what a particular page is all about. Also, this gives visitors an idea what each page is about. Social media is the same and optimization it is often overlooked. This is obviously a big mistake especially because of the popularity of social media with hundreds of millions of users all over the world.

In one study conducted by ShareThis, they came up with the conclusion that Facebook makes up about 37% of traffic from shares with the use of the social share button. So, the question is if you’re fully taking advantage of this opportunity. In some cases, some organizations are still in the dark having no Social Media strategy at all.

Where to Begin
If you want to begin as soon as possible, you need to initially focus on two social optimization tactics:

1. Social Sharing – you need to have your Social assets in place and continuously improve on these assets. You should also leverage these assets on your site. This will not only enable you to become an authority through the point of view of search engines but it also allows users to share your content easily. It is very simple, the more shares you have, the higher your authority and visibility in SERP.

2. Social Graph and Social Sharing – this automatically points to the Open Graph because of its close connection to adding social share buttons. These two should come together since not having Open Graph tags hinders sharing.

Do you agree that the era of traditional website authority building is long gone? With today’s multitude of fresh and innovative channels, it is undeniably true that you have better options when building site authority. Using social media seems to be the best option, don’t you think? Well, on the surface this options appears easy and simple, but truth is social media also entails commitment, hard work and ample dose of strategy.

What is Website Authority?
If you have a website with awesome contents but it never seems to rank high on major search engines, then take a look at your website authority. What is it? It simply implies that your website is legitimate and has some pull. You’ll know you’ve increased your website authority when people start visiting your website because they learn something. Some might even leave an informative comment or link to your site. With this, search engines will eventually like your site for particular reasons. So once you create a useful post, search engines will get that content indexed quickly and rank just as fast.

What Search Engines Take Into Consideration?

• Number of quality inbound links
• Age of Domain
• Time that Visitors Usually Spend on the Site
• Site Authority

This article will give you 4 tips on how to influence social metrics using social media. This will help build your website’s authority.

Be True. No, you can’t fake becoming an authority in a specific industry. So be creative and be passionate. Train your staff and keep them updated regarding industry related topics. Create clever content that you can add to your website, which can be shared also on Social Media .

Know Your Target Market. Sure, identifying your audience is simple, but knowing your target demographic is not that easy. Determine how to effectively craft your messaging using social media. Encourage more meaningful interaction. Aim for maximum impact by engaging with your audience appropriately. You may send out customer surveys or conduct social listening research. This will help you recognize niche social networks including social sites, blogs and forums.

Grow Your Network! So you’ve shared contents on Facebook, tweeted out a few posts and received some +1’s? Should you stop right there? No. Using social media to develop your brand’s authority requires continuous participation. Your goal here is to have other authoritative users on the platform recognize your site and acquire a lot of friends, followers and/or circle-ers. Apparently, it’s mandatory to have regular interactions and high engagement levels.

Creating a small business website using WordPress is very easy. This is why most businesses prefer to use this when creating a website. An amazing thing about WordPress is that it is easily expandable using the WordPress plugin system. This way, it is very easy to optimize your website, manage content or create backups.

However, there are hundreds of plugins available and it is quite difficult to choose which ones to use for your small business website. Here are some of the most important plugins you can use for your website:

Yoast SEO

WordPress is definitely one of the best content management systems. A minor problem is that it isn’t completely optimized for search engines. The basic version lacks some core features that usually result to issues of duplicate content. This is where Yoast SEO comes in. This plugin makes it very easy to optimize title tags, remove unnecessary archives, organize sections of the site and remove categories from the category page URLs. This plugin is very easy to use and packs a lot of useful features.

Yoast Analytics

With this plugin, you will be able to easily track logged in and logged out users. You can even segment by post type and track particular links as events. However, this is a little difficult to install into your website if you’re using Google Analytics. The Yoast Analytics plugin will allow you to connect your Google Analytics account with your website easily. Also, you will be able to tag all the pages and make Google Analytics Code easy to install.

W3 Total Cache

The biggest problem with WordPress is performance. Traffic for large websites with a big amount of content can be very slow. The best solution is to create static “cached” pages for the content that is published. This is one of the most common practices for increasing the speed of a website. The W3 Total Cache plugin is a great plugin that will allow WordPress users to setup, test and install caching systems easily.

ShareThis Plugin

Because of the increasing importance of social media, it is very important to optimize your site for social media and not just for search engines. The most basic way to do this is to add social share buttons to your published content. The easiest way to do this is to use the ShareThis plugin for WordPress. This makes content sharing very simple and easy.

Taking advantage of social signals is one of the newest trends in SEO. Google +1s, likes, and re-tweets are believed to have a significant effect on SEO. Although there are many so-called SEO experts who still believe otherwise, most experts agree that social signals are very important in increasing rankings. However, the truth is that social signals are only important if they come from authority sites. Basically, you need to focus on your own authority and at the same time your relationship with other authority sites. On the other hand, social signals from sites that are not considered authority sites can still have other benefits.

Regarding Facebook

Facebook is without a doubt the largest social network today with over 150 million users in the United States alone. About half of the population of the US are Facebook users. According to a survey, only about 10% of Facebook users in the US are very active liking, sharing and +1ing. This basically means that it is very difficult to take advantage of social signals from Facebook. However, if you are able to reach out to this small percentage of Facebook users, you will experience enormous benefits in terms of SEO.

The Bottom line

The bottom line is that relevance is important. Content that is recommended by friends and other people you know is usually more relevant compared to content from strangers. This is according to Google’s Webmaster FAQ. Also, Google relies mainly on crawling to look for links shared by users. Basically, author authority is complicated with Google because they don’t have feed level access to Facebook and Twitter’s data streams. On the other hand, Bing has a feed level access to Facebook so social signals are more relevant with this search engine.

Summary

So the final question is regarding how social media can be used for SEO. The answer is basically about sites or people who are considered as authority. The main idea is to focus on authority. You have to catch the attention of these people/sites and create a good relationship with them. If they decide to share your content, your rankings will be affected positively. You also have to focus on increasing your authority. However, this is not very easy since it is difficult to catch the attention of these people. Another way to use social media is to increase visibility with your intended audience, improve branding value and attract direct traffic.