Continue reading »]]> Localize your business, optimize Google Plus Pages, Foursquare and Banjo apps, set up your local business presence to attract your local social audience.

If your business is local as it should be, then this post is for your eyes.

Google Plus Business Pages and Google Places

Google Places

Probably you already have a Google Local Page and probably you still don’t know that you can merge your Google Plus Business Page with your existing Google Local Page. Do it and improve your social presence through the Big G platform. As soon as you’ll merge the two pages (at the moment just the category “Local Business or Place” have this chance), you’ll notice a better rate of visits to your website in relationship with the actions realized by the users in Google Places (Google Maps).

The same simple law, try to engage your social audience: comment their posts, share their content, do “+1″ on their thoughts.

Foursquare

The power of FourSquare

Foursquare has over 30 million users. Its strength comes from its users, recommending and sharing their opinions, views and thoughts throug this social media and on different social media sites. Remember that the great part of the shares are realized through mobile devices, so never share many lines of text (conciseness is a winning weapon). Here are the steps to follow to build your business presence, to localize your business:

- Create your branded page on Foursquare (also download the app Foursquare for Business) – https://foursquare.com/create_page

- Start posting coupons, specials and promotions to have appeal on your audience through your Foursquare dashboard. Remember that your posts should be no longer than 160 characters.

- Share photos and news to make know your customers you are there, next to them in any moment they need you.

- Answer to any comment or any check-in you receive also through the different social networks your users are enjoying. Try to make feel each of your potential customers as unique and important (whenever a customer share something in Foursquare he/she can also share this on Facebook and Twitter!).

- Remember that the Foursquare audience is localized, use this info to appeal your customers to visit you physically.

Banjo

Banjo App

Banjo is an emerging social app for iPhone and Android that lets you view people’s social network profiles based on their location. It’s a perfect way to engage your local audience. Banjo covers these social networks: Facebook, Twiter, Foursquare and Instagram. Try to use it.

It’s very interesting the alert function that alert you as soon as one of your contacts is near to you. If your business is local and you want to localize your business, this app is a must for you.
Other local business sites

There are many other sites you can use to create incoming links and build your local presence (localize your business).

Among them and depending on the kind of business you have and where it is, I would suggest:

• Zagat
• Yelp
• Yahoo! Local Listings
• City Search
• Merchant Circle
• Insider Pages
• Angie’list
• Dealer Rater
• Judy’s Book
• Trip Advisor
• Edmunds
• OpenTable
• Urban Spoon
• Demand Force
• Kudzu
• Yellow bot
• City Voter
• DexKnows
• Super Pages
• Menu Pages
• Lila Guide
• Vitals
• Bidding for Travel
• Expedia
• Orbitz
• Fodors
• Travelocity
• Travelpost

 What else?

Are you planning a trael to Italy ? Take your iPad or your Android device with you and do a Foursquare check-in wherever you’ll stay. I would suggest:

1st in the north of Italy the Garda Lake. Stay at the wellness hotel Acquaviva Hotel 

2nd in the middle of Italy the Cinque Terre (Liguria). Stay at the Monterosso Hotel, Hotel Marina 5 Terre.

3rd in the middle of Italy the Gonfalone 6, a wonderful bed and breakfast in the heart of Rome.

4th in the south of Italy visit Tropea and stay at the Sunshine Club Hotel, a wonderful wellness hotel to stay.

So .. happy business and happy travels.

localize your business

Continue reading »]]> Fashion is social is the thesis of this post.

Just count the number of followers that some fashion brands have on the most popular social networks to realize how the brands, associated with the world of fashion, are investing in the social net.

Having a look on the table, we can easily deduce how some brands are still lagging behind the others. Different brands haven’t got a presence on Instagram yet, someone on Pinterest, etc…

Arranging the data for the number of “fans” in any single social network, we can see that three brands are conducting the game: Victoria’s Secret, Burberry and H&M.

If your business has to do with fashion or simply you deal with fashion (you have a blog dedicated to fashion) social networks can be a valuable tool to increase your fashion media marketing popularity.

Be up-to-date is the prerequisite for a good work on social networks. I would suggest a fashion blog like Fashion and Runway (http://www.fashionandrunway.com), the website is dedicated to give news on the fashion world, with timely news on all the new collections of leading fashion brands.

Returning, however, on social networks, the classic ones where you need to be present, they are surely Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Google Plus. However, there are “minor” social networks that seem to best convey the visual discourse, social networks that seem to favor particularly those involved in fashion and in general all those activities related to images.

Pinterest pinterest.com/

Let’s talk first of all about Pinterest. The social network was launched to the public in 2010 and it has acquired more than 13 million users worldwide in a couple of years. Pinterest is quite useful to generate traffic and to fix customer loyalty of any brand. If you have a site with fashion images, just insert the famous “pin button” to start to register the shares of those who surf your site.

To check what has been shared, just type http://pinterest.com/source appending the name of your domain. Pinterest will provide you the shared images of that source.

You must create your personal account and possibly that of your brand, then you need to start stimulating your audience or at least your target. Participate in Pinterest by commenting the pins related to your brand, follow the users that are pinning more the topics of your interest …

A very useful tool to understand the value of your PIN, is Reachili (ex Pinterly) http://www.reachli.com It is a real analytics tool for Pinterest with the ability to monitor each pin you post. You can know how many clicks, likes and repins you receive thanks to Reachli. You’ll understand which words make you drive more visits to your website, which kind of images lend themselves more to be “repinned”.

A strategy that can be adopted to increase your fashion media marketing popularity is to create “shared boards”. You create a board and invite more users (usually the ones that are very popular in the topic of the board itself). The result is usually an increased visibility of the board and of your profile.

Instagram http://instagram.com/

This social network has its popularity only to mobile devices: iPhone, iPad and iPod and just recently to Android devices (2012). The secret of success in Instagram rely on tagging the shared images. Through the research of the tags, you can access the images that have the searched tag. The more tags (coherent) you add to your posts the more chances you have to be visible in Instagra searches. The second tip is to engage the community of Instagram: search for people interested in your images and follow them. In many cases, those who follow will follow you back.

A key tool of Instagram is dedicated to the control of the followers: never follow too many users who do not follow you back. The best tool for this kind of control is Instunfollow http://instunfollow.com/

Even though Instagram has just gained the web, there are several platforms that amplify the signal. Here are some:

Pinstagram
Followgram
Gramfeed
Webstagram
Copygram
Statigram
Webbygram
Extragram
Pingram
InstaCanvas
GetMeRated

Finally, another interesting chance that gives you Instagram is the ability to amplify your voice. Each post can reach different social networks at the same time: Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Flickr and Foursquare.

Lyst http://www.lyst.com/

Lyst is a stunning social network. Lyst counts on the participation of the major fashion brands and it represents the concept of “Social ecommerce”. It’s in fact a social network but also a platform for buyng dresses and clothes. The platform is complex. You have, as in other social network, the followers (those who follow you) and the following (those that you follow), but Lyst allows many other things: connect your blog to your profile, connect your Pinterest account, create your collections, create your own wish lists and then be paid for the sales produced and potential customers brought to the platform.

Shopcade http://www.shopcade.com/

Se avete un’azienda che produce capi di abbigliamento, potreste tentarre di essere inclusi in Shopcade e vendere i vostri capi attraverso questo social network. Si tratta sempre di un social network e social ecommerce (come Lyst) con un alto grado di “gamification”. Ogni volta che si compie un’azione in Shopcade si ottengono punti. I punti possono poi essere convertiti in oggetti virtuali (abbellire il proprio robot Shopcade) o buoni sconto. Anche qui abbiamo followers e following

If you have a company that produces clothing, you could try to be included in Shopcade and sell your items through this social network. It is as Lyst a social network and a social ecommerce with a high degree of “gamification.” Whenever you perform an action in Shopcade you get points. The points can then be converted to virtual objects (embellish your Shopcade robot) or discount vouchers. Here, too, we have followers and following.

Pose http://pose.com/

Pose is undoubtedly a social network dedicated to fashion. Pose can considered ‘the younger sister of Pinterest” but with more experience on mobile. The application of the Mobile allowed to receive some popularity until Pinterest launched its own app. The target is very young. If your target audience is young it might be a good social network for you to engage.

Fancy http://www.thefancy.com/

It’s a social network dedicated to images and where clothing has a remarkable preponderance. Even there you have “followers” and “following”. You can follow lists (specific topics), you can post pictures to your network of contacts asking to confirm that the image posted is “fancy.” Depending on the popularity of the network you have a score (rank). There is an incipient social ecommerce.

Thumb http://thumb.it/

Thumb is currently an application for Apple and Android mobile devices. The social network aim is to give your opinion for any image posted through a thumbs up or a thumbs down.

Poshmark http://poshmark.com/

Poshmark is a social network dedicated to fashion, currently only available for Apple mobile devices. The idea of this social network is simpl: you can sale your clothes and buy the clothes of any other user. In times of crisis, buying clothes from big fashion brands at reduced prices is a great idea.

At the moment I’m posting there are many other social networks that can give you fashion media marketing popularity, I’ll be posting something in my next posts. See you soon fashion addicted readers.

Continue reading »]]> Click through rate (CTR) is determined by a perfect landing page, your ad text and your offering; the post relates the anatomy of a perfect landing page.

The most important elements of a website, a part from the home page, are the “landing pages”. Landing pages, also known as “lead-capture pages”, might be considered the tools that make possible to convert visits into leads or visits into purchases.

The post anatomy of a perfect landing page will illustrate all the elements that make your landing pages perfect.

You can reach visits to your landing pages through different media, among them: DEM, newsletter, pay-per-click (PPC), social network interactions, etc… But the most important factor will be the conversion rate of the landing page.

Normally the CTR varies from 5 to 15% but a perfect landing page will make you expirience between the 30% to 45%, depending on the sbject dealt with the landing page. My own experience is referred to a concrete case study: http://www.flagsonline.it, our flags ecommerce. The tips that followed have been applied there.

The “landing pages” were the DEM to our customers. We have doubled the CTR reaching a CTR of 30 % with a conversion rate that has been varying from 3 to 6%, depending on the offers we have been proposing.

The first important element is the “Call to action“. You have to be clear in telling your visitors “what you want them to do” and “why they should do it”.

The call to action might be realized through a good healine and, possibly, its sub-headline or secondary head line.

Remember that landing pages should be mapped in the Google sitemap and the website should have internal links to the landing pages.

Anatomy of a perfect landing page

Any website page could be treated as a “landing page” but there’s a problem there. The landing page should focus itself on a direct call to action. If the landing page has the navigation bar of the website, the attention of our visitors will be dispersed among all the links the visitor will found in the landing page.

So another tip there. Never use the structure of your website to generate a landing page.   The landing page should have very few internal links. The visitor will execute our action or he/she will exit the website, so remove all distractions, including navigation links.

Other important element of a landing page are:

- Text presentation. The call to action must be clear in the textual presentation. The lenght of the text should never exceed approximately the 500 words.

- Imagine / Video. Images and videos may be more significant than words to express your objective. Otherwise if images and videos might distract your visitors, simply don’t use them.

- Action button. A graphical button is mandatory to direct visitors to the action your require. You have to experiment with various button shapes: breaking the norm can garner attention. The button should be well contrasted and visible. Use a title and a short subtitle, they help the visitors to better understand what should they do. The use of shapes such as arrows might direct attention to your button but it might depend on the subject treated by the landing page. Try and experiment.

- Form. If you need a form to be filled in (for example in order to provide an ebook and get the email address of the visitor), consider to use just the essential fields, just the ones you need, people don’t like to spend too much time filling in forms.

- One Time Offer. This feature has a significant value in case of selling products and services. The one time offer introduces an emotional factor that pushes the user into taking action. Emotion plays a primary role there. A research presented at the IEEE Conference on Commerce and Enterprise Computing event, in Vienna on 23 July 2009, esplains how the 42,6% of the basket abandons depend on emotional factors. ( ref.   http://www.amaze.com/news/news-items/online-shoppers-abandon-their-basket.aspx )

- Testimonials. Keeping on emotional factors, the presence of testimonials helps the visitor to trust the proposal of the landing page.

- The seals (trust indicators). Another emotional factor is determined by the presence of graphical seals that the customer know and trust in. Paypal, VISA and Verisign are samples of trusting logos for each visitor. The presence of these seals make the visitor confident with the website and increase the chances that the call to action will be realized.

- Above the fold. Grant visitors the possibility of visualizing your landing page without having to scroll the page, at least for the most significant element of the landing page itself.

Finally.

Once you have realized the perfect landing page, you can verify the relevance of the page through the Google Adwords Quality Score. The quality score will determine the cost-per-click (cpc) and it’s inversely proportional to the score. The higher is the score, the less you’ll be paying the cpc; the higher is the score the best your landing page will be performing.

A/B Testing. Create more version of the same landing pages and check which version perform better. Measure the performances of your landing pages through analytics tools (You may use google analytics, Webtrends, Shinystat or Omniture) so that your landing pages will be always performing well.

See you on the next post.

Continue reading »]]>  

Social sharing buttons

If you want to make you blog and social presence influent, you have to make your content shareable through different social networks and social media. This article will show you the vertical social sharing count buttons you can install in your blog or website.

Not all the communities might be useful for your blog, but it’s better to know each opportunity you can count on. The share counts twice, it’s a good way to know how your content engage in a specific social network and if the numbers are interesting, it also engage the user that just is visiting your blog or website.

1 – Google Plus or Google+ ( http://plus.google.com ) 200 million users

It’s the most influent social network in a SEO perspective. Its community counts more than 200 million active users and the button has significant influence on Google’s SERPs. You can have a look there http://www.google.com/webmasters/+1/button/ to activate your button or just look for a plugin. The one I prefer is Facebook,Twitter,Google plus one Share Buttons, by Jeriff Cheng. This wordpress plugin allows you to easily integrate others count buttons I’ll be considering in this post.

2 – Facebook like button ( http://www.facebook.com/ ) 900 million users

Facebook has over 900 million active users, more than half of them using mobile devices (May 2012). Facebook offers different social plugins to apply for your website or blog (http://developers.facebook.com/docs/plugins/). The Like button lets a user share your content with friends on Facebook. When the user clicks the Like button on your site, a story appears in the user’s friends’ News Feed with a link back to your website. (http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/like/)

3 – Facebook share button ( http://www.facebook.com/ ) 900 million users

The Share button has been deprecated in favor of the Like button. The vertical button is the box_count type attribute script. The users can click the share button and post the article details on their Facebook profiles which can be viewed by their connected Facebook friends. (http://developers.facebook.com/docs/share/)

4 – Linkedin ( http://twitter.com ) 161 million users

This social network reached its life in 2002 thanks to Reid Hoffman, one of the Linkedin co-founder. According to Linkedin, its community has reached the 161 million users (31st of March 2012). In order to realize your Linkedin share button, just have a look at the following URL:

http://developer.linkedin.com/plugins/share-plugin-generator

5 – Twitter ( http://twitter.com ) 140 million users

This social network was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey. The service gained worldwide popularity and nowadays it counts on 140 million active users. You can set your sharing button directly from the resources in Twitter: https://twitter.com/about/resources/buttons

6 – Digg ( http://digg.com/ ) 40 million users

Digg is the social network for sharing news or as Digg declares: “The best news, videos and pictures on the web as voted on by the Digg community. Breaking news on Technology, Politics, Entertainment, and more!” and also “Digg is a place for people to discover and share content from anywhere on the web”. According to Quantcast this social network counts on 5 million active users just in the USA (the same quantity of the US Linkedin users). You can have a look on how to set your buttons from there: http://about.digg.com/downloads/button/smart

7 – Stumbleupon ( http://www.stumbleupon.com ) 20 million users

StumbleUpon can be considered a “social bookmarkgin” or just a discovery engine that finds and recommends web content to its users. Its features allow users to discover and rate web pages, photos, and videos that are personalized to their interests using peer-sourcing and social-networking principles. StumbleUpon is the easiest way to discover new and interesting web pages, photos and videos across the web. According to Quantcast it involves 20 million active users in the USA. You can share your content thrugh StumbleUpon by visiting the following URL: http://www.stumbleupon.com/dt/badges

8 – Pinterest ( http://pinterest.com/ ) 17 million users

Pinterest is an online pinboard where you can share the things you love online, visually. It’s one of the most recent Social Network (launched on March 2010) and the one that grew more than the others in these 2 last years. If your blog is related to fashion, design, food and drink, having your Pinterest share button is a must. To develop your pinterest share button just have a look at the following URL: http://pinterest.com/about/goodies/

9 – Xing ( http://www.xing.com/ ) 12 million users

XING is a social network that connect business professionals. It’s very useful in order to search for companies, jobs and employees. Actually the Social Network should count on 12 million of users. If professionals are the target of your website or blog, use the Xing share button to submit your content. In order to set your Xing share button, have a look there: https://www.xing.com/app/share?op=button_builder

10 – Reddit ( http://www.reddit.com/ ) 8 million users

Reddit is a social news website where the registered users (redditors) submit content and decide what is popular. Redditors vote on which stories and discussions are important. the hottest stories rise to the top, while cooler stories sink. A good piece of news might receive thousands of click if the story gain popularity. If you admin a news blog or a website about fashion or design, having a reddit button is a must. You can set your Reddit share button from there: http://www.reddit.com/buttons/

11 – Delicious ( http://delicious.com/ ) 6 million users

Delicious is a social bookmarking web service for storing, sharing, and discovering web bookmarks. This social network was established in 2003. Users can follow you or just a category you manage. If your content is fresh Delicious may be the right social network trhough which you can share your content. It’s hard to find the right way to have your Delicious social button, but here is where you have to start: http://delicious-button.googlecode.com/svn/v1.1/setup.htm

12 – BufferApp ( http://bufferapp.com/ ) 500.000 users

BufferApp isn’t a social network. Buffer provides you very professional tools for your social media marketing. The presence of the Buffer share button makes evidence that the website you are visiting is a professional website. The button invites social media professionals to share your content. If you are involved in graphic design, SEO, Social Media or just Web Marketing, having the buffer button is a must. To install your buffer button, just have a look at the following URL: http://bufferapp.com/extras/button

13 – DZone ( http://www.dzone.com/ ) 150.000 users

As DZone declares, this directory is made up of “fresh links for developers”. The purpose of the website is to develop acommunity to share and promote developer-related info. DZone works like Digg and Slashdot. The Dzone motto from Rick Ross, DZone CEO, says: “We scout the developer web for the best links, so you don’t have to”. You can have your button from there: http://www.dzone.com/links/buttons.jsp

14 – BizSugar ( http://www.bizsugar.com ) 50.000 users

Share small business news, tips, blog posts and information with BizSugar‘s community of small business owners and entrepreneurs. It’s not a big community but if you can engage the community you can have excellent results. The news are subdivided in these categories: marketing, finance, franchises, management, news, technology and startups. If your business is related to one of these categories, bizsugar might be the right button for you.

15 – Design float ( http://www.designfloat.com/ ) 20.000 users

Design float is not a social network, just a niche website related to web design news and tips. If your blog refers to design, graphics, internet or just if you admin a geek blog, the Design Float share button will be giving you hundreds visits more. You can set your Design Float sharing design through this URL: http://www.designfloat.com/tools-en.php

16 – SERPD ( http://www.serpd.com ) 10.000 users

SERPD stay for Search Engine & Internet Marketing News. If your business is related to Marketing and SEO, this social button might be a good tool to make known your content. The community is not so populated but people are very responsive. If your content is referred to a blog, SEO or just marketing, apply the button.

17 – The Web Blend ( http://www.thewebblend.com ) 10.000 users

The Web Blend is a community for designers, developers and tech junkies that keeps you current with a summary of the latest in web related news and trends. It’s very similar to DZone in its purposes even if it seems not to have the same and significance audience of DZone.

18 – Design Hovel ( http://designshovel.com ) 10.000 users

The website confirms: Design Shovel is a place to find the latest web design/development, digital art, traditional art and graphic design articles published online. If your content is related to design and graphics, the social share button might be a good tool to spread your content.

19 – Tip’d ( http://tipd.com ) 900.000 users

The purpose of this social network is to build a community for financial news, ideas and tips. You can find clear instructions there: http://tipd.com/bloggers The display of the social button seems to be a bit slow but if your blog speaks about financial topics, it should be a must to add this social count button. According to Quantcast this social network counts with 900.000 users. I placed this share button at the end of the list as sometimes I had problem to display it as their

20 – TweetMeme (http://tweetmeme.com/ ) 60.000 users

TweetMeme is a service which aggregates all the popular links on Twitter to determine which links are popular. Each link belongs to categories, subcategories and channels. The Retweet button is for website and blog publishers that want to encourage their audience to retweet their content on twitter. You can take the sharing button from there: http://help.tweetmeme.com/2009/04/06/tweetmeme-button/

Tweetmeme has not so many users, just 60.000 users according to Quantcast, but it can be exploited to leverage your Twitter audience and receive retweets for your posts. The button is at the end of my list as I prefer the original Twitter and Buffer button. I suppose that a third “Twitter” button would confuse my audience.

Additional social sharing buttons

Vkontakte ( http://vk.com ) 290 million users

VK or VKontakte is the Russian Facebook, very popular in Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Moldova and Belarus. At the moment the sharing button doesn’t allow the vertical alignment of your button, just the horizontal version is allowed. By placing the “Post on VK” button under articles of your publication or blog, you will allow the VK users to rapidly share your materials with their friends. If your website or blog has russian content, it would be a must to install this button. Look at the following page to have your sharing button: http://vk.com/developers.php?oid=-17680044&p=Share

Tuenti ( http://vk.com ) 14 million users

Tuenti is the spanish version of Facebook. If your content is in spanish, you have to use Tuenti social share button. Unfortunately at the moment there’s just the share button but it has no counter. Anyway an audience of 14 million users that all speak spanish is something that you cannot loose if your content is in spanish too.

That’s all for now Boys and Girls.

See you soon Social

Continue reading »]]> The following steps should led you to increase your edgerank in Facebook and give you the popularity and influence you deserve in the most popular social network of the World.

1 Step: Facebook Edgerank, the measure of your success

Two Facebook developers (Ruchi Sanghvi and Ari Steinberg) explained what the Facebook Edgerank was during the F8 event in San Francisco, on April 21st 2010. Nowadays every Social Media Marketer knows that the EdgeRank is the algorithm that determines what items populate your news feed in Facebook. Its formula is simple:

Facebook Edgerank = Affinity score * Weight * Time Decay

The Affinity score represents the affinity between the user and the creator of the item. It’s value is based on the messages exchanged between the user and the creator of the item and the number of times the user’s profile was checked .

The Weight is the type of the interaction between the Facebook users. This value is calculated on the following interactions (listed in the order of importance): a tag on a picture , a comment and a Like on a post (picture, video or text message).

The last element is the Time Decay. The older is the post, the lower the time decay number.

Facebook Edgerank determines that only 14-16% of your content is being seen by your fans. Once you know this variable, you just have to fight to increse this index.

2 Step: Increase your Facebook Edgerank , the simple way

There’s a simple way to increase your edgerank. Whenever it’s possible, post the type of content that people share most. This includes the following actions:

• Photos and videos have better chances to be shared, so post them frequently and directly.
• Each link you post should have its image and a short endearing description.
• Keep your posts to under 160 characters, people don’t like to read a lot in Facebook.
• Post a variety of content to attract interactions, variety grants a better affinity score.
• Be positive, be cool. Think positive and share positive and fun content. You fans need it. Smile to your fans and they will be smiling at you.
• Never leave a fan without an answer. The faster is your answer to any comment, the higher will be the affinity score, so the Edgerank. Replies and comments are the base of affinity and weight factors.
• Enhance your website or blog with the social plugins: like and send buttons, comments and suggestions are tools that increase the interactions.
• Post questions, quizzes, surveys and polls to your fans. Engage your Community.

3 Step: Your Facebook Image, the The Importance of Appearance

The Facebook Timeline cover photo (both for people and brands) is 851×315 pixels. Change it regularly to keep your Page fresh and engage your Community. Consider that you can also Highlight a Post, the related image to be displayed may also be 851×315 pixels. Change the Hightlighted Post frequently.

4 Step: Facebook features, make the distintion

Facebook offers new features for your Business Pages. Among them:

• Pin to top. If you “pin” a post, this post will stay in the upper left side of your Page for 7 days. This feature can be useful for promotions and offers.
• App thumbnails. Since having a default custom landing tab is no longer an option, you should work on the app thumbnails. These thumbnails allow the user to access directly to a new app/page. You can choose till 5 app thumbnails to be added to your Facebook Page.
• Interests lists. This is a quite recent feature that promises to become popular and useful for social media marketing. You can set an interest and then you have to choose which users and Pages include in this specific interest. Each list may be public or private.

5 Step: Your Facebook performance, measure it !

Measure is the base of your success, so try to use Facebook Insights. The first element you can check through Facebook Insights is the number of fans even if many of your fans probably will never be reading your posts after they clicked on the like button of your Facebook Page. The elements to be considered are:

- Reach. Is the number of People who have seen your post during the next 28 days. You could calculate the Reach Index dividing the number of people reached by the number of fans you have.

- Virality Rate. This is the number of People Talking About This divided by the Reach (the number of people who have seen your Post).

You could easily export the “Post level data” to Excell from Facebook to monitor your posts and verify which kind of posts have a better performance. You should also consider the time of your posts. This is a very important factor.

6 Step: Facebook Tools to boost your Edgerank

The last step is about the tools you can apply to improve your Facebook presence and influence.

Edge Rank Checker ( http://www.edgerankchecker.com )

The star name is Chad Wittman (http://twitter.com/#!/ChadWittman) and he is the founder and the prophet of EdgeRankChecker.com. His magic Facebook Tool allow to monitor your Edge Rank Score on each Page you admin. You can choose between two versions:

The Edgerank Free version that just allows you to monitor the EdgeRank Score and the Best/Worst Avg Day.

The Edgerank Pro (from 15 dollars a month) allows you to have a report on the industry your Page belongs to, post grading, page recommendations, EdgeRank score over time, visual analysis of your engagement progess, best day + best time + best keyword and many other features. The Pro version gives you the best time to have the most impressions, most likes and most comments possible, a very useful feature.

I personally consider Edge Rank Checker one of the best Facebook Tool. The tool shares the knowledge of 200.000 Pages who influence of over 3 billion Facebook fans in the World.

Snappapp ( http://www.snapapp.com )

Snappapp is a website that offer a different services, the free option includes: create a Facebook landing page, coupon/special offer page or mobile landing page , access theme library for background images or upload custom images and the analytics to measure your Facebook performances.

Woobox (http://woobox.com )

Woobox is another application that offers the ability to add new Thumbnail apps to your Facebook Page. You can choose to add a Coupon, a Photo Contest, a Group Deal, a Custom Tab, a Vote Tab and, recently, the Pinterest TAB.

BufferApp ( http://bufferapp.com/ )

BufferApp is more a Twitter Tool but it also provides you the chance to schedule your Facebook posts. It’s so precious because you can publish a post whenever you have more chances to be read from your audience. It’s a precious Tool.

Continue reading »]]> It’s always hard to build a presence in Twitter, to gain an audience for your tweets. The idea of this post is to suggest you some special Twitter Tools to increase your influence in Twitter.

Twitter Tools

I also want to clarify that the results of your twitting will also depends on the right time you place your post on Twitter. Just read the article of Dan Zarella if you are looking for the best time to publish your tweets. http://www.problogger.net/archives/2010/12/06/whens-the-best-time-to-publish-blog-posts/

The preamble I need to do is that there isn’t the perfect Twitter tool. You have to try and re-try. You’ll find your tools depending on the needs you will have. The list below want to stimulate your research on them. Among the tools I tried, these represent the solution to my doubts and needs. Might be that your needs are different and you’ll find other interesting Twitter Tools.

The Twitter tools

Who Unfollowed Me

One of the best and simple Twitter Tool I found is Who Unfollowed Me ( http://who.unfollowed.me ). The lite version is absolutely free and it’s a perfect tool if you don’t have more than 100 twitter users that aren’t following you back.

The most exciting feature you have in Who Unfollowed me is the button “Who Unfollowed me” that will be displaying the users that have unfollowed you since the last check you did. You’ll be look at his/her name, avatar, number of followers and following and finally the note if you were following him/her. This feature will allow to unfollow people that are not following you anymore.

Another interesting feature is “Who’s not following me back” so that you can see the Twitter users you haven’t engaged yet.

Who's not following me back

I have 90 people that are not following me back In my list. Among them: Rand Fishkin from SEOmoz (http://twitter.com/#!/randfish), the prophet of the Modern SEO (the Social SEO); Cyrus Shepard (http://twitter.com/#!/CyrusShepard), Marketing director for PlaceFull; Avinash Kaushik (http://twitter.com/#!/avinash), Digital Marketing Evangelist, Google expert and Co-Founder of Market Motive; Biz Stone (http://twitter.com/#!/biz) the co-founder of Twitter Inc.; Jeff Bullas (http://twitter.com/#!/jeffbullas), one of the most popular blogger of the planet; Pete Cashmore (http://twitter.com/#!/petecashmore), the CEO and founder of the popular blog Mashable, a Technorati Top 10 blog worldwide (http://technorati.com/blogs/top100/); Danny Sullivan (http://twitter.com/#!/dannysullivan), the voice of SearchEngineLand.com; Matt Cutts (http://twitter.com/#!/mattcutts), the head of the webspam team at Google; Arun Chaudhary (http://twitter.com/#!/arunchaud), the first White House videographer; Kim Kardashian (http://twitter.com/#!/KimKardashian), Fashion Queen and best social celebrity; Oana Damian (http://twitter.com/#!/OanaDamian), Marketing and Business Development Executive at LeighFisher; Janet Aronica (http://twitter.com/#!/JanetAronica), Head of Marketing for Shareaholic; Claudia Marquez (http://twitter.com/#!/clauditamarquez), Marketing head at Click Media; Ana Maria Lopez (http://twitter.com/#!/analopezh), Journalist working in Digital Marketing; Blanca Cela (http://twitter.com/#!/blancacela), Social Media, Seo, PPC and Analytics expert; Laura Bringas Herrera (http://twitter.com/#!/Laurambh), Director of Media and Content at SMO Lead2Action; Joanna Lord (http://twitter.com/#!/JoannaLord), Director of Acquisition & Retention Marketing at SEOmoz.

Buffer App

Buffer App Dashboard

Another interesting Twitter Tool is Buffer App ( http://bufferapp.com/ ). This nice tool is also available as an app for iPhone and Android devices and it also has a plugin for Chrome (wonderful!). Buffer App is useful if you are looking to leverage the social power of Twitter to increase your Audience.

You can schedule your tweets, queuing up a list of tweets to post them at the best time. This tool will allow you to drive traffic to your website, to expand your social influence and/or to solidify your corporate presence or brand.

If you update your account and pay 10$ per month you’ll have: 50 posts in your buffer, 6 social accounts, 2 team accounts, free browser extensions, free mobile apps, ability to use your Bit.ly details and an advanced scheduling system

In the extra page of Buffer App you’ll look at many interesting extra Twitter Tools such as SocialBro and Tweriod.

Tweriod

Tweriod confirms most of my followers are online at 7 pm during the weekdays.

Tweriod ( http://www.tweriod.com/ ) analyses your tweets and your followers to verify which are the best times to reach your audience, so that you can start tweeting when it makes most sense to reach others. Tweriod can be connected to Buffer App to post your tweets when your followers are online.

SocialBro

SocialBro ( http://www.socialbro.com/download ) is a very efficient twitter tool. You can apply the segmentation of your audience on different values: language , number of followers and friends, number of lists , followers/friends ratio, account age, number of tweets per day, time since last tweet, verified and non-verified users, profiles with customized avatars or with the default avatar, accounts with URL or no URL.

This tool will let you know which are the Twitter users more influential among your following and followers, understand when you can reach your audience and the best way to interact with them. The best time to tweet is determined by analyzing your 100 top followers.

Another important feature is that you can backup your audience/community, save it in a local database, download all your Twitter followers and friends to a local database which you can consult even when offline (HTML5 powered).

SocialBro suggest when I should post my tweets

SocialBro can be integrated in Buffer App so that your tweets will be twitter when most of your followers are online (usually 38/40% of them).

Other interesting features offered by SocialBro are:

Twitter Lists Management . You can organize your followers and friends creating Twitter lists with the search results and update your existing lists with the new members of your community.

Easy Follow/Unfollow Back Tools. The tool shows you your new followers and an easy system to follow them back, to thank them shortly. SocialBro will also allow your to clean up your account by detecting noisy friends, potential spammers, and inactive users, and an easily way to unfollow them.

Fast Communication with Your Community.

Target your audience by tweeting and sending a direct message to selected users from the search results.

Fast Comunication (direc tweet or DM) . Through SocialBro you can tweet and DM your new followers or search users and weet them.

Search, Filter All Twitter . You can use SocialBro to find potential clients and potential consumers, from more than 20M active users.

Dashboard . You can easily see the evolution of your number of followers, friends and tweets.

Twitter Community Map . Visualize the world wide distribution of your community as a map.

Stats. See the stats of your competitors’ Twitter accounts and export to a pdf file. The charts are by: language, time zones, profiles with web URLs, users by number of followers, etc..

Hootsuite

HootSuite

A possible alternative to Buffer App is Hootsuite ( http://hootsuite.com/ ). The freeware account gives you the chance to admin till 5 social profiles from Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, Google Plus, Foursquare and the other social networks, quick reports, a message scheduling system and the chance to update your posts from 2 feed RSS or Atom.

Twitterfeed

TwitterFeed

The chance to post from a feed, we found it in Hootsuite, is the main function of Twitterfeed ( http://twitterfeed.com/ ). Twitterfeed allow you to choose how many rss feed you want and then to publish them both in Twitter and in Facebook. Twitterfeed also offers real-time Stats for tracking your posted feeds. It’s useful to connect your blog to your social networks.

Twit Cleaner

Twit Cleaner ( http://thetwitcleaner.com/)is the perfect tool to analyze your followers. Twit Cleaner will determine which users have potentially dodgy behaviour, which ones are usually absent, which ones have no activity in over a month, which ones have not much interaction, which ones are talking all the time, which ones have little organic content and which ones are not so interesting. If one of your followers has no post in more than a month, it might be useful to unfollow him/her, her/his account might be dismissed.

Twylah

Twylah ( http://www.twylah.com/ ) might be defined as the “Twitter Brand Page” tool, a sort of Twitter curation and presentation tool. Twylah enables you to create dynamic landing pages, or “Fan Pages” from your Twitter content, allowing to leverage your Twitter to a superior SEO level. Twylah.com provides great Twitter Curation and Durable SEO for your Tweets. The access is to invite. The dynamic Fan Pages are organized by your trending topics, they are shareable on Twitter and Facebook and they make evidence of your Twitter content. To use Twylah you need to sign in and wait for an invitation from the Twylah Team.

Monitter

Monitter ( http://monitter.com/ ) is a real time, live twitter search and monitoring. You can create how many columns you need to life monitoring a special keyword, hashtag or username you want to monitor. It’s more efficient than Twitter Search.

Twiends

Twiends seeds

Twiends ( http://twiends.com/ ) is a Twitter Community that help Twitter users to make them known among the rest of the users. Twiends creates an incentive for people to check out your social networks through a system of “seeds”. When you follow someone they give you seeds, and viceversa when they follow you. You can decide how many seeds you want to offer per follow, and when you run out you remain on the list so people can still follow you if they like. It’s an ethical way to gain your audience. A social network inside the Twitter Social Network. I like it.

Conclusions, if possible …

Obviously the Twitter world evolves so that you should always be monitoring the new Twitter Tools that the Twitter Community speaks about. I’ll try my best to upddate you on significant new tool I’ll find on the way.

Continue reading »]]> Let’s talk about your need to measure your success with Pinterest, your Pinterest influence. If you are a web marketer or just the owner of a Brand that is trying to invest in Pinterest, you would probably need to know which audience you are gaining, which images are performing better than others and finally what kind of popularity you have in Pinterest.

three Pinterest Analytics Tools

You are lucky as there are at least three tools you can use to check your Pinterest Presence and its performance. Let’s talk about Pinreach, Pinerly and Pinpuff: three tools developed for Pinterest Analytics.

Before analyzing these tools, I just suggest you to read my old post on Pinterest: http://afo.li/pi
I also would suggest to read carefully the post of Colby Almond in the blog of SeoMoz http://afo.li/pinseomoz

The post of Colby Almond show you each secret on the best way to post your pin in Pinterest. There’s a time to pray and a time to love the Bible says and there’s also a time to pin.

Pinreach

Pinreach Popular Pins

Pinreach is your Pinterest Influence and Analytics tool. Once you log in you have on the right side of your dashboard a nice table with your avatar, your PinReach Score (as Pinreach affirms “the PinReach score is a combination of various social activities you complete while using Pinterest”. It’s value is calculated by PinReach. The best score I found is 82 of Jane Wang http://pinterest.com/janew that has 2,880,841 followers 15,823 pins at the date) and a resume of all your data including: pins, repins, likes, followers, following, comments and boards.On the left side you have 4 interesting TABS: Analytics, Boards, Pins and Influential Followers.

The Analytics tab is quite graphical showing your trend. You can have a look at your personal score, the popularity of your best 5 pins (repins on them), the popularity of your boards. Clicking on the Boards TAB you can have a look of the data of each board you have (repins, followers, pins, liked and comments). The TAB Pins, instead, will display your top 10 pins that reached the greatest number of repins among your pins. Finally you have the TAB Influential Followers where you can see the 6 most influential pinterest users that are now following you.

Above your dashboard you also have different links to browse: Highest Reach, Trending Pins, Trending Members, Recently Checked Scores and Score Details. It’s useful to know the most trending members, the most trending pins in Pinterest. You can evaluate the people to follow and also which kind of “pins” have a better chance to gain popularity.

You also have to know that PinReach is launching PinReach PRO, a suite of valuable tools for marketers. I hope to have the chance to try the beta version soon.

Pinerly

Pinreach analytics

Pinerly is the righ tool for testing your pinterest activity, a good Pinterest Analytics Tool. The dashboard presents on the right side a little table with the following data: Followers, Following, Likes, Pins and Boards. The TABs are: Campaign, Pinalytics, Suggested and Follow.
From the TAB Campaign you can prepare your PIN: upload the image or just take it from a website. Once you do this you can set the landing URL and the description of your PIN. The next step will be on Pinalytics. There you can have a look on the pins you realized through Pinerly and their results. For each pin the Analytics will offer: the number of Click received, the Likes received, the Repins received and the Audience you reached (the number of pinterest users that possibly saw your pin through all the repins).

One of the most repinned images I pin

Actually my Pinterest performance has a percentage of clicks on my followers that varies from 0,80% to 4,0%, depending on how interesting is the image of the pin and how original this image is. The number of repins may reach the 10% if the image is significant and the audience can be multiplied by 12. So if I want to have 100 visits each time I post a PIN, I have to suppose to reach I have to dispose of a number of followers that vary from 2500 to 9000. I’ll be giving a call when I’ll have these followers in Pinterest.

The Suggested Tab just display a particular image that you could pin. And finally the Follow Tab is the tab where you can see the most influential pinterest users you can follow for each topic (Cuisine, Travel, Design, Photography, Fashion, Décor, Graphics, Kids, Entertainment, etc …).

Pinpuff

Pinpuff

Pinpuff is a particular Pinterest Analytics Tool. The right size of the dashboard display your avatar and the Pinfluence Score (mine is 52). Below the score you can look at the three most boards you have in Pinterest and below there are the “Quick Stats” that include Followers, Following, Pins, Boards, Likes, Liked and Repins. On the left side of the dashboard you have the Value of Pins & Referral Traffic. My pin worth 0.27$. Then you have other data. My Reach Score is 33.1 and Pinpuff says “You have above average following on Pinterest and can easily be improved further.” My Activity Score is 73.6 and Pinpuff says “Great!! You are very active on Pinterest – perfect choice for Brands on Pinterest”. My Virality Score is 47.4 and Pinpuff says “Lovely! Your pins are doing great job and people are really liking them and repining”. Below I can look at my first 20 boards with the number of Followers, Pins, Repins and Likes gained.

Now it’s the time of your choice. Try them and verify if you need them.

Continue reading »]]> This document represents a needful topic for each aspiring SEO specialist. The idea is to update it regularly and to integrate this document with your contributions.

Automated SEO reports

This is the easiest solution you have in your hands. Here is a list of free automated SEO tools that can offer interesting SEO reports on confirming the value of the SEO on the site you are analyzing.

http://www.quarkbase.com/

http://marketing.grader.com/

http://www.seoworkers.com/tools/analyzer.html

http://www.cubestat.com/

http://www.statbrain.com/

http://www.jonasjohn.de/test-tool/

http://spydermate.com/ (the apps for Android and iPhone are freeware)

The purpose of this post is to make your own SEO analysis.

The first step is to understand what kind of website we have to analyze. If you have access to its statistics, perfect. Otherwise nevermind: you can always determine the site, its structure, its possible ranking and traffic too.

Website Crawling Verification

Website Crawling Verification

You can start the job by crawling the website to be analyzed. There are many tools available. Some of the more interesting are: Screaming Frog SEO Spider Tool (http://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/) and IIS SEO Toolkit (http://www.iis.net/download/seotoolkit). One of the most appreciated to me is Xenu Link Sleuth (http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html). Finally I would also suggest you Crawl Test from Seomoz (http://pro.seomoz.org/tools/crawl-test). Seomoz offers different SEO tools even if you have to pay if you want to use them regularly.

You have to check the following ON-Page SEO factors:

• Website architecture. A flat site architecture is preferrable to a deep levels website. You can have a look to the following article to understand better the question: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/site-architecture-for-seo.
• Link equity. Verify that each page of the website has a good number of incoming internal links. Consider that Google has no problem to reach the 4^th level, that is to say that each page of your website should be reachable from any page of the site in no more than 4 clicks. If this is not your case, consider rebuild the structure of the website.
• Link errors. Verify if you have any broken link, if a linked page answer with an error (500,400,404 …)

Site Indexation Verification

Verify the status of Indexation on Google Search Engine.

You have to check the following SEO factors:

• Indexed URLs. You can simply realize the following query on Google: site:namedomain.tld
  Google will return the list of URLs it has indexed from your website. If the number of indexed URLs is quite different from the URLs you have registered using your crawling tools, it might be existing a problem for the Google spider to crawl the entire website and you should try to understand the reasons.
• Home Page verification. Search in Google the exact words you have in the tag “title” of the Home Page or the first part of it. If the website doesn’t rank in the first position of the SERP (Search Engine Results Pages), you can bet there’s a SEO problem on the website.
• Obsolete Indexed Pages. If old pages are indexed in Google, you have to redirect permanently to the new pages they should represent. You could also remove them from Google Webmaster Tools but just in case the resource gives you a server error 404.

Content Verification

You have to check the following ON-Page SEO factors:

• Duplicated Content. If you have access to the web statistics of the website it would be easier. Otherwise you could use Webmaster Tools by Google or Seomoz to verify if the website has duplicated content. If you don’t have access to these tools (it might be the case if you analyzing a competitor of your website), you’ll have to verify it performing different queries on Google on topic services and products offered from the website. There are a lot of tools you can use to make the job easier, just check this post: http://slodive.com/web-development/10-top-tools-checking-duplicate-content/

• Canonization Problems. The job is to verify if a rel=”canonical” is due or not. The question usually refers to the Home Page, where it might be responding as domain.tld/ domain.tld/index.php domain.tld/index.html or domain.tld/index.asp You should just have a single Home Page. If you can’t redirect index.asp to / that the case where you need to canonize the Home Page, placing this code inside the header tags, as it follows:
  <link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.domain.tld/”/>
• Pagination Problems. If your website has many products or services it’s probable that the website will have a sort of pagination of its products/services. In those cases it’s also probable that the website will have duplicated content pages or duplicated titles of pages. You have to play with rel=”prev” and rel=”prev”. You can have a look at the following post: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.it/2011/09/pagination-with-relnext-and-relprev.html

• Duplicated Title of Page. Duplicated titles of Pages are deprecated by Google and the other search engines. To check if the website has “duplicated” titles of Pages you can use: Google Webmaster Tools, Seomoz or just Xenu Link Sleuth. Even if Xenu was thought to be used in Windows, you can make it run also in Linux using wine. Once you have spidered the website, just order the pages for “title” and it will be easy to see which pages have the same Title of Page.

Extra SEO Verification

An important factor that it’s not strictly SEO but it’s related to, it’s to understand the audience of the Website. You can use different tools:

Google Adwords (free) https://adwords.google.com
Google Trends (free) http://www.google.com/trends/
Alexa (free) http://www.alexa.com
Quantcast (free) http://www.quantcast.com
Compete (from 199$ a month) http://www.compete.com

SEO analysis checklist

These tools give you important details on the demographic of the website visitors, the most popular keywords used to reach the website and many other data you can use to choose, update or change the keywords you want to rank first with the website itself.

Once we have determined the structure of the website, its indexation in the Search Engines (basically Google), the possible presence of navigation problems and the audience of the website, we are ready to the next step of the SEO analysis.

Domain On-Page SEO factors

• Age. Older Domain means better Search Engine Ranking.
• Keyword Representation. The domain itself should contains the most significant keywords of the website. The domain name should be short to be easily remembered, it shouldn’t contain underscores and special characters.

Domain Off-Page SEO factors

• 

  Google Page Rank

  Page Rank. It’s the value determined by Google each page of the website. The root domain Page Rank can considered the value of the domain itself. Page Rank samples: Flagsonline.it PR4 Bizonweb.it PR5 Seomoz.org PR6 ShinyStat.com PR7.

• Alexa Global Rank. The Alexa rank is calculated using a combination of average daily visitors to the website and pageviews on the same website over the past 3 months. The site with the highest combination of visitors and pageviews is ranked 1st. It’s useful to evaluate this rank in combination with some competitors of the website to better understand its value. (http://www.alexa.com)
• Compete Rank. Compete offers an estimation of the traffic of the website and it represents this value with the Compete Rank (http://siteanalytics.compete.com/ )
• MozRank, Page Authority and Domain Authority. The domain mozrank is a global link popularity metric, calculated similarly to Google’s PageRank on a log scale between 1-10. Page Authority and Domain Authority are two metrics calculated through Open Site Explorer by SeoMoz. These metrics are represented on a log scale between 1-100. You can have freely these values by checking your website there:http://www.check-domains.com/website-analysis/website-analyzer.php
• External backlinks. You can use http://www.majesticseo.com/ to calculate the incoming links to your website. You should represents these data:External BacklinksReferring DomainsReferring IP addresses

  Class C subnets

  Consider that if you have thousans of incoming links but all the links come from a couple of C subnets it’s probable that all the domains that link your website belong to you … so the value of the incoming links it’s insignificant. You could also check the Followed Linking Root Domains, that is to say the number of domains with at least one followed link to any page on the root domain (ref. seomoz.org).
  You can also add Alexa Sites Linking In as important ranking factor to be analyzed. The Google query “link:domain.tld” is not anymore a good SEO reference.

• Dmoz presence. One of the first step we did 10 years ago when we did a website was to sumbit it in Dmoz Directory. The presence of the website in DMOZ is still considered a SEO factor.
• 

  social network analysis

  Social network references. There’s a check list you could create on the Social Network environment. You should check if the website is present and mentioned in the following Social Network:- Facebook

  - Twitter

  - Google Plus

  - Linkedin

   

On-Page SEO factors

• URL. The url of each page should be search engine friendly and it must contain the most significant keywords of the same page.
• Title tag. The title should contain the keywords we promote in a discursive manner, it can’t be just the list of the keywords of the page. As Google indicates in the “Google SEO Report Card”: “A descriptive title and description meta tag can help a result pop out better to search users.” The reference is here: http://www.google.com/webmasters/docs/google-seo-report-card.pdf
• Description meta tag. The description should be descriptive and contains the keywords we promote inside the page. The actual standard confirms that the description should be not longer than 156 characters, including spaces and commas.
• H1, H2 and H3 tags. Each page of the website should present these tags and these tags shoul be ordered (h1,h2,h3) and inside they should be presenting the keywords for the page they represent.
• Keyword density. It’s the keyword density inside the body of the page. A good ranking could be determined by a good density (5 – 20% of the total words inside the body).
• Bold Keywords and Strong Keywords. A keyword inside the tag <strong> or <b> is an heavier keyword, better visible to Search Engines.
• Keyword prominence. A keyword in the upper left side of a page is heavier than the same keyword placed in ths inferior right side of the page. The prominence is how early the keyword is inside the page.
• Anchor text. The anchor text should be keyword representative. If you have a link to the SEO section the anchor text should be “SEO section”.
• Title of Link. The title of Link should be keyword representative. You can have a look at this post to understand its importance:
  http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/link-tilte-attribute-and-its-seo-benefit
• Image Alt and Image title. Alt text is an alternative information source for those people who have disabled the images in their browsers and those who are simply unable to “see” the images. It should describe what the image is about and get those visitors interested to see it. The alt text contributes to rank in Google Images search, so it’s a relevant ranking factor. Image title should provide additional information. Tt should be relevant, short, catchy and concise and it helps to promote the keywords of the page (be careful as it might be checked as spam if the description and the content of the image have nothing to do with, i.e. Kewyord stuffing).
  

You can check many of the SEO factors I describe above using this simple page:

http://www.seocentro.com/tools/search-engines/metatag-analyzer.html

The last step of the SEO analysis is an advanced SEO analysis and it’s referred to other aspects you can improve for ranking better.

Usability

• 

  Usability test

  Website Usability Review. You should check if the website is usable, if you can easily navigate it even if disabling javascript.

• Form Usability. Each form of the website should be usable even if you disable javascript.
• Navigation Analysis. Each section of the website should be reachable in no more than 4 clicks, otherwise we have a navigation problem to enface.

Crawl Ability

• Robots.txt On the root of the domain you should have the robots.txt This file is useful for the search engines to understand which pages they can index and which ones they cannot. It might be something so:User-Agent: *Disallow: Sitemap: http://www.domain.tld/sitemap.xml
• Sitemap. The sitemap helps the search engine to know all the URLs we require to be indexed at once. Each Search Engine has its own page to submit the sitemap:Google – https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ Bing – http://www.bing.com/toolbox/webmaster/
• Crawl verification You can check how crawlable is the website using a text browser (Lynx) or using this javascript browser:
  http://www.domaintools.com/seo-browser/

Text Quality

• You can use automated tools to verify the quality of your texts. Specifically you can check the two metrices: Lexical Density and Gunning Fog. The Gunning-Fog Index may vary from 4 (easy) to 20 (hard to be read), while the Lexical Density index represents the Complexity factor and it’s a percentage (normally from 20 to 60%).

Page Speed

Page speed by Google

All you need is to use the Page Speed by Google (Make your web site faster).

https://developers.google.com/pagespeed/

The most significant points are:

• Browser caching. Setting an expiry date in the HTTP headers for static resources instructs the browser to load previously downloaded resources from local disk.
• Compression resources. Compressing resources with gzip or deflate can reduce the number of bytes sent over the network.
• Compressed Images. Properly formatting and compressing images can save many bytes of data. Each image should be compressed and should specify high and width values. Properly sizing images can save many bytes of data.
• Sprite CSS. Combining images into as few files as possible using CSS sprites reduces the number of round-trips and delays in downloading other resources.
• Minify and Deferr Javascript. Compacting JavaScript code can save many bytes of data and speed up downloading, parsing, and execution time. Deferring parsing of unneeded JavaScript until it needs to be executed, you can reduce the initial load time of your page (basically you could place most of your javascript code before the tag body is closed).
• Asynchronous Resources. Fetching resources asynchronously prevents those resources from blocking the page load (javascript static code, facebook and twitter widgets etc..).
• Consistent URLs. It’s important to serve a resource from a unique URL, to eliminate duplicate download bytes and additional RTTs.
• Minify HTML. Compacting HTML code, including any inline JavaScript and CSS contained in it, can save many bytes of data and speed up downloading, parsing, and execution time.
• Optimize the order of styles and scripts. Correctly ordering external stylesheets and external and inline scripts enables better parallelization of downloads and speeds up browser rendering time.
• Specify a cache validator. By specifying a cache validator – a Last-Modified or ETag header – you ensure that the validity of cached resources can efficiently be determined.
• Minify css. Compacting CSS code can save many bytes of data and speed up downloading, parsing, and execution time.
• Specify charset early. Specifying a character set early for your HTML documents allows the browser to begin executing scripts immediately.
• Specify a vary accept encoding header. Instructs proxy servers to cache two versions of the resource: one compressed, and one uncompressed. This helps avoid issues with public proxies that do not detect the presence of a Content-Encoding header properly.

Complete SEO analysis checklist 2012

Once you have worked on all these steps you should know the strength and weakness of your website or of your competitor and you should be ready to fight to rank first. If you are still having troubles for ranking, just comment this post.

If you don’t agree with what I wrote, here I’m to listen to your comments.

Continue reading »]]> Recently a study wasrealized by Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon University on users’perceptions of tweet credibility (microblogging and Twitter)*. The report indicates important steps to increase reputation trustworthy and credibility on Twitter, strategies that tweet authors can use to enhance their credibility with their actual and future readers.

Increase reputation trustworthy and credibility on Twitter

Twitter users have two different approaches to have a piece of information: follow another user they consider interesting for the content he/she produces or search into the Twitter search engine the info they are looking for. The fact that 1.6 billion of queries are generated on Twitter Search Engine (ref. Siegler, M.G. At 1.6 Billion Queries Per Day, Twitter Finally Aims To Make Search Personally Relevant. TechCrunch, June 1, 2011) is a clear evidence that both approaches are significant.

The survey reveals the sources Twitter users adopt to have an info.

• Reading tweets from users they followed
• Conducting searches on search.twitter.com (84%)
• Clicking trending topics on the Twitter homepage (84%)
• Searching for tweets using Bing’s and Google’s social search functionality (72%)
• Encountering tweets mixed into the results of general Web searches (81%)

The survey makes evidence that the ability of Twitter users to determine reputation, trustworthy and credibility is largely limited to features visible at-a-glance:

• user picture
• user name
• tweet content
  

The credibility factors are here reported (max impact 05.00):

The survey shows that the credibility of an author on a given topic is determined by such factors as the Twitter homepage bio, history of on-topic tweeting, pages outside of Twitter, or the location relevant to the topic of the tweet.

The author reputation, on the other side, seems to be determined by the number of followers the User has, the number of retweets he/she receives, and the mentions he/she has about and if the author has an official Twitter account verification seal.

The author credibility is also greatly influenced by his/her picture. The pictures of males and females are preferred to the default avatar (the Twitter egg). The reason is simple. Default avatars may easily represent unreal users.

The credibility of the content seems to be granted by the following factors:

• URL leading to a high-quality site
• Presence of other tweets conveying similar information
• The tweet is a retweet

Considering the survey of Microsoft, the steps to have a good reputation, trustworthy and credibility are determined.

• Update your profile with a complete biography on the topics you are going to tweet.
• Upload your personal image (if you are not a company).
• Don’t follow the planet, is not credible that you can follow 20,000 users.
• Tweet regularly.
• Try to engage the Community, more followers = more trustworthy.
• Tweet URLs if possible.
• Tweet using hashtag.

Simple or not ? Anyway this is the way to increase reputation trustworthy and credibility on Twitter, the path to the success !

Happy tweet guys and girls !

The original doc is available there:

http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/155374/tweet_credibility_cscw2012.pdf

Continue reading »]]> All success in Search Engine Marketing begins with Keywords says Robin Nobles, Co-Director of Training of Search Engine Workshops. The analysis of the keyword effectiveness index is the reason of this post.

keyword effectiveness index

Sumantra Roy (1stSearchRanking) invented the equation used to calculate KEI. The keyword effectiveness index (KEI) compares the number of searches for a keyword with the number of search results that include that particular keyword in order to determine which keywords are most “effective” for your SEO activity. In other words the KEI tell us which keywords have less competitiveness but at the same time a good traffic (visits).

You can easily discover your keyword effectiveness index for your Keywords just using Google Keyword Tool (https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal) to acquire Monthly Global Searches (Searches) and Google’s search engine to determine the number of Competition Pages (CompetitionPages).

The most common formula may be written as follow:

KEI=Searches²/CompetitionResults

or if you prefer:

KEI=(Monthly Searches/30)²/CompetitionResults

< 0.001 = Poor keyword

0.001-0.010 = Good Keyword

0.010-0.100+ = Excellent Keyword

This index comes with many weakness points for Web Marketing Practitioners.

Here they are.

Google Keyword Tool reliabilty

As Rand Fishkin has recently pointed out http://www.seomoz.org/blog/be-careful-using-adwords-for-keyword-research, GKT is not reliable. I invite you to read it carefully but, resuming his post, Fishkin makes evidence that if you don’t place the most significant keywords in GKT, Google will never suggest all the most significant keywords. That said, if the list of keywords you place will not include significant keywords, Google will never suggest the most significant ones.

You can partially correct this problem integrating different tools to have a significant and complete list of keywords to be analyzed. You can use:

• WordStream’s Keyword Suggestion
  http://www.wordstream.com/keywords
• Microsoft Advertising Intelligence
  http://advertising.microsoft.com/small-business/adcenter-downloads/microsoft-advertising-intelligence
• Semrush
  http://www.semrush.com

I also would suggest to use Google Trends

http://www.google.com/insights/search/

Google Trends can help you to determine among different keywords which are the most trendy.

Localization

Even if you use different tools, they will never suggest you “localized keywords”. If your business is in Verona (the city of Romeo and Juliet) you should always consider that the chance to convert for a determined localized keyword is greater than any other keyword, not localized. If I need a flag is more probable that I would buy where I live if I find a good producer in my city instead of searching far away.

So when it’s time to determine which keywords you want to promote for your website, always think to the local Market, it’s so important as the Global one. Internet is a global market but people still prefer to buy at home if they have a chance to.

Websites are different

seo keywords

Rank first for “flags” with a new website is different than ranking first with a 10 y.o. website. The websites have different values so that it would be important to consider the value of the website before determing the keywords of my Campaign – Promotion. Nowadays the value of a website is the Google index (Page Rank).

The competition results are a neutral index but it’s quite different compete with thousand of websites or with ten websites with PR 8. We should try to integrate this value to the common formula both for the website we promote both for the competitors we have for each keyword.

Improve your SEO approach on the keyword effectiveness index

Start listening

Try to speak with the customer care if the website you are going to promote and rank has one. Nobody knows better the company than the customer care operators. They know the problems, they know what the customers want and this is the Key for determine a valuable list of keywords to use for your analysis.

Be creative

There are many different approaches to an improved version of the Keyword Effectiveness Index. I would suggest some:

• The re-visited KEI version fo Web Site Advantage
  It considers the Page Rank of the website into the formula.
  http://seo-website-designer.com/KeyWord-Analysis-KEI
• The re-visited KEI version of Ivano De Biasi
  It’s in Italian but you can still understand it. The formula includes the index “relevance”, how important is the keywords for the website.
  http://www.ivanodibiasi.com/come-scegliere-le-keyword-da-posizionare.htm
• Your own KEI
  You can build your own index. This is a suggestion you can work on. The “PRCoptrs” might be the average Page Rank of the 10 websites in the first 10 positions for the analyzed keyword.

KEI=YourPR*(Monthly Searches/30)²/CompetitionResults*PRComptrs

You are the only limit to your keywords

There are no difficult keywords and easy keywords. There are prepared web marketers and unprepared ones. If you are prepared, you can rank well for each keyword you might wish. Obviously keyword effectiveness index can help you in improving your SEO techniques.