October 27th, 2011
Google Tweaks AdWords Keyword Tool
Google’s Keyword Ranking tool is a big help to page owners and SEO strategists. It’s one of the fundamentals when it comes to writing SEO articles to fuel content syndication in the entire SEO campaign. While there are alternative sites that offer keyword ranking analysis, Google’s Keyword Ranking tool is the old reliable. For quite some time, users have been seeing the usual traditional bars that are filled depending on its level of competitiveness. The more the bar is filled the more it’s competitive. But Google is now replacing those bars with text descriptions to gauge the level of competitiveness a keyword has. SEO site, Search Engine Land, notes the list below as competitive labels:
- Low – Competitiveness number under .33
- Medium – Competitiveness number between .33 and .66
- High – Competitiveness number over .67
A keyword’s competitive score is connected to AdWords rather than organic search. This area in the Keyword Ranking tool is defined as: “This column shows the number of advertisers worldwide bidding on each keyword relative to all keywords across Google. The shaded bar represents a general low-to-high quantitative guide to help you determine how competitive ad placement is for a particular keyword.”
Google says that the recent change will not affect the granularity as-to how this ranking was assigned. Users can still download a report to acquire figures similar to when the green bar was still in use. Further information about a keyword can be downloaded as a spreadsheet as well. Aside from this latest development, Google’s Matt Cutts has a new video that talks about Google not considering SEO as spam. Check out the vid below.
October 25th, 2011
Can SMEs Leverage Social Media to Increase SEO?
Let’s face it, unless your local business is a multi-national company like Dell, Coke, or McDonald’s, you won’t get instant 10k fans in a week on your Facebook page. Fret not, small is the new big according to marketing guru Seth Godin, and SMEs actually have the upper hand in terms of leveraging social media platforms to increase brand awareness. I reckon that you shouldn’t even try those tricky websites which offer instant followers or fans, mind you, some of those fans are either mock accounts or mere bots. Those sites are what my colleagues and I consider as the equivalent of black hat strategies in the world of SEO. So can a business owner increase brand awareness by leveraging on search engines and social media networks to catapult profit margins? Are there strategies that don’t require buying followers or fans?
We all know that the Internet still depends on Search Engine Optimization, using a search engine is not a trend, it’s a necessity for people. And so is the use of social media, Facebook and Twitter has made the Internet a destination-location for customers and merchants. Even people who don’t even have an email account has a Facebook account nowadays. Reality checked: if your business doesn’t put a premium on SEO and establish a firm presence in social media networks then it doesn’t exist at all.
Google and Facebook are enhancing their analytics tools in order to improve how business owners monitor traffic. It gives them an idea if their Facebook page actually leads customers to their website and vice versa. Today, some businesses ignore the fact that you should have a presence in the open web as well. Some business owners tend to be complacent when they have a solid following on their Facebook page. They think that having 10k Likes on their page is enough already. Well, having a firm presence on Facebook is simply a chunk of the whole online marketing campaign to increase brand awareness, SEO is still very much what fuels all websites. While Facebook is the largest social network in the planet today, it’s still a website, right? So how can business owners maximize SEO to increase social media traffic and vice versa? The answer is Facebook Page Management.
With its new Facebook Landing Page Maker, social dashboard Squareberry now allows you to control another aspect of your Facebook Page. Your events and promotions are sent as reminders to your Wall, displayed on your Facebook Page Calendar and now featured on your customizable Landing Page. The Facebook Landing Page is designed to be a hub that connects your page viewers to your complete online presence and drive real world traffic by showing off events and promotions. Now business owners and community managers can maximize from the synergy of SEO and Social Media.
