Pinterest is a fast growing social sharing community.

One year ago today Pinterest was hardly worth mentioning and known to a very small number of people. Now, the content sharing service accounts for nearly 25% of all social media web traffic. While FaceBook is overpowering the market in sheer numbers, Pintrest is coming up as a reckoning force when it comes to driving eCommerce. The site is popular for sharing content that often features random accessories, clothes, handbags, apartment decor, recipes and their ingredients. The shape Pinterest has taken and steep rise in traffic makes it a ripe ground for eCommerce driven websites to gain traffic and more conversions.

From the chart above, we can see the rapid growth of Pinterest, receiving it’s boost starting in February, 2012. This is significant because there are older platforms that are now falling short of Pinterest. These social media sites have earned loyal followers over the years, but now the popular giants like Twitter and StumbleUpon, just are not delivering what they once were. The Pinterest train is gaining steam and doesn’t look to be derailing anytime soon. Now is the perfect time for eCommerce businesses to jump aboard!

Pinterest in eCommerce

A recently conducted survey by BizRate Insights shows some very interesting results from 7,431 online shoppers. Nearly 70% of those surveyed told BizRate that the pinup site is used for inspiration and keeping up with the latest trends, making it even more attractive to eCommerce as a part of their daily SEO. Pinterest carries a lot of Domain Authority and using the site to engage shoppers will help websites earn authority through social sharing and linking.

With the amount of traffic Pinterest has, the nearly perfect Domain Authority scores, and the trust of its users, why would any eCommerce site pass this up? With the rapid rise of Pinterest in 2012, the following year will only improve. So integrating a Pinterest strategy now will set your online shop straight for 2013.

The New Google Disavow Link Tool Has Launched

The head of Google’s web spam, Matt Cutts, announced Tuesday to the relief of many webmasters, the Google disavow link tool. This tool will allow those demoted by the Penguin update to block low quality inbound links. Although this tool is available, Google encourages that a site owner first attempts contacting the sites and ask for a removal of the links. That of course is Google’s recommended actions, but if for some reason, all attempts fail, there is the new Google disavow link tool. 

Google Penguin was an update released in April of 2012 in order to combat spam by assessing the quality of links. Before Penguin, sites with a large number of inbound links were rewarded and often appeared high in the search results. This gave rise to the now infamous “link farms” and the result pages were just over crowded with spam and low quality content.  Sites that relied heavily on link farms and spammy tactics are now noticing the effects of the algorithm update. Some may have survived with an honest and consistent link building strategy, but many are facing the reality of negative SEO and can’t get out of the nightmare.

What is Negative SEO? Can Google Disavow Link Tool Help?

Negative SEO is what happens when a website has been demoted in the search engines from failing 200, or more, signals on a given page and site. There are two very important factors to know when it comes to link building and SEO— Domain Authority and PageRank. Search engine algorithms rank sights that follow best practices. Sites that have low on page SEO and a mix of irrelevant low quality content, end up passing the same value in their links. As with websites that have high quality on page SEO  with relevant content focusing on the niche, they in turn, will pass high valued links.

Although PageRank does not have the same weight it once carried, it is still an indicator on the quality of a given site in Google’s eyes. There are different ways to check PageRank, but you can use this tool to test your site. There is only one way to find your Domain Authority and that is through SEOmoz. PageRank, aka PR, and Domain Authority, aka DA, take into account the the ranks of the site passing links to one another. So, as my father always would tell me, “Lay down with dogs, and get their fleas,” the same logic can be applied now to link building.

IT’S ALL ABOUT QUALITY NOT QUANTITY

Now if you find yourself with a low PR and DA, participated in any link farming, or purchasing of links, I would advise you contact the source of the low quality links and clean them up. If for some reason you can’t get a response or cooperation from the linking site to remove, then it is time to use the Google disavow link tool and disconnect those crummy links!

Watch Matt Cutts explain the tool himself

So you’ve probably heard, FaceBook will let you promote your posts

You probably also have heard that FaceBook is charging a premium of $7! Well, not quite, it’s only $5 and it’s quite effective. Although this move has received a lot of criticism, I on the other hand am giving praise to the idea. Most of the nay-sayers are the average FaceBook user, getting overly excited and ready to torch, or troll in some circles, just about everything! But just like anything out there, only one way to find out what FaceBook post promote is all about…

So I tested FaceBook Post Promote!

I wanted to use a post that would be attractive, but not flashy attractive or a hard promotion. So, I chose to use the FaceBook post promote on this article about affiliate marketing. I selected this article because it has links that are embedded with my affiliate code and that way, I have a shot at making some money off of this test. I posted a screenshot of the promoted post along with the results and a quick recap.

FaceBook Post Promote Statistics:

• Total Reach 1,047 people saw this post in the news feed
• The $5.00 Paid Post reached 978 People and GB has roughly 650 Likes
• 9 People Liked the post
• 3 New Likes from friends of fans who saw the post
• 2 People shared the post
• 2 People actually followed the link to the site

Anyone that does paid advertising should find this pretty valuable. I feel like if my post was a high converting product or a really cool niche, it would have performed much better. Still, the fact that my post about affiliate marketing brought me new fans, generated some engagement and gave GuruBloggers some recognition– to me, that’s $5.00 well spent.

This is my first paid post, but by no means will it be my last. I see too much potential in this new FaceBook post promote feature for engaging fans and getting the message out there. Perhaps next time I will put more thought into what is promoted, but the FaceBook Post Promote is a win to me.

Find out more about FaceBook Post Promote from FaceBook.com

Just about anyone can make a webpage or post a blog, but not everyone can SEO.

Today, the Internet is a well developed community with millions upon millions of websites, blogs and social media pages. Many of these pages are created by professionals while there are just as many if not more that are done by amateurs and enthusiasts. No matter what level of expertise, just about everyone making web pages wants to their work to rank well in the search engines. While this takes hard work and dedication, here are some tips that will help you make your website’s pages and blog posts have strong SEO qualities that will also encourage consistent traffic.

Find a niche and stick to it – Become your niche and write passionately about it, this will carry over to your readers. This will also encourage them to comment and share your post to others on social media. This will further your reach and visibility to others.

Write original posts often – This is the Internet, and the Internet’s purpose is to be a place of information and sharing. With that said, you need to give the Internet information to share if you expect to have traffic. The more you write, the more content you have to share, and the better you get at writing in general! Also, do not duplicate or copy the work of another, this is bad practice and will get you penalized in the search engines. So, make the effort and it will pay off!

Keep posts short, but not too short –  The “goldilocks zone” for posts is right around 300 words. Thanks to Panda, Google will not index “thin content” aka short posts. Also, don’t write big blocks of text, this is can be viewed as “work” by your reader and will often discourage a reader. (you know you’re guilty of it!)

ALT Tags on images – Make sure each and every image on your site has an ALT tag that has keywords mixed in with a description of the photo. Don’t overdo keywords, but do this right and you will add a nice boost to your SEO score

Unique Page Titles – Each page and post should have a unique Title tag attribute. This will help the search engine better identify and index your site. Make sure your keyword is worked into the post as well so it coincides with the page or the post’s topic.

Balance your internal and external links – Links are important, so important that Google made an algorithm update to deal specifically with links called Penguin. You can’t have too many, too quick, and you can have too little for too long. You can’t have too many links internally, and the same goes for links that leave your site. Too many of any type and Google calls it SPAM, while a low number shows that a site is uninteresting, un-sharable and that the site owner is not a friendly Internet user that does not give credit to sources. Great advice: Place a “nofollow” TAG to 1/3 of all your links, especially multiple links that lead to the same destination. Links are tricky, but practice makes perfect.

Integrate comment boxes and social media sharing/commenting – Giving someway to let your readers engage your site will bring them back to keep the conversation going; this also adds to the SEO strength of your website as it adds more keywords and content to the topic.

These are just a few to the many items on an SEO checklist, there are so much and I plan to add more, but it is best to leave this as a series of tips rather than one long write up. Doing that very thing follows best practices as I’m keeping this short, but informative and I also give something for you, the reader, to return to.

The all important SEO terms and definitions.

Have you ever been looking into SEO and come across some words or terms that just left you baffled? I spent a good hour thinking up common terms searching for the exact meanings, so here you go, a comprehensive list of SEO terms and definitions.

SEO – Search Engine Optimization; The process of configuring Web content in order to gain the highest potential rankings for a given search engine.

SEM – The paid process of promoting websites by way of advertising on search engines. As opposed to SEO, which is trying to optimize your site to get “free” traffic in what are called the “organic rankings”

Search Engine -A program for the retrieval of data, files, or documents from a database or network, esp. the Internet.

Search Algorithm – an algorithm for finding an item with specified properties among a collection of items. Google’s has a highly secretive program used to scan and rank pages based on content. According to Google, each page is considered on over 200 factors to determine its value in response to the particular search in question.

SERP -A Search Engine Results Page, is the listing of web pages returned by a search engine in response to a keyword query. The results normally include a list of web pages with titles, a link to the page, and a short description showing where the keywords have matched content within the page.

Content – The things that are held or included in something. All of the pictures, articles, blog posts, advertising, etc included on a web site

PageRank – A link analysis algorithm, named after Larry Page, used by the Google Internet search engine that a assigns a numerical weighting to each element of a hyper-linked
 set of documents, such as the World Wide Web, with the purpose of “measuring” its relative importance within the set

Title Tag – An HTML element is an individual component of an HTML document. HTML documents are composed of a tree of HTML elements and other nodes, such as text nodes. Each element can have attributes specified. Elements can also have content, including other elements and text

Meta Tags – HTML or XHTML elements used to provide structured metadata about a Web page. Such elements must be placed as tags in the head section of an HTML or XHTML document.

Backlink – incoming links to a website or web page. Inbound links were originally important (prior to the emergence of search engines) as a primary means of web navigation; today their significance lies in search engine optimization (SEO).

Keyword Density – Keyword density is the percentage of times a keyword or phrase appears on a web page compared to the total number of words on the page.

Keyword Stuffing – Where a keyword or phrase is used excessively in page content or alt tags in an attempt to gain higher rankings. Can result in page penalties or bans.

Web Crawler – a computer program that browses the World Wide Web in a methodical, automated manner or in an orderly fashion. Other terms for Web crawlers are ants, automatic indexers, bots, or Web spiders, Web robots, or—especially in the FOAF community—Web scutters

Robots.txt – A file in the root directory of a website which has been created to direct the activity of search engine crawlers or spiders.

Linkbait -Link bait is any content or feature, within a website, designed specifically to gain attention or encourage others to link to the website. Matt Cutts defines link bait as anything “interesting enough to catch people’s attention

Link Farm – a group of web sites that all hyperlink to every other site in the group. Although some link farms can be created by hand, most are created through automated programs and services

Anchor text – The link label or link title; the visible, clickable text in a hyperlink. The words contained in the anchor text can determine the ranking that the page will receive by search engines

NoFollow – A link which carries the rel=”nofollow” attribute. A link with the rel=”nofollow” attribute, will not pass juice, and does not count towards overall link authority and PageRank.

Sandbox – a separate index, the sandbox, where it places all newly discovered and penalized websites. When websites are on the sandbox, they won’t appear in the search results for normal search queries. Once Google verifies that the website is legitimate, it will move it out of the sandbox and into the main index.

Duplicate Content – Using the same content on more than one page. Aka plagiarism The practice of taking someone else’s work or ideas and passing them off as one’s own

EMD URL – Exact Match Domain; a domain name made of a long-tail keyword phrase, company name, etc. ex “www.freecreditreport.com” to rank for the phrase “free credit report”

Canonical URL – Canonicalization is a process for converting data that has more than one possible representation into a “standard” canonical representation. A canonical URL, therefore, is the standard URL for accessing a specific page within your website. For instance, the canonical version of your domain might be http://www.domain.com instead of http://domain.com.

Got it?…. Good! Ha! Feel free to come back anytime or bookmark this as a reference! I also encourage you to sign up for our newsletter for more  tips and tricks!