Orangehat Expert SEO Tips

With a little effort, lots of guidance and strategy you can make your website sizzle and maximize your SEO for success. Make sure your site is accessible to search engines.

Don’t underestimate the power of Networking can have on SEO!

Meeting new people, exchanging ideas opens up opportunity to new blogging, marketing ideas, and builds good public relations.

Content is crucial so make sure that you have quality content on your page. Stay current and use the keywords or keyword phrases that best work for your product and services.

Use the tools that are out there, let’s face it Social Media is here to stay.

Learn more about Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and learn to understand how to use them to your advantage.

Page ranking is important but not the only factor, don’t focus only on that, rather, focus on maintaining quality content and information on the website.

Adding new content to your page on a regular basis keeps the page interesting and alive and will generate traffic.

If you don’t update and change your website often you will need to blog at least three times a week to keep searches fresh.

Search optimization is not a one time job, its a daily and ongoing process.

Orangehat will work to help you determine the best strategy for marketing your business and increasing traffic to your website.

Contact Orangehats for a free website SEO audit and see what we can do for you!

Call us today at 800-788-8596

Orangehat Content Marketing, SEO, and social media marketing

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agent October 2, 2013 0 Comments

Pinterest is a fast growing social sharing community.

Pinterest is perfect for ecommerce!

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.

Source: StatCounter Global Stats – Social Media Market Share

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.
Social Media ecommerce study

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.

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agent October 22, 2012 0 Comments

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

Facebook Post Promote
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

 

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agent October 11, 2012 0 Comments

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 scoreOrangehat SEO and Content Marketing focus on customers.

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.

Agent Orange supports distilledU

 

 

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agent October 10, 2012 0 Comments

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
Agent Orange is well versed in search engine optimization terms. 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!

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agent October 9, 2012 0 Comments

Google confirms hidden SEO benefit of authorship: bonus links after a clicking the back button

Digging into useful SEO information out there for you readers is one of my favorite things to do, and in doing so, I stumbled upon something that will benefit anyone who actively stays on top of Google trends.  Today, I stumbled upon an article that confirmed the hidden SEO benefits of Google Authorship.

What is this SEO benefit?

According to Search Engine Land’s Matt McGee:

If a user returns to the search results after reading an author-tagged search result for a certain period of time, Google will add three additional links to similar articles from the same author below the originally clicked link.

Really??!! What exactly does this mean and how does this happen?

If you do a Google search and pick a result that has an author rich snippet associated with the article, read the article for a short period of time and click the back button, Google will then include “More by (author)” along with three links to other articles.

You read that correctly, Google will build you back links! You can actually do this yourself by reading your own articles as well and add this to your daily SEO routine. Search for your posts, click and read, then hit the back button. Although, you can’t do this with haste as Google is measuring time-on-site to determine if a reader enjoys the content. There is no specific information out there on how much time a user needs to spend on a post, but tests out there on the Internet determined a minimum of 2 minutes.

Google has confirmed the following:

If a user visits an article by an author and it seems like they’d be interested in finding more articles by this author, when they click the “Back” button to return to the results page, we’ll show more results by that author.

This is all very good news for us bloggers and SEO professionals out there! Link building is a challenge since Google clamped down on this past year with algorithm updates. Too many links too quick will get you penalized! This is a safe and Orangehat way– it’s also Google approved!

To learn how to use Author Rich Snippets for SEO, read my article about how to set it up so you too can take advantage of this hidden SEO feature.

Agent Orange is well versed in search engine optimization.. Example of Authorship Snippet

Read more SEO tips and tricks by Ryan Neal

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agent October 1, 2012 0 Comments

All to many times through out my circles of  colleagues, potential customers and even my friends, I hear that social media is not a good tool for marketing.

That just could not be further from the truth… Here are some common objections that I have heard about social media and it’s place in business.

My Customers Don’t Use Social Media

Really? Have your customers heard of the Internet? This has got to be on of the most naive statements I have ever heard! Do a quick search on the Internet and you’ll find something like this:

Facebook: 955 million users; more than 42 million pages and 9 million apps
Youtube: 4 billion views per day
Google+: 250 million registered users

-Craig Smith on Social Media

Chances are, your customers are in that mix somewhere… also, that is a lot of prospects to go after and market to!

Social media is not for our business

If your business is not about marketing for dollars, then this could apply. I assume that it is a common misconception that social media is just a place for friends and that no one pays attention to marketers. Your brand has a story to tell, so be social and put a human face to your brand!  A successful social media campaign will bring in: AWARENESS, SALES, and LOYALTY 

Nobody tweets about us, so we don’t need social media

This statement is true to those that do not give people something to tweet about. This could also be true for businesses and people with boring concepts and marketing strategies. Look into viral marketing, these types of campaigns are successful because they are exciting and have the ability to generate buzz. Give people something to share and talk about and your idea could hit levels that were once unimaginable!

Social media is just marketing

Social media plays a role in marketing, sure! But it’s much deeper than that. Social media is a way to engage people and even manage your customers! These day, people are quick to turn to social media and either praise or trash, so why not give them the avenue to come straight to you? Social media could even limit the time spent on the phones talking to irate customers and show publicly how well you can handle a situation.

If you’re not using social media in this digital age, you are truly falling behind. Sure you may not see instant result, but you build the story and reputation of you brand. That is the most important part of the whole game.

Agent Orange knows social media

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agent September 28, 2012 0 Comments

Author Rich Snippets help Google organize your pages and posts!

In the world of SEO and content marketing, it is very important to not only appear high in rankings, but that your displayed result is both eye catching as well as informative as to what the content is about. This will help users better identify with your search result as your message comes across before visiting the page.  Author Rich Snippets also give credibility by making well organized content stand out over spammy sites and amateurs by displaying your name as the author along with your G+ profile picture. There is also information on displayed about the number other posts or pages created by the author.

Author Rich Snippets

Can you spot the Author Rich Snippets?

Author Rich Snippets take direction from Open Graph Protocol tags that are inserted into pages and posts.

If you are familiar with OGP (open graph protocol), then you’re more than half way there! I also did a write up about how OGP works, a post that lists the tags and even a write up about a WordPlus plugin that makes it all very easy. Feel free to reference those posts if Author Rich Snippets and OGP are unfamiliar.It will be best to know what you’re working with and exactly why you’re doing it.

How to setup Author Rich Snippets

As with just about everything on the Internet, there are multiple ways to accomplish a single goal. The same applies to Author Rich Snippets. No matter what path you take to get this done, there is one step that can not be skipped, over looked or even worked around to get your Author Rich Snippets to work…

First you must create a Google+ profile.

That’s right! In order to take advantage of Author Rich Snippets,  you will need a G+ profile with your full name and a facial photo of yourself that you want displayed! You will also have to set yourself up as a contributor to your website in your profile settings.  If or when your profile is setup, follow this link and enter in the website, or sites, you write for.

Take notice to the image I have to the right, it is a screen shot of Google’s search results, you should now be able to see which are the Author Rich Snippets and which are not! Which search results stand out to you? Which ones build that instant trust?

Adding HTML tags to your posts for Author Rich Snippets.

Now that your G+ is ready, you will need to add a few things to link your blog posts so that Google can clearly identify the relationship to display the Author Rich Text Snippets. This can be done by using a link to your Google+ profile, coupled with the rel=author query string parameter.

  1. Go to your Google+ profile and copy the URL, don’t copy “/posts” only up to the last number prior.
  2. Insert a link in your blog post and use the copied URL as the destination (make sure /posts is not at the end).
  3. Make a link using your full name as anchor text that matches the name used on your G+ profile.

Author Rich Snippets HTML Tags should look like this:

<a href=“{G+ profile URL}” rel=”author”>Firstname Lastname</a>

Mine looks like this:

<a href=“https://plus.google.com/116634598694124071705″ rel=”author”>Ryan Neal</a>

Where you actually place the link on your post is up to you, maybe use an “About the Author” section. Depending on the level of access you have, this option should work in most cases. Once you have placed your tag, don’t wait for days and just hope that it works, test it! Google has an Author Rich Snippets Testing Tool that will check the format on one of your posts. If Google returns an example of your Author Rich Snippets then everything is in order! Ok… now what most of you are probably here for…

A simple WordPress plugin that makes it easy and a one time deal to setup your Author Rich Snippets.

Author Rich Text Snippets plugin The plugin name Google Authorship by Mervin Praison does everything we need to make our Author Rich Snippets work.  You can download the plugin from the WordPress website, or install it through the dashboard. The best part is you just need set it up one time and your Author Rich Snippets are good to go! Just set it and forget it!

The plugin places “Google Plus profile information” into your User Settings through the WordPress dashboard. Setup the plugin by copying and pasting your G+ profile URL along with your full name. Click update profile and you’re done! Now any page your create on your WordPress blog or website will be Author Rich Snippets ready!

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agent September 24, 2012 0 Comments