SEO in 2015 (and Why You Should Care)

If your business is healthy, you can always find plenty of reasons to leave SEO on your to-do list in perpetuity. After all, SEO is technical, complicated, time-consuming and potentially dangerous. The SEO industry is full of self-proclaimed gurus whose lack of knowledge can be deadly. There’s the terrifying fact that even if you dabble in SEO in the most gentle and innocent way, you might actually end up in a worse state than you were to begin with.

To make matters worse, Google keeps changing the rules. There have been a bewildering number of major updates, which despite their cuddly names have had a horrific impact on website owners worldwide.

Fear aside, there’s also the issue of time. It’s probably tricky enough to find the time to read this article. Setting up, planning and executing an SEO campaign might well seem like an insurmountable obstacle.

So why should you care enough about SEO to do it anyway?

The main reason is that you probably already see between 30% and 60% of your website traffic come from the search engines. That might make you think that you don’t need to bother, because you’re already doing so well. But you’re almost certainly wrong.

If you have a look through the keyword data in your Google Webmaster Tools account, you’ll probably see that around 30–50% of the keywords used to find your website are brand names – the names of your products or companies. These are searches carried out by people who already know about you. But the people who don’t know who you are but are searching for what you sell aren’t finding you right now. This is your opportunity.

If a person goes looking for a company or product by name, Google will steer them towards what they’re looking for. Their intelligence does have limits, however, and even though they know your name they won’t be completely clear about what you sell. That’s where SEO would come in.

Still need more convincing? How about the fact that the seeming complexities of SEO mean that your competition are almost certainly neglecting it too. They have the same reservations as you about complexity, time and danger, and hopefully they aren’t reading this article and so are none the wiser of the well-kept secret: that 70% of SEO is easy.

I’m going to lead you through what you need to do to tap into that stream of people looking for what you sell right now.

WHAT IS REAL SEO?

Real SEO is all about helping Google understand the content of your website. It’s about steering, guiding and assisting Google. Not manipulating it.

It’s easy to assume that Google already understands the content and relevance of each and every page on your website, but the fact is that it needs a fair amount of hand-holding. Fortunately, helping Google along really isn’t very difficult at all.

Rest assured that real SEO has nothing to do with keyword stuffing, keyword density, hacks, tricks or cunning techniques. If you hear any of these terms from your SEO advisor, run away from them as quickly as you can.

UNDERSTANDING YOUR CURRENT SITUATION – GOOGLE ANALYTICS

Before you can do anything to improve your SEO status, you need to get an idea of how you’re already doing. Below is a very quick and easy way of doing so.

1. Open up your Google Analytics account.

2. Click on the date range selector on the top-right of the interface and change the year of the first date to last year. So 12 Dec 2014 will become 12 Dec 2013. Then click on Apply.

3. Click on the All Sessions rectangle towards the top-left, click once on Organic Traffic and click Apply.

4. Click the little black-and-white squares icon that has now appeared under the date selector on the top-right, and drag the slider all the way over to Higher Precision.

5. Change the interval buttons on the top-right of the graph to Week to make this easier to digest.

At this point your graph should look something like this:

Graph showing all sessions per week.

It’s worth noting the approximate proportion of your visitors that currently come from organic sources.

6. Click the little downwards arrow to the right of the All Sessions rectangle and choose Remove, so that we’re only looking at the organic traffic on its own.

7. Click on Select a metric next to the Sessions button above the graph and select Pages / Session. You should then see something like this:

Graph showing pages per session.

In the example above we can see that the quantity of traffic has been increasing since the middle of August, but the quality of the traffic (as measured by the number of pages per session) has fallen significantly.

How you choose to view this is down to your own graph, recent history and interpretation of events, but this should give you an indication of how things stand at the present time. Trends are often much more revealing than a snapshot of a brief moment in time.

YOUR GOOGLE WEBMASTER TOOLS DATA

If you’re not very familiar with your Google Webmaster Tools account, it’s really worth taking ten to fifteen minutes to see what’s on offer. I can’t recommend this enough. From the point of view of an SEO health check, I’d advise you to look into the HTML Improvements, Crawl Errors and Crawl Stats, and most importantly the Search Queries.

From what you see here and the trends shown in your Analytics data, you should now have a good idea of your current status. If you want to explore further, I recommend Screaming Frog as a good diagnostics tool, or Botify if your website is large or unusually complex.

COMBINING THE DATA INTO SOMETHING USEFUL

Your Google Analytics session will have shown you how you’re doing from an SEO point of view in terms of the quantity and, to some extent, the quality of your visitors. But it’s only showing you what is already working. In other words: the people who are finding you on the search engines, and clicking on your links.

The Google Webmaster Tools search query data, on the other hand, will give you a better idea of what isn’t working. It will show you the keyword searches that are getting you listed in the results, but which aren’t necessarily getting clicked. And it doesn’t take much by the way of expertise to see why.

For example, if you see your targeted keyword, which you feel is extremely relevant, has generated over 2,000 impressions in the last month but produced only two clicks, you’ll probably find a very low average position. Bear in mind that an average position of fourteen will mean being around halfway down the second page of results. Think about how rarely you go beyond the first two or three listings, never mind to the second page of results, and you’ll understand why the click-through rate is so low.

So now you have an idea of what you’re being found for at the present time. But what about the other terms?

WHAT WOULD YOU LIKE TO BE FOUND FOR?

This is one of the more common SEO mistakes, on a number of different levels.

Many businesses assume that they don’t need to worry about keyword research. They think they know what terms people use to find what they sell, and they also assume that Google understands the content on their website. This is incorrect on all counts.

A better starting point is to brainstorm a small number of your most obvious keywords, then run them through Google’s Keyword Planner. Ignore the information in the Ad group ideas tab, and instead go straight to the Keyword ideas tab. Rather than wade through the very unfriendly interface, I recommend downloading the data as a spreadsheet, in which not only is more detail included, but you can also slice, dice, sort and report the data as required.

From there you can delete all the irrelevant columns, and start working your way through the list, deleting any irrelevant keywords as you go along.

It’s around this stage that you may hit a problem in terms of where to focus your efforts. The number of reported searches for a given keyword is of course important, but so is the level of competition. Ideally, you’d like keywords with plenty of searches but not too much competition.

I personally like to factor both together by adding a column that simply divides the number of searches squared by the level of competition:

(number of searches × number of searches) ÷ competition

There are plenty of alternatives to this basic formula, but I like it for ease of use and simplicity. Once I’ve added this column, I then sort the data by this value (largest to smallest) and I then only usually need ten to fifteen keywords at most to give me plenty of ideas to work with.

This is a slightly involved but effective methodology for keyword research, as what you’re left with is a list of keywords that both Google and you consider to be relevant to the content of your website. And relevance is an important concept in SEO.

Real SEO keyword research is about making sure that your customers, website and Google are all in agreement and alignment over the content of your website. Other sources of inspiration and ideas include having a look at what terms your competition are targeting, Google Trends and, of course, Google Suggest. If you’re not sure where to find these things, you can probably work out where to search for them!

If you want to dive further into understanding your current search engine status, search for some of the better keywords that you just discovered and see where you rank compared to your competition. Note that it’s vital to avoid Google serving up personalised results, so either use the privacy, incognito or anonymous mode of your browser for the searches, or use a browser that you don’t normally use. I hope this is Internet Explorer. If what you find isn’t great, don’t despair: everything in SEO is fixable (terms and conditions may apply).

PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER

You should now have a good idea of where things stand with your current search engine traffic, and a solid list of keywords that you’re not getting visitors for but very much want.

All that’s left now is to work out how to use these keywords. But before we do, let’s take a quick step back.

If you have in any way kept up with what’s been happening in SEO over the last couple of years, you’ll have probably heard about Google updates with names like Panda, Hummingbird, Phantom, Pirate and more.

I won’t go into the technical details of what Google is doing, but it is important to understand why they’re trying to do it. At the most basic level, Google understands that there’s a very real problem with people who are trying manipulate its index. In response to this, Google is trying to clean up its results. They don’t want people getting fed up with bad results and considering other options – have you even tried Bing?

This is extremely important. Remember earlier when I said that 70% of SEO was easy? That rule still applies. So, for example, if you have a list of keywords that you know are relevant to what you sell, then all you need to do is create great content for them. Incredibly, that’s all there is to it (terms and conditions apply again, unfortunately – see below).

There is, however, one simple rule to be consistently followed without exception: that the content you create should not only be good quality and completely original, but it should also be written primarily for the human visitor and not the search engine spider.

In other words, if you create some fantastic content for a keyword like “choosing a small business HR service”, then the article should not only make perfect sense if read out loud (as opposed to the same phrase being repeated fifteen times), but also provide real value to the person reading it.

So the process is simple:

1. Choose your keywords

2. Create spectacular content

WAIT. IS IT REALLY THAT SIMPLE?

Unfortunately there’s a lot more to the other 30% of SEO than just creating great content and waiting for the visitors. There are issues like helping Google understand the content on your pages and website, incoming links, page authority, domain authority, usage patterns, spam factors, canonical issues and much more.

But there’s the often overlooked fact about Google: it actually does a reasonable job of working out what’s on your website and (to some extent) understanding the gist of it. If you’ve never done any SEO on your website but still get some traffic from Google, this is why.

Even without dabbling in the other 30% of SEO, by creating the right content for the right visitors using the precise language and terminology that your potential customers are using, you’re significantly better off than your competition. And you can only gain from this.

When you’ve checked this off your to-do list and made it an ingrained part of your content creation process, then you’re ready to delve into the other 30% of SEO. The not-so-easy side.

Until then, work on understanding your current situation, exploring the opportunities, creating a list of good keywords, creating the right content for them, and starting 2015 with a little bit of smart, safe and real SEO.

(Source: Dave Collins, 24ways)

Ways to Use LinkedIn to Market Yourself

When it comes to business networking; LinkedIn has won the social media battle when it attracted 259 million professionals from over 200 countries with 178.4 million visitors monthly.With the various features it provides for business networking and marketing,an increased number of professionals use LinkedIn everyday to make important connections that help them and their companies grow.

So what can you do to market yourself and your work using LinkedIn?

1.Have a %100 completed profile

You can follow LinkedIn’s Profile Completion Tips when editing your profile. Add a profile picture of your face looking professional. A smile is a plus but stay away from Facebook-like profile pictures. Make sure your title is how you present yourself to people and not your current job title. For example, your title could be “Professional Business Writer” while your job is a content manager at Xycompany. The title is the 1st thing that people see so it’s really important that it tells your story. You can use it to tell everyone that you’re seeking opportunities but be careful not to actually state that you’re looking for a job. This might upset your current employer as well as make you sound desperate.

Complete all the fields on your profile as this will help you appear in search results when someone or some company is looking for skills, experience or keywords used in your profile.

2.Endorsements are important

This feature allows anyone who is viewing your profile to quickly see your top skills based on how many endorsements you have for each. While a single endorsement taken in isolation may not provide a ton of insight, if someone is endorsed for a single skill 99 times, that becomes a very powerful way to understand their key strengths and the strength of their network.

Another benefit is that LinkedIn’s algorithms actually take your skills and endorsements into account. Let’s say you’re a computer engineer living in Saudi Arabia and have been endorsed for your communications skills 140 times; LinkedIn algorithm will use that combination of factors to show you jobs you might be interested in.

Remember, the more people you endorse, the more you will be endorsed.

3.Ask for recommendations

The best way to get a recommendation on LinkedIn is to ask for one. Make sure you personalize your recommendation request to each person specifically and refrain from asking people that can’t directly speak to your work ethic. Never send a mass message asking all of your connections to take some time to rate your work. No appreciates that.

Likewise, recommending others in return is a great way to get them to recommend you in return.

4.Make great connections

You can make as many connections as you want on LinkedIn but it will get you no where; unless you’re interested in viewership of the links you share or the posts you write. Search for people you have already met and re-introduce yourself. LinkedIn also has a “People You May Already Know” tool that’s great for making meaningful connections, but use it sparingly and do a little research on your own.

Likewise, it’s important to keep up with the LinkedIn contacts you already have by updating your contact page and consistently updating your business page as well. Once your LinkedIn connections increase, you’ll have to search for laptop deals because your business will grow so fast you’ll need computers for all your new employees.

5.Join and Create Groups

Within LinkedIn’s like-minded professional bubble, there are specific interest groups for certain areas of focus within the business arena. Joining a LinkedIn group is an effective way to network and demonstrate your expertise within your field of interest by posting and commenting.

Likewise, taking the time to create your own interest group will boost your LinkedIn presence as one of the leaders in your industry or at least someone the group members will turn to for help and advice. It will also help keep your name and your picture remembered. But before you start a new group, search groups to see if a similar one already exist and join it.

Linkedin is the number one social network used by employers and job seekers alike. Even if you’re not yet looking LinkedIn is a great tool to build your personal brand and connect with other professionals.

(Source: Arab News)

7 Simple Ways To Be Much Happier Than You Already Are

Want to be happier? I have good news and bad news. First, the bad news: Research shows that approximately 33-50% of your level of happiness is hereditary. Your genes dictate your “happiness set point.”

Now, the good news. According to psychologist Sonja Lyubomirsky, 10% of your happiness is due to life circumstances and 40% is the result of your own choices and personal outlook: your career, your relationships, your friends, your activities, your level of health and fitness…

So even if you have a relatively low happiness set point, you still have significant control over how happy you feel. The key is to exercise that control by making choices and developing habits that make you happier.

Easier said than done?

Actually, no:

Surround yourself with positive people.

Like Jim Rohn says, we’re the average of the five people we spend the most time with. Spend time with negative people and your outlook will become more negative. Spend time with a chronic devil’s advocate and your attitude will go all to hell. .

Good friends encourage you, support you, and lift you up when you’re down. They see the best in you, and that helps you see the best in yourself. (That’s also true for our co-workers, and is why it's so important to have great colleagues at work. It's not just that we spend a lot of time with them, we essentially become them.

You can’t choose your family, but you can choose your friends. Choose people who make your life better – and happier.

See perfection as the enemy of happiness.

Your career doesn’t have to be perfect before you can be happy. Your marriage doesn’t have to be perfect before you can be happy. Your kids, your home, your car, your clothes… nothing has to be perfect.

And that’s a good thing because nothing can ever be perfect. Setting a bar you’ll never reach only ensures you’ll never be satisfied, fulfilled, or happy.

Instead think about what you already have. Think about what you’ve already accomplished. See where you are today not in terms of where you think you should be…. but as a great platform for achieving even more.

Then focus on doing well. Focus on doing great. Focus on excellence – not perfection, but excellence.

And know when to smell the roses – because you have a much bigger garden than you let yourself think.

Focus on now, not later.

“What if?” is like kryptonite to happiness. “What if I get fired? What if my business fails? What if something happens to my family? What if....”

“What if?” thinking is great if it results in a plan.

“What if?” thinking that only results in worry and stress and distraction is a waste of time.

If you can’t control tomorrow, don’t worry about tomorrow. Just worry about making today great, because the best way to be happier is to enjoy every moment as it comes.

Compare yourself to yourself, not to other people.

Comparisons are a zero-sum game you will always lose: no matter who you are, there will always be someone smarter, or richer, or more attractive, or more successful. Someone will always have “more.”

(But no one will have what you have.)

So stop comparing yourself to other people and start comparing yourself to yourself. Work to be a better version of you than you were last week, last month, and last year; that way when you look back you’ll love seeing how far you’ve come.

And you’ll feel a lot happier with, and about, yourself.

Do unto others.

“It is better to give than to receive” has a scientific basis: studies show providing social support can be more beneficial to the giver than the receiver.

Not only is helping a person in need gratifying, the act is also an explicit reminder of how comparatively fortunate we are… and that’s a wonderful reminder of how thankful we should be for what we already have.

You can’t control whether other people help you. But you can control whether you help other people – and that means you can control how happy you are, since giving always makes you feel happier.

Live your life.

The most common regret of people that only had a few months to live?

"I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me."

What other people think -- especially people who aren’t important in your life -- doesn't matter. What other people – especially people who aren’t important in your life – want you to do doesn't mater.

You have hopes. You have dreams. You have goals. Regardless of what other people might think or say, make the choices that support those hopes and dreams and goals.

Don’t look back and wish you’d done things differently. Decide what you want, decide how you want to live, decide what is best for you, your family, and the people you love… look forward and live your life in the way that supports what you truly want.

Have the courage to be who you are. You’ll be much happier now… and much happier later.

(Source: Dharmesh Shah, HubSpot)

Google's Very Rough Transition

Google's stock price hit a 52-week low yesterday.

This is not surprising news.

This has been a year of major change for Google, and it hasn't always been pretty.

CEO Larry Page, frustrated with the pace of innovation at the company, took a big step back from day-to-day operations, turning over control to Sundar Pichai.

Google's core business, search advertising, is looking shakier than it has in years. The problem is the rise of mobile. Search advertising is the best way to make money on the web. But people aren't using the web as much on their mobile phones as they did on their desktops. Last quarter, Google's advertising business grew at its slowest rate in six years.

People are searching for products on Amazon, rather than using Google. The only reason search makes money for Google is that people use it to search for products they would like to buy on the internet, and Google shows ads for those products. Increasingly, however, people are going straight to Amazon to search for products. Desktop search queries on Amazon increased 47% between September 2013 and September 2014, according to ComScore.

The executive in charge of running the moneymaking side of Google, Nikesh Arora, quit for a new job at Softbank. Internally, Arora's departure has been the source of some tension and disappointment. Before he left, Arora was planning to throw a huge conference for Google sales employees in Las Vegas. Now that Arora is gone, the event has been canceled in favor of more regional meetings, and we've heard some Googlers are bummed. These same Googlers are under the impression that the whole company is in the middle of a hiring freeze. After speaking to several more sources, we're pretty sure there is not actually a hiring freeze at Google. But it is interesting that some people inside the company think there is. Clearly, there are pockets of pessimism.

Google is getting knocked around overseas. Google just pulled its engineers out of Russia. It shut down its news aggregator in Spain. The EU wants to break up the company. The situation isn't looking great in Brazil, either.

Facebook has decided to compete with YouTube for video-advertising dollars, and Facebook may win. Facebook is working on bringing YouTube-like video to its News Feed. It's also rolling out video ads. Many in the industry believe that Facebook is in a better position than YouTube to eat into the advertising dollars that are leaving TV. Anmuth writes, "Facebook appears better positioned to capture new dollars coming online given its 21% share of mobile time spent, strong leverage to news feed ads, and nascent opportunities in video and Instagram."

Add it all together, and there are some serious worries about Google in the industry.

Says a former Googler: "I think 2015 is going to be disastrous."

"Mobile has been eating away [at them] for years, but they've been able to pull rabbits out of the hat to increase revenue."

"[That] has to end somewhere."

(source: Business Insider)