11.12.13
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How An Idea Turned Into An Explosive Viral Post!

The literal meaning of “going viral”, is that your content has stirred up the audience so enormously, that it’s spreading like fire. It ends up being the very latest big thing on the Internet. It happens when your content is getting liked, retweeted, commented on, shared, blogged on, and is being talked about by everyone in the industry – something that earns you more views than you would ever have imagined.

The things mentioned above are nothing but a powerful result for your content and the brand’s reputation. However, it is rather unrealistic to make content viral just like that. What one should concentrate on is to make the content the most informative, fascinating and the most interesting online experience for their audience. Going viral is not at all about good fortune or luck. Instead a number of things go into it. This post is about how we turned an idea into one of the most comprehensive post for the SEO fraternity, which will be looked forward to as a very valuable and helpful source of study by experts and amateurs alike.

How it all started?

Our team was having a discussion on what is it that the SEO’s all around the world would be looking forward to know. Something that could prove to be a valuable resource and at the same time, budding SEO’s could actually come to know what are those things that their SEO idols do. The first thing one would like to know is their way of working. This includes a number of things, but what really drives our curiosity is the tools/plugins that they work with.

SEO Plugins are one the most compelling things in this industry, and to know which ones are being used by the prominent names in the industry would prove to be a boon for everyone. This gave us an idea of getting in touch with all the SEO experts around the globe and ask them what is it, in terms of plugins that they can’t live without while SEOing. We asked just one simple question:

“Which are those 3 SEO Browser Plugins/Extensions you simply can’t work without?”

Identifying the Participants

We knew that the answers to these questions would be looked upon as a valuable source to all experts and budding SEO’s alike. The question was simple, yet curiosity driving. The answers to these questions were all set to become valuable assets not only for us, but also for those who would be accessing them. This drove us to get the answers straight from the horses’ mouth. The people who are considered to be the assets of the SEO industry, contributing their valued information for the well-being of other co-SEO’s. Sounds like a great idea? Read on…

We made a list of all stalwarts in the online marketing industry who are considered to be the trend-setters. Those people who were regularly coming up with new posts, blogs and videos to educate people on SEO were the first choice, as many are looking forward to their advice on various aspects of the industry. This made the team prepare a whopping list of 280 experts for this post. We acquired their e-mails from their websites and social media and started sending them personalized emails.

Unfortunately, almost 38% of those on the list were unable to contribute, maybe because of a very tight schedule. However, we were overwhelmed to see the responses appearing on our inbox from the rest.

The Response

What we got in response, made us go dumbstruck! We had never imagined that 105 SEO experts would actually be gracious enough to share their favorite SEO plugins, and let the world know their desktop secrets. It was this massive response that made our endeavor a successful one. We received their contributions in absolutely no time after asking them the question. The contributors have actually helped in making this post viral.

The Contributors

All those in the SEO industry, would be able to identify the names of the contributors at once. Saying anything about these prominent names, would be an understatement.

The Contributors

The Contributors

The Making of the Post

As soon as we got the response, we started organizing all the data that had been received from all the contributors. We also filtered out the top 5 plugins, those which appeared commonly in all the contributions. This serves the purpose for all those who are looking for the top plugins used by SEO experts around the globe. The next thing was to make a compilation of all the feedback and present it along with the post. The idea behind the whole process is to come up with a post that could prove to be a valuable resource for eternity.

The team did exactly the same, and the post was created that carried pictures and messages of all the successful SEO experts. The idea behind the whole post was simple:

Know the Flow: One of the most important things to get the desired response for a post is that it should touch the audience in some way. The content has to inspire awe and trigger curiosity. The motive was to set an awakening, broadening of knowledge which could be cherished for a long time.

Value: The post should be used as an informative source that helps others in improve on their SEO tasks, understand things better and make valued decisions with the help of the information available.

Eventually, the team came up with a compelling post which was all set to create a buzz in the SEO industry.

Promoting the Post

It wasn’t very tough as the post itself is a guide for all those who want to know the best tools in the market to perform various SEO activities.

The reason why I am writing this particular post is because I wanted to share an idea. An idea, that if you have a valuable, an informative, and an engaging resource on hand there isn’t much marketing required, as it has all the capabilities of going viral. The post was an initiative to educate people, and the purpose was received very well by all the contributors. Half the job was done by them as they started sharing this post throughout their network. This made the post spread faster than lightning, and the count of visits was ticking up with each passing day.

We did not resort to any paid advertising. Instead we decided to promote it through our social profiles and it started spreading like wildfire. Read on to know the social networking figures.

The Virality

The team had never imagined that what started out as a mere idea to create a post to help out, would prove to be a massive hit among its readers. The post proved to be so successful, that it started receiving a stream of appreciating comments from all over. The count of likes, tweets and shares started going up with each passing day, and we are still counting.

All those who have read this, find it to be the most comprehensive and a very useful guide for those who would like to try out new plugins for their SEO projects. People are actually asking us for more of such posts which could give industry insights. We could now say that this post has actually turned out to be a linkable asset for us, for the number of times it is being shared on social networks.

Success Factors

I know very well, what you are looking out from the SEO’s perspective. Here are some of the most popular counts. Before mentioning them I would like to mention that this count is at the time of writing this segment of the post.

  • Links:   50+ including one from Search Engine Land
  • Google+ 1s:   437
  • Linkedin Shares:   149
  • Tweets:   375
  • Facebook:   238

And, if you want to have a look at the number of visits here is the graph. On the very next day of putting the post live we were overwhelmed to see the number of visits.

This was meant to be just that – another post. We had never thought that we would come up with a post that would manage to create a buzz.

Conclusion

Creating survey posts like this could take a lot of time, and the responses could be long-time pending from those whom you requested.

However, once you have created one, you’ll get tons of comments, shares and likes if found useful by your readers. By conducting surveys like this one, you and your readers could find out how your idols work, and also this shows what the audience is looking for. This response could serve as a platform to come up with more compelling posts and surveys.

Guest Author: Sanket Patel is the Founder of Blurbpoint.com, a leading Internet Marketing Company specializing in content marketing and SEO Services. He has extensively researched on the ultimate recovery process of Panda/Penguin which is working successfully these days.

10.28.13
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How Site Speed & A Slow Website Impacts Online Sales

When was the last time you abandoned a website because it took too long to load?

If you’re like me, then there’s not too many things that are more frustrating than a slow website!

In 2006, 40% of online shoppers were abandoning a website if it took more than four seconds to load. In today’s fast paced world, people expect a website to load in two seconds or less. That’s right. 2 seconds.

According to Amazon.com, for every one second delay, conversions will drop by 7%. That’s a $2.5 million loss per year if you sell $100,000 per day.

Conversion rate by page load speed

A study by Akamai in 2009 surveyed more than 1,000 online shoppers and found that more than 47% of people expect a web page in load in two seconds or less. The research also found that speed impacts customer loyalty with:

  • 52% claim that a quick page load is important to the loyalty of the website
  • 64% who are not happy with the site will shop at a competitor
  • 79% are less likely to return to the website

A slow website not only affects your online sales, but 27% are also less likely to shop at the sites physical store.

In 2010, Gomez interviewed more than 1,500 online shoppers in their “Why Web Performance Matters” report.  One of the biggest findings from the Gomez report was that more than two-thirds told others about a disappointing web experience.

A slow website will lead to you losing business online and offline and customers will shop elsewhere

Site speed improves SEO

Another important aspect to site speed is SEO (search engine optimization). A slow website not only provides a poor user experience, but will also get your website penalized in the search results.

Site speed became a focus to search engine ranking factors in 2009, which came from a usability test that both Google and Bing conducted to determine the impact of a slower search results page.

In their study, Google found that by slowing page speed down from 100 to 400 milliseconds. the number of searches per user decreased over a four to six weeks period.

Bing’s study had a measureable impact on clicks and revenue by delaying the search results by two seconds. Bing found that the two delay decreased revenue by 4.3% per visitor. With more than 48 million monthly visitors, that’s a huge loss.

Websites are getting slower

Eight years ago, Amazon announced that for every 100ms of website speed improvement, they saw a 1% increase in revenue. Yet for the leading eCommerce sites, websites are getting slower.

Top 500 Retailers Average Page Speed

In just over eighteen months, studies* have revealed that of the top 500 retailers:

  • Only 8% use image compression
  • The average page load time is 7.72 seconds
  • Sites are 13.7% slower compared to 2012

* Studies using Google Chrome browser

In order to fix your site speed issues, there are a number of tools you can use. Here are three of the best tools you can use to test your site speed:

Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool provides recommendations on what you can do in order to make your site faster. The most common problems experienced are browser caching, un-optimized images and minifying JavaScript/ CSS.

Impact of making your site faster

Prioritizing site speed improvements is challenging.But there are ways to increase site speed, or perceived site speed. One way to get internal buy-in is to run your competitor websites through the WebPageTest tool and using the ‘create video’ function.

SuperOffice compared their site speed with SalesForce, Zoho and Sugar CRM. The test discovered that SuperOffice’s competitor sites were loading in just over two seconds, whereas SuperOffice took 12.8 seconds to load.

By watching the video comparison, SuperOffice could see that the flash was taking a long time to load. As a result, the flash banner was removed from the home page and a new video test was created, comparing SuperOffice websites – One website without flash and three websites with flash.

The second video test found that:

  • Page load speed WITH flash = 11 seconds
  • Page load speed WITHOUT flash – 2.7 seconds

This means that by removing the flash banner, the website speed improved by 10 seconds.

Their website now loads faster, which delivers a greater user experience. But how does this impact conversion rates?

SuperOffice compared the changes five days after the change with the five days prior to the change.

The result was that conversion rate increased by 88%, from 0.36% to 0.67% and goal completions increased by 78%, from 19 to 34.

Impact of Page Speed to Conversion Rates

During the comparison period, overall web traffic decreased by 4% and no other marketing activities were launched. The only change documented was the improvement to site speed.

Make site speed a priority

A slow website will negatively impact your business, and website users expect your site load within two seconds. A fast website is no longer a luxury or a nice-to-have. It’s expected.  And by keeping a slow website, your customers will turn to the competition.

Here are five steps you can take to make sure your website loads faster:

  1. Use the conversion loss calculator to estimate how much revenue you are losing
  2. Use the WebPageTest tool to compare your site speed against your competitors
  3. Send these results to the senior management or CEO to make site speed a priority

Once you have been given the go ahead to improve site speed performance, you can:

  1. Run your most visited 10/25/50 pages through a site speed tool to identify load time issues
  2. Have your IT team fix the problems immediately

Once your page speed issues have been fixed, you can then monitor the improve to your conversion rates.

Looking for More Conversion Rate Optimization Tools?

I’ve created a list of 18 Conversion Rate Optimization tools that every CRO experts needs to boost conversion rates.

And I’m sharing them with you, for free.

Access the tools below.

Other resources:

09.16.13
by

Will Google ask the Syrian government to hide their chemical weapons?

Last week Norway´s largest newspaper Aftenposten published an article with the headline  “Google asks online stores to ‘hide’  weapons” . The article tells the story of how Friluftsmagasinet, the largest hunting and fishing store in Norway , was suspended from advertising on Google. The reason being that they sell hunting and fishing equipment – weapons – that obviously can hurt animals.

This week Google is threatening to shut down Norway´s largest online cosmetics  shop because of UPS Revitalash . Google claims this word/product is an illegal supplement . What are the people in Google´s global policy team thinking?

Global Policy or Local law?

I’m no expert on the law , nor on Google policy. I like Google and I think it is positive that Google prohibits advertisements for alcohol, tobacco and chemical weapons , but where should Google draw the line? Is it possible a large American company to keep track of all local laws and regulations in all countries? Is it really Google’s responsibility to ensure that businesses worldwide have appropriate ethical guidelines? If that is the case :

Google’s core values

In the Aftenposten article, the issue is whether Google should abide by the Google global policy and/or local laws and culture. I admire Google and how they operate in the marketplace, but in this case I think the search engine company have ignored the Google core values . Here are some of Google´s core values: (with my comments below):

Google core value #1: Focus on the user and thus solves the rest by itself

Comment: Focus on the user has been a mantra at Google since its inception. This user centric approach has turned Google into one of the world ‘s strongest brands.  In this case Google is not focusing on the users (local Norwegian businesses and local consumers ). Instead Google employees are acting like bureaucrats referring to the the great “Global Policy”.  Where´s the critical thinking?  Are lawyers and bureaucrats  running Google now?

Google core value #2: It is best to do one thing really well .

Comment: Google is good at search technology . Google should continue focusing on search. It is impossible , even for a large American company (even with some assistance from the NSA ;)) to keep track of all local laws and regulations worldwide. Perhaps Google’s central policy department should hand over responsibility for policy to those of its employees who are really good at NORWAY ?

Google core value #4: Democracy on the web works

Comment:  Why should a central body in Google determine what is legal and what is illegal in democratic countries. Shouldn´t a democracy decide? Why not create a system that gives people the opportunity to decide what should be allowed in each country ? Give users the opportunity to complain about the ads ( Facebook does it already) . If enough people complain, a  local Google representatives in consultation with local authorities and NGOs should decide whether ads should be banned. Look to Wikipedia. Their system seems to work quite well!

“Do no evil” or abide by Googles global policy?

Google´s mantra is “Do no evil”. But what happens if the notion of “evil” is different in countries where Google operates. Who defines evil? If someone within Syria had created an Adwords account with the sole purpose of identifying the location of chemical weapons in Syria, how would Google´s central policy team react? Would they blindly follow the Google policy? Would they apply critical thinking? Would they notify the Syrian Government about a potential national security breach or would they ignore it and let a foreign state bomb the locations? My point is that Google should strive to let their core values determine what they do – not a global policy that is forced upon all the countries in the world. I like Google, but I don´t think Norwegian hunters agree that an American company should that decide what Norwegian companies should be allowed to advertise for!

09.12.13
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The Complete Best Practice Magento SEO Guide

Magento SEO guide

Download Magento SEO Guide (Plus Bonus Tips)

If you have a website, you will want to attract natural and organic traffic.

And as e-commerce platforms go, Magento is one of the best out-of-the-box solutions you will find for how to optimize your website for search engines.

To make the most out of your visibility in search engines, there are a number of search engine optimization (SEO) techniques within the Magento admin you can do to increase the potential of buyers finding your site and making a purchase. During the last five months, I’ve worked with a brand that has five websites in five different languages.

The following Magento SEO guide explains how several improvements lead to an increase in organic traffic from 4,200 visits to 28,800 visits and an increase in organic revenue from $57,000 to $395,000. organic traffic increase

Register your website with Google and Bing Webmaster Tools

Webmaster Tools provides insight into how Google and Bing see your site and if you have problems with it when they crawl your pages. Register your website in both Google Webmaster Tools and Bing Webmaster Tools  – Google will provide you with a ‘Google site verification’ tag and Bing will provide a ‘msvalidate’ tag. Copy and paste the HTML tag into the Magento admin. You can find this under System > Configuration > Design > Miscellaneous Scripts. webmaster tools field

Auto redirect base-URL to canonicalize your domain

It’s important that Google only find and index one version of your home page. If both http://www.example.com and http://example.com  can be accessed, your website will be penalized for site-wide duplicate content. You will need to redirect one to the other in Magento. The default setting in Magento is set at a 302 temporary redirect. A 302 temporary redirect will not pass on any link juice so you need to change this to a 301 permanent redirect. You can change this under System > Configuration > General > Web > URL Options and set “Auto-redirect to Base URL” to “Yes (301 Moved Permanently)”. autobase redirect url

Enable web server rewrites for user-friendly URLs

Having a user-friendly URL structure is important for both search engines and usability.In order to make sure your URL’s are user-friendly, visit System > Configuration > General > Web > Search Engine Optimization and set “Use Web Server Rewrites” to ‘Yes’. web server rewrite The difference in having a user-friendly URL structure compared to session based/ dynamic URLs can be seen below when we turned on the “Use Web Server Rewrites” setting, with the number of impressions in Google increasing immediately. search impressions In 2012, Atoll Paradise updated their URL structure to be more user-friendly and organic traffic increased by 350%. Over the course of twelve months this mean more than 420,000 visitors.

Prevent duplicate content by disabling category URLs

By default, Magento will use the category structure in the product URL. For example, a home furniture store may have a page URL www.mywebsite.com/bedroom/candles. However, you may have products that exist in multiple categories. For example,

The best URL structure here would be www.mywebsite.com/candles.This removes the category in the URL. To change the URL structure visit System > Configuration > General > Catalog > Catalog > Search Engine Optimization. You can then change the setting “Use Categories Path for Product URLs” to “No”. category path If you haven’t done so already, you can edit two further settings under “Search engine optimization”. Make sure that the following fields are set to “Yes”:

    • Create Permanent Redirect for old URLs if Url key changed
    • Use Canonical Link Meta Tag For Categories
    • Use Canonical Link Meta Tag For Products

Using the rel=canonical tag will stop your website being penalized for duplicate content. rel-canonical

Create and upload robots.txt file

A robots.txt file is a text file that help search engines determine which information on your site to index. As a default, there is no robots.txt file in Magento so you will need to create the robots.txt file yourself. By having a robots.txt file, you can prevent duplicate content issues and hide pages from search engines that you do not want indexed, such as CMS login, reports and files. A robots.txt file is set up for one domain. In order to install it, create a new text file in Notepad and save it as a robots and a “.txt” file. You can then upload the file to the web root of your server (ex, www.mywebsite.com/robots.txt). Here as an example of a standard Magento CMS based robots.txt file: robots txt file Simply copy the above and upload to the web root of your server.

Enable “Index, follow” to get your website found in search engines

It’s common that when you’re testing your website before launching, you hide the site from search engines so you enable “no index, nofollow”. But it’s also common that when you go live with your new website, you can forget to change it to “index, follow” or any other option that prevents your site being found in search. To ensure that your website is being indexed and links are followed, visit System > Configuration > General > Design > HTML Head > Default robots “Index, follow”. index follow

Create default Meta data to avoid duplicate content

As a default setting, Magento will leave your “default description” field blank, which means that both the default title tag and Meta description is missing. By leaving them blank, you may end up with hundreds or thousands of duplicate content issues on your site and Google will struggle to index certain pages. In order to set a default title tag and Meta description for pages that have yet to be optimized, you can visit System > Configuration > General > Design > HTML Head > Default description. default meta content

Using Rel=alternate hreflang for International rankings

For International websites, you will most likely have similar versions of your website in multiple languages. Google has provided a way for webmasters to not be penalized for duplicate content by creating the rel=alternate hreflang=X link attribute. By implementing this snippet into the <head> section of your website for each page that exists in a different language/ website, Google will be able to show the correct language and page in the search results. For example, if you have German websites for both www.mywebsite.de and www.mywebsite.at, you would implement the following snippet in the <head> section on both websites.

In order to get the most out of your International website, this should be implemented at page level site wide. For example, your product page would include a similar snippet:

By implementing these snippets, Google will then be able to show the Austrian page to searchers in Austria and the German page for searchers in Germany. To implement the rel=”alternate” hreflang snippet in Mangento, visit System > Configuration > General > Design > HTML Head > Miscellaneous Scripts. href lang At nameOn, we saw that the Norwegian website, which had the highest domain authority, was being ranked first in Google for branded searches. nameon SERP 1 Once we were able to implement rel=”alternate” hreflang on both the German and Norwegian websites, the German website was immediately positioned in the first spot, which has helped organic traffic grow in Germany. nameon SERP 2

Implement Google Analytics tracking code

Although not entirely related to SEO, tracking website visitors and site behavior is crucial to your businesses success. You will able to track which marketing activity generates revenue and from which country. Your Google Analytics profile ID will start with “UA” and be followed by several numbers. For example, UA-3465789-9. Paste your Google Analytics profile ID into the field and tracking will begin immediately. It’s easy to get started with Google Analytics and once you have created an account, you can visit System > Configuration > Sales > Google API > Google Analytics. google analyticsgoogle analytics For International websites, it is recommended that you implement cross-domain tracking so that you can avoid having your websites appear as sources under the referral traffic report. cross domain tracking

Default home page title tag

Another default setting in Magento will be the homepage title tag, which is set to “home”. You will need to edit this into a natural title tag that summarizes what your website is/ or does. To edit the home page title tag, visit CMS > Pages and once you find your home page, edit the “Page Title” field. default title tag In addition, you can edit the Meta Data tab (on the left) and update your home page Meta description. default meta description

Create an XML Sitemap and submit it to Webmaster Tools

Creating an XML sitemap allows Google and other search engines to find products, categories and pages on your website. It’s up to Google to determine whether or not your page belongs in the index but an XML sitemap will speed up the process of being indexed/ crawled. To set up an XML sitemap, visit www.xml-sitemaps.com. Once you have your XML sitemap upload it to the root of your website (for example, www.mysite.com/sitemap.xml), and submit the sitemap under “Catalog > Google sitemap” in Magento. xml sitemap You can also submit your XML sitemap to Google Webmaster tools and best practice is to include the XML sitemap in your robots.txt file too. Here is an example of how we included it at nameOn. xml sitemap robots txt When adding the XML sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools, we saw an immediate impact in the number of pages crawled by Google. crawl rate

Conclusion

No CMS is fully optimized for search engines and you will always need to further optimize your site to increase its visibility.

SEO is an ongoing process but the SEO tips used above only need to be addressed one time, which means you can instead focus your efforts on building your social media presence, creating content and optimizing conversion rates.

By following the Magento SEO tips above, more people will find your website in search engines and this will lead to an increase in visits and higher organic sales.

Looking for help with Magento? Visit the Magento blog for eCommerce tips and more.

Bonus section

Now that you have these Magento SEO tips set up to dominate the search engine results pages, it’s time to take your search engine optimization knowledge one step further. I’ve created a proven model that will boost your SEO traffic and revenue.

The three tier keyword conversion model helps you identify a wealth of keyword opportunities. I don’t always share my secrets; this is an exception.

Are you interested? (click the link below).