SEO - Optimize Website Images | ALT Tags

Why You Should Still Optimize Your Photos For SEO

Most SEOs will tell you that it’s important to optimize your images. It has long been considered an essential part of on-site optimization, especially if images are a central part of your content strategy.

But in recent years, website builders like WordPress have been able to offer more out-of-the-box on-site optimization, with automatically formatted images in many cases.

So just how important is it to optimize your images in 2017?

What Image Optimization Is For

First, let’s explore why you would want to “optimize” your images in the first place. This includes all images on your website, from header and “featured” images to embedded images in your blog posts. 

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Influencer Marketing | Influencers, Branding, Social Media

The Added Value of Influencers

From creative content to mass syndication, influencer marketing has its perks. It’s no wonder more and more brands are reserving marketing dollars to enlist in the support of niche talent with very engaged networks. And the more we launch influencer programs the more benefits we discover for our clients. There is added value of influencers around every turn.

Courting Sparks Awareness

Let’s face it, not every influencer you speak to is going to enlist in the project ahead. That’s perfectly okay. Most influencers hold their fan base and its interests very closely. This requires brands and agencies to brainstorm and collaborate alongside each influencer to truly determine if the campaign parameters and deliverables are in the right wheelhouse.

The plus side is that all the while, this courting and research phase informs top industry talent that your brand is committed to innovative projects that connect with modern audiences. It puts you on the radar and allows your brand to network with some of the most influential social media creators, bloggers, vloggers and beyond.

Front of mind leads to word of mouth and that’s a win any day.

Authentic Brand Advocacy

Marketing is fun. Especially when you work with a team of big thinkers, visual artists and captivating personalities. And when marketing is fun, influencers tend to gravitate to and support your brand long after the contract wraps up.

Check out some of your favorite Instagram accounts. Sure, individuals tag brands that pay for posts, but six, eight, ten months down the line, you may notice they’ll tag the jacket they’re wearing, the vehicle in the background, the camera lens they’re using and so on. Influencers tend to “pay it forward” and shine light back on the companies and projects that allow them to live their lifestyles.

If your project is brag worthy and progressive, heartfelt and inspiring, chances are everyone involved will continue to associate with your brand well after project launch. Every post is that much more relevance and exposure for your brand and its future.

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SEO | Technical SEO | Content SEO

Machine learning & neural networks: The real future of SEO

TensorFlow & SEO

So what do machine learning and TensorFlow have to do with SEO, algorithms and reaching that coveted No. 1 spot in the SERPs?

As Google’s RankBrain gets smarter in understanding users and their intent, it’s also learning to better understand content, information and if that content will provide the right answer, not only to the query, but also to the individual user. With the algorithm now truly understanding the query intent on a linguistic level, it can deliver new kinds of results that are correlated and weighted in a way that a human brain can’t even begin to predict. This dramatically changes two aspects of SEO: technical SEO and content SEO.

Technical SEO

As many have said before, the role of technical SEO in the context of fixing links, optimizing title tags and ensuring correct markup is no longer a valid SEO role, meaning there should be no brands out there hiring a practitioner just for that purpose. This nuts-and-bolts work should be done from the beginning of the website build and audited by the web dev team on an ongoing basis.

Instead, the true technical SEOs of the future need to understand more than just HTML and XML; they need to understand how machine learning works, how TensorFlow handles data and weighs inputs, and how to understand and train models. There will always be crawling and discovery, but the main focus is now more analytical — truly data-driven, with the SEO practitioner more a mathematician and software developer than web designer.

Content SEO

The last few years have seen a convergence of SEO content and content marketing. We know we must now create contextually relevant content that is authoritative, not just keyword-stuffed. Now it’s time to look at more than minimum/maximum character counts and keyword density. We have to start using machine learning models and linguistic analysis to weigh and score our content to ensure it truly answers the consumer question, instead of just telling a brand story.

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SEO | UX, AMP, Artificial Intelligence

3 predictions about the future of SEO

SEO is a constantly changing and growing industry. No longer is search engine optimization seen as internet “black magic,” but it is now regarded as an essential part of any serious digital marketing strategy. Last year, it was estimated that businesses invested more that $65 billion on SEO services, and that number is projected to climb to over $70 billion by 2018.

We’ve come a long way as an industry — and from the looks of it, our best days are still ahead of us. The hardest thing in the world of search is predicting what will come next. As the major engines continue to update and refine their algorithms and SERP displays, we in the field shouldn’t just wait around to react. I believe we should be proactive and look at past trends to help guide us.

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Social Customer Care | Social Media Marketing

Social Customer Care Is The New Marketing

For those brands that have already embraced social media as a powerful customer service channel, I applaud you. For those that haven’t, here is a crash course on getting started. (Even those that already have might find an idea or two that is useful.)

1. Get social. Your company probably has a presence on the major channels, but are you using those channels for customer service and support purposes? If not, it’s decision time – and that decision should be to move forward with a formal social care strategy.

2. Be on the channels your customers are using. When I’m asked which channel a company should be on to support its customers, I simply respond by asking: What channels are your customers using? That’s a good place to start.

3. Invest in software that monitors every mention of your brand on the Internet. There are a number of excellent software programs that will track mentions, comments, reviews, etc. Some are even free. You need to know when people are talking about you.

4. Respond to every comment or mention. One of the biggest social media mistakes a company can make is to ignore social posts, comments and reviews. There is a reason they call this social media. It’s social, and that means others are watching to see how you respond to comments, especially complaints. All comments should be acknowledged.

5. Respond quickly. If not responding to a social post is one of the biggest social care mistakes, then not responding quickly is a close second. Surveys indicate that companies are taking days to respond. If you’re in the social care game to win, then do it right. Don’t wait hours or days to respond. Respond within minutes.

6. Avoid canned responses. Be authentic. A robotic or canned response may work initially, but over time people will see the pattern and pick up on the insincerity of the response. So, make it personal. Don’t just copy and paste messages. People are watching and making judgements about your brand based on the way you respond.

7. Be proactive and engage with your community. Don’t just react to social comments from customers. Put out your own valuable posts. Not promotional posts, but good information with value to your customer community. YouTube is an excellent way to post content such as answers to frequently asked questions, cool and unique ways customers are using your products and much more. While some view this as content marketing, others (including me) see it as a valuable part of the customer experience.

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SEO - Internet Marketing | Modern Imprint

SEO Simplified: 3 Main Factors In Getting The Right Customers To Your Site

Online sales already account for more than 8 percent of total retail sales, and eMarketer predicts that North America “will see consistent double-digit growth through 2020.” By then, online sales are expected to exceed $4 trillion worldwide.

But the biggest question is: how will customers find your products on the ever-changing and extremely crowded world wide web? The name of the game is search engine optimization but it has to be done right and in compliance with Google’s webmaster guidelines. SEO is all about coming out at the top of search results relevant to what customers are looking for.

There are 200+ factors involved in Google's core algorithms, and majority of these factors fall into the following three areas: technical website structure, on-page SEO and off-page SEO. In order to rank well in a Google search, you need to not only pay attention to what these factors are, but maintain your site anytime Google releases an update or you make changes to your website. This isn’t an easy task, but if you build it into your day to day website maintenance routine, you can stay relevant while maximizing exposure and sales.

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SEO | Small Business | Internet Marketing

Most small business owners have come across the term search engine optimization (SEO). Many of them know it is critical to their business online. But prod them a bit more and it becomes clear many don’t know what it really means.

According to a new survey by Memphis, Tennessee-based marketing agency HigherVisibility, 20 percent of small businesses still don’t have a website. What’s more, 54 percent of the surveyed respondents said they don’t have a budget for SEO.

For a small business, SEO is essential because it helps drive more people to their website. But as the survey reveals, businesses are making some common mistakes that have an adverse effect on their website’s SEO.

For example, 38 percent of surveyed respondents wrongly believe keyword stuffing is a good thing. Twelve percent incorrectly think it’s okay to publish duplicate content that has been copied and pasted from another website or page.

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