5 Ways to Engage Audience through Blog Comments

Is it possible to measure your success via content marketing or blog? - Page views, search engine rankings, earned links, conversions or sales can any of these options help you to track your success in content marketing. Whatever metric you may use, all needs to achieve the marketing goal for your blog.

With that in mind, have you ever thought to consider blog commenting as a way to measure your content marketing success? If not, then try it now.

Why do you need comments for your website/blog?

It sounds like no-brainer to the digital marketers as to whether comments are a source of popularity or just a simple user engagement. To some of the digital marketers, metrics like the rankings and page views hold more weight, and that is partially true. Ruling your blog with comments is a little bit foolish aspect.

There will be blog posts, which might receive comments and page views more than other. The goal of the contents in your blog is to encourage traffic rather than engagement, then the comments might fall by the wayside. However, it is advisable not to put all the eggs in one basket.

Do not concentrate on one metric. With the evolution of social media digital marketing sphere has broadened and thus building a community around your brand equally important as appearing in the 1st page of the SERPs. In order to be outstanding in the digital marketing sphere, you have to merge facets like social, content, search and paid media all defines to become ‘holistic.’

The goal and objective of your content marketing should encourage user engagement. Quality is no doubt important when it comes to comment. No one likes to get spam. Real judgment lies in the fact that what said is what shared. What additional value it adds up to your content?

Therefore, it is mandatory not to accept comments lamely, just for the sake of user engagement. Encourage quality comments for your website. What should you do to engage fans with quality comments?

#1.Start asking questions to your blogger commentor – ask actual questions and not those rhetorical ones. If you give people a reason to share their thoughts, then they are going to engage themselves in quality comments. The best tactics is to place the question at the end of the blog post. This allows user to respond with a variety of answers rather restricting to a single response.

#2.Share inspirational comments – offer something that people has never seen in any other blog. This brings quality over quantity. If your content is unique and adds true value to the content topic, niche, industry or sector you deal. It is quite normal that users will comment to either contribute posts or praise your efforts.

#3.Topics should be exciting enough to drive more traffic to your content – Content may contain latest industry news, events or might take something popular that happened within your niche in recent days. If you create such content when there is a demand for it and if it resonates with your audience, then people will comment more on it.

#4.Stay active as soon as you post a new blog on your website – Blogging and commenting walks side by side, so if you think to get a lot of comment without investing time in actually engaging your blog by yourself, then you have to wait for long. Contribute comments that are both interesting and insightful. Leave behind exciting tips, questions and keep replying. This will actually help you to build the bridge of relationship and encourage contribution of contents to your blog.

#5.Do not forget to reply – You must reply to the comments, at least share “thanks” for their thoughts and touch on what they have contributed. This allows your readers to know that you have read their comments and acknowledged their contribution. To elongate the conversation you can ask questions and keep the debate going.

Seeking attention like this drives a long way and users will only be happy to share content so that they keep coming.

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SEO 2014 Trends and Preparing For Google Updates in 2014

If you look carefully, 2013 has certainly been eventful especially when it comes to important updates laid down by Google. Some of the major highlights encompass critical releases like Penguin and Panda, importance of content and author ranking and the shift from just offering keywords (thanks to encrypted search mechanism).

Most webmasters have gone ahead to ask themselves if whether or not SEO still exists or is it dead or irrelevant. Research and reviews show that Google has now taken steps to fight spam and as a result, it created stiff challenges for most site owners. Concisely, it is now not so easy to get a rank in popular search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing unless you do not follow the laid down parameters.

As competition grows, many business owners can now see the importance of having a strong and prominent online presence. The potential to earn a strong ROI has encouraged people to take drastic steps. As black-hat tactics no longer exists, but if you still follow them then it would not be long before you get noticeable and penalized.

You may want to take this more of a tactics rather than a strategy. However, successful players usually try to anticipate Google’s next moves and proactively respond to them to make an everlasting presence. In other words, this game of chess with Google around SEO services would always continue however, the rules would become more complex every year.

By offering a mix of what I have observed and have read in the past and what I have experienced in the field of onlinemarketing, here are some suggestions on how to prepare your brand for 2014:

All key learning from 2013 are still relevant but more amplified

If you observe 2013 then be sure of the fact that Google will continue to penalize those sites that do not adhere to their guidelines. This would continue in 2014 and so you can expect more websites to fall prey. You can however expect a few adjustments to Panda and Penguin that would continue to target both link quality and content quality on websites.

Quite a few site owners would feel benefited by having quality inbound links. They would continue to perform periodic audits and remove unnatural inbound links. The key focus would always remain on quality and unique content.

Do remember that a solid performance in 2013, then in 2014 you can build a strong foundation and you can do exceptionally well and draw more relevant web traffic.

Marketing yourself through content is going to be bigger and better than before

From being nascent to mature, content is going to be the buzzword for most websites. This will continue in 2014. If you look at it from a SEO perspective then Google would accredit companies that offer robust content development efforts.

Advantages of having good and unique content:

-          Fetches targeted audience

-          The platform to share and engage more people

-          The sign of freshness and uniqueness would be alive

This I guess would not be new as the approach to SEO got a basic shape in this way. The kind of changes you make in 2014 largely depends on what elements miss from your current website. Quite a considerable number of companies may want to build their strategies around mobile marketing, which is not a bad idea at the end of the day.

If you have not moved in the direction of content marketing then it is high time to become committed and start looking for unique ways to shape the content on your website.

Role of Social Media

Social media is and has been playing an important role in digital marketing for the past few years. In the beginning, we saw the exponential growth of both Facebook and Twitter and now, we see how strong social media platforms like Pinterest and Instagram are becoming.

Today, we see diversification in the trend and kind of role content plays on social media platforms. Both B2C and B2B companies recognized the powerof social media platforms and the way it changes the brand visibility.

Focus on Google+

In addition to social media, strengthening your position on Google+ is not a bad idea. According to Moz, certain critical factors have shown that Google+ is playing an extremely crucial role in SEO rankings.

Guest blogging and content limitation

May be you are not aware of this but GuestBlogging has gained a lot of popularity in the past one year or so. It is an effective means through which you can develop quality inbound links and achieve more traffic. Having mentioned that, you need to be sure that the content you place for your Guest Blog is of good quality. Do ensure that the length of the content is adequate and must be written in such a way so that it draws the attention of onlookers.

Author Bio:-

Sophie Hyde is a technical news junkie and works at SearchEccentric in India. She loves everything about digital world, Search Engine Marketing, Internet Marketing, Social Media and gadgets.

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7 Ways an Internet Marketing Campaign Can Grow Your Business

Marketing is the most important point of any business. It helps to keep the profits rolling. It does not matter if you are running an online or an offline business. If you do not market it properly then you are not going to make any money. The market equation is as simple as that.

This article is trying to explain the novice and the experts how they can get a big scoop of profits through internet marketing. Through this blog post, she want to share a thought on the variety of ways that a SEO Company can help grow your business through online marketing.

An internet marketing campaign is going to grab the attention of the people who already knows you and your business in a revamped manner. For example, a reputed internet marketing company will use strategies such as SearchEngine Optimization to boost your position in the search engines. This will be a major source of traffic for you. If you adopt the right strategy, then you will find that a number of new people start to discover your website, and hopefully will end up purchasing from you.

Boost the reputation of your company with a successful internetmarketing campaign. It is going to reinforce your brand. Every marketing company will use a variety of different techniques to accomplish this. For example, some companies will try to know about through social media, and others may look out for your blogs, so you become a trusted authority. Honestly, the more trusted you are online, the more likely you are to make a sale, no matter what you charge for your service or product!

As your internet marketing campaign gets into full swing, you will find that your brand name starts to become associated with certain products and services. This could happen on a local or a national basis depending on where you are targeting with your campaign. It is the goal of every marketer to cross this stage. If your company becomes synonymous with certain products and services, then you will get a massive boost in your business. People will start discussing about you online and offline with other people. It takes a long time to get to this stage, but once you do, you are going to earn a lot of money.

Internet marketing could help you capture leads. Many people are there who probably heads to your website, have a quick browse, and then leaves the website quickly. They may be interested in your services, but looking at your website nothing might have fascinated them and hence they take a swift adieu. An internet marketing company must look at the variety of ways to capture these leads for you to use in the future. Perhaps you could get in touch with the customer over the telephone and try to drum up their business, or add them to your mailing list and send out promotions to them later. The choice is completely yours. One thing is for sure, you will generate a lot more business through this method!

Social Media is going to be the key to drive profits through internet marketing campaign. Social Media is the desired way to get a suitable rank in SERPs and to build company reputation. If you can get people discussing your business then you are going to notice a significant jump in turnover. In addition to this, you are going to earn a group of people who likes your products and services and can instantly get in touch with to communicate your latest special offers and promotions.

Some companies may try to make use of email marketing. This sort of ties into lead capture, although you can use email marketing on existing customers too. With email marketing, you will be sending out a regular newsletter. You can use this to communicate information about your company as well as share special offers and discounts. Not only is this going to remind people about your company, but it is also going to give you a nice little boost to business whenever you wish. Honestly, I think any successful internet marketing campaign should make use of email. You will be surprised at just how much extra money you will be able to generate with just a few people on your list. Remember, it is much easier to convert existing customers than gain new ones!

Marketing is also a key for helping you change the focus of your business. As you know, the things that customers want will change over time. Internet marketing will allow you to stay on top of changes in your industry and give customers what they want. This will ensure that your business does not dwindle away.

Therefore, here is a small scoop of the large profits that a company can reap from the right internet marketing strategy. Add your own views if you like to share with our readers.

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SEO Glossary – Five-In-One List for Novice and Experts - III

Now in this post we are going to catch up with the latest alphabets, which come just after ‘J’. Here in this article we are going to gather the rest for our readers. Let us grab attention for our new readers who has not read our articles before.

K

Keyword – This are the common terms, which we use to find information on the Internet. Search engines track the words typed by users to find on the websites their interests. The refined keywords will turn more meaningful generates results from search engines.

Keyword Phrases – The phrases that you want your website to show up when people search them online.

Keyword Density – The percentage of times a particular keyword or phrase is used in the particular webpage.

Keyword Research – The process of choosing keywords that you want to target for your website.

L

Landing Page – The landing page is the first page that a user visits after clicking on a link in the search engine pages.

Link – Link is the element on the webpage that allows user to navigate in other pages or a new location on the same page. The search engine crawlers follow up links to index web pages on the Internet.

Link Bait – The content on a website with the primary intention to encourage other websites to link it to the other contents.

Link Building – An activity associated in creating more inbound links for a particular website. The search engine rankings tend to improve as more of inbound links are created.

Link Juice (Google Juice, Link Heat) – The Link Juice is the figure of speech for the authority given to a website or webpage by search engines that links from one site to another.

Long Tail Keyword – This are the multiple string of keywords typed into the search engines. For example, “movie tickets” whereas a long tail keywords might be “movie tickets for night show in trident opera”. It has more than four keywords.

Link Farm – This is the website that exists just to link to other websites.

LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) – This process used by search engines to determine what a page is about, just by the types of words and phrases contained in it and relationships between them.

M

Meta Description – This is a brief description, which tells what the page is about and it shows up in the search results below the title of the page.

Meta Keywords – This HTML code indicates the details of the page to the search engines.

Metadata – The internal words, which gets store in the HTML of web pages, may not become visible to others, and is noticed by the search engine crawlers.

mozRank – This is the algorithm that runs against websites to make sure how many inbound links exists. SEOmoz devised this approach to assign each page a rank within 1 to 10 and thus set the importance of each pages. PR 10 represents the page with the best use of inbound links.

N

Nofollow – This attribute often applies to link and prevent them from passing authority to the page with which it is going to link.

New Visitor – This is similar to unique visitor but he or she is that visitor who has never visited the website before.

O

Organic Search Results – This is the result shown by search engines determined by their algorithm and not by the amount of money that advertisers have paid.

Outbound Link – The link from your website that points to another website is popularly called outbound link.

More two list will punch up soon!!!

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Which Update Will Maintain the Google Traffic Now? - It’s The Zebra Update

Google is going to release yet another algorithm update and this time they are going to call it as the Zebra update. That is a merchant quality update.

While browsing through the latest SEO news it caught our attention.  A PressRelease from the SEO agency of Chicago that took initiative to inform the world on this new update. Finally, news on the SearchEngine Journal steals our attention. Is it really the “merchants doom”?

Generally, the updates, which Google releases mostly, affect the search engine rankings for the websites making money online. The recent update on the search algorithm called Hummingbird. Hummingbird had not done so much damage like Panda and Penguin but would Zebra affect this time equally.

At SXSW, Matt Cutts announced that after the Hummingbird they are planning to launch an update looking after the quality of the merchants. They do not low quality experience merchants to rank in the search results. Cutts further added in his remark that it will help Google to "spot whether someone is not a great merchant."

Google has a strong affinity for black and white animals yet Hummingbird appeared to be a little colorful in midst of the B/W frame. After Panda, Penguin, Zebra is obvious adaptation.

Zebra is going to be a serious blow for the e-commerce platform and affiliate marketers. How will e-commerce platform protect them from this effect? How will you determine the quality of your e-commerce platform?

In the SearchQuality Guidelines updated in November 2012, you will find that Google has claimed that they are looking for quality merchant to float in the web.

Under the subheading "Recognizing true merchants”, one can find the following provisions.

·         a "view your shopping cart" link that stays on the same site.

·         a shopping cart that updates when you add items to it.

·         a return policy with a physical address.

·         a shipping charge calculator that works.

·         a "wish list" link, or a link to postpone the purchase of an item until later.

·         a way to track FedEx orders.

·         a user forum that works.

·         the ability to register or log in.

·         a gift registry that works.

If a site does not follow the given guidelines then according to Google you will be thorn in the rotten basket.

The big question is that when Google will release this surprise basket?

If it does then the low quality merchants should start packing their bags or make improvement to their sites. Until Google officially declares about Zebra, there is nothing much to worry.

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SEO Glossary – Five-in-One List for Novice and Experts - II

Getting into the SEO glossary list once more, this is the second list as I got on with the first list successfully. I got a lot of likes on the StumbleUpon page. Here is another list coming your way:

F

Feed - Content delivered to the user via a special website or programs like the news aggregators

FFA – Free For All is a page or site with many outbound links to some irrelevant websites, containing little unique contents.

Frames – A web design where two or more than two documents appear on the same screen each within their own frame. Frames are not good for SEO as spiders fail to navigate them in the right order.

Fold – The Webpage cut off by the bottom of the screen at this line. This gives an initial glimpse of the webpage and gives pertinent information to the viewer without scrolling down the entire page.

G

Gateway Page – A web page attracts traffic from the search engine and then redirects it to another site or page. A doorway page is not similar to cloaking, but the effect remains same as the user and search engines serve as different content.

Gizmo – The smallest application used on the web page to provide a specific function like hit counter or IP address display. They are good link bait.

Google Bomb – It is the combined effort from the multiple webmaster to change the Google Search Result to have a humorous effect. Like “a miserable failure – George Bush” and “Greatest American Living – Steven Colbert”.

Google Bowling - Malicious way to lower the site rank by sending the links to bad sites.

Google Dance – A change in the SERP caused due to update in Google database or Algorithm.

Google Juice – It is the trust or authority from Google, which flows through the outbound links to other neighborhoods.

Googlebot – A Spider program controlled by Google

Google Keyword Tool – A tool that is going to provide the SEO Analyzers with new keyword ideas based upon the keywords they type.

GYM – Google, Yahoo and Microsoft, the three big search engines spelt together

H

Hit – It is a standard, which once judged the web traffic, but now they are replaced by page views a.k.a Impressions. A hit occurs when the server sends an object – documents, graphics, files etc. One page view can generate many hits.

Hubs - It is a trusted page with high quality contents, which send links to other quality pages

HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) – These are used to add formatting and web functioning to plain text for use on the internet. HTML called the mother tongue of the search engines so you must strictly use it at the webpage.

Header Tags (H1, H2, H3) – This is an important piece of HTML code which indicates the search engines on what is present in your web page.

Home Page – This is the most important page and the first page seen if you type your domain in the address bar.

.htaccess – A file on your website server by which you are allowed to set a number of functions.

Hummingbird – A popular Google Algorithm launched in 2013 that focus on improving conversational search.

I

Impression – When a user views a webpage one time at least

Inbound Link – A link from a website that points towards your website

Internal Link – A link to connect one page of your website to another page

Information Architecture – The way, by which you categorize, organize and access the content in your website.

Index (n) – A database of the webpage and their content from which the search engines use them every time.

Index (v) – This is the process to add webpage to the search engine index

Indexed Pages - The pages on a site that’s indexed.

IP (Internet Protocol) Address – This is a unique number given to the computer or server connected to the internet.

J

JavaScript – To add dynamic features to your website, this is a special type of code.

Wait for three more lists, which are going to end the glossary list. Bookmark the pages for quick reference.

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Looking Down the Future of SEO with Major Updates in Google

Updates!  Updates! and more Updates!

Google made some notable changes as a part of their long-term strategy. This change has both good and bad effects on the digital world. This Helps genuine websites get good rankings in search results. Google carries out a brilliant job in taking people from tactical SEO and getting near to a strategic approach. Here are the impacts of these changes in accordance with SEO.

What are those updates? Let us take a ride down the lane, to know how these updates benefits or hurts your website ranking.

 1.           Not Known

Google has taken steps to make organic searches Secure from September 23, 2013. This means that you will lose the ability to produce keyword data for the users visiting the website from Google search box. It is certainly a miserable condition to lose Google keyword data. This severely affects the publisher in several ways. However, there are ways to work on this change. Keep in mind, as it will not be simple and easy as it was earlier.

2.            No updates on Page rank since February

Google updates the Page Rank numbers in the Google toolbar for every 3 months. However, it’s seen that Google has not updated the Page Rank numbers since February. That means 8 months gone without any updates. Yes, Google skipped two updates. Distinguished Engineer for Google, Mr. Matt Cutts said that there would not be any updates on toolbar page rank in 2013. Hence, it is better to rely on other factors instead of page rank. When Google itself show laziness in updating page rank, why should you consider about it.

3.            Hummingbird

Some elements of Hummingbird Algorithm Google announced on their official birthday. It is going to create a major change in the platform. Google will be much better with the conversational search queries than ever before. Hummingbird made real changes to the keyword game. In the flow of time, exact keyword matches will not be a big deal.

4.            Google+

Everyone knows that Google Plus is not a new factor or concept launched on 28 June 2011 is amplifying their reach quite faster. It made a slow start, and at present, it has gained momentum. It is hard to analyze the data on Google+, but it is clear that there are some clear search evidences like display of personalized results.

5.            Google Authorship

Google authorship launched on 7 June 2011 at present plays a good role in getting personalized results. You can get a strong response for personal stuff by getting Google authorship. Whatever is the process, it says that if you need rank in Google, then, build author ranks. Google introduces the authorship in order to give importance to the stuffs with its authorship naturally.

6.            In-depth articles

Google Gives importance to the web pages with in-depth articles with the proper title and Meta tags. It is better to provide the local information in the Meta lines. This helps Google to bring the pages with good article to the front of the searches.

These are some of the significant changes in the future of SEO with the major changes in Google. You can consult with an SEO expert to bring the necessary changes to your website.

Author: The author Rajeev Kumar is an experienced SEO consultant at ESEO Solutions, who loves to study about the updates and changes in Google. He helps the website owners to make changes on the website to work in accordance with the changes.

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