What are the general guidelines that will help google find your page?

by Aditi Phadnis | Jan 25, 2019 | SEO

What are the general guidelines that will help google find your page?

There are several guidelines you should follow for making it easy for google to find you. Only then you will be ranked in the top positions. Please follow the below checklist and check if you are missing on any of these guidelines.

Guideline #1 Anchor Links:

Anchor Links are very important. Make sure that your page can be reached or navigated from other findable link on google. The referring link should include a “text” that is relevant to the target page. Or if it is an image there should be an image attribute describing what the image is about. Google cannot crawl all the links. Ensure that your link uses an <a> tag with an “href” attribute.

Guideline #2 Are sitemaps important in terms of SEO ranking:

It is very important that you upload your sitemap in your google search console. If you are using WordPress you can use Yoast SEO plugin to automatically create an XML sitemap. Click on the SEO tab in the side bar of your WordPress dashboard, select features tab and enable XML sitemaps.

Yoast plugin creates sitemaps for all the various sections on your website. All the individual sitemeps are combined into a sitemap index by Yoast. All you have to do is to submit this sitemap url link Yoast keeps updating this link, as you add, remove or update any content on your website.

Guideline #3 Limit the number of links on any pages.

Do not add too many links on any of your pages. Limit the number of links to a few thousands.

Guideline #4 If modified since Http header:

If modified since header tells Googlebot one of the two things:

It responds with a 304 status code only with headers, telling google that the page has not changed since its last visit Or
It responds with a 200 status code sending the entire document to google telling that content has been updated since its last visit, so it needs to be downloaded and crawled once again.

For those people who have huge website crawling process will consume a lot of bandwidth and an extra cost. So If modified since http header can save them some resources.

Guideline #5 Use robots.txt

In SEO, the robot.txt file tells the robots which pages it should crawl and which pages it should not crawl. Robots.txt file is also known as Robots Exclusion Protocol or Standard.

If you want google bots to spend its crawling budget effectively on your website you should remove pages that have duplicate content or error pages, hacked pages, pages having infinite spaces or proxies, low quality spam content.

If you help google spend their budget wisely, your most valuable pages can be easily discovered, which means your site visibility will also increase.

Guideline #6 Avoid embedding text inside image

Try to use text instead of images to display information that is important to your users. Especially text like heading, menu items should be written in a text format. In case you want to use image, use an alt tag that can tell google what the image is about. Page translation does not work on images. Hence use of text embedded on images should be avoided as far as possible.

Guideline #7 Mobile friendly

Make sure your website is responsive and mobile friendly. Use mobile friendly testing tool to test whether all your pages appear properly on all mobile devices.

Aditi is an expert in digital marketing. She handles SEO activities for her other business- Yog Gokul Yoga. She also actively manages the social media handles. Aditi is also a certified Yoga teacher. Prior to this she has worked with various financial companies as a credit analyst.

9 Powerful Ways To Combine Social Media and Email Marketing

by Aditi Phadnis | Jan 25, 2019 | Social Media

9 Powerful Ways To Combine Social Media and Email Marketing

Social Media Marketing is a brilliant way to create awareness for your brand, product or service. Email Marketing is very helpful for conversions. On an average, your brand needs to be seen by a person at least 12 times before he or she makes a buying decision.

The only way to do this is to use social media marketing in combination of email marketing.

You should blend them together wisely and follow a cost effective strategy to grow your business.

Please follow the tips below and get started right away!

Tip #1 Mix up Social media along with Email Marketing too Build Trust and Integrity

What your potential customers are looking for is your Brand Integrity. It means they are looking for brands they can trust. You should have a professional attitude with an intention to solve their problem or make their life easier.

Your brand message should be consistent. For example you cannot be funny and informal in your email messages and serious in your Facebook Posts. This type of marketing will result in weak branding and cost you your customers.

Integrating Social Media and Email Marketing is not hard. There should be proper communication among the Marketing team. Training should be given about the brand voice and brand standards. There should be a proper mechanism for approvals for emails to be sent and posts to be posted on social media.

Tip #2 Learn from your mistakes while doing Email Marketing to take informed decisions on social media sites.

Although, social media is a powerful tool for marketing, it doesn’t come cheap. Test your campaigns in emails. For example- which title works better, which ads are getting more clicks, A/B testing for Ad banners.

Use whichever copy worked best for you to advertise on social media so that you don’t waste your budget.

Tip #3 Recycle your content

It is very simple to recycle the same content you used on social media and use it for email marketing campaigns. It all boils to having one system in place- internal communication among the teams.

For example- You can package your new product update and share GIFs on twitter. When the update is out you can repackage the same and create an email update to send out to your customers.

Ask your customers on Facebook and Instagram to share their successes stories by either direct message or commenting in the comment box below. You can later re-write the best of the stories and create an email marketing campaign.

Tip #4 Add your social media links and the links to the latest posts to Emails:

If you add your social media links in your email updates, it is likely that you get followers who have subscribed to your newsletter to like and follow your social media pages and posts.

Tip #5 Schedule your social media posts to remind people about your email marketing updates:

You can schedule a post to collect email ids by directing them to your landing pages. Remind the user what is the use for subscribing to your list- such as get a free newsletter weekly or any diet tips and weight loss tips if you are a fitness coach. Give any offers that come to your mind.

Tip #6 Create a link in your bio on Instagram

Adding these links will help the user to reach your users more easily and get them to visit your landing page comfortably.

Always make use of CTA- (Call To Action) available on Facebook or Instagram. This way people can visit landing page with just a simple swipe up.

Tip #7 Run Contests

Running social media contests are pretty cool ways of creating awareness and engaging your customers. For example “Chumbak” always runs contests on Instagram- They launched a contest asking people to upload their Diwali Photos by adding #mykindadiwali and comment what Diwali means to them. They kept 3 surprises for 3 best entries.

Boom now a lot of your follower’s followers will notice your brand and increase your organic reach.

Tip #8 Take full advantage of Social Media Email Alerts

Start joining groups on social media and publish great content. Lot of people sign up for email alerts on well known social media sites like LinkedIn and Facebook. This way the group members will get an email in their inbox without being signed up for your email list.

If your content is really great, people will end up subscribing to your email list by clicking on the call to action (You can give a link to your landing page).

Tip #9 Upload your Email List to Social Media

You can import list of email ids of people who are already subscribed with you and retarget them by using Twitter (Tailored Audiences), Facebook (Custom Audiences) and LinkedIn (Matched Audiences). This way you can choose to show your Ads to the customers who have already encountered with your brand.

Wrapping Up

Now a days there are more and more ways to reach your audiences than ever before. But all this comes at a price which is not cheap.

Businesses can integrate different marketing channels by integrating them with each other for getting better results.

4 Biggest Social Media Mistakes that you are making

by Aditi Phadnis | Jan 23, 2019 | SEO

Biggest Social Media Mistakes that you are making

Posting content too often:

Everyone will keep telling you the more content you post the more followers you are likely to get. Try not to post more than one post per day.

Avoid Posting Mediocre Content:

If your content is not engaging or something that you would not share with your friends, it is likely that you won’t have enough engagement on social media.

So make sure you create quality content. If you are not sure how to create quality content go to Buzz Sumo and type in your keywords and you will get to see what is the content that is popular for your industry.

Leverage Video Content

The third mistake you might be doing is not leveraging videos. Videos is the future of content. Make sure you create interesting videos and share on social media. You can get upto 2-3 times more engagement on your video content than you just upload photo or a text update.

Not Engaging

The last mistake you should avoid is not engaging. Create content and reply to every comment that appears in there. Social media is about two way communication. So even if someone writes thanks for the content, you can respond by saying thank you for reading.

You will find over time you will get more shares, views and likes than if you didn’t engage with your content.

Reasons why you should hire a digital marketing agency and How to find the Digital Marketing Agency that is right for you?

by Aditi Phadnis | Jan 21, 2019 | SEO

Reasons why you should hire a digital marketing agency and How to find the Digital Marketing Agency that is right for you?

Reasons why you should hire a digital marketing agency

You have a website. You want to get more traffic. But if you don’t have time to do your own SEO and Digital Marketing, then you can consider hiring a good digital Marketing agency. But before that let me warn you. If you hire any random digital marketing agency out there you will get burnt and loose money.

I will teach you today, how to find a digital marketing agency which will give you high return on investment.

How to find the Digital Marketing Agency that is right for you?

Traffic to their own website

If someone does not have traffic to their own website, how can they get you traffic to your website. There are agencies who claim they can to conversion optimisation or paid advertising or they are good at SEO.

You have to keep in mind to check their website. If they have not shown results from their own website it is likely that they cannot show you result for your website.

So always ensure that the agency you hire has a good content on their own website.

Case Studies and Testimonials:

Look out for case studies and testimonials. If you see any big names then you can be assured that the agency you are hiring is doing well, else why would big companies pay them unless they are getting sufficient return on investment.

Look for a digital marketing agency who is tactical:

No matter how smart and knowledgeable the agency is. Unless they know how to implement the changes to your website, they will not be able to get you any traction.

Check who is working on your account:

Ensure that your account manager is also well versed with the digital Marketing concepts. The good agencies are always picky when it comes to choosing their employees. However you can always ask them in advance who is going to work on your account so that you know that your website is in the right hands.

Communication:

You should ask the agency to send timely reports, emails and have weekly calls to know what is happening to your account. Last thing you want to do is to spend money and not be communicated on the status of your website promotion.

References:

Ask for references. You don’t have to call the references. But if someone who doesn’t have references to vouch for the good service they have been providing, it means they never have given the return on investment to anyone out there.

People who have worked on similar businesses:

It doesn’t have to be people who have worked with direct competitors. What you need to check is if they have worked with similar sized companies. You don’t want companies who have worked with Facebook, google or LinkedIn. Check for people who have worked with small and medium enterprises. If you are running a local business, check for people who have worked with local business.

Follow the above mentioned strategies to hire a right digital marketing agency for you. If you had any bad experience in hiring a digital marketing agency or got ripped off by doing it, leave a comment below. I am just curious to know how can I help my visitors more and if I need to write any more content to warn against non standard practices that could affect any small businesses.

What are featured snippets? What makes them so unique?

by Aditi Phadnis | Jan 21, 2019 | Blog, SEO

What are featured snippets? What makes them so unique?

Featured snippets give quick information to the user that is concise and direct answer to their question, without having to click anywhere on the results page. Featured Snippets appear in the organic search results below the ad box. There are three types of featured Snippets.

Paragraph
List
Table

Interesting facts about featured snippets.

Majority of the times featured snippets are triggered by long tail keywords
Start with a question type search query (How, why, what?)
You can use a keyword research tool that immediately shows whether a query triggers a featured result.

Types of Questions:

Basic Questions (What is):

These kind of questions relate to defining a concept. They don’t contain lengthy explanation. People are searching about a quick meaning or explanation.

How to Question?

These include step by step instruction of how a particular task is done.

Adding videos to explain how a task is done can help you to increase CTR.

Branded Questions:

These questions are specific to a brand. It may include your competitors brand. These are typical ROPO queries. – Research Online Purchase Offline.

Below are the examples of branded questions:

People asking how to buy your product.
Navigation question
Competitor research question. Ex: How is your product better than your competitor etc.

Featured snippets are playing a critical role in how google is providing results to your searches. Featured snippets is known to be position Zero as it is displayed above the organic search results.

How do you achieve this position zero- The direct placement in google search box? In short, how do you get your website appear in google’s featured snippet?

We, at The Digital Shark, have run a variety of tests to achieve this position zero? We have boiled down to the four steps below:

Identify direct questions related to your business that people often ask.
Provide a direct answer to that question.
Offer value added information in addition to your answer.
Make it easy for google to search you on google.