How To Build Backlinks That Get You Ranked In Google

What did you guys think of this? Some pretty useful content in there about how backlinking works, the importance of it and how to get some for your own website. How many of you have implemented these strategies? Did they work? Have you had success with some other strategies, maybe, that you'd like to share? Leave a comment below.

How Important is the Number of Followers on Your Social Media?

How Important is the Number of Followers on Your Social Media?

How important is the number of followers on my social media account? ……. I get this question All. The. Time!

From all sorts of people, with all sorts of different goals.

Look, I get it. You see an account that has 100,000 followers, and you want the same. You see an account with a million followers, and you want the same. I’d be lying if I told you I didn’t think about my accounts hitting those kinds of numbers too.

It’s an inherently natural position to want to have that “vanity metric”. That one criteria by which all other accounts, including yours, is judged upon. How popular is your account? How many people know about you? How many people can you sell to?

We all want that big inflated number for a variety of reasons.

But, it is only valuable if you have the right people following you – not the right number of people.

Let’s take this away from social media for a minute. Let’s say you own a store and in one year 50,000 people walk through your doors. That would be good, right? That’s 137 people every day of the year. But what if, for all those people who came through, only 1000 of them actually had any interest in what you were selling. And of those 1000, only 82 of them actually bought anything – all year. That means, you invested employees’ time, resources, and business expenses to entertain 50,000 people, of whom only 82 actually spent money.

Now, what if instead, only 1500 people came through your store all year? That’s 4 people per day. But of those 4 people each day, all of whom are loving what you’re selling and are interested in your product, 2 people every day purchase something from you. That means for a fraction of the work (4 people’s attention versus 137), you will have sold products to 730 people – a lot more than 82!!!

I realize these numbers are arbitrary but I hope they work to prove a very important point: it’s not about the number of people, it’s about the quality of the people. Obviously, if you had 50,000 people walk through the doors and 80% of them were interested in what you were selling, that would be the better scenario of either I just mentioned. But you get my point…. it’s about having people interested in what you’re offering!

So, yes, how many followers you have on social media does matter. You can’t sell to anyone if no one is following you. You can’t drive opt-ins or sign-ups if no one is following you.

But, likewise, if you have a boat-load of followers who don’t give a crap about what you’re offering, you can’t sell to them or get any opt-ins or sign-ups from them either!

How fast your audience will grow will also depend on the size of your brand.

If you’re a new, solopreneur with no existing audience, you aren’t going to find 10,000 people to follow you immediately. However, if you’re a well-established brand with a large mailing list and/or busy store front locations, it won’t take you long to hit large following milestones.

If you’re that small brand, don’t compare yourself to big brands in your industry. It’s not a fair comparison.

Rather than stressing about that follower count, focus on the quality of your audience.

Create content for your target customer. Provide quality service via social media. Entertain, educate, and give value to your audience. Build your brand on the audience who cares about you.

It might take a while to hit 500 followers, or 1000 followers, or 10,000 followers. That’s ok!

This frivolous number doesn’t mean anything to your business goals and revenue goals if you can’t use that platform and that audience to build your business.

While you want to see that number of followers grow, set realistic expectation and look at long term growth, rather than short term growth (in general). Set a monthly goal to increase followers by 10% a month or by 500 followers a quarter. Understand that this will fluctuate at different intervals and daily, even weekly, monitoring of your follower counts is not a realistic representation of your brand presence on social media. It’s the annual and long term growth that will drive the end results you’re looking for.

Finally, rather than focusing only on this one numeric value of a follower count, instead evaluate the following criteria for more valuable insights into your social media efforts and results:

• Engagement rates
• Clicks to website
• Website traffic patterns or conversions from social media sites
• Campaign conversions
• Social media mentions or check-ins
• Shares of your content or posts

I hope this helps you answer that age-old question about how important the number of followers on social media really is… cuz in and of itself, it’s not *really* that important!

By Jenn Herman

Article Source: http://www.jennstrends.com/how-important-is-number-of-followers-on-social-media/

LinkedIn For Business Step by Step Online Video Tutorial for Beginners a...

How many of you are using LinkedIn for marketing purposes? Have you had much success? Share your success stories below.

SEO Checklist for Content Marketers: 21 Common Mistakes to Avoid

With so much content being created, published and promoted online every second—as well as consumers becoming increasingly self-directed in their quest for answers—competition to capture your audience’s attention has never been more fierce.

As a result, quality and strategic SEO has probably never been more important for helping you be the best answer whenever and wherever your audience is searching.

But as seasoned marketers know, SEO has gone through a tremendous evolution since its early days of keyword-focused content. With more than 2 trillion searches happening on Google every year, today’s SEO is about finding the perfect balance between user-centric content and convincing search engine crawlers that your content is supreme.

Of course, on the journey to creating the perfect content for both humans and search, you may make some mistakes. But the good news is that may are easily avoidable.

Below we dive into some of the most common SEO mistakes, as well as tips for helping you avoid or remedy them.1

#1 – Optimizing content around one keyword.

In the “old days” of SEO, it was common practice to optimize web pages with a specific keyword that you wanted to rank for. Today, that practice not only provides a poor user experience for your audience, but it’s simply ineffective since search engines are becoming increasingly better at determining search intent.

Tip: Simply put: Do not optimize any pages for just one keyword. Instead, think bigger about the need your content can fill and hone in on keyword topics that include a variety of relevant and related search terms.

Think bigger about the need your #content can fill and hone in on keyword topics. @CaitlinMBurgess #SEOCLICK TO TWEET

#2 – Neglecting dated content.

Let’s face it. You’ve probably created a ton of content in the last couple years that you haven’t touched since it first published. But you could be leaving opportunity on the table if you’re not regularly looking for ways to refresh it and keep it relevant for searchers.

Tip: Dig into your analytics to find your top and worst performing pages and blog posts, paying special attention to evergreen topics. Then conduct some keyword research to discover new opportunities for updating that existing content to continue or improve ranking momentum.

#3 – Forgetting mobile users.

Whether you’re a B2C or B2B brand, much of your audience is likely using a mobile device to find good content. If your content isn’t mobile friendly, the user experience will be negatively impacted.

Tip: Take steps to ensure that your website and its content is mobile friendly and responsive. Also, focus on creating content for users that would typically use a mobile device.

#4 – Not optimizing for site speed.

This one is pretty simple. Faster sites have a better crawl rate and provide a better user experience.

Tip: Use site speed tools like Google PageSpeed Insights, Pingdom, or WebPageTest to analyze your site speed score. Some of the most helpful tips to improve site speed include leveraging browser caching, optimizing images and minifying JavaScript.

#5 – Failing to include relevant and helpful internal links.

If you’ve attracted people to your content, you have a captive audience that’s interested and probably looking for more. As a result, internal links are critical to keeping people engaged and signaling that you have more to offer.

Tip: Always be on the lookout for opportunities to link to other content on your website. In addition, use keyword variations for anchor text to expand visibility for the keyword topic that content represents.

Be on the lookout for opportunities to link to other #content on your website. @CaitlinMBurgess #SEOCLICK TO TWEET

#6 – Failing to include relevant and helpful external links.

Just like internal links, external links have the ability to provide your users with more helpful and relevant content. In addition, quality external sources can also signal credibility to search engines and users.

Tip: Make sure that all external links open in new windows to allow users to venture to other content, but also make it easy for them to go back and stay engaged with your content.

#7 – Serving up hard-to-read blocks of content.

Users are often looking to find and absorb content quickly, and move on if they are unable to easily see the value in the content they’ve clicked on. In addition, studies show that people read online content in an “F” pattern. As a result, large blocks of text can be a big turn-off for many, especially those using mobile devices.

Tip: Utilize headline tags to break up content. This will not only make it easy for users to scan content, but also send a positive signal to search engines.

8. Forgetting about image optimization.

The images on your website or blog add an important visual element that can positively impact user experience. But they can also help you tell your story to search engines.

Tip: Cover all your bases by making sure image filenames and alt text contain relevant keywords. Also, to ensure your page loads quickly, optimize the image size for each screen size and/or lazy load the images.

9. Not having unique content.

While it can be tempting to reuse some of that great content you’ve already created, be careful. Search engines will not be fooled, and you could be penalized if you duplicate content across pages.

Tip: Don’t publish duplicate or similar content to your site, including title tags and meta descriptions. When it comes to the technical stuff such as title tags and meta descriptions, just take the little bit of extra time it takes to create something unique. When it comes to full pages of content, if you have existing content that fits, take a repurposing approach to make it personalized and different.

10. Focusing on quantity over quality.

In today’s competitive world of content, it can be tempting to try to out-create your competition. But publishing more content than the next guy doesn’t guarantee results, especially if that content isn’t a quality piece that actually helps your audience.

Tip: Create a content strategy that includes audience and keyword topic research. In addition, study the other content that is already out there and look at what your competitors are doing. This will allow you to identify content gaps and help you create content that fills them. In addition, shoot for writing longer pieces (600 to 1,000+ words), that are optimized for scanability and include visual elements.

11. Not optimizing URLs or site structure.

Many marketers leave the title of the page or the post as the URL, which can lead to long URLs that do nothing to help your search rankings.

Tip: Keep URLs short, concise and optimized with keywords. In addition, make sure that your URL structure is consistent throughout your site to make it easier to crawl.

Make sure that your URL structure is consistent throughout your site to make it easier to crawl. #SEOCLICK TO TWEET

12. Neglecting broken or redirecting links.

During our technical crawls and site evaluations, TopRank Marketing often finds that many sites have broken links or links that redirect instead of linking directly to the target page.

Tip: Conduct a technical audit to identify all broken links and internal links that redirect to a different page. Then update with links that connect directly to a target page. This will help search engines crawl your site more efficiently.

13. Not auditing the redirect rules for a site.

For websites with multiple redirect rules, there’s an opportunity to remove redirect chains and errors that make it more difficult for search engines to crawl.

Tip: Audit the redirect rules to make sure you’re properly using 301 or 302 redirects and remove any redirect chains you might have.

14. Focusing on meta keywords.

Meta keywords are not used by Google and can be a sign of spam from Bing.

Tip: There typically isn’t a reason to add meta keywords to your site. If you choose to utilize the meta keywords field, make sure you limit the amount of keywords to less than five.

15. Forgetting analytics or misusing metrics.

Data is an incredible tool to not only measure the impact of our marketing efforts, but also help inform those efforts. So, neglecting our analytics reports outright or not using the right metrics can have a costly impact.

Tip: Use the right metrics to inform your content and SEO strategy, and decrease the importance you put on vanity metrics. In addition, leverage Google Search Console or Bing Webmaster Tools to get a better understanding of what people are actually searching for.

16. Not allowing your site to be crawled

This one is pretty obvious. If you’re site is blocking search engines, your content will not be found in search results.

Tip: It’s simple. Don’t block your site from search engines in your robots.txt file or a “noindex” meta tag.

17. Not taking advantage of Local SEO.

All businesses have an opportunity to take advantage of local SEO and visibility. At the very least, your business should claim and optimize your Google My Business listing.

Tip: At the very least, focus on getting local citations by using tools like Moz Local or Whitespark.

18. Incorporating too many PDFs.

While PDFs are a great way to provide users with information that can be easily downloaded, it’s not ideal for search. First of all, most websites don’t track PDF views in Google Analytics, making it difficult to see if that content is having an impact on users. In addition, PDFs don’t allow you to create a custom experience for users easily.

Tip: Change PDFs to HTML format to be able to create a consistent experience and get the most search benefit from each content asset on your site.

19. Not optimizing for other search engines.

While Google is pretty much the King of Search, other search engines—including those within social media channels—deserve your attention, too.

Tip: Take steps to optimize your content for other search engines such as Bing and Yahoo. In addition, optimize the content you’re putting out on social media sites such as LinkedIn and YouTube.

Optimize the #content you’re putting out on #socialmedia sites such as LinkedIn and YouTube. #SEOCLICK TO TWEET

20. Not focusing on getting quality backlinks.

While link building and link earning gets a bad rap sometimes, the number of quality backlinks a website has is still an important ranking factor for search engines and links deliver interested users to your content.

Tip: Conduct outreach to relevant influencers and websites to earn quality links back to your quality content.

21. Having too many blog categories or tags.

When you create a blog category or tag, you’re essentially creating a new page on your website that can be indexed by crawl bots. However, if those categories or tags don’t have a decent amount of content associated with them, you could be signaling thin content to search engines and it could potentially hurt your crawl budget.

Tip: Remove categories or tags that contain orphaned content, and retag or recategorize that content within a relevant and more robust category.

How do you find the perfect balance between quality, user-centric content and optimizing for search? Share your tips in the comments section below!

By: Caitlin Burgess

Article Source: http://www.toprankblog.com/2017/02/common-seo-mistakes-to-avoid/

Building Brand - The Power of Social Media: Daryl D'Souza at TEDxRyersonU

Inspirational stuff. Check this out if you haven't seen it already. 70,000 views.

What do you guys think?

YouTube Tips - How to get started with Video Marketing for your Business

Sound advice if you're just starting out in video marketing. What do you guys think of this? What stage are you at? Do you have any tips that you could share? I'd be interested in connecting with you.

5 BEST INSTAGRAM BOTS TO TRIPLE YOUR FOLLOWERS

Who Am I?

My name is Derek Anderson and I’m a viral Instagram account creator. I currently have over 100,000 followers on multiple accounts and have made $1000’s using Instagram and bot software.

This is my list of the best tools (that I’ve used) for generating thousands of free followers and likes on any Instagram account. Using these tools you can create auto followers and auto likes on Instagram.

How They Can Help You To Gain Followers/Likes

Among those around 150 million people who have signed up for Instagram, if you want a huge number of followers or maximum likes on your each post, what will you do? Sure… you have the option to try out the tedious tricks like follow people, properly using hash tags, keep posting on a regular basis, choosing the image wisely, using filters and so on.

But the thing is that all these methods are quite time consuming and still you cannot be sure whether those methods actually work or not. Therefore, you have an easier option to generate more followers and likes in your Instagram account.

Here comes the use of Instagram Bots which is an automatic way to choose the right people to follow and of course, it will lead them to follow you back. Now, don’t you think it as an easier way than manual methods for getting more followers and likes on Instagram?

Ultimate Autopilot Method

This is the method I used to get a test account from 250 followers to 1000 followers in three days. All I had to do was create an account with one of these sites and sign up for the shortest possible time (if you’re not happy with how many likes/followers you got back then you can just get a full refund, no questions asked).

Keep the follow/like speed low for the first day and then fast for the second and third day and you should get a couple hundred followers from it. (Results vary depending on your account).

To optimize people following you back, pick a popular account that is similar to yours and just follow their followers. Bots like FollowAdder allow you to do this. 

1. Follow Adder - ééééé - $8.33/month

2. Influx - ééééé - $9.95/month

3. Fan Harvest - éééé- $15/month

4. Monster Social - ééé - $13.33/month

5. Followliker - éé - $57.99 one-off payment

The Quick Down and Dirty

 FollowAdder

• Photo Uploading and Scheduling – This is their most useful feature because all you have to do is upload lets say 30 photos and you won’t waste time everyday uploading and writing a caption for every photo. You set it up once and it auto uploads for you.
• Automated Following/Unfollowing, Liking and Commenting – These are standard features you expect in a bot but a lot of bots these days don’t even have these basic features. FollowAdder keeps up to date with the instagram api so that you can follow/like/comment as much as you want without getting penalised.
• Multiple Account Management – Useful for people who have multiple accounts to manage (like me).
• Follow A Specific User’s Followers – This is another really useful feature and I’ve gotten a follow back rate of 70% by following and unfollowing users from accounts that are similar to mine
• Free Customer Support – They guarantee that the software works and you are happy.

Let’s have an in-depth look at these programs and how they can help you –

What is an Instagram Bot?

In today’s world, it is quite popular to apply different methods to boost the numbers of followers and increase the number of likes on the posts of your Instagram account. The software can make your task easier by automatically adding more followers to your profile.

It is a complex computer program that saves your time and effort to perform the task by your own.

What are the benefits of using an Instagram Bot?

There are numerous benefits, such as –

• Instagram Bots boost your profile with more than 2000 likes and followers every week. Thus you have the option to increase the popularity of your account massively.
• For gaining huge number of followers and likes within short period of time, there is no better option than this software as it can work at an incredible speed, be it your individual profile or your business profile.
• You don’t need to stay online and be active all the time on this social media platform. It can even run overnight while you sleep peacefully.

How to Use Instagram Bots to Gain Followers and Likes

For getting new likes and followers using the program, it is essential to fix your target, i.e., the group of people who would have interest on your profile/service/product. This will give you more likes and followers and you will get the chance to use the social media platform to create your personal or brand image.

When you will start using Instagram Bot, it will automatically follow other popular accounts where most of the popular pictures are being posted on the regular basis. Now, the Bot scans those profiles to find out other pictures having similarity with your hash tags and then likes them.

The basic idea is that it just does the same thing that you would do manually; however, it performs it within a short period. Whether you need more likes or more followers for your Instagram pictures, you may opt for the Instagram Bot accordingly as there is separate Bots available as per your requirements.

So, choose your Bot wisely and enlarge your target audience within a very short time.

By Derek Anderson

Article Source: http://instagrambotreviews.com/best-instagram-bots/