Sticky Websites

Why People Return to Websites

When you think of the word “sticky,” what comes to mind? A spilled soda, the surface of something you bought after you removed a sticker, or your hands after you peeled some fruit?

In the Internet industry, sticky refers to something that makes a person want to come back to a website. A sticky website stands out above the many thousands of other websites because it offers something unique and valuable.

Here are some ways to make your site sticky:

• Make your site clear and navigable. Have a short paragraph near the top introducing yourself. Make your best pages available with prominent links. Use an image of yourself and have your phone number, email and other contact information in a place the visitor can easily find them.
• Write an FAQ. It stands for Frequently Asked Questions and it is standard on all major websites. Don’t be intimidated, you can have an FAQ too. Think about what most people ask you most often. Write in clear terms and provide plenty of contact information where visitors can contact you for more information.
• Set up blogs and social media accounts. Blogs and social media accounts breathe life into your site, provide fresh information, and engage your readers. Plus it’s a lot of fun. Answer questions, start new discussion topics, and state your opinion about recent news. People will notice, and the search engines will too.
• Make sure your website reflects your personality. Are you a practical joker? Are you committed to your church? Maybe you are dedicated to making your community a better place. Giving your audience a window to your soul will make them want to do business with you.
• Get into video. That new cell phone of yours has incredible video capabilities. A YouTube account is free and super easy to use. Call a friend who will be your videographer and make some two-minute videos introducing your business.

The Power of Infographics

A picture is worth 1,000 words so using infographics can get you more real estate for your posts. We’ve compiled a few tips for you to get started with creating quality infographics:

Define your Target Audience
Many businesses have multiple audiences for their services and products.  To get the biggest response, define a single audience for each infographic you create.

Craft a Clear Message
Is your infographic saying too much?  Define your purpose and then craft a clear message that both offers professional insight / advice while also promoting your product.

High Quality Images & Smart Sizes
Want people to read and share your infographic?  Make it easy to read and share!

Logical Layouts
Break your message out into a logical, easy to read layout.

Brand It
Don’t forget to brand your infographics. You are giving free and valuable infomation to the end-user to build brand loyalty AND to create awareness around a product or service that you offer.

Share It
Don’t forget to share your infographic on your social media platforms, on your website and in your email campaigns. Make sure to include your website link when sharing as this will both drive traffic to your site and  increase your SEO value!

Posted by: Sarah Rose Stack

5 Tips for a Website Makeover

by Blogmawebcenters • August 19, 2014 • 0 Comments

It’s time.  Your website has been outdated long enough and it may be starting to cost you business.  We know it can be overwhelming, so let’s take a look at 5 key points to keep in mind when planning your website makeover.

1.  What’s Your Point?

•   What is the primary focus of your site?
• What is the secondary focus of your site?

2. Who’s Looking?

• Who is your target audience?
• Demographics?
• Where are they located?

3. Social, Social, Social

• Social media is the largest referral network in history.
• Is the content on your site shareable?
• Are you driving your viewers to your social platforms?

4. Call to Action

• What do you want viewers to do?
• Sign up for a newsletter?
• Share something?
• Buy Something?
• Request more information?

5. Plan from A- Z

• Who will write the content?
• Media – Images, Videos, Downloads etc.?
• Who will Design?
• Who will Develop?
• Responsive Design?
• What about Marketing the Site?  (SEO, SEM, Social Media, Email Campaigns)

By: Sarah Rose Stack

SEO Basics for Small Business

SEO for Small Business

Posted by: Dailius Wilson March 13, 2014 in Web Strategies & SEO

Most small businesses starting out on the web have much of their own web responsibilities, and they have heard of SEO, but they don’t know what it is, or how to implement it on their website.  SEO stands for search engine optimization and is an area of expertise in implementing certain techniques and practices to help your site rank as high as possible on search engine results pages (SERPs). Even professional website technicians have heard of SEO, and wish they knew enough about it to do it well, so how can the small business owner stand a chance?

If you keep in mind that SEO isn’t the only component of your website, then it is possible to take a few small, easy steps to start doing SEO on your own.  One of the most important things a small business owner can do is optimize the company website for search engines.  Your content should be the backbone of your website, and positive SEO results will come as a result of this solid structure.

You can spend a lot of time effort and money on SEO, and achieve very few if any results if you do not have the quality content to go with it. As a small business owner, saving costs is always part of the bottom line and few people realize that proper SEO can be learned with little effort.  Some companies even over-optimize their websites which can have little results for the added effort.  Sometimes taking care of the basics is all that is really required.

So where do you begin? Well, one of the first things you can do if you haven’t already done so is to verify your site ownership with Google.  Google’s Webmaster Tools offer a lot of useful features such as email forwarding, which offers you emails informing you of any problems found on your site.  The problems that Google may find could be site inaccessibility, malicious content, and possible broken links.  It’s useful to have this kind of information so that you can troubleshoot your own site.

The next area you can cover is in your content, which should be unique.  You will have to focus on the keywords, or words that will be used frequently in the page text.  A keyword can be a unique word or phrase that is generally used as the subject of the content.  For example, your special keyword(s) or phrase(s) should take up about fifteen percent of the text.  Don’t use the keywords so many times that it has a negative effect on your content meaning and readability. You don’t want to discourage your users, and you also don’t want search engines to tag you as spam.

Another area that you can cover while optimizing your site is to go over your design. A great design can be the key to your success.  SEO and quality content can help push your site up the search engines, but once they’ve found you, you only get one shot. First impressions always last, so make them count.  Remember to interact with your customers online, they are your audience, and your lifeline.  Without them your business will fail.  Answer their questions, interact with them through social media, whatever you do make them feel engaged and an active part of your site and you will be a success.

7 Things your social media plan should consider for 2014

Let’s face it, you simply cannot ignore the fact that social media is here to stay – it’s as an important aspect of your marketing mix, as anything else you have been doing up to this point. Unfortunately, for many businesses it’s still not included as an integral business activity – in short, it’s often an afterthought, something to be done, when time allows.

Your social media goals for 2014

If you don’t want your competitors to leave you standing then 2014 is the year you need to get serious about using social media in your business. If up until this point you’ve simply stuck your toe in the water but no more, it can seem a pretty daunting task, so here are my 7 tips to help you get under way.

1. Know why? – Why are you in business? When you first started what was your passion, what made you decide to set up the business you have – what difference did you want to make to those who use your services? –  Starting here is a great way of re-assessing every aspect of your sales & marketing strategy, this will be important when it comes to communicating, via social media, who you are and what you do.
2. What outcomes do you deliver? – Many businesses make the mistake of only listing on their websites what they do and how they do it. Clients are much less interested in these factors, rather they want to know if you can solve their problems or help them achieve their business objectives. Does your LinkedIn profile communicate this well?
3. Who is your audience?  - Is it time to reassess who your clients are? Are there some who are more profitable for your business, who are easier to deal with and should you be searching for more of these type of clients? Social media sites, such as LinkedIn and Twitter provide free tools to enable you to locate and engage with thousands of potential new clients – you just need to learn how to make best use of these tools.
4. What is your story? – Marketing has changed – the focus now is on building relationships, not driving transactions. Potential clients want to know more about you, your beliefs, attitudes, values, how you’ve helped others similar to them to achieve success – they want to like you and above all trust you. Your job is to share content via social media that has heart, real stories about real people – your clients, your employees maybe? – social media content needs to engage at a human level, it’s not simply about sharing corporate sales messages, no one believes these any more. Establish a connection first and clients will buy, you will rarely have to sell to them.
5. It’s not just about posting – There is a misconception that if you post sufficient information via LinkedIn status updates, in groups, on Twitter, Google+ and Facebook that eventually you’ll attract plenty of new business and yes, you will attract some. However, if you’re not prepared to engage in dialogue with those who view your profile or respond to your posts – if you’re not prepared to engage in discussion forums and Twitter conversations then you’re not being ‘social‘. Engagement is the key to building relationships.
6. Create content that engages – Content is definitely king – when it comes to social media and websites Google takes specific notice of those sites that share great content and that are linked to other sites that share great content. Your job is to create or curate great content (sounds simple doesn’t it?). What is great content? It’s content that your clients want to read, not what you think they should read. Consider sharing industry trends and updates that are relevant to your clients, be an indispensable resource to them. Share positive stories where you have had an influence in helping other similar businesses – be cautious of being too overtly salesy though.
7. Don’t forget the sales element - In the end though, there is no point making all these connections and attracting many followers and likes -sharing wonderfully useful content with them, if they are not going to visit your website or enquire about your services further – you must put your sales hat on. For example, use Google Analytics to assess which of your website pages visitors land on most frequently and make sure that your social media content includes a link, every time, to these pages. When they land on your page, do you have a capture mechanism, clearly identified, where the visitor can sign up to your newsletter or special offer, so you capture their data? You must consider and include an end-game as far as your social media plans are concerned.

I believe that there is much confusion shared on various sites about linking social media activity with sales and marketing – they are linked, in fact they must be linked, otherwise we are all just being busy fools.

Social media is no silver bullet, it may bring instant results and certainly I have seen many examples where it has. However, patience is key here – be prepared to put time in and be consistent – measure and assess your progress – what do people respond well to, what isn’t working and needs to be changed? Social media is a process, it works for those who apply it with consideration and it’s not going away any time soon – you’re competitors are using it and winning, so are you prepared to get in the game and learn how to make it work for you in 2014?

Wishing you a great 2014 and if you would like to learn how my business helps company’s like yours to attract more new clients to your business click here now. Want more tips like this? Sign up to our weeklynews-brief here.

*Article by Steve Phillips (Managing Director/Linkd2Success)

How Google will know if you're lying

A Soothsayer from the Sibylline Sisterhood was the first of her Sisterhood to see the TARDIS

The value of any piece of information is only as good as its truthfulness. Data that’s out of date, inaccurate or just plain false is next to useless. Worse than that it can lead to seriously flawed decisions based upon it.

The Roman Emperors knew that which is why they kept Soothsayers from the Sibylline Sisterhood around (rejoice Dr Who fans for the reference) who guided them in their choices.

We don’t have Soothsayers around anymore but we have Google and its semantic search engine. Semantic search is a Big Data solution to the problem of ever increasing amounts of information accumulating on the web. As such its success is defined, precisely, by its ability to deal with the four Big Data vectors:

• Volume
• Velocity
• Variety
• Veracity

The sheer amount of information being pumped out (Volume), its spread across the web (Velocity) and its ability to be repurposed (Variety) are signals in their own right. Each piece of information, each data point, each node, experiences these vectors in a unique combination that also makes the digital identity of that piece of information unique. What they all have in common however is the “yes” or “no” answer that’s provided by the fourth Big Data vector: Veracity.

Veracity is a measure of the truthfulness or provenance of the information you find on the web and the ability of the computationally driven, answer engine of semantic search to gain our trust, rests completely upon it.

How Veracity Works

A new patent awarded to Google shows that the mechanics through which this process is carried out rely upon the connections of semantic relationships which themselves have a very specific meaning and intent. Google ascribes a trustworthiness value to each connection and a total value to the semantic network of connections. If more than one semantic network is involved in the calculation of the answer Google ascribes a trustworthiness value to each of them.

The moment a conflict is detected between two pieces of data Google uses a trustworthy algorithm to determine which is the correct one, updates the obsolete or inaccurate document on the fly and presents the results to the end user both with the correct version and the annotated inaccurate version.

The description of Google’s patent on Veracity detection says:

With existing search mechanisms, a user search for the product will include web page documents that contain the original release date of the product, without providing any indication in these returned documents that the release date has changed. Thus, the user may be presented with erroneous information. In contrast, the annotation mechanism in the illustrative embodiments identifies obsolete data within a web page document, annotates the document with up-to-date information to override the obsolete data in the document, and returns the annotated document in the search results to the user. Thus, when a user clicks on the annotated document, the obsolete data is annotated in the document with up-to-date data also obtained from the repository. When a document comprises data whose veracity is in question due to the existence of conflicting data in other documents within the repository, a “trustworthiness” algorithm is used to dictate which data source contains the correct or most reliable data. Any data that is deemed to be incorrect or unreliable on the displayed web page is annotated automatically. In an alternative embodiment, rather than determining which data is correct via a trustworthiness algorithm, a link may be provided in the annotation which provides a summary of all the conflicting data, along with sources of the conflicting data. In this case, users may determine for themselves which data source is most reliable.

In plain English Google will determine whether a piece of data is true and will:

A. Display an answer (based upon it)
B. Display the correct web page and the incorrect, annotated one
C. Display the conflict regarding a web page’s truthfulness and then provide a link to all the sources that the search engine has determined create the conflict so that the end user can decide.

Which will appear is most probably determined by the complexity of the search query and the degree of conflict experienced.

‘Simple’ Questions Have Complicated Answers

To illustrate just how important this is consider the ‘simple’ question of “Can a Hippopotamus Swim?” or “Can a Kiwi bird fly?”. As the image below shows, Google’s semantic search right now (December 2013) simply doesn’t know.



The reason that this is not an easy question for search to answer lies in the knowledge necessary to actually determine this from the page. In the traditional Boolean search a webpage that states: “The hippopotamus, a creature indigenous to parts of Africa, is the only mammal that cannot swim. It is also the only mammal that does not have hair.” has the same opportunity to come up in search as one that says: “There are a number of animals in the Edinburgh zoo, including penguins, zebras, and hippopotamuses. Visitors can feed the penguins, but they cannot swim in the penguin pool.”

There is simply insufficient information for search to distinguish the correct page. The keyword occurrence and frequency is the same. Thanks to this new approach however, Google applies a relevancy algorithm that creates a semantic network out of the content of the page that looks a little like this:



The image shows the breakdown of the semantic relationships with words being nodes (i.e. data points) and connections being edges. It becomes evident that from this break down through the relevancy algorithm the answer begins to emerge, especially if the same break down now occurs on the web page that Boolean search would have marked as identical:

So, What Have We Learnt About Semantic Search?

A few things: first that Google uses a layering of algorithms to arrive at its answer. In this example alone it would have to create a semantic network out of each web page and then use: A Relevancy Algorithm – to determine the relevancy and meaning of connections (nodes) within the semantic network

• A Trustworthiness Algorithm – to compare data between two documents with similar but conflicting information.
• A Deductive Reasoning Algorithm – if an outright answer is warranted in search.
• An Annotation Engine – that would enable Google search to annotate and correct wrong information on the fly and display the changes.

How Is This Applied?

Well, think of a major event that is heavily publicised by your company that gets reblogged about and mentioned everywhere across the web. Then just a few days before the event, for whatever reason, the date has to change. While changing the information on your company website is easy, changing it across the web is next to impossible. There is no way you can realistically identify and then chase to change, all the websites where the original date of the event appears.

Google can now actually do that right at the search page, updating the out of date event with the correct date and showing what’s changed.

There are wider implications: As information across the web scales (and we pump out more and more data each day) Google can begin to examine the semantic networks in its storage and determine the correctness of the information presented on the search page. This makes it a natural filter of false or incorrect information which will begin to transform Google from a search engine to a Truth Engine.

As semantic search scales across the web Google search will start to become the go-to place for verifying information just like now it has become the world’s favourite means of spell-checking.

In the age of semantic search the Sibylline Sisterhood would be out of a job. The Soothsayers in need of retraining.

What You Missed

Google’s Hummingbird Deepens Semantic Search Results
How Semantic Search is Changing End-User Behavior
Most Common Questions On Semantic Search Answered
Ten New Questions on Semantic Search Answered 

How to increase Organic Social Traffic by on page SEO & SMO

Learn how quality SEO and SMO help webmasters increase a website’s organic and viral social search.

Imagine, the news which you read yesterday, the same is being delivered today and may be the same will be delivered tomorrow. Would you enjoy or take interest in reading it like you enjoyed yesterday? Obviously no! We all like to read new, fresh and useful content. This means the base of website traffic is usefulness and freshness. It also means users read, share and like useful and relevant content over one that has no substance.

If your article is not upto the guidelines set by search engines it won’t get much traffic.  Today, optimization involves both SEO and SMO. Webmasters must ensure both these tools are properly and proportionately utilized to earn maximum traffic.

How to Increase Website Traffic?

On the internet, writing is perishable. Since, several details come in every second, and users prefer article or website that is up-to-date. Therefore, it is important for webmasters to upload unique and fresh content frequently.

Additionally, if you are a blogger you should update your blog regularly with latest and fresh content. Make sure you serve your readers properly. Don’t fool your readers by re-posting stuff that is already posted last week or month or year. All these points might increase your website traffic.

How to be Unique on Page Search Engine Optimization?

While handling On Page SEO, webmasters should know and employ following points, compulsorily.

• Your page title should be catchy and interesting, as your title communicates what is inside the page. It should not exceed 66 characters.
• Your content should be audience-specific. Always keep your target audience in mind while writing.
• Focus on completeness. Do not provide incomplete information, as no one including you would like eating half-cooked food.
• Try to avoid long sentences. A paragraph of not more than 2-4 lines should be created.
• Meta description is mandatory. However, it should not exceed 150 characters. Also, including keywords in Meta description is not compulsory. Users read description therefore write perfectly and attractively.
• Don’t forget to give suggestions in your content (depending upon the need of your write-up). Also, don’t forget to add conclusion in the end.

How to Be Unique on Social Media Optimization?

In order to promote your website socially and want people to share your work, webmasters should know and use the following points.

• Internet users spend less time on one site, and in that minimum time they want to learn more about the portal. Therefore you have to work really hard to engage users. Make use of info graphics, sub headings and videos to convey your thoughts and services.
• If you are using info graphics, try to be unique, add watermark.
• Use sharing button of top social media sites like Pinterest, Facebook, Google+ and Twitter. Readers use these buttons to share your content online.
• The more you socialize the more ranking you’ll get. Be active on social media sites, reply comments and clarify doubts. This sends a positive signal about your brand in the minds of people.
• Appreciation is very important here. Value your readers and appreciate their thoughts and comments.
• Develop engaging status post every alternate day.

The Bottom Line

SEO and SMO go hand in hand. Developing original content is of no use, unless you promote it socially and people share, comment, and read it. Fresh content is for users, but optimization is for search engines. Therefore, the webmasters should know how to impress readers and search engines.

In case you are not following the above tips, start doing it now. As they say ‘it is never too late to start something useful.’ Write, post, share and earn!