TopRank Digital Marketing News

According to last year’s State of the Blogosphere report by Technorati, approximately 346 million people worldwide read blogs.  According to the same report, more than four in five bloggers post product or brand reviews and blog about brands they love or hate.  In other words – bloggers have influence about brands and they aren’t afraid to use it.

Bloggers are the world’s connectors that help businesses, products or idea reach a tipping point, or level at which momentum becomes unstoppable.  These connectors are the people who “link us up with the world” and have influential social networks.  Clearly this is an important group for spreading ideas online and connecting end users with your business.

A more accurate question, and corresponding answer, would be:

Q: Can changing my website hurt my search engine rankings?
A:  Yes, it can.

Notice the emphasis.  To accurately answer the original question (see: Title of this post), we need to clarify what we mean by ‘change.’

Common changes to a web site include:

• Changing website design
• Changing content management systems
• Changing domain names
• Changing web hosts

Changing website design and content management systems are the most common things that affect search engine rankings amongst the list of issues above.

Twitter, a popular microblogging site that lets users communicate messages in 140 characters or less, has exploded in popularity. Twitter has become so popular, many companies feel they must have a presence there, if only to stay ahead of the curve.  But is this really the case?

As much as it may seem everyone is on Twitter, this simply isn’t true.  CNET reports that while 99 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds have profiles on social networks, only 22 percent use Twitter.

Both gut feelings about the number of Twitter users and statistics detailing exact numbers are fairly irrelevant to the question at hand.  What’s truly important is the percentage of your audience that is on Twitter.

People and companies that start blogs often do so for different reasons ranging from promoting products to opening up channels of communication with customers.

Answering the question of “How you start a blog?” must go beyond the mechanical process of signing up at a service like WordPress, Blogger.com or Typepad.com.  While each of these services provides step by step instructions, they don’t have any way of providing a blueprint for success in each specific situation. 

From prominent locations including title tags, to less visible positions such as the alt text describing images, there is not one area of a website where keyword insertion will not be beneficial. Per Google, there is even “a little bit” of benefit to inserting keywords into URLs.

Does this “little bit of benefit” necessitate a site-wide overhaul?  Not necessarily.

If you are launching a brand new website, or already have a complete website overhaul planned, it certainly makes sense to build with best SEO practices – from the ground up.

Link building is an important signal for people and for search engines that the content being linked to has value. There are hundreds of reasons and ways for interlinking web content with the most common being a blue, underlined hypertext link from one web page to another. Since the links to company web site content are important both for driving traffic as well as a signal to search engines that can increase rankings and drive even more traffic, it’s important to acquire links on an ongoing basis.

If you’re grappling with ways to building links, here is a list of link building tactics to consider:

Google uses a method known as PageRank to quantify the “importance” of a web page. PageRank is determined by an algorithm which assigns a numerical weight between 1 and 10 (10 being the highest) to measure the website’s relative importance.

By taking into account factors including quality and quantity of incoming links, Google’s PageRank leverages a probability distribution to determine the likelihood of a visitor landing on a page, and assigns a score accordingly.

However, PageRank is just one of the methods Google uses to determine a page’s relevance or importance.

As with most web updates, if not done correctly, changing your domain name can hurt your keyword rankings. If search engines are indexing the current domain name and web pages, it matters a great deal how the implementation of a new domain name is handled.

The first order of business is to create a process for implementing 301 redirects from your current web pages to the new web pages. We would recommend mapping out existing content and implementing the permanent 301 redirect to similar content under the new domain. To improve the user experience, avoid redirecting all pages to the homepage on the new domain.

As keywords are the corner stone to a successful Search Engine Optimization (SEO) program, it’s important that we not only focus on where the keywords are on the page, but who the keywords are trying to reach.

How do you know when it’s time to revisit your keyword strategy? Ask yourself the following questions:

• Has my business model changed?
• Has my target market changed?
• Have I altered my product or service offerings?

If the answer is yes to any of the above, then it is time to audit your existing keywords. In addition to the above, anytime you undergo a website redesign consider revisiting your current keyword list before optimizing your new website copy.

Social media provides a great opportunity to engage your target audience and increase brand awareness online. Social media encompasses blogging and blog marketing, social networks such as Facebook and LinkedIn, microblogging via sites like Twitter, social news and bookmarking, video sharing, image and audio sharing, and wikis.

To develop a social media strategy that works for your business, the first step is to outline your goals. What do you want social media to do for you? Drive traffic to your website, engage your target audience in conversation, build relationships with your prospects, or build awareness for your brand online.