Pinterest begins predicting your interests

Pinterest is one of the fastest growing and most user friendly social networking sites on the web today, but they’re clearly not satisfied with maintaining the status quo. Over the past few months they have been insistently adding new features to develop the experience and help users find more of what they want.

Their latest update is so noticeable you’ll wonder why it didn’t already exist. The new Pinterest Interests feature analyzes the things you’ve previously pinned and suggests other pins based on what you’ve expressed an interest in.

Best of all, Pinterest groups these personalized pins into categories so you can browse groups of pins suggested just for you, rather than the common list of categories you’re used to looking through.

To start Pinterest Interests, if you haven’t already, simply login to Pinterest and you’ll be prompted with this message on the home page.

Click on ‘Come See for Yourself!’ and you’ll be taken on a short tour through the fresh interests page called Explore.

This feature is obtainable only on the desktop site for now, but in the official announcement they state it will be rolled out to mobile and everywhere something like the world soon.

In the announcement they also admit steps needed to be taken in order to make the skill to find pins more relevant to each user.

Before today, all the billions of Pins on Pinterest were organized into just a handful of broad categories… We’re working hard to make Pinterest as applicable as possible for each person so it can be a place you can find and save all of the things you love, even if you didn’t even know you were looking for them.

Speaking from knowledge as a male using Pinterest, it can be very hard finding pins that pertain to my interests when browsing through the general categories. Pinterest Interests makes the knowledge much better. Here’s a glimpse of my Interests page, which is filled with amazingly true recommendations:

This is not only great for the average user, but if you use Pinterest for business it will help you find a more targeted audience of people to follow, and increases the chances of your pins being seen by them as well.

The Interests page will be constantly changing and promises to get even more accurate the more you use Pinterest. All the more reason to keep pinning.

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High Ranking in Google Could Be a crash tip

We all want our websites listed at the top of Google’s search engine results pages (SERPs), right? A high-ranking can bring embattled and (mostly) free traffic. More significantly, it brings leads and potential conversions.

If you’re working to get a top ranking, your goal is simple: you want Google to love your website. But the trouble with Google’s love is that it doesn’t come with a promise of ongoing reliability. Google has no loyalty to your business. Because of this, your rankings can become a possible point of failure.

Don’t misapprehend – I’m not saying you shouldn’t work to get a high-ranking in Google. It is just that I see a lot of business owners who work very hard at it and end up accidentally baking important point of failure into their business plan. That’s not a good thing.

4 Steps to Break Your Google Over-Dependency

At the heart of breaking your dependency is realizing Google is not the only source of traffic on the Internet, nor is it always the best. By focusing on four key areas, you can get some of the same results you’re seeking from that high Google ranking.

1.    Make “Micro-Conversions” Your New Favorite Word. I will scheme a guess that the majority of people who visit your website do not become customers right away. This is a usual pattern for any website, and this is where micro-conversions can play a important role in your business. The whole idea of micro-conversions is to push people to give you permission to keep talking to them after they leave your website, whether it be through an email list, Facebook, Twitter, or any other social medium that provides the chance for conversation. Entire businesses can be built on micro-conversions without any help at all from Google.

2.    Think Beyond Your Website. If you have an e-commerce business, understand that your website represents just one channel where you can convert users into customers. Amazon, Sears, Shopping.com, and dozens of other marketplaces with important audiences provide you with an opportunity to sell your goods. Take advantage of these external channels.

3.    Stop Thinking Rankings; Start Thinking Referrals. You know one key to ranking is links, and a key to long-lasting rankings is quality links built naturally. So how do you build quality links naturally? One way is to start thinking about excellence sources for referral traffic rather than what just provides a good link. If you start thinking of your link building campaigns more in terms of networking and public dealings, you’ll likely find that the quality, lasting links build themselves without much help from you.

4.    Build a List—(And Use it). This can be filed under micro-conversions, but it’s so significant it deserves its own point. Once your readers or customers opt in to your email list, you’re able to communicate with them directly, right in their own inboxes. It’s much more direct communication than writing blog posts, or posting updates on social media networks. As long as you’re if valuable content to that list, the members will remain and you’ll have a built-in audience whenever you want to launch—or sell—something new. In addition, if you lose your Google rankings, you can still build an email list through myriad methods and techniques.

Remember, a high page ranking in Google should be an achievement that enhances your website and opens it up for new growth. Make sure you don’t turn that top ranking into a promising failure point. Implement new marketing methods, and your website will be healthier, more stable, and most importantly, a far more precious benefit.

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Google’s explanation of a widget link scheme

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Until recently, Google’s definition of a widget link scheme was sweet broad. However, Google has gotten a lot more detailed in an update to its Link Schemes page to clarify what types of links in widgets violate its webmaster guidelines.

As Search Engine Roundtable reported, widget link schemes used to be defined by Google as:

Now, Google defines a widget link scheme as:
Keyword-rich, hidden or low-quality links embedded in widgets that are distributed diagonally various sites...

The example Google used ruins unchanged.
It seems that Google’s update to its link schemes description was simply done to reduce potential for confusion and leave a bit less room for personal understanding.

Furthermore, while the old definition implies that any link in a widget is a scheme, the new definition doesn’t openly state this. Instead, it provides some factors that will cause Google to view a widget link as spam.

Google's Matt Cutts newly warned against widgets as a winning link building strategy, also suggesting when it's correct to use rel=nofollow for them.

"I would not rely on widgets ... as your main source to gather links, and I would recommend putting a nofollow, especially with widgets," Cutts said.


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Matt Cutts Explains about the Importance of Social Media Signals

 Matt Cutts, Google’s head of search spam, answers a question about social media signals in his most recent Webmaster Help video where a user writes in to ask:

Are Facebook and Twitter signals part of the ranking algorithm? How much do they matter?

Facebook and Twitter pages are treated just like any other indexed pages, Matt explains. If Google is able to edge it on Facebook and Twitter, it will be integrated in the search results.

Google Doesn’t creep Social Media Sites Like Other Pages

To the best of Matt’s knowledge, there are currently no signals in the ranking algorithms that put any weight on how many Facebook likes or Twitter followers a exact page has.

The reason for this, Matt says, is that there was one case where Google was blocked from crawling these pages for over a month. As a result, Google engineers are weary of doing any type of special engineering work to extract data from pages when they might get barren from being able to crawl them in the future.

Another reason why they don’t crawl social media sites too extensively is due to the personal and time sensitive nature of the content. If Google crawled social media pages the way they crawl other sites, the snippets could end up containing information the user didn’t intend to have showing up in search results.

Social Signals Seem To Have No influence On Rankings

Matt says not to suppose that because there is a signal on Facebook or Twitter pointing to your site that Google is able to access it. This is due to various reasons such as the social media profile being blocked from public viewing, or the link is no-followed, or other things like that.

As a result of not being able to access social signals, Matt gives the notion that they don’t directly influence rankings. Matt goes back to the familiar argument of correlation does not equal causation. An awesome piece of content doesn’t rank well because it has a lot of Facebook likes, it ranks well because it’s awesome, and in turn it gets shared on Facebook a lot because it’s awesome.

Influence To Be A issue in the Future

Matt ends the video by saying that in the future he expects Google to be able to better identify who is writing content where and place more importance on it based on the influence of the individual. But for the time being, Google has to crawl the web as it is.

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How Algorithm Updates influence SEO

It isn’t difficult to look back at current algorithm updates from Google and evaluate how each one has altered the role of an SEO. In the simplest sense, Panda forced us to become better writers and researchers. Penguin made us alter the way we build links. Most recently, although it was less of an algorithm update and more of an communications change to Google’s core algorithm, Hummingbird asked us to consider conversational search queries in the content we produce.

Regardless of how small an algorithm update may be, the development and growth of an SEO’s tasks can be traced back through the history of updates. The fact that SEO is so dependent on updates creates quite a bit of uncertainty in the industry. But hey, as SEOs we know that the only thing that stays the same is that everything changes!

The only confidence is that things will be dissimilar tomorrow.

Saying an SEOs role has changed in the last five to 10 years is an understatement. SEOs are tasked with more each year and the definition of SEO has broadened significantly. It’s become nearly impossible to be a one-man (or woman) show. It requires a team with a number of different skills to perform quality SEO today.

How SEO has Changed

There used to be a time when SEO was strictly about getting traffic to a website. It didn’t matter how it was done as long as it was accomplished.

That was a long time ago.

Today the role of an SEO is much more than attracting visitors. It’s about conversions. It’s about building a brand, having a social media presence, and producing unique, high quality content better than anyone else in your industry.

Why is this happening? It’s simple – Google wants it. Aside from making money, Google wants it’s users to find the best search results possible. How do you weed out the good sites from the bad sites? Make it tough for the bad sites to compete. Google is accomplishing this through their algorithm updates.

This is well beyond the scope of early SEO that built-in keyword research, generic, keyword-stuffed content production, site convenience, and link building.

Staying practical beside Algorithms

The difference between great SEOs and ordinary SEOs is that the great ones have a sense of what the upcoming holds. They’re able to look into their crystal ball and plan for potential algorithms that may lie in front. What’s their secret? It’s experience. There is a good possibility that at one time or another they were penalized for their SEO practices and have a full understanding of the power of Google.

Here are a few things you can do to stay proactive:

•    Don’t have a one-dimensional backlink profile. An example would be a site that has mainly built links through guest posting. While guest posting is a great way to link build, your backlink profile is supposed to look normal. Having a site with backlinks primarily coming from one source is an obvious sign to Google that you’re trying to influence rankings. Instead make an effort to switch up your link building strategy. For every guest post you write, try to get a couple of directory links and a few blog comments as well. Some consider directory links and blog commenting outdated link building tactics but they’re still helpful as long as they’re relevant links on quality sites. select carefully where you build these links and if you’re going to leave a comment make sure you are contributing to the discussion.

•    It’s always a good time to clean up your backlink profile. If you actually want to be proactive with link building, don’t wait for the next update to get rid of bad links. We all have a few links we’re not proud of and it’s best to remove them now before it’s too late. Do you best to have these links removed by contacting webmasters and if that doesn’t work then use Google’s disavow tool. Still Google stresses to use this tool after all other attempts have failed.

•    Diversify your attach texts. This shouldn’t be breaking news to anyone but if you haven’t already made an attempt to vary your anchor texts when link building then there is no better time to start than today. This goes back to building a natural backlink profile. A site that has the best part of its links coming from one or two anchor texts is another sign to Google that your links are unnatural.

•    Be significant in everything you do. The importance of relevancy for Google isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. Whether you’re producing content or building links, staying applicable to your niche is vital to maintaining ranks and satisfying Google.

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Accommodating Guest Post Good, Bad or poisonous

As Google rules have tightened and link building becomes harder and harder to achieve, some companies have adopted a straightforward guest-posting policy. By hiring a few writers to talk up their products and services, they can get a few links in return, and they might even move up a speck in search engine results.

A lot has been said about this exact phenomenon. But as a business owner and blog administrator, you might also consider accepting guest posts on your own blog. Doing so could permit you to reap some of the same rewards, but there are also a number of situations that could be problematic, should you accept these posts. Some might crash your company’s online reputation, and in serious cases, some could land you in court.

The Good Parts

Accepting guest posts often means accepting hundreds of new viewers. Guest bloggers are expected to share links to their printed pieces with their own followers via Twitter, Facebook, and Google+, and each share could result in a fresh fan that follows the blog on a regular basis. If building traffic to the company website is the idea of keeping a blog, using guest bloggers seems ideal.
Similarly, using guest bloggers can give a small company some much-needed cred. An expert view written by someone with years of experience in the industry can lend a shine of expertise to the company website, even if that company is new and has very small experience at all.

The Bad Parts

Sadly, accepting guest posts can also guide to some tricky reputation management problems, particularly if those posts aren’t monitored in any way. A writer with a bone to pick could discuss a person, a company, a place or a thing in a disparaging manner, and if the word got out, that post could quickly zip through cyberspace and become a world-wide phenomenon that tarnishes the status of the company that hosts the blog. Publishing the piece can seem like tacit approval of the words that appear, and it can be hard to undo the damage.

Editing the pieces might not help, either. Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act is designed to help defend the owners of websites from the actions of third parties, including guest bloggers. But as the Electronic Frontier Foundation makes clear, adding in a few key words, or amending a few option phrases, could be seen as contributing new content, and that could leave the blog owner open to lawsuits.

Outstanding a Balance

Many blog administrators aim to protect their companies by crafting detailed rules about the kinds of blogs they will and will not publish. These same administrators might refuse pieces out of hand, when the blog entries seem a little too unseemly, or they may ask writers to rewrite those pieces and submit them again. Clear, well-defined rules allow these companies to communicate clearly with their guests, and they can keep editors from taking chances with content that could cause the company damage.

Administrators also craft public statements about their problem, when a guest blog is in play. A simple statement of deniability, suggesting that the writer is the cause for the opinion and not the owner of the blog, might be enough to keep a company out of the courtroom, should disaster strike.

But from a reputation management viewpoint, it’s best to simply deny any blog entries that seem too risky. Controversial blog posts can spread long before a company management has a chance to delete the offensive data, and some consumers have long memories, when the issue involves discrimination, libel or some other form of bad behavior. By reading over each and every word before posting, and ensuring that nothing untoward is contained within, blog administrators can do their best to gather the rewards of accepting a guest post, without damaging their companies in their quest for new viewer.

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5 Go-Tos To Create On the internet Opinions Perform For Your Business

By now, everyone knows that on the internet opinions can have a remarkable effect on consumers’ buying choices. Ultimately, a single review — good or bad — can tip the scale in support of one company over another. No doubt, the power of opinions on Google+, Howl, Angie’s List and other local internet search internet directories is constantly on the mount.

Evaluation popularity in look for outcomes is also increasing, as they often appear for a business just below their company website and make up most of the corresponding top 10 look for results.

Major search and evaluation sites weight on the internet opinions very extremely, and the on the internet “word-of-mouth” reliability they offer small companies is huge. Opinions are silver details for regional promoters, and without them, many companies risk not being found in regional internet search results.

However, it has not been easy for small companies to produce opinions, particularly outside of the kindness industry. Indicating the task, Saurage Research found that while 84 % of People in america say testimonials impact their purchase choices, only 28 % have published opinions — often when they have had a bad experience rather than a positive one. In addition to that, in order to minimize bogus opinions, many genuine opinions are getting trapped in website filters. (We’ve all heard about Yelp’s overactive review filter.)

Opinions are crucial to online exposure and in getting results in convert. Amazingly, a product or business can win the overall online exposure game — showing high in search results — but then lose probability interest or a client cause because they either have adverse opinions distributing the web or, more intense, no opinions at all.

With all of these difficulties, how can regional marketers make use of online reviews for the best regional internet search visibility?

1. Analyze Present Evaluation & Online Reputation. Small businesses should first assess their exposure across major evaluation websites and internet directories, e.g., Angie’s List, Google+, Howl, YP.com, and any relevant vertical-specific evaluation websites. If a company does not have a existence on these sites, they should create or upgrade their record or company information to improve SEO. Once a information is created, businesses get notices when new opinions are posted. Tracking current opinions and opinions from customers is also a good way to see how employees are doing across many or a few company places.

2. Deal with All Feedback

It might seem natural to address only adverse opinions, but entrepreneurs should react to all scores and opinions whether positive or negative. This makes an outstanding effect on all prospective buyers studying reviews.

Furthermore, adverse opinions have the prospective to remain online for years, so it is very important cope with any problems easily and offer quality for the customer. As long as almost all opinions are not adverse, people will value the organization's professional strategy and responsiveness.

3. Develop Evaluation Creation Into Workflows

Asking for online opinions should not be frustrating, and small businesses need to allow their team to encourage faithful customers to provide reviews. Putting a Howl tag on the organization's door, offering clients a printed card with guidelines on how to keep a review, or even just making a spoken demand, are all perfectly genuine ways to motivate clients to keep feedback. Testimonials are some of the most powerful promotion material available to companies and have the biggest prospective to impact new customers.

If easy is set up for workers to demand a fast evaluation — it might even be useful to offer workers rewards for getting opinions — the selection and marketing of opinions can be easier. For certain service-based companies, e.g., redecorating companies, asking for a review via a video or taking a picture with a client and the finished job quickly reveals the natural seal of acceptance and is easily distributed across public networking channels.

4. Amplify Good Reviews

When a small business produces excellent opinions, it should always use those recommendations to their benefits by publishing them on their website and/or Facebook or myspace page, such as them within a company publication and discussing them with workers, since excellent opinions provide as a excellent group spirits booster. Companies need circulation these opinions as extensive as possible since they illustrate their high quality or authority part within their industry.

Evaluation filtration's are a double-edged blade for regional businesses. On one side, they can be very beneficial for removing adverse opinions published by a opponent or an unjustified, wild customer. They can also avoid good opinions published by actual individuals from creating it online.

5. To avoid this from occurring, small businesses should “follow” Howl evaluators who have published positive, strained opinions in order to increase their credibility. How evaluators can often help force their opinions through the narrow if they complete their information information by including a picture, linking their information to their Facebook or myspace page or providing opinions on a frequent basis.

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Steps That Will Give Your WordPress Blog an Efficiency revolution For 2014

 If you’ve been thinking about updating your blog for the New Year, but are anxious that it might be overwhelming,

There are eight easy things you can do to update your blog to help you work more efficiently and make your blog more competent at bringing in leads and hopeful sharing. 

And the best part: You don’t need to use a dime to implement any of the tips. If you have a crucial understanding of how to use WordPress and minimal design skills, you are all set.

Are you ready to see a boost in your blog’s metrics for 2014?  Here’s what you need to do:       

1. Create CTA Footer Images

A call-to-action (CTA) footer image is a clickable image that you insert at the bottom of each blog post. These images are an professional way for business bloggers to promote resources, products or a specific message to their readers. On most really popular blogs, like Hubspot’s, you will watch they always use CTA footer images.

My company blog, Socially Stacked, uses a CTA footer image at the bottom of every blog post to feature one of our newest eBooks or PDF downloads. When readers click the image, the free resource instantly gets downloaded onto their desktop. Here’s an example of the CTA footer image created for a recent eBook.

HubSpot uses CTA’s to cheer readers to download their resources and promise to their blog.  It’s best to create multiple CTA’s for the bottom of your posts and rotate them.
To generate these CTA footer images, we use Photoshop to design bar images that are the width of our blog post column. Once we’ve shaped them, we upload them into the WordPress Media Library and type “CTA” in the account box of the image.

 This way, after we write a blog post, we can easily search “CTA” in the Media Library and all our CTA footer images will appear, making it easy for us to exchange them. The next only some steps are as follows:

1.    one time your CTA footer image is inserted into your blog post, click the landscape icon to edit it.

2.    In the “Edit Image” tab, insert a link in the “Link URL” section that is appropriate to your CTA footer image. For instance, if the CTA footer image we feature is about our newest holiday eBook, in the “Link URL” section we insert the direct download link for the holiday eBook.

3.    Click “Update” and you’re done!

2. Set up Tracking Links

For 2014, commit to using tracking links on your blog. Tracking links will help you befall a whole lot more efficient at tracking the return on your blog’s content. The link-tracking software that I use for ShortStack is Improvely — the least-expensive plan is $29 a month and well worth the investment.

Improvely links are awesome because you can use them anywhere: an ad, highlighted text, a newsletter sign-up button, etc. When a reader clicks on the benefit that has an Improvely link in it, you are then able to see in Improvely’s dashboard whether any of those properties produced any conversions.

All of our blog’s CTA footer images have Improvely links in them. To do this, after you’ve uploaded your CTA footer image into a blog post, edit the image’s Link URL to be an Improvely link — it’s that simple!

Using Improvely links in the CTA footer images allows you to easily analyze which of your CTA footer images are clicked most and which are converting the most blog readers into blog subscribers or check users.

3. Permit For Pin-Ready Blog Post Images

Pinterest has become one of the web’s top social platforms and is a huge source of traffic for a lot of blogs. To make your blog content more Pinterest friendly, keep this one little trick in mind: After you’ve updated your blog post images, edit your image’s “Title” and “Alternative Text” sections to have the same title as your blog post.

Doing this helps with your blog’s SEO and it makes it so that when a reader clicks on either your blog’s Pinterest plugin or share button, your blog post image is ready to be pinned right away. anything copy you put in the “Title” option of your image will appear as the pin’s description copy.

4. Download Tweetable Code (the way The New York Times does)

In August of 2013, the New York Times tested a new characteristic in one of their online articles that allowed readers to tweet highlighted quotes from the story. According to Mashable, the publisher reported that the story they tested the new characteristic with first was shared approximately 11 times more than their most accepted Times stories in the past month. Even if you get a much smaller bump, it’s a very simple way to highlight chunks of tweetable text.

You can download Tweet to Code and learn how to use the characteristic on your WordPress blog. Also, if you’re thinking you’d rather not have to download something to your WordPress blog, but you love the feature, there are other options. Consider using a simple and free online tool like Click to Tweet to create highlighted, tweetable text pieces within your posts.

5. Install Twitter Cards

Installing a WordPress plugin that enables Twitter Cards makes your blog’s content pop in the Twitter feed. When one of your readers uses your blog’s Twitter button(s) to share a link to one of your Twitter-card enabled post, their tweet will feature intro text and an image from your blog articles in the tweet . The more noticeable and attractive your blog’s content is in the Twitter feed, the better, and the more likely it is to be shared.

Installing Twitter Cards to your WordPress blog is a little tricky and can take some developer skills. If you’re serious about using Twitter Cards, I recommend you do a little research on them share with your business’s on-staff developer. Websites like GitHub.com offer great resources for those involved in learning more.

6. Launch Google Authorship

Google authorship is more influential than it looks. When you set up Google authorship on your WordPress blog, it connects blog post authors’ Google+ accounts to WordPress. The instant change after you do this is that your Google+ profile image and byline is featured in search results pages.

The deeper advantage of Google authorship is that it makes your blog’s content stand out in search results. According to heatmap eye-tracking studies, discussed in a great blog post on Buffer’s blog, rich snippets  are more eye-catching and get more clicks — the research proves it.

If your blog’s writers previously have Google+ accounts, establishing Google authorship is a breeze. After you “link your Google+ profile to the content you create” there are just a little more simple steps. 

7. Add Twitter Buttons

If you want to use your WordPress blog to boost your brand’s number of Twitter followers, use Twitter buttons in your posts. They’re incredibly easy to use and customize.
To add Twitter buttons you can start by heading to Twitter’s resource page. There, choose the Twitter button you want to use in your blog post, then copy and paste the code Twitter gives you into WordPress’s “Text” tab of  the post you’re working on. And boom, you’re done! If you covet, check out the new feature in preview mode before you publish your article.

8. Join Blog to An RSS Publisher

It can be time-consuming to log in to each of your brand’s social platforms to post about your newest blog article. To save time, use the free tool IFTTT — it stands for “If This Then That” and it allows you to make time-saving social media “recipes.” What does that mean, exactly? You can easily connect your blog’s RSS feed to your different social platforms.

For instance, you could use the “RSS to Twitter” recipe so that whenever a new article is published on your blog, a link to it is tweeted out on your brand’s Twitter profile. basically, recipes make sharing your blog’s content automatic. And automatic content sharing allows your WordPress blog to be super efficient.

January is the perfect  time to reflect on how you can improve your business’s blog. Whether you’re one of the 37 percent of marketers who say “Blogs are the most precious type of content marketing.” or a small business owner who wants to make your blogging efforts more capable, these eight tips can help your blog perform better in 2014 than it did in 2013.

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