#2 Join the Party!

 By Lissa Monroe

Join and participate in your niche community.

Find what interests you and your audience. Communities are great places to comment, plus and actively share great content. Follow people and pages and get followed back. Expanding your audience and helping build others' follower count.

Find your niche community, engage the super-engagers. Participate on a daily basis. If you can't find your community, start one!

Some Google+ Love and Advice

By Lissa Monroe

Yes, the argument is still hot about how much G+ actually affects search engine results. What is not up for debate however, if it does. Yes. The answer is yes. Authorship alone has an undeniable impact... your head shot and content showing up in the SERPs!

It's easy to get seduced by follower counts (whoever has the most Tweeter followers wins!!), but  Plus-ers aren't Twits (no offense intended). You must have a different, solid and long-term approach to both your current and targeted audience.

Here is the first of five simple, effective strategies to maximize your G+ impact on search results.

#1 Install Authorship script on your website.  

 An active Authorship strategy is skyrocket your SEO.  It's been speculated that, '...organic ranking will shift from “pulling” SEO value from the Internet to a website into “pushing” SEO value to a website via Authorship."

Authorship gives personal branding with an image, free effective differentiation within the SERP, shows the follower count and will help to attract more of your targeted audience.  Looks like a win-win-wind to me.

Need help establishing Authorship?  Email lissa@freshmintmarketing.com.

#5 - Vintage is Not Cool in SEO

Antique strategies can easily translate
into Black Hat SEO.
Bottom Line: Don't use vintage SEO.

By Lissa Monroe

Keep the focus on the page,
not the keywords. 

I know we've been attached to ranking keywords for a long time now. And sometimes its hard to give up what seems like a promising metric. Remember, the one constant is change.

There is so much more to Search strategy than ranking keywords. And anyone who's familiar with Google Analytics and seen Google  officially making all of it’s keyword data “(not provided),” knows there is little usable measurement or consolation available here.

Keyword-centric SEO strategies are just not going to cut it anymore.

Your SEO has to become page-centric. Focus on designing pages with quality and shareable content, engaging the user. Then measure the traffic and conversions at the page level.

#4 - No More Nonsense

By Lissa Monroe

freshMINT marketing and design offers fresh ideas
and innovative strategies for your local marketing

Semantic Search

Another product of the Hummingbird update is search is all about meaning and understandability. Google’s newest algorithm is equipped to understand the meaning of search in context. Keywords are no longer king of the hill.and they should no longer dictate your SEO. Don't get me wrong, keywords are still integral to your SEO strategy but in different ways now.  Tag your images and blogs (for example) but don't list a bunch of random, seemingly relevant words and expect results anymore.

Use everyday language (that your clients actually use!) to create content and SEO strategy.  Be conversational. Market to your customers, not at them.

#3 - Dude, Get Your A*$% on Google+

freshMINT Marketing and Design takes
local optimization very, very seriously.

By Lissa Monroe

Seriously.

Sorry to break it to you, but Google + is not going away.  

Among the many, many, many reasons to embrace Google's social network, there is authorship. Google’s authorship system enables authors to build trust based on their content, quantified by Author Rank. Author Rank is a metric comparable to Page Rank  correlated to social shares, +1’s and other signals).  Some in the industry foresee Author Rank  significantly impacting Google’s evaluation of sites. 

You already know Content is King (again), this year, make sure to have your content team on Google+. Focus on Author Rank and quality content and the Page Rank will soon follow. 

Another reason to embrace Google+... it is integrated with all Google products and services; making it as important, if not more so, than Facebook or Twitter for SEO.

#2 - Link Building is Soooo 2013.

freshMINT Marketing and Design offers
custom blogging service and social media management.

By Lissa Monroe

Content, once again, is King.

No surprise here, to be honest. Search Engines want to crawl quality content, not link after link after meaningless link.  This need for content is a trend that will only grow in importance for the rest of the year.

With updates designed to penalize black hat SEO, Hummingbird has effectively ended the era of link farms and link networks who once earned bogus high page ranks by detecting bad link patterns and rewarding authentic value.

In this new year of the Horse, only the creation of original, relevant and quality content will turn Google's fickle eye. But don't discard all your links yet.... authoritative sites such as Google+, Yahoo and Bing Local, local directories and root data providers will definitely feature prominently into your site's ranking factors.

Work on shareable content such as blogs, Google+ posts, tweets, Facebook content and YouTube.  Inspire links by creating compelling, shareable content.

Make Search Marketing a Priority in 2014

By Lissa Monroe

The one constant in Search is change.  It continues to innovate, evolve..... algorithm updates, search patterns, most importantly best practices.  All of these factors keep us search marketers on our toes, adapting and revising our strategy to fit Google's shifting criterion for ranking sites. Best practices once used to score a high page rank are now verboten, with more traditional SEO tactics falling out of favor after Google's most recent update, Hummingbird. 

Don't freak out yet. In fact, we should welcome these changes with open arms! Despite the changes, website SEO and ranking on search will not be that difficult.  It can even be argued that it will be even simpler.

Over the next few weeks, we'll be focusing on five big changes that can guarantee SEO success in the new year. 

Make Local Optimization
a priority in 2014.

1. Local Is Everything. 

20% of searches are related to location and 56% of mobile users search locally.  These numbers tell us it is more important than ever to optimize for local search, and new Google features like Plus Local and Carousel* drive that point home even more. It is loud and clear.... local is everything. If you are a local business or service , create a clean citation on Google Plus Local, and be sure to localize content, Geo-tag your images using Picasa or similar program and use social and rich snippets. 


*Google Carousel is the row of images across the top of the Google SERP. The carousel contains up to 20 results and appears primarily in results for travel, hospitality, and restaurant queries but we are seeing it appear more often for other industries such as sports, entertainment and education.