SEO is not the easiest thing to understand.  It actually has become something that is extremely difficult for small business owners to do themselves.  The “Guru’s” have been lying to them so they can get a jump in the industry.

Last year Google made two major algorithm updates … Panda and Penguin … they were feared by many websites as it made thousands plummet to the bottom of the search engines.

This was because the changes were implemented in order to rank poor quality sites, such as content mills and link farms, down and give more weight to sites that produce quality content.

This is carried out by making changes to how Google’s spiders recognize a site, giving better rankings to sites with quality, well written content and social media engagement. For web professionals, this created something of a panic, as static sites that were not particularly well written and stuffed with keywords began to fail.

Penguin and Panda updates relied on a new set of rules and more complex algorithms designed to rank a site on a number of different factors.

These include:

• Content: Google spiders can now tell if a site is badly written, with spelling and grammatical errors, lots of ads and bad quality links. This change is seen to be a welcome one for many SEO and digital professionals, as it immediately knocked poor quality article syndicates and content mills down the ranks, so that high quality could take their place and be more useful to searchers.
• Freshness: the “freshness” of copy has become more important to Google than inbound links. This means that in order to compete on Google, it’s necessary to add new content often. The freshness ranking looks at 3 key areas: #1: Trending topics such as the Olympics or US election #2: Recurring famous events such as the Superbowl #3: How recently the content has been added.
• Unique content: ever copied and pasted some content into a website to cut corners? Now it will also cut the site’s ranking. Original content is one of the most important aspects of determining position. Content containing unnatural links will also be penalized, so it’s important to ensure that links appear organically and are very relevant to the content. This is only going to become even more important as Google’s Author Rank takes off.
• Social: as many of you will know, social is the new marketing and is a very powerful tool for SEO. Google now uses social in search results to determine just how useful a site is across the board. It’s important now for online marketers and SEO experts to include social, ensuring that all brand colors and logos are uniform across social channels and websites. Additionally, it’s important that the social presence is well managed; badly, bot-managed social will harm a site’s rankings.
• Free from technical errors: this in particular is important for web professionals, and will no doubt knock a lot of blogging sites off the top perch. A site that has a sound architecture will perform better than a site which is built off templates, Flash, or is more than two years old. This means that code should be standards-based with valid CSS tags and tidy meta data.

 

How to address problems with a site’s ranking

Even some of the biggest sites were affected by the changes to Google algorithms, I read of one which had to be stripped right back in order to change all of the keywords and duplicate pages.

A site that is poorly written should have all of its content refreshed, preferably by someone who can write. This includes blog posts and articles, so if a site has lots of content like this, then it may be a better idea to strip it all from the site and add as you get it, or different content, written.

Meta data also has to be clean and tidy and Google tends to ignore keywords and concentrate on descriptions here. Keywords of course still have their place and it’s important to ensure that these are still well researched and analyzed, but articles and blogs with a high keyword density are likely to be penalized. This is because keywords, when overused, tend to compromise the quality of the writing.

Panda concentrated on getting rid of those sites which attempted to “trick” its algorithms with the overuse of keywords and link spamming. In order to determine if a site has spam links pointing at it, use Google’s Disavow Tool, which will remove them for you. However, it’s important at this point to note that a site audit should be carried out to identify bad links and it should be with caution that the tool is used.

For Panda, it’s also worth checking that a site’s content is unique; it has to be 60% unique site-wide, as well as accessible, in order to pass Panda’s rules.

Penguin concentrated more on the actual content and both algorithms are still updated regularly in order to refine them. For the most part, Penguin concentrates mostly on keyword stuffing within articles and spam links.

Essentially, they are both concerned with accessibility, content, spamming techniques and new rules that are designed to prevent black hat SEO.

 

What is black hat SEO?

Basically, this is a way of attempting to manipulate the search engines so that it essentially ‘tricks’ them into thinking a site is valuable. Black hat uses aggressive tactics and is geared towards the search engine, rather than a human audience.

Over coming articles, I will take a look at black, white and grey hat techniques in order to give a clear overview of which can be used safely and which are a no-no. The problem that many have found is that some, less than reputable, SEO ‘experts’ have employed black hat techniques in order to win more customers and make a quick buck. This is why some business sites have dropped like a stone down the rankings, often unaware that they have done anything wrong.

Black hat techniques include:

• packing code with ‘hidden’ text;
• link farms where a group of sites all link to each other to spam the index of a search engine;
• blog spam, using the comments field on blogs and forums to place links to other sites;
• scraping, a practice where one site takes content from another in order to appear more valuable to search engines;
• doorway pages used with the intention of enticing searchers with phrases not related to site content;
• parasitic hosting , where a site is hosted on someone else’s server without permission;
• cloaking, a technique in which the search engine spider sees different content to the end user who views through a browser.

Black hat methods are seen by many web professionals to be unethical, as they use tactics that promise swift returns but run the chance of damaging a company’s reputation, website and in turn, profits.

Utilizing black hat methods often means that a site doesn’t have to wait months for link backs, as you would with traditional white hat methods. However, it also fills the internet with useless information and spam, and over the years has seriously affected search.

It’s also cheaper for the SEO strategist to carry out as often, a blog network will already be set up to link to and it doesn’t depend heavily on analytics and content, as white hat practice do.

Not only does employing black hat methods often lead to the threat of legal action, if they are used alongside a PPC campaign, heavy penalties can be incurred from the advertising host.

It’s not recommended that a site use black hat techniques due to the penalties involved, in terms of legal action, reputation and the threat of not ranking. However, no doubt that won’t stop everyone, despite the Google updates.

Saying that, we’re already seeing content mills dropping rapidly down the rankings, so the updates are obviously working as this is one of the key areas that Google wanted to address.

Google and all of the major search engines have a vision, one that intends to clean up the web and do away with bad practices, leading to more useful content appearing at the top of search for us all. Whether you use black hat techniques or not is between you and your conscience, but certainly I for one am glad of the ability to search and not come up with a page full of junk before I get to what I want.

 

Talk Soon,

CJ Hallock

 

What problems have you run into as a result of Panda and Penguin? How have you solved black-hat techniques employed by predecessors? Let us know in the comments.

 

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Since Pinterest opened “Pinterest for Business” there has been many businesses wanting to use Pinterest but the problem is knowing how to use it the right way!

There are hundreds of things I could suggest to help you market with Pinterest, but, because a lot of them go together with other internet marketing I’ll not go into everything…

The things I do plan on covering are very basic and generic.  I cover some of the basic uses for pinterest but feel free to get creative and take some of my examples and customize it just to your niche.

I have put together 10 tips for using Pinterest and hope it helps … here we go!

1. Create very specific boards

This is very important. When you first get started on Pinterest, you will be tempted to have general boards. Don’t do this. What will happen is that you will start pinning all recipes to recipes and then before you know it you will have 300 recipes – from dips to desserts to crock pot beef stew. Segment as much as possible. Some examples

• Tips and tricks (for posts like this one!)
• One board per micro-niche (you can do specific types of recipes like: meals, crock pot, desserts – or different types of workouts: mma, womens fitness, crossfit ect)
• One board per holiday (Christmas, Valentines, Easter, Halloween, etc.)
• Sewing
• Project Life
• Memory Keeping (general scrapbook type pages)
• Printables
• Favorite books/books I want to read
• Inspirational words
• Photo inspiration

 

2. Create a completed pins board I have pinned countless items to Pinterest. I have found it very gratifying to create and use a completed pins board. Once I have made a recipe, done a project, etc. from Pinterest, I will repin the item to my completed pins board, along with comments about what worked/didn’t work, etc. This is very helpful for me – and for the followers of that board.

3. Follow a lot of people I love following a lot of people on Pinterest because it means I find a lot of great items to pin. Interestingly, Pinterest also adds you as a follower to boards that their algorithm thinks you will like. This helps you to find more great stuff to pin.

4. Learn your URL If you are a blogger, use this formula to search  pins from your site: http://pinterest.com/source/URL/ So, for Visionet Media, my URL is http://pinterest.com/source/visionetmedia.com/. This is also a handy way to see what has been pinned from your favorite sites.

5. Pin from your favorite sites If you see something you like on a website pin it! (I have the Pin It tool installed on my toolbar, which makes it really easy to pin from any site. It takes about 5 seconds to install.) Pinterest is only as good as the stuff that is pinned on it, so it needs people to pin new items to it. Plus, pins help drive traffic to your favorite sites. (I’m so thankful every time you pin something from this site.)

6. Pin the specific URL of a post to Pinterest (not the generic site URL) This is an important one! When you see something on a site that you want to pin, be sure to click on the post so that you pin from the actual post – and not the main site URL. Otherwise, once that post moves from the main page, no one will be able to  find it. (Similarly don’t pin from a google image search – pin from the site the image came from).

7. Search pins to find new inspiration If you are researching ideas, check out the search function on Pinterest to find new ideas. The search function isn’t as robust as I would like it to be (it isn’t endless, you can’t sort by recent or popular, etc.), but I do always find SOMETHING worth repinning. I especially like using search when I am looking for a recipe, home dec ideas or party inspiration.

8. Write meaningful descriptions (include key words, @+a name will tag someone) Pinterest requires you to write a description of some sort. It is frustrating when a description is something like yum or must try and doesn’t tell the viewer what the picture is of. Be sure your description tells what the pin is.  It is also nice when you include the blog name or tag someone. You may have noticed that more and more bloggers are including text on their images to make the images “Pinterest friendly” and helpful for viewers on Pinterest.

9. Don’t post an entire blog post in your pin It is poor etiquette to paste an entire post/recipe etc. on a pin. Instead, when you pin an item, write a simple description of the item so people will click to get the full tutorial, recipe, etc.

10. Comment! Pinterest is a social site like Facebook and Twitter, so interact!

Bonus Tip for Bloggers If you are a blogger/business owner and are interested in generating revenue through Pinterest, optimizing your boards for SEO, and more – click here to check out our InfoMarket Box which is a collection of ebooks including “Free Traffic from Pinterest” which is a great ebook on Pinterest. 

What would you add to this list? Please feel free to leave your Pinterest name in the comments so I can follow you. AND, if you are not on Pinterest and need an invitation, send me an email and I will happily send you an invite.

Talk Soon,

CJ Hallock

 

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I have studied the changes within Facebook and Facebook’s Timeline for many years.  It is hard to get the info you need for all of Facebook without doing some serious research.  So I put together a Facebook Timeline Infographic for 2013 and it is 100% current as of today.  Check it out …

Facebook Timeline Infographic 2013

 

Starting Tuesday May 7, 2013 I’m going to have a full video walkthrough showing you how to customize your facebook page for free along with an awesome ebook and predesigned facebook cover photo templates.  I will keep you posted.

Feel free to share this with your friends…

Talk Soon

CJ Hallock

 

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It’s been a roller coaster but after about 3 months of going back and forth I finally did it.  I got Gary Vaynerchuk for yet another interview!

For those of you who do not know Gary, I’ll introduce you!

“Gary Vaynerchuk, a 36 year old New York Times and Wall Street Journal Best-Selling author who is also a self-trained wine and social media expert. From a young age, it was clear that Gary was a businessman. At 8-years-old he was operating seven lemonade stands in his neighborhood and by 10 he had moved onto selling baseball cards at local malls. In high school while working at his family owned liquor store, Gary started reading The Wine Spectator and wine books, and realized collecting wine offered an allure similar to his previous hobby of collecting baseball cards. With a wealth of knowledge and an entrepreneurial spirit, Gary spent every weekend of his college years at his parents’ wine store. Recognizing the importance of e-commerce in 1997, Gary launched Winelibrary.com and helped grow his family business significantly from $3 million to $45 million by 2005.

In 2006, with a flipcam and NY Jets bucket Gary began Wine Library TV which revolutionized the wine world. His wine reviews soon attracted over 100,000 viewers each day and his die-hard fans nicknamed themselves “Vayniacs.” Gary’s cult-like following was the result of his unconventional, often irreverent commentary on wine. Using comical expressions like “Sniffy Sniff” and “The Oakmonster,” he encourages straightforward wine tasting and debunks wine myths. A business visionary Gary also started Cinderella Wine, a flash sale website which features one wine per day beginning at 9PM EST for 24 hours sold at a severely discounted price.

Gary does not claim to be a ‘techie’, but in 2005, he began video blogging and is known as a true social media trailblazer! He has close to 1 million followers on Twitter and was included in BusinessWeek’s list of the top 20 people every entrepreneur should follow. Gary’s first business bookCrush It! Why Now Is the Time to Cash in on Your Passion (October 2009) hit the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Associated Press Best-Sellers lists in its first weeks. It maps out Gary’s road rules for how to “Crush It” in today’s business market by following your passion and building your own personal brand. His second New York Times bestseller The Thank You Economy (March 2011), details the effect of social media on business and has become required reading for business leaders. In the spring of 2009, Gary and his brother AJ launched VaynerMedia, a new breed of agency that helps Fortune 500 companies like Campbell Soup Company, PepsiCo, Green Mountain Coffee, the NY Jets, and the Brooklyn Nets find their social media voices and build their digital brands.

Gary has appeared on countless programs from Jimmy Fallon, Late Night with Conan O’Brien and Ellen to MSNBC, CNBC, CNN and NPR. He was also notably featured in Decanter Magazine’s 2009 Power List which is a list of the 50 most influential people in wine and named Innovator of the Year at Wine Enthusiast’s 2009 Wine Star Awards. Additionally, Gary was one of Askmen.com’s 49 Most Influential Men of 2009.

Gary’s ultimate goal is to own the New York Jets. Although his various businesses obviously play an enormous role in his life, he always puts his family first.”

Gary Vaynerchuk Discusses New Book

When asked about his new book coming out November 26, 2013, Gary explains it … “It’s about how to put out content on all the different platforms. With the launches of Instagram, Pinterest and Tumblr. How to get content seen on all those different platforms. How to tell your story in a noisy social world… How do you break through?!”

Gary Vaynerchuk is also known for the many different “Angel Investments” he has made over the years.  He has invested in many different social platforms and other online businesses.  You can click on the image below to see the different investments he has made.

I hope you liked this! If so, please comment below and let us know what you think. Also, feel free to share and like this on Facebook & Twitter!

Talk Soon,

CJ Hallock

 

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When writing a blog post, the blog post structure and layout of your blog post is really important.  (**Disclaimer** this is based on my personal experience) It’s very easy to just get the text in a blog post.  The hard part is writing it in such a way to keep people on your blog and reading it … a lot!!

For almost a year I was averaging about 10-25 unique visitors to a blog I was running.  After using the Blog Post Structure, I am about to share with you, my visitor count is up to 300+ per day!

Why does it work so good?

I have broke the layout and structure of a blog post down to 10 parts. I’m going to list all 10 for you then I’ll break each section down for you and let you know how you too can use this structure!

10 Parts to a Properly Structured Blog Post

1. Title
2. Blog Post Cover
3. Visual Status Post
4. Intro-Content
5. Main Content
6. Call to Action #1
7. Closing Content
8. Call to Action #2
9. Signature
10. Comments

To see the infographic in full screen – Click On It!

Now that you know the 10 parts to a blog post … lets break each part down and why different parts are more important than the next.

1.  Title

The title of a blog post is very important.  It shows the actual title and the date the blog post was published.  The title should be short and to the point.  Some bloggers try to use their titles to leave people hanging in hope to draw people to their blog.  You want to keep your title on track and just give them a brief overview of what your blog post is about.

2.  Blog Post Cover (BPC)

Basically put, Blog Post Covers are images that span the width of your blog post that is customized specifically for that one post!  It includes a relevant theme/picture and the blog post title.

The reason for Blog Post Covers is it gives your blog a visual touch that most people are not doing right now!

Want a good example?

Take a look at BlueGlass.com … for every post they include a “Blog Post Cover” and a regular pic for every post that they put up on their site!

If you go to their site, you will notice that they are all synced and look basically the same.

Same Color Theme

Same Fonts

It creates a pattern your readers will see and it will help them remember your posts and of course your blog!  Having “Blog Post Covers” work together to assist with the color theme of your site helps tremendously!

 

3.  Visual Status Post (VSP)

This is touchy.  In the infographic, you will see the image placed to the left, this is what I suggest but some get higher conversions aligning their images to the left. (test this and see what works best for you)

The VSP serves many different purposes but the main reasons are to give your post an image for the search engines to share with the post as well as giving yourself an image to help you drive traffic.

When I publish a blog post with this structure I create a new VSP for each post.  Once my post is published I use Instagram to push my VSP to Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Foursquare and Flickr.  I suggest you keep the image the same (don’t use any filters) and in the description for the VSP include the full link for your blog post. Their are “Shortlinks” with WordPress but I suggest you share the full link because it will read as shares with the DiggDigg WordPress Plugin (This is a strongly suggested plugin for social sharing on your blog)

Then after I “Blast” my VSP with Instagram I use Every Post (a free social media tool for the iPhone) to post it to Google+ and LinkedIn.

The next step … PIN IT!

So as you see, once you finish your blog post, your VSP will help you get not just 8 solid links back to your blog post. But, if you do it right you can get many shares/likes/comments on your social media platforms which turns into readers of your blog post!

4. Intro Content

The intro content for your blog post should be brief and should let your readers know exactly what they are about to read! This is important because even if your BPC and VSP are very good, you could lose your reader in the first paragraph.  Grab their attention with either stats or by stating a problem that you are going to solve with your post.  Get creative with this.

5.  Main Content

This is the “Meat and Potatoes” of your blog post! It doesn’t have to be just text.  You can use text, video or audio for this.  It doesn’t matter what you use to deliver content.  What does matter? Make sure you have solid & great content!

It’s hard to decide how much to share or what to share but I’ll tell you that you will find some great tips with the Marketing By Sharing video by Jason Freid.

6. Call To Action #1

Don’t overdo this! … keep it short and simple! Yes … KISS! That is the secret for CTA’s inside of blog posts! This can be a suggestion to watch a video on youtube that covers the topic you are writing about.  Or, maybe a link to a products page of something you mentioned in your blog post.

7.  Closing Content

This is important … if you don’t close out your blog and ensure you have delivered the last few nuggets of info you needed then you could lose out on return readers!  If it is something you are not sure about, you may want to have a friend or partner read everything over and let you know if there is something else you could share in the CC area.

8. Call To Action #2

This is one of the most important parts of any blog post! Ask for them to do something! It could look something like this …

“Like this blog post? Share it with your friends by using the tool on the left.”

“Leave a comment and let me know what you think!”

9.  Signature

This part is the last part of a blog post that is in your control.  Naturally you want to close out with something like…

“Talk Soon” or “Sincerely”

But the 2 things in your signature that  a lot of bloggers don’t think about is

• Having an “Author Box” – this allows for your “1st time readers” to know a little bit about you and also gives readers a few ways of contacting you.

• Related Articles – This part of the signature is something that helps in so many ways.  Listing 3-5 related articles (blog posts) will create a never ending circle of articles.  This creates a black hole that your readers could get lost in! Jumping from post to post reading your blog.

10. Comments

When it comes to the comments section of your blog … this could be the most important part! Too many times have I left a comment on a blog for the author and never received a response. The interaction within your comments can keep more people coming to that specific blog post as well as bring you more traffic.  Comments are like legs to a table the more you have the stronger your table (post) is.

Google does see comments and does rank your blog higher if you have comments than if you don’t.

So interact and keep it busy!

 

 

Need Some Help?

As some people have told me, while going over this blog post structure, “I don’t have photoshop” how do I create the BPC’s and VSP’s?”

I have templates you can use to help with this! Check them out here!

 

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Now, when it comes to blogging you want to stay with a schedule. Don’t overwhelm yourself but keep a schedule.  Writing blog posts with this structure is very time consuming and I wouldn’t recommend that you use this structure every time you write.  If you are going to publish a blog post every day Monday thru Friday, I would pick one day to write a “Pillar” blog post.  (a pillar blog post is one that is extremely long and uses this structure) and the other posts keep them solid but unless you have the time I wouldn’t spend it putting blogs together.

 

Have Questions? Want to add something you think I left out? Comment below and let me know!

Like this post? Share it with your friends by using the neat tool on the left!

Talk Soon,

CJ Hallock

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OK so as you start to get your business online the first thing you are going to need is your domain (www.yourbusinessname.com) and I know it isn’t much but like they say, “a penny saved, is a penny earned”.

So you will find in the video below a cool little trick to get a (dot) com domain for only $0.99.  The only trick is you will be charged $7.00 for each additional domain or year that you register a domain.

If you are wanting a coupon code for GoDaddy you will find many good coupon codes online from places like FatWallet and others.  I will say that I have used the same coupon code on GoDaddy for years when I don’t do the trick mentioned in the video below and it always has worked for me when I buy (.com) domains … and the code is  ”DIGGNATION”.

Watch this video to learn how to get a domain for a dollar!

As you see this trick to get a .com domain is amazing!

So the next thing you are going to need to get your business online is hosting. Read More Here

Talk Soon,
CJ Hallock

Well, we have come to the final lesson in the Google+ Basics Crash Course. I sure hope you have enjoyed your lessons and learned a lot about how Google Plus functions and how you can use it to your advantage.

In today’s lesson were going to talk about Google Plus pages, how they work and how they differ from your regular Google Plus account.

According to Google, Google Plus Pages provides businesses, products, brands, and organizations with a public identity and presence on Google Plus .

Pages are extremely similar to profiles, but there are a few slight differences when it comes to setting up Google Plus Profiles and Google Plus Pages.

Let’s go over a few of those differences very quickly:

• Pages can’t add people to circles until the page is mentioned or added first. They can use circles to share with and follow other people, however pages can only add followers of the page to its circles.
• Pages can be made for a variety of different entities and can have multiple administrators.
• Pages automatically have the +1 button making it easy for visitors to endorse them.
• Pages can’t play games and they don’t have the option to share to ‘Extended circles’.
• Pages can’t use hangout on a mobile device and local pages have special fields that help people find the business’ physical location.

To create a Google Plus page you first have to have a personal profile on the network. You can then create a page from inside your profile by clicking on the more tab and choosing pages.

Pages can be created based around five different categories:

• Product or Brand

This is where you would create page to promote a specific product or build your business brand. There are a variety of categories to choose from under the product or brand tab including, apparel, cars, electronics, financial services and more.

• Company, Institution or Organization

This category should be used if you are building a page to promote companies, institutions, organizations or non-profits or similar entities.

• Local Business or Place

This is perfect for business owners who want to promote locally including, hotels, restaurants, places, stores or services. This can be a powerful tool if your location is important because you can add a map to your Google+ page that directs customers right to your door.

• Arts, Entertainment or Sports

Under this category you can create pages for movies, TV, music, books, blogs, sports, art shows and more.

• Other

If you don’t feel your page fits in any of the other categories mentioned you can select Other, where you can enter your page name and website without any additional category selection.

Just like with creating your profile from within Google Plus you’ll want to spend some time creating a public profile for your individual pages as well. Make sure that you include a profile picture, a professional tagline, along with compelling information and relevant links.

There is no doubt that pages are a powerful tool for anyone looking to promote their business, brand or institution. They can help people find you, plus learn about services, products, promotions, and pretty much anything else you want to share.

While we have only scratched the surface of working with pages I hope that this lesson has given you some valuable insight that you can use to start your first Google Plus page. There are literally thousands of tutorials available online that can help you expand on this topic.

As we close this final lesson I would like to thank you again for joining me and I sincerely hope that you have learned a lot about how Google Plus functions and how you can take full advantage of everything that it has to offer.

Talk Soon,

CJ Hallock