Month: April 2016

Improve Your SEO Now With 5 Easy Tips

29 Apr 16 by Chris Jenkin

While it’s always wise to hire a SEO professional for guidance in improving search engine rank, you can improve your SEO now with 5 easy tips (and save some cash).

This list is for the digital marketing do-it-yourselfer. Keep in mind the depths of search are vast and complicated. This entry level guide will give you enough confidence to dive in, and swim.

Start in Production

In the early phase of your website production, you’ll need to carefully determine which keywords are relevant and most popular about your business, goods, and services. These keywords will be part of the original blueprint for your website, and as the developers build your site page by page, these words will be used to name the page urls, which will help improve your overall SEO score, improving the usability and indexing of your site.

When carefully analyzed in the very beginning, this research can be used to create a website that Google loves to share in its top search results. If your website is already developed and you’re suspecting some mistakes might have your rank down, it’s essential you contact an SEO expert, like gotcha! Mobile Solutions, for a free assessment of your website. Our report will reveal crucial errors that could be affecting your website’s traffic and overall visibility.

Optimize Keyword Usage in Design Structure

In addition to building the foundation of the site, core keywords should be implemented throughout all other parts of your website design process. Page designers should be made well aware what focus search terms and words have been selected so that the structured pages can incorporate optimal keyword usage.

Just like the developers who work on the back-end of a website, designers also need to know keywords and direction to inspire their own ideas for the layout and visuals. Work together with your designers to ensure that SEO is drawn right into your website from the very beginning, and you’ll be fast on track for ranking success.

Create a Successful Content Strategy

Moving past the design, you can improve your SEO right now by mapping out an effective content strategy that incorporates correct usage of said keywords throughout the heading tags, images, page content, and blogs.

What does that mean at the moment? It means scour your website from top to bottom and from page to page. Once you have your concrete list of targeted keywords, you can begin to see the gaps in your published material. Don’t be generic when it comes to writing copy, and by all means make every word count.

Ditch any pre-written web text or product descriptions and customize all of your content so that it is packed full of rich keywords, which in turn will help improve your site’s ranking. To add even more value to your site, consider writing a blog. Yes, of course. You’re probably wondering why the heck you need a blog. The short answer is, the more SEO-packed content that you can continually add to your website, the faster your SEO score could improve. When in doubt, focus on writing engaging and evergreen web content that is timeless. Become an expert in your niche so that Google will identify you as such, and you’ll rank higher in search results just by producing frequent and compelling content. If you can’t pen that many words in a week, hire a professional content writer who can. The results will be worth it.

Incorporate SEO in Your Social Media

It’s not all pins and memes. Don’t forget to integrate social media into your successful SEO strategy. After all, social websites are considered search engines, all in themselves. Google will search social pages for signals that a website is active. While links may not improve your social ranking on their own, viral posts can have significant impact and will increase your page visibility.

Social profiles are often the first introduction a potential consumer has to your brand. Keep your social profiles updated and interesting to help boost the engagement on your pages, and to help direct traffic to your website. Increased web flow will organically improve your SEO score.

Hurry Up and Wait

It takes time to improve your SEO ranking, but these 5 do-it-yourself tips will help you save some money, when time is all you have to spend. Small start-ups and at-home businesses can still tackle SEO at-home without having to hire a professional web developer or SEO company. Then again, when you’re ready to expand, you’ll need to incorporate much, much more to continually improve your SEO score and ebb and flow with any upcoming Google updates. Search is always changing. The best way to stay ahead is to make sure your site checks off with each of these SEO tips.

Ready to hire our team of SEO experts? Let us do the work.

Give it your best, and then call gotcha! for the rest.

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Email Etiquette

22 Apr 16 by Chris Jenkin

Let’s get back to the basics. In a world where keyboards have replaced the mighty pen, there’s still a place for email etiquette. Before you shoot off thousands of emails to your contacts or subscriber list, make sure you’re respecting their time, while representing your company with class.

Choose Your Subject Carefully to Avoid the Trash Pile

The subject of your email will make or break it, and determine whether or not someone will even open it, or discard it. Make your subject purposeful and relevant to the content you’re sharing and avoid clever marketing ploys, which will only irritate your reader. Avoid using all caps, all lowercase, and poor grammar. Your subject line makes the first impression.

Practice Professionalism in Your Correspondence

Work emails are supposed to be professional. Avoid sending offensive jokes or irrelevant emails to your colleagues. If you’re using business owned equipment, keep it mind your employer will frown upon the misuse of company time and supplies. Internal emails are a serious issue. If you want to be treated with respect from your coworkers, you must practice professionalism on the job whenever you correspond.

Addressing the Recipient

How do you address an individual you just met? While many people quickly assume a first name is suitable, it’s proper etiquette to wait until your new contact requests a first name basis, for example he might state “You can call me Joe.” In the beginning of all correspondence, email etiquette includes using a formal salutation.

Avoid Misspelling Names

It takes just a second to check your recipient’s name and spelling.

Use the Blind Copy Option When Necessary

If you’re sending a bulk email to recipients who do not know each other, it is common email etiquette to use the blind copy option in the address fields, so that you’re not sharing their name and private email addresses to the rest of your contacts.

Avoid Reply All

Have you ever been caught in a texting chain of messages, none of which matter to you? Reply all is the same thing. Unless you want everyone to read your message, be sure to carefully select the appropriate reply option and don’t send to everyone unless necessary.

Get to the Point

Successful email marketing is targeted and gets right down to business. Don’t waste your reader’s valuable time by beating around the bush to say what needs to be said. Short sentences and short paragraphs are easier to read, and much faster too. The less time a reader has to invest his time reading, the more time he can use making an important buying decision.

Don’t Over-punctuate

Over-punctuating your sentences makes them cumbersome to read. Although you may hope that your reader feels your excitement through multiple exclamation marks, if you choose the proper words and format your sentences correctly, very little punctuation is necessary.

Add Links

The main purpose of your email correspondence might be to gain more business and make a sale. Don’t forget the importance of adding links within the body of your email message. At the end of your message you should provide that call to action and also close your email with the necessary contact information.

Why Email Etiquette Matters

Email etiquette matters because people’s time is valuable. In addition, it can be difficult to allow your humor or intent to correctly flow through words alone. Establishing a set of email etiquette rules for yourself will help guide you in the process of communicating with your partners and colleagues in a positive manner that encourages loyalty.

From the beginning to the end of your email message, proper email etiquette ensures your work ethic and professionalism shine.

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Facebook Live and the End of Television

15 Apr 16 by Chris Jenkin

An anchor sits at a desk on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, talking with guests about the future of Facebook. The cameras pan and switch between shots, broadcasting in an eye-pleasing wide frame.

It would be easy to mistake the broadcast for a CNBC TV show, except for the big piece of cheese sitting on the middle of the desk. This is Cheddar, the first startup betting on Facebook’s embrace of live video as the next big thing.

Cheddar was founded by Jon Steinberg, who previously served as chief operating officer and president of BuzzFeed. It’s a business-focused, video-first media operation that broadcasts live five days a week for up to an hour. It plans to expand to eight hours a day by the end of the year.

Its content will appear on platforms aside from Facebook, but it’s clear Steinberg sees the social network, and particularly its Live platform, as the beginning of the end of TV.

“It’s going to replace live television,” Steinberg said. “I think it’s the opportunity of a lifetime for new entrants.”

Steinberg admits that might be a bit optimistic, but he has a point. It’s tough to find anybody who is willing to bet that Facebook Live definitely won’t be the wave of the future in media — particularly after a week in which CEO Mark Zuckerberg made it a centerpiece of this week’s big developer conference.

Then again, just about anything Facebook wants to do could change the media world.

And the rest of the media world is maybe kinda over it.

Facebook [fill in the blank] could change the entire media industry.

First Facebook pushed publishers to embrace branded pages and social reader apps. Later came an emphasis on visuals. More recently, it was all about Instant Articles and in-feed (but mostly soundless) video.

This month, it’s live video.

Nobody doubts the power of Facebook as a kingmaker. Its audience — and, perhaps more importantly, its willingness to control what that audience is shown — are unmatched. Zuckerberg could wake up one day and decide that interpretive dance was the way of the future, and media companies would have to at least give it a try.

So when he took the stage at Facebook’s F8 conference this week to announce that Live was not only a priority, but now completely open to any live video (hint: make it prettier), it was received with a mixture of cautious optimism and hard-earned weariness. You could almost hear the media companies respond in unison with: Sure, why not.

In conversations with a variety of media executives, the message was relatively uniform: Yes, we are investing in this, but we really hope that there’s a plan.

“Overall I think we’re really looking forward to Facebook articulating the monetization plans just so we as publishers can plan how to invest on the platform,” said Sarah Iooss, senior vice president of business development at Viacom.

Concerns about monetizing Facebook go beyond Live. The allure of Facebook’s massive reach helped boost companies like BuzzFeed — and yes, Mashable — and convince investors that their brands would soon supplant the old guard as the media titans of tomorrow.

That might still be true, but Facebook’s sluggishness to figure out how to help media companies make money in the near term has deflated expectations. In a quote that could be applied to most of the digital media industry, one source told Re/code about BuzzFeed: “They’re driving in the dark at 60 miles an hour, without headlights…but that’s still better than standing still.”

Facebook has provided some light at the end of that dark tunnel. Media executives who spoke to us on background said their own interactions with Facebook had indicated that Live would indeed have a payoff.

Facebook declined a request for an interview, but it noted in a statement that the company will “be working closely with these partners to learn from them how we can build the best Facebook Live experience and explore with them potential monetization models.”

One source at Facebook who agreed to speak on the condition on anonymity said the goal was to quickly monetize Live, with its willingness to pay some producers, including Mashable, BuzzFeed and the New York Times, an indication of Facebook’s priorities.

Facebook won’t pay media companies forever, but it’s a small taste of what could be on the way.

Penny for your live stream?

To be clear: Every major media organization you can think of has already done a Facebook Live video, and most of them are planning to do a lot more.

What will they look like? To start, most TV companies seem to want to avoid doing TV.

“We are not doing CNN TV on Facebook,” said Andrew Morse, general manager of CNN Digital Worldwide. “I think it’s an interesting opportunity, but I don’t look at it as an opportunity to do broadcast television.”

Fine, it’s not TV, but it’s pretty close. Fusion launched a broadcast-quality program on Facebook, “The Chris Gethard Show.” E! has announced a daily talk show. And CNN has a handful of shows in the pipeline.

As for what’s been popular online, the first truly viral hit came from BuzzFeed with its already infamous watermelon video. The stream received more than a 750,000 concurrent viewers and now has more than 10 million total views.

Ya gotta believe…

For all the frustration over Facebook once against moving the goal posts, there are some indications that this is the real deal.

“Facebook’s roots are a social network, but it aspires to be a full-blown media and communications company.”
For one, Zuckerberg himself is said to have placed the highest priority on the project, having reportedly been “obsessed” with building it out.

The eventual goals of Facebook also fit nicely with live video. Jessica Liu, a senior analyst at Forrester, noted that the broader ambitions of Facebook are well served by live video.

“Facebook’s roots are a social network, but it aspires to be a full-blown media and communications company,” Liu said.

“Currently, they have the community, publishers, and ad content. If they want to challenge the TV industry, they would need to successfully incorporate original programming, network programming, and major live events… and marry that programming with their user community.”

That community is key to making the Facebook Live experience better than regular TV.

“This would create a unique live viewing plus live social commentary experience that the broader TV industry can’t deliver,” Liu said.

Right now, Live is just video that shows up in your news feed, but some see the potential for more.

Jigar Mehta, vice president of digital operations for Fusion, noted that Facebook has developed a habit of spinning off successful product.

“Right now it’s starting off in the feed, but I could see a future where it’s driving another experience kind of the way Messenger is driving another experience,” Mehta said.

As for Steinberg and Cheddar, he said watching Facebook Live develop has been like seeing a highway built in front of him as Cheddar was on the production line.

With Facebook Live, he sees a focusing of the tremendous power that the social network has to level the playing field. He’s already attracting thousands of concurrent viewers, hundreds of comments and plenty of prominent guests who are eager and willing to appear on his not-quite-TV show. And it’s just week one.

This is only the start of how Facebook is going to change TV and how people consume live video — as long as it still wants to.

“Nobody’s going to have a cable box, and you’re going to watch on-demand programming and that’s going to be Cheddar,” he said. “Why wouldn’t it be?”

Author credit: JASON ABBRUZZESE

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