Posted on October 1, 2015 by sue

Best Social Media Management Tools 2015

Managing your social media channels can be time-consuming and therefore, expensive. Finding a great social media management tool for your business is the key to maximising the impact and ROI of this precious time resource. Despite the costs involved social media is here to stay and can be a super way of engaging with customers and finding new ones. So this begs the question – what’s the best social media management tool for my business?

Great news – the team at Seriously Social, has created an infographic comparing the best Social Media Management tools in 2015 based on user reviews collected by G2Crowd. Want to find a social media management tool that streamlines activities, cuts down on time pulling together reports and analytics and offer competitive metrics for benchmarking purposes? This is the infographic for you – see it in full below.

So What’s the Best Social Media Management Tool?

Having reviewed the cool infographic, I’m delighted to see that the tool I recommend, AgoraPulse, comes very highly recommended – scoring top or close to top in all categories – including best value! It’s not just the high scoring that’s so impressive. This is a real David and Goliath story with the small, committed team of 13 souls at AgoraPulse pitted against the goliath of HootSuite, Hootsuite has raised $260M and has a team of 550 employees. Just goes to show bigger isn’t always better!

Check out the infographic below to see the full findings.

Infographic brought to you by Seriously Social and G2 Crowd

You can read the original Seriously Social article here. If you want some advice on what the best social media platforms are for your business or how you can boost your online sales with our internet marketing expertise, please don’t hesitate to give EzSales a call on 0862108821 or use the contact form on our website. Hou can also check us out here on LinkedIN.

Posted on January 17, 2014 by sue

Internet Marketing Blogs – Top 5 to Watch in 2014

Uncover the best internet marketing blogs. There is a lot of great content to be found on the web, in fact there is so much that it can seem overwhelming. Time is precious and it can be difficult to know what blogs you should follow to keep up to date. Here are my top 5 favourite blogs, covering various important elements of interent marketing.

Website Usability

This is fundamentally important and often overlooked, which is why it is top of my list. Businesses often focus so much on how they want their website to look, that they forget to take into account how it should function. Website usability is fundamental to the success of any website. Find out how the design, layout and content of a website affects it usability and ultimately its success.

http://www.nngroup.com/articles/

Google Analytics

This is my favourite and a no brainer as far as I am concerned. Analysis how customers interact with your website is crucial to its success. Keep on top of new tips, tricks and functionality by following Google’s own blog.

http://analytics.blogspot.ie/

Search Engine Optimisation

The internet is alight with search engine optimisation blogs but my favourite is the SeoMoz blog. Now known as Moz.com, I find it helps to keep up with what is going on, best practise and changes to the Google search algorithm that significantly impact ranking. It’s also ‘white hat’ oriented so it will keep you and your websites out of trouble. Some of the articles are opinion pieces and not all the ‘experts’ agree with each other, so bear that in mind before taking any content that you read here as gospel.

http://moz.com/blog

Facebook Marketing

I love the Agora Weekly Pulse, a weekly roundup of the best Facebook marketing and advertising blogs each week with their key points in bullet form. An excellent resource to stay on top of what the Facebook Marketing experts are saying each week, without having to follow each individual blog.

http://www.agorapulse.com/blog

E-Commerce and Inbound Marketing

I wanted to include blogs in these areas, but to be honest all the bloggers that I follow occasionally, such as Shopify and HubSpot include a hard sell with their content that I dislike, this is not to say that the content is not worthwhile. The result being a name-check but no link 🙂

I hope this has proved useful and that you will learn loads to help you in your internet marketing efforts in 2014.

Posted on November 30, 2013 by sue

What is responsive web design and why do I need it?

Web design that adapts content layout in response to the device that it is being viewed on is the essence of responsive web design. Web designers and developers have had to change tack in how they handle mobile browsers. Initially, mobile websites using a subdomain such as m.mydomain.com with reduced content and a single column were seen as best practice. This thinking has changed as mobile Smartphone technology has developed.

Responsive web design adapts to the device. Customers on the website see the same content, at the same URL whether they are viewing it on an 1800 pixel desktop computer or on a 320 pixel Smartphone. The layout of the content will be very different though. Another advantage is for the client, as they only need to post content to the website once and no longer have to edit it for a mobile specific website. Given the growth in mobile internet usage it also makes sense to concentrate on one message and one website.

Internet usage on mobile smart phones and tablets has grown exponentially, it is growing faster than desktop; and will overtake it in the near future. People browsing the internet on their mobiles expect the same great content as those browsing at their desk at work and if your current web design doesn’t allow your website to display in a usable way on a Smartphone, you could be missing business opportunities.

So how does responsive web design work? Thanks to CSS web developers can now define how content will render based on min/max device and display width/ height and on device orientation e.g landscape. CSS allows up to 13 different factors to be taken into consideration and because of these multiple factors CSS media queries work better than a simple screen resolution detection system.

In Ireland we are ahead of the curve in terms of our mobile phone usage, there are more active mobile phones in Ireland than there are people. You only need to look around you on a bus or train or in a café and you will see people all around browsing the internet on their mobile phone.

Responsive web design is just one of the important factors that you need to consider when developing a new website. If you are developing a new website or redeveloping an old one – talk to us – we have lots of project management experience in this area and we can also help to recommend the right developer for your project, be it an e-commerce or a corporate website.

Posted on November 15, 2013 by sue

How to Re-Size an Image

This is a straightforward process for many of us but for small business owners who are trying to manage images on their website using a CMS, it is only straightforward once someone has shown you how it’s done!

First of all I use Microsoft Office Picture Manager to resize my images. It is available in most recent versions of Windows and the process of resizing an image is simple and straightforward.

Step 1: Find out the size of the image that you require in pixels. If you are unsure but know it needs to be the same size as other images in the CMS you can usually navigate to your website, hover over a similar image, right-click with your mouse and view image properties. Write down the size. Lets use 600×400 as an example. Width is listed first.

Step 2: Open your image using Microsoft Picture Manager. To do this locate the folder that your image is stored in. You may need to night click on your mouse and select open with Microsoft Office Picture Manager.

Step 3: Once the image opens in Picture Manager select ‘edit pictures’ from the menu on the top of the page and then ‘resize’ from the menu that appears on the right hand side once you have selected ‘edit pictures’.

Step 4: Enter the dimensions that you require into the custom width and height field. Then check the size setting summary. As you can see if I resize this image to 600pxiels wide it will only be 325 pixels high, which is too small. This means that I need to do some cropping.

Step 5: Set dimensions to the minimum size that will allow cropping from only one of either the width or height dimensions, but not both. In this instance when I set height to 400 width defaults to 737. As you can see I had to play around a little with the width to get the height to the 400 pixels that I was looking for.

Step 6: Select OK when you have the crop-able width or height that you are looking for.

Step 7: Select edit images from the top menu again and then select crop from the menu on the right hand- side.

Step 8: Crop the image to the size that you want and reposition the crop line to display the optimum section of the image.

Step 9:Select OKAY

Final step: Go to file and save as. Save the image under a different file name so that you don’t lose the original high resolution image. This is because images can’t be successfully sized up in the way that I have outlined.

I hope this helps!

Posted on October 21, 2013 by sue

What is Google Hummingbird?

Google Hummingbird is a new search algorithm announced by Google as part of their 15^th birthday celebrations at the end of September 2013. The salient part of the previous sentence is a new algorithm; this is a totally new departure and potentially affects over 90% of searches. Interestingly, the algorithm was changed about a month before the announcement and received no noticeable negative feedback from users – a sure sign of success!

Why a new algorithm?

Users’ searches have been getting longer and more specific over time. As search queries became longer and more conversational in style Google had to understand the meaning of those queries and to adapt search results accordingly. As always it was about giving the user the information that they wanted.

Give me an example

Google wants to understand what you mean when you type in a search term. First off an example: Think of some interchangeable search queries – say ‘the best ice-cream shop in my area’. You could also mean ‘the best ice cream parlour in my area’ or ‘where to get the tastiest ice-cream in my area.’ These are all long tail conversational style queries, and Google needs to know the best pages to return as a result. Hummingbird is the new algorithm that Google hopes will provide the solution. First off they need to know where you are, which they do if you have set your location.

How does Google Hummingbird Work?

To put a very complex process in simple terms, Hummingbird uses Google patents to re-write queries using synonyms, and by paying attention to all the words in that query and how they relate to one another Google Hummingbird hopes to provide the most relevant search results based on that particular query.

In other words, ice-cream and ice cream mean the same, tastiest and best probably mean the same, and shop, parlour and where to get all mean an actual place.

Here is an excerpt from one of Google’s patents:

A search query for a search engine may be improved by incorporating alternate terms into the search query that are semantically similar to terms of the search query, taking into account information derived from the search query. An initial set of alternate terms that may be semantically similar to the original terms in the search query is generated.

Hummingbird ties together the query re-writing patents that Google has filed and also builds on the latent semantic indexing that is the discovery process for finding related terms and phrases. LSI plays a key role in what is returned on search engine results pages (SERPs), learn about LSI in my earlier blog – Why content is king, the science behind the statement.

What does Hummingbird mean for me?

It seems clear that Google is working towards returning the most relevant content to any given search query. In practical terms this means that Google will continue to reward good quality content. Having a content strategy based around long-tail keywords, and paying attention to the 5 W’s (what, where, when, who and why) will pay dividends in the long term.

Sources:
Bill Slawksi, Seobythesea.com. Rand Fishkin, The Moz Blog.

Google Patent Examples:
Search queries improved based on query semantic information
Synonym identification based on co-occurring terms

Posted on October 18, 2013 by sue

How to Add a Goal To Google Anlaytics

As a copywriter and content creator I recently cringe when I look at my own blog. There are no recent posts in there because I have been so busy creating content for other people. So Five Minute Friday is my solution. Five minutes of (hopefully) useful content every Friday – no excuses, that’s five minutes of typing, it will take less time to read. I’ll let you know how long this actually took at the end…

This week: How to create a GOAL in Google Analytics.

A goal is an action that you want to measure, like time on a page, a .PDF download or submission of a contact form, or a newsletter sign up.

Log in to analytics and select admin from the account screen.
Select goals from the administration panel

Select create goal
Enter goal description and select goal type.

Destination example: thank-yous.html
Duration example: 5 minutes or more
Pages/Screens per visit example: 3 pages

If you choose destination enter the destination URL
Select ‘begins with’ or ‘equals to’. You might use ‘begins with’ to track all pages of a blog and ‘equals to’ for a specific URL, such as thank-you.html as above.
Give the goal a value if you want to measure ROI.
Verify the goal and select ‘create goal’
Edit the goal to add a funnel (path) later if required.

Note: if you want to track PDF downloads or video plays, you will need to set up event tracking.

I hope this Five Minute Friday article has been useful.
P.S. This took 10 minutes to write – I’ll need to get faster!

Posted on November 14, 2012 by sue

Why Include Video Content on Your Website?

If a picture is worth a thousand words, I have only one question, ‘What is a video worth?’

Internet marketers have been telling us for years that content is king, well in my view the king of content is video. Not any and all video, but really well produced, engaging video content. A well produced video can tell your potential clients about your product and service and if it’s good enough, set you apart from your competitors.

In Ireland YouTube registered 2.4 million unique visits in January of 2012. A unique visitor, a common measure of website traffic, is based on a computer’s IP address, not on individual people, and is determined by cookies. YouTube has changed the media landscape forever. Google purchased YouTube for $1.65 billion in 2006 and in 2010 YouTube became the second biggest search engine in the USA, according to comScore. Google’s long term plans for Google TV is to integrate YouTube into every television, via the internet, not surprising given that YouTube gets 4 billion video views per day. Apple has similar plans for AppleTV.

Google is featuring more video content in its search engine results pages (SERP’s)and getting your video thumbnail in those search results could be really valuable and here’s why. A recent eye-tracking study came back with some very interesting results. The study tracked subjects’ eye movements on the SERPs to produce a heat map. The search term “How to make pizza” produced video thumbnails in position #2 and #3 in the Google organic search engine results page. The heat map showed subjects focussed on the first video thumbnail, possibly at the expense of the number 1 organic search result. In general, where the eye focuses is where the click happens. Getting your video thumbnail in the SERPs could result in more clicks than a number 1 organic listing.

Integrating video into your website has multiple benefits; it gets your message to your potential customers in a dynamic, engaging way. Great videos means you can feature on the second biggest search engine in the USA, YouTube and getting your video thumbnail into the organic search results on Google could means more clicks, more traffic and ultimately more business.

Posted on May 21, 2012 by sue

Search Ranking Trends April 2012

Over the last month, Google has been testing what appear to be some significant algorithm changes, which have cause significant changes in ranking for a variety of sites. There are some facts and opinion below, but first I want to make sure you have some tangible actions.

1. Check to see if you’re affected, and by how much. Do a quick search on Google for your brand name, domain name and for any high-volume head terms. If you find that you are not ranking on the first page for your brand name, or if other terms have significantly slipped in rankings, then it’s a likely sign that you’re suffering. Looking at your analytics will give you more insight into how your total organic traffic is looking. This will also help you find out when your site first suffered.

2. Don’t panic, and don’t make any sudden movements. It might feel like the sky is falling around you right now – particularly if your traffic for a really valuable term has just slumped to zero – but an immediate response isn’t likely to be helpful. Also, any changes you’ve made to your site in the last few days / week are unlikely to be the cause of your particular issue; don’t worry too much about them or try to ‘undo’ things. As discussed below, there’s a chance that Google has been overzealous and made mistakes here; if this is the case, then we would expect to see some of the impact reversed in the coming days.

3. Be prepared to clean up your SEO. If your company has benefited from ‘shady’ SEO techniques, then this is a perfect time to get your house in order and take a more honest approach in future. Now would be a good time to put the brakes on any low-quality link building practices, and to start cleaning up any poor-quality techniques you’ve been using, either on-page or off-page.

A Short Timeline / Background

During March and April, Google has been sending out a significant number of messages to webmasters (via Webmaster Central) – many were ‘Unnatural Link Warnings’, telling the site owners that Google recognised ‘artificial or unnatural links’ in their backlink profile. Google also issued warnings to the SEO community about penalties for ‘over optimisation’, but with scant details on what factors they were assessing. At the same time, Google has been aggressively trying to penalise large link networks. Sites that relied on using these kinds of services for link-building suffered from the drop in link equity to their site. On 18th April, Google tried rolling out an update to recognise parked domains (and presumably reduce their rankings or remove them from search.) It was publicly announced that there was a bug in this change, which mistakenly impacted some sites. However, it’s clear that some sites are still suffering significantly lower rankings, indicating that either this update’s issues haven’t been fully reverted, or that another algorithm change has come into effect.

Our Thoughts

The effects of these changes have been an update targeting exact match domains (EMDs) that got out of hand. If I launch a slew of domains such as CheapCarSalesGalway.com with thin content and a lead generating form, then Google is probably quite right in trying not to give the site much credit. Buying EMDs is a pretty cynical tactic, that’s definitely been used as a ‘quick and easy’ way into the top results.

One theory is that Google is not mis-categorising sites, but actually mis-understanding search phrases. There’s also a strong feeling (among SEOs talking online) that Google may well admit to a mistake here, and undo or dial-back the impact of some of the recent changes. (There is precedence for this: in the days after the Panda Update, some sites saw their rankings return to roughly their pre-Panda positions). It is with this possibility in mind that we made the recommendation above to not panic.

If you are confident that your site has a clean link profile, and there’s nothing murky or egregious in your site’s SEO history, then it might be best to lie-low and see what changes over the coming days. For sites that have used any questionable tactics in the past – particularly if you have any ‘grey’ links in your profile – now would be an appropriate time to take action on that. Better still, it’s an opportunity for people to take a closer look at what might have happened in your specific case, and try to plan so your site regains its rankings and traffic. If you would like to talk about some specific issues you are having, please feel free to email me on sue@ezsales.ie and I’ll offer whatever advice I can based on the information supplied.

Posted on March 12, 2012 by sue

Internet Marketing Intelligence – Keeping up with Search Ranking Trends

Developing an internet marketing strategy requires a breadth of knowledge across multiple disciplines. You need to know:

How to develop a great website
What marketing messages are right for your product or service.
How to integrate social media messages into your strategy
How to reach your target audience and get your website found on the internet.

Staying on top of how search engines rank websites is a really important aspect of an overall internet marketing strategy. Online marketing is not the same as traditional marketing, you can have the coolest website, a great product and some cutting edge marketing messages but if no visitors come to your website, you are not going to sell any products online are you?

Google issues a very general monthly report that it labels ‘Inside Search – Search Quality Highlights’. It gives a broad-strokes overview of where it is taking its ranking algorithms, allowing you to see where the trends are heading. In February Google announced that it made 40 changes, the highest number to date, which shows that search moves quickly! Here are the major trends in my opinion:

Local Search

More locally relevant predictions on YouTube: For example a for the query [U2 in] performed on the US version of YouTube Google might predict [U2 in America], whereas the same search done on the Australian version might predict [U2 in Sydney]

Improvements to ranking for Local search results: improves the triggering of local universal results by relying more on the ranking of main search results as a signal

Improved local results: new system to find results from a users city more reliably, can now detect when both queries and documents are local to the searcher.

Freshness

Google continued its work on promoting ‘fresh’ content in the changes it made to its algorithms in February. Google disabled two old classifiers relating to query freshness, it also updated its algorithm for image search to surface fresh images when they appear on the web, they have also applied new signals which allows them to surface fresh new content more quickly when it appears on the web. Google has also consolidated its signals for spiking topics, so they can rely on signals that they can compute in real time, keeping them ‘on trend’ for the spike in popularity of a particular topic. They have also updated the data in the Panda System making the famous ‘freshness’ update more accurate and more sensitive to recent changes in the web.

Authority

Google likes authority, which means knowing that they are returning the user with a reliable source for their particular query. In February Google adjusted it algorithm to more accurately detect official pages.

Cleaning up

Google has also updated its SafeSearch algorithm for both image and search to ensure that it is better at detecting adult content in image searches and also making it less likely that irrelevant adult content will appear for most queries. Google has also worked on their auto-complete policy to make offensive and inappropriate terms less likely to appear.

Google also turned off a method of link evaluation that they have used for several years. They didn’t say which one, or how it affected links, that remains to be seen. I can be sure of one thing, having looked at the search trends over the past few months, you can bet that it prioritises high-quality in-bound links from authoritative sources and negatively affects anyone engaging in ‘black-hat’ SEO such as link-swapping or link – farming practises.

Evaluating Googles Search Insights it is apparant that engaging in a search engine optimisation strategy that focusses on great content that generates high quality in-bound links, combined with ‘fresh’ updates that engage your consumer, will reap long-term rewards. Google are trying to eridicate black-hat SEO techniques, by changing the way they evaluate links and promoting fresh relevant content. I’m certain I won’t be proven wrong on that one!

Posted on January 23, 2012 by sue

Just Why Is Content King? – The Science Behind the Statement

We get asked this question all the time and I suppose the answer hasn’t changed for some time. The way in which the search engines are tracking content however has. When a search engine is asked to search for a service provider, for example to replace a “Flat tyre”, the person looking for the service wants to find a solution, not just information. The way websites rank in the search results depends on the strength of your keywords and how frequently you have used them in the areas of your site that are crawled by search engines. They run algorithms that will seek out the frequency of your keywords and add that to the number of times that your site has been visited and again further to check how often people have linked to your site through recommendations or Backlinks. It all starts with content in this process and the algorithm is using Latent Semantic Indexing or LSI. To embrace the science, you first need to understand the basic principles and that’s important when we try to explain to our clients the benefits of having a cohesive internet marketing strategy when developing great, fresh content. We want to see reward for their efforts.

What is Latent Semantic Indexing?

LSI or Latent Semantic Indexing is a complicated term with a simple explanation. The main concept behind Latent Semantic Indexing is to discover words and phrases that are related in the context of any document or group of documents. Search engines, Internet Marketing Professionals, and Website Designers often use LSI in their day-to-day activities.

Latent Semantic Indexing is the discovery process for finding related terms and phrases. LSI is a mathematical equation that will fold words into a matrix for analysis that will draw out semantically related terms. This equation relies heavily on the context in which any given word is used. For example, if the term “flat tyre” is used in a document, some semantically related terms would be: car, vehicle, repair, wheel, tyre pressure, and wheel brace. You can see that all the words in the list are related to the term “flat tyre”.

The Inner Workings of LSI

The actual work of Semantic Indexing is very complicated and can only be performed by computers running specialised software. These computer programs will build a word and document matrix and run a semantic analysis and output the semantically related terms. These related terms are commonly known as LSI terms. These programs can analyse one document or a group of documents, one website or many websites.

How Do Search Engines Use Semantic Indexing?

Search engines, such as Google, use Latent Semantic Indexing as part of their search analysis, when trying to decide what websites will show up in their search results. The goal of every Search Provider is to provide the most relevant results for any query. For example, if a user searches for the term “flat tyre”, Google must decide what websites or documents are most relevant and display them in the search results. LSI plays a key role in what is returned on search engine results pages (SERPs).

Why is Latent Semantic Indexing Important to Me?

As teams or individuals create content for the Internet, there is often an overriding goal to have this newly created content found by the search engines. To do this, they need to use the terms that are the most related and relevant to their keyword or phrase. If I fix flat tyres, I want to be found for flat tyre repair in my city or town. My internet marketing success depends on the search engines finding my web content and showing that page in the search results when someone types in the query “flat tyre repair Galway”.

What Do You Do If YOU Don’t Have Time To Work This Out Alone?

Well, that’s easy. We help our clients to develop strong keyword strategies and then we can assist them in building great content that is LSI centric. After all, if you are committed to improving the ranking of your website, you’re going to be working on new content all the time, right? Why not work smarter rather than working harder? Allow us to guide you on the science and let the science drive your creativity by providing focus on the things that matter most.

Isn’t it great when everything works in harmony?