Happy Thanksgiving to all those of you, who regularly check your sites for issues and fix them, keep your backlinks clear and make customers happy. Here’s a brief recap of the latest SEO news so you can get back to enjoying family and friends.

Google News

Google has confirmed that a new Penguin Update 4.0 will go live by the end of 2015. Luckily for many webmasters, the upcoming Penguin iteration will process all the toxic and low quality links that you removed or disavowed after the previous manual penalty in real time. Do you remember that it took months to recover from the manual penalties of the previous Penguin updates? If you have not yet refined your backlink profile for the upcoming Google Penguin 4.0, be sure to check your backlinks for domains with a low trust level (0.30 or less) and then submit them in a list to the Google Disavow tool through the Web CEO Backlink Quality Check tool.

Google has officially rolled out its new artificial intelligence algorithm RankBrain. This new machine learning system is a part of the Google Hummingbird algorithm and the third-most important Google search ranking signal that helps to interpret and better understand non-exact match search queries on the level of an individual searcher’s intent. This means that SEO will see a shift from keywords to topic-focused research and optimization.

Google+ just recently updated its design with a heavy focus on Communities of Interests and Collections. Now the “ugly duckling” of the social media family strongly resembles the look of Reddit and Pinterest. With the new design, folks were saying that Google+ local pages forgot to add business reviews. Google then officially confirmed that business reviews will no longer be displayed on Google+ local pages, but they will be accessible when doing search via Google and Maps.

Yet again G+ received an enthusiastic response from users, but maybe not the response they had hoped for:

Yandex News

Yandex has announced that they will start to crawl CSS and JavaScript content, as a test in order to better understand the content of web pages. They are now informing webmasters to stop blocking their CSS and JavaScript files and resources. In the long-run, this will have an effect on Yandex SEO processes. Yandex has also added a mobile-friendly label to mobile search results and released a supporting mobile-friendly diagnostic tool for webmasters to make sure that their website pages meet mobile-friendly guidelines.

Facebook news

Facebook has launched lead ads! Yes, you heard right. Facebook now allows running lead generation ads (similar to Twitter lead generation cards) which collect user information, share lead capture content and make prospects complete a desired action without actual leaving Facebook. Read more on how to configure your lead generation program on Facebook here>> .

Now local businesses can promote their products on Facebook more effectively with local awareness ads. The new ad feature allows you to target groups of people who reside near your business neighborhoods.  Furthermore, Facebook has made the Instagram Ad Platform available to all marketers around the world. Now you can launch a photo or video ad campaign right from your Facebook ad management tools (Power Editor).

Twitter news

Twitter has suffered a lot of quality changes recently. One of the major updates of Twitter has been the change of the shape of its Favorite icon from a star to a heart.

Not long after this redesign trick, Twitter officially shut down its API that provides data on Tweet Share Count. Now you can’t see the number of your article Twitter shares in your social share button bar. This may have a negative impact on user interaction and social proof factors for your content.

For those of you who want to drive more user engagement and learn what followers think on this or that topic, you can now create polls on Twitter!

The post Happy SEO-News-Giving Day! appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

Social media is an effective tool for B2B marketers and has played useful roles in increasing brand awareness, establishing companies as thought leaders and growing lead conversion rates.

Broadcast media used to be the go-to place when it came to advertising. There are many benefits to be gained from broadcast media just as there are many benefits from social media. People are able to make really great strides in marketing using these platforms.

The likes of Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram, Google+ and YouTube need no introduction. Marketing on any of these platforms can bring some amazing returns. You just need to ask companies like Air Asia, Taco Bell and Safaricom (the most profitable telecommunications company in East and Central Africa).

Air Asia’s story

A well-managed company loves to have a strong brand.

The problem – small budget for massive advertisement

Air Asia is now probably one of the best known airlines. However, previously, it was just another airline from Malaysia that few people had any idea existed. What the company wanted to do is launch a new flight from Australia.

As you probably know by now, the competition in the airline business is stiff, what with the likes of Virgin Atlantic and British Airways. Such a small airline would not normally stand a chance against these major corporations because they lacked the budget to run an effective traditional advertising campaign. Air Asia still needed to raise brand awareness and they needed to do it very fast. They wanted to get the brand out there to the millions of potential customers while squeezing into a very tight budget.

How they solved the issue –> Facebook

The marketing team chose to run a Facebook campaign. They launched the campaign giving away – wait for it – a free airplane. Well, it was almost a free plane. The company created a competition on Facebook where the winner had the chance to select 302 of their Facebook friends to fly for free. The flight would be from Australia to Malaysia, absolutely free.

What you would do on Facebook is choose the friends that you want to take along with you on a hypothetical flight and then tag them in the seating plan. Take a snapshot and then share it with all the tagged friends. It was as simple as that. Did the plan succeed? Massively!

Outcome – a brand that everyone knows

Perhaps the biggest benefit was the doubling of the number of flights. The company wanted attention; it got the attention in doubles. This is on top of generating PR that was worth an approximate $1.5 million. The company was able to reach out to over 2 million people on Facebook so effortlessly. The Facebook fan base grew by a staggering 30% during the period that the campaign was running.

Why it worked – viral potential

When creating a social media marketing campaign, the goal is to make sure that it goes viral. It does not matter whether you are creating awareness about something specific or you are building a brand. It just needs to go viral for you to get the results you want and even more. A campaign with massive viral potential like Air Asia’s was set to be a great success right from the beginning. The campaign was highly social which made people want to get involved. It also harnessed the principle of reciprocity.

Taco Bell’s Story

Admittedly, if you are so accustomed to using Facebook, Twitter might be a bit of a challenge to begin with. Taco Bell, however, did not have a problem getting their social media channels engaged using Twitter. The company was suffering low engagement and fewer followers than larger brands. This did not work so well for the brand image. So, Taco Bell had to re-engage and they did this by beginning conversations with Twitter users who ad more than 10,000 followers (Twitter influencers). This increases the potential for brand mentions. The whole campaign resulted into a reach of over 600,000 Twitter followers.

Safaricom’s  Story

Social media marketing does not work in America and Asia alone; Safaricom proved this. This company based in Kenya (East Africa) is one of the most profitable corporations in Africa.

The company is famous for having some awesome advertisements on TV and radio. The same is true online. A number of the Safaricom adverts have made it to YouTube and they have great viewership. The company is known for using YouTube, Twitter and Facebook a lot.

They offer customer support on Twitter and while in the business of solving customer problems, they advertise their products. Everyone who uses Safaricom knows that if they want fast customer care, they should go to Twitter. This popularizes their Twitter handle and their hashtags.

They once gave away free smartphones on Facebook. You have probably noticed by now that Facebook users have a thing for free giveaways. Back on YouTube, they place their ads on the channels of influencers. Before you can play the latest video from your favorite artist, you will probably be watching a Safaricom advert (depending on where you are).

How will you gain from social media yourself?

The answer to this question is pretty difficult to give because it all depends on how your campaign is set up. You will need to get someone who has a good understanding of the dynamics of using social media for marketing in order to make the most of it.

For optimizing your social media marketing campaigns and tracking their success, use WebCEO’s Social Media Analytics Tools. WebCEO provides a comprehensive suite of tools designed to enhance your digital marketing strategy, improve your SEO, and streamline your social media efforts, ensuring your campaigns are effective and impactful.

The post 3 Social Media Marketing Success Stories appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

It’s almost time for summer vacation and all you can think about are beaches, forested mountains and cold beverages. But, there are also events in the digital marketing world you’ll want to think about before you hit the trails.

What’s new in SEO?

The search space has been lately engaged in an algorithm updates race.

On April 21^st Google hit mobile search with its long-awaited Google Mobile-Friendly Update and only the mice in the fields remain ignorant of this. The experts from Google pointed that Mobilegeddon was even larger than Penguin or Panda: twice as many non-mobile friendly pages lost rankings as gained after the Mobile Update. If you have not yet re-optimized your website to meet mobile-friendly guidelines, you’d better start working on it before you take that vacation.

Here is the Mobile SEO Issues Checklist you will need to check your website pages for in order to gain the rankings you may perhaps have lost.

But this is not the last Mobile-Friendly Update that comes into our view. At SMX Sydney, Garry Illyes (Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google) just said there will be another update called Platypus targeting slow page speed and app download interstitials usage.

In addition to all this noise, Google has confirmed that it is now official that there are more searches on mobile devices than on desktops. This is big news and, if you want to dominate on Google search, then the mobile search optimization strategy is in your first-rate priority do-to list.

On May 6^th, Google officially updated and renamed the Search Queries report in its Webmaster Tools. Now, in your Webmaster Tools you can find the Search Analytics report with more accurate data and filtering options.

On May 20^th, Google Webmaster Tools was rebranded into Google Search Console. Google decided to changes the ten year old name of the tool to a more universal because it is used not only by webmasters but also by website owners, SEO experts, marketing specialists, designers, web developers etc.

At the beginning of June, the Google team announced that they are going to rework the Penguin algorithm so it runs on a permanent basis. It means that there won’t be any manual actions toward ranking changes because the data will be refreshed all the time. It doesn’t mean that you can sit and relax because individual websites can still be hit with huge overnight ranking losses. This means that you will need to work towards keeping your backlink profile ever clean and genuine in the eyes of Google.

According to Search Engine Land this year the SEO Success Factors Table has been immensely updated and complemented by new factors such as the availability of Vertical Search, HTTPS and Direct Answers results. Greater Importance has been given to Mobile Friendliness and Structured Data etc.

To keeping up with Google’s updates, use WebCEO’s Online SEO tools to analyze your site’s SEO performance and ensure it aligns with the latest Google algorithms.

What is new in Social Media?

The fact that Social and Search have become more integrated and interlinked is proven by the latest Google-Twitter deal. Starting on May 19, users in the U.S. can see relevant and real-time tweets in their search results when using the Google search app on iOS and Android. That’s good news for search giants, users and for brands. Twitter promises to bring its real-time content on to desktop search and to more countries in the upcoming months.

Unlike with Twitter, Facebook doesn’t want to rely on Google and decided to build its own in-app search engine. Thanks to its own search team, Facebook is already testing the ability to crawl and return content for users without the need for them to search Google directly.

At the beginning of June, Instagram announced plans to launch InstaAds which will be labeled as “Sponsored.”

We wish you a happy summer and be sure to enjoy nature and the little extras summer brings.

The post The SEO News Recap You Should Read Before Your Vacation appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

What is the bottom line of the deal between Google and Twitter that switches the firehose back on?

You must know by now that Google will shortly return more real-time social media content to its search results because of a new Google-Twitter partnership.  Yes, Twitter will open out its arms for Google again in order to give Google the power to index and implement more Twitter data into its search results. Currently, the percentage of tweets indexed and embedded directly into Google search results is no more than 7 %. No doubt, both Google and Twitter will benefit from this deal. The Google search results will become even more timely, relevant and highly “socialized”, while Twitter will get more traffic and new users that would result in a quick boost of revenue, especially now after the February release of the Instant Timeline feature that helps mobile users simplify and automate the customization of your Twitter account (categories of interest checkup, relevant accounts following etc.).

We are all excited about the future impact of this on the current Google search algorithm hierarchy.

What Twitter performance metrics would most likely be included in Google search rankings algorithm?

The announcement of the upcoming changes will certainly affect the Google search ranking algorithm. It means that the indexation and rankability of tweets will depend on Twitter signals and metrics similar to the Google ones. Google doesn’t have to reinvent the wheel, but reorganize the old and add some new social signals which would give the end user the most relevant and valuable information. What Twitter signals that we know of would probably be used in a modified Google search algorithm?

#Hashtags are a direct indicator of relevance. Hashtags, like bells, drive users’ attention to trending news, viral content campaigns, seasonal offers or some common questions or problems. As a result, hashtags bring retweets and high user engagement. Hashtags can be abused, however.

Retweets/Favorites/Mentions are the key indicators of the user engagement rate. The more retweets and favorites, the more valuable and high quality a tweet is considered. Even now you can see that tweets for a particular keyword (often with a hashtag) that also earn retweets are “ranked” higher on Twitter search results.

Link Page Quality, similar to the Google Page Rank signal, may evaluate the quality of the pages that are linked from your tweet copy.

Tweet Volume indicates your brand presence strength.

Followers Count/Quality is a direct indicator of your brand strength and authority.

What advantages can you get from Google-Twitter search synergy?

Here are some of the obvious advantages:

• Your Twitter content found in Google search will provide you with more space and terms to be ranked for.
• Your active Twitter account will raise your brand authority and reputation in the eyes of Google
• Twitter links to your on-site content will be found more and drive traffic + engagement and interaction. Google will likely also consider these links as part of your backlink profile and this could benefit your overall rankings.

Twitter Content Management recommendations

The upcoming Google-Twitter Algo Change will provide websites with an awesome opportunity to gain more search visibility for specific terms. It means you should monitor and analyze your website promotion strategy on Twitter on a regular basis:

1. Become more socially devoted and proactive on the Twitter platform.
2. Pay more attention to highly engaging image and hashtag usage.
3. Promote various kinds of tweet forms, be it links to your blog, retweets of your authoritative followers’ content, troubling questions which drive high volume response, videos etc.
4. Track your Twitter profile rank progress in order to see if your tweets work well or not. In the WebCEO Rank Tracker, you can enter your Twitter URLs to be considered as part of your website in rank reports.
5. In addition to your Hootsuite account (create one if you haven’t yet) we recommend that you track the Twitter buzz for targeted keywords in order to keep updated with the latest business news trends alongside your own brand mentions/favorites/retweets trend. You can monitor this inside the WebCEO Web Buzz Tool as well.

To sum up,use Twitter regularly, point in your tweets to your own fascinating or relevant content on your own website. Users will love you and Google will reword you with higher rankings.

The post What Could the Google-Twitter Real Time Search Algo Do To Your Brand? appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

Have you ever had the pleasure of watching Mad Men? I am a huge fan of this TV drama series that describes the structure and code of the marketing world of the 1960s and uncovers the concepts of TV, radio and newspaper advertising campaigns and commercials in a fascinating, sticky way. This drama is full of inimitable genius characters. Here we have Don Draper with his hidden split personality, full of secrets, feminism-driven Peggy Olson with her keen desire to rule in a man’s world and many other characters we, marketers, can drive inspiration from. But what I like the most is their feel for marketing, I love the way they put teeth into effective advertising campaigns. Those guys and gals, in real life, wrote a major chapter in the history of modern marketing. I think, every marketer should watch the episode with Don’s Kodak slide projector ad pitch called “Carousel”. Isn’t it brilliant? He pulls on human sentiments but bases it all on his own experience. This helped to add a personal touch to the ad which is essential for today’s marketing approach.

What secret tools and special skills did the old marketing mad men have at hand in the Golden Age of the advertising world of the 1960s?

In a nutshell: guts, experience, creativeness and an office kit. These unalloyed salesmen brought a top flight creative mindset and genius to copywriting. Unlike today’s Internet marketers, they worked in most cases with the real products. They tested them in special test groups, where ordinary people tried, tasted, wore and slept with the products in order to spot the real pros and cons of the product in question. No special technologies were invented or used for an ad creative. The old marketing school required less analytical work and a lot of guesswork. All you needed to provide was one great idea approved by a positive nod of a client. It was the era of superiority of creativeness over accountability.

Fortunately (or unfortunately for particular reasons) we, millennials live in a totally different cyber world where the TV/Radio/Print mass media channels have been largely replaced by digital media. Blogs, Email, Paid Search, YouTube and Social Media are all new ways of driving audience attention and getting them to buy any type of product or service. With an infinite stream of information and big data, digital media has turned out to be a huge challenge for today’s marketers.  With access to more robust data, the Mad Marketing Men have evolved into Math Marketing Men. Data integration, automation, evaluation and optimization play decisive roles on the way to successful digital marketing. The only thing that has not really changed much in marketing is the vision of a customer persona profile. Сatering to what your audience needs has been crucial ever since products turned into brands and buyers turned into nearby consumers. But the methods, tools and skills used to understand, analyze, satisfy and convert people into loyal consumers has become more holistic and tangled. If Donald Draper were to work in a modern digital marketing world, he would have to sign up for multiple digital marketing tool accounts in order to find shortcuts for syncing SEO, Social Media and Paid Advertising campaigns in order to optimize digital marketing ROI.

The helping hand of Web CEO is here to direct you to the most useful and actionable digital marketing tools, most of which are recommended by experts and well tried by some of our in-house marketers.

Project Management Tools

Properly organized workflow and wisely assigned duties will benefit your final digital marketing ROI to a great extent. Try some of these cloud-based project management tools which are basically free.

Redmine is an open source (basic version) bug/task/feature tracking tool for effective digital task teamwork. Read more about the nuances of Redmine usage for project management here.

Asana is free for up to 15 team members. This project management tool is full of useful features for collaborative work under one roof. Multiple projects, task management and tracking, third-party tools integration, individual workplaces, calendars and project dashboards are all available within this one single platform.

Podio is available for free for up to 5 team members. It is an all-in-one collaboration tool that makes project progress transparent and flexible with all content and conversations integrated smoothly.

Pro tip: Don Draper would have greatly elevated his productivity level if he used a simple Kanban productivity system. The Kanban method (board) allows you to simplify project progress by splitting and visualizing it all into upcoming, current and complete tasks.

Market Research Tools

No one can tell you more about your target audience than your potential and current users. Nothing works better here than online questionnaires and surveys. Here are some industry-trusted DIY online tools that can provide you with interactive customizable consumer panel surveys, a huge database of easy-to-target respondents and interpretive reports.

SurveyGizmo is one of the most powerful and affordable survey tools available. With the help of the Survey Build tool you can create 40+ survey question types, which can be customized with your brand, and then sent to respondents via email, social media or embedded in your own site. The pricing is lower than other providers’. The basic membership charge is as low as $25/month.

SurveyMonkey is another leading survey platform that provides you with in-depth real-time market research results. A freemium version is available with 10 questions and 100 responses as the limit.

Samplify is a free market research tool that has a clean and user-friendly interface with easy-to-customize targeting and insightful reports about survey results.

Search Engine Optimization Tools

Every digital marketer should have fundamental SEO tools, which are important for keyword research and analysis, backlink checking, link acquisition, rank tracking, social engagement analysis and competitive benchmarks. All of these integral SEO tasks form the bottom line of a cohesive digital marketing strategy. If you miss any of these tasks, you won’t be able to see the forest for the trees.

Alexa is a great source of digital marketing data with comprehensive visitor traffic analysis, mobile insights, competitor metrics and basic social engagement insights. Membership pricing varies from $9.99 to $799 per month.

Compete is one of the digital industry’s old timers. They provide digital marketing experts with in depth information about your target market and your business rivals. Note that the data provided by Compete is tailored around the U.S market. The most popular solution from Compete is the Compete Pro that allows you to dive deep into your competition research, discover new proven keywords, analyze your website and check your competitors’ referral traffic. The account pricing starts at $249/month (higher than other SEO tool platforms).

Ahrefs is the most powerful and trusted link research platform with the largest index of live backlinks refreshed every 30 minutes (powered by its own search bot!). Ahrefs provides a detailed analysis of the link profile of your site compared to your competitors’ sites, plus data on new link acquisition and lost link tracking.

Google PageSpeed Insights is an open source web page testing tool powered by Google. The tool runs a number of tests regarding your site page performance in order to eliminate issues related to resource caching, assets upload/download size, JavaScript and CSS codes etc. The pagespeed insights of your pages are supplied with DIY SEO recommendations and advice, the successful implementation of which can significantly shorten your page load time and reduce your bounce rate (the page load time should not exceed 3 sec).

The Google Mobile-Friendly Testing tool is coupled with the PageSpeed Insights web page testing tool. It checks your site to see if it is eligible to be included in Google’s mobile search results in accordance with the new Google Mobile-Friendly algorithm factors. This tool is also open source and absolutely free.

KeywordTool.io is a free keyword research tool that provides up to 750+ relevant long-tail keyword suggestions based on the autocompletes of Google, YouTube, Bing and App Store search. Additional data parameters like search volume, CPC and bid competition are available in Keyword Tool Pro accounts (starting at $48/month).

Web CEO is the all-in-one SEO solution. For Don Draper it would be like a universal office toolkit that can be useful for anyone in the office. With this SEO oriented digital marketing platform you can cross out all of the above mentioned tools. If you really know the value of your time and want to run the bridge of your battleship, then Web CEO is what you need. You can conduct industry-level keyword research, technical and content SEO audits with in depth reporting and recommendations on mobile optimization. From there you can do a backlink analysis showing low quality links that you can then detox, after which you can track new link acquisition and spy on the best links your competitors have earned so you can maybe get the same ones from the same places. Add to that deep SERP tracking on 350+ global, local and social search engines (such as YouTube). Then there is the Content Submission Tool, the Site Audit tools, the Internal Links Optimization Tool and other SEO related features. 12 of 14 SEO tools are available for free (no time limits and no credit card required).  One of the unique free features that every digital marketing geek would love about Web CEO would be the ability to brand your SEO reports with your company or clients’ logo and color scheme. You can even host your own white label SEO tools or read-only SEO reports on your own website (via API or CNAME to a sub-domain)! With automatic report mailing, scheduled scanning of multiple projects and batch operation management, Web CEO can keep a modern web agency humming with progress reports that bring in hard cash. Customizable task lists can also be used as a project management tool and reporting system. There is even a great Social Media Metrics tool which will do most of the functions mentioned in the next section. Take this shortcut and start monetizing your SEO with Web CEO.

Social Media Marketing Tools

Google Social Analytics (Acquisition reports) is the first account you should sign up for in order to be socially plugged in! By tracking your social traffic you will be able to measure the progress of your organic social media campaigns. Here you’ll find some critical data on social network referrals, landing page engagement, social conversions etc. This data will help you keep the pulse on the social media performance of your site and identify your most viral content.

Buffer is a content curation and distribution tool that will save you a lot of time. It is a must-have tool for those digital marketers who have multiple accounts and a huge base of followers whom they want to keep updated with the latest information about company updates and industry news.

Hootsuite is a powerful social media management and marketing tool that Don Draper would fall in love with. Use it for the efficient management of your multiple social assets and workflow, collaboration with your marketing fellows and to bring your social media marketing campaigns in line with the time you have to spend on them. At the time of this writing, Hootsuite’s retweets did not include a presentation of the Twitter image of original Twitter posts, but that is a minor issue they should clear up quickly. The tool can be a real social media time-saver.

ManageFlitter is one of a number of nifty tools to use when you are following more people on Twitter than are following you back. Twitter only lets you follow 2000 people before it sets a limit of not allowing you to follow more than 20% more people than follow you back. No matter how popular you become, you may have to use a tool like this to unfollow enough people to keep following those new people who are really interested in your business. For Google+, there is a similar service called Cycloscope that lets you know whom you’re circling but who are not circling you back.

Facebook Page Insights is for the social analytics of your Facebook page. Analyze the engagement, likes and shares and other metrics of your page posts alongside your competitors’ page performance in order to improve your organic facebook reach and outperform the competiton.

Facebook Ads Manager is the essential tool for multiple Facebook ad campaigns management. With the help of Ads Manager you can optimize your ads for better conversion and customize your targeted audience. You can also use pixel tracking to reach the people who are most likely to take action on your ads (retargeting).

Content Marketing Tools

Content is the way to drive peoples’ attention to the product you offer. Statistics show that 90% of all online companies market with content. Don’t become one of the 10% who pull up the rear.

Google Alerts is the best free alert email notifier about the latest news around the web. All you need to do is specify targeted keywords and the frequency of the individual alerts you want to receive in your email. With Google Alerts you can be the first to elaborate around an issue regarding a hot topic, thus increasing the odds of a blog or social media post going viral which can then help you win first page rankings for your keywords.

BuzzSumo is one of the best content generation tools that can help you get new ideas for your future posts, examine what kind of content works best and find new influencers in your niche. Be sure to follow these influencers from your active and now-popular social media accounts.

Quora is certainly the most authoritative Q&A platform showing crowed-sourced expert answers for any topic. You can use Quora as both a content alert forum, a content distribution channel (write answers to questions that relate to your business) as well as a lead generation tool (if someone is asking about where they can find a product that can do what yours does, you may want to pounce). Create a profile, follow all the topics and questions you are interested in + get alerts to your email box about the latest answers. You can use Quora as a content distribution tool by sharing links to your website and blog posts within your relevant and helpful answers.

MailChimp is an email marketing tool that automatically sends regular newsletters and reminders to your customers about industry news, company updates as well as your latest blog posts, special offers etc. With this leading email marketing provider you can easily personalize email templates and send them to the right people at the right time. MailChimp is also great for mobile email marketing.  Remember that keeping in touch with current and prospective users is the easiest and most savvy way to retain active users and stir up inactive ones.

PPC/Advertising Tools

Google AdWords is a paid advertising platform powered by Google. It is a traditional online advertising scheme that makes your ads visible to searchers when they enter relevant queries on Google search. The process of an ad campaign setup is simple. You launch an ad that is attached to your branded or other targeted keywords, set a budget for your campaign and pay Google for every click on your ad.

AdRoll is a cross-platform and cross-device retargeting provider that will help you run multiple retargeting campaigns on the Web, Social Media, Desktop and Mobile. It is a more effective type of advertising than Google AdWords since it reaches the people who have already visited your site and follows them with your retargeting ads onto other websites and platforms.

Taboola is the new word in the search engine marketing world. This tool is the perfect combination of Native Advertising and Content Marketing tools. Instead of spending your budget on less effective paid banners, you’re better off spending your time and money on the monetization of your branded content. Taboola will help you bring targeted highly engaged traffic to your dedicated landing pages, blog posts, infographics or other viral content via third party publisher sites where your content will be featured as sponsored, relevant material. Simillar approaches are offered by Zemanta and Outbrain.

Conversion Rate Optimization Tools

Conversion is at the top of the digital marketing funnel. If you master the subtleties of conversion rate optimization, you will benefit from well converted traffic and high rankings. Your landing pages are the first content assets on which to run A/B optimization tests in order to make changes that can boost your website conversion rate. Here are some tools that will help you.

Clicktale is designed specifically for the analysis of user behavior on your website. Features provided by the platform include Conversion Analytics, Experience Center and Session Replays. The pricing is based on the solution you buy.

Crazy Egg is a great and easy-to-use heat map tracking tool. You will love it because it gives you a view of what areas of your landing pages are more and less clickable. This can help to maximize your optimization of valuable spots with call-to-actions in order to generate more conversions.

Tip: Try to keep your list of essential digital marketing tools to a minimum in order to avoid a tool overload. If you spend more time trying to master a tool than on getting results from it, then dump it like Don Draper would have done.

The post 30 Digital Marketing Tools the Real Mad Men Would Have Wanted appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

Boasting one thousand friends on Facebook doesn’t mean you’re cut out to create a major social media (SM) marketing campaign. If you want to dominate in the SM landscape, you need to learn from the greats, take risks, and avoid making any moves without plenty of market research.

Ready to get inspired?

Let’s check out some of the best SM marketing campaigns from 2014 to find your motivation.

Urban Decay’s Coachella-Meets-Cosmetics Contest

Nothing goes better with cosmetics than a fashion show turned music festival like Coachella. There’s a certain image that’s reflective of Coachella that’s part boho, part hippie, and 100 percent Pinterest-worthy.

Urban Decay used Pinterest to host a contest to create the best Coachella looks – using UD makeup whenever possible, of course. The best looks won tickets to the festival, but really everyone was a winner because fans enjoyed the diverse fashion designs presented during the contest.

The takeaway? Urban Decay’s SM campaign did everything right, starting with targeting the correct audience. It encouraged interaction with the brand via a large, popular music festival and created a scenario where everyone wins. UD’s Pinterest page gained over 51,000 followers on one board alone! Consider coupling an upcoming event with your brand in a fun way to gain follows.

Mashable’s Easter Egg Vine Competition

Easter is a played out holiday from the commercial perspective. There are rabbits laying eggs. There are chocolates and marshmallow Peeps. The jelly-bean-infused holiday was basically begging marketers for something out of the ordinary.

This year Mashable reinvented the Easter egg decorating tradition with a Vine competition asking users to create the best holiday egg. The most creative entries received recognition in a follow up article.

The takeaway? Mashable coupled a fun holiday tradition with a social media contest, allowing users to participate by creating a video. Audiences love the chance to be recognized for their creative talents. Find new, exciting ways to implement the holidays into an SM campaign for maximum impact.

Tiffany’s Instagram Video

If you query “Tiffany blue” on Etsy alone, you’ll get more than 22,000 results. There’s something about that iconic blue, which is why when #Tiffany created its own hit Instagram video, it was an instant classic revisited.

The video itself is simple, rich with that signature hue and garnered thousands of likes in hours.

The Takeaway? Nostalgia resonates with consumers. Even if your brand is too new to be considered classic, you can experiment with nostalgic marketing on social media platforms to appeal to your audience.

Microsoft’s Use of LinkedIn

Microsoft turned to LinkedIn, and the outcome was a viral SM campaign. LinkedIn, the third most used social media platform according to research, is optimal for SM campaign success.

Boasting close to 2 million followers, Microsoft dished up a view of the company that’s never been seen before (a real behind the scenes peek), welcomed questions, and doled out blogs on thought leadership that had entrepreneurs and techies squealing.

The takeaway? Use social media to offer an inside look into what makes your brand tick. Communicate and update often – and always offer topnotch content that brings something new to the conversation.

Four Seasons Job Ads via Video and Content on LinkedIn

The hospitality giant Four Seasons also found great success on LinkedIn, where it knew professionals were making hotel and travel reservations by the bucketful.

Four Seasons neatly places job ads within fantastic selections of video and content. This allows them to target prospective employees while simultaneously offering great content, which is a winning situation for the company, its prospective employees, and its audience.

The takeaway? Be strategic as you plan your SM marketing campaign. Opt for killing as many birds with a single stone as you possibly can. It saves resources and also helps attract the right people to your brand, as advocates and even as possible employees.

Rotten Tomatoes’ Participation on Google+

Rotten Tomatoes is doing it right on Google+. It posts often, keeps its content current, and offers its latest reviews in an easily digestible format. Its niche can’t be unsuccessful. Everybody loves movies and shows. It is one of the things that connects people all over the world.

The takeaway? Give your audience what they want, and give it to them often. Rotten Tomatoes’ Google+ following of over 13 million speaks for itself; people depend on the brand for daily updates on their favorite shows.

Domino’s #letsdolunch Twitter Campaign

For people who love Twitter and pizza (and who doesn’t?), the #letsdolunch campaign is a worthy candidate for this list. It got fans talking, interacting and engaging while bonding over the idea of affordable pizza.

To enhance the campaign, pizza prices in some parts of the world were slashed in half for key lunch periods. All that was needed to score the deal was use of the hashtag #letsdolunch.

The takeaway? If you’re not the business to offer free pizza, offer an amazing deal that can’t be refused – then sit back and watch as your brand becomes recognized.

Not all social media campaigns will be successful, and there’s no guaranteed way to go viral. But with a lesson from those who did it right in 2014, you can also score big with a strategic SM marketing campaign.

For analyzing the effectiveness of your social media campaigns and to gain insights on how to improve them, use WebCEO’s Social Analytics Tool to make informed decisions and refine your strategies for better engagement and ROI.

The post 7 Examples of Killer Social Media Marketing Campaigns from 2014 appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

Welcome to Fright Night (also known as All Hallows Eve which comes before All Saint’s Day)! We are all anxiously awaiting the second most commercially successful holiday in the United States. Social media explodes during this time of year, whether they are posting pictures of their cutely costumed kids or showcasing their ornately carved pumpkins, the social network platforms light up like a Jack O’ Lantern in October.

Americans spend over 7 billion dollars a year on Halloween related items with the average consumer bleeding around $77 dollars from their wallets. How can we cast a spell on all our social media trick or treaters and have them coming to our haunted house for Halloween? What sort of tools do we need to carve out our niche on these pumpkin filled platforms for some screaming success?

Here are five, eerily effective and uniquely unmasked ways to watch your online cauldron boil over with devilish delight:

#1 – SCARY SWAP

Facebook has a site for National Costume Swap Day, which is a relatively new trend online. See if there is already one in your area and if not, start one up. Whether you are promoting your own event or sharing one with others, you can still have a ghoulishly good time connecting with your freaky new friends.

#2 – TERRIFYING TWEETS

Consider challenging your audience to a “most terrifying tweet” contest or perhaps a “cutest costume” campaign for kids or pets (kids, cats and dogs rule social media).

To get your hashtag really moving, think about turning your brand or company into something more Halloween relevant just for the spooky season. For example, Mary’s Pizza could become #scarymaryspizza or Ted’s Auto Repair might be termed #terribletedsauto. Search for Halloween terms online and you’ll see a whole vocabulary of frightening words and phrases to use.

Even if you don’t promote an actual contest or event, you can still Tweet, post and pin your Halloween themed messages and ask that others do the same. You will connect positively with your audience, engaging them to share their own macabre messages.

#3 – FREAKY FREEBIES

Everyone loves free stuff, especially around the holidays. Offer your audience a variety of different Halloween themed items, for example you can upload pumpkin carving templates, party planning tips, alternative pumpkin recipes, any other unique or original ideas you may have. When you post these on a social media site, give a partial intro for your item and then link it back to your website or blog.

#4 – ZOMBIE ZONE

Using a specific theme or popular character, like zombies, sponsor a new local event that you can repeat annually. You could have a Zombie Zone at a neighborhood park, play Zombie football, baseball, basketball or go golfing with Ghosts and Ghouls. Start a new charity, a Witches Walk for Wildlife Preservation or a costumed run for disease research. Promote your event on various platforms, link registration and other details back to your website or blog. These types of get-togethers are growing in popularity and give your brand a positive image.

#5 – PULVERIZING PUMPKINS

Smashing pumpkins (not the defunct rock band) is a popular Halloween pastime. Start a campaign or contest inviting users to upload their photos and videos of them doing so. Ask for original ways that they are pulverizing their Jack O’ Lanterns, carved or whole. Offer your own unique method with which you destroyed your Halloween fruit. Don’t just drop one off a rooftop, try something different, a sledge hammer perhaps, maybe drive over one with your pickup truck. You’ll see a lot of traffic and attention for viewing these images.

Now that Halloween is almost here, before long we will be ringing in the New Year. Get your spook on and be ready to ramp up your marketing strategies for the holiday season. Make sure to analyze your social media marketing effectiveness using the social media monitoring tools from Web CEO.

The post 5 Spookily Effective Social Media Tactics to Drive Your Marketing This Halloween appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

“To be or not to be…” on social media? This question keeps stirring up the minds of millions of people concerning the issue of their brand’s or company’s presence on social media channels. The challenge is that no one can clearly measure the ROI of social media in pursuit of getting the most bang for the buck. Furthermore, no one can directly point to social signals as the ranking factor, even Matt Cutts hesitates.

Do you remember when, earlier in 2010, Matt Cutts kept telling us that social signals have nothing to do with ranking factors and have nothing to do with the overall Google algorithm? Then later, at the end of 2010, he reported on the direct impact of social shares, likes, tweets and +1s and other ways of social signals on the positive rankings in search results? But later, in January 2014, he fully denied the ranking power of social signals. The bottom line of Matt Cutts’ message was that Google doesn’t rely on your social profile performance as a source for extracting and analyzing data, since Google doesn’t have full access to crawl some leading social media platforms. However, Cutts suggests that social networks are a place with a strong presence of prospective leads (followers and interactivity in the same field of business). In other words the main goal for a company pursing a social media campaign is to build a brand’s authority and drive targeted traffic.

What is the state of Social Media in 2014?

Let’s have a look at a recent report made by Shareaholic (click to enlarge). You can see that the growth of social referrals dominated over that of organic search traffic.

Can we think of the biggest social media channels like Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, Google+ as Social Search Engines? Yes, absolutely! Millions of folks use social networks as the way to search not only for people, but also for news, trends, hot topics, leads and a lot more. The profiles in the social space are web pages similar to Google SERPs, and the news feed posts are search results specific for each and every user. So, we can easily call Social Media Optimization as the new SEO (we can call it Social Engine Optimization).

To give credence to the statement that social media is the new SEO let’s have a look at Google search results regarding the query “Forbes” (click to enlarge).

What do you see? That’s right! We see social results in organic positions 4and 5 and the right hand column shows special page results for the term “Forbes.” The more popular the term, the higher social results appear. Social engines give a boost to the most popular social profile pages and brands’ fan pages with a large number of likes, retweets, +1s treating them as if the page owners efficiently conducted white-hat link building by spreading the content pieces throughout the internet with the help of others who thought the content was interesting.

Read more about how important social media is and how to track the rankings of your Google+, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube profile pages with the help of the WebCEO Rank Tracking tool.

What are the most popular social engines in 2014? And what are the most effective social marketing optimization tips?

From the screenshot above, we can count 3 top social media platforms that score well on Google in 2014.

Google+

The first and main reason to play on the Google+ platform is that it is highly integrated with other services and features of Google and Google has full access to its own platform. Let’s see what we have:

• YouTube integration with Google+ accounts.
• Local search results display through Google+

• Organic search visibility thanks to your added circles (followers) newsfeed distribution.
• Featured search results display.
• Authorship markup content distribution in search results which has a strong positive impact on rankings.
• Google+ business pages are indexed more properly and effectively.

Facebook

The current Facebook policy makes users and businesses pay for “hanging out on the playground.”  Everybody noticed the recent news feed algorithm change and the update of a new look for ads (they are getting bigger) in the right hand column. This all means that only big boys who are stronger and smarter will run the game on the playground. Organic visibility is at a lower level now than in the past. The latest statistics indicate that only 6% of your branded company page posts appear in your audience’s newsfeed, unless you promote sponsored posts. Let’s be honest, free fair play is not for Facebook. Promote (pay) or get out!

Twitter

The latest update of the Twitter page layout has caused a lot of controversy.

On the one hand, the improved visualized content (bigger resolution of photos and video) is part of a promising trend, since it attracts more and more customers by making a company’s content catchy and highly targeted.

On the other hand a lot of users claim the new look reminds them more and more of Facebook.

Along with the new header and profile page images there is another positive feature of the upcoming Twitter layout that would bring benefits to business-oriented customers. You will be able to pin the most important messages within your timeline to the top of your profile page. This feature is useful for discount and sale promotional campaigns, for a specific hashtag display that would attract additional traffic for the term, etc.

Take advantage of Twitter social marketing, because it is a growing force.

Don’t underestimate Social Media Marketing. Although most social signals come with the “rel=nofollow” attribute, they help you to build dofollow relationships with your lead prospects and increase your targeted audience traffic.

Meanwhile, we can’t hide great news from you any longer – soon the WebCEO Social Metrics tools will be expanded with great social media tools! The Social Citations report will track social activity backlinking to your target pages on Facebook, Google+ and Twitter. It’ll also help you analyze your competitors’ activities to set realistic benchmarks for your brand. The Social Traffic report will show visits that social channels bring to your pages. This information is essential if you are serious about your social media marketing (as you should be!).

The post Does SEO stand for Social Engine Optimization in 2014? appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

Twitter now shows protected tweets in its search results. But don’t worry, not all users will see them. These tweets will be shown only to the user who has the protected account, and to that user’s followers, according to a recent tweet from Twitter.

“If there’s a small website that you think should be doing better in Google, tell us more,” – asked Matt Cutts recently on Twitter. Google notices this survey will not affect rankings, they just want to know about small qualitative websites.

Since the beginning of August the only way to submit a reconsideration request to Google is if there is a manual action in the manual action viewer in your Webmaster Tools account. Recent Matt Cutts released a video explaining this. He says Google receives about 5,000 reconsideration requests per week through Google Webmaster Tools. Google reviews each reconsideration request and responds to almost every one.  Now they hope to reduce the number of warrantless requests they have to answer.

To effectively manage your online presence and keep up with such changes, consider exploring WebCEO’s suite of Online SEO Tools, which can offer valuable insights and help in optimizing your website’s performance.

If you manage multiple AdWords accounts for your business, you will be glad to know that Google announced cross-account conversion tracking and search funnel reporting. With Cross-account Conversion Tracking, you can now measure conversions across all your accounts with a single tag. You just need to create one snippet of code to use across all of your accounts and ensure a conversion is counted just once across accounts.

And one more improvement from Google: They’ve heard users feedback and made AdWords Test Accounts easier to manage and accessible via the User Interface. If you have an existing test account, you may continue using it as well. And now all test accounts are designated with a prominent red “This is a test account” label.

The post SEO News from Matt Cutts, AdWords and Twitter appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

Google says they are unifying all their AdWords display tools in one easy and streamlined location. The Contextual Targeting Tool, the Placement Tool and the Google Ad Planner are now moved to the new Google Display Planner. Google says this will let you add all the keywords, placements or other targeting ideas you choose directly into your campaigns with just one click.

Google updated the link schemes document under their Webmaster guidelines. Link building is getting even tougher. Now massive article marketing and guest posting campaigns with keyword-rich anchor text links are no-no. Google is also against links with optimized anchor text in articles or press releases distributed on other sites. To navigate these changes and ensure your backlinks align with Google’s guidelines, WebCEO’s Backlink Checker can be an invaluable tool. He can help you analyze the quality and relevance of your backlinks, aiding in the adaptation to Google’s evolving standards.

Twitter is finally rolling out kind its version of “universal search results” on Twitter.com.

There are three primary changes to Twitter.com’s main search results panel:

• Accounts are now mixed into the search results.
• Photos are now showing as search results.
• There’s also a new Photos tab on the left, joining the “Results” and “People” filters.

The post SEO News: AdWords, Link Schemes and Twitter Search appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.