USA SEO Pros: Reporting Industry News

There is no denying the importance of search engine optimization (SEO). You might have the best content ever written, but if no one knows it’s there, it won’t do you or anyone else much good. SEO ensures that your website is presented to searchers so you gain more traffic and more opportunities to turn that traffic into conversions. SEO gives you opportunities, but it’s up to you to make the most of them. That’s where conversion optimization comes in. Your site needs to be optimized not just to bring visitors to it, but also to turn those visitors into paying customers.

Engage Your Visitors

You want to engage your visitors as much as possible. Think of a way to add calls to action on your website. Remember you are in charge of how you want your visitors to search your website, and to ultimately buy from you. Adding graphics, hyperlinks, and even short forms can prompt your visitor to move forward through your website, until they have officially landed on the page you want them to be. If you decide on using forms, try to keep them short and to the point, otherwise your visitor may lose interest and move away from your website, which would be a bad thing. If you have great imagery and solid content then make it easier for your visitors to obtain more information. All of this can lead to interested visitors, which in turn can bring you more business.

Provide Vital Information

Surprisingly enough, many websites do not have the right information on their landing page. If you want your visitors to continue through your website, then you have to offer them the vital information they need, like a phone number. Yes, believe it or not, many companies forget to add their contact information for visitors to find, and this could be a problem. Remember you want to engage your visitors and provide them with easy access and information throughout your website.

Grab Your Visitors’ Attention

Gain your visitors’ interest by providing incentives throughout your website. If you want to gain information from your visitors, like their phone number and email address, then give something away in exchange. People love receiving free stuff, even if they just have to fill out a short form. Taylor your website based on the type of user you expect will visit your site.

SEO can work wonders for your website and for your business. Keep your website updated on a regular basis and optimize it to gain maximum conversions. Transform your website into a well-optimized site for search and for conversions to gain the traffic and business that will make your business a success.

The last few weeks have shown a dramatic decline of community participation in the popular social sharing site, Digg. The demise was noticed when Digg stop receiving over 40 million unique visitors to its site every month after its redesign. Visitors from the US declined by 26% and visitors from the UK by about 34%. Because of this extreme user decline, it currently only takes about 200 Digg users to get a story on the top 10.

Digg is beginning to stabilize the decline and has added many features that its visitors have asked for, but the overall activity level of people still visiting the site is noticeably down as well. What are users looking for, and how can user voting sites like Digg survive?

Continuing Forward

Digg’s redesign took about 18 months to finish and it was only in beta testing for two months. The preparations for the site obviously fell short for what was needed. Digg’s VIP of Product, Keval Desai stated, “We had a game plan, and clearly it did not go smoothly. In hindsight, there are several things that could have been done better.”

The complaints that they received indicated to Digg that they still had passionate users who are loyal to the site and want things to be fixed. Now, how will they regain the users that they once had before this fiasco?

Keeping in mind the average user and how they think and maneuver, Digg and other voting sites must keep up with the demand and trends that users are expecting. Digg is still trying to meet the needs of its users and publishers large and small who make the site what it is. Even though the redesign has caused a lot of upset and backlash, Digg has recently begun to see a slow increase in user activity again. Making changes according to the habits and desires of its users has helped Digg start to gain more traffic again, though slowly.

Changing With the Times

Another voting site, Sphinn.com, has gone in a different direction that may gain better acceptance than the commotion Digg’s redesign caused. Sphinn noticed a trending decrease in voting coupled with a tendency to “game” the voting system. As a solution, instead of letting users vote for the best articles and stories on the site, Sphinn has gotten rid of voting all together. They hope to bring discussions back to the forefront by letting users add comments and suggestions to stories and articles that have been published. This allows the user to have more of a say in what is being published, without forcing the voting model. This concept could be one direction for other voting sites to take.

Concluding Thoughts

With the ever-growing trend of users desiring greater personal expression online, we might see more discussion groups popping up as user participation models continue to evolve. The ability to discuss issues separately from submitting articles has been widely popular and seems to be coming to the forefront to meet the user demands. Perhaps other voting sites might head in this direction by providing users the ability to voice their opinion in different ways other than voting. Only time will tell what will truly happen to these voting sites, and for now, users have different options to choose from to express their opinions.

The SMX (Search Marketing Expo) has already made its stop in London this year, and some interesting tips were brought up during the event. There have been several posts that list some of the more helpful tips that were discussed, and we’ll summarize some of those in this post. USASEOPros already does most of these things, but a lot of people seem to be behind the times. It’s important to keep on top of the SEO community, or it’ll leave you behind pretty quickly.

One of the posts about SMX London is a list of quotes from the event and it can definitely be helpful for marketers and SEOs. Most of these quotes come from two people who really seem to know what they’re talking about when it comes to SEO: Rand Fishkin (from the SEO authority SEOmoz) and Patrick Altoft (from Branded3). They both had some very interesting (and sometimes obvious) things to say that people should think about.

One of my favorite quotes from Rand is, “Alexa data is slightly better than random guessing.” This has always seemed to be the case, but for some reason a lot of people still believe that Alexa is an authoritative source for data that they don’t actually produce. One of the more obvious, but still little-known facts that Rand covered was that Google devalues links in sidebars and footers. If you want a link to have power, make sure to put it in the main body.

Patrick had some good things to say at the event as well, and one of the quotes that stuck out to me in the article was, “It doesn’t matter if a link is paid for or not. Important is if the end product looks like a paid link or not.” The debate between whether or not buying links is kosher has been argued for a while, and this is an interesting outlook on the situation. While Patrick obviously doesn’t mind buying links, he brings up a good point: make sure they don’t obviously look like they’ve been bought if you do decide to go that route.

A different blog post includes an attendee’s notes that he wrote up after going to the event. The post lists 41 tips that he heard while listening to presentations, and there’s some good stuff in there. Some of the better tips in the list include paying attention how your competitor’s site is set up for SEO, and also optimizing for popular misspellings (but make sure to do this in a professional way.

For an Internet marketing, the SMX events can be a great benefit to your profession. The events happen all across the globe, so when you’re unable to attend one, it’s great to see that other people are willing to spread the knowledge like the creators of the above two posts do.

There has been a debate flaring up recently. It isn’t a new debate, but with some heads of the industry taking a stand on one side or another, it’s beginning to be talked about more than usual. The discussion is about exactly how much of an effect social websites have on an SEO campaign. It isn’t difficult to see that social networking/bookmarking definitely has some effect when it comes to exposure and branding, but what about actual SEO efforts?

Some SEO companies are now selling campaigns that include social networking as part of the overall package, explaining that it effects SEO in such a way that it needs to be a part of the overall effort.

Others in the industry are on the other side of the debate and say that social accounts have a minimal effect on actual SEO. These people say marketers should stick to more traditional SEO in their campaigns. These professional don’t argue the idea of exposure, but say that the social accounts aren’t worth the effort if your concern is strictly SEO.

At USASEOPros, we have numerous social accounts all over the Internet. As an SEO company, it’s important to at least test the waters and see for yourself before you go listening to other people. Our findings seem to be somewhere in the middle when it comes to this discussion. There are definitely some benefits to be had when using social accounts for SEO, but it doesn’t seem to be as big a deal as some other companies may try to make it out to be.

Social accounts are great for a number of reasons: they can increase brand exposure, bring in new people to see what you have to offer, and can even get you a few fans. As far as regular SEO goes, social accounts do have an effect, but traditional SEO is still a very important. Social accounts aren’t a replacement for traditional SEO, they are a compliment to it.

Social accounts can be tool to help a website gain more links. If you post links to a good article or something interesting on a site, there’s a chance other people will link to it as well, and more links means more search engine power. In the same respect, there are some social bookmarking sites that have the potential to give you some good SEO juice if enough people vote on your link submission. As long as you produce things people want to see, social sites can be a useful tool for SEO. Otherwise, it may just be a good way to get exposure and do some reputation management.

If you’re curious and want to sign up for some sites that may be good to test out some of the facts of this debate, we’ve posted a blog with the eight most important social sites for marketing on our company site.

Also, here’s some video of professionals discussing social networking and marketing. The first part is embedded, the rest can be found on YouTube.