Take 3D Photos (Anaglyph or Stereo) on Windows Phone 7 with ShutterPro

3D videos and photos are new fascination of modern world. From 3D TVs to 3D cameras capable of taking 3D videos and photos are available in market. But that doesn’t mean your good old digicam is obsolete. In fact if you have two webcams connected to your PC then you can take 3D videos using Red Cyan Camera software.

Now if you own Windows Phone 7 based mobile phone, then here is good news for you. You can now take 3D stereo photos or stereoscopic photos with your smartphone camera. ShutterPro is free app for Windows Phone 7 phones which lets you add many filter to photos taken from phone camera and make it look awesome like taken by pro photographers.

Once you install ShutterPro on your Windows Phone 7, go and start ShutterPro app. Under app settings you can set how you would like to take pictures, using dedicated camera button or tap on screen to take pictures. Under share tab you can share photo taken using shutter pro on facebook.

If you want to take 3D photos then you need to set 3D stereo or 3D anaglyph it under effects before taking photos. As the procedure to take 3D photos is not one click process. You need to take two different photos for that.

For all other photo effects, you can either select effect first or take photo and then apply effects. Once you got the picture of your choice you need to tap on save button. ShutterPro offers following effects, normal, negative, black&white, sepia, solarize, multicolor, tilt shift, 3D anaglyph and 3D stereo jpeg. Each effect also has different modes and settings which you can change from customize button.

Overall ShutterPro is pretty good app for those who want to make their photos awesome but doesn’t have photography skills. With ShutterPro you can instantly make them cool looking ready to be shared on your social network.

Pros: Easy to use, has good number of photo effects, lets you take 3D photos.

Cons: ShutterPro free version adds watermark on every photo taken using ShutterPro.

Download ShutterPro Windows Phone 7 App.

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Forget SEO: Here’s How to Write a Post That Goes Viral

You don’t have to write in order to get the attention of Google algorithms… you have to write in order to get the attention of people who will share it.

So, let’s kick SEO to the curb and just write viral posts.

If you think that sounds like I’m out of my mind I can point to at least two large publications that pretty much did that.

The New York Times and The Atlantic.

The New York Times focused on building a brand, loyalty and a community, unlike content farms like About.com who depend strictly upon SEO. This is how NY Times actually profited when they installed their pay walls…an issue that a lot of people thought would fail.

On the other hand, when The Atlantic took down its pay wall in early 2008 it grew its web audience from 500,000 to over 13.4 million visitors a month.

You think they did that on slick SEO moves? Not all.

They added a number of high-profile writers to drive content, created two new online properties and built up digital ads to pay for those properties.

They also changed their editorial strategy to adapt to the social media landscape to maximize these platforms as sources of traffic. They now get over 40% of their traffic from social media.

Scott Havens, an exec from The Atlantic told Mashable, “Truly [our writers] are not really thinking about SEO anymore. Now it’s about how we can spin a story so that it goes viral.”

So, would you like to know how to spin a story so that it goes viral? Let me show you. It’s pretty darn simple…

Step #1: Write your own headline using this technique

The Atlantic writers are responsible for coming up with their own headlines. This is no easy task, but there are certain methods you can use to creating a viral-worthy headline.

One approach I use a lot is the 4 U’s.

• Useful – A great headline always communicates to the reader a benefit. Makes sure it is an emotional benefit that solves a real need that your reader has. For example, How to Make Your Small Business Stand Out with These 8 Marketing Twists is very clear about what you will get if you read this post. How-to posts are naturally very useful.
• Unique – How does your headline stand out from the competition? Have you tested it on Google to see if other people have used it? If you find copycats…change yours.
• Ultra-specific – Next in line is to write a headline that describes your article clearly and distinctly. This is where using numbers and exact names comes in handy like Joel Friedlander did with 3 Simple Ways to Turn Your Website Archive into Profitable Books and eBooks.
• Urgent – The most common way to generate urgency in your readers is to give them a deadline like Why You Might Want to Delete Your Google Browser History Before Next Week. Another way is to simply tell your readers that something is broke…and they need to fix it. Chris Garret’s 3 Ways to Fix Your Broken Marketing is a good example.

Now a lot of the headlines I shared have all or some of the 4 U’s in them. The key to a great, viral-worthy headline is to get as many U’s in it as you can.

Step #2: Allow professionals to rewrite your headline

You may be the master of your content…and you may have used the 4 U’s to create a screaming good headline, but that doesn’t mean it couldn’t be better.

It helps to have someone else…someone who is trained in headline writing…to rewrite it for you. That’s what The Atlantic does.

After the writer submits his or her article with the preferred headline…the channel editors will often rewrite the headline.

And after that, the homepage editor will probably rewrite it, too.

But that’s not all. Those headlines are often rewritten to appear on Twitter or Facebook.

Step #3: Write killer content

Let’s admit it: SEO, copywriting, content marketing…even social media…it’s not all that sexy. It’s hard to get people excited about the possible problems the Penguin update created or the 15 newest Twitter metric tools you should be using…

Let alone have that article go viral.

So what should you do? You need to turn your ideas into killer content. Here are four approaches:

• Controversial – A “controversy” is something that is debatable or questionable. Too many people believe that Google rules search to think that this is a controversial subject. But if you write about how Google is spying on you…that may cause some heads to turn. The key is to hit people’s hot buttons…stuff that they hold near and dear to them…or hate passionately. One of The Atlantic’s all-time popular posts on Facebook is Why Do Smart Men Date Less Intelligent Women? And the post is over 14 months old.
• Trending – What is hot on Google Trends right now? Can you spin an article to tie into the Zombie apocalypse? Or the 2012 Olympic? What celebrity is in the news? For example, the term “bath salts” is popular right now. You could write an article called “How to Make Your Product as Addictive as Bath Salts.” Over at The Atlantic a popular article is America Has No Idea How Few Gay People There Are…taping into the same-sex discussions going on.
• Lists – This is a standard that has been used and abused forever…but people still like them. They are an easy way to consume content and are great to share. That’s why you have entire websites like Listverse devoted to lists. Buzzfeed creates some of the best viral list posts like 40 of the Most Powerful Photographs Ever Taken and The Atlantic always has a popular top ten such as The 10 Things Economists Can Tell Us about Happiness.
• Inspirational – If you’ve ever spent a significant amount of time on Reddit you realize that there is a lot of truth to the saying that users there are sophisticated, crass and skeptical. In spite of that, however, it’s unbelievable how much inspirational content gets voted up. I guess people like stories that inspire them…especially when the underdog wins. A great example of that on Copyblogger was Why James Chartrand Wears Women’s Underwear. Great stuff!

There are dozens of different strategies to writing killer content. These were just a few of my favorites I wanted to share.

Does this mean SEO is dead?

No, SEO is not dead. And no I don’t say that just because I’m an SEO consultant…

Now, SEO has changed a lot and one thing that we can’t ignore anymore is that social is really starting to push how search rankings are determined. For example, Google+ and Search Plus Your World were straightforward moves by Google to not only pick up more users, butinfluence the way people search.

Plus a recent study by branded3 has proven that tweets in fact do affect search position.

So SEO is still part of the game, just not as much as it used to be. It used to be the way to online success was getting to that number one position. These days it’s all about writing viral worthy posts.

So what do you think the future of SEO is?

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How to Make Your Small Business Stand Out with These 8 Marketing Twists

Getting attention in this cluttered world of products and marketing messages is a very difficult task.  And to make matter worse, it’s really hard to compete with the big brands that seem to have endless supplies of cash to throw at advertising.

Does that mean that you as a small business should just give up and not compete? Absolutely not! There are dozens of ways that you can use to get the attention your product deserves without breaking the bank…here are my favorite eight:

Marketing Twist #1: Convert brand detractors to brand evangelists

Dell frequently holds what’s called a customer advisory panel. This is different than a focus group in that Dell does not have a product for the panel to test out.

All Dell wants from these customers is feedback…both good and bad.

Dell is extremely open about these panels, and what they learn. During a recent panel Dell learned five things:

1. The emotional link with customers was broken.
2. Their advertising was misleading, but their products and support were reliable.
3. The customers on the panel were astounded that a company the size of Dell actually listened to customers.
4. Customers still cared about Dell, and there was a small army of Dell ambassadors defending the company and helping other customers.
5. They needed to deliver better customer service.

The sweet thing about this experience is that it converted a lot of Dell’s detractors into believers.

And this experience also highlights the need for you to continually monitor your brand across the social media landscape.

Marketing Twist #2: Influence brand ambassadors

From the very start, the $100 yoga pants maker, Lululemon, decided to go grassroots when it came to growing their revenue. To do this they gave local fitness experts $1,000 worth of free gear in exchange for wearing their pants when they worked out.

This worked since students of these fitness experts looked to them as authorities…and if they saw them wearing a particular pair of pants…then they were likely to buy a pair, too.

Lululemon says that the brand ambassadors…the fitness experts in this case…lead the company and their marketing, and not the other way around. That may sound counterintuitive, but in the end, this tactic leads to a stronger brand since these local experts are on-the-ground, accessible virtual salespeople.

Sales projections for 2012 are around $1 billion. This strategy of letting customers create and control the marketing is a unique marketing twist…but it works.

Marketing Twist #3: Go guerrilla

Spending less money is the name of the advertising game for small businesses, so no wonder that guerrilla marketing can provide huge promotional benefits without taking a huge bite out of your pocketbook.

In addition to that, guerrilla marketing is perfectly suited for small businesses that usually thrive on the local customer base.

The other nice thing about guerrilla marketing is that it usually fits with your offline promotions. This means an idea that goes viral online or offline will transition to the other one without much effort.

For example, this is what happens when you have couponing on Foursquare or with QR readers. Sometimes magazine ads will encourage readers to text to watch a short documentary.

That means this is also another way to measure your marketing effortswith metrics like cost per impression or cost per customer.

One guerrilla marketing tactic is to use wild postings. These are a grassroots effort at advertising that involves plastering dozens of posters with your message across a city. These posters are put upon buildings or construction sites, subway trains or alley ways.

These posters range in sizes from 28 by 40 inches to 45 by 45 inches and are hung either horizontally or vertically…side by side and one on top of another to cover a large, particular area.

The cool part about guerrilla marketing is that the image is often hard to ignore, as in these Shepherd Fairy posters:

In addition, these posters can be used indoors, and are usually of a smaller variety…like 11″ x 17″ street posters. Some posters use static-cling or magnets to attach to building material.

Marketing Twist #4: Get ambient

You’ve probably seen it on taxis or buses when these vehicles have been changed into a rolling advertisement. LivingSocial promoted its business by giving passengers of London taxis the opportunity to take a chance about where they were going by rolling a pair of dice.

Amnesty International put a woman in a clear suitcase, and then set that suitcase on an airport carousal to promote their efforts to end human trafficking.

News photographers streamed to the airport to capture the ambient ad, which then spread the message as they took their messages to the air waves.

IKEA built a hotel, and then furnished it with their furniture as a way to create an ambient experience that promoted their company.

Then there is Apple’s Genius Bar. This ambient experience allows lovers of the brand to actual connect with other brand lovers…and people who work for Apple…which are brand lovers themselves. To top it off, Apple built these bars in really cool locations that people wanted to go to.

Marketing Twist #5: Get personal

Self interest is one of the strongest motivators behind customer purchases. People want to see themselves in your products…they don’t want to see you.

Intel managed to create a campaign where people didn’t care what Intel actually did…create second-generation Core processors…they just saw the results. And the results were all about them.

The campaign was called “Visually Smart” and involved a Facebook app called “The Museum of Me.” That app tapped into your account and, in a matter of seconds, took photos and content to create a gallery that was all about you.

As you can probably imagine, it became a viral success. In just 5 days the app received 1 million hits. Keep in mind that there was not any paid promotion at all…just the cost of creating the app.

The beauty of this campaign is that Intel educated customers about a complex product like a processor…and they did it in a measurable way, namely web hits and likes.

Marketing Twist #6: Raise the stakes

When you give your customers a reason to care…they will do anything for you. That was the basis behind an AOL-owned About.me billboard advertising campaign.

About.me allows people to create a simple site that is all about themselves. The contest to raise awareness of this product was designed to raise the stakes so that customers could not resist getting involved.

About.me offered customers a chance to win a trip to New York City and appear on a billboard in Times Square for the person who had the most votes for their page.

The steps to enter were simple enough:

Those who wanted to win started Facebooking and tweeting to get the word out about voting for their landing page. Obviously this brought even more exposure to About.me…in fact one of the most common questions surrounding the campaign was “What is about.me?”

I would say that is a win!

It’s that type of word of mouth marketing that works so effectively on the web… and when you give your customers a huge incentive to participate, it’s really easy for them to talk to their family and friends about your product.

Now by no means do you have to spend the kind of money About.me did to raise the stakes, but hopefully it spurs some creativity.

Marketing Twist #7: Use the velvet rope

There a lot of examples of companies using the invitation-only marketing approach, but probably the most effective campaign involved Spotify when it arrived in the U.S.

It first got heavy online influencers to talk about the product, and then started to roll out very-limited invites for a beta version.

That limited invitation started the demand for the product to rise instantly. When it was time to release the product to the public in September 2011, one of its boldest moves was to hook up with Facebook.

Spotify proved to be a great product, and that only added to the endless buzz about it.

Marketing Twist #8: Show people how you seamlessly fit into their life

You can never go wrong when you create a product that solves a meaningful problem that customers have. This way you don’t end up bragging about the wonderful features of your product…instead you can talk about how you are giving people the answer to long-sought questions that they desperately wanted…and you are showing them how your product can fit seamlessly into their work and life patterns.

Apple is easily the most popular example of this.

The brilliant Siri commercials showed people how the new iPhone 4S would guide them through their day…helping them with basic tasks like scheduling appointments, sending emails, searching email and finding local coffee shops.

Google’s recent Project Glass concept video is another great example of demonstrating how a product can solve problems in your life without being inconvenient.

Conclusion

As you can see from the ideas above, creativity is really the name of the game when it comes to small business marketing. You don’t need a big bank account to go viral or create an outstanding promotion. You just need a unique and different idea.

I do want to point out that another part of success with coming up with ideas like this is that you need to test and experiment a lot. You will have failures…but hopefully those failures will lead to even better ideas!

What other little-known marketing ideas can a small business use to advertise?

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How to Build Links Through Guest Blogging

Google wants less spam and more quality content on the web. And you need more links for your website. Guest blogging is the perfect solution to both Google’s wants and your needs. It is the marriage of content development and link building.

Here’s how you can get the most out of guest blogging and link building to drive more traffic to your website:

Step #1: Building your content portfolio

Whenever you are contacting a blog owner or editor for a guest posting opportunity on their site, you will want to provide some of your content for them to review. If you are just starting out, then make your own blog your quality content portfolio.

If you own additional websites or have the opportunity to contribute to other blogs, then be sure to do so. When presenting yourself as a potential guest blogger, the more quality content samples you can provide, the higher your chances of getting your guest post accepted.

So what kind of quality should you be aiming for when it comes to your content? That depends on the sites you want to get a guest posting spot upon. For example, if the main sites you want to guest post upon have posts in excess of 1,000 words, then you will want your content samples to be the same length. This is especially important for sites like Social Media Examiner who want you to submit your three top content pieces before considering a post from you.

Step #2: Finding the best guest blogging gigs

There are many ways you can find great guest posting opportunities such as…

• Google Search – Try variations of your niche keyword plus guest post, guest post by, guest blogging, guest bloggers, and write for us. Also, if you know someone in your niche that does a lot of guest blogging, search for their name plus guest post or guest post by.
• Twitter Search – Use the same keywords suggested above, but search them on Twitter search instead.
• Check Backlinks – Do you know of a website in your niche that gets a lot of links through guest blogging? Run their website through Open Site Explorer and look at their backlinks to find some blogs that are accepting guest posts.

Remember that all guest blogging opportunities are created equal, especially if you are looking to get some good links. As a link builder, you probably know what to look for in terms of PageRank and domain authority. Once you get past that, there are some sites that will give you more link juice than others. Here are some things to look for beyond the main blog stats.

• Blogs that place the author bio (and link) before the content– The higher up on the page your link is, the more link value it will have. While an author box at the end of the post is still better than being in the comments, a link at the top of the post would be ideal.
• Blogs that offer an author bio (and link) on the post itself versus a link on the author page – When it comes to getting clicks from readers to your website, a blog that offers a bio on the post itself will get a lot more CTR compared to blogs where the visitor will have to click on your name to get to your author bio page.
• Blogs that offer more than one link in the author bio – If you’re building links to more than one site or you want to include a homepage and internal page link, finding blogs that allow you more than one link would be best. This way you can include a link for SEO purposes and a link to entice clicks, such as a link to your free report or top post.
• Blogs that offer links to your social profiles in addition to your website link – If you can’t get people to click through to your website, getting them to follow you on Twitter, Facebook, or Google+ is the next best thing.
• Blogs that mark author bio links as nofollow – The last thing you want to do is spend time crafting a great guest post, submit it, then find out that the link back to your website has been nofollowed and will not count towards your backlink profile.

Step #3: Organizing your guest blogging opportunities

As you find new opportunities, you want to record them along with your guest posting efforts. Why? Because you might need to use them for additional projects down the road. Maybe someone says that they aren’t looking now, but they will be in a few months. Maybe someone else says they would want you to write more posts for them in the future. Keeping track of these responses will give you a database of opportunities to refer back to in the future. You’ll also want to keep track of every post that you get published!

What I would suggest is having a spreadsheet with two tabs. The first tab is for opportunities and contains the following information.

• Blog Domain – Just the base URL to keep track.
• PageRank – Google’s authority ranking of a domain. Find out any domain’s PageRank using toolbars like SEO Site Tools for Chrome orSEOquake for Firefox, Safari, or Opera. You can also use PR Checker.
• Domain Authority – The strength of a domain as measured bySEOmoz Toolbar for Firefox or Chrome.
• Subscribers – Subscribers are anyone who follows the site. Keep a column for Twitter followers, Facebook fans, and RSS subscribers. If a site doesn’t display their RSS subscribers but uses Feedburner, you might be able to find out the subscriber count by taking their RSS URL and adding ~fc to the link like this: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~fc/TechCrunch/.
• Traffic – There are several ways you can judge the traffic of a blog. You could record the blog’s Alexa rank by going to http://alexa.com/siteinfo/domain.com. Blogs with a lower number have the most traffic. Or you can get estimated visitor numbers by looking up the domain on Google Ad Planner.
• Guidelines – This is a link to the blog’s guest posting guidelines.
• Contact – This is a link to the blog’s contact form or blog owner’s / editor’s email address.
• Name – This is the name of the person you need to contact about guest blogging opportunities.
• Response – Once you get a response, be sure to record it in this column for future reference.

The second tab is for published guest posts and contains the following information.

• Title – The title of your blog post.
• URL – The direct link to your blog post.
• Link – The link you included in your author bio.
• Anchor Text – The anchor text for the link you included in your author bio.
• Link 2 – The second link you included in your author bio.
• Anchor Text 2 – The second anchor text for the link you included in your author bio.
• Tweets – The number of tweets your post received in a specific timeframe. You can make the cut off point for this one to two weeks after the post goes live.
• Likes – The number of Facebook likes your post received in a specific timeframe.
• +1′s – The number of Google +1′s your post received in a specific timeframe.
• Comments – The number of comments your post received in a specific timeframe.

Keeping track of the analytics related to your guest blog post will help you in determining which topics work best for a blog’s audience. This will especially be helpful if you are going to become a regular contributor to a blog.

Step #4: Getting to know the blog owner or editor

Once you’ve lined up some potential guest blogging opportunities, your next job will be getting to know the blog owner or editor. This doesn’t have to be time consuming, just start by following and interacting with them on social media sites. Twitter is usually the easiest. Show interest in their blog by commenting and tweeting on posts. Be sure to tweet the posts with the blog’s main Twitter handle in the tweet so they notice too!

You can also try to get an introduction through a previous guest poster. If you know someone who has written for the blog before, ask them if they could introduce you to their contact. This could make a huge difference between your name being another in the inbox vs. someone the blog owner or editor will be on the lookout for.

Another great way to get guest blogging gigs is through networking events. When you meet someone, get their business card and find out what their blog is. Then, after you get back to your home or office, check out their blog to see if it is a good fit. If you decide to contact them, gently remind them where you went and of your conversation. The fact that they will recognize you personally and not see you as a complete stranger will help in getting your post accepted.

Step #5: Learning the ropes

Before you make contact about a guest post, be sure to fully review the guest blogging guidelines for that site. Every site has their own requirements. In particular, pay attention to…

• What to Submit – Some blogs will only want writing samples, one or more topic ideas, or full posts.
• Submission Format – Check the guidelines on how to submit a guest post. Some blogs will want you to send it via email in specific format (Word, Text file, or Google Doc), attach it to a comment form on the blog, or create an account on their blog and submit it through the dashboard fully formatted.
• Topics – Just because you want to write about something it doesn’t mean they want you to write about it. Be sure to stick to the topics that the blog specifies. If they don’t specify, take a look through their archives to note topics and level of posts (beginner, intermediate, or advanced information).
• Length – You don’t want to submit a 600 word post to a blog that typically publishes 1,000 word (or longer) articles, or vice versa.
• Links – Some blogs allow you to include one or two self-serving links within your blog post, while others want you to steer clear of anything with your name on it outside of the author box. Also, watch out for blogs that might not allow you to have links to your site at all, even in your author box.

Also be on the lookout for sites that allow you to submit content on a personal blog which has the potential to be moved up to the main blog.SEOmoz is a great example of this. You submit your blog post toYouMoz, and if the post gets good reception (comments, likes, and social shares), it will get moved to the main SEOmoz blog.

With sites like these, you will want to publish great content and promote it so that it makes it to the main audience!

Step #6: Submitting the perfect guest post

So how do you submit the perfect guest post? Once you fully understand the guidelines, be sure to include extra touches that really customize the post to the blog. Some things to include are…

• Links to related posts – Not one of yours, of course, but theirs. The easiest way to do this is to subscribe to their blog via RSS, then scan through the list of post titles until you find one that matches a keyword or phrase in your post.
• Familiar formatting elements – If you get the chance to format your guest post, be sure to do it to fit the blog’s usual style. This means using the same headers, quotes, calls to action at the end of the post, images, and so on. If you make the post feel like the blog owner wrote it themselves, they are much more likely to accept it.
• Current resources – If the blog seems open to link love, include current resources that support your guest post. There’s nothing worse than when someone links to a post that is out of date or something you do not want in your guest post.

Step #7: Writing the perfect author bio for conversions & link building

Now it’s time to get to the important part for you…the author bio. Once you’ve crafted the ultimate guest post, you will want to craft the ultimate author bio to go along with it. The best way to do it is to look at a few guest posts by others on the blog and see what their author bio’s look like. Try to make yours match in word count and, of course, number of links.

You will want your author bio to really click with the blog’s readers. If you are an online marketing guru and you are posting on a blog dedicated to Facebook, then you will want your author bio to focus on your Facebook services vs. your general online marketing services.

As an example, let’s say you want to link to your blog about pets in a guest post on a blog all about cats.

You could go with your standard author bio of “Jane Smith is the author of Pets Anonymous, a blog dedicated to pet lovers everywhere.” Or you could go with “Jane Smith is the author of Pets Anonymous, a blog featuring the cutest cats you’ve ever seen!” Guess which one will appeal to the blog audience you are writing for and therefore get the most clicks?

When it comes to your links themselves, you might be tempted to always go with keyword anchor text. But with Google honing in on over-optimization, you might want to consider mixing it up with non-keyword based anchor text. Link to your website, blog, or business name, or link it to your own name. Another thing to consider is not always linking to your homepage. Think about the audience you are writing for in your guest post, choose an internal page on your site (preferably a piece of content), and link to that instead.

Also, try different approaches to guest posting. Instead of just doing it for links, do it for conversions. Link to a page on your website offering a free report or eBook in exchange for subscribing to your mailing list. This way you can get your guest post readers directly into your sales funnel!

Conclusion

Now you are ready to start guest blogging and building up your link profile. To get you started, here are some links to the guest post guidelines on popular blogs in the online marketing industry that you might want to start writing for.

• KISSmetrics – Topics include web analytics, conversion optimization, A/B testing, social media, online marketing, and case studies involving KISSmetrics products.
• Smashing Magazine – Mostly about design related topics but does include posts on CMS, e-commerce, usability, copywriting, and content strategy.
• Copyblogger – Topics include copywriting, content marketing, email marketing, landing pages, Internet marketing, and SEO.
• ProBlogger – Topics include anything that benefit bloggers including blogging tips, social media strategies, and SEO.
• Social Media Examiner – If you are an established authority on anything social media related, submit writing samples here.
• YouMoz – Become a member of the SEOmoz community and submit posts to YouMoz. If your post gets enough positive response, it could get boosted to the main site.

So what results have you seen with guest blogging for links?

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6 Ways to Boost Your Rankings Using Google Authorship

Google authorship is big on the agenda for a lot of SEOs at the moment, and rightly so considering how heavily Google is looking to push this into search results.

Creating a personal brand is incredibly valuable toward building and strengthening great relationships. After all, you’re always going to have more trust in recommendations from your own circle of friends.

This study from Nielsen strongly backs this up, with 90 percent of people trusting recommendations from people they know. In comparison, only 41 percent trust search engine results!

That stat alone shows the importance of why Google had to become more social. If searchers are given more buying trust in their results, then advertisers are going to get a better return on investment. And Google authorship appears to be a key part of their solution toward achieving this, essentially merging personalized search with your social circle.

So what can you do to capitalize on this?

1. Build a Personal Brand Online

Google have realized just how important social media is as an indicator toward assessing the quality of a website. And because in many ways social media is more about personal branding, (as opposed to company branding) authorship starts to make a lot more sense.

Google doesn’t want to just measure the influence of a brand profile on Twitter/Facebook/Google+ – it wants to know about its employees, its writers, and online fans/followers. Treat your own reputation management seriously and look to build a strong profile on key social sites such as Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, etc.

If you’re not an active blogger, you really should start now. It’s never too late! Blogging is a great way to build a personal brand – plus it opens doors to further opportunities such as writing on higher profile sites, conference/event speaking or media interviews, meaning that you can leverage your online profile even further.

2. Setup Google Authorship For All the Websites You Write On

By connecting your Google+ profile with all of the websites you publish content on, it means that your profile is going to be displayed whenever an article/blog post that you’ve written appears in Google’s search results.

On its own this should naturally increase your following – because people will also click through to your Google+ profile as well. So that’s already helping to build your profile and make you more influential.

Plus it’s going to get you extra traffic by positively influencing rankings within your social circle. Which is also another key reason Google promotes this: it pushes large volumes of traffic through to Google+ and gives users a reason to re-visit.

3. Use Google+ Daily

Even if you have to force yourself to do it – try spending a small amount of time each day commenting and sharing your connections content, not just your own, to strengthen those connections.

By making a small effort each day, you’ll gradually start to build up a stronger profile.

4. Use Tools & Interact With Influencers in Your Niche

Firstly identify the key influencers in your industry. Tools like FollowerWonk, Topsy andFindPeopleOnPlus are great for this.

Then get their attention – definitely don’t overdo it by stalking them and replying to everything they say. But make the effort to interact with them occasionally and share their content and hopefully this will go both ways.

In Twitter you can build private lists of people you want to interact with more frequently. Why not do the same with a Google+ circle too?

If you can start getting retweets from people with 10,000+ followers it’s likely to help build your social reach. And again, the same rules apply with shares on Google+.

Another great tool is Google Ripples (see this guide on SEOmoz to show how to use it). Basically, it means you can see who the influential people are when sharing a post and how far it has reached. See this screenshot for the recent announcement of Google Drive:

5. Hire Great Writers With Strong Social Profiles

This is one of the most important lessons to learn. Finding the right people is critical. Making mistakes in new hires can set you back massively.

Take the time to find someone who is great, as opposed to someone who “can do the job.” It’s much more rewarding in terms of the results you can achieve.

This fits in incredibly well with Google authorship – personally this is something I looked for in a writer beforehand anyway. But now there is even more incentive to find a writer who has a great social profile and can reach out to their own audience and network.

In many ways, authorship is almost a Panda-style algorithm update, meaning that Google will reward quality over quantity. Look for top writers within your industry to hire – forget about the $10-a-go copywriting services and find an actual individual who can help promote yourself my using sites such as the Problogger Job Board or AuthorPress and most importantly reach out to your own blog and social network.

If Google is going to measure the influence of a writer’s social profile when ranking content, you should do the same when looking to hire them too!

6. Meet Bloggers and Writers in Person

Meet people in real life. Go to industry events, find blogger meet-ups – figure out where these guys hangout and get to know them. But do it offline – it’s far more personal!

Recently I analyzed the people I had most frequently interacted with on Twitter using WhoReTweetsMe.com because I wanted to see how many of these people I’d actually met in person. Even I was surprised by the results, I’d met 88 out of the top 100!

Having a personal brand is a great first step – but really getting out there and meeting people is the way to take it to the next level.

What Impact Will Authorship Have to Rankings?

At the moment it’s unclear how much of a direct impact authorship has, or will have, to influencing rankings. However, even if it’s not a ranking factor just yet, Google authorship and Google+ already influences personalized search results – which in itself can boost the rankings for connections within your social circle. This opens up huge opportunities for individuals, because it means Google is likely to reward you personally for being an authority online.

Google are also fully aware that a website’s reputation is no longer just based on links. People will much more commonly tweet a link now than they would blog about it, so to ignore social from their algorithm long-term would make no sense to them if they want to continue providing the most relevant set of search results possible. Which of course they do!

It seems pretty clear that this is the way Google intends on heading. There’s no reason not to set up Google authorship. So get in there sooner rather than later

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On-Page SEO factors

SEO factors fall into two categories: on-page SEO, and off-page SEO. Off-page SEO factors are factors that influence your SEO from outside your site – things like whether the text of anchors linking to your site contain your keywords, whether you have quality backlinks

In our introductory lesson “Getting traffic to your site with SEO” we talked about how search engine optimization (SEO) is the general term for things you can do to make your website appear closer to the top of the natural search engine listings.

We also talked about how SEO falls into two categories: On-page SEO and off-page SEO. On-page being the things you can change within your website to make it more attractive to the search engines, and off-page being the things that aren’t actually on your website that can help bump you up — like getting links from other websites.

In this lesson we’re going to go over some on-page factors for your website. There are some tricks which are widely acknowledged to work, some tricks that might have an effect, and others which used to make a difference but have become less useful as the search engines have got smarter. Because you’ll probably see people talking about all of these at some point or other, we’ll go over them all.

1) H1 tags (and to a lesser extent, H2 tags)

Putting your primary keywords into your H1 tags is one of the easiest things you can do for your on-page SEO. While it’s debatable whether this actually has a huge effect on your rankings, most people agree that it does have some effect.

<h1>This is what a header tag looks like in plain HTML</h1>

In Dreamweaver you can just select the text you want to turn into a header, and choose “heading 1″ from the “format” drop down menu in the Properties palette.

A lot of people shy away from these tags because, by default, they’re pretty big and ugly. The good thing is that you can create styles for your H1 tags using CSS so that they’re no bigger or uglier than any other text on your site.

2) Title tags

These are also very easy things to SEO, but are frequently neglected by new affiliates. Your title tags determine what text displays at the top of your browser screen when you view your website. Your title tags also usually determine the title of your website when it appears in the search engine search results.

There are a few things to consider when writing your title tags:

• Your keywords: You should put your primary keywords in there, and if it’s appropriate your secondary keywords as well. You can separate them with a hyphen ( – ) or a “pipe” ( | )
  eg: “Dog chewing problems – How to stop your dog chewing”
• Attractiveness: Remember that it will appear in your search listing, so make it inviting to click on. You’ll see a lot of sites that spam their title tags with keywords, but in the process they make their results look less attractive. Is there much point in (perhaps) being bumped up the search engines a smidgen, if your spammy looking title is acting as a click-repellant?
• Uniqueness: Your title should be different for each page in your website. If you simply duplicate your title across all your pages, you run the risk of the search engines thinking that all your pages are the same and they won’t rank them all.
• Consider whether you really need your website address in the title tag. Nobody is going to be searching for your domain name (they’ll just type it into their browser) so if you include it in your title you’re just wasting precious space. That space could be better used by one of your keywords.

3) Keyword density

Keyword density was a big deal a few years ago, when you could basically cram your page full of your keywords in order to make yourself appear more relevant. Of course the search engines jumped on this activity pretty quickly. These days MSN remains a little bit susceptible to keyword density, Yahoo slightly less, and Google pays pretty much no attention to it.

Therefore don’t go thinking that you need to have that magic 6% keyword density anymore — it’s much more important that your content is well written and natural.

That said, it’s good to have a keyword density of at least 1% to target the susceptible search engines. It also seems to be important to have your keywords appear within about the first 50 words on your page (excluding headers), and some people say that it’s also good to have your keywords in your concluding paragraph of the page.

Other than that, if you’re just writing naturally on your topic you should inevitably mention your keywords occasionally throughout your text anyway – no need to force it.

4) The meta-keywords tag

Also falling by the wayside in recent years is the “meta-keyword” tag. This tag appears in the head section of your webpage (so not in the actual “content” part that people see) and was designed to instruct the search engines as to what the keywords for your page are.

In theory it was a nice idea, but marketers and spammers alike exploited this innocent suggestion by spamming their meta tags with hundreds and hundreds of keywords, many not even relevant to their page; subsequently these days the search engines don’t pay much, if any, attention to these. In fact, we now recommend against using the meta keyword tag (in most cases) since it provides no gain to you, but also gives your competitors previous information about which specific keywords you’re targeting.

5) The meta-description tag

This also goes in the head section of your page and is more important than the meta-keywords tag because this section (like your title tag) is used in your search results listing in the search engines.

You should consider your meta-description to be a low-key advertisement for your website. Like the “meta-keywords” tag, a lot of marketers try stuffing this section full of keywords, but (like keyword-spamming in the title tag) this is really counterproductive, since people are much more likely to click on a “human friendly” description than a whole list of keywords.

However, it is important that you include your keywords in your description. The search engines will look at your meta-description first and will usually use that if it looks relevant, but if you haven’t mentioned your keywords in there, they’ll grab another piece of text from your page that does mention your keywords.

Image alt tags

Yet another place where enthusiastic marketers have keyword spammed and which search engines don’t pay huge attention to. Alt text is text that is added to an image tag to describe what the image is about (the ‘ALTernative text’). It’s designed to make pages more accessible for people using screen-readers (ie, blind users) and for people browsing the internet with images switched off (for example, on a low bandwidth connection).

There are some instances where alt text does seem to do good things for SEO:

1. When you’re trying to get an image of yours ranking highly in Google Image Search. Adding a description with appropriate keywords can help to boost your image up in the results.
2. When an image is a link to another page. In this case the alt text of the image functions in a similar way to the anchor text in a normal link, although perhaps not quite as well. This is useful for websites that use images for navigation/menu buttons.

In general, though, there’s no reason to go making 1px images and loading them with keywords in thealt text, just as there’s no reason to go adding hundreds of keywords to every single image on your webpage. It just doesn’t do anything. And if you’re the poor sod browsing a webpage with a screen-reader you’re not going to hang around to listen to the same keywords being repeated again and again each time an image appears on the page.

Image file names

This is another one with dubious benefit to search engine rankings, but possible benefits for Google Image Search — put your keywords in your file names! If you’ve got a nice picture of an apple pie and yo            zu’d like to see it topping the Image Search results, don’t call it “pic1.jpg” — call it “apple-pie.jpg”!

Website folder names

While you’re naming your files correctly, why not think about putting your keywords into your file names? For a pie recipe website, for instance, don’t do this:

www.example.com/recipe1.html

Do this instead:

www.example.com/pie-recipes/apple-pie.html

Amount of content

Don’t get too caught up in worrying about the length of your content. Don’t think that having 500 words in your article is going to give you dramatically different results than your 300 word article. This doesn’t have as much of an effect as it may have had in the past, and it’s much better to just write naturally, and (even better) consider the needs of your audience and the purpose of your page.

For instance,

• A high-commitment sales page will usually have longer copy.
• An AdSense page needs to be more tightly oriented towards certain keywords, and will usually be between 300 – 600 words.
• A blog entry will be as long as is necessary to get your readers interested and keep them coming back.
• A comprehensive product review should be long, a brief review should be brief.

It’s easy to get caught up in the “rules”, but you’re much more likely to hurt your chances for success by being too focused on word-count and not considering your audience.

Internal linking

One of the biggest factors that helps a page to rank well for a certain keyword is having links pointing to that page using the keywords as anchor text. Usually this falls under “off-page factors” since the links come from other websites, but you should employ this principle when linking your own site together as well. Don’t link to your home page using the words “home” — insert your keywords there to help it rank for them!

• Wrong: Click here to visit our pie recipe reviews
• Right: Click here to visit our pie recipe reviews

Lesson Summary

In this lesson we’ve taken a look at some of the on-page SEO factors that you can influence to boost your search engine rankings, and whether they’re actually effective, including:

• H1 tags
• Title tags
• Keyword density
• Meta keywords
• Meta description
• Image alt tags
• File names
• Folder names

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