Top Seo Pages In Google Plus

In this post we take a closer look at the 10 most popular Google+ pages about SEO (either personal or business pages) and we compare these with the most popular twitter and Facebook pages.

Google plus is the social network that most SEO’s prefer not only for search engine optimization purposes (think Google Authorship) but because it’s fun, informative and owned by Google. Some people may disagree that Google+ is one of the favourite tools of all Internet Marketers but the numbers below tell the truth and I will explain later in the post why.

Is Google+ good for SEO?

The first question we need to answer before getting into the details is whether Google+ is good for SEO. The answer is pretty straightforward, Google+ is (in my opinion) the most important social network for SEO for 4 main reasons:

1. It is owned by Google – While I am not suggesting that Google has a preference to G+ over other social networks because it owns it, the reason that it may play a more important role is because Google has all the data it needs about G+ profiles and pages – something not happening with the data on Facebook and Twitter.
2. Google Authorship – I have mentioned many times in my posts the importance of Google Authorship as a ranking factor and that fact that to implement authorship you need a G+ profile automatically raises the importance of Google+ for SEO.
3. Good for Local SEO – In order to establish your Google+ for Business profile and get better positioning in local SEO you need to have a G+ business page.
4. Google recommendations – When you search Google while logged in you get recommendations based on your G+ circles. The same happens when you browse Google Play or Google Chrome store, so it is very important to have a good Google+ presence with many followers.

How to optimize your Google+ profile for SEO?

This is something I already explained in my post: How to SEO boost your social media profiles but in summary form, to make the most of your Google+ profile for SEO purposes you need to:

1. Upload in your profile a good headshot photo (or a good logo in case of Business pages)
2. Fill in all fields required in your profile including contact information and address
3. Add your website(s) in the ‘contributor to’ section
4. Link to your other profiles
5. Try to gain as many followers as you can by sharing interesting content

How Google+ compares with Facebook and Twitter?

I am sure that you’ve read articles from various Analysts referring to Google+ as a ghost town but is it true? Are the 359 million active users of Google+ ghosts and how do people in the SEO industry use Goolge+?

I think one of the ways to find answers to the above questions is to compare the number of followers for the same persons (or business pages) on the 3 major social networks (Facebook, Twitter and Google+). For those who need more information about FB and Twitter they can read my previous posts: 10 most popular Facebook pages and 10 most popular Twitter pages.

When you do the comparison the general findings are:

• For pure SEO personas like Danny Sullivan, Matt Cutts and SearchEngineLand, Google+ is by far the most important network (with the greatest number of followers).
• Twitter is more popular than Facebook in ALL cases of our list
• Google+ VS Facebook: In the cases that Google+ does not have more followers than Facebook it is still close to the Facebook figures (taking also into account that FB has been around for longer)

How I created the top 10 list with the most popular Google+ pages?

I have used both personal and business profiles in the list so as to see how these compare with the respective pages on Facebook and Twitter. These are the people/pages I follow to stay informed about the latest developments in SEO and a must for anyone interested about Google and Digital Marketing in general.

You can follow my personal profile on Google+ and Reliablesoft Business Page

Disclaimer: I am certain that there are many more Google+ pages that have more followers than the ones listed below and if you think that a page is missing do let me know in the comments and I can update the list accordingly. Google+ followers are as at 26 July 2013.

1. Danny Sullivan (1,775,750)

Facebook: 189,452

Twitter: 321, 245

Google+: 1,775,750

Danny is again first in my list (he is no1 in twitter SEO accounts as well). With the incredible 1.7 million followers he is by far the most important and well known person about Search Engine Optimization and Google related matters. If you take into account that Larry Page (Google’s co-founder) has 6.2 million followers then Danny’s circle count is not bad at all.

You can follow Danny here: https://plus.google.com/+DannySullivan/posts

2. Search Engine Land (518,859)

Facebook: 59,992

Twitter: 179,062

Google+: 518,859

I added Search Engine Land as well despite the fact that it is owned by Danny Sullivan because it is probably the most well-known website about SEO (if you add all 3 networks together). The quality of information provided by Danny, +Matt McGee, +Barry Schwartz and the rest of the team makes the website a great resource on SEO.

You can follow Search engine Land here: https://plus.google.com/+SearchEngineLand/posts

3. Matt Cutts (262,171)

Facebook:?

Twitter: 250,194

Google+: 262,171

I added Google’s Matt Cutts as I was curious to see how many followers he has on G+ compared to FB and Twitter. Apparently Matt does not have a Facebook account but his numbers on Twitter and G+ are comparable. Someone would expect to see a lot more G+ followers than twitter but he is still using twitter actively so the difference is not that big.

You can follow Matt Cutts here: https://plus.google.com/+MattCutts/posts

4. Darren Rowse – Problogger (140,542)

Facebook: 52,775

Twitter: 190,967

Google+: 140,542

Darren Rowse is one of the leaders in the blogging industry and the 140,000+ followers he has on G+ is no surprise. I was expecting more Facebook followers for Darren since he is among the first bloggers who talked about the importance of Social Media in a time where FB was on the rise and G+ did not even exist.

You can follow Darren here: https://plus.google.com/+DarrenRowse/posts

5. MOZ (51,790)

Facebook: 115,116

Twitter: 220,082

Google+: 51,790

Moz (previously known as SEO Moz) is very popular on FB and Twitter but on G+ it is still below the 100K mark. I don’t know if they had a Google+ page before re-branding from SEOMOZ to MOZ and if this is the reason they are low compared to their FB and Twitter numbers but I am sure that their follower count will increase in the next few months to the same levels as FB and Twitter.

You can follow MOZ here: https://plus.google.com/+SEOmoz/posts

6. Jeff Bullas (12,553)

Facebook: 16,688

Twitter: 164,885

Google+: 12,553

Jeff Bullas is the ultimate Twitter persona. His twitter followers are increasing on a daily basis and that’s why he has passed the 150K mark. Besides Twitter his Facebook and G+ followers are very close which is another proof that when it comes to SEO and Social Media Marketing, Google+ has nothing to be afraid off when compared to FB.

You can follow Jeff here: https://plus.google.com/109167101392398799057/posts

7. Search Engine Watch (10,416)

Facebook: 12,430

Twitter: 51,635

Google+: 10,416

With just over 10K followers search engine watch made it to the top 10 list. It is more popular on Twitter with G+ and FB to have around the same number.

You can follow Search Engine Watch here: https://plus.google.com/117807232814593418955/posts

8. Search Engine Journal (9,990)

Facebook: 40,660

Twitter: 38,310

Google+:9,990

Search engine Journal and the 2 last entries below (Brian Clark and Neil Patel) have three things in common. First is that they are popular in Twitter (Brian and Neil have over 100K followers), second is that they all have less than 10K G+ followers and third their G+ follower count is far below Facebook.

You can follow Search Engine Journal here: https://plus.google.com/112953633004578114474/posts

9. Brian Clark – Copyblogger (8,936)

Facebook: 23,748

Twitter: 140,144

Google+: 8,936

Brian is one the leaders in content marketing and besides running copyblogger he is also the owner of studiopress.com – one of the best frameworks (genesis) build on the WordPress platform.

You can follow Brian here: https://plus.google.com/+Copyblogger/posts

10. Neil Patel (8,734)

Facebook: 35,363

Twitter: 118,243

Google+: 8,734

Neil shares great advice for SEO’s and entrepreneurs and besides quicksprout he also runs Kissmetrics and neilpatel.com. He has worked with big companies producing great results and he is a must follow resource on SEO and digital marketing.

You can follow Neil here: https://plus.google.com/112759904453577892472/posts

Conclusion

Google+ is my favorite social network not only because it’s great for SEO but because it’s fun, interesting and easy to use. What I always advice my clients is to take advantage of Google+ to increase their website’s trust and business exposure on Google. If you are not already using G+ either for personal or business use, you should consider start using it without any further delay.

The World’s 10 most popular Google+ pages about SEO by Alex Chris

How to Improve business Using Social Media and Increase Followers

One of the challenges that businesses face when it comes to social media marketing is how to gain more followers. How can you find people to follow your business page and most importantly how do you find people that interact with your pages and share your content?

To make this article more interesting I will not just discuss the theory of social media marketing but I will show you the results of a social media campaign we have been running for the last 10 months for an online business. I will try to explain the challenges that we had to overcome and the solutions that lead to a dramatic increase of followers on Twitter, Google+ and Facebook.

Company Profile

The company is knownhost.com, a web hosting provider offering managed VPS hosting packages to consumers since 2005.

The results

Example of how Twitter Followers increased over the last 6 months

When we started social media marketing for knownhost in November 2013 the company had:

400 followers on Facebook

480 followers on Twitter

200 followers on Google+

After 10 months (September 2014) the numbers are:

7300 followers on Facebook (1825% increase)

4018 followers on Twitter (837% increase)

900 followers on Google+ (450% increase)

The challenges

• It was difficult to reach out to people who were not currently interested in our products (web hosting packages).
• There is huge competition in the hosting industry
• We needed a strategy to differentiate our company from the rest
• We wanted more people to find out about our brand, products and services

3 Steps for a Successful social media marketing for businesses

The solution to the above challenges that lead to a dramatic increase in followers was to combine content marketing with a carefully planned social media campaign. Let’s see below the 3 steps that can almost guarantee you success.

Step 1: You need content

That may be obvious to many people: you need content to run social media campaigns, but for most businesses this is the most difficult part to achieve. The reason is that they have a lot of content about their products and services but not enough content that can be used for social media awareness.

People that use Facebook, Twitter or Google+ are less likely to follow a business page that only advertises their products and services, unless of course they are a big brand (think Apple) that sells popular products.

The solution here is to publish content on your business page that is interesting for people to read, share, comment and follow. In general, you can use content that is part of these 3 categories:

• How-to articles
• Industry news
• Tips and advice

Take a look at the Google+ page to see how the above content rich categories can blend together with the products and services a company is offering. See how we share content about technology news, blogging, social media and everything that may interest our current and potential customers (bloggers, graphic designers, small business owners, webmasters etc).

Step 2: Content is not enough, you also need to promote your accounts

I know that I said above that you need content but content alone is not enough for social media success. You also need to promote your social media accounts and content.

What do we mean by promote? Don’t expect that by just creating and publishing good content on your business page people will start following you. You need to get out, spread the word and tell people about your interesting content. To be more specific:

On Facebook the best way to reach more audience is to use targeted ads. For those that are not aware, Facebook has an advertising platform which you can use to promote your business page or posts and get more likes, more website visits or more sales. What is nice about this system is that you can create targeted campaigns and get your page in front of the ‘right people’. In terms of cost, once you run a pilot campaign for a couple of weeks you will be able to predict how much budget you need to reach more audience on Facebook.

On Twitter the most efficient way to find targeted followers is to use the twitter search function and find out users tweeting about your industry, related products or competitors. Searching for hashtags instead of plain keywords can get you better results (i.e. search for ‘#socialmedia’ instead of ‘social media’). Once you find these people follow them and statistically some of them will follow you back.

You can follow the same approach for Google+ but have in mind that a business page can only follow 50 people per day so you need to follow a less aggressive approach to stay away from unwanted troubles.

Step 3: Monitor your brand and clean up your accounts

So, you have good content, you promote your accounts by advertising or reaching out to potential followers, what’s next?

The next step is to monitor what people say about your brand in the different networks and reply to any comments (either positive or negative). There are various ‘brand monitoring’ tools you can use but another easy way is to use the search function of the different networks and search for your brand name. Make sure that you do this on a daily basis and that you publish and share your replies so that other people can see that you have an active presence.

As a final step you also need to clean up your accounts on a regular basis. ‘By clean up’ I mean remove people that are not active or not related to your niche or business. On networks like Twitter it’s very difficult to find users that only tweet about your industry and niche so you need to regularly review who you follow and try to stick to people that are a better match to your customer profile.

Conclusion

Businesses can successfully use social media provided that they are willing to invest both time and money to establish their social media presence. Depending on the type of business, you can choose which networks to utilize but the recipe for success is always the same: Share useful content that goes beyond your products or services, promote your accounts, protect your brand and keep your accounts in good shape.

To go from theory to practice, take a closer look at what we have done with the knownhost case study and apply the same strategies to make your company a social business.

How businesses can gain more followers on social media (case study) byAlex Chris

Content In Seo And implementing Anchor Text ,Hidden Text and Keeping the content unique in seo

Page Content:

Your page content does the talking to your online business prospects. Designing the structure and ensuring the quality of this content benefits you in all parts of website optimization; from usability and conversions to on-page SEO. In terms of SEO:

HTML to TEXT ratio:

It is an SEO best practice to have more text compared to HTML on your website. The formula used to calculate it is as follows:

HTML to Text Ratio = Text Size / Web Page Size x 100

• A value between zero to 25 percent is considered a page with code bloat. The page needs more text.
• A value between 25 to 70 percent is considered ideal.
• A value of more than 70 percent means there is a lot of content and search engines may consider it to be spam.

Here is a list of some free HTML to text calculator providers:

• SEOChat
• DevSEO
• Simon-SearchMarketing

 

 

Keyword Density:

Once you have your target keywords researched and ready to be inserted in the site content you need to know how many times a particular keyword must be used in order to rank highly. It used to be that the so-called SEO gurus would advise anywhere from two to 15 percent keyword density or even more. Those days are over.

The reality in today’s world of modern search engine algorithms is that the number of keyword recurrences does not matter. What really matters is how relevant it is to the context of the content where it is used. Watch this video on keyword density from webspam head of Google, Matt Cutts.

 If you are confused follow this advice:

• Write your content allowing the keywords to flow naturally into it.
• Make sense grammatically when using keywords in your web page content. For instance, if your keyword is how do I improve my search rankings and you cannot place the first person reference in your content you might have to usehow to improve your search rankings within your page content. Better still you could say something like ‘if you are wondering “how do I improve my search rankings” here is….’
• Content should be readable and must provide value.
• You could check the keyword density of competitor sites that rank high in searches for some useful hints.

The following are some of the free keyword density checker tools:

• SEOChat
• SEOCentro
• WebConfs
• KeywordDensity

Uniqueness:

The text in your page content must not be present elsewhere on the web i.e. it must be original and unique. Use one of the following tools to double check if your content is indeed unique:

• CopyScape
• DupliChecker
• Plagiarisma
• Plagium

If certain pages contain duplicate content that you cannot change, such as product pages on an e-commerce website, you must ensure that you indicate the preferred page as the original content. This must be done so that you do not end up with a duplicate content warning message in your Google Webmaster Tools.

You can indicate certain content as duplicate by adding an HTML tag calledrel=”canonical” on the duplicate pages (with the href containing the URL destination of the preferred original content).

This rule for duplicate content is true for Title tag and Description tag content as well, so ensure that the text in these tags are unique to each web page.

Hidden Text

Stay away from hidden text in your site content. Some of the hidden text tactics include matching the text with the background color, having a font size zero, including text behind images or including hidden text in CSS.

Sometimes hidden text may be placed on your website without you being aware of it. Learn how to detect hidden text on a website using the  Web Developer Toolbar.

Anchor Text:

Anchor text are the words that are hyperlinked to a destination URL (a link either to an internal or external web page). It used to be general practice to link pages or sites with exact anchor text match i.e. the same keyword would appear on both the linked pages. This was a strong signal to search engines to rank the website highly for that keyword. Since this practice has been abused a lot lately, a variety in anchor text that is not only bound to your target keywords is preferred. It gives the impression of natural internal and external linking to the search engines.

NOTE: Make sure anchor text linking with exact-match keywords within web pages is limited to 50% of your total links on the web page.

For example, if your anchor text is “designer watches,” here are some anchor text variations you can use when you link:

• Keyword (<50%) (Designer watches).
• Brand Name (Watchshop).
• Page URL (Watchshop.com, www.watchshop.com).
• Long-tail keywords/partial anchor text match (best designer watches, designer watches discounts).
• Generic words (click here, read more).
• Generic words + Keywords (read more about Armani Designer Watches).
• Info Source (article, source, video, website, report).
• H1 of the linking page (ladies designer label watches).

It is tough to keep up with the ever-growing competition in organic searches if other websites often feature above you in search results. You need to keep abreast of the changing SEO trends and start planning for a wholesome SEO strategy. Building SEO Friendly website content is a quintessential part of this strategy.

Why I Frames ,Frames ,Flash, Popups are Bad For Seo

10 Design Flaws Which Can Destroy a Site’s SEO

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When it comes to creating a new website, a key dilemma is whether the focus should be on fantastic Design and User Experience (UX), or on Search Engine Optimization (SEO). There are many cases where mind-blowing animated design negatively affects the site’s SEO. Whilst you may expect an increasing number of visitors on a better designed website, in reality you may see the opposite occur. In order to be successful, any website needs to perform well in search engines.

Therefore, searching for the compromise is essential.

Most web designers likely to ignore SEO as it limits their artistic possibilities. However, there is no need to cut down on design features for the sake of optimization. Designers can work in tune with SEO specialists and developers to find a formula that would meet both users’ wishes, and search engines’ requirements.

Additionally, there is another trap that must be avoided. Pre-existing sites with good SEO may have to reconsider their efforts during a redesign. Even the smallest of changes can create design errors that will hurt its SEO.

What are these errors? Here are the most common mistakes web designers make when not taking SEO into account:

Mistake #1 – Images Instead of Important Elements

Using images as a primary form of navigation will result in search engines treating them without their functional meaning. On the other hand, pure textual navigation is not a good option either.

The compromise is to use text-over-image techniques with CSS.

On top of this, when using headers, it is also not recommended to replace text with images. Content replaced by beautiful graphics with text may look outstanding, but it will not work for SEO. Header text is intended to highlight important keywords; Replacing them with images will devaluate the content.

Speaking generally about images as website content, it’s essential to know the basics of optimizing them for search engines without sacrificing the design. You can find some useful tips on image optimization here.

Mistake #2 – Lack of Breadcrumbs

A perfectly engineered breadcrumb trail will significantly increase a site’s SEO performance. Text links are easily read by search engines and provide a transparent hierarchical navigation structure. Unfortunately, designers often forget about breadcrumbs, despite the fact that they would noticeably increase the user friendliness of the site.

A good example of breadcrumbs on gameinformer.com

Mistake #3 – A Mobile Version of the Site

As mobile devices have gained more and more popularity in recent years, it’s important to take care of the mobile version of your site. This raises concern regarding whether it’s best to create a separate mobile site, or to use responsive design. According to Matt Cutts of Google, responsive design is a smarter choice for SEO needs. When the mobile version of the site does not perform well (ie. without “rel=canonical”), you can end up with PageRank divided between two pages. This is impossible when using responsive design thanks to using just one URL.

Mistake #4 – Frames

It’s hard to believe there are still websites made with frames. Not only did they become obsolete years ago, but they also won’t act in your favor in website SEO-wise. Frame make it difficult for search engines to read your site with valuable content hidden. As framed websites use three html files instead of one, this causes conflicts with indexation.

The world’s worst website definitely uses frames

Mistake #5 – Improper 404 Page

Creating custom 404 pages is always a possibility to add extraordinary humorous ideas for web designers. But in search of some light relief, they often forget to include the necessary elements.

For example, navigation elements – a link to return to the website. Not only will it improve the user experience, but will also improve the SEO. Otherwise, search engines will find your site contains broken internal links that will reduce its search ranking.

Mistake #6 – Too Much Flash

Visually attractive Flash is still badly indexed by search engines. Surely, your website can contain Flash, but it is recommended not to use it for important content and navigation – and definitely don’t make the entire site Flash. However, it is always up to you to prioritize visual or SEO issues.

Beautiful grimoire.jp Flash design

But the good news is that unlike Flash, HTML5 is SEO-friendly and Google successfully indexes HTML 5 content. Several advantages of HTML5 for SEO are reviewed here.

Mistake #7 – Improper Video Embedding

Whilst video content is a great way to engage your audience, it doesn’t always help your SEO. Specifically, custom Java media players are not readable by search engines. The optimal way is embedding videos directly from YouTube which is owned by Google.

Mistake #8 – Pop-Ups

To begin with, pop-ups are a big no no for designers to use. They are equally badly treated by visitors and search engines. They are annoying and usually closed by most users the moment they appear. Moreover, they immediately evoke prejudice about the website. Search engines don’t even index pop-ups as a part of the site. You can always find another place to put pop-up content on your site; just forget about pop-ups altogether for your own sake.

Mistake #9 – Geo-Redirection

Multi-language sites often use automatic geo-redirection which reads a users’ location and the language of their computer to redirect towards the website with the appropriate locale. Although this is convenient, redirecting away from your home page will hurt SEO. The best way to cope with this problem is to let users manually pick their location.

Mistake #10 – Neglecting Heading Tags

Heading tags are used not only for visual emphasis of content, but have a considerable impact on SEO as well. Saying that search engines like H1 tags means that Google gives them a higher importance. The proper use of H tags includes putting keywords into H1 tag and not using it for a company name or styling purposes.

Generally, all of the mistakes mentioned above are the result of one major mistake which is to consider SEO after designing a website. SEO must be treated as one of the components of a design. A designer can create perfect artwork, but it’ll be absolutely worthless if nobody can find it.

Image:

Text present within images does no good for SEO. If you want your website’s images to be search engine optimized, you need to include a description of the image in the alt text attribute of the image’s HTML, as shown below:

<img src="gaint-prawn.jpg"alt="the gaint pravn at balina">

An Example of the Use of Alt Tags for Images

The following are some important points to note for SEO-friendly images:

• You must include text that is related to the content around it. For example, if you have an image of a formally dressed and well-groomed woman and your site talks about ‘young entrepreneurs,’ describe the image as young entrepreneurs of today and not as smart looking young woman.
• If the image is used for bullet lists or any other decorative purposes you can leave the alt attribute empty i.e. alt=“ “
• If you have images of decorative text, add the same text in the alt attribute.
• Keep the alt text content short and descriptive
• For logos, describe the image as ‘Company Name.’
• Use relevant keywords in context with the content on the page where it is displayed.
• Choose an appropriate file name for the images. Avoid hyphens or underscores.
• Label the file extension, for instance, “.jpg” (JPEG) so that search engines know it is a photo or “.gif” (GIF) so that search engines know it is a graphic.
• If you have a really long description to add to your site’s visuals, learn more about the longdescattribute here.