Category Archives: Digital Marketing

With an incredibly clean and easy to use design, Pinterest has attracted countless users looking to organize themselves in the Internet-age. Pinterest is an online scrapbook where users can post images they find on the Web. 

It has become a place for users to post everything from fashion inspirations to decorating ideas and just about anything else one could dream of. Perhaps that is why Pinterest’s popularity has soared in the past few months, making it one of the fastest-growing websites in history.

What makes this rise in popularity so unusual is that it is driven primarily by women, most hailing from the central part of the United States and the Midwest. Much of the websites appeal for most of these women lies in the ability to display their hopes, dreams and ideas, while all the while searching for new ones.

Access to Pinterest is allowed by invitation only; anyone looking to join needs to request an invite from the website or from an existing user.

Users can follow each other on Pinterest, view the most popular pins or find gift ideas by price range. Users can browse categories such as architecture, fitness and weddings, ‘like’ whatever catches their eye, re-pin it to their own boards or even make a comment.

All of this is great news for business owners who want their products and services to get noticed fast.

Everyone wants their content to go viral. Add Pinterest to the current social-sharing cocktail of Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and countless others, small business owners have the chance to do just that.

Anyone who owns a small business, and is looking for new ways to market themselves online, needs a Pinterest account.

There are already some really creative ways that people are marketing themselves and their business using Pinterest. Be careful, however, because Pinterest and its users frown upon too much self promotion.

 Copyright 2012 dzine it, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Microsoft representative Duane Forrester recently posted a statement on the Bing Search Blog, effectively taking a stance on mobile SEO.

Forrester says that Microsoft and its Bing search engine is pushing a ‘one URL per content item’ strategy, coming out ahead of rival Google in taking a stance on how best to handle mobile search engine optimization.

The basic idea behind the single URL strategy is to keep things simple.

For each website, instead of having different URLs for various platforms, such as desktops and varying mobile devices, Microsoft believes that it is more beneficial to use a single URL.

The benefits of a single URL strategy, according to Bing, are as follows:

• There are more ranking signals being associated with fewer URLs.
• Since there is less crawler traffic, fewer URLs result in reduced bandwidth used by crawlers.
• There is less work in (and potentially less cost associated with) building updating and maintaining various websites for various platforms.

However, Bing recognizes that not every single mobile URL should match a desktop URL.

There are going to be times when a business needs mobile-specific landing pages. In those cases, Bing suggests blocking its search engine spiders.

On the other hand, Google has yet to weigh in on mobile SEO recommendations. Although some company representatives have lobbied publically for a single URL approach, Google has suggested many methods in the past and has not made an official recommendation.

Copyright 2012 dzine it, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

At some point, every business will require a complete redevelopment and redesign of its website at some point.

If a search engine optimization campaign is responsible for driving a significant amount of your business’ revenue, and it likely is, any redesign or redevelopment project can result in the loss of search engine rankings.

The following steps are crucial to preserving search engine optimization (SEO) efforts when redesigning a website:

1. Maintain the site’s URL structure. When redesigning a website, existing URLs should be maintained whenever possible.
2. Use a 301 redirect when necessary. A 301 redirect will tell the search engines that a page has been permanently moved from one location to another. This will prevent users from being taken to a broken page.
3. Don’t duplicate. Avoid canonical issues. This means that multiple addresses (http://yoursite.com and http://www.yoursite.com) mirror each other. Browsers should automatically redirect one of them to the other.
4. Avoid heavy graphics. Page-load speed has an effect on SEO. This is why it is important to compress graphics, clean up code and keep the site moving fast.
5. Delete the old site. Having a “/old-site directory” is not a good thing, even with 301 redirects in place. When an old site can still be crawled, it can mess with the new site’s search engine rank. Instead, back it up locally.
6. Have a robots.txt installed. Robots.txt tells the search engines what do to when crawling a website.
7. Have an XML sitemap. Remove the old sitemap and install a new one once the new site goes live.
8. Migrate all title tags and meta descriptions from the old site. If the homepage had some good keywords in the title tag bringing valuable traffic, the last thing you want to do is lose that.
9. Use an analytics program. If you had it on the old site, carry it over, If you didn’t have one, create a new account with Google or Bing. It is important to monitor traffic statistics.
10. Use webmaster tools. Similarly, it is important to follow crawl rates and other errors to ensure that you’ve covered your bases once you launch.

Copyright 2012 dzine it, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.