Facebook Follows Twitter; Rolls Out Verified Pages for High Profiles

Gone are the days when verified accounts were meant only for Twitter. Facebook, the largest social networking site today has joined the bandwagon by making sure the high profiles, celebrities, and big brands have verified accounts. This step is sure to help several users to find authentic accounts of the people they want to stay connected with.

It is similar to Twitter, and you can easily spot out a verified account by seeing a blue check mark symbol, right beside the name of the page or profile. This symbol appears on the timeline; search results, news feed, and other sections on Facebook. So far, verified pages belong only to a small group of well-known public figures, such as pop idols, journalists, government officials, popular brands and businesses. In short, the ones that have large audiences, and this update is sure to roll out to other profiles as well, but not for the common users.

Facebook will proactively authenticate the pages and profiles, however, users too can report fake accounts. This may have come after a micro-blogging site inadvertently verified a fake account for Rupert Murdoch's wife Wendi back in Jan. 2012. What’s more, Facebook has not really explained what the verification process involves. As such there is no application page, or even a list that is available for accounts that would like to be considered for verification.

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Paid Inclusions in Times of Today

When a website pays a certain price to a search engine company, in order to include their website in the search index, and thereby increase their SEO ranking, it is called as a paid inclusion. It is a safer and economical form of search engine advertising. One only needs to pay a single price to have the website listed in a specific search engine, and often under a particular keyword. This makes sure that the site will be updated on the search engines data base more than the non-paid ones. 

Nonetheless, you should keep in mind that the algorithm is the final decider, and not the pay. In fact, some of the search engine companies even offer permanent visibility for one year, so that the link can be permanently attached to an established website.

Paid inclusions programs were extremely popular in early 2001, but lost their impact as Google did not approve them as they feared it would prejudice their search results. All the same, Google changed its mind over a period of time. Shortly after Google went public in 2004, Google earned an excess of $23 billion, the other main search engines began to drop their paid inclusions programs so as to catch up. And with time Google seemed to be comfortable with these, raising high concerns for publishers and searchers alike. 

In fact, Google is now leading the charge in executing and employing these inclusion programs in particular areas of their business model, in a different form. For instance, Google Flight Search, Google Hotel Finder, etc all have new patterns of paid inclusion programs. This helps in giving better search results, by means of having access to more information. Besides, companies find it a lot easier and simpler to completely control the content of advertisements found on Google. 

Thus, it has helped in increasing their quality by leaps and bounds and finding it rather helpful in the search process.

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How to Skyrocket to the Top of Google Local Search Results

SEO for Google and Bing local places search results is more important than ever for local SMEs/small businesses. About a third of search engine queries typed into Google and Bing now have local intent. Eye-tracking studies also show people to spend more time looking and clicking on local search results, probably because local results have visually stimulating red icons and an accompanying map in Google (this is also why microdata is becoming so useful and will probably soon become even more so for SEO).

So how do you get your website to rank well in local search results? The answer, in the simplest terms possible, is to be thorough and consistent. By thorough, I mean saturating all the possible channels where you can get your website and business listed.  That means don’t stop once your business is listed in Justdial in India or Yelp in the U.S.; continue onto the local yellow pages site and every single other high ranking directory you can find for your local area.

Consistency means making sure that your address, business name, URL and phone number are exactly the same across all channels. This includes local place listings, social media listings, paid search listings, and everywhere else. Inconsistencies confuse Google and can lead to duplicate listings, which split your search traffic and hurt your rankings. Make sure you not only claim all listings and enhance them, but also delete any duplicates that may have cropped up. You can use a tool like Yext to check for consistency.

Oftentimes your customers are looking for a local attraction near your business that can help push traffic to your business. Find a way to link the local attraction to your business's local listing, and when potential consumers search for the attraction, they'll find you too.

Encourage customers to give reviews online. This can dramatically increase conversion rates, as most customers check online reviews before making a purchasing decision. Strategies to do this include implementing QR codes for smart phone users, linking to review sites on your website, and creating a user generated content (UCG) section on your website.

Traditional SEO tactics like onsite optimization of alt, meta, header, and title tags also help local search rankings as well, so don’t neglect the fundamentals.

So that’s your primer on how to skyrocket to the top of Google and Bing local search results. It’s not comprehensive, but it does cover all the fundamentals. Don’t feel like taking the time to do all this yourself? Then take a look at Cosmos's online marketing and SEO services packages, all of which include local search optimization.

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HTML5 Microdata for SEO and Website Design

So far, microdata has been most thoroughly implemented in the case of recipes. Now, you can search Google for recipes and sort them by caloric information, cook time, user rating, ingredients, and many other factors besides.However, it’s only a matter of time before microdata implementation becomes standard industry practice for all sorts of information. The vocabulary is there to tag with microdata people, places, specific types of businesses, products, prices, reviews, phone numbers, and much more besides. The major search giants have partnered together to create a website called schema.org, which contains a complete listing of all supported microdata tags and instructions on how to implement them.

Perhaps the most interesting and most misunderstood new feature that HTML5 brings to web development and SEO is microdata. What is microdata? Microdata is a new set of vocabulary in HTML5 that allows web development companies to semantically tag information in such a way that it can be understood not only by humans, but also by search engines like Google and Bing. This in turns allows search engines to display information more intelligently.The SEO benefit to this is that Google has started rewarding website design companies who use microdata by displaying their websites’ information in search results more prominently than others.

These microdata-enhanced listings are displayed above the standard blue-link search results, giving them coveted first-place status on Google. On top of that, eye-tracking studies show that users tend to spend most of their time looking at and clicking on enhanced search results anyway, which means that if Google displays your microdata-enhanced listing, it will be given a twofold advantage over other websites’ search listings.

Don’t feel like taking the time to learn HTML5’s new microdata tagging language? Then take a look at Cosmos Star Consultants’ website design and SEO service packages, as we’ll be more than happy to do it for you.

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Do I Need SEO for My Local Business?

There are a million websites on the Internet and the number continues to increase with every passing minute. The importance of well-integrated website design has grown radically. We see a huge number of websites competing with each other, thus, making optimization an immensely valuable tool. Search engine optimization refers to an increase in the amount of traffic to a particular website. This is done with the help of search engines so that the website appears in the top 10 results. The technique is to use natural, organic, or algorithmic search results. Read on to know why has SEO become a must for local businesses, and how it can be achieved.

Use your location in the keywords: When you make use of the location it becomes a lot easier for people to find your place and the work that you offer. For example, if you are in Dubai and you sell mobile covers, your highlighted keyword would be “Dubai mobile covers” as it will include your work profile as well as your location.

Use meta-tags: Meta-tags are a great tool to attract traffic on your website. They help to improve your standings in search engines that use them. You should make use of them when you want to gather more page views. Therefore, they provide vital information to customers about what exactly is the website all about.

Quality content is a must: If you are absolutely serious about optimizing your website, you should ensure that the website has quality content. For high traffic ranking, the content should be useful and should talk about the very intention and function of the website. Creating high quality and important content is a primal rule to add to the hits on the website.

Draw on social media: Social media can help drive much more traffic to a website than search engines. Thus, make use of Facebook, Twitter, and several other social networking sites to boost your sales and promote your business for free. What’s more, you can reach the exact audience you’re looking out for without putting in too much effort. In fact, the local groups on various social sites are a great boon as the members are primarily from the same local region you are targeting.

Include original content together with keyword optimization and it is sure to attract quality traffic to your website. All the best!

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