Examples of Digital Advertising

Digital advertising refers to marketing media that is digitally displayed. Digital advertising technology exists on the Internet, on smart phone and hand-held media devices, and even on automobiles and billboards. Businesses and product manufacturers use digital advertising to build or maintain a brand image and market products and services to consumers.

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Electronic Billboard

Electronic billboards are the digital version of traditional billboard advertisements. These billboards display a variety of digital advertising messages. They are targeted because they provide advertisers with the opportunity to change advertising messages throughout the day. Digital billboards are cost-effective because several advertisers share the expense with rotating advertisements. They are flexible because new designs and advertising messages can be changed within a day or two.

Web-Based Marketing

Another example of digital advertising is web-based marketing. This form of advertising targets Internet users while they visit websites. Pop-up advertisements appear as a new window and display an advertising message for a product or service usually related to the original website. Video advertisements are another form of digital web-based advertising that plays brief "commercials" before the video loads, during a break in the video or at the conclusion of the video. Major search engines offer video media options to advertisers.

Viral Marketing

Viral marketing is a form of digital advertising businesses use to spread the word about their brand. Advertising messages are spread digitally through email and other online media. This form of advertising encourages existing customers to tell others about a product, service or company. The intent is for word to spread like a "virus" to others within a social group or network.

Audio Advertising

Audio advertising is a form of digital advertising that targets consumers through Podcasts, Internet radio and live streaming digital radio. Podcasts are digital audio files such as an MP3 that users download to a computer or personal media player. Internet radio and live streaming digital radio play "sponsor" messages that advertise products and services to consumers while they listen to the radio online.

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Search Engine Ranking Factors 2015

Every two years, Moz surveys the opinions of dozens of the world's brightest search marketers and runs correlation studies to better understand the workings of search engine algorithms. We gather this data to gain insight into the factors that may help—or hurt—a website's visibility in search engines.

This year, Moz surveyed over 150 leading search marketers who provided expert opinions on over 90 ranking factors.

In addition, the Data Science team at Moz, lead by Dr. Matthew Peters, ran an extensive correlation study to determine which features of websites and webpages are associated with higher search rankings. For the first time this year, Moz partnered with several data partners to enhance the study, including SimilarWeb, DomainTools, and Ahrefs.

Note that these factors are not "proof" of what search engines use to rank websites, but simply show the characteristics of web pages that tend to rank higher. Combining this understanding with both experience and knowledge of search engine algorithms can help lead to better SEO practices.

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Correlation Data

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Survey Data

Digital Marketing

In simplistic terms, digital marketing is the promotion of products or brands via one or more forms of electronic media. Digital marketing differs from traditional marketing in that it involves the use of channels and methods that enable an organization to analyze marketing campaigns and understand what is working and what isn’t – typically in real time.

Digital marketers monitor things like what is being viewed, how often and for how long, sales conversions, what content works and doesn’t work, etc. While the Internet is, perhaps, the channel most closely associated with digital marketing, others include wireless text messaging, mobile instant messaging, mobile apps, podcasts, electronic billboards, digital television and radio channels, etc.

Why Digital Marketing Is Important

Digital media is so pervasive that consumers have access to information any time and any place they want it. Gone are the days when the messages people got about your products or services came from you and consisted of only what you wanted them to know. Digital media is an ever-growing source of entertainment, news, shopping and social interaction, and consumers are now exposed not just to what your company says about your brand, but what the media, friends, relatives, peers, etc., are saying as well. And they are more likely to believe them than you. People want brands they can trust, companies that know them, communications that are personalized and relevant, and offers tailored to their needs and preferences.

Manage Customer Relationships Across All Channels

Digital marketing and its associated channels are important – but not to the exclusion of all else. It’s not enough to just know your customers; you must know them better than anybody else so you can communicate with them where, when and how they are most receptive to your message. To do that, you need a consolidated view of customer preferences and expectations across all channels – Web, social media, mobile, direct mail, point of sale, etc. Marketers can use this information to create and anticipate consistent, coordinated customer experiences that will move customers along in the buying cycle. The deeper your insight into customer behavior and preferences, the more likely you are to engage them in lucrative interactions.

What is Google Tag Manager?

Automated Tag Management

Google Tag Manager allows customization based on the user requirements, using the user’s own set of tools. It results in better integrations based on current work processes.

Google Tag Manager gives you full control over how your tags fire and are defined. Tag management allows marketers to easily manage tags onto the website. Because of the ease of use of the Google Tag Manager, making changes without IT or developer involvement is simple. The elimination of that step in the process will help improve the website, and eliminate costs.

How to Control Tags

There’s a tag, there’s a variable, and then there’s a trigger.

All tags load independently from one another and in parallel with other page elements. You can pick the most important data elements on your pages and easily collect them with variables. On a basic level, the variable can be assigned. That’s the UA code, the Google Analytics code for a site that can be set as a variable.

There’s an infinite number of variables you can control when it fires. The frequency, and the manner the tags are fired can all be controlled. Custom designed variables can also be done based on a data on a specific page.
Usability, Accounts, and User Roles

Google Tag Master can easily be used by any marketer, including SEOs and SEMs, plus webmasters and IT developers. It has an easy-to-use interface that allows for easy, fast, and convenient processing. User level access can also be controlled so changes can only be done by specific users with a specific level of authority.
Integration and Templates

Google Tag Manager makes web analytics implementations more convenient. It can be used to deploy different types of tracking codes, which enables Google Analytics to track various types of information, including conversions.

Google Tag Manager also supports Google and non-Google metrics so you can quickly adopt new marketing tools into the process.
Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics

The main similarity between Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics lies in the use of codes. Upon signing up, both give users a code to be placed within the site for website tracking.

When you sign up for Google Analytics, you are given a code to be placed on every page. Google Analytics allows for customizable features, but changes need to be made page by page.

Google Tag Manager works very similarly, where you will also be given a code snippet that you will place on your page, but you use the same snippet of code on every page. Changes can be made on a higher level through the Google Tag Manager control panel.

Everything that gets passed over to Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager is on a thing called the data-layer. It contains the different variables on the site. It’s not necessarily readily apparent to a visitor to the site, but the data is there. That information is being sent over to Analytics. This can be defined in the Tag Manager as well and the data layer.

The customer journey on the site can be seen through the Tag Manager and the variables can be defined. All of those can be set up in custom dimensions and that information will be sent over from the site via the data-layer. A lot of data can be captured through this. Once you have all of that information, these can be analyzed and supplement the standard Google Analytics information.
Tips and Tricks

Google Tag Manager WordPress plugin

Installing the Google Tag Manager WordPress plugin in your WordPress will do 99% of the work for you.
Preview Function

Google Tag Manager has a built-in preview function where you can preview anything you do before you actually publish it live to the site. Use this feature to eliminate unnecessary mistakes.

SEO tips for beginners – 15 ways to Google boost your web site

As a beginner to search engine optimization (SEO) you need to understand that there is no magic way to rank your web site in the first page of Google, Bing or Yahoo. Search engines are governed by complex algorithms and it takes a lot of effort to ‘convince’ them that your web site or page deserves one of the top spots.

Nevertheless, there are certain rules you can follow to optimize your web site and provide the bots with the necessary signals.  While the web is floated with SEO tips and advice these are explained in a theoretical level and not how they can be applied in practice. In my opinion, this is why most web site owners are confused and they either give up with SEO or simply do not get the expected results.

Our guide includes SEO advice that works. I have tested this strategy over the years on a number of web sites with remarkable results. Of course there are many other things you can do to help your web site achieve better rankings but the tips presented below can give you a solid and reliable framework that is 100% safe (i.e. you don’t take any risks) and above all it works.

In addition, along with the tips I have added real examples from two clients web sites (both are less than 1 year old), that I’ve been doing SEO work, to help you understand how to apply the guidelines on your own web site or blog.

1. Page Titles and description

Page titles

Page titles are a very important aspect of SEO and this is why it is first on the list. My findings the last couple of months show that page titles are more important than ever especially for Google SEO. Exact page titles for low volume keywords can give you a competitive advantage in search results but this is something I will discuss in another post. For now the most important characteristics of a page title are:

• Each page needs to have a unique page title that accurately describes the page’s content.
• Be brief and descriptive.
• Help the user understand what the page is about

Home page title: The title for your homepage can list the name of your website/business and could include other bits of important information like the physical location of the business or maybe a few of its main focuses or offerings. For example:

Post/other pages title:

Title of other posts/pages of your web site should accurately describe what the page is about and be attractive for the searcher.

Description

A page’s description meta tag is also very important. It gives users, Google and other search engines a summary of what the page is about. Google may choose to show what you type in the description as a snippets for your page or may decide to use a part of your page’s content. In other words it does not mean that what you write in the description will show in the snippet. The guidelines for writing a good description are:

• Always provide a unique description for all pages, post, products of your website.
• Keep the size between 150-160 characters.
• Avoid repeating the title in the description
• Don’t add too many keywords
• Try to use the description as a way to ‘advertise’ your page to the reader so that they click on your title and visit the page.

You can see from the examples above how I use the description tag for my pages.

2. Permanent link structure

The permanent link structure is a term used to describe the format of URLS for pages (categories/tags) or individual posts of a web site. It is shown in the browser address bar and in the search results (below the page title).

Guidelines for optimized link structure

• Make Urls simple and easy to understand for search engines and users
• Use hyphens ‘ – ‘ to separate the words that make up a url
• Avoid lengthy Urls with unnecessary information
• Use words that describe what the page is about but avoid keyword stuffing

Examples of BAD url structures

• http://www.example.com/UK/123213/5005.html
• http://www.example.com/socialmedianews
• http://www.example.com/id=7&sort=A&action=70

Examples of GOOD url structures

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• http://www.example.com/social-media-news
• http://www.example.com/2002/12/social-media-news

3. Breadcrumb

Make sure that you have a breadcrumb in all your internal pages. A breadcrumb is a set of links at the top of the page that aid navigation.  If you are using WordPress there are many free plugins to create a breadcrumb.

 4. Internal links

When we talk about internal links we mean links in a page that point to other pages within the web site i.e. not external links. In the example below when you click on the link with anchor “increase the intensity” you will be redirected to a page with-in the web site to find out more information on how to increase the intensity of an exercise.

Internal linking is a very important factor for web site SEO but still many web site owners are not using it correctly. The rules to follow for internal links are simple:

• Link related articles together either by using keyword anchor text or by using the full article title
• Make sure that the links are useful both for the user and easy to understand by search engines.
• Don’t make links for search engines only. An internal link should help the user navigate the site better.
• Do not use terms like ‘click here’ or ‘[..]’ for internal linking.
• Don’t overdo it. 4-5 internal links per page are enough (create more if really necessary)

Don’t always link old posts from new posts but every couple of weeks go back and link newer posts from older posts. It’s not an easy task to do especially if you have a lot of posts but it’s a very valuable tool for on-site SEO.

5. Text formatting and the use of H1, H2 and H3

Don’t just publish text on your web site without first doing some basic formatting. This is not good for the user experience and works against your SEO efforts. General guidelines for formatting a post or page on your web site:

• Use H1 tags for the title of your post
• Use H2 tags for the main headings of your post.
• Use BOLD and Italics to draw users attention
• Don’t use H2 tags for all your headings
• Write small paragraphs
• Use a font size that is easy to read

When formatting your posts always have in mind the user experience. Can the user identify the main sections of your post (H2 tags) just by looking at the page? Is the text easy to read even on other devices (Apple Ipads, Android tablets etc)?

Click on the image for a larger view (and to see H2)

6. The 404 Page

SEO is about improving the user experience and a proper 404 page contributes to that goal. The 404 page is the page shown when a user is looking for a page on your site that doesn’t exist or mistypes a URL or follows a broken link. When the 404 page is not configured looks like this:

This is not useful for the user and negatively impacts the user experience.

A properly configured 404 page should:

• Give some info to the user of what happened rather than displaying “Not found”
• Have a design consistent with the rest of the website
• Give options to the user to navigate to other pages of the site.

If you are using a professional theme (like Thesis), it takes care of the 404 page. This is how my 404 page looks like: 

7. Image Optimization

Images are sometimes necessary to enhance the user experience but care should be taken not to create other side effects like problems with page load speed or slow response. Especially after the success of Pinterest many webmasters started using more images in their posts. If you do decide to use images, mind the following:

• Use Alt Text to describe the image. You can add keywords but don’t overdo it.
• Use keywords in image filenames (separated with dashes). Avoid using filenames like image1.jpg or person1.jpg. Instead use meaningful names with dashes. For example woman-working-out.jpg
• Keep all image files in a dedicated folder in your site i.e. www.mydomain.com/images/
• Optimize the image size. The smaller the size of the image (in KB) the faster is your web site. You can use this free tool to make your image size smaller without losing the quality.

8. Page Speed

Google has many times said that page speed is a ranking factor and yet many webmasters don’t optimize their web sites for speed. Their aim (Google’s) is to provide the searcher with the most accurate results in the fastest possible way. It is certain that page speed (as a ranking factor) will gain more importance in the next couple of years.

Fast web sites improve the user experience and it is a factor to encourage the visitor to come again. In addition, a web site that loads in less than 4 seconds is more likely to:

• Rank better in search results
• Get more page visits per user
• Get more conversions

How to tackle the page speed problem?

• Remove any unnecessary plug-ins (if you are using WordPress) or java script from the pages.
• Optimize the size of your images
• Use a caching service or plug-in (I use WP Super cache and W3Total Cache).
• Go to http://www.webpagetest.org/ and test how many seconds it takes for your pages to load from different locations, internet speed and browsers. The analysis report at the end will also tell you which components of your page take too long to load so that you can remove them.
• Go to Google Page Speed Service  to analyze your web site and get performance recommendations.
• If you have a lot of images on your site and you cannot improve performance with the recommendations given by the tools mentioned above you can consider using a CDN (Content Delivery Network) service such as Cloud Flare or Amazon Cloud Front

I know that tackling issues related to performance is a technical issue and sometimes it’s not easy for the average user to identify and solve the problems. Nevertheless it is a very important factor for SEO and should not be neglected. If you can identify that your web site has performance issues you can either hire a developer through upwork.com for example, or hire me to help you out.

9. Google authorship

What is Google authorship status?

It’s a way to bind your content with your Google+ profile. When you do that successfully your picture appears in the Google search results next to your content (see example with my picture above)

How Google authorship status relates to Search Engine Optimization?

• It improves the credibility of a web site in both the minds of users and search engines.
• Studies have shown that more people are likely to click a link from the search results if the author is verified.
• You increase the chances of getting natural links (people are more likely to link to your web site or page if you are verified).
• There is also a confirmed hidden benefit from authorship status which gives you additional listings in the SERPS.

Update: Google authorship is no longer applicable. Google has removed author information and pictures from the search results and there is no SEO benefit from implementing Google authorship. Nevertheless, Google suggests that if you already have google authorship and rel=author implemented, not to remove it because they may decide to use it again in the future.

10. Mobile friendly web sites

A significant number of searches performed each day are through mobile devices. Many studies over the last 6 months identified that the number of searches using smartphones is steadily increasing especially when it comes to making online purchases.

I am sure that if you have a look at your analytics data you will see a good percentage of your daily visits coming from mobile. In the example demonstrated below, almost 30% of the traffic is from mobile with Apple products (iPhone, iPod and iPad) being on the top positions.

It’s not in the scope of this post to go in detail into mobile SEO but there some simple steps to follow to ensure that you web site is mobile friendly.

• First thing to do is understand the difference between a mobile friendly web site and a native Android, iPhone or Windows Mobile app. After talking with a number of webmasters I realized that many people fail with their mobile strategy because they do not understand this difference and because they have not yet realized the enormous potential of mobile markets.
• A mobile friendly web site is optimized for viewing on the mobile browser (i.e. Chrome on android or Safari on iPhone).  A native android (iPhone or Windows Mobile app) is an application that can be downloaded from the mobile markets (Google Play or Apple Store). I will cover this with more details in another post but for SEO purposes you must provide a mobile friendly version for your users coming through mobile browsers.
• The easiest way to create a mobile friendly website is to use a plugin (if you are using WordPress) or a service (there are free and paid) which will optimize your web site for mobiles.
• I personally use wp-touch pro for all my websites but there are many others. Read this guide from Google for more information and resources.

Update: The best way to approach Mobile SEO is to adopt a responsive website design. There are many advantages both in terms of SEO and usability.

11.  User Sitemap

A sitemap is a list of all posts/pages of your web site.  You need 2 types of sitemaps. First an xml sitemap to submit to Google, Bing and other search engines and second an html sitemap to help visitors find your content easier. It is recommended to place a link to your user sitemap from the main menu.

XML Sitemap (for search engines)

 Depending on your blogging platform you can use plugins to create and update your web site’s sitemap. When viewed in the browser it looks like this:

 HTML Sitemap (for Users)

The user sitemap should provide links to all (or to the most important pages of your site). It can also group posts by author, date, category etc. Its purpose is to help the user find information on your site easier and quicker. My user sitemap looks like this:

 12. Content is still king

In order for the above tips to work you need first and foremost to have good content on your web site. Content is still king and a web site with good, original, quality content can do better in the long run (with or without SEO) than a web site optimized in SEO but with not  so good content.

What is good content?

When people search on Google, Yahoo or Bing they are essentially looking for answer to a question. Good content is post or page that answers this question. 

How do I know if my content is good?

There are two simple ways to understand if your content is useful. First you can check your analytics and especially the time spend on a page. A reader will stay longer on the page if the content is good and second the number of social media shares (Facebook likes, tweets etc.). This is actually a very good way to understand what user’s want and what type of content to provide in your web site or blog. (I will discuss in a different post how to promote your web site on social media).

How to write good content?

There is no simple answer to this question but the following guidelines can put you in the correct direction:

• Make sure that your content delivers what promised in the title. If for example your title is “How to lose 15 pounds of fat” make sure that your post provides an accurate description (or steps) that someone can follow to achieve the desired result.
• Check your text for typos, spelling and grammar mistakes.
• Format your text (as explained in Tip 8 above)
• Provide links within your content (where appropriate) to other pages on your site (or other sites) to get more information.
• Include references from established research or studies (where appropriate) to prove that what you are saying or suggesting is correct. 

Quantity VS Quality 

Many people often ask me “How long (in words) should I make my posts?” You should understand that there is no single answer that fits all purposes. It greatly depends on the type of post and topic. For example the post you are reading now is more than 4000 words because it is a vast topic. In order to explain someone the basic rules of SEO I had to make the post that long.

If for example you are writing about the benefits of black chocolate then surely you won’t have to write that much. This is exactly where quantity vs. quality comes into place. It’s better to write a quality post without counting words rather than a long unfriendly post for the sake of providing more word count.

Google’s official view about content length is very clear: Short content can be useful and rank well.

What does Google consider good content?

A couple of weeks after the release of Penguin Google published a set of criteriafor accessing the quality of a web site. Among the suggested guidelines they included some questions to ask after you finish a post, to help you determine the quality of your work.

13. Fresh Content

Having fresh content is an incentive for visitors to come back and for search engine bots to visit and crawl your web site more often.

This is true when you really have something new to say about the niche or topic your covering. Avoid publishing pages with similar content just for the sake of updating your web site or blog.

14. Check your external links

External links (links in your web site pointing to other sites) are important for SEO. In general ensure that:

• You are not linking to spam web sites or web sites with inappropriate content
• You have no broken links i.e. links to web sites or pages that no longer exist (you can use xenu – a free tool to analyze your external links).
• You are not in any way selling or exchanging links
• Any links in your comments section carry the nofollow directive

15. Webmaster tools and Analytics

Google and Bing have what is called webmaster tools. This is the place to register and submit your web site to their index. After submission you can visit the webmaster central and get valuable information about your web site.

Although this is not directly related to SEO when you submit your web site to Google webmaster tools and Bing webmaster tools you gain a number of advantages:

• It’s a way to tell search engines about your web site (by submitting your sitemap)
• It’s a way to get feedback on the number of pages indexed
• It’s a way to get notified about potential problems i.e. access issues that restrict web sites from crawling your content
• You can see the number of incoming and internal links.

Also, it is very important to use Google Analytics (or any other traffic analysis tool) to:

• Find out how visitors find your web site (direct visits, search, referrals etc)
• How much time they spend on your pages (and on which pages)
• What keywords they used
• How many pages they view per visit

Bonus Tips:

Schema Markup: One of the ways to help search engines understand the context of your content is through the use of structured data markup. In simple terms structured data is a way to annotate your content so that crawlers can index your pages better.

Although this is not officially part of the Google ranking algorithm, it is something that can improve the presentation of your pages in the search results and this means higher click through rates and more organic traffic.

There are various schemas for almost all kinds of content (articles, videos, images, products etc) and websites (personal, business, local business etc).

Canonical URLS: Canonical URLS are very important for SEO. Setting a canonical URL for all your pages is a great way to:

• Avoid duplicate content issues
• Consolidate links to a particular page (this is useful for ecommerce websites or websites with dynamic URLS with parameters).
• Tell Google the original publisher of an article in case you syndicate your content in other websites.

Read this guide from Google for more information.

I have followed all the above tips, now what?

Once you have optimized your web site for SEO by following ALL of the above guidelines and next steps are:

• Concentrate on improving your web site by (proving more content, whether it’s new product info, articles, services – or whatever you are trying to achieve)
• Promote your web site using techniques that work and above all are safe. If you fail with your SEO optimization your web site may not be running on it’s full potential but if you follow wrong promotion techniques you increase the risk of getting a penalty and completely destroy your efforts.