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Google Plus Setup For Businesses, Franchises & Brands

April 17, 2012 in How-To Strategy, How-To Tactics, Tips and Best Practices

Clients often ask us, “What should we be doing with Google+?” Usually it’s already understood that it’s a social offshoot of Google that fits somewhere into the scheme of online marketing, but the details of how to get started can often get confusing.

  1. Changes are happening fast – check for timestamps on articles online (this one, too).
  2. As Google continues to integrate Google+ with existing assets, bloggers from a variety of industry segments are racing to declare the latest implications. The most dramatic pronouncements tend to gain inflated visibility because of their share/click appeal.

ISM set out to take a closer look at Google’s latest offering, crossed that with some quality investigative blog posts, and boiled the results down to a roadmap for businesses. Many thanks to gurus Danny Sullivan, A.J. Kohn, and many others whose research efforts were included this article.

Google Plus Background

Overview

Summary of Google Plus

Google+ is a social network created by Google, integrated with existing Google user accounts, the “+1” sharing system, and other existing Google assets. Google+ users can “follow” or “friend” other Google+ users or pages by adding them to their “Circles”. Google+ Circles provide a way for users to … Read More

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Staggering usage data from facebook

February 7, 2012 in Industry Trends

Last year Google confirmed something that many of us already suspected: Facebook is the most visited site on the web. We’re big analytics geeks around here, so we started wondering just how much people are using Facebook, in terms of web analytics. We know that a site like Facebook has high engagement, so couple that with huge volume (and a market that’s collectively expanding thanks to the boom in internet connected devices) and you have a website that’s entering completely new territory for usage and overall engagement. But could we find data?… Read More

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Improving organic CTR with semantic HTML

January 9, 2012 in Tips and Best Practices

A visually compelling search result can influence click-through rate (CTR) by 10-30%. ISM decided to investigate exactly which types of structured markup Google looks for when generating CTR-friendly “rich snippets”

Not all search results are created equal. By now most of us are familiar with presence of rich snippets on Google search results:

Google relies on the usage of Semantic HTML to generate results like the one above. Generally speaking, semantic HTML is any markup that is written in a way that indicates the meanings of–and relationships between–elements on a web page. There is no absolute standard for semantic HTML, but various online groups have worked together to establish markup standards that define HTML patterns and element properties for common types of content on the web.

Semantic HTML & Search Marketing

Semantic HTML helps search engines identify objects within a web page, a pivotal aspect of deciding when and how to render dynamic, query-driven snippets. In the example above, Google correctly deduced that my search, “five star pizza”, was submitted in the pursuit of ordering a pizza (and not simply looking up information about Five Star Pizza, the pizza chain). Having made this deduction, Google generated a snippet that used … Read More

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The 15 best WordPress plugins for SEO, social media & site speed (2011)

October 16, 2011 in Tips and Best Practices

We install and manage a LOT of WordPress sites around here, and knowing about the best plugins is a necessary part of what we do. Our recommendations should help make your blog or WordPress site faster, more SEO/social-media friendly, and help enhance the overall user experience. So without further adieu, here is our up-to-date list of must-have plugins for 2011.

In no particular order:

1. W3 Total Cache

This plugin is the unrivaled solution for improving the performance and security of your WordPress blog. When installed, the plugin automatically adds a variety of performance features caching, content delivery network integration and “minifying”—consolidating scripts and stylesheets to eliminate redundancy and reduce the total # of HTTP requests sent by each page. Unbiased tests online have shown the W3 lives up to claims of 10X gains in load time when fully configured. At minimum, we advise installing it and enabling (server) caching.

2. WordPress SEO by Yoast

We recommend this in favor of the more “popular” All-in-one-SEO plugin because it’s loaded with features and maintained by one of the most respected/supported web experts, Joost de Valk. Too many features to list, but serious SEOs will prefer this plugin over alternatives (from … Read More

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