Hey You bloggers we are back again with another brilliant interview.
As part of our BloggersIdeas interview series, today we have Frank Watson, who is extremely obsessed with learning everything there is to know about successfully marketing your website online. Also he is Online marketer, journalist and proud dad. He will be answering various questions related to Social Media, SEO & other Internet Marketing stuffs . So lets start with the interview.
I grew up in Australia though was born in the United States - mother was American, Dad Australian which was fun as I got to travel a lot from a young age.
I did my undergrad studies in Australia - a BS with honors in Psychology and a BA in Journalism and English Literature - I then did my Masters in Journalism at the University of Arizona.
Not an easy answer - authority sites usually get better rankings in the search results but they rarely provide the specific relevant content of a quality niche site. The pros of the one are usually the cons of the other. Quality of content is better in good niche sites but authority sites get more traffic even for that type of content that they may have just curated from the niche site.
As the web grows people find the niche sites and through building good subscription numbers they have the opportunity of reaching their audience and thus convert better on a percentage basis - but if the authority site gets much higher traffic they can often convert more. It's the Catch-22 of the web right now - especially given Google determines which is the authority site.
The popularity of social media and its challenge to traffic referrals over the search engines has pushed marketers to use the platforms and not all play fair. Cramming hashtags to a spam link in a Tweet or Facebook post works. Until the game is tweaked like Google has with its spam, this will be around filling our social channels.
Link building will always be around as long as Google uses it as a major influencer on the ranking algorithm. Unfortunately what ever element Google uses will be gamed - it is just the nature of the beast. Writing good quality unique content still gets attention and as the search engines learn to recognize the difference, link quality and value will remain.
Guest blogging will also have impact if the content is relevant to the hosting site and the writing is good and unique.
Mobile search is growing as desktop is decreasing - like the battle for search share between the engines, the percentage of mobile search is growing and will be the dominant place searching is done.
Recent reports have found the majority of mobile search is local and is searching for brick and mortar businesses. Given that information that is what users want - local results. The impact of location as a major influencer means optimizing for inclusion in these mobile results requires sites to make sure there is consistency in NAP (name,address, phone number).
There are no 10 must have free tools, except for the tracking tools inside the PPC engines and Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools, all quality tools cost something.
If you are dealing with a large PPC campaign you can't hope Adwords editor is your answer.
Tools like Kenshoo and Marin (and there are others that work well too) have been programmed to give marketers a proactive approach to PPC.
The optimizer tools etc inside Google has some flaws and is motivated (by its default settings) to make you spend more and not necessarily profitably. If you are going to limit yourself to free tools then you had better have serious marketing skills.
Trustworthy? There are a number of platforms for building ecommerce sites - the only place trust comes in to it is the purchase processing. There you need to ensure the credit card information is safe, hence a quality processor is needed and the site should be independent of it, though in this day and age even the big brick and mortar places have had problems.
You have to pay a little more whether on the front end with a bank secured platform or through higher percentage fees using something like PayPal or Google Checkout.
There is no 90s HTML code that is going to come to the rescue of SEOs. Most of it has been deprecated by newer versions and the move to HTML5. The few elements that carry over such as the early meta tags - titles, descriptions and alt tags still have influence.
I use Yoast's tools - his SEO plugin is the best there is out there. I also use the social sharing plugins - there are a few that are good and every blogger should be using them.
Social tools are plentiful - I use Buffer and IFTTT to help schedule posting. Feedly is a great way to keep up with RSS feeds that I use to share others articles with my social circles and it integrates with Buffer.
I also use Hootesuite and TweetDeck to keep up with the people I follow on Twitter as well as searches I want to track. I have just started using CoPromote - an interesting tool that uses others outside your direct connection to help promote your posts.
But to be effective you need to be inside the social platforms and make real connections and communicate with your followers. Guy Kawaski learned the hard way that outsource your responses can come back to bite you.
I hope you enjoy this mind blowing interview session with Frank , he had given his best.
If you have any questions or doubts please do ask in the comments below ! Dont forget to share this awesome interview in social media. I will be pleased if you share this now !!! Cheers!!! Join BloggersIdeas on Facebook, Google+ & Twitter .
