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Getting tired of waiting around for your search engine rankings to increase? Make no mistake. SEO is an ongoing process, and results won’t appear overnight. However, there are things you can do to help speed up your SEO efforts.

Focus on increasing social sharing of your content — Building buzz around your content is one of the best ways to speed up your SEO efforts. The search engines now incorporate social signals when generating results. The more times a particular page is shared across Facebook, Twitter, and other social media sites, the higher it is likely to rank in the search results. This means you need to focus on creating content people want to share. Your content needs to be unique, interesting, and worth talking about. And you have to promote it. You need to push it across all the social networks, and you need to focus on getting the major influencers in your niche to share it as well.

Use guest blogging to get more links — Link building is a very important part of SEO. The more high quality links you have from other websites pointing to yours, the better. But building links can be time-consuming. One of the most popular methods of link building right now is guest blogging. By becoming a guest author on other blogs, you get to share valuable content, raise awareness of yourself and your brand, and include a couple of links back to your website. Check out My Blog Guest to find guest blogging opportunities more easily.

Study the competition — Checking out the competitive landscape in the search results is a good way to see what others are doing that you might be able to mimic and what they’re not doing that you could capitalize on. This offers a quick way for you to develop an SEO plan for overtaking the competition in the search results.

Take it a little at a time — There are probably dozens of keywords you’ll want to rank for and countless pages on your website that need to be optimized. Tackling all of this at once is a daunting task, but if you focus your efforts on just a few things at a time (e.g. building links around a few keywords, optimizing a certain section on your website, etc.), you’ll start to see results more quickly, and you can move on to other tasks.

Ensure proper site architecture — The layout of your site is very important for SEO purposes. The more disorganized your website is, the harder it is for the search engines to crawl it and rank it. Make sure your site has clear, easy-to-follow navigation, and use keyword-rich internal linking strategically on your website.

What are some of your best tips for faster SEO results? Share them by leaving a comment below.

By now, you probably already know that social media affects SEO. The ultimate goal of the search engines is to provide users with results that are highly relevant to their interests. By incorporating social signals into their algorithms, the major search engines are now able to provide results that are more personalized to the individual searcher.
But what exactly are the social signals that are important for SEO? And what does all of this mean for you? Read on to find out, and share your own thoughts by leaving a comment at the end of this post.

Sharing and participation amongst friends
If you’re signed in on Google and perform a search, you’ll notice that many of the search results have annotations showing which of your friends shared this link on various social networks. In the eyes of Google (and other search engines), a search result has more relevance to you if one of your friends liked it than if no one you know has liked it.
Simply put, people trust their friends and other people in their social circles. Whenever you’re looking for a recommendation for a good restaurant, you’re more likely to go to the place one of your close friends recommends than the place some restaurant reviewer you’ve never heard of gave 5 stars.

Level of influence
Not all sharing is created equal. The whole premise of incorporating social signals into search is that a link that people share must be valuable, and if that link is shared by users with high influence, it must be even more valuable. In other words, a link that’s Tweeted by someone with 10,000 followers will be seen as more important than one shared by a guy with 5 followers.
Level of influence matters when it comes to social media and SEO. What does this mean for your SEO efforts? It means you need to strive to get your content shared by the influencers in your niche. That requires building relationships with them over time, so that they’ll begin to notice you, read your content, and share it with their followers.

Volume of shares
Finally, the total number of times a link has been shared across the various social media sites influences its ranking. It makes sense when you think about it. If one link was shared 500 times and another was only shared 2 times, it’s a strong indication that the first link has more importance and relevance than the other.
This means you really need to focus on making your content easy to share, interesting, unique, and relevant to the needs of your audience. And you have to put in the work to really promote it on Facebook, Twitter, Digg, ReddIt…you name it. The more your content gets shared, the better it will be for your SEO efforts.

How do you think social media affects SEO? Share your thoughts by leaving a comment below.

While you might cringe any time you hear a cliché, the fact of the matter is we use clichés in our everyday lives because they make it easier for us to explain something. Clichés are pretty much understood by us all, and they can be used to explain just about anything—even social media marketing.

Here are 6 clichés that will help you become a better social media marketer.

Good things come to those who wait — We’ve all heard this one a million times. It’s about patience. Patience in social media marketing really is a virtue. Too many companies launch their Facebook and Twitter pages, expecting to see instant results. That’s rarely how it works. Social media marketing is about building meaningful relationships, and that takes a lot of time. So, good things really do come to those who wait.

Content is king — You know this cliché makes you want to drive your head through a wall every time you hear it, but you also know that it’s true. To be an effective social media marketer, you have to provide your audience with great content. You need to have a sharp understanding of what your audience is interested in, and you need to focus on building content around those interests. Great content spreads, gets you noticed, and starts conversations.

Take it one day at a time — Social media marketing is a marathon, not a sprint. You have to put in the work every single day if you expect to see results. Each day will be full of new challenges, but if you take it one day at a time, you’ll start to gain momentum and build your brand.

Keep your nose to the grindstone — Social media marketing is hard work. Too many people take the “if you build it, they will come” approach to social media, and that just doesn’t work. You have to spend time each day creating content, interacting with your target audience, promoting your pages, etc. While doing all of this, you need to focus on the bigger picture and bigger goals, keeping your nose to the grindstone the whole time.

Think outside the box — There is no simple formula for social media marketing success. You’ve probably seen a few brands successfully pull of viral campaigns online, and you want to experience that success too. It requires creativity. You have to be unique. You have to stand out from the millions of other social media marketers who are vying for the attention of your customers.

You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours — Social media marketing is all about the give and take. If you want others to RT your content, share your links, and help spread your message far and wide, you need to do the same for them. You can’t expect others to help you if you don’t return the favor.

What are some other clichés that describe social media marketing? Share your favorites by leaving a comment below.

One of the measures of a blog’s success at engaging readers is the number of comments it gets. Let’s face it—a blog without comments is just plain sad. If people aren’t commenting on your posts, it means you’re either not getting a lot of traffic or your posts just aren’t interesting enough to warrant comments. Obviously, neither of these is a good thing.

But a lack of comments doesn’t have to be a death sentence for your blog. You can turn things around and right the ship.

Here are 7 things you can do to get more blog comments.

Make it easy for readers to leave comments — The more difficult it is for someone to leave a comment, the fewer comments you’ll get. You shouldn’t force readers to become a registered member on your blog before they can leave a comment, and don’t use those impossible-to-read CAPTCHAs either. Make it fast and easy for readers to share their thoughts.

Respond to your comments — The whole point of the comments section is to create a place for interaction and conversation about the topic at hand. If you don’t respond to the comments on your blog, it’s hard for your readers to have a conversation with you. You need to interact with your readers if you want them to leave comments.

Don’t let spam infiltrate the comments — We’ve all seen blogs that are just riddled with spam issues. When half the comments are from spammers, you’re going to have a hard time convincing your real readers to take the time to leave a comment and interact with each other. Make sure your blog is updated with the latest spam fighting tools.

Ask for comments — Time for a little common sense. Want people to leave comments on your blog? Ask them to do so. Think of it as a call to action, like you’d have in your marketing materials. At the end of each post, encourage readers to comment. It really does work!

Leave room for discussion — When you cover a topic completely in a single blog post, you don’t leave any room for readers to add their own thoughts in the comments. That’s why I like to take one side on a particular issue, or publish a list that encourages readers to add their own tips and thoughts to the list.

Don’t shy away from controversy — If you never take a stand on an issue, you’ll have a hard time igniting meaningful conversation. Too many bloggers shy away from controversy. They’re afraid to rock the boat. I’m not saying you need to intentionally be controversial. That often rings artificial. But don’t be afraid to share your true thoughts on a topic. People might disagree, but they’ll respect your opinion and it will get them talking.

Don’t block negative comments — People aren’t always going to agree with you. They’re not always going to like you either. That comes with the territory of being a blogger. You shouldn’t block negative comments though. If you do, your readers will feel like they can’t truly express their opinions, and they’ll stop commenting.

What are some of your best tips for getting more blog comments? Share them by leaving a comment below.

Now that the holiday season is in full swing, one of your biggest concerns is how to drive shoppers to your website. This is the busiest time of the year for shopping, but you can’t just sit back and expect eager consumers to show up at your website. You have to work to attract holiday traffic to your digital storefront.

These tips will help you attract holiday traffic now and in the future. Use them in good health.

Use Google Adwords Campaign to promote holiday offers — Without a doubt, Paid internet advertisement is one of the best ways to make those holiday sales. With pay per click marketing, you can instantly increase your search engine presence. Target specific keywords that bring buyers for your products and services. Also, make sure the copy in your PPC ads is holiday-themed. Talk about your special holiday deals, mention last-minute shipping dates, and push to get the customer to take action now.

And don’t just use the holiday themes in your PPC ads. Carry it over into your landing pages for consistency. This increases the relevance of your offer, which in turn will serve to boost your conversion rate.

Increase your email sending frequency — You have to work harder than ever during the holidays to catch the attention of your customers. They’re being bombarded by more ads than at any other time of the year, and their inboxes are filling up with sales offers from your competitors.

One way to increase your odds of getting noticed is to temporarily increase the frequency of your mailings during the holiday season. Use very specific, holiday-related subject lines, and make sure each email you send brings value to the recipient. Keep it fresh and interesting, otherwise, you risk annoying your subscribers.

Create holiday-themed linkbait — Now is the time to get really creative if you want to get a huge surge of holiday traffic. Try creating linkbait on your website or blog that is holiday themed. For example, a website that sells movies could create a funny countdown of the worst holiday movies of all time. A gym trying to increase seasonal signups might create an infographic showing how much food people consume during the holidays and how much weight they gain.

Be creative, and promote the heck out of your linkbait. Spread it on Facebook, Twitter, email, Digg, ReddIt…you name it. Get it out there so people will see it, enjoy it, and share it.

Optimize your website for seasonal terms — If your website isn’t currently optimized for seasonal keywords (phrases that get more search volume at certain times of the year), it’s too late to expect organic search engine traffic this holiday season. But that doesn’t mean that you can’t start preparing for next year. Use your keyword research tool of choice to identify trends and seasonal keywords for your industry.

What are you currently doing to get more holiday traffic to your website? Share your tips by leaving a comment below.