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Can Social Media Affect Your SEO Ranking?

Despite the fact that search engines such as Google, Bing and Yahoo! don’t consider social media signals as a direct factor for website rankings, experience proves that social media is a powerful tool for leveraging your SEO if used with common sense and best practices.

So how can you improve your SEO ranking through your social media presence?

Create quality content that can go viral

Having a high-quality post linking to your website on Facebook or Twitter that generates engagement and social sharing by influencers and content creators, can contribute to increased visibility on search engines as this will speed up your content’s indexation. Apart from that, social sharing leads to longer content life, something that search engines simply love.

Keywords, keywords, keywords

Make your content keyword-centric and ensure a dual content strategy between your social media posts and your website’s pages; but don’t overdo it. It’s crucial that your content remains as human as possible, making it sound natural and organic.

Social media profiles rank high in search

Your social profiles definitely influence the content of your search results and they are often amongst the top results in search listings for brand names. Therefore, make sure you own the names on the top channels, but most importantly, let them be active.

Make some room for Google+

Google+ is a social media platform too – often forgotten by marketers. It goes without saying that search engine rankings, or Google rankings to be exact, are directly affect by your Google+ activity, so make sure you populate your Google+ profile with proper content.

Curate on user-generated content

Encourage your fans and followers to share their opinion by commenting and submitting reviews and testimonials. Not only will this help you better understand their needs, it can also give you a better insight on the type of words they use in order to tweak your content’s keywords. Not to forget, the more your brand is mentioned, the higher your chances are in increasing your visibility on search engines.

To sum it up, while social media does not have a direct impact on SEO, it is something that should not be neglected. Just think about the positive effects that increased traffic from social can potentially have on your search rankings. Social media and SEO are more powerful when used together, so why miss the chance to leverage your efforts?

YouTube’s latest makeover for its Android and iOS apps

YouTube, Google’s popular video sharing website, has launched the latest versions of its Android and iOS apps this Tuesday bringing many new features that will improve mobile video viewing experience.

Watch a video and look for another.

So what are the new features and how are you going to experience these new changes? Well open a video, and with a simple swipe of a finger, drag it down to the bottom of the screen to explore other videos and browse through the app.

Watch videos back-to-back.

Youtube’s makeover comes with searching and browsing capabilities for playlists on mobile devices for the first time, which enables the user of playing back to back videos.

Preview what’s going on your connected devices.

Sending videos from your mobile device to your connected TV, like on Chromecast, Google TV, PlayStation 3 and other TVs using the cast button is already featured in the earlier version of the app. But now YouTube let’s you preview and queue what you’re going to watch next.

Packed with new features, the simpler and cleaner version of the YouTube apps is here and it’s available for Android and iOS.

Google+ we are not impressed!

Is it just us or is Google+ still not learning from Facebook and Twitter mistakes and shortcomings?

We are completely aware that the newly launched social network is not yet close to competing with Facebook’s empire and Twitter’s rush , but can you blame our disappointment from Google+ newly launched brand pages?

Google+ is indeed satisfying the masses, and with its newly created brand pages for companies, copycatting Facebook’s pages, companies are rushing to advertize their products on Google+.

First of all, the only features are the rich profiles or about page; you can build circles and list your followers accordingly. However, unlike personal pages, you can only add people to the brand circles if they have added you previously to their circle; hard luck for brands and +1 for the consumers who will have a choice if they want to follow the brand or not.

Brand pages can also benefit from the Hangouts, for group video chats also – but we can hardly imagine here CEO running to catch a glimpse of their targeted consumers, or else it’s their social ambassador stuck behind the webcam chatting with the followers. Come to think of it, unless it’s Kim Kardashian or Ryan Gosling behind these webcams, who cares?

Once you connect an email address with a page you can’t change it and you’re the only one that can edit and admin that page. Although Google has promised that there will be multiple admins in the near future, we wonder when, for now this will be a little awkward for companies that want multiple social ambassadors to communicate through the pages.

What’s really ironic also is that anyone can claim to be a brand at Google+, in other words, if brands do not claim their G+ pages, other wannabes can.

Seriously Google+ is that all you’ve got?