SEO for Smarter Social Media

Social media and SEO may not look like brothers in arms, but they cannot succeed without each other either. While social media stimulates off-site conversation and interaction with your customers, SEO aims to pull traffic to your website. However, these two marketing disciplines have more in common than you may think. A recent article in presented a nice summary of the intersections. Here’s a summary:

• Social media is all about generating interesting content to share with social audiences. As this content is shared, distributed, and discussed on forums, it creates linking opportunities. The quality and quantity of these links can have a big impact on your SEO
• Social media can help you draw traffic to your website for less competitive keywords.
• Social media users tend to search for terms that are lower in the sales funnel. You can use this knowledge to optimize your PPC spend.
• Social media can offer deep insights into search terms that are popular and useful to your audience right now. This kind of real-time optimization can be rich dividends on SEO.
  

At the end of the day, we have to stop thinking of search and social media as two separate marketing silos. Just as online advertising may affect the in-store customer experience, social media impacts brand awareness and SEO in online marketing. It is essential for marketers to integrate SEO and social media in the right way to leverage greater benefits.

12 Elegant and Clean Free WordPress Themes

Choosing a right theme for your blog or website is imperative to accentuate its visual appeal.  In vogue are stylish, yet clean themes that perfectly synchronize the design and text elements. Here is a collection of some popular free WordPress themes that blend elegance with simplicity.

Blumin: For its sheer simplicity and neat layout, Blumin is a highly recommend theme for those who like elegance simplified.

Simple Balance 2.0: With increased control over it’s  layout and color options, advertising space, and multiple font options, this is a theme that can be tweaked to create impressive custom styles.

Zoxengen: With the flexibility to modify font and headline style in multiple ways, Zoxengen, 3 column widgetize theme is  a perfect choice for those who like to update theme styles frequently.

Rainbow Circles: A three column fixed-width theme, with a double right hand sidebar, enabled for widgets.

WPImagination: Featuring a separate homepage for the latest posts and space for “asides” or quick notes, WPImagination is a good choice for creative blogs.

WhiteSpace: Attractive and simple, this  theme is a good choice if your are looking for  soft and simple wordpress themes.

Brilliance: With a  provision for an adsense block in the third column, Brilliance is a 3-column, widget ready theme with soothing colors and design.

Modern: The uniqueness of this theme lies in the horizontal layout of page links that creates a clear distinction between permanent and updated content.

Prima: With eye catching color combinations, Prima is another simple and  attrattractive theme.

Elements of SEO: Designed keeping SEO in mind, this classic theme has multiple tweaks and is completely widget ready.

Nishita: Simple, sleek and with real quick installation, this is a perfect choice for photo blogs.

Sports2: A mix of bright shades and clean layout, this theme is a perfect choice for sports blogs.

Content is King!

With the world becoming so connected and the whole world sharing content over the Internet, how does a company refresh its content so as to achieve top results in search engines? It’s been said before that creating unique and compelling content and syndicating it for relevant placement is the best way to create links and bookmarks for your website or blog. Once you have cast your bait and the ‘fish’ are hooked, its imperative that the past archived content is revisited to encourage more link building and eventually, higher PageRanks.

Link building is not only an external exercise. External links tell a search engine that there are other websites and communities that consider your web content to be of some value. Similarly, internal links can play a vital role wherein that inform the search engines about pages that you think are most important by counting the number of links pointing to that page from within your website.

Its not just about the linking for search engine recognition, your audience will also find it easier with multiple internal links to navigate through your site and it gives you an opportunity to keep the visitor hooked onto your message on multiple pages.

How to Tweak your Content for Higher Ranking

By revisiting your past content, and looking at it with a fresh perspective, you can find innumerous SEO opportunities.

1. The Title – Incorporate your current keywords to modify the title of the content page, article (or blog post).
2. Internal Linking - Include anchor text links to important pages (where the keyword density is greater) of your website and internal links from these pages to relevant newer content pages.
3. External Linking - Revisiting old content to create relevant external links. External links may be created with authoritative sites and appropriate news sites in your industry. An external link tells the search engine and your users that you are helpful and not afraid to link out (sometimes even to a competitor’s site). Become a hub for resource links in your industry.
4. The Tags - Tweak the Meta, Title, URL and Alt tags to make them more focused. Add different keyword variations to the tags to increase the density of the keywords that is viewed by the search engines.
5. Improving the Content – Review and revise. Old content can be used as a foundation for new content. Rewrite older articles to make them more pertinent to current times. Introduce new concepts or start discussions. Web 2.0 is all about sharing. Encourage comments and get feedback!
6. Targeting New Keywords – As the industry evolves, people change their searches, thus changing their search keywords. What worked six months back, may not get you as much traffic now! Old content maybe reworked on in light of newer keywords.
7. Pass on PageRank – On your website – do individual pages have different page ranks? Did you know you can use internal linking to pass the rank juice from well ranked pages to ones that do not have PageRank?
8. Keep it simple – Work on your content, after all every visitor to your website is searching for something to read or see, but keep it simple. Don’t complicate things, don’t overdo the changes. Your old audience who had bookmarked your website originally should still recognize you and yes, still be interested.