1.    Focusing your efforts on getting more Facebook likes. The fact is that few Facebook users ever return to a brand page after they’ve liked it. Likes bring reputation and traffic, but they don’t (always) bring sales.

2.    Using social media just because your competitors do it. Social media marketing requires work and commitment to work. Today, when everyone and their grandmother are using Facebook and Twitter and WordPress, it’s easy to do social media marketing, but without a plan and dedication you won’t achieve enough to justify the time you invest in it.

3.    Writing too much content about others in your industry. One of the most popular social media marketing rules says that you shouldn’t speak only about yourself. Some SMBs interpret this rule radically and write nothing about themselves, only content about third parties. With this approach nobody will reproach you for being a braggart, but nobody will buy your unknown product either.

4.    Demanding too much engagement. Urging your fans or followers to like or share every update you post gives the impression that you’re asking for a favor. It could even become annoying and will soon become ineffective, too. Drive engagement by choosing enticing pictures and writing compelling headlines.

5.    Replying too slowly to customer questions. Most SMBs using social media know that it’s good to try to provide customer support directly through Facebook or their corporate blog, but few do it fast enough. Social media users expect replies within minutes, or one or two hours at most. There’s no good replying days later. For this reason it might be necessary to assign one member form the IT staff to monitor and answer questions as soon as they appear.

6.    Focusing on the wrong network. While Facebook and Twitter tend to work for all kinds of businesses, sites like LinkedIn, YouTube, Yelp, Pinterest, or Instagram tend to suit some businesses more than others. For example, because it’s so visual, Pinterest is a more effective marketing tool for a women’s hair salon or fashion shop than it is for a computer repair service or translations firm.

7.    Ignoring review sites. Websites like Yelp or TripAdvisor that feature reviews and can be conveniently accessed on-the-go through mobile devices can sometimes help a growing local business more than Facebook or Twitter, where the competition is tough, and where the focus is on engagement and brand culture, rather than on description/location/contact.

•    Consolidate your online presence.

•    Join Google+, create a business page, and fill it up with relevant information.

•    Create a Facebook page.

•    Build a subdomain for each of your locations.

•    Claim a business listing with Facebook Places, Google Maps, Yellow Pages, as well as with any other popular business listing in your area. Fill in all the fields, providing detailed information about your business and its address and hours of operation, and add nice photos taken at your location.

•    Use local keywords. Add the name of your city to your key phrases. When your neighborhood is big, or when you have locations in multiple neighborhoods in the same city, you should add to your keywords the neighborhood name as well. By doing this you’ll attract visitors that can bring you really high conversion rates. Keyword-optimize not only your website, but also your blog, social media profiles, and business listing descriptions.

•    Give importance to your local address and contact details. Do it on your site but also on your social media profiles. Make sure your local address and contact details are always up-to-date, make them visible on your homepage, and mention them often in your article writing, blog posts and social media profiles. The more you associate them with your local business, the easier it will be to rank well for local searches via Google, Bing, and other search engines.

•    Focus on mobile users. Customers searching for a local business are often more likely to use a smartphone than a desktop or a laptop. Optimize your website for mobile users.

•    Try to collect as many reviews as you can. The reviews that matter are those your customers leave on Yelp, Google Places, Bing, and Local.com. Reviews help all brick-and-mortal businesses consolidate their reputation and attract more customers, but they are especially important for bars, restaurants, and cafes. If you run one of these, you want to encourage customers to leave you reviews through your social media profiles or blog.

In the end remember that local SEO is always work in progress. Keep on at it!

•    Donate a product or money for each like your business page gets. You can get Facebook page likes by the thousands with a good charitable campaign. For best results choose a charity that appeals to all your fans, regardless of their age, sex, or nationality, like one providing medical treatment to children in underdeveloped countries.

•    Add the Facebook likes button to every new post you publish on your blog. These days almost all blogs have the button on their homepage, but many still don’t have it on their blogs, especially if they don’t use a blogging platform that makes the implementation of the button easy.

•    Become an active member of Facebook groups relevant to your industry. Join discussions and speak your mind, offering facts. With an active participation in groups you will add Facebook likes to your pages constantly, because other members of your group will become interested in your page.

•    Cover hot, controversial topics. Add Facebook likes to your business fan page by constantly writing about controversial subjects and encouraging discussions. Provide striking facts, ask contentious questions, write witty comments. Make sure you don’t offend anyone though.

•    Hold contests often. Few things encourage fans to press the Facebook likes button more than contests with exciting prizes. Contests not only increase exposure and engagement, but they also improve the image of your brand. Before holding a contest you want to check out Shortstack.

•    Trade Facebook likes for free content. There are plugins out there for all major content management systems including WordPress and Joomla that enable you to block a download button for an e-book, report, video, music file and so on for all users until they press the like button on your page. This strategy is extremely efficient if you want to get Facebook page likes by the scores.

•    Create status updates that increase likes or shares. For example, you can post an image or a quote and use the message ‘Click Like/Share if you agree.’ This is one of the simplest and most effective strategies for increasing Facebook engagement, and when used regularly, it can yield great results.

Finally, remember that a sure way to increase Facebook engagement is to be more active. Post updates at least once a day, and preferably twice or more, at the hours when your customers are most active.

New Panda and Penguin Updates are Coming

Google’s well-known Matt Cutts has recently said during a SMX conference that a new Panda update will be released on March 15th. It will be the second Panda updated released this year, after the one that came on the 22nd of January.

As always, it’s unclear what effects the new update will have, or how many sites will be affected. The Panda update released in January affected about 1.2% of search queries, and it might be that the new one will have a roughly similar impact. But it’s hard to say, and until the update goes live we won’t know for sure. What we do know is that the update will likely be another step taken by Google to promote the ‘good SEO’ made with organic SEO techniques.

But that’s not all. Cutts also mentioned that a massive Penguin update will be soon released. It will likely have a major impact and will be one of the most talked-about algorithm updates in 2013.

What the Updates Mean

Google is keen on improving the user search experience, to remain the world’s most popular and accessible search engine, and perhaps the most accurate as well. The updates are good news for users.

For their part, web masters and website owners should assess the state of their website’s SEO and see what improvements they can make to raise the quality of their content. Site owners who have suffered from previous Penguin or Panda updates will especially want to invest some effort into improving their SEO, else they run the risk of seeing their ranking slump again.

This is probably the best time of the year to hire expert SEO services to help you improve your site before the Panda and Penguin updates kick in and stir the SEO world. Make organic SEO techniques your priority and focus on providing content for people, and you will have nothing to fear.

What Actually is the Disavow Links Tool?

It’s a way to deny or block inbound links coming from poor quality websites that could negatively affect your SEO ranking, by asking Google to exclude them when it assesses external links leading to your site. In theory, it should help those who have purchased links and have come to repent it, or those who somehow managed to get the wrong sites link to their site.

How Does it Work​?

You create a plain text file in which you list the URLs to be excluded, or if you want to exclude all URLs from a single domain, you use the format ‘domain:facebook.com.’ Once your file is ready, you open the Disavow Links Tool in Google Webmaster Tools, select your site, and submit your file. Google will review your list and disavow the links, in a few weeks. The disavow links file cannot be bigger than 2MB. A warning: If you make a mistake and disavow the wrong site, it will probably take a month or more to ‘reavow’ that site.

Who is This Tool for?

Google Penguin victims, and in general, all webmasters who have used link-buying or spamming to improve their website’s SEO ranking. It’s a tool for those who repent and want to redeem themselves.

What Should You Know Before Using it?

• It’s generally not a good idea to use the disavow links tool if you haven’t been penalized because you might be implying to uncle Google that you’ve been doing shady SEO.
• You cannot know for certain that a link is doing you harm, and by choosing to disavow it you might actually do your site more harm than good.
• Since the process of disavowing links takes weeks, don’t expect this tool to bring you over night the traffic you’ve lost after Penguin was introduced.

Conclusion

So, should you use the Disavow Links Tool? You shouldn’t. Focus on creating good content instead. Unless of course you already have fantastic content and for some strange reason your SEO ranking is rotten…

Benefits

Social answers websites provide content for Web searchers that’s more accurate and more convenient than the SEO content that article writing directories and websites in general provide. So it’s not at all surprising that such sites are a big trend in online searching, and more Q&A sites are continually being launched.

The answers you’ll find on these sites are for the most part highly relevant because the people giving them are actually interested in the topic. What’s more, because of the answer voting/rating system that most Q&A sites use, there’s always a friendly competition between respondents, who are encouraged to provide answers that are as exact as possible.

Social answers websites enable Web searchers to find more intelligent answers to their search queries. And since those answers are always provided by real people with an actual interest in the topic, they are extremely informative and appealing for the searchers. More so than an article or even a blog post which takes 300 words or more to speak about a topic, and it the end does not actually provide a practical answer to the searcher’s question.

Impact on Business and Marketing

For online business owners and marketers, the rise of social answers sites means that they should try to implement a Q&A section on their site, one that’s preferably updated with content from the community. It also means that employees who are experts in a topic should be encouraged to provide answers to questions consumers ask about their brand on social answers sites. This can help boost the business site’s SEO ranking, and also increase the reputation of the company in the eyes of the consumers.

•    Bump for Networking (iOS, Android) [Free]
A business card scanner is a must-have app for a small business user, and Bump is probably the best free one available. It enables you to exchange business card information with new contacts just by tapping smartphones together. Only the information that you want shared will be shared.

•    Dropbox for File Sharing and Storage (All Platforms) [Free Basic Accounts]
One of the best file sharing and storage services ever made, Dropbox is a must-have app for small business users, as it enables simple on-the-go file sharing between employees. Dropbox beats other similar services because of its intuitive interface and ease of use. Ideal for document, report, datasheet, and PDF file sharing.

•    Pocket Informant for Time Management (All Platforms) [Commercial]
With this accessible app you can set up events and tasks and display them together according to your preferences. This app also synchronizes Google and Google Tasks, Outlook, and iOS calendars. Additionally it helps you manage your contacts and notes efficiently.

•    Evernote for Note-taking and Sharing (iOS & Android) [Free]
An indispensable app for every smartphone user, Evernote lets you quickly take notes, create to do lists, and store content – including images – for future reference. All the things you store can be then easily shared with colleagues or employees. Think of this app like notepad on steroids with sharing features. Once you get used to Evernote you won’t be able to live without it.

•    Toggl for Time Tracking and Invoicing (iOS & Android) [Free]
This app has two uses, as a time tracking app for employees, which helps them improve their productivity by better managing their time, and as an invoicing solution that enables you to bill customers by the hour. What’s great about it is that it works with the cloud, so that you can easily store records or invoices.

There are many more good smartphone apps for small business users out there, both free and premium, so do check the app stores!

Uses

Using Mouseflow alongside your current analytics software enables you to do advanced traffic analysis by getting inside the head of your visitors and studying their behavior on site, to improve your web design, call to actions placement, and so on, in order to increase your conversion rates.

Mouseflow is an advanced web analytics tool that works with any kind of website, whether personal, business, or non-profit. It doesn’t matter what your website is about, with Mouseflow you can better understand your visitors and their needs, and by doing this you can identify the problems in your design and quickly fix them.

How It Works

To use Mouseflow you have to sign up for a plan. There’s a free plan available that enables you to record 100 sessions a month for one website, and it’s a good idea to try this out before committing yourself to one of the paid plans that start at 10€ for 1,000 recorded sessions a month for one website and end at 199€ for 100,000 recorded sessions a month for up to ten websites. You can change the plan at any time, so it’s best to start with the lowest one and then upgrade as your needs increase.

Features

The visitor session recording and playback is an extremely useful feature that lets you see all mouse movements, scrolls, clicks, keystrokes, and form interactions for all recorded users, from the moment they hit your site until they leave it. The recording doesn’t have any bad effect on your site – it certainly doesn’t slow it down.

Mouseflow page analysis features are more advanced than what many free web analytics software options offer. They enable you to discover how much time users spend on page, and more specifically, how much time was actually spent interacting with page elements.

Heatmaps are detailed visual overviews available for page clicks as well as for mouse movements. Heatmaps from different periods can be quickly compared, so that you can discover whether any recent changes you’ve made to your site had a positive effect.

Other useful features provided by Mouseflow that you might find useful are link analytics, multiple account users, and viewport maps.

Conclusion

Mouseflow makes traffic analysis intuitive and easy, more convenient than conventional analytics software options that provide only statistics. It’s definitely worth trying.

Often large firms (legal, engineering or consulting) will try to save money by using their own staff for translations. Sometimes a firm will be tempted to hire outside consultant translators who are not certified or properly trained. With very few exceptions, both of these practices can be huge mistakes on several levels. The problems become even worse if what is to be translated is technical in nature.

Six Common Mistakes Made by Amateur Translators

• First of all, technical documents have a language of their own. Even in English, documents such as scientific publications, manuals or legal briefs can be unintelligible unless the person reading them is educated in that particular topic. Each academic area has its own lingo, jargon, phrasing and abbreviations. Unless the hired translator knows these peculiarities, they will not be able to translate the document accurately.
• Secondly, amateur translators tend to translate documents word for word, creating a literal translation without trying to understand and record the meaning conveyed by the author. This type of translation can result not only in awkward documentation, but can also cause problems when using the translated document. If a law firm is involved in the litigation of biotech intellectual property, for example, the translator needs to be able to understand not only the science in the patents, but the legal phrasing and what that means to the scope of the science allowed by the patent. Missing even one key phrase or word can mean billions of dollars lost on the part of the client!
• Third, amateur translators often use phrases that seem to have a particular meaning in the language they are translating, but in fact the sense of the phrase or word is completely different in the language to which they are translating. The two languages may be using the same word, but cultural differences cause the word to have very different connotations.
• Fourth, amateur translators often make serious grammatical errors. To understand the gravity of this, think of the last time you spoke with somebody for whom English is not a primary language. While you can pass off the grammatical errors the person makes in casual conversation, errors in technical documents will be more difficult to overlook and sometimes impossible to understand.
• Fifth, since some amateur translators may not be native speakers of the language (or both!), or may not speak in the language as a matter of course, they tend to be much less efficient than trained, certified professional translators. Money that firms believe they are saving by not hiring a professional translator is a myth because amateur translators will take more time to complete their assignments or will not be able to meet crucial deadlines.
• Sixth, if there is no real translation from one language to another, an amateur translator will usually not know. The firm that contracted the translation will end up with a very strange translation in those cases. Professional translators, however, know these difficulties in a given language and will be able to let the firm know.

Avoiding these crucial mistakes may not be completely possible, but firms can make sure to hire professional translators who have training in the relevant technical area.

Tips for Amateur Translators

Avoiding these crucial mistakes as an amateur translator is a little bit more difficult. In order to be an amateur translator in high demand, one must carefully understand how to do the best job possible or, if necessary, to turn down a job. Follow the rules below and the mistakes you make will be few and far between:

1. If you are given a deadline that you know you are not able to meet, either turn down the translating job or negotiate more time in which to do the job. In patent law and other disciplines, you may find that the deadlines are hard deadlines (e.g. the firm has a court date and needs documents by a particular day). In all cases, be honest with your potential employer and let them know how much time *you* think the translation will take. If you are being pressured you will not do a good job!
2. Do not be afraid to ask a lot of questions if necessary. Sometimes amateur translators do not ask questions because they feel their employer will view them as incompetent. Employers in all fields have a big secret: they LOVE for you to ask questions because they know they hired someone who is working, who is interested in what they are working on and who will not try to guess at what they are translating.
3. If a job is not within your wheelhouse, do not accept the job. In other words, if you are not at least somewhat an expert in the topic area and if you do not have a working understanding of the language, turn the job down. In some jobs, you are expected to learn as you go. Translation is not one of those jobs. Translation, especially of technical documents, requires the translator to already be knowledgeable in the topic area. It does not do you or your employer any good if you decide you want a ‘challenge’ and will learn the topic as you go. It also shows that you understand your limitations if you turn down a job under these circumstances.
4. If the job is not confidential, ask to see the document before you accept the job. This will ensure that you know what you are getting into and will put your employer at ease about your abilities or limitations.
5. If you are not clear on the voice or jargon of the document, consult someone who can guide you.

Being an amateur translator does not have to mean that you do a substandard job. It can be a stepping stone to a lucrative career as a professional certified translator or it can be an excellent source of extra money if you build a reputation as a careful, knowledgeable, conscientious translator.

•    Google+ Integration Will Become More Important
Google+ has already been integrated into search results: Google+ posts are quickly picked up and pluses are also promoted by search engines (Google at least). In 2013 the social media platform is set to become even more important, so much so that even those search engine marketers who until now could afford not to use Google+ because they did well on Facebook or Twitter will have to embrace it.

•    Press Releases Will Boost Credibility More than Other Types of Content
Not only have press releases surpassed articles published on article directories in terms of value, but for many websites, press releases are just as important as blog posts. That’s because press releases serve two purposes at the same time: first, they feed media channels fresh information, which search engines eagerly pick up; second, they convert targeted traffic, directing prospective customers to product pages.

•    Video Optimization Will Become Necessary
More and more companies use YouTube videos to provide insights into their operations, to introduce their staff to customers, to provide practical how to guides, to promote their hottest products and services, etc. YouTube is already one of the world’s leading search engines. To do effective video marketing next year, pay attention to the content, titles, description, categories, and channels of your videos.

•    Pinterest and Similar Visually-oriented Social Media Sites Will Become Increasingly Valuable
Why? Users and search engines just love them. They feature loads of high-quality, fresh content. And they are also well designed and optimized for search engines. Pinterest is different from Facebook or Google+, which means that even if you use the latter two effectively you should not ignore it. You need it.

•    The Focus Will be on Organic Search Marketing
PPC campaigns will still bring in many customers to many websites, but organic SEO will often have the higher conversion rates. And it will be the most effective long-term strategy in terms of both sales and price, as Google algorithm updates will continue to push fresh websites packed with original, useful content to the top of the rankings.

In conclusion, if you want Google, Bing, and other search engines to rank your website well next year, invest in onsite SEO, social media marketing via Pinterest and Google+ (alongside the social networks you’re already using), video optimization, and the creation of press releases.