Instagram says they’ve restored account access for these users and that no pictures or data were lost. Yet in the hours since the story first broke, angry IG users have taken to platforms like Twitter to express their displeasure over the sudden (and unexplained) deletion of their accounts.

9to5mac.com’s initial report said that the accounts were deleted because of what Instagram called “terms of service violations.” Instagram has yet to elaborate on the situation and hasn’t yet posted anything on its company blog that further explains the mishap. In the meantime, MarketingLand’s Danny Sullivan writes that “Don’t Delete” hashtags are in heavy use on Instagram by panicked users who are protesting the alleged deletions and hoping to save their own accounts by using the hashtags.

Early rumors claimed that those who don’t use Instagram’s in-app camera and instead only import photos from their phone’s built-in camera were subject to the mass account deletion as a result of account inactivity. A number of tech bloggers and writers quickly called foul on these claims, however, and nothing from Instagram (so far, anyway) supports this line of thinking.

We’ll be sure to keep an eye on this situation and update the post as more information becomes available. In the meantime, have you had any problems with your Instagram account or do you know anyone who’s had their account deleted? We’d love to know more about your experience.

Oh, and one other note? Keep calm, People of Instagram! There’s no need to panic…well, not yet, anyway!

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Instagram Account Deletions Caused By Temporary Glitch is a post from: V3 Kansas City Integrated Marketing and Social Media Agency

So how do you create a website that will propel you into Google’s top search results and generate positive feedback about your company? Here are 4 rules you should be following:

Quality Content Is Key

Paid search is a complicated and evolving art and science, so rather than focusing on specific algorithmic tweaks, “we encourage you to focus on delivering the best possible experience for users,” says the Google team.

Google tells you its secret right there. Create a landing page to compliment your PPC campaign that potential customers find useful. It seems like common sense, but it really is the easiest way to enhance your PPC campaign and help customers remember your website. In every step of building your website, ask yourself if it’s easy to navigate, helpful and pleasing to the eye.

The goal is to create an information-rich site with pages that clearly and accurately describe your content. This will help your PPC campaign by increasing your quality score. A higher quality score means higher advertisement placement at a lower cost-per-click. That, combined with a website people can’t resist buying from, and you’re in business.

Stay Up To Date

Not only should the content on your website be high quality, but it should also be fresh. The two go hand-in-hand. Your quality content cannot be of the highest standard if it’s old news, and users tend to prefer sites with more recent dates when searching on Google.

If you’ve put the effort into creating a great PPC campaign, don’t waste your time and money with an outdated landing page once a potential customer clicks on your advertisement.

Put Yourself In Your Customer’s Shoes

In both your Google AdWords campaign and your website, think about your potential client. What words would they most likely search to find your company? How can you make it easy for them to find you?

Choosing keywords for your PPC campaign is an important process, and one that has a strong effect on the success of your business.

Once you choose keywords for your PPC campaign, make sure your website has those words in it. Use corresponding descriptive titles and ALT tags as well. A PPC management company with trained Google AdWords experts can help you design a website that corresponds with your PPC campaign.

Link Issues

Link-building can complement your PPC campaign and help direct traffic to your website by making your brand popular with Internet users. You want people to link to your site, so promote your company any way you can.

Unnatural or artificial links are links that manipulate your website’s rank in search results. Whether paid or created by spammers, these links are unacceptable in Google’s eyes. Over the past year Google has begun to send out warnings to sites with unnatural links. If you receive one of these emails, act on it immediately.

Google penalizes sites with unnatural links and lowers your ranking in organic search results. This is bad news for any website, but especially if you’re running a PPC campaign. Unnatural links will lower your quality score and your ranking on Google, so you’ll be paying for a wasted campaign.

Instead, focus on building natural links from similar businesses, partner organizations and loyal customers and you’ll keep Google happy–and that’s always good news for your website.

David Chapman is a Google AdWords certified expert and a specialist in all online marketing aspects related to Google and pay per click advertising.

Image via DonkeyHotey via Flickr CC

4 Tips For Building A Website That Google Will Love is a post from: V3 Kansas City Integrated Marketing and Social Media Agency

News flash: there’s nothing new about social media. OK, OK—maybe that’s a bit of an exaggeration, because tools like Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Vine and LinkedIn didn’t exist a few years ago. Yet look past the tools and, at its core, social media is a publishing platform—plain and simple. And it needs to be treated as such, rather than approached with a new way of thinking that gets little mileage out of these digital tools.

Of course, the type of content you publish on each social media platform will vary. A tweet, for example, doesn’t necessarily translate on Facebook. But what’s important is that you have a strategic, thoughtful content marketing strategy that maximizes the assets of each social platform you use while delivering the information your audience needs.

Consider Forbes’ social media strategy. The publishing powerhouse maintains an active presence on a variety of networks. Yet they don’t just post the same stories across the same networks at the same time. Instead, they tune into their audience to customize their strategy. The Forbes Google+ audience, for example, largely wants tech stories and info—and that’s what they get.

Understanding that social media networks are digital publishing platforms is critical to your digital marketing success. Another must-have tool? Good writing.

I won’t lie—I seriously wanted to stand up and yell “AMEN!” and “HALLELUJAH!” as Alex spoke about successful social media strategy. One piece of brilliance? “You can train people to use social media platforms, but you can’t train them to write.” And if that isn’t the truth, well, I don’t know what is.

Lesson learned? Take a look at your social media marketing strategy. Are you building a strong content library that’s tailored to each group of users and fans? And while you’re sharing your own content, are you also taking time to share content from others? Social media marketing, after all, is a two-way street—and even though social networks are based on publishing, you don’t simply want to broadcast your own information—you want to share other relevant resources, too.

One last tip? If you don’t have a skilled writer on your social media marketing team, you might want to consider adding one. This investment in your content will pay off, I promise—and you’ll be confident in all of your written material ranging from web copy and blog posts to social media status updates and whitepapers.

Do you agree with Alex’s assessment of the biggest social media mistake? If not, what’s at the top of your Social Media Sins list?

Image: Nina Matthews Photography via Compfight cc

Avoid The Number One Social Media Mistake is a post from: V3 Kansas City Integrated Marketing and Social Media Agency

Prescient Digital Media’s The State of the Social Intranet 2012 report delves into the state of enterprise Intranets, their functionality and, most importantly, how employees use them (and feel about them). And when it comes to employee Intranet satisfaction, well, it’s not very widespread. Here’s a closer look:

Only 22% of organizations rate employee satisfaction with Intranet 2.0 tools as good or very good.17% of organizations rate executive satisfaction with Intranet 2.0 tools as good or very good, and only 19% of organizations rate their overall satisfaction with Intranet 2.0 tools as good or very good. Bottom line, at all levels of the enterprise, satisfaction with Intranets is pretty dismal. And when it comes to employees at all levels, we all know that if they don’t like it, they don’t use it.

Forrester’s study published this past February entitled “SharePoint Enters Its Awkward Teenage Years” also substantiates the basic findings discussed here and, more importantly, explores whether SharePoint, the key component of many enterprise companies’ social and content operations, has what it takes to deliver on customers’ needs for mobile, cloud and social now and in the future.

If you’re an enterprise company using an Intranet system, this might be an opportune time to examine your employee satisfaction with the tools. Many Intranets include social components like blogs, discussion forums, wikis and commenting and are often precursors to external adoption. For many of our clients, we find that a company Intranet can be a training ground for employees, managers and senior leaders to understand how to interact socially amongst one another and teach them the basic premises of blogging and sharing thought leadership in a “comfortable” space. Thus, Intranets can play a big role when it comes to getting your team members comfortable with content creation and social networking and engagement.

My take? Companies that understand the importance of creating a dynamic Intranet experience for their employees can ultimately make the transition from internal social to external social exponentially easier. As with anything, it takes the commitment and buy-in of senior leaders, spending money to buy the right kind of system, investing in ongoing training and support and making a commitment to continual change and adaptation as the web continues to force growth and capability online.

And as you decide what system to implement and/or upgrade to, don’t overlook the power and importance of gathering feedback from your employees and execs. Remember to reach out to your connection base on LinkedIn and in other peer groups and ask people about their experiences. You’ll find plenty of SharePoint users, because up to now that’s been the choice of IT leaders, but you’ll likely also find Yammer users, as well as advocates of Jive, Box, IBM and Google.

Like any digital tool, a company Intranet is something that constantly evolves to better serve users, so it’s important to make sure you’re giving your employees a platform that works beyond document collaboration and delivers a user experience that makes your team members excited about using it instead of groaning at the thought.

Are you surprised by the study findings? Are you an Intranet user? Which one and how do you like it?

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Your Employees Likely Hate Your Intranet: Here’s Why is a post from: V3 Kansas City Integrated Marketing and Social Media Agency

The free MarketingProfs seminar kicks off at 1 p.m. ET on May 30. And, as is typical with MarketingProfs events, this (free!!) seminar is a veritable powerhouse of information and actionable tips that will help you and your B2B brand reinvent and reinvigorate your content strategy.

After all, creating enough content to sustain an effective content marketing strategy takes serious work. And time. And resources. And if you’re short on the last two, well, it can make implementing a content strategy downright difficult. Don’t stress. That’s where we come in.

Yours truly, along with Amanda Maksymiw of Lattice Engines, Marcus Sheridan of The Sales Lion and moderator Corey O’Loughlin of MarketingProfs will draw from our content and client experience to teach you several things, including:

• How to create stories that are rooted in your brand and resonate with customers across a variety of social channels and distribution programs
• How to plan for and organize your content creation in a way that you can sustain, repeat and track
• How to decide which channels mean the most to you and your company and leverage them

I can already see you perking up. Regardless of your budget and resources, you can create an effective content marketing strategy—and if you can carve out time in your schedule on May 30, we’ll show you how.

Hop over to MarketingProfs and register now for the 60-minute webinar. Seriously? It’s free and only an hour? You’ve got no excuse not to join us, so mark your calendars now.

And in the meantime, I’d love to know more about your B2B content marketing pain points. What’s stressing you out? What do you want to fix? What do you wish you could do better?

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[Webinar] Become A B2B Content Brand With Limited Resources is a post from: V3 Kansas City Integrated Marketing and Social Media Agency

He then shared pragmatic use cases on rolling out an advocacy program, walked through research on best practices and pitfalls from leading brand programs and discussed how to measure success. Scott shared his social media team’s strategy in launching an employee advocacy program to 90,000 tax professionals across 10,000 retail offices.

H&R Block’s case study is one of the few formalized employee advocacy programs for large Fortune 500 companies. Zena highlighted two key elements of employee advocacy in social media: 1) Content marketing and 2) Gamification mechanics, then walked through the benefits of Expion’s employee amplification browser plug-in, Social Advocator.

Listen to the recorded webinar:

Here are the webinar slides:

Want to learn more about Expion’s Social Advocator? Set up a demo today!

Zena Weist is the Vice President of Strategy at Expion. She is an integrated media strategist with over 17 years of executive leadership in online marketing on both the agency and brand side, providing digital communications and social media strategic counsel across a portfolio of Fortune 500 companies. Zena has led award-winning interactive teams at Edelman, H&R Block, Sprint, Hallmark and Embarq, providing leadership in online brand engagement, digital strategy, and integrated marketing communications. When her fingers aren’t on the keyboard, Zena is playing with her family of four active kids plus one adorable husband or trying to sneak in a run.

This post originally appeared on Expion’s blog

Altimeter Joined H&R Block And Expion To Chat Employees and Amplification is a post from: V3 Kansas City Integrated Marketing and Social Media Agency

With that in mind, I thought I’d share some of the best uses of B2B mobile marketing so that you can apply some of the ideas to your business. But before we get started, let’s recap a few mobile marketing statistics so that you can better understand why B2B mobile marketing is becoming so critical in today’s world.

Check out these statistics compiled by BarnRaisers.com:

• 96% of marketers currently use or are planning to incorporate mobile into their mix
• 85% report an intent to raise their mobile budgets in the near future
• 84% use mobile websites; 78% mobile search; 76% mobile apps and 75% mobile display ads
• 42% are concerned about having proper mobile metrics in place
• 42% report an ability to prove ROI
• Only 21% state they have been successful in mobile – a decrease from 2010

Now you’re convinced, right? If you’re still unsure of how exactly to go about implementing a B2B mobile marketing strategy, here are 15 ideas to get you started:

Create A Mobile Website

This is the foundation for all mobile marketing, so if you don’t have a mobile website yet, we’d encourage you to create one. Surprisingly, it’s not all that complex. You can either work with a firm like Mobilize Worldwide or BlueTrain Mobile, both of whom specialize in creating mobile websites. Or, if you’re a do-it-yourselfer, you can read How to Create a Mobile Website on the 60 Second Marketer blog.

Find Out How Your B2B Mobile Website Stacks Up

Marketing Grader is HubSpot’s upgrade to their Website Grader tool. Included in the tool is a mobile grader that can give you insights to how well your mobile website is performing. Another useful tool is MobileGrader from our friends at BlueTrain Mobile. Both tools are worth checking out.

Generate A QR Code

QR codes won’t be around forever, but they can still be used to engage B2B audiences. Ready to create one? Use a simple QR Code Generator to create a code that you can tie into a promotion, a landing page, a limited-time download or some other digital perk.

Drop A QR Code into Your Next PowerPoint Presentation

When I do keynote speeches at trade shows and corporations around the globe, I drop a QR code into the presentation. The first person to scan the code gets an autographed copy of Go Mobile. It’s a great way to engage an audience via mobile marketing.

Add A QR Code to Your Business Card

Again, QR codes won’t be around forever, but if you add them to your business cards, they can help you stand out from your competitors. You might even consider designing a special landing page with your contact information and other pertinent resources. Just be sure you test the final destination to ensure that it’s optimized for a mobile experience, otherwise the QR code won’t be nearly as effective.

Link Mobile Banner Ads to Email Campaigns

You can run a mobile banner ad that, when clicked, creates an email instead of loading a web page. So, for example, when a person clicks on a banner ad from their smartphone, an email pops up on their screen that they can forward to friends. In a B2C marketing plan, the email might have a discount at a local restaurant or bar. For B2B companies, you could offer a limited-time download of a particularly compelling whitepaper, or discounted registration to an upcoming industry event. For more information on this technique, check out some of the case studies on the MobClix website.

Create A Mobile Banner Ad That Only Targets Certain Demographics

Did you know that you can create a mobile banner ad campaign that only targets people in airports? Or only people who have visited ESPN.com (or some other website) in the past 2 weeks? Or only people who use the Android, iOS or Microsoft operating system? Yup. It’s crazy easy to do, too. Just ask your ad agency or mobile ad network to show you how.

Run A Mobile Banner Ad That Adds An Event To The Visitor’s Calendar

This is another fun trick that the folks at MobClix created and it works like this: someone visiting a mobile website sees a mobile banner ad on their smartphone. The banner ad is for your company and it says, “Mark Your Calendar For Our Upcoming Seminar!” When the user clicks on your banner ad, the event is automatically added to their calendar. Pretty cool, eh?

Create A Customized App For Your Event Or Trade Show

AppMakr helped The Inc. 500 Conference create an app that enabled attendees to navigate the conference with ease. It was a great way for the event to stay connected with their audience. If you’re considering creating your own event app, you might include a schedule, a map of the conference center and suggestions for nearby points of interest so that attendees have all of the resources they need in their hands.

Launch An SMS Campaign

Only 6% to 15% of all mobile phone users in the U.S. have QR code readers on their phones, but virtually 100% of them can read texts. Launching an SMS campaign is crazy easy — but you’ll have to go through an SMS service provider like SumoText to get it going. And another tip? Create a plan before you start blasting texts to your audience. This form of messaging, while effective, can quickly become spammy, so you want to be sure that each message as a clear and concise purpose and call to action.

Use SMS To Stay In Touch With Customers

Airlines, accountants and real estate agents are using SMS to remind customers about their flights, appointments and meetings. It’s a great way to stay connected and keep people happy, and something you might consider depending on what business you’re in.

Grab A Star Star Code

Remember all those people who got in early on the 1-800 craze? They grabbed numbers like 1-800-INSURANCE and sold them back to insurance companies at a premium. The same might be happening with Star Star codes, which allow people to dial **INSURANCE (or something else) to connect with brands. I’m not necessarily advocating that you snatch up a bunch of industry-related Star Star codes just to make a tidy profit, but you might consider purchasing one that connects directly to your industry or company and incorporating it into your marketing materials so that people have an easy way to remember your contact information.

Integrate Your Social Media Campaigns With Mobile

Social networking is becoming an increasingly large part of the mobile online experience, so don’t overlook these channels as you plan your own B2B mobile marketing strategy. Are you serving up content on your social networks that’s optimized for your mobile users? And does some of that content help drive users back to your mobile-optimized website? Don’t hesitate to grab your own smartphone and surf around your website and your various social networks to get a firsthand look at how other mobile users view your digital presence (and adjust as needed).

Run A Mobile Paid Search Campaign

Mobile paid search is a hidden goldmine. It’s hard to make a killing with desktop search these days, thanks to the high cost of keywords. Yet the cost for mobile search remains low (for now), which means you’ll likely get great ROI on your investment.

Update Your Online Listings

As more people use their smartphones to search the Internet for information, it’s more important than ever for your business to be as visible as possible. One quick way to do this? Make sure you’ve updated your online listings with the correct location, contact information and other pertinent details. A B2B company likely won’t include the same information as a B2C company, but you still have prospective clients that might want to find you, right? Make it as easy as possible for them to get the information they need when they need it.

What other B2B mobile marketing ideas have you tried?

Jamie Turner is the Founder of 60 Second Communications and co-author of “How to Make Money with Social Media” and “Go Mobile.” He is also a popular marketing speaker at events, trade shows and corporations around the globe.

Image: William Hook via Compfight cc

B2B Mobile Marketing: 15 Ideas You Can Use Today is a post from: V3 Kansas City Integrated Marketing and Social Media Agency

Facebook community management takes a lot of skills: writing, editing, customer service, some degree of tech savvy and a knack for conversation, among others. Think you need to take your community management to the next level? Try these tips, straight from the mouths of the amazing people I’m lucky to have on the V3 team. We pretty much live Facebook (not to mention all things digital), so we crowdsourced this question amongst our team and hope we can offer you some helpful perspective that you can apply to your own Facebook pages. Without further ado, meet some of our community managers and see what they have to say about their respective keys to success with Facebook community management.

Be Present

The most important aspect of being a successful community manager is to be present. No matter what anyone says, there’s no autopilot or set-it-and-forget-it mode. It’s also important to understand your audience. Know when they are online and how they use your online information. Are they looking for customer support, industry news, upcoming events/trends? It goes without saying, but use your analytics to determine what kinds of posts get the best reaction and when your optimal engagement times are. –Jen Bradshaw

Make It Personal

Even if you’re representing a brand or company, don’t forget to be personal. Every business, after all, is comprised of people—and that personality should be reflected on your Facebook page. Have fun. Make jokes. Be conversational and approachable. Ditch the corporate speak and post content that makes your audience take notice, helps them solve problems and keeps them informed and entertained. Your company has a personality and a story—and Facebook is an ideal platform on which to show your customers, fans and audience exactly who you are and why they should pay attention to you. –Katy Schamberger

Customer Service Is Key

If they’re upset, I try to empathize, remember a time when I had a customer service debacle and get in their shoes. I also try to remember that it’s hard to really understand tone in the written word. I may think a customer is being snippy when really it wasn’t their intention to come across that way at all. I always remember to realize that someone might just be having a bad day and their interaction with me might be the one thing that turns it all around. I never, ever forget that I’m dealing with a human being on the other side of this interaction. –Jenny Rapson

The Power of Listening

Over the last several years, I’ve spent a lot of time meeting new people and learning about how they interact and the one lesson I’ve learned over and over has been to listen. A good community manager listens to their community; to the individuals and the group as a whole. You have to be willing to listen to the voices of the individual while also keeping the entire community in mind. It’s important to remember that YOU are not the community, but rather the liaison between the brand and the community. –Amanda Henson

Stay Engaged

With so many available scheduling and automation tools, it’s sometimes hard to stay truly engaged on Facebook.  These tools are handy and play a key role in getting content and information shared. Yet if you don’t keep up with the day-to-day activity, you’ll miss out on the opportunity to engage with fans and build your network. –Libby Hastert

Although these tips are specific to Facebook, most of them apply to any social network. After all, community management is called that for a reason—you’re managing and building a community, and that’s something that takes daily work and insight in order to succeed.

What else would you add to the list?

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How To Be A Better Facebook Community Manager is a post from: V3 Kansas City Integrated Marketing and Social Media Agency

I know that when we do content audits for prospective clients, in many instances we find that the content they’re writing is good enough content, it’s just not getting read. And it goes without saying that if it’s not getting read, it’s not getting shared. And the two, well, they pretty much go hand in hand.

In this year’s BrightEdge survey, 31% of marketers said that social sharing of content as a means to improve rank will be much more important in 2013 as compared to 2012. Additionally, 33% indicated it’s much more important to understand the correlation between social sharing of your pages and rank for these pages in 2013, as compared to 2012. We agree. Social sharing plays a critical role in credibility not only of your content in general, but also of your website or blog as a whole. Shares speak to interest, credibility, reach and trust—all important components of search.

So now that social sharing is being viewed as an increasingly important SEO signal, where are marketers spending their time? The BrightEdge survey indicates that a majority (86%) will focus on Facebook sharing. Google+, comes in at second with 68% of the vote, followed by LinkedIn (43%) and Twitter (41%).

Although sharing itself is critical, most search marketers said that it’s more important this year to identify trending topics in social media, creating a pool of data that will drive sharing for relevant topics—and, as a result, boost rank. Geek talk for don’t underestimate the importance of monitoring and the use of listening tools, identifying trends and keywords being used and SEO’ing your content (social and otherwise) and distributing it appropriately.

I found this study especially interesting because it underscores the importance of search, content and social and how they all work together as a part of your integrated marketing strategy to drive results. Poorly written, non-relevant content will fail, no matter what tactics are in place to share it across the web. And conversely, well-written, contextually relevant, SEO optimized content that is shared across multiple channels by credible individuals and outlets—that’s going to produce results. One phrase I often say when I’m presenting on this topic is especially relevant: How do you know you’re doing it right? If it’s good for people, it’s good for Google. Think of your content, how you write it, optimize it and share it, in that way. And if it’s good for people, it’ll be good for The Google.

Interested in even more data? Make sure you check out the complete 2013 Search Marketer Survey results—that’s what I call the best kind of leisure reading!

What’s your take on these survey results? Have you seen any sort of SEO boost from consistent social sharing? And if not, is this something that’s on your radar screen this year?

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Report: Social Sharing Likely To Improve Search Rank is a post from: V3 Kansas City Integrated Marketing and Social Media Agency

The next time you’re writing a blog post, use these 6 tips as a pre-publish checklist:

Optimize Your Page Title

The page title (also known as a meta title) is an important element of optimizing your blog post and it should be unique for every post.

Use the Google keyword tool to do some research regarding what keyword you want to optimize based on and then include these keywords within your title. You might discover an opportunity to include multiple keyword combinations, which is great because you have a chance of ranking on Google for multiple terms.

The title is displayed on search results so it’s important that this is not just a list of keywords. If you wrote a blog post on optimizing your website to improve speed the title could be:

“How to Optimize Your Website To Improve Speed”

But if you use the Google keyword tool to do some keyword research, you’d see that ‘website speed optimization’ is searched 720 times per month.

So you could change the title to the following:

Website Speed Optimization: How to Improve Your Website Speed

In this title, the keywords are at the start because Google gives priority to words at the start of a title.

Action: Review your page titles and optimize!

Share Your Content on SlideShare

SlideShare is a social network for businesses initially designed for sharing slides but has since expanded to include documents, videos and much more.

When you upload content to SlideShare it gets indexed within seconds and there’s a good chance of getting ranked well on Google. You may not be able to rank for your content on your own site but you could rank for content on SlideShare.  Just make sure to have a clear call to action at the end to bring people back to your website!

Creating a presentation based on your blog post is not creating new content. You’re simply presenting your blog post content in a different format, which means you can get someone else to create the presentation for you if needed.

Action: Read Todd Wheatland’s excellent book, The Marketers Guide to Slideshare, and upload relevant blog content as a presentation on SlideShare.

Optimize Your Images

If you’re optimizing your blog post based on a particular keywords or a set of keywords (which, of course, you are, as we already discussed), make sure at least one of your images is targeted at these keywords. And another tip? Check to be sure you’re using relevant keywords for all images.

When you upload images, consider the following:

Name of Image: Uploading an image called 13255.jpg does not help Google, so make sure you use appropriate keywords in the name.

Title: Write a good title and caption for your image. Although this doesn’t necessarily help with ranking, it will improve the click-through rate for that image.

Alt Tag: An alt tag is something that Google reads to help it understand what the image is about. This is another critical spot for keywords that speak to your blog content and the most important image element.

Image Size: When you’re uploading an image, size it appropriately. For example, if you upload a large image but decide to display it a small area, then the image will be adjusted in dimensions but not in actual size.

Action: Consider images as an important part of optimization.

Get External Links To The Post

When you create a new post on your site, there’s no other site linking to this post. When websites of authority link to this blog, the post becomes more valuable and more likely to rank higher for your search term. And if sites link to the post using terms you want to optimize (or similar terms), this will also help boost your visibility. As you write or proofread your blog, check to be sure you have a few internal and external links. You don’t want to include a ton of internal links, as that looks spammy. Instead, make sure you’re directing your readers to the resources that they need (internal or external).

Action: Review your posts to see if you can improve internal linking.

Get Internal Links To The Post

External links are important elements of any blog post, as are internal links to related resources or previous posts. Not only do internal links help Google find the post, they’ll also help boost your website’s link authority–and that also makes Google happy.

Share Your Post On Google +

Google + is becoming increasingly important in Google search. Google doesn’t index all content on Google+, but as you build up your profile, your chances of getting a post indexed are higher. And that means you should make Google+ sharing a priority and encourage others to +1 your content (as you do the same for them, of course). Keep in mind that when you share to Google+, the first line of the blog post will be used as the page title, another reason it’s so important to include keywords in your first sentence.

Action:  If you’re not up to speed on Google+, start following Ray Hiltz, Mark Traphagen or Amanda Blain.

These are a few ways that you can help optimize your blog content so that it appears higher in search results. What other tips would you add to the list?

How To Move Your Blog Post Up In Search Results is a post from: V3 Kansas City Integrated Marketing and Social Media Agency