Author Archives: Alex Chan

About Alex Chan

Alex has helped countless websites grow and build traffic. His most recent project Build For Search manages SEO for high traffic websites such as Celebrity Net Worth. Since growing in rank, Celebrity Net Worth has been featured on CNN, Fox News, CBC, and other major news publications. Based in Whistler, Canada, Alex gets a fair amount of down time on the mountain. Follow him on Facebook @buildforsearch and Google+.

5 Steps to Creating an Amazing LinkedIn Company Page

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June 4  |  Social Bookmarking, Social Media Sites, Social Networks  |   Alex Chan

5 Steps to Creating an Amazing LinkedIn Company Page

Everyone knows that social media is latest platform for promoting their products but where do we go beyond Facebook and Twitter? Facebook lets us reach friends of friends and Twitter broadcasts to news addicts so what about everyone else? In the past year, LinkedIn has reshaped their site to present a new opportunity to reach professionals, businesses, and companies. They actually have and send traffic now. Creating a LinkedIn profile for your company is a step forward to building your company’s image and increasing its popularity.

Making a LinkedIn profile for your company is very easy and more important, it’s free! Here are a few tips on how to create a good LinkedIn profile for your company:

1. Don’t skip the “About Us” section
Write a detailed summary of your company under the “About Us” section at the bottom. Put effort into writing a good description for everyone to see. Tell people what’s important about your company. Upload a crisp and clean cover image. The cover image is much larger than your profile image so viewers will see that first.

2. Use the Products & Services tab
All social networks are a great way of promoting your products and services. With the Products and Services tab, you can put images of products and even provide links so people can buy them. LinkedIn gives you the opportunity to place your most prominent product on the top of the list so people can see it first.

3. Connect with your employees
After you create a profile for your company, ask all your employees to connect to the profile and say they work for your company. This increases the circle of people that can connect to your company, but also provides visitors a possibility to connect directly to the employees. It makes your company accessible and open to the general public.

4. Recruit people
The LinkedIn profile can also be used as a recruitment tool. The Careers Page is used to recruit talented people and make contacts with other professionals. If you wish, you can pay to have the Career page available on your LinkedIn profile.

5. Generate good content
Last but not least, always make sure you keep your profile page updated and interesting to users. Always generate good quality content on your LinkedIn page. Customers like to be constantly updated with the new information whether it is about your company or in general. Generating good content is the hook that attracts more followers. If you have nothing to say, then nobody would follow you.

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What to Expect From Google’s SEO Department in 2013

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May 21  |  Link Cleanup, News, Video SEO, Wordpress SEO  |   Alex Chan

If you’re wondering what’s in store from Google for 2013, the video above shows Matt Cutts giving an elaborate explanation of what to expect.

Coming soon is the newest version of the Penguin algorithm, called Penguin 2.0. This update will have serious improvements from the last Penguin 1.0, and we should expect it any day now. The new Penguin will detect black hat SEO, go deeper into the websites, and have a larger impact than the previous updates. Sites should get ready by using Google’s Disavow Tool to defer any spammy links.

Along with Penguin, a new Panda update is coming. This update is expected to have an enormous impact on many websites and Google will try to “lower” the affects to keep from harming websites. The last major Panda update had serious impact on all websites. We should expect something similar for this one. The fact that Google states they need to “tone it down” means it’s going to be HUGE.

After punishing Interflora and a few UK Newspapers, Google will start looking into advertorials and other types of advertising that directly violate Google’s guidelines. Paying money for advertising in order to pass the PageRank is one of the issues that Google has been regularly monitoring this year. A number of link networks have already been shut down or heavily penalized.

Many users in England complained about pay day loans and other pornographic queries that appeared on Google.co.uk. Google will introduce two new changes in the area of spammy queries. One method is to detect links “upstream” in an effort to reduce the value of the spam links. Along with monitoring links in a new way, Google plans develop advanced link analysis software that will make Google’s search engine understand the linking flow better.

When certain websites present an authority in a certain field like travel, medicine, real estate, and so on, Google will try and boost the authority of those pages allowing them to top on the search result pages. This is great for existing authoritative websites but it will make it harder for new websites to join the race. In addition to handing out higher authority, Google will make another attempt at cleaning the “cluster issue”. The cluster issue was presented back in 2012 for websites that dominate the first page for a single keyword. That includes websites like yelp, and possibly even Google Maps, YouTube, or other Google entities. This is an attempt to diversify the results and offer the end-user a wider range of information.

Last but not least, Google hopes to improve the communication with the webmasters. This is great for white hat developers and we’ve already seen some improvements after Matt Cutts announced the best method for handling a manual Google penalty. When dealing with webmasters, Google announced that they will be providing more detailed and explicit information to the webmasters in their Webmaster Tools. That was something that Google was always criticized about and anyone who’s dealt with this can relate.

By the sounds of things, Google has a few good ideas that are going to help webmasters on the way. The improved communication sounds great but everyone should be prepped for both Penguin 2.0 and the upcoming version of Panda.

User Generated Content Can Get You Penalized

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April 29  |  Link Building, Reputation Management  |   Alex Chan

User Generated Content Can Get You Penalized

Mozilla was manually penalized by Google this week for having tons of user generated spam on its website. User-generated spam usually appears on websites that have forums, guestbook pages etc. But in this case, it turned out it was not entirely Mozilla’s fault. Prior to a few days ago, searching for “site:mozilla.org cheap payday seo” would have yielding pages of spammy forum posts.

After receiving a notification from Google stating that it has applied manual spam action against them, Chris More, Mozilla’s Web Production Manager, immediately started repairing the problem. It turned out to be difficult as he could not find the reason for which Mozilla was being penalized. He stated that he could not find nor detect any spam content on www.mozilla.org. Since Google was not willing to be more precise regarding the spam, Mozilla could not remove the spam in question.

Google has often discussed the idea of being more transparent when handling spam actions, but that has not happened yet. Such idea was quickly turned down since Google does not want to give spammers pointers where they did wrong. This creates a very big problem for domains since they get penalized for something they did not know existed in the first place.

Manual penalties, unlike algorithmic penalties, are easier to handle. You detect the spam on the website, delete it, and send a reconsideration request to Google about your actions. But the problem with undetectable user-generated spam is that people usually do not know what to fix and what to send a reconsideration request for. Here’s the catch! By sending a reconsideration request, a website can ask Google to point out the user-generated spam. This procedure might take a couple of weeks, but it will rectify all the problems that have occurred on the way.

So to all webmasters, carefully monitoring your websites and police your user generated content. That seems to be the best defense against all the spammers out there.

Tips To Grow Your Newsletter Email List Fast

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April 22  |  Brand Building  |   Alex Chan

Grow-Email-List

Many companies and marketers have stated that one of their biggest goals is to increase their mailing lists. These days, most of them are trying to engage their customers, and interact with them. Quality lists have overtaken over lists built based on quantity.

So what important steps must companies take in order to get a larger number of mailing addresses from their customers that are real and not just made up at the moment?

The first and most important thing for companies and marketers are their websites. The design of the website can genuinely attack or appall customers in the very beginning. User friendly sites, where customers can easily browse and look through pages are highly recommended. The Opt-In option must be easily detectable and easy to fill in. Most companies tend to focus on the social networks and forget to optimize the opt-in feature. Remember, this option will also provide you with emails from potential or existing customers. The Opt-In form should be placed as many times as possible on your website – at the top, at the bottom, on the right and on the left side of the page, always visible to the user. When creating the forms, try and make them simple. Nobody wants to fill in long and boring forms that make people feel like they are being interrogated. Make it simple and precise!

Other ways of collecting emails is through direct contact with your customers. Set up collecting points at your stores. Ask customers to provide you with their email and mobile phones and in return, offer them some benefits. The best way for them to give you their emails and phone numbers is to write them. Touchpads are the most efficient option for this. Ask customers to type in the information. In that way you avoid any misspellings or illegible handwriting. Ask permissions before you start sending SMS and emails to the customers.

And last but not least, don’t forget the social pages. Your website must enable users to register through their social accounts; otherwise many will not bother registering at all. Your site must be equipped with Facebook, Twitter, Google+ social sign-in options. The chances that the customers will find you through the social pages are big, so use the potentials these social pages have to offer you and benefit from them.

Reasons Why New Pages Rank Well Then Drop

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April 15  |  Video SEO  |   Alex Chan

One of the most common occurrences with new web pages is that they reach a very high ranking on Google and in the first couple weeks of publishing, then experiences a slow ranking drop.

As this is a continuing trend for newly developed pages that have quality content, Matt Cutts has an answer to why this happens.

When a new page is published with quality content, the freshness of the content raises its ranking very rapidly. It takes Google a little while to investigate where the content came from. Time is taken to determine if the content is original, or just a way of retelling a story. After a few days or weeks, Google makes a decision which can affect the original ranking.
Matt Cutts highlights that Google is just taking its best guess based on the quality content, the keywords, and the freshness of the content. As time passes, more information becomes available. Everything then gets incorporated in the Page Rank algorithm. Ranks usually change over time as the content of the pages change, links change, and certain information becomes more popular than the other. The algorithm adapts to all these changes, and assess the web pages in order to provide the best results.

Reasons Why New Pages Rank Well Then Drop

Turbo Charge Your Guest Posting

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April 8  |  Brand Building, Link Building  |   Alex Chan

Turbo Charge Your Guest Posting

Being a blogger may like a pretty lush job on the surface. They get to voice an opinions whenever they feel like it. It’s essentially the ultimate form of venting. There is a catch. As a blogger, we need to make our content useful. It’s not just about writing something, but rather writing something people want to read. Beyond great topics, we need to make the articles useful. So how do we do that?

When you are a blogger, it doesn’t really matter that you write 5, 8, 10 blogs in the day if there isn’t anyone to read and share them with the rest of the world. And if you are a newbie, the trick is to get yourself involved and connected to other bloggers and have them share your work. This interaction benefits both you as an author and the blogger. You get a little endorsed promotion, and the blogger that shared your post has a chance at reaching a wider audience. It’s white hat at it’s best.

However, guest blogging is not always an option. Popular blog owners have established themselves so just any regular article won’t do. Providing readers with good content can be easily achieved with a few easy tricks:

Stick to one subject and one conclusion

It’s easy to get carried away writing an article. Thanks to the modern entertainment age, most people have short attention spans. The best articles are the ones that are short and sweet.

Mention other bloggers

Connecting yourself with others is a good way to spread the fame. Popular bloggers are also a great source to reference to. A good reference can giving your post more legitimacy.

Create a relationship with other bloggers to send and receive guest posts

This is a “give and take” relationship. This interaction benefits everyone so take the time to tweet, facebook, and meet other bloggers in the community.

Guest Blogging

Aim for a magnificent future not a minute of fame

It is not a disaster if the guest post you place on a website does not reach its peak in an instance. Write the post as best as you can and make sure it contains all keywords you’re trying to reach. Beyond that, be available for feedback or comments and do your best to reach the new audience.

Your readers are important!!!

Whenever you write a post, you’re goal is to get people to interact. Any publicity is good publicity. Let your readers know you care about their opinion and reply to as many comments as you can. Use some of their comments and ideas. It will only increase your audience.

Make your guest posts simple and easy to read

Most of the readers are newbies. They find posts on Google when they search for something they don’t know – a term, an answer to a question or they just click some links that appear on their screens. That is how new readers are created. When writing a guest post make sure it’s clear and precise and easy for a beginner to understand.

So to all you writers-to-be out there, keep it simple! Respect your audience and they will always respect you. Always ask for help and remember that mutual respect amongst bloggers is what will make you rise high up the steps of the world of blogs.

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