7 Tips to Make Money Online

The internet has opened vast money-making opportunities for everyone. The fact is that there are so many avenues on the web that it can become almost confusing where to start with. If you are looking for easier and quick to start opportunities, the following tips will help you achieve your money-making goals.

1. Blogging

Blogging is one of the most widely used methods for making money. Despite its widespread popularity, it still has vast money-making opportunities. This is one horizon where it is not about competition, it is all about standing out with your unique niche and delivering value to your audience.

In its simplest form, building a blog with a large list of followers is difficult. If you are going to choose this strategy to make money online, you should be ready to work hard. Once you have achieved a major milestone in terms of followers, things will become much easier. If you need inspiration, let it be known that there are many bloggers in this world who earn hundreds of thousands every month from their blogs.

Blogging takes time and effort to help generate the desired results. If you are ready to pay the price, it will not fail you.

2. Paid Writing

If you are good at writing, you can find thousands of people and companies willing to pay for quality and unique content. Make sure to build a great portfolio to start with. This is unique niche in online money-making because you have to be really interested and dedicated to it to make it successful here.

It will be better to have your own website promoting your writing services. Then there are many freelancer websites that allow you to create your profile page and bid on projects. Most of them charge a percentage fee for the work you get. As an independent writer, you may also directly contact web designing companies and writing service providers.

3. Affiliate/Reseller

If you are good at promoting products or services, you can sell for other businesses and earn massive commissions. In some industries, the commissions can be as high as 40-50%. Affiliate marketing or reselling is easy and almost anyone can start it. However, you should know how and where to promote.

It involves placing your affiliate link or banner in your pages or online content and driving sales. The more people buy products after clicking on your link or banner, the more money you will be able to earn.

4. Freelancing for Professionals

If you are a professional, you could sell your services by freelancing. There are many people and businesses who are in need of a wide range of professional services. Whether you are a designer or a marketing professional, there are websites where you can register and start selling your services. Your experience in your field can help you get paid by reaching out to people online.

If you have excellent photography skills, you could sell your photos online. Whether it is a full time profession or you want to make some additional money, there are many websites that allow you to sell your collection of unique photos for a tiny commission. It is easy and quick to start with. If you are good with the camera, you will never tire selling your photos online. Individuals and companies are always in need of unique photos. And with the web growing ever so vast, there is infinite demand for valuable pictures.

5. Online Marketing

If you have your own niche, you can use online marketing to make money. It can be a special skill or talent, a hobby or a passion. If you have an expertise in a field, you can use your knowledge to help people. There are millions of people who are looking for advice and help on a wide range of topics ranging from personal to commercial ones. Once you start looking, you will be amazed by the vast gamut of opportunities available.

6. Buying/Selling domains

If you know how to choose the right domain names, you can make huge profits in the business of buying and selling domains. This is one field you should have some patience and an eye for what will sell better. There are so many key elements to consider when choosing the best domain names. You would want to give more emphasis to the following domain names, but don’t restrict yourself to these:

• Names which are currently popular
• Business names
• Generic names
• Geographic areas

7. Sell Your Own Brand

If you have a product or service to offer, you can sell it online and increase your profits. The overhead costs for selling online are much lower than selling from a brick-and-mortar facility. When selling online, you can offer better price compared to competition and drive more sales. It will require setting up your own website and promoting it, but it pays off well in the long term.

Today the internet has almost become infinite in terms of its reach and number of opportunities it has to offer. If you are serious about making money online, you will be able to find many ways. The key is to find a niche or field in which you have some experience.

Author Bio

Author is an online marketing specialist with and consultant with over a decade of experience in the industry. He has helped hundreds of businesses in and around Calgary to succeed with their digital marketing (social media marketing) campaigns.

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“BOONS OF SOCIAL MEDIA OPTIMIZATION”

Social Media Optimization or SMO as it is commonly known is the ideal association between social media and search engine optimization. It is used for amplifying the product and brand responsiveness by means of social media communities and communities. This embrace the use of social video sites, media sites as well as bookmarking sites, RSS feed plus blogging sites for lashing traffic to the web and perking up the site’s organic search upshots. The methodization of the social media commotion is done with the plan for getting inimitable visitors to the web content.

1. Ensures a Strong Presence on the Web

With SMO, you can make certain a brawny web presence for the business as well ascertain the internet which influences the brand. It not only pioneer people to the trade but also assists in improving, branding, improving recall and visibility.

2. Increases the Reach

Social media optimization endows the break to put forth to niche audience. The medium permits you to position the brand to the consumers on their own conditions. With user-friendliness through video, mobile, audio, your consumers get the opportunity to reach out to you everywhere and anywhere.

3. Drive More Traffic

Social Media Optimization is a massive source for traffic production. The social media channels permit you to contact customers globally. Furthermore, this can take place without additional investments.

4. Lead Generation

Even though social media is mainly functional for creating a buzz as well as   for branding it is gradually more used for lead production?Drumming into the social media channels can alter the lead generation promotions extensively.

5. Improves Search Engine Ranking

In sync with the search engine marketing and the search engine optimization endeavors can also facilitate in perking up the level on the search engines. Ever since search engines have started attain facts from social media guides such as Google+ plusillustrating them on the search outcomes, SMO has gained eminence among contenders.

To get the most of social media optimization, corporations necessitatekeeping their content pertinent as well as allocating. The more the content is allocated the enhanced would be its position in search engines. This will escort to a sturdy social media charisma and also constrain traffic to the web.

However, social media optimization facilitates the populace to toil and work resourcefully. There are countless boons of social media optimization if utilized properly your business can thrive and flourish efficiently with the souk effectually.

Author Bio:Victoria is a proficient consultant and educational writer at Ideamens. She assist students with her blogs and also deals with those students who seek guidance related to their career.

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5 Awesome Things You Can Learn By Studying Facebook App Install Ads

Facebook App Install Ads is a Facebook Marketing tool designed to market apps through Facebook. It is becoming a huge marketing tool that is being used by people to promote Apps for a number of different platforms.  These ads are becoming the norm for advertising on the internet due to their large exposure to a worldwide audience at the fraction of the cost of many other traditional marketing tools. This can promote Facebook Page and the adverts alike.

1. Facebook Page Management

App Install Ads are controlled and managed through Facebook page management that is solely administered by Facebook. This allows a huge amount of clicks as well as the amount of clicks you have from the Facebook advert. It also allows you to control the advert itself and make changes to it accordingly and as you need to.

2. Facebook Marketing Tool

A Facebook marketing tool allows Facebook to charge a small fee for each click on the advert. This is both beneficial to Facebook and to the person who has assigned this marketing. Facebook, however, ultimately wins because it is taking up a small amount of space on their entire platform and allows them to place multiple ads all in one place. This ultimately creates a huge amount of income for minimal changes to their software.

3. Eye Catching Images

All Facebook install apps have eye catching imagery that draws the reading or viewing into the advert. This is a particularly an important piece of Facebook marketing advice on Facebook App Install Ads. Without the images that draw the viewers in, the adverts would hardly ever be clicked. Using eye catching images also help to promote Facebook page solely through the images themselves.

4. Concise content

Content can be entirely changed through Facebook page management; however, it should always be to the point and should be very concise. The ads only have a small size such that you cannot fit a large amount of information. You can also use the ads to promote Facebook page and vice versa from the advert.

5. Cost Effectiveness

The cost per click on these adverts is minimal to the followers as well as to your company. Therefore, their cost effectiveness is significant. The ultimate drive of traffic from Facebook is enormous, allowing huge numbers of people to look at and peruse your app. If anything, the sheer number of traffic will allow some downloads, and from the downloads come a lot of chatter among friends. Ultimately hence, more and more people will download your app.

The Facebook App Install Ads is the way of the future in marketing of all types of apps no matter what operating system there may be. It is incredibly cost effective to anybody who is commissioning the marketing and drives a huge amount of traffic from Facebook to the app. Therefore, the overall exposure is enormous. Most of the more popular apps have already started using this Facebook marketing tool, and many more companies are following accordingly.

Andy Thompson has been a freelance writer for a long while. Her passion in writing is her main drive in crafting articles that are engaging, informative, and meaningful. Her partnership with TroopSocial has given her a whole new opportunity to take writing to a whole new level.

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THE FUTURE OF SEO

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Understanding The Relevance Of Guest Posting Services

While many SEO tools have changed or been forgotten, the debate around guest posting continues. No matter what many may want to believe, guest posting still is one of the best ways to get traffic and back links. Most SEO experts are already using the tool to the maximum, while there are others who are getting their work done by professional writing services. Guest posts have not been dead, but the earlier approach is surely gone by now. Today, posts are accepted for relevant and known websites when the niche and work are at par with one another. Without genius writing and creative thoughts, posts make no sense and are often rejected.

Why outsource?

While most writers and SEO experts believe writing for other websites and for varied niche is easy, it is not necessarily true. Most websites, especially the authority sites, are now focused on what they publish on the site, and there is no way to fool the audiences and the concerned websites. As such, the approach to guest posts is way more creative. You need to focus on quality and essence, and at the same time, there is a need to be within the limits of niche. Most SEO experts and web marketing gurus don’t have that amount of time! Here’s why outsourcing is a good idea.

Get genuine writing services

One of the main reasons why guest posting services are around is because of what they offer. You don’t need to bother about writing or finding relevant blogs and websites for posting anymore. The service hired will check for the niche you have, check the blogs that fit the bill and take care of the writing. Once the articles are written and reviewed, they do the posting job, and finally what you get are genuine links. With all that in a package, who wants to work for writing anyway?

Get authentic pricing

Guest post writers don’t come cheap, at least not the professional ones you want to hire! As such, professional services are actually a better deal. You can find bulk order choices, where you hire a team for a particular number of articles and posts, and the bigger the deal, the most genuine rates you get. This certainly scales down the cost for most web marketing and SEO experts. For website owners, there is nothing more valuable than having a trustworthy services worth the time.

Get more niche understanding

Every niche and industry has its own standards when it comes to guest posts, and only quality matters. As such, when you don’t have the time to research and understand a niche, these services can help you get that in least time and with an assurance of the work being approved. Why would you even spend time in understanding the writing standards when a small sum can get the job done?

Professional guest posting services are getting all the attention for the right reasons, and you have plenty of choices to pick one!

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Mobile Payment Service in Facebook

With the remarkable strides and milestones being made in the technological world, there has been an increasing use of mobile payment services and electronic money transfer. The use of these methods of payments has not only been triggered by technological advancements but also by the need and desire to bring a great level of efficiency and speed in the field of monetary transactions. The Facebook mobile payments services are expected to come just at a time when most companies and especially those that deal with technology are embracing the trend.

Basically, this is a service that is aimed at enabling individuals and Facebook users to keep money on Facebook and also utilize it to make global payments in addition to making cash exchanges with other people using electronic money transfer. This is a technological concept that could see Facebook make a great leap to embracing current technology. In addition, this is a service that might see them double or almost triple their annual profit if it turns out to be successful. 

The though and decision to come up with this mobile payment service has been highly motivated by some other large companies that have been fully utilizing the service. The most common and well known is PayPal. This is a worldwide known money transfer method that has gained a great extent of popularity. Its popularity has been due to the great efficiency and effectiveness and thus many other companies such as Facebook are also willing to follow the footsteps.

Google has also been another company that has been on the verge of coming up with a mobile payment service with the introduction of the Google wallet. However, in spite of this discovery, this is a service that has not been quite successful for the past few years.

Despite the fact that the Mobile payment service in Facebook is really heating up, there is some information and facts about the service that are yet to be clarified. To begin with, there has been no clarification yet on the specific countries or nations the service will be available. This means that there is a possibility of some countries being left out in the plan. In addition, there is yet an approval to come from the central bank of Ireland on when the service will commence.

With the much awaited mobile payment service in Facebook, it is quite clear that the world is gradually changing into an environment where most monetary transactions will be done through electronic money transfer.

Author bio: I am Manton Angus. I am focus on custom essays online last so many years which have helped me out to gain knowledge in various disciplines of writing assignments for all class of students. I have worked in different essay writing companies from the last many years..

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6 Common SEO Mistakes to Avoid

After years in SEO, I’ve seen thousands of websites and audited hundreds of them. After a while, one starts to notice trends. The same basic SEO errors are repeated over and over. Most of these are easy to find and fix, the kinds of things that any decent SEO consultant should be aware of.

If you have a site and don’t have an SEO consultant, these are a few of the things you can quickly go and check yourself. If you do have an SEO consultant, they should have brought these issues to your attention.

If they haven’t …and sadly I see a lot of clients who have had “SEO consultants” for years but still have these problems, you may want to question if you have the right consultant working for you.

Here are 6 common SEO mistakes to avoid

1. Duplicate content

What is duplicate content? Duplicate content in the context of SEO, means the same content appearing in more than one webpage (URL) within same or different domain (web site). The most common problem with duplicate content is that search engines can’t decide which content to index, eventually not showing this web page in search results.

Duplicate content can come under different types. One of the most common errors is duplicate versions of the homepage:

Homepage Duplication

One of the first things I check with a site is whether there are duplicate versions of the home page.

Here are some examples of duplicate homepage:

• http://www.example.com.au
• http://example.com.au
• http://www.example.com.au/index.html
• http://example.com.au/home
• http://example.com/default.aspx 

If you are serving duplicate versions of your home page to the engines, they are duplicate content. The engines will usually figure out which version to index, but sometimes they get it wrong. So why confuse them if you don’t have to?

Duplicate URL

I have seen quite a few duplicate URL’s, where upper case or lower case URL text are used inconsistently, causing search bots to be confused and consequently devaluing the URL  or not ranking your website highly.

The issue here is if you have all your internal or external links pointing at www.example.com/Apple-Iphone  or www.example.com/apple-iphone  and the “real” version of the page is www.example.com/apple-iphone, you’re splitting the link equity between these two URLs. You want all that linky goodness pointed at the one original URL you want to rank in the search engines.

Different Webpages Having Nearly Similar Content

Almost every site I’ve ever worked on or for has had duplicate page content problems.

Duplicate content happens when you or your staff either copy some other website content then paste it on your site or you use same piece of content across different pages within your website. This issue occurs more often especially when an SEO guideline has not been put in place in the architecture phase of building a site. A designer or content writer for your website might not pay attention to it because they are not SEO specialists.

How do you resolve these duplication issues?

• Minimise similar content: If you have many pages that are similar, consider expanding each page or consolidating the pages into one. For instance, if you have a restaurant site with separate pages for two locations, but the same information on both pages, you could either merge the pages into one page about both locations.  You could also separate it into two pages and write unique content about each location.
• Delete duplicate page version of your content
• 301 redirect the duplicate versions to the original ones or Place “rel canonical” tag on the original page  to send a strong hint to search engines your about preferred version to index among duplicate pages on the web. If you are not clear what 301 redirect or rel canonical tag are, just ask your web developer to fix them for you.

• URL best practices: Use hyphens to separate words when necessary for readability. They should not use underscores, spaces, or any other characters to separate words. The URL of a web document should ideally be as descriptive and brief as possible. Do not use CAPITALS in words in URLs.

2. Forgotten about content marketing

Don’t expect that your hired SEO team will make your website traffic take off significantly just with onsite optimisation, link building and without any content strategy in place.

Many things in the SEO world have changed drastically, especially for the last couple of years when content has started to play a critical role in determining whether your SEO or digital marketing campaign is successful or not. Any SEO strategy without content marketing in place should not be considered. The days that SEO agencies build hundreds of backlinks on directories, social book marketing sites, blog comments and forum comments pointing to a static website are well and truly over.

Let me give you an example:

When I started working on New Cars Plus (which are a discount new cars buying services based in Sydney). Their website was as static and had very low traffic. It had only 400 visits a month. After 12 months of regularly creating and posting content, the site traffic soared from 400 visits a month to 8,596 visits per month.

Wow!!…. Did I do that? The good news is that it wasn’t rocket science but a combination of link building, pure content production and social seeding.

So my point is not to expect your website traffic to be soaring up the rankings with pure off-page optimisation (link building and social signals). Remember, this site took 12 months of continuous work.

Even if you rank number one on a number of keywords (in the case of a perfect world), the maximum traffic you’d get is xxx number of visits per day and it is not growing, especially with the constant updates from Google, your high ranking positions are not ensured.

3. Poor site structure

Often when building a new website, your web developer doesn’t integrate best SEO practices into the website structure. This is totally understandable because the web developer is not an SEO specialist. Therefore an overlooked facet of site architecture (in other words, the way the website is laid out and how the pages connect to each other) is fairly common.

I would argue it’s the single most underrated area of SEO.

In general, the home page of your site is going to have the most authority because it’s going to have the most incoming links and the best quality of inbound links. Authority (or link juice) flows throughout a website from high authority pages to low authority pages through links. For every step away a web page is from the home page, the less and less of that total authority is going to be passed to it. All other factors being equal, the further away the page is from the home page, the worse it will rank.

I’ve seen cases of high authority web pages being buried deep in site architecture and losing rankings dramatically. I’ve also seen the reverse where web pages are moved closer to the home page and suddenly jump several spots in Google. Ultimately you want to create your website structure so it is easy and intuitive to navigate for users.

A flat structure often satisfies that requirement and will help you get more of those users to your site through search engines.

Here is another example of mine, this website at www.warrantyandinsurance.com.au  and extended car warranty insurance company.

We  built a flat architecture site, having all related pages linking to each other through targeted keywords, writing unique Meta Title and Meta Description, page content with targeted keywords.

This is basic on-page optimisation stuff which also includes updating the site twice per month with some blog posts (I should produce more content than that, but it is a low budget site).

Despite that the website traffic has been naturally growing at the rate of 30% month on month and generating more than a 8.5% conversion rate. Compared to other car insurance sites this is a huge success considering I haven’t done any link building to this website.

4. Don’t have a mobile site design for multiple screens

Google is now taking into consideration the mobile when ranking websites. Here are some other facts to keep in mind about the importance of a mobile site

• 61% of customers who visit a mobile unfriendly site are likely to jump to a competitor’s website (Karim Temsamani at IABALM 2012 via IAB)
• According to a recent Herald Sun report, smartphone users in Australia will reach 12.2 million in 2013.
  
  
  
• Traffic coming from mobile devices from websites I have managed is now at an average of 25% and it is still going upwards.
  
  
  

With so much focus on usability, the demise of the desktop browser dominance, and the prevalence of mobile devices, Google’s made it very clear that no mobile experience, no love from Google!

Therefore, creating a user-friendly site design that works well and fast across all devices…especially mobile and tablet.

Mobile versions for your website can be built easily by using one of three popular mobile design technologies such as dedicated mobile site( m.example.com.au) or responsive design (Google’s preferred method) or native application (for complex design/user interface).

For most of the simple sites, I would recommend using responsive design for anyone who has limited resources for maintenance, limited budget and want a SEO-friendly website. I built this Responsive Design Testing Tool on my website. So if anyone of you wants to see how your website looks like on different devices, check out this tool.

                             

5. Unreasonable SEO expectations

SEO isn’t easy, fast, or cheap. Gone are the days of scalable, easy tactics that exploited loopholes in the algorithms.

Another thing, there is a widely-held belief that SEO is all about rankings on a certain keywords. I don’t totally agree with this, let me show you why.

Most of the time customers want to target short-tail, competitive and high search volume keywords such as:

• Truck finance
• Equipment loans
• Machinery finance

The reality is much different. People type in search terms differently and most of them use long-tail keywords. Some examples of this are:

• “Truck finance no deposit”
• “Bad credit truck financing”
• “How can I get equipment finance with bad credit”
• “Machinery finance no credit check”

And guess what?

They are not on your keyword ranking list. Another thing according to the latest research done by Neil Patel, is that long-tail keywords generate more conversion than short-tail ones.

If you look at the image above, you’ll notice that one- or two-word key phrases are costly to rank for and they don’t convert well. Searchers are also getting more sophisticated and are starting to use more words in their searches.

Many websites have high traffic coming in but it doesn’t convert well as people bounce in and out. Does your ranking help in this case? Not really.

My point is the SEO success measurement should not solely or mainly based on ranking; other factors such as traffic, longer time visit, lower bounce rate, and most importantly more enquiries or sales are things to look at.

Thirdly, if you want to have a successful SEO campaign, your website have to deserve it. Many site owners think that SEO can make up for the fact that the site is not exceptional, but that’s just not the case.

Take a good hard look at your site and your business. If you truly deserve to SEO success, SEO can help you get there. But if your user interface sucks, your design is dated, your prices are too high, your content is self-centered and boring or your customer service is lousy, fix that stuff first. Then do SEO stuff to get you where you should be.

In the old days you could be successful at SEO and generate the money to make your site great. Now you have to spend the time and money and resources to be great, and then you can be successful at SEO.

6. Hiring a crappy SEO consultant

I hate to say it, but this is still one of the most common SEO mistakes I see business owners making.

Whether it’s because you don’t want to (or can’t) allocate the resources or because your SEO agency/consultant is lazy, incompetent, out-of-date, or just taking you for a ride, hiring an SEO that isn’t on his or her game is the most dangerous SEO mistake of all.

Hiring a crappy SEO used to be just a waste of money at worst, but now they can bury you. I’m not talking black-hat stuff here either. Even in my short time as a full-time consultant (after many years in-house) I’ve talked to site owners who have SEO consultant who:

• Missed most of the items above
• Built large numbers of crappy, money keyword anchor text focused links from spammy blog networks and directories (Ever heard of Penguin?)
• Claim to have built links that they couldn’t show the client because it would give away their “secrets”.  If any SEO agency you talk to seems vague and indirect in their answers, doesn’t want to show you the link report of existing clients (assuming they are allowed to), move on to the next agency.

During my time as a SEO consultant, I have had to fix many bad SEO sites. You are better off not having an SEO consultant at all than having a bad SEO site.

Conclusions

I’ve pointed our most common mistakes that people have when it comes to SEO, there are many SEO mistakes that you should look out too, but I think you should leave them to your SEO specialists, as the owner of the website or marketing manager, you should look at SEO from high-level, strategic point of view to make sure that your SEO campaign is heading to the right direction.

My recommended SEO approach here is to fully optimise your onsite for search engines, optimise your landing pages for better conversion, develop awesome content and generate high quality, thematic links to your site. Does it sum up everything about SEO? Pretty much I believe.

I will cover some cool SEO topics later on, stay tuned!! If you have any questions or comments, feel free to leave some below.

Inspired Article From: http://www.jeffbullas.com/2013/11/04/6-common-seo-mistakes-to-avoid/#m7WXPZPtY79QgAJZ.99

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Google celebrates 15th birthday : 15 things you didn't know

September marks 15 years since graduates Larry Page and Sergey Brin set up a small web crawler from a garage in Silicon Valley, which went onto become the world's biggest search engine.

The site was originally called BackRub, but was changed in 1997 to Google - a misspelling of the word googol which is a term for the number one followed by one hundred zeros.

There is a little confusion around when Google's official birthday is, but reports claim papers to incorporate the company were filed on September 4 1998. The company became incorporated three days later and the domain was registered on September 15.

A screenshot from the beta version of Google: September marks the 15th anniversary of when Google was first incorporated by founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. The company started from a garage in Silicon Valley in 1998 and is now the world's largest search engine -with more than 13 billion searches a month.

Google's 15th birthday: 15 things you didn't know

From the company's original name to the first Google doodle, we search the archives of Larry Page and Sergey Brin's tech giant for some little-known titbits.

Google is 15 years old today. To celebrate, here are 15 facts you probably didn't know about them.

1. Google was originally called BackRub. The homepage read: "BackRub is a 'web crawler' which is designed to traverse the web."

2. Google has acquired an average of one company every week since 2010.

3. The first Google doodle was a Burning Man symbol. Founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin went to the Burning Man festival in 1998 and added the doodle to let users know they were away from the office that weekend.

4. Google hired its first in-house chef, Charlie Ayers, in November 1999, when the company had just 40 employees.

5. Ayers went on to become the firm's executive chef, overseeing a team of 150 employees across 10 cafes at its headquarters in Mountain View, California.

6. You can use Gmail in more than 50 languages. These include: Welsh, Basque, Tagalog, Malayalam, Telugu and Cherokee.The first Google Doodle from 1998 – incorporating the Burning Man logo. Photograph: Google

7. Around 1,000 of Google's employees became millionaires when the company went public in 2004.

8. One of those millionaires was masseuse Bonnie Brown, who worked at the company giving back rubs for $450 a week back in 1999.

9. The "I'm Feeling Lucky" button, which bypasses the results page to take users directly to the first result of their search, has been estimated to cost Google around $100m in lost ad revenue every year.

10. Google hires goats. In 2009, the company rented around 200 goats for a week to eat the grass and fertilise the soil at its California headquarters.

11. Google's first official tweet was the words "I'm feeling lucky" in binary.

12. Almost all of rival company Mozilla's money comes from Google. The firm pays $300m a year to be the default search engine on Mozilla's web browser Firefox.

13. Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin own just 16% of the company.

14. That 16% gives them a combined net worth of around $46bn.

15. A new Google employee is known as a "Noogler" and a former employee is referred to as a "Xoogler".

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Happy Birthday Penguin!!!

Happy Birthday Google's Penguin Update

Today is the one year birthday/anniversary of the release of Google's Penguin update - it was released on April 24, 2012. Since then, we've had two additional updates of it on May 24, 2012 and then on October 5, 2012. Now we await the fourth update which is expected to be really big sometime this year.

This update was felt by more SEOs than the Panda update. In fact, our polls (very scientific ones) said 65% of SEOs were impacted by the update. And our polls also show that 94% didn't fully recover from the Penguin update. So this update is serious business for SEOs, webmasters, businesses and of course, Google.

Happy Birthday Penguin! You're one year old. By now you should be able to walk, talk and understand the difference between good and bad. The last one probably still needs some improvements but anyways, here's your birthday song: 

Now, I know joking about this update is insulting to many SEOs and webmasters. But sometimes, we need a smile. I hope anyone impacted by Penguin or any Google update finds their way back to making a lot of money via Google.

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SEO Preparation for 2013: Build Up Your Author Rank

The first week in December marks the need to get ready for the New Year. Whether your business slows down or speeds up during the holidays, the New Year is coming and people are expecting bigger and better things from their favorite businesses. If the consumers weren’t enough to get you thinking about 2013, think about your competition. Most companies will look back at the last year, analyze their mistakes and their successes, and create an improved strategy. It’s important your company do the same.

One of the things that will be important this upcoming year will be author rank. For those who are unfamiliar, author rank is a way for Google to rank the quality of particular authors. This only helps increase relevancy for users, so it’s quite clear that Google will put a larger emphasis on Author Rank in 2013. So how to begin to build an Author Rank? It’s easy, and you may already have started without even realizing it.

How to Begin Building an Author Rank

Building an Author Rank doesn't have to be difficult, but it is a task that takes time and is something you have to understand before you can really get going. Below are a few different ways you can begin to build your author rank:

• Google Authorship Markup. This is probably the most important thing an author can do to help gain a good ranking and gain more exposure. Authorship markup is a way for you to connect you writing with your Google+ profile. All you need to do is: Set your Google+ posts to public à Go to “Contributor To” under the “About” section of your profile à link your sites by adding them to this section, and you’re finished! Eventually the results for your content will look like this on a Google SERP:
   
• Google+ Sharing. Google is going to take into account how active you are on Google+ because this helps improve the popularity of your content. This means that you should always share all of your content and include every site you contribute to in your “contributor to” section. I myself have been slacking in this department, but 2013 is certainly the year to make it happen. Also make sure that you’re actively looking to connect with those in your industry and using Google ripples to get your content shared.
   
• Google+ Connection. If Google understands your connections it will help them improve the relevancy of your Google results. This makes it incredibly important that you’re not only adding people to your circles, but that others are doing the same to you.  The New Year will be all about connections and what you decided was relevant to you, so getting started now is vital!
   
• Google+ Activity. Not only do you want to share your own content, but you will want to share the content of others. Make sure you’re always out +1ing content you like and commenting on your connections. This will show Google that you’re actually social and helping your connections.
   
• Other Networks. Although Author Rank relies heavily (very heavily) on Google+, having a presence on other social networks is still important. Your Author Rank should encompass everything about the author and all of his/her interactions, and Facebook and Twitter are a part of that.
   
• Great Content. Although obvious, it never hurts to mention the importance of great content. If you want a good Author Rank, you’re going to need people helping you, and that simply won’t happen if you’re not creating meaningful content for your readers.

If you own a website or a company website and you’re not the primary writer, it is still important the those who do write content on your website begin to build up his/her author rank. This is great for the author, but it also helps this content to show up at the top of a Google search. It’s essentially a win-win.

Inspired Article From: http://www.highervisibility.com/blog/seo-preparation-for-2013-build-up-your-author-rank/

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