7 SEO Trends That Will Dominate 2018

In online marketing, few strategies are as competitive or as quickly evolving as search engine optimization (SEO). Marked by a history of algorithm updates, new technologies, and new techniques to win real estate at the top of search engine results pages (SERPs), most SEO experts (like me) chomp at the bit to predict or learn the latest trends that will shape our businesses’ digital futures.

Though algorithm updates were few and far between, 2017 was still an exciting year for SEO, and I’m anticipating even bigger changes on the horizon for 2018. Based on my observations, some trends that unfolded through the end of 2017, and some speculation on some newly unfolding technologies, I’ve come up with a list of predictions for the trends I think will dominate the SEO field in 2018:

1. Video and image search will vastly improve. Gradually, our online interactions have evolved to become more visual. Over the past few years, faster internet speeds, more visual-friendly social media platforms, and a general public desire to engage with more images and videos has led to a surge in visual online interactions. Accordingly, I think we’ll see some changes to how Google and other search engines treat images and videos in an online environment. New startups like Moodstocks and Eyefluence (both of which were acquired by Google) have sought to recognize visual elements within images and videos more accurately, or have sought to improve user interactions with them. I’m not sure what changes these startups foretell, exactly, but I bet we’ll see a vast improvement in search sophistication for visual assets.

2. The Knowledge Graph will dominate. For a few years now, Google has been steadily increasing the frequency and specificity of featured snippets—the concise answers to questions users pose in their search queries. Yet, just last month, the frequency of featured snippets declined significantly, apparently replaced by equivalent answers found in Knowledge Graph boxes. I think this event could portend the rise and eventual dominance of Google’s Knowledge Graph, replacing a good chunk of the space currently occupied by featured snippets in an effort to provide users with even better, more consistent answers.

3. Voice search will sharply increase with the rise of smart speaker sales. Do you have a smart speaker? If you don’t, I bet you know at least a few people who do. Smart speaker sales, like those for Amazon Echo and Google Home, surged in 2017, and sales will probably grow further in 2018 as newer models start to roll out. Because these speakers are activated by voice and provide spoken search results, users are getting even more used to interacting with search engine results with only their voices and their ears. This could drastically change the types of queries we see and reshape the way businesses think about SERPs (since they may no longer be as visual).

4. Individual customization will change the way many rankings are calculated. Google has been pushing the development of more personalized search results for the better part of a decade, relying on individual search histories, browser cookies, and other information to give better, more customized SERPs for individuals. With the advent of smart speakers, the increased convenience of search, and greater technological sophistication, the personalization factor will likely increase even further in 2018, making it more difficult to predict how your company will rank—or what you’ll rank for.

5. Machine learning will spell the end of traditional search algorithm updates. RankBrain remains Google’s deepest dive into machine learning—at least in how it pertains to its search algorithm. But Alphabet, Google’s parent company, has invested heavily in machine learning and AI over the past several years. Though Google hasn’t released any official news about when or if it plans to roll out more machine learning updates to its core algorithm, my guess is by the end of 2018, we’ll see a greater influence of machine learning over typical search results. Eventually, though it will probably be years from now, we may see algorithm updates fade away entirely, in favor of an automated, continuous and iterative algorithm updating process carried out by machine learning.

6. SEO will expand beyond Google and Bing. Over the past few years, I’ve seen an increased trend of companies competing for ranking space outside Google. Google still dominates the search engine sphere, remaining the most popular search platform by far, but third-parties like Yelp and Amazon, as well as digital assistants like Siri have stepped in to become relevant search engines in their own right. If you want to be found by a greater percentage of user searches, and introduce yourself to the widest audience possible, in 2018, you’ll need to begin to think beyond Google’s range of influence.

7. Hyperlocal results will finally take off. I anticipated 2017 to be the first major year for hyperlocal marketing (as did several other experts); I wasn’t wrong about the increased influence of local search and local SEO, but the world wasn’t ready for hyperlocal intent to become the new normal. By “hyperlocal,” I’m referring to the process of targeting customers (or presenting search results) based on physical proximity, down to less than a block radius. I imagine by the end of 2018, with more mobile use than ever before and the rising relevance of VR and AR, companies currently involved in local SEO will need to do more to target hyperlocal keywords and optimize for even more locally relevant appearances.

First seen here

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What are social signals and how to use them for SEO? Read this

What are social signals? I hear you ask!

Well, within the SEO fraternity we all are aware that we might some time go overboard with abbreviations and tech terms which are simply incomprehensible to the mass. (including this mortal in most occasions). So when I got asked this question earlier today while discussing a campaigns with a prospect, I did a little research to see if someone has described it better than me and found this lovely article from our good friends at Zadroweb.

 

 

Move over SEO. Social media is fast becoming the optimal way for businesses to rank at the top of search engine results through customer feedback known as social signals. This new process has become a major factor in the success (or failure) of a company in ways that can’t compare to traditional ranking methods.

Social Signals Defined.

Social signals are the likes, shares, votes, pins, or views people place on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or other social media sites that filter out to the various search engines.

Social signals indicate that your brand is being talked about by consumers, and this improves your SERP ranking because search engines view social signals as trusted “recommendations”.

“Traditional” SEO Vs. Social Signals.

For years, traditional SEO strategies were the definitive way to ensure a high search engine ranking for a site. The right anchor text links, backlinks and keywords were a vital part of a mathematical formula that determined SERP rankings. However, after Google’s many Panda and Penguin updates, the focus began to shift more toward the value of a site’s content, and today it has shifted again to add people’s feedback into the mix with social signals.

What Can Social Signals Do?

The right social signals reduce bounce rates and create more repeat site visits.
Social signals from one page can actually impact other pages within a domain to improve ranking criteria.
Voting for or liking web pages may potentially begin to replace backlinks, and the improved brand visibility that social signals creates can generate new inbound links and produce a “tag team” effect to move a site higher in the SERPs.
Why Have Social Signals Taken Hold?

The increasing use of social media sites to share information or just keep in touch has changed how we communicate, and social signals are the natural outcome of this communication shift.

Research shows that people now choose to visit particular websites not because of a high search engine rank, but because friends have recommended the site either directly or through social signals. In addition, socially linked websites have improved conversion rates along with better brand loyalty and brand awareness, leading to more positive reviews through social signals.

As social media continues to grow, consumers will look to social signals to help them make the best product and service choices.

What You Should Be Doing.

If your company has not yet created a social media presence, it’s time to act. Set up accounts and publish content about your business on social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, Pinterest, and YouTube. If you’re confused or unsure on how to proceed, there are professional social media management companies that can help get you started.

Once you’ve created your sites, don’t let them stagnate. Regularly update your social sites with diverse content like posts, bookmarks, votes, re-shares and comments — these are just a few actions that Google uses to help determine a site’s ranking.

Remember that although social media now plays a significant role in SERP rankings, your focus should still be on your customer first and foremost. Don’t just publish content for the sake of publishing content; share content that your customers will find truly valuable. Engage with your customers through lively discussions and commenting, videos, images, contests, polls, and anything else that elicits positive feedback. The more value a customer perceives from your brand’s social sites, the more likely they are to like, share and recommend your brand to others.

Social media is now the strategy of choice to keep your brand in front of your customers, and to keep your customers engaged in your brand in ways that traditional SEO only can not accomplish.

The post What are social signals and how to use them for SEO? Read this appeared first on mojo media.

source https://www.mojomedia.pro/what-are-social-signals/

What are social signals and how to use them for SEO? Read this

What are social signals? I hear you ask!

Well, within the SEO fraternity we all are aware that we might some time go overboard with abbreviations and tech terms which are simply incomprehensible to the mass. (including this mortal in most occasions). So when I got asked this question earlier today while discussing a campaigns with a prospect, I did a little research to see if someone has described it better than me and found this lovely article from our good friends at Zadroweb.

 

 

Move over SEO. Social media is fast becoming the optimal way for businesses to rank at the top of search engine results through customer feedback known as social signals. This new process has become a major factor in the success (or failure) of a company in ways that can’t compare to traditional ranking methods.

Social Signals Defined.

Social signals are the likes, shares, votes, pins, or views people place on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or other social media sites that filter out to the various search engines.

Social signals indicate that your brand is being talked about by consumers, and this improves your SERP ranking because search engines view social signals as trusted “recommendations”.

“Traditional” SEO Vs. Social Signals.

For years, traditional SEO strategies were the definitive way to ensure a high search engine ranking for a site. The right anchor text links, backlinks and keywords were a vital part of a mathematical formula that determined SERP rankings. However, after Google’s many Panda and Penguin updates, the focus began to shift more toward the value of a site’s content, and today it has shifted again to add people’s feedback into the mix with social signals.

What Can Social Signals Do?

The right social signals reduce bounce rates and create more repeat site visits.
Social signals from one page can actually impact other pages within a domain to improve ranking criteria.
Voting for or liking web pages may potentially begin to replace backlinks, and the improved brand visibility that social signals creates can generate new inbound links and produce a “tag team” effect to move a site higher in the SERPs.
Why Have Social Signals Taken Hold?

The increasing use of social media sites to share information or just keep in touch has changed how we communicate, and social signals are the natural outcome of this communication shift.

Research shows that people now choose to visit particular websites not because of a high search engine rank, but because friends have recommended the site either directly or through social signals. In addition, socially linked websites have improved conversion rates along with better brand loyalty and brand awareness, leading to more positive reviews through social signals.

As social media continues to grow, consumers will look to social signals to help them make the best product and service choices.

What You Should Be Doing.

If your company has not yet created a social media presence, it’s time to act. Set up accounts and publish content about your business on social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, Pinterest, and YouTube. If you’re confused or unsure on how to proceed, there are professional social media management companies that can help get you started.

Once you’ve created your sites, don’t let them stagnate. Regularly update your social sites with diverse content like posts, bookmarks, votes, re-shares and comments — these are just a few actions that Google uses to help determine a site’s ranking.

Remember that although social media now plays a significant role in SERP rankings, your focus should still be on your customer first and foremost. Don’t just publish content for the sake of publishing content; share content that your customers will find truly valuable. Engage with your customers through lively discussions and commenting, videos, images, contests, polls, and anything else that elicits positive feedback. The more value a customer perceives from your brand’s social sites, the more likely they are to like, share and recommend your brand to others.

Social media is now the strategy of choice to keep your brand in front of your customers, and to keep your customers engaged in your brand in ways that traditional SEO only can not accomplish.

The post What are social signals and how to use them for SEO? Read this appeared first on mojo media.

source http://www.mojomedia.pro/what-are-social-signals/

How Google aims to bring TV advertising into the 21st century

Catalonia plots digital government in exile in bid for independence

Is this the future where tech meets politics??? Saw this article and thought you guys will like it
Photo credit: David Ramos/Getty Images

As Spain threatens to suspend the region’s autonomy, Catalan activists are making plans to take their government online.

Catalan activists are preparing to create a digital government-in-exile if Spanish prime minister Mariano Rajoy follows through on his threat to suspend the region’s autonomy in a bid to prevent it declaring independence.

“If the Spanish government does restrict Catalan autonomy – especially if it bans Catalan political parties – we will probably have a clandestine government,” says Simona Levi, founder of digital rights non-profit platform Xnet. “The internet would be an important part of that.”

Although details of the plan are unclear Thomas Harrington, professor of Hispanic studies at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, suggests “a country in the east of Europe which had itself gone through the process of declaring its independence from the former Soviet Union not all that long ago,” – believed to mean the Estonian government – might be Catalonia’s blueprint.

Estonia – already the world’s most digitally advanced society – plans eight data embassies that will each store copies of the government’s critical data to reboot in the case of physical or cyber attack. The first embassy, based in a cage in a high-security data centre in Betzdorf, Luxembourg, comes online at the start of 2018.

“When the Russians invaded the Ukraine we asked, ‘Can we survive as a nation even if we don’t own our territory?’” explains Taavi Kotka, Estonia’s former chief information officer who spearheaded the scheme. “If you can have everything online, you become location independent. We built data embassies in the way Lord Voldemort placed his soul in different vessels – if one goes down you boot up another for digital continuity.”

The Catalan government and pro-independence activists have already survived an online game of cat and mouse with the Spanish state, according to Xnet analysis. On September 13, the Spanish government used a court order to shut down the referendum.cat web page – prompting the Catalan government to open new sites and a Valencia-based user called GrenderG to publish the site’s content on Github.

Clone sites proliferated and over the following ten days the Spanish government blocked more than 140 websites, forced Google Play to remove an app with voter information and blocked the domain gateway.ipfs.io, which used the peer-to-peer Inter Planetary File System protocol to store referendum information across a wide network of servers. Guardia Civil officers raided the headquarters of the .cat registry on September 20, seizing computers and arresting the company’s CTO Pep Masoliver – who was later charged with sedition.

“The Spanish government is using an anti-phishing technical infrastructure to stop people going to those websites,” says John Graham-Cumming, CTO of web security company Cloudflare. “In Togo or Gabon or Tunisia or Syria with maybe one large telco that’s probably state owned it’s relatively easy to shut the internet down. Inside Spain, they’re redirecting those domain names to their own servers where there’s a page from the Guardia Civil saying the page is shut by court order.”

“This is not something that you normally see in a modern democracy – it’s the kind of thing you see in Turkey, Egypt, China and Iran,” says security consultant Troy Hunt.

In response, activists set up channels through encrypted messaging apps such as Telegram, guiding internet users to access the affected sites using Virtual Private Networks and proxy services. During the October 1 referendum and resulting police crackdown, polling station volunteers communicated through clandestine data networks created by routing smartphones through VPNs to operate without access to the open internet. In the streets, activists and referendum officials chanted “airplane mode”, urging voters to preserve network bandwidth for people working inside the polling stations.

“What we are seeing playing out in Catalonia is the strategic use of secrecy via technology to imagine and enact a different kind of politics,” says Dr Clare Birchall, senior lecturer in contemporary culture at Kings College London who writes on secrecy and surveillance argues this represents a new, radical form of secrecy.

“We could say that the Spanish government feels as threatened by this appropriation of secrecy and opacity as it does by the possibility of Catalan independence. From arcana imperii to covert surveillance and operations by intelligence services, secrecy has largely always been the preserve of the state. This could herald the rise of a ‘radical secrecy’ – an attempt by activist groups to establish secret networks to rival those of the state.”

Catalan premier Carles Puigdemont is expected to declare independence on Tuesday at a session of the Catalan parliament already declared illegal by Rajoy. In a Sunday interview with Spain’s El País newspaper, Mr Rajoy insisted “the government will ensure that any declaration of independence will lead to nothing.” Asked whether he was prepared to invoke the Spanish constitution’s Article 155, allowing the national parliament to run the autonomous region, Mr Rajoy added: “I don’t rule out absolutely anything that is within the law.”

 

We found this article on this link below:

http://www.wired.co.uk/article/catalan-government-independence-internet-spain

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source http://www.mojomedia.pro/catalonia-plots-digital-government-exile-bid-independence/

UK crowdfunding platform Seedrs hits £50m valuation following £6m raise

I actually have worked with seeds team before and can say they deserve every penny of this. They are an amazing platform and has a brilliant track record of helping start ups to grow.

 

Yessi Bello Perez from UK TECH NEWS reports.

 

Seedrs is now valued at £50m following a £6m crowdfunding campaign ran on its own platform.

The company, which raised £4m from Woodford Investment Management last month, received the funds from more than 2,000 of its customers.

According to Seedrs, the average individual investment amount was £3,200, with the biggest individual investment hitting £800,000. Most investors, it said, came from the UK, Germany, Portugal, France and Italy.

Jeff Kelisky, chief executive officer of Seedrs, said he was delighted with the news. “It was highly important to us that we could open up as much as possible for our existing investor base, and this sum, combined with Woodford’s investment of £4m earlier this month takes us to £10m.

“This round is yet more evidence of the market’s conviction that Seedrs is on the right path to delivering shareholder value by opening venture capital opportunities to retail investors for fast growth companies – and without Seedrs having pioneered regulated equity investment, these opportunities would have remained closed to them,” he added.

British tennis star Andy Murray backed the company: “It is with great pride that I have made this investment into Seedrs latest funding round. As an active investor into early-stage businesses through the Seedrs platform, it was important for me to take up my pre-emption rights.”

“I have made a substantial follow on investment into this round to show my support for all that Seedrs has achieved since the last raise in 2015. The team has done some great work in supporting European startups and I’m looking forward to seeing how the business will continue to grow with this additional investment,” Murray added.

Seedrs will use the funds to launch new product capabilities, to boost sales and marketing efforts and launch a series of strategic partnerships.

The company is also looking to scale its campaign executing through the use of automation, machine learning and AI.

The post UK crowdfunding platform Seedrs hits £50m valuation following £6m raise appeared first on mojo media.

source http://www.mojomedia.pro/uk-crowdfunding-platform-seedrs-hits-50m-valuation-following-6m-raise/

What Phil had to say about us :-)

This is what makes what we do worth doing.

We have been working with Phil at Pathway Cleaning for a while now. After only 3 months, we were able to rank them for the key words they were after. We even out ranked brands in their market that has historically been there for ages and has a bigger war chest.

Makes me Happy

Shan and Mojo Media team has been working with us to grow the cleaning business and he has done a fab job with advice, guidance and then the delivery of the our site. Thanks Shan for your patience and support.

Phil Egginton

Pathway Cleaning Ltd.

 

The post What Phil had to say about us :-) appeared first on mojo media.

source http://www.mojomedia.pro/phil-say-us/