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SEO Marketing Blog for Small Business and for SMEs.

Keeping your small business or SME afloat is a tricky proposition. Lucky for you, SEO North Sydney is here to help keep the sharks at bay!

Google's Head of HR Will Reject Your CV if You Do This!

25/9/2014

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As a novelist, screenwriter and SEO copywriter, it's not too much of a stretch to say that words are my life. In my younger years, when I was a professional film actor, it was the spoken word that held my focus. But since then it's all been about the written word.

Like most writers I am obsessive about what words to use, in what order, and why. On the top end of that obsession you deal with issues of thematics, tone and voice. Of narrative and of structure. And at the bottom end you deal with spelling, punctuation and grammar.

This perfectionism (because that is surely what all writers suffer from) means that even something as mundane as an email or an sms / text, must be written well and correctly spelled. Language after all is a symphony made up of an endless amount of notes. And it only takes one 'bum' note to spoil your enjoyment of the music. As my late sainted mum used to say, "If you say it correctly, you'll spell it correctly". And in the digital age, we can perhaps flip that to read: "If you spell it correctly, you'll say it correctly".

Imagine my surprise then, when I read how Laszlo Bock (such a great name - must pinch that for my next novel!) Google's head of HR, revealed that Google instantly delete any CVs that contain spelling mistakes.

Apparently the Human Resources department at Google receives over 50,000 resumes per week. And, so Laszlo told Business Insider, if you have so much as a single spelling mistake on your resume, it ends up in the trash.

Laszlo, who has himself reputedly reviewed over 20,000 resumes, said that upward of 58 percent of resumes Google receives have "Spelling mistakes, punctuation mistakes, or noun-verb agreement errors".

When quizzed as to why he is so obsessive about spelling mistakes, et al, Laszlo said: "Typos are deadly because employers interpret them as a lack of detail-orientation, as a failure to care about quality".

Which is pretty much what we writers have been saying all along!
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Looking for SEO Sydney for your website? Then you've come to right place. Simply call 0425 204 887, today. The first page of Google is only one click away!
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Google Panda Update - Better Content, Better Results

22/9/2014

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Google have just announced that they have this week started rolling out the new and improved Panda algorithm. The roll out is expected to take a week to two weeks to totally proliferate the internet.  

This Google Panda update is influenced by webmaster and user feedback, which has allowed Google to eek out a few more signals to help Panda identify low-quality content. This will result in a higher percentage and greater diversity in search results, and will enable high-quality small and medium-sized sites to rank higher against larger and traditionally more powerful sites.

This is a nice touch from Google, as the quality of the content should be the ultimate deciding factor in a page's worth, not the overarching power of the TLD it comes from. Sure, great content doesn't exist in a vacuum, but just like each individual page has its own page rank, so does each individual page have its own on-page ranking factors, with how great the content is being by far the most important.

It is expected that approximately 3-5% of all queries will be impacted.
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Looking for SEO Sydney for your website? Then you've come to right place. Simply call 0425 204 887, today. The first page of Google is only one click away!
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SEO Testimonial - Cushy Cushions

10/9/2014

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Hi Brian

SEO results have been fantastic over the past few months. First page rankings have also been kick ass. You have done a fabulous job getting the traffic numbers up and I certainly appreciate the effort and service.

Kind regards

Kai
cushycushions.com.au
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Looking for SEO Sydney for your website? Then you've come to right place. Simply call 0425 204 887, today. The first page of Google is only one click away!
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The History of Instagram and its Impact on Social Media Optimisation

7/9/2014

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Instagram - 'Capture and Share the World's Moments'.
The underlying framework and methodology driving social media development in 2010 was visual. In a social media landscape lorded over by words (think the original incarnations of Facebook and Twitter) 2010 saw both Pinterest (March 2010) and Instagram (October 2010) burst onto the scene with a focus on the insatiable human appetite for visual stimulation, via pictures and videos.

What is Instagram? 

Instagram was founded by Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, and is an online social networking service that focuses on mobile photo-sharing and video-sharing. It allows users to take pictures and videos and then easily and conveniently share them via a number of other popular social networking platforms such as Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, Tumblr etc. Users are also able to apply a variety of digital filters to the pictures and videos they post.

Kevin Systrom (CEO, co-founder of Instagram)

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Instagram Co-Founder, Kevin Systrom
Like many internet trail-blazers, Kevin Systrom went to Stanford University, graduating in 2006 with a Bachelor of Science, majoring in Management Science & Engineering. His initial foray into internet start-ups was as an intern at a company called ‘Odeo’, a search and directory website for RSS-syndicated audio and video that allowed users to record, create and share podcasts with a Flash-based interface. You’ll be forgiven if you’ve never heard of Odeo. But you probably will have heard of what Odeo would eventually morph into. A little known company called, ‘Twitter’. 

After graduation, Kevin cut his teeth with a couple of very productive years working at Google, where he was tasked with developing Google Reader, Gmail and associated products as part of the Corporate Development team. 

Kevin has a longstanding love for photography, which he and co-founder Mike Krieger combined brilliantly with the launch of Instagram.

Mike Krieger (co-founder of Instagram)

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Instagram Co-Founder, Mike Krieger
Mike Krieger, like his long-time friend, Kevin Systrom, also graduated from Stanford University, where he studied Symbolic Systems, specialising in Human-Computer Interaction. 

While doing his undergrad, Mike interned with Foxmarks (now Xmarks) as a software developer, and at Microsoft's PowerPoint team as a Product Manager. 

His Master's thesis was a brilliant discourse on how user interfaces can be utilised to support large scale collaborations.

After graduating from Stanford, Mike worked for a year and a half at Meebo as a front-end engineer and user experience designer, before eventually joining the Instagram team doing design & development.

The Growth of Instagram

In March 2010, Burbn Inc. (the parent company of Instagram) received seed funding of $500,000. This was seven months before the actual photo-sharing social networking service was made available to the public. 

In February 2011, a few months after the public launch, Instagram raised their series A funding round of $7 million from a consortium of venture capital funds. The company was valued at $25 million during this funding round.

Some 14 months later, in April 2012, Instagram raised another funding round of $50 million from venture capitalists, with a valuation of $500 million.

Instagram is Acquired by Facebook 

Immediately after launch, Instagram started gaining huge popularity and reached a registered user base of a 100 million people in April 2012. This was technically only one and a half years after the official launch. At which time the company was acquired by Facebook for a mouth watering $1 billion (paid via a mix of cash and stock).

This purchase was by far Facebook’s most significant acquisition and was a definite indicator of how important mobile and photo sharing were becoming to Facebook. An interesting parallel for this purchase can perhaps be drawn with Google’s $1.65 billion acquisition of YouTube in 2006. In as much as it demonstrated an internet behemoth with expertise in a particular area (search, in the case of Google, social media in the case of Facebook) acquiring expertise in an adjacent (but different) area, via purchasing a fast-growing start-up.

This purchase was unusual for Facebook, as its previous purchases of other start-ups were modest by comparison.  
“This is an important milestone for Facebook because it’s the first time we’ve ever acquired 
a product and company with so many users. We don’t plan on doing many more of these, if any at all. 
But providing the best photo sharing experience is one reason why so many people love Facebook 
and we knew it would be worth bringing these two companies together.”

Facebook CEO and Founder, Mark Zuckerberg 

Instagram – Features and User Demographics

Instagram allows users to upload photos and short 15-second videos, apply digital filters to create colour and contrast effects, and then enables them to share this content through social networking platforms such as Twitter and Facebook. Instagram deliberately restricts images to a square shape, in a nod and a wink to those wonderful instant Polaroid photos many of us grew up with. Instagram users can interact with content posted by other members by ‘liking’ it, or by following the user that posted it. They can also search for content using hashtags.
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Instagram Picture
The Instagram mobile app is distributed primarily through Apple’s App Store, Google Play and Windows Phone Store. The app is supported on iPhone, iPad, iPad Touch, Android and Windows handsets, while third-party Instagram apps are available for BlackBerry 10 and Nokia-Symbian handsets and devices.

Boasting 200 million active users in 2014, Instagram’s user-base growth over the years has been nothing short of phenomenal:

Number of Active Users on Instagram

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Number of Active Users on Instagram

Instagram Milestones and Achievements

Other important milestones and achievements for Instagram over the years include:

  • Instagram was declared the ‘iPhone App of the Year’ in December 2011.
  • Instagram app for Android Froyo version 2.2 launched in April 2012 got downloaded more than a million times in less than a day.
  • By July 2012, Instagram was rated more than a million times on Google Play, to become the 5th app ever to reach a million ratings. 
  • As of April 2013, Instagram was rated more than four million times on Google Play.

A look at statistics from September 2013 reveals that a total of 16 billion photos and videos were shared via Instagram, with an average of 55 million new shares being made per day. At time of writing (August 2014) Instagram users are making an average of 1.2 billion new Likes per day.

According to another 2013 study, some 13% of all Internet users worldwide were found to be using Instagram. And some 70% of Instagram users were found to be logging on to the site daily, with 35% logging in more than once a day. 

A 2014 study revealed that the Instagram mobile app user base registered a 25% growth between December 2013 and May 2014. And as of March 2014, a total of some 20 billion photos had been shared via Instagram. It has also been reported that in 2014, an average of one thousand new comments get posted on Instagram every second.

Unlike something like Google + (where people sign up, but hardly ever use it), Instagram demonstrably shows us that people come back again and again to the platform to both post and interact with other users.  And it’s this interaction (much like Facebook itself) that allows us to see why Facebook valued the company at $1 billion in 2012.

As the following Statista chart demonstrates, Instagram has been found to be the 2nd most popular social media app among American smartphone users aged between 18 and 34:
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Most Popular Social Media Apps Among Americans Aged 18-34
According to a 2013 study, some 25% of the Fortune 500 companies were using Instagram as a social media networking platform. A 2014 study indicates that some 43% of the top 100 brands post daily on Instagram, with the average number of posts made by these (top 100) brands on Instagram per week standing at 5.5. Some 65% of the world’s top 100 brands had Instagram accounts (as at 2013).

In 2014, the average value of sales orders generated via Instagram referrals has been found to be a very respectable $66.75. In a late 2013 study, Instagram was also found to deliver the 4th highest (1.08%) conversion rate among all social media platforms and services, trailing only Facebook (1.85%), Vimeo and YouTube (1.16% each).
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Social Media Conversion Rate
A 2014 survey conducted by Social Media Examiner reveals that Instagram is among the top 10 social media platforms used by online marketers.
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How Marketers Use Social Media
According to the SocialMediaMarketingReport of 2014, some 28% of online and social media marketers use Instagram as one of their marketing channels. This report also indicates that some 42% of the marketers (that were polled during the survey on which this report is based) were planning to increase their use of Instagram as a social media marketing platform. As this report further indicates, a significantly higher number (49%) of B2C marketers are likely to increase marketing activity via Instagram than their B2B counterparts (32% of which said they will increase Instagram activity).
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Interestingly, the same percentage of marketers (i.e. 42%) also expressed their willingness to learn more about Instagram as a social media marketing and optimisation platform.

To paraphrase the old adage from the W. P. Kinsella novel, ‘Shoeless Joe’ (popularised in the classic 1989 movie, ‘Field of Dreams’): ‘
"If you build it, they will come."
And with more and more people flocking to this photo-sharing social network every day, it is not surprising that Instagram has emerged as one of the world's 'must use' platforms for businesses, online marketers and social media optimisers.
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Looking for SEO Sydney for your website? Then you've come to right place. Simply call 0425 204 887, today. The first page of Google is only one click away!
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Written by Brian M Logan
The Doyen of All Things Digital
SEO North Sydney
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SEO Testimonial - Cap Fencing

1/9/2014

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SEO North Sydney Testimonial

September 2014

I first contacted Brian at SEO North Sydney in November 2013 for advice on my website because he came up on top of my Google search for SEO.

It was agreed that my website was well out of date and in need of a completely fresh start.

Brian was very helpful the whole time and had a lot of great ideas and input for the new site.

He worked his SEO magic right from the start enabling us to achieve many first page and position 1 results for relevant searches even on new product lines that we did not have on the old site.

We are very happy with our new site capfencing.com.au and its position in the marketplace.

We will continue to use SEO North Sydney’s services going forward to maintain our Google rankings.

Terry White

Director

Cap Fencing Pty Ltd
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Looking for SEO Sydney for your website? Then you've come to right place. Simply call 0425 204 887, today. The first page of Google is only one click away!
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    Author

    Brian M Logan is an on-line marketing, SEO and copywriting expert with over 15 years' experience in the web and over 20 years' experience with the written word. 

    This blog is primarily designed for entrepreneurs and business owners, with a specific focus on helping Small Businesses and SMEs gain greater market share via online search strategies. Without breaking the bank.

    As a screenwriter and novelist repped out of Hollywood by one of the world's 'Big 3' agencies, Brian also adds the occasional creative writing sample to this blog (when the mood strikes him), by way of a change of pace.

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