How to get the new WordPress SEO 2.0 to Join Google's Knowledge Graph

The 'WordPress SEO 2.0' is the latest addition to the notorious YOAST SEO Plugin.
All what you have to do is to either download it, or if you already have it, just update it.


Once you do you will find this new feature which support Google’s new Knowledge Graph.

When Google has picked it up and shows a Knowledge Graph block for you or your company, it would look like this: (but it is not guaranteed of course)

20 Reasons Localization Is Essential To Website Conversions

Thanks to the global reach of the internet, website localisation is one of the best things you can do to increase website conversions. By creating a culture- and language-specific version of your website for each demographic market you target, you become a truly international business. All businesses, even small online retailers, can benefit from localization. In fact, you can’t afford not to have localized websites, and here are 20 reasons why.

1. It offers global expansion and increased reach.

Although English is still the predominant language online, other languages, most notably Chinese, Spanish, French, and Arabic, are quickly closing the distance. Offering web content in additional languages and cultures helps you increase your reach and become a respected international business.

2. Localization helps you appeal to multicultural audiences.

Translation helps international visitors find and buy from you, but it doesn’t consider cultural differences and sometimes doesn’t convey your message or brand very well. Localization includes both cultural and linguistic concerns, helping you reach audiences in different cultures much better.

3. It increases web traffic.

Search engines rank websites with localized versions or pages higher than non-localized websites and return your website as a result more often. On top of that, local sites are more likely to link to you when you provide information in the local language. Increasing traffic is one of the three most important things you can do to boost revenue, and more traffic means more sales.

4. You get more traffic from regional and language-specific search engines.

These smaller search engines have much less competition because they’re small and most businesses don’t have localized websites to appear in results. This means it’s much easier for your localized websites to rank higher than your English website. The higher you rank and the more often your website appears in search results, the more traffic and sales you get.

5. Localization increases brand recognition.

When you translate your website into the language and culture of your target market, you show that you respect and value your audience. They in turn are more aware of your business than your English-only competitors because they see your website more often and more easily understand your message.

6. Localization increases website stickiness and sales.

Having a strong localization plan boosts your presence and sales in a targeted area, such as localizing in French and German to increase sales in Europe. Multiple studies have found that when users are presented with a website in their native language, they stay on the site twice as long and are four times more likely to make a purchase from it.

7. It increases overall ROI.

Increased traffic, conversions, and brand awareness also leads to increased trust, credibility, customer loyalty, and satisfaction, in turn leading to more conversions. Localization is also scalable for both your audience and your budget, delivering huge benefits for only a marginal additional cost.

8. Localization maintains low printing and content distribution costs.

Localizing your website increases reach without raising these costs a few ways. First, you can reuse much of the same content across multiple languages; second, translating your website into a new language and culture is scalable; finally, having a web presence costs the same no matter what language or culture. Having a localized website may also eliminate the need for direct mail such as catalogs and brochures in various languages.

9. It is a cost-effective virtual branch office or satellite location.

Instead of building a brick-and-mortar store or renting an office in an international location, your localized websites become those virtual stores by offering information, products, contacts, and everything else you can deliver digitally.

10. Localization lowers customer support costs.

By answering questions and providing information in a target market’s native language and culture, you give customers what they need online in the best format for them, which reduces the need for multilingual phone and chat support.

11. It allows you to target minorities in your own area.

Many countries have large subgroups with their own languages, cultures, and skyrocketing purchasing power, such as the Latino market in the USA. Creating localized websites for these groups helps you solidify your presence and boost sales in your own area.

12. Localization maintains brand image and voice across cultures.

The problem with straight translation is that it doesn’t consider cultural differences and doesn’t always maintain your branding message. Localization is better than translation because it considers communication, sales incentive, design, layout, and programming specific to each culture and area, so you don’t lose the integrity of your brand across languages.

13. You become a local business.

Localizing your website turns you into a local business, which boosts conversions because many people want to buy locally, you get more traffic from local keywords, and you have an easier time building brand awareness.

14. Localization makes your local marketing stronger.

When you have a website specific to a certain area’s language and culture, your local internet marketing efforts (including search engine optimization, directory listings, and social media) benefit from having a local resource to point visitors to.

15. It makes you more trustworthy and credible.

By using the area’s local slang, idioms, metaphors, and figures of speech, you can communicate with your target customers more easily and directly, reducing confusion and boosting your own reputation.

16. Localization appeals to more customers.

Most web users don’t buy products online in a language other than their own. By offering them that option, you attract more prospects and close more sales.

17. It means fewer abandoned carts.

Programming can be as much a barrier as language or culture. Localization includes proper programming to prevent backend problems such as forms that make it difficult to input personal and payment info. Fewer problems means more closed sales and higher average order value.

18. Localization makes payment easier.

When you enable local credit cards, shipping and tax codes, and buying practices, your localized websites attract customers that would shop elsewhere otherwise, boosting your ROI, conversions, and revenue.

19. It increases local sales.

Offering products, support, FAQs, and other information in your customers’ native languages makes them more likely to buy from you because they have all the information they need in a format they understand to make an informed purchase.

20. Localization increases revenue.

Most consumers care more about language than price. So even if they know they can find a product cheaper somewhere else, they are more likely to buy from you at full price if you have a localized website for them.

20 Reasons why Localization is Important to Website Conversion

Thanks to the global reach of the internet, website localization is one of the best things you can do to increase website conversions. By creating a culture- and language-specific version of your website for each demographic market you target, you become a truly international business. All businesses, even small online retailers, can benefit from localization. In fact, you can’t afford not to have localized websites, and here are 20 reasons why.

1. It offers global expansion and increased reach.

Although English is still the predominant language online, other languages, most notably Chinese, Spanish, French, and Arabic, are quickly closing the distance. Offering web content in additional languages and cultures helps you increase your reach and become a respected international business.

2. Localization helps you appeal to multicultural audiences.

Translation helps international visitors find and buy from you, but it doesn’t consider cultural differences and sometimes doesn’t convey your message or brand very well. Localization includes both cultural and linguistic concerns, helping you reach audiences in different cultures much better.

3. It increases web traffic.

Search engines rank websites with localized versions or pages higher than non-localized websites and return your website as a result more often. On top of that, local sites are more likely to link to you when you provide information in the local language. Increasing traffic is one of the three most important things you can do to boost revenue, and more traffic means more sales.

4. You get more traffic from regional and language-specific search engines.

These smaller search engines have much less competition because they’re small and most businesses don’t have localized websites to appear in results. This means it’s much easier for your localized websites to rank higher than your English website. The higher you rank and the more often your website appears in search results, the more traffic and sales you get.

5. Localization increases brand recognition.

When you translate your website into the language and culture of your target market, you show that you respect and value your audience. They in turn are more aware of your business than your English-only competitors because they see your website more often and more easily understand your message.

6. Localization increases website stickiness and sales.

Having a strong localization plan boosts your presence and sales in a targeted area, such as localizing in French and German to increase sales in Europe. Multiple studies have found that when users are presented with a website in their native language, they stay on the site twice as long and are four times more likely to make a purchase from it.

7. It increases overall ROI.

Increased traffic, conversions, and brand awareness also leads to increased trust, credibility, customer loyalty, and satisfaction, in turn leading to more conversions. Localization is also scalable for both your audience and your budget, delivering huge benefits for only a marginal additional cost.

8. Localization maintains low printing and content distribution costs.

Localizing your website increases reach without raising these costs a few ways. First, you can reuse much of the same content across multiple languages; second, translating your website into a new language and culture is scalable; finally, having a web presence costs the same no matter what language or culture. Having a localized website may also eliminate the need for direct mail such as catalogs and brochures in various languages.

9. It is a cost-effective virtual branch office or satellite location.

Instead of building a brick-and-mortar store or renting an office in an international location, your localized websites become those virtual stores by offering information, products, contacts, and everything else you can deliver digitally.

10. Localization lowers customer support costs.

By answering questions and providing information in a target market’s native language and culture, you give customers what they need online in the best format for them, which reduces the need for multilingual phone and chat support.

11. It allows you to target minorities in your own area.

Many countries have large subgroups with their own languages, cultures, and skyrocketing purchasing power, such as the Latino market in the USA. Creating localized websites for these groups helps you solidify your presence and boost sales in your own area.

12. Localization maintains brand image and voice across cultures.

The problem with straight translation is that it doesn’t consider cultural differences and doesn’t always maintain your branding message. Localization is better than translation because it considers communication, sales incentive, design, layout, and programming specific to each culture and area, so you don’t lose the integrity of your brand across languages.

13. You become a local business.

Localizing your website turns you into a local business, which boosts conversions because many people want to buy locally, you get more traffic from local keywords, and you have an easier time building brand awareness.

14. Localization makes your local marketing stronger.

When you have a website specific to a certain area’s language and culture, your local internet marketing efforts (including search engine optimization, directory listings, and social media) benefit from having a local resource to point visitors to.

15. It makes you more trustworthy and credible.

By using the area’s local slang, idioms, metaphors, and figures of speech, you can communicate with your target customers more easily and directly, reducing confusion and boosting your own reputation.

16. Localization appeals to more customers.

Most web users don’t buy products online in a language other than their own. By offering them that option, you attract more prospects and close more sales.

17. It means fewer abandoned carts.

Programming can be as much a barrier as language or culture. Localization includes proper programming to prevent backend problems such as forms that make it difficult to input personal and payment info. Fewer problems means more closed sales and higher average order value.

18. Localization makes payment easier.

When you enable local credit cards, shipping and tax codes, and buying practices, your localized websites attract customers that would shop elsewhere otherwise, boosting your ROI, conversions, and revenue.

19. It increases local sales.

Offering products, support, FAQs, and other information in your customers’ native languages makes them more likely to buy from you because they have all the information they need in a format they understand to make an informed purchase.

20. Localization increases revenue.

Most consumers care more about language than price. So even if they know they can find a product cheaper somewhere else, they are more likely to buy from you at full price if you have a localized website for them.

How to make the internet a better place with SEO? by Matt cutts

Does Google Consider SEO to be spam?
A 3 years old video by Mat Cutts that answers a question people still ask.

And the answer is yet the same and will still be the same:

SEO, Stands for Search Engine Optimization, is about trying to make sure that your pages are well represented to search engines. 

How?

• By making sure the site crawlable (Robots, sitemaps, etc.)
• Finding the Right keywords (KW and competitors research)
• Usability and design (titles, headers, landing pages, content, multimedia)
• Speed 
• Responsiveness (is it mobile and tablet friendly or not)
• Update rate (How frequent the site adds new content, and how valuable and informative it is)? 

Read more: Search Engine optimization Starter Guide

The Future of SEO is Taking your Visitors to Your Company's Kitchen

Many of you must have heard of Google's new R&D projects to emulate human interactions on website to base their ranking algorithm on the user experience and whether the visited site offered a perceived value or not.

That is why the future of SEO will not be keywords or backlinks but "Users"
Therefore, site owners need to offer a true user experience to their visitors by being more transparent with them. i.e. involving them in the kitchen :


So, Forget about the famous quote, attributed to Otto von Bismarck: 

Laws are like sausages, it is better not to see them being made.

How To Be More Transparent?

1. Add a company page.
2. Add images to your company page (let your visitors see you.)
3. Add team video. Let your visitors see and hear you and your team
4. Photos or video of your office. Let your visitors see where you work and what you offices look like.
5. Don’t hide your phone number. This is a huge red flag.
6. Integrate your social media accounts
7. Show customer reviews and testimonials
8. Embed a Google map of your office
9. Show a photo and name of your sales person on the sales or contact page
10. Don’t use stock photos of people in offices. Instead take real photos of your people in your offices.
11. If you sell services, then describe your process
12. If you sell products, then show how they get made

(I know a Toronto based SEO company called Powered By Search that has an animated photo of their office on the Main header on the Home Page showing visitors their employees while working.) 

Here are some extra guidelines from the Stanford Web Credibility Project: 

Resources:

1. http://credibility.stanford.edu/ 
2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_Web_Credibility_Project
3. http://blog.seogroup.com/the-most-important-website-trend-in-2014-is/

Complete Guide on KML Geography Sitemaps

If your business has a physical location, you would need to tell Google about it, not only to gain higher authority and credibility, but to better rank on the results page.

Standard SEO requires that a website should have a sitemap.xml file to help search engine robots (i.e. GoogleBot) to crawl a site and index it.

Sitemaps concept has evolved that we currently have several types of specific sitemaps; news sitemaps, Video sitemaps, and geography sitemaps.

Geography sitemap file may also called KML (Keyhole Markup Language) [Do you remember the days when Google Earth was called Keyhole? Well, that is it]

Keyhole Markup Language (KML) is an XML notation for expressing geographic annotation and visualization within Internet-based, two-dimensional maps and three-dimensional Earth browsers.

KML was developed for use with Google Earth, which was originally named Keyhole Earth Viewer. It was created by Keyhole, Inc, which was acquired by Google in 2004. KML became an international standard of the Open Geospatial Consortium in 2008. Google Earth was the first program able to view and graphically edit KML files.

You can create KML files with the Google Earth user interface, or you can use an XML or simple text editor to enter "raw" KML from scratch. 

KML files and their related images (if any) can be compressed using the ZIP format into KMZ archives. To share your KML and KMZ files, you can e-mail them, host them locally for sharing within a private internet, or host them publicly on a web server. Just as web browsers display HTML files, Earth browsers such as Google Earth display KML files. 

Once you've properly configured your server and shared the URL (address) of your KML files, anyone who's installed Google Earth can view the KML files hosted on your public web server. Many applications display KML, including Google Earth, Google Maps, Google Maps for mobile, NASA WorldWind, ESRI ArcGIS Explorer, Adobe PhotoShop, AutoCAD, and Yahoo! Pipes.

The KML file specifies a set of features (place marks, images, polygons, 3D models, textual descriptions, etc.) for display in Here Maps, Google Earth, Maps and Mobile, or any other geospatial software implementing the KML encoding. Each place always has a longitude and a latitude. 

Other data can make the view more specific, such as tilt, heading, altitude, which together define a "camera view" along with a timestamp or timespan. KML shares some of the same structural grammar as GML. Some KML information cannot be viewed in Google Maps or Mobile.

KML files are very often distributed in KMZ files, which are zipped KML files with a .kmz extension. These must be legacy (ZIP 2.0) compression compatible (i.e. stored or deflate method), otherwise the .kmz file might not uncompress in all geobrowsers. The contents of a KMZ file are a single root KML document (notionally "doc.kml") and optionally any overlays, images, icons, and COLLADA 3D models referenced in the KML including network-linked KML files. The root KML document by convention is a file named "doc.kml" at the root directory level, which is the file loaded upon opening. By convention the root KML document is at root level and referenced files are in subdirectories (e.g. images for overlay images).

An example KML document is:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<kml xmlns="http://www.HaveResults.net/kml/2.2">
<Document>
<Placemark>
  <name>Have Results</name>
  <description>SEM Tools Reviews</description>
  <Point>
    <coordinates>-74.006393,40.714172,0</coordinates>
  </Point>
</Placemark>
</Document>
</kml>

 or could be more detailed like this (in Microformats):

<div class="vcard">
<h2 class="fn org">Have Results</h2>
<div class="adr">
<div class="street-address">adress</div>
<span class="locality">City</span>,
<span class="region">Quebec</span>
<span class="postal-code">123456</span>
<span class="country-name">Canada</span>
</div>
<div class="tel">00123456789</div>
</div>

or in Schema.org format:

<div itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/LocalBusiness">
<h2><span itemprop="name">Have Results</span></h2>
<span itemprop="description">SEM Tools Reviews</span>
<div itemprop="address" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/PostalAddress">
<span itemprop="streetAddress">adress</span>
<span itemprop="addressLocality">city</span>,
<span itemprop="addressRegion">Province</span>
</div>
Phone: <span itemprop="telephone">00123456789</span>
</div>

You can now create a file with KML extension for the Geo sitemap. 

To notify Google of the whereabouts of your locations, proceed by taking the following steps:

1. Upload the KML file to your domain server with FTP.
2. Login to Google Webmaster Tools and add the Geo Sitemap. For more information about submitting the Geo Sitemap, please read the Google Help pages.
3. Don't forget to add your address details to your website 

There are easier ways to add your GEO sitemap (KML file to your site) 

If you are using WordPress, install a plugin called WP GeoSitemap

If not, you can use the geo sitemap generator to create you a file and you just upload it and notify Google through GWMTs. (Here is the link: http://www.geositemapgenerator.com/) 

Resources:

• https://developers.google.com/kml/documentation/
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keyhole_Markup_Language
• https://developers.google.com/kml/documentation/kml_tut
• https://support.google.com/earth/answer/148118?hl=en
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geography_Markup_Language

Store Locator and Local SEO Plugin for Wordpress

Yoast has just released a major update to its Local SEO plugin. This new version has some new functionality; most important is the new store locator option. 

This option is especially handy if your company has multiple locations or your brand is sold in many different stores. 

The store locator will allow customers to easily find the nearest location of your company. 

Customers can fill in their home address and a list of the nearest locations of your company will appear! 

Check out the new functionality and buy the Local SEO plugin!

This Local SEO plugin largely improves the usability of the contact page of your website. It allows you to:

Insert Google Maps - This extra functionality will make it easier for your customers to  (physically) navigate to the location of your company.

Insert address(es) of your company - Our Local SEO plugin makes it easy to show your company address(es) in a clear and uniform format, while adding all the necessary technical markup for search engines.

Insert opening hours of your company - Our Local SEO plugin makes it easy to show your opening hours in a clear and uniform format.

Insert a store locator - The store locator will allow customers to easily find the nearest location of your company. Customers can fill in their home address and a list of the nearest locations of your company will appear.

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Another Local SEO Tip

Another Local SEO Advise is to List your hours of operation on the home page and the Contact Us page. 

Search engines love this information, since it’s something that consumers specifically are looking for. In fact, Bing Local used to display little “Open” icons on business profile pages in some cases if they knew the business was open while a searcher viewed the page. 

For some types of businesses, there could be a high likelihood that search engines might change rankings according to the hours of operation, particularly on mobile devices, too. 

After all, it doesn't make sense to show a searcher all the restaurants that are closed at the moment as first in the list, right? 

A Local SEO Secret

If you run a Local business website and of course want to rank higher on SERPs, I am sure you will find this piece of advice useful to you:

Use a Local Phone Number not a 1-800-Number in your Contact us page

If you remember that search engines want to enhance their user experience by sending them to the most relevant site, they will remember to better position your site.