5 ways to Build and Establish your Brand.

So you’ve taken a leap of faith and started your own business, Congratulations! For some, it’s an exciting time to venture out and put their entrepreneurial skills to the ultimate challenge, a challenge they’re so eager to embark on. For others, it can be quite terrifying to try something new, wondering if the world will appreciate what they have to offer as they determine the best path to take to success.

Your brand is how you want to appear to the world. How well do you want to be recognized? How will you build your authority and your following? We learned a thing or two about establishing your personal brand from thought leader, Thomas Smale, a contributor for Entrepreneur.com and Founder of FE International shared an insightful article on this topic. Here are 5 Brand Building Tips:

1. Be true to yourself
For a brand to be “authentic”, so should the creator. Your brand should tell your story, who you are, what you believe in, where you came from, and how you came to creating your own brand. People connect with people better than they connect with “things”. When speaking to others about your brand, wouldn’t it would be harder to fake it then to just simply be yourself? Just some food for thought.

2. Speaking Engagements
Are you a people person? Do you speak with knowledge or from a level of authority? Do you have the ability to intrigue and captivate others? Being an entrepreneur is all about developing good communication skills because part of building your brand is being able to speak about it on a regular basis.

3. Write thought leadership articles
This will build your credibility as a leader in the industry. Write about topics that talk around your brand and share your knowledge with people who are seeking this kind of information.

4. Build and protect your internet presence
Claim your business online and be aware of how you appear or what people are saying about your brand online. Embrace online reviews, even the not so pleasant ones. Start a Facebook business page and ensure that it presents you in the best light possible. Meet your customers expectations by appearing in their search results, it further legitimizes your brand and your existence.

5. Never stop learning
You may be an expert in what you do but the development and advancement of your brand has no limits. In order to stay relevant in this ever-changing, ever-growing world of technology, continue to learn from other thought leaders and competitors in your industry. You can never have too much knowledge and perspective.

The most important thing to remember is to stay humble by being open to the opinions of your followings. Be honest about your weaknesses and strengths. There’s nothing more believable when it comes to branding than one that is “human” and one that people can relate to.

Webspam Report 2016: How Google Fought Webspam

With 2017 well underway, we wanted to take a moment and share some of the insights we gathered in 2016 in our fight against webspam. Over the past year, we continued to find new ways of keeping spam from creating a poor quality search experience, and worked with webmasters around the world to make the web better.

We do a lot behind the scenes to make sure that users can make full use of what today’s web has to offer, bringing relevant results to everyone around the globe, while fighting webspam that could potentially harm or simply annoy users.

Webspam trends in 2016

• Website security continues to be a major source of concern. Last year we saw more hacked sites than ever - a 32% increase compared to 2015. Because of this, we continued to invest in improving and creating more resources to help webmasters know what to do when their sites get hacked. 
• We continued to see that sites are compromised not just to host webspam. We saw a lot of webmasters affected by social engineering, unwanted software, and unwanted ad injectors. We took a stronger stance in Safe Browsing to protect users from deceptive download buttons, made a strong effort to protect users from repeatedly dangerous sites, and we launched more detailed help text within the Search Console Security Issues Report.
• Since more people are searching on Google using a mobile device, we saw a significant increase in spam targeting mobile users. In particular, we saw a rise in spam that redirects users, without the webmaster’s knowledge, to other sites or pages, inserted into webmaster pages using widgets or via ad units from various advertising networks.

How we fought spam in 2016

• We continued to refine our algorithms to tackle webspam. We made multiple improvements to how we rank sites, including making Penguin (one of our core ranking algorithms) work in real-time.
• The spam that we didn’t identify algorithmically was handled manually. We sent over 9 million messages to webmasters to notify them of webspam issues on their sites. We also started providing more security notifications via Google Analytics.
• We performed algorithmic and manual quality checks to ensure that websites with structured data markup meet quality standards. We took manual action on more than 10,000 sites that did not meet the quality guidelines for inclusion in search features powered by structured data.

Working with users and webmasters for a better web

• In 2016 we received over 180,000 user-submitted spam reports from around the world. After carefully checking their validity, we considered 52% of those reported sites to be spam. Thanks to all who submitted reports and contributed towards a cleaner and safer web ecosystem!
• We conducted more than 170 online office hours and live events around the world to audiences totaling over 150,000 website owners, webmasters and digital marketers.
• We continued to provide support to website owners around the world through our Webmaster Help Forums in 15 languages. Through these forums we saw over 67,000 questions, with a majority of them being identified as having a Best Response by our community of Top contributors, Rising Stars and Googlers. 
• We had 119 volunteer Webmaster Top Contributors and Rising Stars, whom we invited to join us at our local Top Contributor Meetups in 11 different locations across 4 continents (Asia, Europe, North America, South America). 

We think everybody deserves high quality, spam-free search results. We hope that this report provides a glimpse of what we do to make that happen.

Google Optimize Available Globally: Free and Premium Optimize 360 A/B Testing Tools

We know at March 15, 2016 Google Introduced the Google Analytics 360 Suite and at September 28, 2016 they rolled out Google Optimize — a free version of enterprise-class web and mobile-web testing and personalization tool. Google Optimize is aimed at help Small Businesses and Professionals track website data and it is the free version of Google Optimize 360.

At that time we were told that:

Google Optimize will be globally available at that time. Additionally, we’re including enhancements to many of our existing free products. Read on for details.

March 30, 2017 Google has announced that its Optimize and Optimize 360 A/B website testing tools are now available to everyone after a prolonged period in beta.

Both Free and Premium versions of the tools allow businesses to try out different versions of their company websites to see how each version performs based on the desired outcomes. They allow for a full A/B test with a WYSIWYG visual editor with drag-and-drop components. Tests can be targeted to specific types of users, and URL rules can be set to determine the pages that should be tested.

As we know Optimize is free, but Optimize 360 is not. Optimize 360 doesn't have a price listed online, but Convert has listed it at more than $150,000 a year. The differences are mainly in how many tests can be run at once. The free version only allows for three concurrent tests, and target metrics are limited to three as well. Optimize 360 has unlimited tests and target metrics available.

Google Optimize Features

Easy to Implement: A Google recent survey showed 45% of small and medium businesses don’t optimize their websites through A/B testing. The two most common reasons given were a "lack of employee resources" and "lack of knowledge to get started."

If you're part of that 45%, Optimize is a great choice for you. Optimize has many of the same features as Optimize 360. It's just right for small and medium-sized businesses who need powerful testing, but don't have the budget or team resources for an enterprise-level solution.

Optimize is easy for anyone to set up. Early users of Optimize have been happy with how easy it is to use. In fact, it's built right on top of Analytics, so if you're already an Analytics user you'll add just a single line of code to get Optimize up and running. With just a few clicks more, you can start using your Analytics data to design experiments and improve the online experience for your users.

Easy to Use: Worried about having to hire someone to run A/B tests on your site, or frustrated about not knowing how to do it yourself? Don't be. The Optimize visual editor allows for WYSIWYG (what-you-see-is-what-you-get) editing so you can change just about anything on your site with a drag and a drop. And more advanced users will enjoy the ability to edit raw HTML or add JavaScript or CSS rules directly in the editor.

Easy to use google optimize

Powerful targeting capabilities within Optimize allow you to serve the right experiences to just the right set of users. And you have flexible URL targeting capabilities to create simple or complex rules for the pages where you want your experiment to run. To find out if a targeting rule you've set will apply to a specific URL on your site, use the new Optimize URL tester. Just enter a URL and the tester will immediately tell you if that page is a match for your targeting rule.

Easy to Understand Data: Google Optimize calculates results based on your existing Google Analytics metrics and objectives using advanced Bayesian methods, so the reporting shows you exactly what you need to know to make better and faster decisions.

Easy to understand google optimize data

Google also upgraded the improvement overview (see image above) to help you quickly see how an experiment affects the metrics you care about most, whether that means purchases, pageviews, session lengths, or whatever else you’re tracking in Analytics.

Easy to Try: Leading businesses are building a culture of growth that embraces the use of data and testing to improve the customer experience every day. Google offering Optimize to everyone to help deliver better user experiences across the board.

Try Google Optimize

As of today, Google Optimize is available in over 180 countries. And we're not done yet: Keep an eye out for more improvements and announcements in the future.

See the Complete Customer Journey: Marketers require full visibility and context to see what’s really happening across all customer touchpoints, devices, and channels.

Useful Insights, not just more Data: Marketers need enormous computing power, data science and smart algorithms, all working together to quickly make sense of data for them. In other words, built-in intelligence to do the heavy lifting for marketers and make insights easy to see.

Enable better sharing within your organization: Marketers seek to put insights into everyone’s hands and get the whole company on the same page — resulting in stronger cross-functional goals and smarter decision-making.

Deliver engaging experiences to the right people: Internet Marketers want to make their brand immediately useful to consumers. With integrations across multiple Google technologies, the suite products not only work well together, but also with other products, including AdWords, DoubleClick, and 3rd-party platforms — enabling marketers to take immediate action and drive business impact.

What are you waiting for? Try Google Optimize Right Now!

Google updated Safe Browsing's Site Status Tool

As per the Google's March 29, 2017 Post at Google Security Blog, they have updated Safe Browsing’s Site Status Tool. The new update includes, cleaner UI, easier-to-interpret language, and more precise results.

Google Manage warnings about unsafe sites

Google safe browsing helps showing warning message to users specially when they trying to navigate to dangerous sites. It gives more precise and clear transparency report. The Google's transparency report includes details about threats that safe browsing identifies.

Google warnings to mobile users attempt to navigate to dangerous sites or download dangerous files.

Site Status Tool helps users to protect themselves from web-based threats like malware, unwanted software, and social engineering. Users can check the current safety status of a web page, before they visit the website.

Google Safe Browsing gives users tools to help protect themselves from web-based threats like malware, unwanted software, and social engineering. We are best known for our warnings, which users see when they attempt to navigate to dangerous sites or download dangerous files. We also provide other tools, like the Site Status Tool, where people can check the current safety status of a web page (without having to visit it). 

We host this tool within Google’s Safe Browsing Transparency Report. As with other sections in Google’s Transparency Report, we make this data available to give the public more visibility into the security and health of the online ecosystem. Users of the Site Status Tool input a webpage (as a URL, website, or domain) into the tool, and the most recent results of the Safe Browsing analysis for that webpage are returned...plus references to troubleshooting help and educational materials. 

We’ve just launched a new version of the Site Status Tool that provides simpler, clearer results and is better designed for the primary users of the page: people who are visiting the tool from a Safe Browsing warning they’ve received, or doing casual research on Google’s malware and phishing detection. The tool now features a cleaner UI, easier-to-interpret language, and more precise results. We’ve also moved some of the more technical data on associated ASes (autonomous systems) over to the malware dashboard section of the report.

While the interface has been streamlined, additional diagnostic information is not gone: researchers who wish to find more details can drill-down elsewhere in Safe Browsing’s Transparency Report, while site-owners can find additional diagnostic information in Search Console. One of the goals of the Transparency Report is to shed light on complex policy and security issues, so, we hope the design adjustments will indeed provide our users with additional clarity.

How To Properly Use Schema Markup For Local Business?

How To Properly Implement Schema Markup For Local Business Website To Improve Search Visibility?

Today I Came Across Quora and Found a Question About How To Use Schema Markup For Plumber and HVAC Business Website To Improve SEO?

I answered the question and I thought It would be great, If I publish my answer here at my Blog.

Google's search result pages support Semantic Markup that allows local business owners to provide information about their business by using schema.org vocabulary. By providing with a mix of required, recommended and optional properties with values for the https://schema.org/LocalBusiness class, a business can now provide Google with information about things like the business's name, address, telephone number, physical location and hours of operation in a machine readable way.

This also called structured data markup, and can be eligible to appear in two categories of Google Search features:

Rich Results Snippet: Structured data for things like recipes, articles, and videos can appear in Rich Cards, as either a single element or a list of items. Other kinds of structured data can enhance the appearance of your site in Search, such as with Breadcrumbs, or a Sitelinks Search Box.

Google Knowledge Graph Cards: If you're the authority for certain content, Google can treat the structured data on your site as factual and import it into the Knowledge Graph, where it can power prominent answers in Search and across Google properties. Knowledge Graph cards appear for authoritative data about organizations, and events. Movie reviews, and movie/music play actions, while based on ranking, can also appear in Knowledge Graph cards once they are reconciled to Knowledge Graph entities.

Google has supported the provision of local business information with schema.org since April 08, 2014, but this is the first time they've published prescribed property specifications for Local Business.

You can provide structured data markup in your HTML and AMP pages. Google Support Following Structured Data Markup Formats:

Microdata: Microdata is a WHATWG HTML specification used to nest metadata within existing content on web pages. Search engines, web crawlers, and browsers can extract and process Microdata from a web page and use it to provide a richer browsing experience for users.

JSON-LD (Google Recommended Format): JavaScript notation separate from the body of the HTML itself. Markup is placed inside a script tag in the head of the HTML page. The markup does not have to be interleaved with the user-visible text, which makes nested data items easier to express, such as the Country of a PostalAddress of a MusicVenue of an Event. Also, Google can read JSON-LD data when it is dynamically injected into the page's contents, such as by JavaScript code or embedded widgets in your content management system.

RDFa: RDFa (or Resource Description Framework in Attributes) is a W3C Recommendation that adds a set of attribute-level extensions to HTML, XHTML and various XML-based document types for embedding rich metadata within Web documents. The RDF data-model mapping enables its use for embedding RDF subject-predicate-object expressions within XHTML documents. It also enables the extraction of RDF model triples by compliant user agents.

How To Implement Schema Markup For Local Business Website To Improve Search Visibility?

Make sure your Plumbing and HVAC Business Contact and Geographic Information is implemented correctly on your website should be the first step when it comes to implementing schema markup onto your website.

The Local Business section of https://schema.org/LocalBusiness has a variety of categories that businesses can implement as part of the footer or contact page of their website, including address, phone, fax, operating hours, and even accepted payment types.

Microdata Example For Plumbing Service

The microdata schema markup is displayed via div tags and isn’t displayed on the live version of the website. The div tags designate the information that applies to the chosen schema markup:

<div itemscope="" itemtype="”https://schema.org/Plumber”">
<span itemprop="”name”">ABC Plumber</span>
<br />
<div itemprop="”address”" itemscope="" itemtype="”http://schema.org/PostalAddress”">
<span itemprop="”streetAddress”">123 Main Street</span>
<span itemprop="”addressLocality”">Phoenix</span>,
<span itemprop="”addressRegion”">AZ</span>
<span itemprop="”postalCode”">85001</span>
</div>
Phone: <span itemprop="”telephone”">555-555-5555</span>
<a href="http://googlemapsurl.com" itemprop="”maps”">URL of Map</a>
</div>

In this example for an Plumber’s Business, the only information that is displayed on the public-facing side of the website is the information between the span and div tags. Visitors won’t be able to tell that a business is using schema unless they view your website source code.

The ‘itemprop’ in the span tag identifies the schema markup property for that piece of information. All available properties are shown on Home - schema.org in their applicable category.

JSON-LD Structured Data Example For HVAC Contractor

Below is an example of a common JSON-LD syntax which can be used to define a single HVAC Company Business Information:

<script type="application/ld+json">
     {
     "@context": "http://schema.org",
     "@type": "LocalBusiness",
     "address": {
  "@type": "PostalAddress",
  "addressLocality": "Phoenix",
  "addressRegion": "AZ",
  "postalCode":"85001",
  "streetAddress": "123 Main Street"
  },
   "description": "This is your HVAC Contractor Business Description.",
   "name": "ABC HVAC Contractor",
   "telephone": "555–555–5555",
   "geo": {
 "@type": "GeoCoordinates",
 "latitude": "40.75",
"longitude": "73.98"
     },
 "sameAs" : [ "http://www.facebook.com/your-hvac-company-page.",
"http://www.twitter.com/your-hvac--company-profile",
"http://plus.google.com/your-hvac--company-profile"]
   }
</script>

In this example for I created an HVAC Company schema markup by JSON-LD Format.

Once you have your markup/code placed on your website, go ahead and test it with Google Structured Data Testing Tool.

If you have little or no web development experience, it’s easy to run into error when trying to customize the code examples with your own business information. In this case, i advocate you to hire an Professional Consultant.

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