Are you currently using a free Gmail account to send your emails? Yes, then read on, No, then read on anyhow, you can tell all your friends

Starting in June, you will actually be incapable of using a free Gmail account to send. Your emails will be rejected (and no one likes rejection!), Google is going to change its DMARC policy from p=”none” to p=”reject”. This means that any emails using “@gmail.com” in the FROM address will need to come from Gmail itself (and not your own website.)

The effect of what will happen or who and how many businesses will really be effected by the change is yet to be determined, if you do however start having problems and your business email is linked with your FREE gmail email account then this will probably be your first port of call for the reason

The purpose of the move is their atempt at reducing the amount of Phishing emails that are being sent

More Info: https://dmarc.org/wiki/FAQ#What_is_DMARC.2C_and_how_does_it_combat_phishing.3F

A few SEO tips for 2016

1. Importance of Social Media in SEO

   Many of you will already be using social media apps such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn in. In these upcoming times you will now gain more importance on the SERPs (The State Earnings Related Pension Scheme ). Already, 76% marketers use social media to support and boost SEO.

   You may of noticed when searching recently that companies social media posts are now being indexed within Googles search results and other popular search engines such as Bing and Yahoo. With this change now in place from an SEO prospective it’s blurring the lines between ‘web’ and ‘social media’

   In short this basically means keep onto of your social media accounts for better ratings

2. Mobile optimisation will become a crucial part of Google and other Search tools

   Is you website mobile-friendly? Is it responsive? With tablets and mobile phones being used so heavily now it means that your audience is no longer in one place. You need to make sure your website can be presented correctly for ALL platforms.

   Google will be scoring sites better if they meet these responsive guidelines.

3. Thinking about voice searches when optimising SEO

There is a new player in town!

Voice searching is becoming more and more popular with companies such as Microsoft, Google and Apple all launching their own versions. It is becoming a huge part of mobile usage.

Baring this in mind you need to make sure that your content is easily searchable through voice searches by using long-tail keywords, which are more likely to be spoken.

Google increases Title & Meta Description Length!

You may or may not have noticed that Google limits the character count of results displayed in the SERP to a fixed length.

Previously, titles longer than 55 to 60 characters will be truncated while for the snippets (the description underneath the title) the character limit is around 160 characters.

Recently Google’s been experimenting with longer titles and snippets, here is a list of some of the changes Google has been making

• The new character limit of titles and snippets
• The impact of the increased character limit
• How you can change your existing title to take advantage of the new change
• The effect of the change in mobile search

This change now allows more feedom in crafting your titles and snippets, and its worth keeping an eye on as these changes are still new and Google could still change their search results again. Since this is the age of A/B testing, we can’t be sure if these changes are temporary or permanent until Google announces it.

But it is a good sign for us to be aware and take note of what’s currently happening in the industry.