How to do SEO and search engine optimization. Search optimization tactics and SEO tools, all of the proven basics of the best SEO strategy.

content marketing

7 Ways To Use Content Marketing

/in , /by

Seven methods that can help increase your customer base through content marketing

Creating and marketing your content can be one of the best and quickest ways to promote your business. As a matter of fact, if you can compose a to-do list containing just seven items, then you can easily compose an article that can help you maximize your customer base as well as profits.

Listed below are seven methods that can greatly increase your business from published articles through content marketing.

1 – Article content can in no time place you as a professional within your industry.

We all know how powerful the written word can be. Crafting informative articles will separate you from your competition. You will never have to convince your readership that you are an expert on the subject. Your articles will do that for you, due to the fact that well-published articles will always increase your “credibility”.

2 – Articles can advertise your business 24/7.

The moment your article is published on the internet is like having a salesperson do the selling for you. You now have your business advertised 24 hours, 7 days a week, 365 days a year to an international audience.

3 – A single article can be utilized in a variety of ways.

This is known as leverage. A single article could be used for a free report, as an incentive, featured in a newsletter or blog, transformed into a book, and countless other ways.

4 – Articles can be used to spread the news in regards to your business and products.

5 – Promoting articles is painless, effortless and economical.

This is especially true in comparison to other means of marketing online. Remember, there is no cost to you when it comes to writing an article. There is also no cost to have it listed on article directories. Consider what it really might cost if you had to pay someone just for the exposure.

6 – Well written articles can help in building your mailing list.

Whenever you have a few articles under your belt, you then have the potential to gain attention from the masses of prospects out there. It’s important to continue growing your business in order to keep traffic as well as new prospects coming to you.

7 – Article marketing makes it possible to stay connected with your customer base while selling more products.

Use Content Marketing To Stay “Top Of Mind” with Your Audience.

Remember, it normally takes eight contacts or more for turning a new prospect into a customer. Well written articles enable you to stay connected with new prospects while providing them with useful information.

social media

Secrets of Landing Page Optimization 

/in , , /by

Landing Page Optimization Secrets

Here are some strategies that will help you achieve success in landing page optimization:

landing page optimization1. Clearly state the value of your offer

A visitor who does not know what you are offering will not care to continue reading your content. A landing page whose value proposition is not clear will turn people off. Therefore, let your audience know the benefits of spending time on your website. Clearly inform them why they should read what is on your page. Your landing page should convince visitors that they are in the right place. As you do this, avoid commanding statements and focus on giving value to your visitors.

2. Avoid commanding, pushy and arrogant headlines

Your headlines will determine if visitors will be convinced to continue reading or press the ‘back’ button on their browser. A good headline should convince visitors that it is worthwhile to stay on your webpage. Pushy, arrogant and commanding headlines will turn visitors off. Too much hype on your headlines is also not necessary. Let the value of your offer be clearly and honestly stated in your headlines. Always use friendly and welcoming words.

3. Be specific about your offer

Capture the attention of every visitor by being specific about your offer. Use bullets or numbers to list the benefits that target audience should expect from your website. This will guide your reader’s eye and demonstrate your offer in a tangible manner. Win the trust of your visitors by stating your offer in a specific and self explanatory manner. This will encourage them to continue reading and interact with your website more. Exaggerated claims and false promises will annoy your online visitors.

Implement the above three strategies and see your online marketing efforts improve drastically. Your offer will be more compelling to the target audience, thus increase your conversion rate. Figure out what you want your visitors to do and then make it easy for them to so.

negative seo thumbs down

Negative SEO Techniques That Harm

/in , /by

Negative SEO Techniques That Can Hurt Your Website

Greedy SEO agencies and unscrupulous web masters often deploy SEO tactics that attempt to trick the search engines in the vain attempt to achieve ranking positions. Along with doorway pages, thin and/or duplicate content pages, poor search engine optimization may also use the following negative SEO techniques to sabotage a website:

1. Poor quality backlinks

The first negative SEO technique that people may use is to point a large number of poor quality backlinks to your site. They pay for huge number of spam links and point them to your website. This is intended to negatively affect your site’s link profile so that you get penalized by search engines. Search engines usually penalize sites that receive a sudden rise in backlinks. Since you cannot stop people from sending poor backlinks, you should monitor your site’s backlink profile regularly to identify any spam links. If you identify unnatural links, take down those links or contact your webmaster to do so. If this fails, use Google’s Disavow Links Tool to address the problem.

2. Duplicate content

Duplicate content can attract severe penalties from search engines. Crooked competitors may duplicate your content even before it is indexed. Their intention is to convince search engines that you are stealing content from another original site. Conduct a quick Google search of any sentence from your site in quotes to know if your content is being stolen. Prevent your site from this evil activity by maintaining an up-to-date sitemap. Additionally, include the rel=canonical tag on your webpages to establish you as the original author of that content.

3. Hacking

If your site has loopholes, then it might be at a risk of being hacked. The intention of hackers is to either take your site down or make it impossible for Google to crawl it. Hackers will use the loopholes in your site to add malicious codes or links. Denial-of-service attacks are also propagated by hackers. Hacking can severely affect your site’s ranking. Therefore, scan your website regularly for any changes in the site code.

4. Fake reviews

Customer reviews are important in determining search engine ranking. Your competitors may use fake reviews to bring down your site. Their ultimate goal is to have your site punished by search engines. You can prevent this damage by reporting fake reviews to Google. Additionally, plug the loopholes in your site before they are noticed by other people.

5. Evil crawlers

The speed of a website is important to customers and search engines. A fast site gives its users a good experience. People might sabotage your site by using crawlers to crawl your site continually. As a result, it will become slow to load and use. This in turn will worsen your SEO campaign and also affect your site’s conversion rate.

More Negative SEO Tactics

In some industry verticals, rank chasing is common and does more harm than good to the brand and the business. Frequently city or location pages with duplicate and thin content are created to influence local SEO and local rank. This tactic eventually gets caught up in spam filters and can lead to a significant decline in organic search traffic and a potential for the the domain being banned by the search engines. This is one negative SEO tactic to avoid at all costs.

google analytics

6 Free Tools For Grassroots SEO

/in , /by

SEO Today Includes Mobile Optimization

In the modern era, simply creating a visually stunning website is not enough. With modifications to the Google search algorithm like Panda, Penguin, and Hummingbird, attention to detail has become crucial. For business owners that want to forego hiring an SEO professional for over $100 per hour, there are few options outside of learning it themselves. Fortunately, recent changes have put pressure on the market to come up with easy-to-understand software solutions, which can make doing and learning SEO possible at the same time. Below are six free SEO tools you should be using to do your on-site optimization will be enumerated and described for your convenience.

Free SEO Tools For Mobile SEO

google-mobile-testAs mobile SEO continues to grow, the importance of knowing how your website appears to your mobile audience is a priority for success. Adopting a mobile first mentality is key to long term business growth and one recently upgraded mobile SEO tool is from Google. The Google Mobile testing tool  offers an excellent overview of three key areas that impact mobile performance, mobile friendliness, mobile speed and desktop speed. This free SEO tool also makes recommendations for improvements.

Structured data testing tool
In tandem with the mobile testing tool above, Google’s structured data testing tool highlights structured data on your website that can help promote both your mobile and desktop grassroots SEO efforts. Check out this free SEO structured data testing tool here: https://search.google.com/structured-data/testing-tool.

Screaming Frog SEO Tool
Screaming Frog is a tool that is basically free to grassroots marketers as well as professsionals in the SEO game. The software is only “basically” free because it allows for 500 scans before you have to begin subscribing. For a person only handling optimization on a single business website, this is equivalent to free software. The program itself scans your website and allows you to see things you are missing or elements you have duplicates of. Areas of analysis include such elements as:

  • Titles
  • H1/H2 Headings
  • Meta Descriptions
  • Meta Keywords
  • Images/Alt Text
  • Internal/External Links

Google Webmaster Tools

Webmaster tools are another free SEO tool offering from some of the major search engines. There is no separation between pro and amateur, though, so using them really is free. Because their algorithm changes have had the most drastic effect on SEO in recent years, most people tend to focus on Google specifically. However, Bing has a webmaster tool that is far more exhaustive and informative and even includes file size, load time, and compression analysis that Google lacks. This is not to say that one is better than the other, just that both should be used for their unique strengths.

Google Analytics

free-seo-toolsGoogle provides analytical tools meant to provide tracking data for visitors to your website. While proprietary tracking systems are available, Google is the industry leader and provides their service for free. The data provided allows you to take an in depth look at just what people are doing when they reach your website. Using Google Analytics can allow you to pinpoint weaknesses and exploit strengths with little more than the addition of a single line of tracking code to your website’s HTML. Analytics allow you to track:

  • Demographics
  • Behavior
  • Browsing Platform
  • Conversions
  • Mobile

On Page Content Analysis
The days of targeting misspelled keywords to gain an edge are gone. Obvious spelling and grammar errors are ranking metrics, and remarks by Google’s Matt Cutts as well as Bing’s Duane Forrester confirm it. You should be making an effort to spell and grammar check every piece of web copy you place on your site with your word processor’s built in tool. There is also a plethora of websites out there that provide textual analysis for word repetition, and SEOQuake is an add on available for Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Opera that shows the highest frequency words for pages you already have published. Checking for repetition can help you weed out accidental keywords and highlight overuse of keywords you really are targeting.

Use Free SEO Tools To Help You Optimize Efficiently

Getting SEO right on your website is no easy feat, even once you have been doing it awhile. However, using a few free SEO tools that are at everyone’s disposal can yield much more insight into what you need to do than you might expect. There are tools out there that charge large sums per month for use, but until you can internalize and use the tools listed here there is not much reason to switch. Most of the advanced tools tend to employ more complicated ways of looking at the same data and are often designed for SEO professionals. Get your grassroots SEO marketing started with the free SEO tools listed above.

local seo

Advertising On Google Maps

/in , /by

Plant Your Local Business on Google Maps Today!

If you’ve ever driven through a busy business district, you have probably noticed a lot of creative signs that are meant to catch attention. In a very similar way, local businesses can catch a customer’s eyes by planting their virtual signposts on digital maps. In fact, logos and pins on these online maps can even connect map users to current promotions and other kinds of relevant ads found on Google Maps and local search.

One of the largest and most popular providers of these types of map advertisements is Google. Since local searches have become an important way for companies to market, it’s worth knowing about this innovative source of local search advertising.

Why Google Map Ads Drive Local Businesses Success

local seoAccording to the company, ads on maps could appear on mobile and laptop versions of Google Maps. At the same time, the company has made it clear that they unveiled this kind of advertising with mobile users in mind. When their spokesman introduced this new part of the search network, he mentioned that local and location-based searches had grown more than any other kind of searches. As a result, local, location-based Google searches account for about 30 percent of total searches.

The company included Google Maps as another platform in their search network in order to take advantage of the popularity of their mapping system. In addition, Google released the news recently that the number of mobile searches had finally overtaken the number of searches performed on desktop and laptop computers. Thus, these ads provide a good way to target nearby customers who are searching for local businesses.

How Advertising on Google Maps Can Help Local Businesses

When a user searches for a certain kind of business in a specific location, companies that participate in the program can have both a company logo and pin that highlight the location on the map. When these pins and logos get clicked, the system will bring up more information about a business.

This additional information can even include search ads with current specials and other related advertising. These features help focus attention on these businesses and increase the chances that a customer will call or walk in the door. Of course, the additional information also includes basic details like a phone number, operating hours, and driving directions. In this way, AdWords integrates with Google My Business listings.

How Grassroots SEO Can Use Google Map Ads

To qualify for Google Maps advertising, follow these steps:

  • Enable the location-extensions feature within Google AdWords.
  • Ensure that the business listing within Google My Business has been filled out accurately.
  • Target locations for the advertisements.
  • Set bids for locations, and notice that these bids can even increase when searchers move closer to your location.
  • Create keywords that are likely to attract customers to your business.

Google offers pay-per-click ads on maps. Pricing includes charges for various kinds of actions that searchers might take. For example, a click charge could apply to a user who clicks to get directions to your store. As with other kinds of AdWords ads, it’s fairly simple to monitor the campaign’s performance within the system.

Will Ads on Google Maps Benefit Your Local Business?

Many businesses rely upon local search marketing in their grassroots SEO efforts to bring in new customers. If a potential customer searches for the products and services that you offer with Google Maps, these advertisements should get their attention. If you offer relevant deals or other attractive marketing within your advertisement, you’re likely to draw customers in. Google has made it easy for both small and large local businesses to get started with this innovative kind of local marketing. While different kinds of companies might have different success rates with these ads, they seem worth testing as a way to take advantage of local and location-based searches.

seo wireframe

Build A Better Blog With Quality Content

/in , /by

Befriend The Panda – Create Quality Content

Many legal blogs have seen a decline in impressions where these types  sites that have more dynamic blog posts than static practice area pages. Often the quality of posts are of lower quality than the more focused legal static pages. Blog posts suffer from low quality content,  citing  pop or legal news with recent celebrity divorces, or local traffic and police information like car accidents or recent arrests frequently resulting in duplication of content across many online properties.

Panda quality guidelines frown on these types of low quality posts. The lower quality content also trips the quality algorithm filters with poor engagement signals, high bounce rates and little time on site. For example a high profile New York law firm has this type of site profile:

  • 1987 internal URLS
  • 81.7% have a 100% bounce rate
  • 65% of the bounce comes from blog pages
  • 25% of the blog posts have a 0% CTR

Not that there’s anything wrong with an 81% bounce rate or anything if you don’t mind being excluded from search results. Recently, Google is simply de-listing hundreds of these posts from search results.  Early adopters of blogs that generate multiple blogs posts per week of suspect quality are at risk of getting caught in these ever strengthening quality filters. These blogs are definitely sending the wrong signals to the search engines.

Be Friends With Bots!

Add into this mix the bad SEO tactic of robots.txt blocking the tags. It is not uncommon to block tags via robots.txt, but doing so creates a very negative search engine problem.  This tactic is deployed to keep bots from crawling tags to lighten server loads, but creates a negative SEO environment because having links on pages that people can see, but forbidding the search bots access to the same data sends a signal to the SERPs that something dark and mysterious is happening behind closed doors.  Search engines reward transparency and dislike “hidden” content. Blog tags are used throughout sites in various ways that can include:

  • Cloud tags
  • Category tags
  • Tag bar on side navigation
  • Tags within each post
  • Tags archives page
  • Tags on month/year archives
  • Tags within schema code

When the blocking is excessive, it appears to a search bot that  a “dark web” is being created behind the wall of robots.txt blocking. Again, not a good way to signal quality to the search engines.

blockedurl

How To Fix A Bad Blog With Grassroots SEO

1. Don’t block the bots. Transparency for most bots is a good thing. Sure some folders may need security, but it’s best to let your blog and site be crawled. You can control what is and what is not seen easily with a robots.txt file.  An example for WordPress might be something like this:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /wp-includes/
Disallow: /wp-content/plugins/
Disallow: /wp-content/cache/
Disallow: /wp-content/themes/
Disallow: /trackback/
Disallow: */trackback/
Disallow: /*?*
Disallow: /*?
Disallow: /*~*
Disallow: /*~
Disallow: /wp-*
Disallow: /comments/feed/

User-agent: Mediapartners-Google*
Allow: /

User-agent: Googlebot-Image
Allow: /wp-content/uploads/

User-agent: Adsbot-Google
Allow: /

User-agent: Googlebot-Mobile
Allow: /

Sitemap: http://domainname.com/post-sitemap.xml

Another robots.txt example might be:

User-agent: *
#Global Rules – START
Disallow: /content
Disallow: /data
Disallow: /modules
Disallow: /Disclaimer.shtml
Disallow: /E-mail.shtml
Disallow: /Error.shtml
Disallow: /Error-Espanol.shtml
Disallow: /Gracias.shtml
Disallow: /Thank-You.shtml
Disallow: /mt-bin/
Allow: /content/images
Allow: /content/css
#Global Rules – END

#Site Specific Rules – START
Sitemap: http://www.domainname.com/sitemap.xml.gz
#Site Specific Rules – END

2. Promote quality content. Start by classifying the blog posts. One quick way to process this assessment is to start by running an analysis of your content by highest bounce rate and shortest time on page. These are often the most troubled content pages and posts.  Review them, are they good and no action needed at this time, or are they poor and need to be removed? If they are questionable, can they be corrected?

Sometimes its as simple as combining several short similar topics into one or two longer higher quality pieces of content. Another option to improve the content quality might be to rewrite the first and last paragraph and add semantic phrases into the header tags (H1, H2). This refined and refocused content can provide a boost to overall site quality.

3.  Promote socially. As the content improvements are made, send a fresh set of eyes there with links from social posts when appropriate. This is a nice way to send new signals about content quality improvements.

By paying some attention to on page analytics, it’s not all that hard to monitor your SEO efforts. A small focus on content quality will bring big benefits for both your audience and your website metrics. Make sure that you include content KPIs in your grassroots SEO strategy, it will reward your brand over the long term.