Search engine optimization best practices and SEO strategy. Grassroots SEO from the ground up, including local SEO and mobile SEO. #SEO

content marketing

7 Ways To Use Content Marketing

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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 

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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

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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.

seo wireframe

Build A Better Blog With Quality Content

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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.

mobile optimization

Create Mobile Friendly Content

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Is Your Content Mobile Friendly?

Does your content mirror mobile user behavior? Do you develop generic all encompassing content for your website or do you create mobile friendly content as well? There are industry benchmarks indicating mobile users searching with a high volume of branded terms that include location or activity based keyword modifiers. This search query behavior does vary from common desktop search that leaves out many of the branded terms. Sources below. This is yet another compelling reason to consider creating mobile friendly content specifically for your mobile audience.

mobile optimizationThe theme for mobile optimization success is to keep it simple. Keep the code simple, keep the design simple, and keep the content simple. To counter the difference in mobile search, it is imperative that your mobile SEO strategy accounts for these differences with tactics and techniques that include location and or activity optimization. Most importantly, make your mobile friendly content easy to find.

Think Fast and Short For Winning Mobile Content

Make sure that your mobile content is not blocked by robots.txt.    If you are all good there, then audit your mobile search critical content to verify that it supports location or activity optimization. Let’s use the example, “Bike Shop, Portland”. If you are targeting a mobile audience for this phrase, begin with a focus on speed and shortness. When possible, deploy short form  factors to the URL of the landing page, the page title, and the meta data. Think about the mobile platform that will display the results, does your page provide concise relevant content to the query and will it render in a readable format on a mobile sized screen?

Microformat Your Mobile Content

A great way to promote your location, category or time sensitive information, is to apply microformatting standards to your content. Terms may vary but, microformat and semantic markup use strict standards to enable your online content to be parsed and repurposed by search engines, browsers and apps. Depending upon the search crawler in use, these bots can recognize the micro-formatted code and provide your encoded mobile content in ways making it easy for your mobile audience to engage and utilize on their mobile device. The application of micro-formatted mobile content helps promote your site as mobile friendly and mobile focused. Additional microformat information can be found in the sources listed below.

Silo Mobile Content

Now that you have made sure that your mobile code is clear, take the next step and make fast and easy to understand. Similar to the way humans process and read mobile web pages, search engine crawlers tend to read the same pages rapidly and value the way the information is presented at least as much as the mobile content on the page. Site architecture is mission critical for mobile success, simple navigational hierarchy is the optimum way to proceed. Don’t forget that your mobile users usually have a different agenda when they are on your mobile site, they don’t need to be bogged down with to many links to click to get to the information they are after. Remember that your mobile visitors want to complete tasks quickly and easily, so your navigational structure for mobile must make this possible. This is commonly referred to as task oriented responsive design. So keep it simple, page titles, headers, micro-content and images should be short, concise and aligned to both your business objectives and visitor goals. This is an excellent way to promote mobile friendly content and a positive mobile experience. #mobilefriendly #mobileSEO

Sources:

  • http://www.accuracast.com/search- daily-news/mobile-7471/uk-local-mobile-search-rankings/
  • http://www.google.com/intl/ en/press/zeitgeist2007/index.html
  • Microformat information: http://microformats.org
  • Mobile compliance guideline information: http://www.w3.org/TR/mobileOK-basic10-tests/

Mobile Optimization – Location Factors

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Mobile optimization: Location Variables That Influence Mobile SEO

Mobile optimization location variables are one set of factors that make the mobile experience different. The vast majority of searches performed on mobile devices are task completion driven or location specific; and Bing, Yahoo and Google continue to refine their mobile search results to generate a more positive mobile experience that accounts for this time sensitive search behavior. Understanding that these mobile queries have constraints from device screen size, OS platforms, predictive search, and the browser search bar limits, it’s not a bad idea at all to make results more readily accessible to your mobile audience.

Some of the top performing searches on mobile include the phrase “near me” such as; “restaurants near me,” “pizza near me,” “auto repair near me,” and “lawyer near me.” Google has even recently suggested including “near me” in active Adwords campaigns with a click to call extension because these types of mobile searches deliver excellent ROI. Learn more here

Important Mobile Optimization Variables

mobile-seo-tacticsMobile users are driven to task resolution as quickly as possible, and speedy results leave less time for a deeper dive into browser results. This means second page results suffer and are rarely viewed. The enhancements to mobile predictive search functionality as mentioned above, strive to deliver quick accurate results using *location* and *category* biased search parameters in the algorithm. These mobile location variables are only one way that mobile search differs from desktop search. Account for these variables in your mobile SEO.

Screen Size Drives Design Layouts

Mobile devices have smaller screen sizes than their desktop counter parts and this directly impacts the size of the browser search bar and the returned search engine results page. The major search engines compensate for these challenges by altering the results page layouts into new location-based and category-based designs. This criteria bolsters the need to correctly deploy micro-formatting to all location content and whenever possible to schema.org category content as well. Learn to use micro-formatted content to your advantage and represent your brand in the best light possible to your mobile customers and clients. Embrace and use structured data to push your site up the mobile ranks.

The Many vs The Few

Yet another unique mobile seo variable includes the mobile browsers themselves. Laptop browsers have standardized themselves over time and consolidated into a few major platforms like Internet Explorer, Safari, Chrome and Firefox. Mobile search browsers are numerous, and they remain a “Wild West” of offerings, with multiple features and options with little standardization. Add in the many apps that incorporate “in-app” search functions, and it becomes clear that new search parameters are needed to provide the best search engine results.

Ranking For Mobile SEO
What mobile SEO conversation doesn’t have a reference to rank? Add up mobile browsers, mobile user behavior, predictive search,  results page mobile designed layouts, page speed and location and category algorithm bias, and it becomes evident that mobile page rank is different from desktop / laptop search. These new mobile search dimensions “urgency,” “nearness,” and “category”  are key elements in mobile search relevance.

Awesome mobile optimization begins after “normal” search engine optimization ends. Mobile search engine optimization starts with the assumptions that your site has an established baseline of clean code, architecture that invites craw-ability, search guideline compliant and your content is high quality. Only then can you factor in the mobile variables that take advantage of the current algorithm biases that help your brand be competitive in the mobile space. Continue developing your mobile SEO strategy, with a standards compliant site featuring markup for location and category. All of your mobile users will love you for it!

#mobileoptimization #mobileSEO