SEO World

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Businesses often put a great deal of thought into marketing strategies, business plans and hiring tactics, but still fail grow because customers aren’t aware of their services.  Word of mouth is rarely sufficient to drive business in today’s market.  But what if a company could guarantee a top result from the search engines whenever someone typed in a certain keyword?  One of the easiest methods of capturing business is through search engine optimization (posicionamiento en buscadores), or SEO.  SEO requires the use of certain formatting and keywords to gain visibility on websites such as Bing, Yahoo and Google.

style="text-decoration: underline;">Why Is SEO So Important?

By including keywords throughout a website, companies can drive “organic” results that lead to more visibility and business. Google itself provides the results for many other sites, like AOL; nearly 70% of web searches are performed on Google or given results through Google.  Although these keywords can be tough to work into your text when trying to produce a quality freelancing article, it’s important to note that a well-written piece with properly used keywords can drive business for your clients, leaving them with more money to spend on quality freelancers like you!  Even if you’ve never produced copy for a SEO piece before, it’s not hard to learn the secret language.

style="text-decoration: underline;">The Basics

Most assignments will include a set of keywords that you should use a certain number of times.  Review the keywords.  Figure out how they work into the overall article once you’ve figured out the angle and tone of the piece.  Plan to use at least one in the article title.  Work backwards from there.  Brainstorm sentences that naturally incorporate these terms.  Brainstorm paragraphs that fit with the sentences.

Don’t worry if the article requires special SEO formatting rather than just straightforward text.  Even if you’ve never coded before, these are easy to learn and repeat for future pieces.  Formatting will most often be utilized in the title and heading, as well as image file names.  Simply write the content, and use the formatting tags around each part.  For example, your title should be placed between these two tags: <TITLE>Your Title Here</TITLE>.  Headers should be written with similar tags: <h1>Your Header Here<h1>.  Subheadings can be similarly identified by using <h2> and <h3> tags.

Don’t try to “stuff” every keyword into a title or header.  Include them as part of these items, but not as the sole text.  Believe it or not, search engines can identify abuse of their systems and this technique can have the opposite effect.

What if client has an unrealistic keyword expectation?  First, make them aware that you can meet the requirements, but that the article may not have as much elegance as one with fewer keyword demands.  As long as they understand this, make use of creative titles and headings to use up as many keywords as possible so that it doesn’t overcrowd your writing.  Type up the piece and go back to tweak individual sentences so that they incorporate keywords naturally.

While many writers fret that they can’t express their creativity when they are required to use keywords, realize that finding a way to include these terms is a creative endeavor in its own right.  Rather than feeling like a slave to keywords, use them to guide you throughout your writing, and be satisfied that you’ve gotten your client one step closer to growing their business.

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HigherVisibility

When you have a blog, you’ll attract all different types of readers, from those who just pass through one time to casual readers who come by occasionally to dedicated readers who subscribe to your blog and read every post. Clearly, your goal is to attract as many dedicated readers as possible, but that doesn’t happen instantly. Typically, you have to work on turning casual readers into dedicated readers over time.

Here are 5 ways you can transform a casual reader into a dedicate reader.

1. Focus on creating a great reader experience—The quality of your content isn’t the only thing that matters. It’s the overall experience that keeps readers engaged and coming back. Your blog needs to have a clean, compelling design. You don’t want to annoy readers with pop-up ads, complicated registration processes, spammy comment section, etc. Focus on creating the best possible experience for your visitors.
2. Make it easy for readers to subscribe and participate—The easier it is for someone to subscribe to your blog, the likelier it is that they’ll do so. Make sure your subscribe button is clear to see, and you can even include a call to action at the end of each post encouraging readers to subscribe. Also, make it easy for your readers to comment and share your posts on social networks. Don’t require them to register or complete a CAPTCHA to leave a comment. It’s annoying and kills their drive to participate.
3. Interact with your readers—If you want readers to stick around and keep coming back, one of the best things you can do is interact with them. Respond to them whenever they leave a comment. Connect with them on Twitter and Facebook. This builds relationships and increases their loyalty to your blog.
4. Give your readers a sense of ownership in your blog—Make your readers feel invested in your blog so they’ll keep coming back. Allow them to submit guest posts. Highlight the best comments. Ask them to submit ideas for topics they want to see you write about. Hold a contest. All of these things will create a community and make your readers feel like they own a piece of your blog.
5. Be real—It’s the easiest blogging advice you’ll ever receive. Just be yourself. Write like you talk and let your personality shine through in every aspect of your blog. That’s how you’ll build a personal connection with your readers that keeps them coming back for more.

What’s your best tip for turning casual readers into dedicated readers? Share it by leaving a comment.

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SEO Hosting Blog

This is not the first time I am doing a post on content re-packaging in different forms and types. Thus, I have already shared why giving your great articles a new life is so effective for content marketing:

✔ It brings traffic to your old content (and reanimates your old linkbait);

✔ It lets you share your guest post at your own site creatively;

✔ It brings links to both old content and its re-packaged version (which means at least twice as many links);

✔ It spurs your creativity and lets you test different types of content link bait (without the need to create new content and conduct any additional research).

This post looks at one type of content re-packaging: turning your old content into an image (and thus allowing it for download and easier spreading).

1. Create a Comic

Comics always go great and most of your content can become the source of inspiration for a great link-baity comic. Here’s the recipe that is sure to help:

• Get inspired: Read your own archives and browse through existing awesome comic collections: 1, 2, 3
• Find the best free tool: There are quite a few but my personal favorite is Strip Generator
• Create a few drafts and the idea will arrive!

Example please!

Here’s mine. I am not that great at humor (especially humor in a foreign English) but I got inspired by my own post on how blocking on Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus works:

2. Create a Flowchart

A flowchart makes a great infographic especially when it is based on a detailed instruction. It makes things so much easier to follow and understand, and moreover, it will better explain the whole process. Therefore, a flowchart is a great idea for a how-to article, manual and tutorial (even if it’s a how-to on your own product or service!)

• Get inspired: Here’s a great collection of flowchart-based infographics.
• Find the best free tool: You can use this tool as a decent flowchart generator. This one is paid, but it’s free to try. Alternatively, you can just use a pen and paper (or a whiteboard) which (for me) somehow frees the creativity.

Example please!

It’s been always hard to prompt our MyBlogGuest members to follow the rules on creating and formatting a guest post. So I created a checklist to help them, and then later visualized the guest article quality check process using the flow chart on my whiteboard. If you write a lot of guest posts, that’s something you should do as well!

3. Create a Comparison Chart

You probably know I love comparison charts. I frequently make them and the feedback is always that they make the content much easier to digest and remember. So if you want to create a downloadable freebie to please your readers, here’s a great idea: throw your product review in a table, turn it into a .jpeg image and share it. If your content is useful, if doesn’t have to be well-designed!

• Get inspired: Here’s one comparing popular models of cameras. Here’s another good example that compares apples to oranges (in both cases, scroll down a bit to the actual table).
• Find the best free tool: Any HTML editor you are using that can insert and customize tables.

Example please!

Do you want to train your team to remember the difference between article marketing and guest blogging, let them save this table, print it and use for reference.

4. Create a Mind Map

Like a flowchart, a mind map is a great way to visualize the information structure, but while a flowchart is better for explaining the process, a mind map is perfect for structuring any content.

• Get inspired: Here’s a great collection of mind-map-based infographics.
• Find the best free tool: Here’s my old post that lists some tools and tips on mind-mapping (but as you’ll see from the comments, the preferred way is still to use pen and paper!). If you can come up with a cool idea, just use What Do You Suggest which is based on Google Suggestions.

Example please!

It has just occurred to me that you can use “What Do You Suggest” to tell your Google search story (similarly to the Youtube project of the same name):

5. Create a Typographic Image

While all the 4 four ideas above are perfect for better explaining what you meant to say, this one is purely for fun. But fun is a great content marketing tool as well!

• Get inspired: Here’s an awesome collection compiled by PsPrint for Inspired Magazine
• Find the best free tool: Both of these are totally awesome: Wordle and Tagxedo.

Example please!

Here’s one I have built based on one of my old posts on what guest blogging is NOT (notice how it almost looks like one of our brand elements (a cloud)):

Let’s Recap, Shall We?

Any more ideas here? Please share them in the comments!

Image credits: 1, 2

Related posts:

1. HOW TO: Re-package Your Best Content for More Exposure (and Links) A couple of weeks ago I did an article at…
2. Find Your Most Useful Content with Help of Copy Heat Map What determines the usefulness of some of your content (as…
3. Blatant Content Plagiarism – Am I To Thank You? Today I’ve been struck by the most blatant content plagiarism…

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SEO Consulting Blog – Seo Smarty

Google calls it user intent. About.com calls it “mindsets of search”. Whatever label you may put on it, the point is that search is all about the user.

I have already written a post about user intent and how it is the foundation of search. I did not, however, breakdown the different kinds of user intent, which the Google Search Quality Rating Guidelines (2011) spelled out for us.

Google classifies user intent into three categories: action intent (DO), information intent (KNOW), and navigation intent (GO). While the way Google determines user intent when they enter a search term is not really that important to us, we should still be paying attention to what WE intend to provide our users once they get to our websites. What kinds of users can we cater to? Which of their needs can we, or do we want to answer?

Ideally, a page should have different content elements that would address each of the three user intent. However, it is important that the page also focuses on primarily addressing one of the user intents. For example, an online store obviously caters primarily to users with the action intent of purchasing a product in mind. This means that while having a good site structure that will make it easy for users to go to another page when needed, thus answering the needs of users that land there whose real intent is to navigate and browse through the different pages of the site, the page should primarily be designed to encourage user to buy the product. The content that should stand out then, aside from information about the product,  are elements like the checkout button, menus for easy colour and size selection, and links to related or similar products that the shopper might be interested in buying.

On the other hand, if you have a blog, then your primary focus is to answer the needs of users who fall under the information intent category. Again, it is better if you also have actionable elements like the subscription/RSS feed button, social sharing buttons, downloadable content, polls, and such to make the blog multi-dimensional. However, you have to ensure in this case that you always have informative content that caters to your audience’s specific needs. I find it a good idea in the case of informative sites, such as blogs, to refer to About.com’s study on the mindsets of search, since the three mindsets (i.e. Answer Me, Educate Me, Inspire Me) discussed will guide you into deciding how to present information so as to make it more authoritative, relevant, and interesting to users with different mindsets. Should you provide short informative snippets on general topics or should you provide in-depth articles on the same topic and have an expert/professional on the field write it? Knowing the mindset of your target audience will help you figure these things out so that you can come up with a better concept for a new website, or overhaul an existing site if need be.

Last but not least, you should realise that ALL users want to have an easy time navigating a website. That means that a good site architecture and alternative ways for site navigation are imperative. However, there are users that have navigation as their primary intent upon landing on a page. Examples of these users are those that look for the homepage of a website (i.e. company site such as Apple.com) with the intention of looking for a more specific page on that site (i.e. iOS 5 page). While you might wonder why they simply didn’t enter the search term “iOS 5” instead of “Apple”, you should realise that people go about search in different ways, and there are people who just prefer to do it this way. Sometimes users also do not know the exact search term but have an idea of where to look for information about it. In this case they might not know the term iOS5, but only know that they want to upgrade their iPhone to the new OS they’ve heard mentioned by a friend. Because of such users, you need to make sure that your homepage does indeed have a very clear and easy way for users who land there to go from page to page. At the least, if they lose their way once they get to subpages, it should be easy for them to go back to the homepage and start searching once again. If you don’t have a clear navigation structure, you can bet that your bounce rates will be high despite good content.

Image credit: ItsFixed.com

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SEO Blog

If you’re like me, you’re obsessed with generating leads for your business. But just getting the leads isn’t enough. All the leads in the world are meaningless if you don’t convert them into customers. And far too often, that’s the case.

Here are some of the most common reasons leads aren’t turning into customers.

• You’re attracting low-quality leads—If the leads are weak, there’s not much you can do to turn them into customers. Above all else, you need to focus on the quality of the leads you’re getting, not the quantity. Give me 10 highly qualified leads over 1,000 low-grade leads any day of the week.
• You’re buying leads rather than generating them yourself—For the record, I’m not totally against the idea of buying leads, but I’ve always found that you have more success when you put in the time generating the leads yourself. Self-generated leads are always higher quality and more responsive than those purchased from some list.
• You take too long to get in touch—Whenever a lead comes in, you need to contact that person immediately. The longer you take to send back an email or give them a phone call, the likelier it is that they’ll take their business elsewhere. Today’s customers expect fast communication, so you need to be ready at all times. No dillydallying around!
• You have limited information about your leads—If you have nothing but the basic contact information for your lead, it’s hard for you to follow up effectively with the person. Ideally, you want to know a little something about each lead—who they are, what they’re interested in, where the lead came from, etc.—so that you’re not contacting them blindly.
• Your leads are getting lost in the shuffle—Do you have a system in place for keeping your leads organized and monitored? Or are you just passing the leads around on sticky notes or forwarded emails? There are plenty of good CRM systems out there that can help you manage leads more effectively.
• You don’t have a lead nurturing strategy in place—If you don’t have a specific plan in place for handling leads when they come in, you’re asking for trouble. You need to have a specific lead nurturing strategy that dictates how you’ll follow up with the lead, how often to follow up, who’s responsible for handling leads, etc.

What are some of the other reasons leads aren’t converted into customers? Share your thoughts by leaving a comment.

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SEO Hosting Blog

One thing I get asked frequently by clients is:  how can we keep in touch with our customers on Twitter?

The answer is actually very easy, but judging by the reactions when I’ve explained this, it isn’t something which many people are doing at the moment. So I thought I’d list the process I’d recommend following in order to import your clients/customers into social media sites such as Twitter and Google+.

1) Export your customer database to CSV - you can do this with social media connections too – for example, exporting LinkedIn connections – or in the case of this example, exporting email blog subscribers from Feedburner:

2) Trim down CSV & add Firstname & Lastname – so that your spreadsheet looks like this one – just use fake names, as we don’t need these:

3) Import email as contacts into a Gmail account – I’d recommend setting up a contact group for this to make it easier to manage.

4) Find friends via Gmail – Google+ will automatically suggest contacts from your Gmail account and Twitter allows you to import contacts via Gmail:

I’d recommend just selecting the users who are already using the site; you don’t want to annoy everyone with invitations and obviously you need to have a good social media strategy in place (but that’s for another post!). Don’t just follow them from an inactive account and expect to see great results.

So it’s as easy as that! I’d be interested in hearing in the comments how you connect with your customers using social media?

© SEOptimise – Download our free business guide to blogging whitepaper and sign-up for the SEOptimise monthly newsletter. How to Import Your Customer Database into Google+ & Twitter

Related posts:

1. How to Manage & Grow Your Social Media Network
2. 30 Very Useful Twitter Tools You Must Be Aware Of
3. Twitter Netiquette: 10 Reasons to Unfollow Someone

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SEOptimise » blog

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SEO Book.com

Yesterday it was reported that J.C. Penney have showed signs that their Google penalty has now been lifted.

The original penalty was imposed at the end of Feb for “shady SEO practices”. Searchmetrics have published a report to show that organic search traffic is back on the rise again for J.C. Penney:

Obviously we can only speculate about the SEO activity that J.C. Penney have employed in order to get this penalty turned around so quickly. The obvious steps would be to clean up their backlink profile and remove any paid or suspicious links and then submit a re-inclusion request (which has been confirmed by Matt Cutts).

So when analysing J.C. Penney’s recent backlink history, wouldn’t you expect to see a drop in links?

No! Majestic SEO shows that they’ve actually had a significant increase in recent links. So what does this mean? Maybe they’ve bought more links Or perhaps they’ve had a very successful PR campaign? In fact, that is much closer to the truth!

So even when it’s assumed they’ve made large efforts to remove links, they’ve actually increased volumes by considerable amounts. But it’s not just about numbers - if you look deeper into the quality of these new links, you’ll find that the quality of these are very high. There are many global media and newspaper websites covering the story, along with hundreds of authority blogs such as Search Engine Land, Search Engine Watch, Econsultancy, Techcrunch etc – as well as the huge number of SEO blogs picking up on this.

That’s all without looking at the PR value of how much coverage and brand visibility they’ve generated from this. Being from the UK, I’ve got to admit – I’d never even heard of J.C. Penney before this.

So what can we learn from J.C. Penney?

1. Admit your mistakes – it’s great linkbait! It would have cost them a fortune to buy links and coverage like this from the NYTimes otherwise!
2. Clean up your act, quickly – figure out why you were banned and fix it. In this case it appears to be more of a manual penalty than an algorithmic one, so it’s likely to require a re-inclusion request to make sure Google are aware that you’ve corrected any issues and can reconsider the penalty.
3. Make sure everyone’s aware when ban is lifted = more links! They didn’t even have to leak the news this time, there’s so many SEOs watching the outcome of this one that any change in rankings/traffic was always going to picked up on.

The end result: J.C. Penney have set a great example of how to turn a negative into a positive.

They’ve cleaned up their backlink profile, replaced these with a huge volume of very high quality media and blog links which are far more natural and defensible – and are likely to return to Google in a much stronger position than ever (certainly long-term).

© SEOptimise – Download our free business guide to blogging whitepaper and sign-up for the SEOptimise monthly newsletter. How to Turn a Google Penalty into Great Linkbait, by J.C. Penney

Related posts:

1. How to Turn a Loss into Something Positive
2. How To Use Infographics for SEO & Linkbait
3. Is Your Content Great, Big or Just Long? Quality vs Size

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SEOptimise » blog

 Only it’s not good. In fact it’s even worse than Fine Gael’s desperately bad Valentine card. I’m not going to even link to it. It’s just too dire. It was the worst online effort in #GE11 so far. But then the Green’s did something worse – even worse than even not doing anything at all.

I was in the middle of gathering my thoughts about the challenges facing internet businesses in Ireland and the complete lack of them on anybodies radar. The challenges I’m referring to aren’t about driving traffic or recessionary but a look at the wider challenges of a developing but diverse Irish Internet scene. Gateway providers, retailers, enablers and consumers are faced with a growing range of problems that are not being addressed or even heard of at a national and political level.

But, despite these the Green Party has decided to be completely unhelpful. They’ve suggested that we tax data usage on the internet. Just trying to do that would be an exercise in futility but it would seriously damage our international competitiveness, our fledging internet businesses and our campaigns to make internet access more universally acceptable (and this after we’re already behind). I’m shocked and slightly outraged to be honest. Cynically, I’ve wondered if this was a bit of a political “smoke screen” – designed to create a diversion – but why would you want to divert people by destroying your own name? Something they learnt while in power perhaps,…

They suggest that this would be a good replacement for the TV Licence. Granted, the TV licence should go. Afterall, it subsidises RTE’s overpaid staff – allowing them to charge less for advertising (pushing more effort on the independent channel TV3) while pretending to carry the voice of the national as the “national broadcaster”. Got to love the recent Edelman Trust Barometer that highlights that Google is now more trusted than RTE by the public as a news source. And its not even a news source…

It does highlight the plain ignorance and almost contempt that Irish politicians treat the internet with. Comparing a data download tax with the TV Licence assumes that data is nothing more than idle 21st century consumerism – digital “Fair City” if you will.

Ireland’s future is intertwined with the Internet – it will either take us into the future as product developers and technology owners or it will drag us there, enslaved because we failed to identify, adopt and embrace it.

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SEO Blog

Bing has announced that they have created a whole new level of Facebook integration into their search results and have "designed a new way to experience search, focusing on great design, task completion, instant answers, and vertical categories like shopping and travel to help you make decisions faster."

Bing states in their blog post that Research tells us that 90% of people seek advice from family and friends as part of the decision making process. This "Friend Effect" is apparent in most of our decisions and often outweighs other facts because people feel more confident, smarter and safer with the wisdom of their trusted circle.

In October 2010, Bing formed a partnership with social networking giant, Facebook that would allow Bing to use the Facbook social data and integrate them into Bing search queries. Initially, Bing was slow to integrate the data. In February of this year, Bing took a step towards more complete integration but still was not utilizing the full potential of the data that was available to them.

With the new update from Bing, search results can now be tailored to your Facebook profile based on your friends and even the collective Facebook network (not your FB friends).

Some of the biggest changes are:

• Receive personalized search results based on the opinions of your friends by simply signing into Facebook.
• You can see what your Facebook friends "like" across the Web
• Incorporate the collective know-how of the Web into your search results, and begin adding a more conversational aspect to your searches.
• You can quickly see what your friends like and are sharing.
• Showing which of your friends liked the search results given by Bing via Facebook.
• Bing will promote search results that are "liked" by your friends to the front page of the Bing personalized search results.

Google has used social media as a ranking signal for many months and continue to attempt to incorporate social media signals into their search results. Until Google has a popular social networking platform from which to draw data from, it looks as though Bing has taken the lead in personalized searches by utilizing Facebook social media data.

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Beanstalk’s SEO News Blog