SEO Your Content: 7 Tips to Boost Rankings

Posted on December 18, 2012 at 11:55 am by Christy Grant in SEO

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for any website content involves many factors beyond the words on the site. There are coding standards, tags, the architecture of the site, navigation, and page titles — many components. Yet when it’s time for you to write a piece for your site — whether it’s a blog post, an update to the About Us page, or any other collection of words — you need to know how to SEO your content so that people will find you.

Original Content

The number one important thing is to write unique and relevant content. Put the most important content near the beginning. Remember that your words sometimes appear out of context, so be specific. For example, instead of writing “snow shovels,” say “North Pole Gear snow shovels.” That helps search engines identify you and helps people know you.

Also, be sure not to duplicate content from other pages of your site or from any other site. Google is highly suspicious of duplication and will penalize your site for this. Always write something original and valuable. Search engine optimization helps people find your content. Providing something of value keeps people on your site.

Keywords

This part goes into the content that you write. After doing your keyword research, use your chosen keyword throughout your content as it naturally fits. You can vary it to use singular and plural versions of the words, use acronyms or abbreviations. Just use it as relevant and as it fits. Those keywords will help Google find your page and display it in the search results, and it will help people click through to your page when they see you have the subject they’re searching.

Page Title

This is the title that the search engines read and that people see when searching a relevant subject. Most likely, you are using a content management system and a portion of the page title will be automatically created. As long as it sounds good, frontload your page title with your keyword or keyword phrase. The page title should be a max of 66 characters, including spaces. Be sure to write it so that it sounds like a title written by a person, rather than a machine-generated string of words.

Meta Page Descriptions

This is the brief description that appears with the page title in search results and helps people decide whether to click the link to your page. It’s a great idea to include keywords, but more importantly, it needs to be compelling. The max length should be 156 characters — or slightly longer than a tweet — with no quotes or non-alpha characters since Google removes those. So write a slightly long tweet and include information not already in the page title.

Article Title – H1 Tag

This is the title of the actual piece you write. This is your heading to alert people to the main subject matter of your article. Be sure it is brief and clearly conveys the main point of your writing. Use your keyword one time within the header and be sure this is in the H1 tag in your page code.

Internal Page Linking

This is your chance to take advantage of all the other content you have on your site, to share relevant information, keep users on your site, and show search engines that your relevancy is strong. It is a great opportunity for users to explore other areas of your site, so definitely offer that.

Be sure to use real and relevant words as the actual links. The words “click here” are generic and not relevant to your subject matter. See the links in this post as examples of relevant words to use as the links to other relevant content. All you need to do is link a phrase that is naturally part of your writing.

Images

Almost all content benefits from having images along with it. Just be sure to always include alt attributes within the image tags. Search engines read alt attributes, and anyone who uses a screen reader can hear the alt text.

Image names are also valuable for having your images — and therefore, your site — found in image searches. Accurately describe each image in the file name and alt attribute. Use a keyword if at all relevant. Use dashes between words, rather than underscores. And do not use non-alpha characters.

So go write about what you know. Write unique content. Be compelling and provide value. With the tips above, you can include the pieces that help search engines show your excellent content to the world, helping people find it and choose to read it.

Tags: search engine optimization, unique content

435 Digital helps businesses build brands on the web. Visit here for inspiration on how to stand out and grow your business.

View the original article here

Content Marketing: The Engine that Drives B2B Marketing

Every few years there are ideas that significantly dominate the “internet marketing” discussion. Mobile Marketing and Social Media Marketing are examples, and today the topic at the forefront of nearly every B2B (business to business) marketing discussion is Content Marketing.

David Kirkpatrick, Senior Reporter at MarketingSherpa recently wrote, “According to research from the 2012 Lead Generation Benchmark Report, content marketing was one of the top four channels for lead generation budgets for this year (2012). And, as a less quantitative measure of the importance of content marketing, it was featured in almost every presentation at the recent B2B Summit 2012, whether the main focus was lead gen, email, social media or event marketing.”

At the core of this trend is the fundamental desire for most B2B Buyers to conduct online research before we know they are interested in making a purchase decision.

According to SiriusDecisions 2012 – 70% of B2B buyers’ journey is complete before they ever become a sales lead. Which leads us to the fundamental question: “How do we influence a buyer before we even know who they are? Or if they are interested in our product or service?” For a growing majority of B2B marketers, the answer is Content Marketing.

Despite all the discussion and focus, there can be a lot of confusion around what Content Marketing is, and isn’t.

Content Marketing is not a direct sales tactic. It’s not fast, cheap or easy. Content Marketing is about understanding your target audience, systematically learning what pain they experience, what information they are likely to need at each stage in the buying cycle and then providing it to them, even if that information does not directly relate to your specific product and or service.

Content Marketing is about building a reputation within your market as a thought leader, as an information aggregator and as an industry collaborator. It’s about establishing a connection with buyers by providing information across multiple channels without the expectation of immediate gain or short term sales. Because in the process of helping your market, you are given the opportunity to build trust and respect with potential buyers in the first 70% of the buyers journey.

So let’s say you’re interested in getting started and you’re wondering “What’s the next step? In answer to that question we put together a 4 point list.

· Create a Content Needs Assessment: Reach out to your current clients and ask them a few questions about what information they found helpful or what information they wished they could have found during their purchasing journey. Try to gather information that corresponds to the stages in the buying cycle. You may also want to creatively envision an improved buying journey to provide information or help your current clients may not have considered.

· Audit your existing resources for content: Your website, blog, sales presentations, research and sales collateral materials are good places to look for existing content.

· Use User Generated Content (UGC): Social media networks are a good place to look for unsolicited testimonials and customer experiences.

· Repurpose The Content You Have: Consider ways to repurpose the existing content to make it more useful; more easily understood or simply more interesting. Using information you have to create a SlideShow, or a Video or Podcast are examples of repurposing content.

At some point you will have exhausted your existing content resources and the focus will turn to content creation, which is neither easy nor free.

Daniel Burstein, of MECLABS recently shared this three point strategy for content creation:

“Identify your audience and understand their needs. Everyone, everyone, everyone has pain points.”

“Invest aggressively. Social media, especially blogs, aren’t free, and they’re not even cheap. This may be as simple as investing your time in writing rich blog posts that address those pain points in step 1. It may be investing your Subject Matter Experts’ time on the blog. Or it may go so far as a monetary investment in a brand journalist or social media manager.”

“Focus on helping your customers, not selling. And for this reason…I do not recommend sticking a copywriter on your blog. But if you do, make it clear to that copywriter that the point of the blog is not to sell.”

Unfortunately, as Daniel points out, new content creation isn’t easy and it’s certainly not inexpensive. There is no magic bullet and it will take both time and investment. Because of this we recommend you make plan that identifies your most important content needs, and sets a realistic goal for steady / ongoing new content creation.

Remember Content Marketing is a long term effort and it’s focused on long term gains. Steady consistent progress is best. The goal is to develop trust and name recognition during that crucial first 70% of the buying journey, so that when they are ready to take the next step, they have been nurtured and guided to consider your solution set.

· 70% of B2B buyers’ journey is complete before they ever become a sales lead.

· Content Marketing is how we influence a buyer before we know who they are.

· Content Marketing is about understanding your target audience, systematically learning what pain they experience, what information they are likely to need at each stage in the buying cycle and then providing it to them, even if that information does not directly relate to your specific product and or service.

· Ask current clients what information they found helpful or would have liked during their purchasing journey to identify currently available resources and opportunities for new content creation.

· Mine your website, blog, social media, sales presentations and collateral materials for existing content.

· Repurpose existing content to make it more useful; more easily understood or simply more interesting.

· Invest aggressively in content creation.

· Focus on helping your customers, not selling.

· Make a plan for the consistent production of new content.

Tags: B2B Marketing, Content Marketing

435 Digital helps businesses build brands on the web. Visit here for inspiration on how to stand out and grow your business.

View the original article here

SEO Terminology Explained: Keyword Research

is the study of the search queries that are most beneficial for a given business to rank for on search engine results pages.(“Rank for” means that when someone searches for a given phrase in Google, your website is the first result a user sees.)

Keyword research takes into account the amount of times people search for a keyword or phrase, the amount of competition vying for the top rankings, and the relevance to the keyphaase to the business.

For example, Alex’s Pizzeria wants to find out which search terms would help them sell the most pizzas. They start off by compiling some basic ideas: pizza, pizza delivery, chicago pizza.

Once this preliminary keyword research is complete, the terms that have been compiled can be researched using a number of tools, one of my favorites being the Google Adwords Keyword Tool. Once you input the keyphrases you’ve compiled, the tools will help provide you with an understanding of the amount of traffic a given phrase gets and a general understanding of how much competition there is.

Over the course of their keyword research, Alex’s Pizzeria finds out that though there are 246,000 searches for “Chicago Pizza” there are also 98,000,000 results for this phrase. As Alex’s Pizzeria only delivers within a 5-mile radius, there are even fewer searches of those 246,000 that are likely to be sales for their Michigan Avenue shop.

In this example, a term that is more geographically relevant would be the way to go, since most of the business of the pizzeria is walk in traffic. A term like “Michigan Avenue Pizza” would be a great one, since it is geographically relevant to the company.

Tags: Keyword Research

435 Digital helps businesses build brands on the web. Visit here for inspiration on how to stand out and grow your business.

View the original article here

John Chow dot Com 2012 Blogging Annual Report

written by John Chow on December 31, 2012

We’re at the end of 2012 and that means it’s time for the John Chow dot Com Blogging Annual Report. This is where I tell you all the cute stats and milestones the blog achieved in 2012. Thanks to WordPress, this job is actually quite easy because they have prepared the annual report for me in a nice infographic.

Some of the highlights from the annual report includes me getting more visitors than a small European country!

About 55,000 tourists visit Liechtenstein every year. This blog was viewed about 9,500,000 times in 2012. If it were Liechtenstein, it would take about 173 years for that many people to see it. Your blog had more visits than a small country in Europe!

In 2012, there were 430 new posts, growing the total archive of John Chow dot Com to 4,734 posts. The busiest day of the year was April 27th with 67,073 views.

I wish to acknowledge the 2012 most active commenters. You guys are awesome!

See The Full John Chow dot Com 2012 blogging Annual Report

Stay up to date with all of John Chow’s tips for making money online and blog posts by subscribing via email. Your email will be kept private and never shared with anyone.

It’s 2013, Time To Update Your Blog’s Copyright Notice

Happy New Year everyone! Welcome to 2013. As a blogger, the first thing you should do in the new year is to update your blog’s copyright notice to say 2013. If your blog doesn’t have a copyright notice, you should add one right away. Many bloggers may consider this a relatively minor issue but from a professional and branding standpoint, making sure your blog has a copyright notice with the correct information is very important.

For most bloggers, this is a simple task of logging into the WordPress admin panel and editing the footer.php file in the themes editor. Find the part that says Copyright 2012 and change it to say Copyright 2013. Because this is done only once a year, many bloggers will forget to update the copyright notice until someone points it out to them.

How To Auto Update The Copyright Notice

Instead of manually updating the copyright notice once a year, there is a simple way to make WordPress do it automatically. Start by Logging into your WordPress themes editor and open the file that holds your copyright information. For most WordPress themes, this will be the footer.php file. Keep in mind that you can only edit a file from the WordPress editor if the file permission is set to writable. If the file is not writable, you will have to FTP in to change the permission, or update the file using FTP.

Find the part with the copyright notice and replace it with the following.

Copyright © Blog Name

Instead of hard coding 2013 into the copyright notice, you replace it with , which will automatically pull in the year from your web server calendar (the “©” creates the copyright C logo). This only works if your server is set to the correct year. If it’s not, you’ll have to contact your web host and get them to adjust the date. In my case, I like to do my copyright from the year the blog started. The code will look like this.

Copyright © 2005 – John Chow, Inc.

Now, instead of trying to remember to update the copyright notice at the beginning of a new year, the blog will do it for you automatically. That is, as long as the clock on the server is correct.

Stay up to date with all of John Chow’s tips for making money online and blog posts by subscribing via email. Your email will be kept private and never shared with anyone.

Dot Com Pho – Feels Like Vancouver Edition

written by John Chow on December 30, 2012

Dot Com Pho Orange County felt a lot like Dot Com Pho Vancouver this week. Not only did we have Stephen Fung from Vancouver visit us, but he brought the rain with him! We were forced to have Pho indoors.

On this edition of Dot Com Pho OC, we have Sally Chow and Lexi Fung kicking it Gangnam Style, Stephen reveals how I helped him make money online, how to make $1 million by blogging, no more bow ties, a ton of veggie, very little meat, and a whole lot more.

Anyone is welcome to join us for Dot Com Pho. Follow me on Twitter to find the time and location of the next one.

Stay up to date with all of John Chow’s tips for making money online and blog posts by subscribing via email. Your email will be kept private and never shared with anyone.

How Embedded Social News Grew My Content, Traffic, and Engagement, and Saves Me Time [Case Study]

This guest post is by Brian Lippey of Guitar Shop TV.

Every blogger wants to offer the best content to his or her audience.

With Guitar Shop TV (GSTV), I set out to create an online community for passionate guitar fans and music lovers around the world.  My goal was to offer the best guitar-related content to my audience.

To achieve this, the GSTV team has filmed over 200 hours of original online TV content. We update our blog regularly—with everything from live performances and backstage interviews, to commentary on upcoming album releases and the latest guitar gear. We tweet. We post on Facebook. We even have an on-site guitar shop.

But audiences today have a large appetite for content! With over 100 million guitarists and countless guitar music fans in the world, it’s important that our content’s fresh, entertaining and timely. Guitar news happens fast, making it difficult to churn out blog posts on everything out there.

Our audience is also very vocal about guitar-related content, as is evident on our Facebook page.

As creator of GSTV, I was looking for a social news platform that could deliver top guitar content from across the Web directly to our blog and allow users to participate on a social level. We want to engage music enthusiasts, not talk at them.

Our research led us to new social platform, ROCKZi.

ROCKZi is a social news platform that helps us deliver a fun community experience and share relevant content with our users. Unlike other social platforms that draw your readers to their networks, with this one, the traffic is directed to my blog, which gave me increased opportunities to attract more music fans and expand our community.

The platform lets you customize the content so that it really speaks to your blog’s audience. It let us pick a news category that was relevant specifically to our blog. For most websites, a category probably already exists, but if not, you can create one yourself.

We literally embedded the platform on our News page in three easy steps.

I was relived I didn’t need a developer to completely redesign our website—we had it up and running on our blog in about five minutes. The platform allowed us to alter the appearance of the content, so it fit nicely on our news page and matched our web design.

Since embedding the platform in August, we have seen traffic to the site increase by 25%. The average time spent on the page has also increased by four minutes.

Our readers started to come back to our site more often to educate themselves on guitar-related news that had been shared by otehrs in our community. And when they are on our site scanning the headlines, they do more than just read.

The platform comes pre-loaded with social tools that let readers post comments on stories, vote the best stories to the top, or submit their own stories they’ve discovered on the Web about the latest musicians or guitar gear.

So you can see what I mean when I say that this tool gives our site more than just good content.

It’s adding a social experience to the site that is bringing readers back more often to engage with other readers around content our audience cares most about.

We’re getting more traffic than Sturgis in August! And readers can pin, post, Facebook or tweet stories right from the page on our site, allowing them to feel more like a part of the community.

All the interactions between your users and the content that’s shared on your site (votes, shares, comments, etc.) will generate direct links through their social networks that will point directly back to your blog.

Do you use a social news tool on your blog? Have you tried ROCKZi? Share your experiences with us in the comments.

Founder Brian Lippey has a background that combines music and business. In Guitar Shop TV, Brian combines his passion for and knowledge of guitars with his strong business acumen.

View the original article here