Search engine marketing: June 2016

Saturday, 25 June 2016

History of SEO

SEO marketing has changed tremendously over the years since its birth, and it will continue to change in the future. In its humble beginnings, SEO marketing was less like a marketing strategy and more like a loophole or a cheat code. Over time, Google began building new algorithms that thoroughly analyzed keywords and how they’re used. SEO became a full-fledged strategy and a full-time career.

SEO started way back when people first started using search engines to scour the internet for pertinent information. Of course, “pertinent” back then was mostly geocities pages and dancing hamsters. In those early days, Google’s first algorithms were straightforward and only ranked pages based on a small number of factors. It didn’t take long for digital marketing strategists to figure out what these factors were and how to trick search bots into ranking their websites.

It wasn’t until around 2003 that Google finally starting tightening its belt and regularly updating its algorithms. At this point, Google search bots had the intelligence to analyze pages based on complex factors and even penalize those that didn’t adhere to best practices. Marketers could still predict how Google would rank a certain page by using certain keywords and phrases, but the days of computer vomit were finally over.

Since those first updates in and around 2003, Google algorithms have steadily grown more intelligent and complex. In 2011 and 2012, Google’s Panda and Penguin updates further regulated the type of content Google search bots could analyze. The Panda update made sure content was relevant by penalizing sites that used filler, duplicate language, and keyword stuffing. To fend off sites built with fake backlink pages, the Penguin update learned how to analyze the legitimacy of links.

Websites that had natural inbound links were rewarded with a boost to their page rank, while sites with faulty links were penalized. Now Google’s algorithms are so smart they can tell the difference between what’s actually relevant to a consumer’s search term. That’s pretty impressive for a robot.

So, what does the future look like for SEO? Some people have thrown in their hats and emphatically declared “SEO is dead!” It’s understandable to think that way. Google’s ever-changing algorithms become more and more complex with each update. There’s no longer an easy way to “cheat” the system anymore, and SEO strategizing is basically a full-time career.

But that doesn’t mean SEO is dead. It just means strategists will have to keep up with the changes and update their websites. Google’s intentions are to make life on the internet easier for consumers. It’ll continue to enact best practices that make high-quality, relevant content the most rewarded.

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The use of keywords won’t fizzle out altogether, but it won’t matter how many posts you publish or how many back links your page has. The bots will focus on finding content that answers a specific question quickly and honestly. To do that, algorithms will study:

• Content quality. High quality content will always be heavily rewarded. Searchers are looking for thorough and engaging answers to their queries.

• Content honesty. Businesses that present content in an unbiased and honest way will be favored by search bots. Algorithms will eventually learn to weed out overly sales-y content.

• Mobile content. This is already a new ranking factor as of April, 2015. Websites that aren’t optimized for mobile are penalized by Google. Over time, this will become more stringent. Sites that aren’t optimized in every way (I’m looking at you, inappropriately-sized CTAs that won’t close out) will see their page ranks drop significantly.

• Types of content. Images are one of the main ways to increase traffic and engagement. The importance of images will continue to grow. Sites that have a nice, balanced mix of media types will be smiled upon by the SEO robot-gods.

• Performance of content. As always, the performance of your website and its content will be important to page rank. SEO bots analyze the time people spend on your site, bounce rates, and the freshness of your content. This will continue to grow in importance, and only optimized, up to date sites that work flawlessly will be rewarded.

Web Content Writing Tips

Your web content is like an ambassador for your company, and if it’s not on point you’re going to lose out on sales.

Always start with keyword research for SEO. The reason why our content is so successful is keyword research. We don't always write keyword-based posts, but when we do they tend to rank well.

Keyword stuffing is never okay. Although SEO should always be a focal point, if you stuff keywords into your copy you’ll negatively impact the readability of your content, its conversion rate and how well it ranks in the SERPs.

Always hyperlink to your sources. When you reference another website's content, make sure you hyperlink back to that site. It’s good internet etiquette and you’d want the same courtesy.

Make the reader happy. Crafting content that goes viral is every writer’s dream, and tapping into a reader’s emotions is the way to do it. Did you know that social media users are more likely to share content that makes them happy?

Keep the action in your content writing. If you’ve read tips about writing for the web before, you’re probably familiar with the term passive voice – but do you know what it actually means? The passive voice happens when you switch the subject and object in a sentence.

When writing for the web, chop it up. Put simply: keep it short! A five-line paragraph is great, but a three-line paragraph is even better. Some content kings like Derek Halpern even let single sentences fly solo. Don’t worry if an idea doesn’t seem to be fully “complete” before hitting that enter key.

Update your links. Every single page on your website should link to other pages — not only does this help you boost the rankings of the pages you link to, it also gets users hopping around on your site and spending more time there.

Don’t forget the extra SEO juice. If you’re using WordPress or a similar platform to host your content, repeated your targeted keywords a couple times isn’t enough. Remember to place your target keyword in the url, in H2 headers, in the meta description and even in the alt tags of your images.

"Dos and Don'ts" — which is correct? The latter! Nothing drives us crazier than people putting apostrophes in pluralized words. When in doubt about spelling, capitalization or grammar, Google it! Which brings us to…?

If you're not sure, look it up. You'd be surprised at how much you teach yourself when you consistently look up things you aren't sure about. We learned most of this stuff by double checking the words/grammar/spelling/etc. we weren't sure about. It takes a little time at first, but if you make a habit of not having to double check the same thing twice you'll be an expert in no time. Then, you can write your own blogs about web content writing tips!

Dictionary.com is your friend — so visits the site often. You'd be amazed at how many words people misuse on a regular basis.

Provide added value. Your content writing should always offer value to the reader in terms of insightful ideas and actionable tips. But if you really want your content to earn repeat traffic and rise in search engine rankings, give your readers a parting gift.

Bing VS Google VS Yahoo

The three major search engines Google, Bing and Yahoo all have a customer base so wide, you do not want to just stick with one. All are very different and when you add information to one search engine, it does not automatically help out a position on the other two. It is frustrating thinking of all the time and effort that goes into setting up a business online, but all 3 search engines offer different benefits to make them worth your time.

Bing

Powered by Microsoft, Bing launched in 2009, making it relatively new to the search game. However, they do have some experience as it existed as MSN Search back in 1998. Since then, it has evolved into a better and smarter search engine.

Before you decide to just skip down to the paragraph on Google, Bing has improved their search results a lot recently, taking about 18% of the market share in July. Bing works like Google in that the more people are pointing to an article or website, the more likely it is to be at the top of the results. Even just typing in information will bring up all sorts of resources such as IMDb, Wikipedia, YouTube, etc.

Moreover, it is not at all difficult to get a ranking on Bing’s page. As long as you use focused keywords for your heading and content, generally, you are set to appear on the SERP. However, while this may be a great feature for new site owners and bloggers to gain visibility, users are not likely to be too happy with the search results. This is because Bing doesn’t care if the sites they are ranking on their SERP have high authority links or not, thereby compromising the relevancy of the result as well as making users question the authenticity of the site.

Google

Recently, Google is an innovator in new technology with a driverless car, the Google-glasses and the Knowledge Graph that will answer questions, propose follow up questions, do comparisons and pull information from anything you are signed into. This is their biggest downfall, in that it has ALL of your information stored and where will that take us?

Furthermore, Google displays results on its SERP by assessing the authority of the sites. It determines authority of a site by taking into account other websites that are linking the site. Thus, when it comes to obtaining validated and trusted results, Google wouldn’t disappoint its users. Also, Google’s crawlers are expert when it comes to distinguishing between a valid link and an artificial link. Over the years, it has upgraded its algorithms, thereby turning its focus to valuable and quality content rather than promoting well established links and pages, like Yahoo does. Though this might be debatable but the general consensus is that Google gives start-up websites and blogs an opportunity to build their links naturally. As long as you deliver quality content which potential users may find highly relevant, Google will display your link on its SERP.

Yahoo

Having been launched in 1995, Yahoo! has been in the search game the longest, compared to Google and Bing. Though, during its early years Yahoo! used search results from other web crawler, it started its own indexing and crawling in 2003. While it may not seem so threatening, Yahoo! is Google’s biggest competitor in the search engine industry. Especially, since Yahoo! formed a partnership with Bing in 2009 (making its internet search powered by Bing), the combined forces of Yahoo! and Bing pose serious threat to Google.

Lately, Yahoo! has been making a lot of changes and upgrades to its search engine algorithms. When it comes to indexing websites, Yahoo! is quite good at it. However, it still tends to favor old and established web pages compared to new sites on its SERP. Also since Yahoo! has a lot of internal content on the website through its paid inclusion program, the search results it displays tends to be biased as it redirects searchers to its own content. This practice might compromise the relevancy of the results, which users find decidedly unacceptable.

Google, Yahoo and Bing, all are yearning to capture a greater market share which keeps them in the constant flux of making developments and improvements to their search engine so that they stay ahead of the game. For now, however, Google seems to be the most efficient and in-form search engine having aced almost all of the above mentioned criteria with flying colors. Nonetheless, if you are working on improving your website’s ranking, you need to concentrate on all and not one.

Thursday, 23 June 2016

Creating a Content Marketing Strategy

Content marketing strategy doesn’t create itself. It’s the result of clear intention, careful planning, and focused execution. As Carmen Hill, social media and content strategist at Babcock & Jenkins, puts it, “Whether it’s a targeted campaign or a comprehensive program, you need to plant a strong foundation of content that attracts prospects at every stage of the buyer’s journey, seeding awareness and nurturing ongoing interest.”

Here are some of the best practices:

Get Stakeholder Support

Content marketing is not a short-term affair; it’s a long-term commitment that requires continual collaboration and engagement to succeed. This means you’ll most likely need to sell the idea to the executive team, as well as other key people or departments within your organization.

One effective technique for getting internal buy-in begins with not talking about content marketing at all. (At least not initially.) Instead, focus on your stakeholders’ goals and pain points, even their bonus systems – those areas that affect their own success. Then introduce content marketing as a valuable way for them to get better results.

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Understand Your Audience

Content marketing isn’t about selling. It’s about educating, entertaining, or otherwise informing your readers in order to earn their trust over time.

To be successful, you need to understand who your audience is – and what they want and need from you – in order to gauge how much viable content you already have and what content you’ll need to create.

Taking a Customer-Centric Approach

To identify the depth and breadth of content that will resonate with your audience segments, it’s essential to focus on what they want. Which means you have to do some research to find out what’s already out there… and what’s missing.

Here are some key elements to get you started

• Study your website analytics. Your visitors offer a wealth of clues about their needs and interests. Uncover it by looking at keyword performance, internal search data, and user behaviour and bounce rates.

• Investigate the social web. This includes blogs, forums, and the ever-increasing networking channels your audience is interacting with. A variety of listening tools – many are free – can help you collect data about the conversations and topics people are discussing as they relate to your company’s products and services.

• Get your hands on industry research. In the age of big data, research studies are being published more frequently than in the past, with many of them at low or no cost. Relevant research results can provide insights into your industry, as well as your competitors.

• Survey your customers. Ask your current customers specific questions about what they’re interested in when evaluating whatever it is that you sell, what features are important, what their favorite websites are, what information piques their interest or breaks the deal.

Identify the Right Content Formula

Content marketing is about helping your current and future customers solve an issue that’s important to them. To do this, your content needs to facilitate conversations among influencers, stakeholders, and decision makers, giving them the confidence to take the next step. If it doesn’t, your content marketing strategy will fail. (Or at the very least under-achieve its goal.)

Plan SEO-Friendly Content

The business success of a search engine company is completely dependent on satisfying the human searcher. As a result, the search engines are constantly leapfrogging each other to deliver better results, creating an ever-shifting landscape that can leave marketers frustrated. Google, for example, typically makes between 500-600 algorithm changes per year. While most are inconsequential, a few are major enough to impact your SEO efforts.

Get Maximum Mileage Out of Your Content

Developing the volume of content necessary to fuel a content program is a challenge. Try using the Rule of 5 – use one piece of content in five distinct ways. Five may not always be the optimal number, the goal is to extend the life of your content by using it in multiple ways, offering it in multiple formats, and distributing it everywhere.

Driving Results

Good content marketing establishes long-term, trusted relationships with current and future customers by regularly delivering high-quality, relevant, and valuable information. In addition, it can bolster your SEO and brand positioning.

Dos and Don'ts of Social Media

Have Your Social Media Profiles Completed in Full

No one likes to get to a Twitter page only to find out that they haven’t taken the time to upload a photo to their account.

Don’t Have Multiple Profiles

Just as hard as it is to try and live two separate lives, so it is to manage multiple profiles of yourself. This doesn’t mean that everything is all or nothing and you have to live your life as an open book.

You Are What You Tweet…and Share

Just use good common sense. The internet is now the track record of your life. Don’t share something that you don’t want to be left as a representation of you. But don’t let this stop you from making yourself known on issues and things that matter.

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Use Automation sparingly…Social is Still about Relationships

Automating certain aspects of your social media updating can be good for both continued social media engagement and for your own time of day.

Don’t try to be Everywhere All the Time

If you have a few free hours every day, and then by all means, try every social network out there. But let’s be realistic, that’s not the case. Don’t spread yourself too thin. Pick one or two social networks for starters and go from there.

Be a Friend to Get a Friend

See someone ask a question on Twitter that you know the answer to? Send them a reply! Is one of your Facebook friends asking for a recommendation for a realtor? Recommend your friends Business Page. Did you write a helpful post on your blog?

Don’t Be Needy

No one likes someone who is needy. Don’t ask your Twitter followers to “retweet this tweet please.” Don’t beg your Facebook friends to come “Like” your page. Get creative with things. You can still accomplish those tasks, but learn how to disguise them.

Be Wary of Spam (and Don’t Be Spammy)

Just because you get a follower on Twitter doesn’t mean they’re a real person. Do your homework. If they’re following 20,000 people and have zero followers, chances are they’re garbage. And please don’t click on any links they might send to you.

Transparency is the Ultimate Form of Trustworthiness

Should you run into an issue that causes a flurry of activity on social media, the worst thing you can do is try and hide from the issue. Never delete comments, try and respond the best you can, and don’t become defensive.

Have a Direction for Your Sharing, Don’t Be All Over the Place, and Build Consistency

Find a direction and stick to it. People don’t like having the rug pulled out from underneath them when it comes to what they are expecting.

Don’t Over Share

At that same token of consistently, don’t over-share. With Twitter, you can tweet a half dozen times per day and be fine.

Avoid Poor Grammar and Spelling

Nothing makes you look sillier than bad grammar and spelling. Word of advice: prep your social media updates in a Word doc before going public just to make sure.

WHY ARE YOU WRITING IN ALL CAPS?

Please for the love of all things holy stop with the all caps. All they say is that you’re not creative and probably upset about something.

#Don’t #Abuse #Hashtags

Hashtags are a good way to help get your tweets and Facebook posts categorized with similar content so when someone searches for that keyword, they find you. This does not mean that you turn every word into a post a hashtag.

Stop Sharing the Same Message Again And Again

It’s definitely lazy and in poor taste to take the same status update, tweet, or LinkedIn post and continue to share it over and over again.

Stay Away From Auto-DM’s

As you learn more about social networks, you’ll learn about things other people do and tools that they use. When the time comes and you think you should send new Twitter followers an automated direct message (DM)….please doesn’t. It’s tacky.

Engage in Constructive Introspection

Always ask yourself “does anyone care about this except me?” and you’ll really find out whether or not your social media posts are hitting the mark.

Share without Any Intention of Getting Something in Return

Remember this especially if you’re just starting out. Just because you’re doing something on social media, doesn’t mean it matters yet. Just like starting out with your business, things were slow at first until you made connections, built up a reputation, and got a handle on things. Same goes for your social media accounts.

Be Generous and Give Credit When Credit is due

This is especially true on Twitter. Nobody likes it when you steal a good update. Take the time to find their Twitter handle and mention them in a tweet. Send out thank you tweets to people whose work you enjoy. You’ll make some great connections.

Match the Right Content to the Right Network (and be Mindful of the Tone of Each Network)

Just because you’re on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter and you find a really cool article to share, doesn’t mean that it belongs on each network. You’ll learn in a short time what sort of things get shared on each network.

Don’t Automate Across Platforms

Twitter has a feature that allows you to share your tweets to Facebook, simultaneously. You can also tweet out your LinkedIn status updates as well. Stay away from this multi-channel messaging feature and you’ll be fine. Take the extra 30 seconds it takes and write an original message for each channel.

Act How You’d Like to be treated

If you find it annoying when a Facebook Business Page continually posts updates about their store hours or if you follow a Twitter account that continually send out the same tweet in all caps, remember not to do the same. It’s just good to keep in mind.

Think Before Tagging

Tagging people in photos is a great way to expose you and your business to their friends. When they’re tagged in a photo posted by you, you’ll be shown to their network of friends. But please, always check with someone before you tag them in a photo or check them in with you on a social channel.

Don’t Get Caught Up in the Numbers Game

It’s so painfully easy to get caught up in the numbers game but remember this: while having lots of Facebook Fans and Twitter followers is good, they’re only as good as they’re makeup.

Have Fun

Remember how social media started as a way to keep in touch with friends and family? Just because you’re using it for your small business doesn’t mean that you should stop having fun with it.