SEO Tips For Internet Marketers

Does your marketing lead anywhere? Is there a plan and a purpose behind your content, or do you just toss something out there and see what happens? While there is a place for general content marketing that keeps us in the forethoughts of our prospects, there is also a need for funnels that strategically guide readers through from introduction to sale.

While there are many ways to construct a content marketing funnel, this easy 3-step model will get you started quickly. Before you begin, you'll want to consider these questions:

1. What result do you want to achieve? At the end of the funnel, what should happen? Are you looking to make more sales of a particular product, for example? When you systematically implement a process that supports that goal, you can instill a marketing funnel that guides prospects to the specific information you want them to see and in the order you want them to see it.

2. What obstacles must be overcome in order to reach this goal? There are friction elements for every product and service. What makes people hesitate before taking the action you want them to take? How can you overcome those obstacles?

3. How can I educate prospects and provide valuable content related to my desired result? This is a win-win. By educating prospects, you're offering them information that they both want and need while also guiding them toward your desired result.

Once you have answers to the questions above, it's time to set up your funnel. During every phase, keep your end result in mind. If you aim to increase the number of product sales, remember to use that in each of the 3 steps.

Step 1 ? Write an Article

If you ask me, the primary goal of any article should be to offer excellent content. I'm not a fan of shallow pieces that are penned just for the sake of trying to increase backlinks.

Think about the result you want to achieve (say, getting people to purchase a particular model of leaf vacuum). Also consider the obstacles you must overcome to accomplish this goal (not being able to see the product firsthand, competitor's products, etc.). How can you educate prospective customers and/or provide valuable content that will encourage them to ultimately purchase? One step at a time, that's how.

Start with an article pertaining to this model of leaf vacuum ? maybe about the product's unique features or benefits, a comparison between your product and manually collecting the leaves from a large lawn or commercial property, etc. Use the link in the Bio or the About the Author section of your article to point people to the next step in the funnel. You might link to the product page of your site or another web page if you feel it is more applicable.

Step 2 ? Free Short Report or Ebook

Once on your site, visitors would find an invitation to download a free report, ebook, whitepaper, case study, or other piece of content. This piece would go into a bit more detail about the product and how it would benefit the prospect.

Remember to keep your focus on the reader, not on your product or service. The goal of the ebook or report is not to create a brag fest that's all about you. It is to highlight how the customer will benefit after using your product or service.

Throughout the short report, offer calls to action for both purchasing and receiving additional information. Those who have seen enough and are ready to buy can then click immediately to your shopping cart or contact page. Others who still need a bit more convincing can request the content available in Step 3.

Step 3 ? In-Depth Content

Whether you choose content in the form of DVDs, CDs, full-length ebooks or other options, Step 3 should provide in-depth information. After a prospect chooses to opt in for the third link of the funnel, you'll want to home in on your desired result and reinforce what you've already provided through Steps 1 and 2.

You can also incorporate incentives to buy into Step 3, such as discount coupon codes, free upgraded shipping, additional service options not available to others, etc.

Not everyone communicates the same way. While some make quick decisions based on limited facts, others want numerous questions answered before feeling confident enough to buy. When you set up a content marketing funnel that purposefully walks prospects through from introduction to purchase, you ensure that every customer gets what s/he needs. More conversions are bound to follow.

Labels: 3Step, Content, Funnel, Generate, Leads, Marketing

By Jill Whalen

Have you heard of Google's Authorship program yet? Whether you've heard of it or not, you've likely seen its fruits in the search results. You know those listings that have a photo of the author next to them? Most likely they get that extra cool stuff because they're using Rel=Author correctly and Google has accepted them to participate. Unfortunately, it's been a bit hit-or-miss as to whether your content gets accepted or not. I saw mine accepted for a day or two many months ago, and then *poof!* it was gone. I reviewed their new guidelines recently, however, made a few changes, and sure enough, within a week or so, my content started showing up?yay!

While you may or may not get your content into the program, the only way to know is to try, and persistence is definitely a key.

If you're thinking it's just not worth the trouble, here are 5 reasons why it's super important:

1. It's kinda sorta easy to implement.

While it is a bit confusing to figure out exactly how to enable authorship based on Google's directions  (which seem to keep changing), in reality their latest criteria have made it easier than ever to implement.

I'm not going into the specifics on how to do it, because you can follow Google's directions. Suffice it to say that the main things you need are a Google Profile page  that links to the website where you have author status, and a link back from your website's home page to your Google Profile page.

You can also have an "author page," such as the About Us page on your website, as long as your Google profile page links to that page.

Once you've got that all implemented, every time you write an article, simply link your name in your byline to either your Google Profile page or your author page with the Rel=Author code, as I have here:

By Jill Whalen

Be sure to add the Rel=Author tag to as many of your old content articles as well, especially ones that you know show up well in the search results.

While Google has moved toward having you link directly to your Google Profile page in your Rel=Author links (as opposed to your author page) to make things less confusing, I still link to my author page, and it works fine.

If you go this route, be sure to follow their older, more confusing instructions as well.

2. It makes your content stand out.

Imagine if you could put big stars around your content listings in Google's search results that everyone would see. Rel=Author does exactly that! Only it's not stars, but your name and photo.

Before Rel=Author became widespread, only logged-in users and those who participated in social media might see a little profile photo of you if they happened to search on something that you had tweeted about. But with Rel=Author implemented correctly, even users who aren't logged into their Google accounts or their social media accounts will still see the rich author information and photo.

This is huge, folks, and this reason alone makes it worth figuring out the implementation.

3. Provides credibility and more exposure.

Beyond just seeing my smiling face in the listings for my content, as you can see in the above screenshot, Google is also showing how many people have circled me on Google+ as well as a "More by Jill Whalen" link. Clicking that link shows more information about me from my Google Profile, plus posts I've made on Google+ related to the search query, and all the other articles that I've written on the subject.

I've also seen them show articles others have written on the subject that reference me in one way or another.

4. Higher clickthrough rate.

I'd say this one goes without saying, due to all of the above factors. It would be difficult to *not* click on the listing that Google is screaming for you to click on. Time will tell on this one, but so far it appears that since my authorship status started to show up in the Google results (it's less than 2 weeks now), I've been getting more traffic for certain articles.

5. Additional metrics in Webmaster Tools.

As if all of the above weren't enough, once you have your authorship up and running and showing up in Google results, you'll also see new author stats in your Webmaster Tools account. (Look under "Labs.") The information there shows you approximately how many times each of your content pages showed up in the search results (impressions) and approximately how many times it was clicked on, along with other interesting details that you can't really get elsewhere.

Of course, Google has their own selfish reasons for giving us all of this awesomeness. Their number-one priority this year is Google+ and all that surrounds it. Rel=Author provides anyone who creates online content with a darn good reason (make that 5!) to create a Google Profile. And the more people who do that, the more who might start using Google+, especially if they want to get those circle numbers up as mentioned in #3 above.

Jill

Labels: Content, Reasons, RelAuthor

Posted by admin on September, 14th 2011

One of the first rules you learn when you start doing Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is that search engines hate duplicate content. Firstly, duplicate content doesn’t add value to web users as several websites popping up with the same content is irritating for users who are trying to do research. Secondly, search engines then have to decide which website posted the content first, which has the most authority etc and then decide which reigns supreme over the others.

This is why Google implemented their Panda update – to encourage people to stop posting copied or similar (spun) content across the web which added no value.

The Panda update affected mostly article websites, but if you post a lot of content on your website, you may want to check that you aren’t harboring duplicate content. One trick to check for duplicate content is to compare the number of pages of your website that Google has indexed to the number of pages you crawl on the site itself.

To do this, you can use the “site:domain.com” function of Google to see how many pages Google has indexed. The program Xenu for Windows (http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html) and Integrity for Mac (http://peacockmedia.co.uk/integrity/) are free programs which crawl an entire site and essentially create a sitemap, telling you how many pages are indexed and the page structure of the website.

If Google has ignored many of your pages then it is likely that there is a duplicate content issue. This might become obvious when looking at the the list of crawled pages that you have generated on Xenu or Integrity or you may have to use a service such as Copyscape to check for duplicate content on a page of your website: http://copyscape.com/

If a lot of your pages are missing, what happens next?

If parameters/session id issues are not to blame for the pages Google hasn’t include in it’s index then the issue may lie with copied or shallow content.

Technical issues that may be holding back the number of indexed pages in Google could be problems such as the robots.txt file, mis-used iframes or canocial tag issues. If this is the case then your SEO company needs to liaise with your web developer to rectify this as soon as possible as the negative impact upon SEO can be catastrophic. Check out our blog post of canonical tags to find out more.

Hopefully, once all pages on your site are unique enough to make it into Google’s index, you can concentrate on other aspect of SEO which will help you on your way to conquering your SEO goals.

To find out how SEO can help your business, contact David Wiltshire on 0845 544 1765.

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Labels: check, Content, duplicate

Today's feature article is a guest post from my friend and B2B marketing consultant Dianna Huff. If you're a B2B company in need of online content writing and marketing, you'll be in good hands with Dianna! In addition, she?s also hosting local, low cost, lunch time web marketing seminars in the MA-NH Merrimack Valley area.

Without further ado, read on as Dianna teaches you how to?

++Help People Find Your Blog Content with Categories and Tags++

By Dianna Huff

Although they work similarly, the categories and tags found on blogs have different functions. Categories, as the name implies, are a filing system. Think of categories as paper file folders in a drawer. When I pay bills, for example, I staple the check stub to the invoice and put the invoice in one folder: Telephone, Taxes, Insurance, AmEx, etc.

This makes it easy to find the invoice later.

Tags, on the other hand, are like the expense accounts listed on each check. If you go to Staples and use your AmEx card to buy some paper and a new chair, and you have the copy center print business cards, your check to AmEx might list the following expenses: Office Supplies, Office Equipment, and Advertising: Letterhead.

Categories are part of your blog's navigation

Because blogs lack the standard navigation found on websites (for example, Services, Products, About Us, etc.), categories help site visitors find the content on your blog.

When creating categories, it pays to carefully consider which categories to use in terms of:
Your audience ? Clearly defined categories help users find content quickly. Instead of having to troll through dozens of posts, users can click a category and see all of the posts in it.Your topics ? With a blog, it's pretty easy to get off topic, which can lead to lots of untargeted traffic (been there, done that). Having categories that relate to your industry, service, or product offerings helps keep you on message.Your keywords ? Categories are anchor text, which means they get indexed by the search engines. It pays to choose them carefully.
To keep things simple, you'll want to limit the number of categories to about 10. The longer your list of categories, the harder it is to file -- and find -- posts. Again, think about your paper filing system: The more file folders you have in a drawer, the easier it is to misfile and lose things.

Plus, a long list of categories is overwhelming to your readers.

Depending on your WordPress theme, you should be able to add a meta description to each of your categories.

Tags complement categories

Like categories, tags are anchor text hyperlinks. Unlike categories, tags don't appear in your blog sidebar (unless you include a tag cloud, a visual representation of the words used in your tags). Instead, tags appear in the footer of your blog posts.

Think of tags as subcategories. For one of my clients, for example, I created the broad category "Oral Health." I then created a tag, "Oral Cancer." Anytime I wrote a post about oral cancer, I used this tag. Website visitors could then click the tag and see only those posts tagged "Oral Cancer" -- as opposed to seeing the entire Oral Health category.

Used effectively, categories and tags can help your content get indexed and found in the search engines and drive lots of targeted traffic your way.

The Problem -- Tag Spam

As Jill has pointed out in articles and interviews, people use tags to spam the search engines. It's very easy to add half a dozen or more tags to your posts -- even if your company doesn't offer a product or service related to the tag.

As a test, I tagged my recent blog post about creating mobile-friendly websites with the tag "wp touch plugin." Google is displaying that post at position #11, which is pretty good considering that I don't actually have the plug-in available for download, nor am I a WordPress designer or developer giving a review of it.

The problem, from a marketing perspective, is that this tag won't deliver the type of site visitor I want -- therefore, it's useless. And yet, "high rankings" and traffic are how we judge the merits of our SEO and/or content marketing efforts.

For many SEOers and marketers, this type of search engine result is perfectly acceptable. It's exposure, right? And if someone clicks on it and goes to your site, then they learn about your company.

I disagree.

If you're getting high rankings and increased traffic due to spam tagging blog posts, but this traffic doesn't convert, you're not doing your job. Your job is to get your clients more leads and sales through traffic that converts. Therefore, keep your tagging to a minimum and use tags that relate to the post and to the services you, or your clients, offer.

I'm not saying that you shouldn't use categories and tags with an eye toward SEO. You'd be dumb not to. However, keep your blog visitors in mind when creating categories and tags because, as Jill is forever saying, "What's good for people is good for search engines."

Labels: Categories, Content, People