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By Steve Shaw in Featured

contentWhen you first get your website up and running, your first thought may be to implement some article marketing strategies to get the traffic pouring into your site. Your sole thought may be to do something “out there” in order to produce the results that you want on your site.

There is one step that should happen prior to that though, and it’s one that a lot of site owners overlook. Before anything, you need to develop the content on your website. You see, in order to attract readers, you need to have some reason for them to be at your website.

What sort of information are you providing?

What problems are you solving?

How are you helping your readers?

You may attract readers when you submit articles, but if you don’t have any “stickiness” on your site, then the increased viewers don’t do you much good. They just show up at your site and immediately click away because they haven’t found the information that they’re looking for.

Before starting to market your site, go to the effort of adding content that will make readers want to stick around. Here are some ideas for you:

1 – Create a Blog That is on Your Website

With a blog, you will be creating a regular stream of content that is fresh and helpful to readers. New content gives readers a reason to keep on returning. Sites with regularly updated content tend to rank better in search engines as well.

You can do this by simply setting up a WordPress blog. After your blog posts are published for the month, then you can rewrite them and submit them as free reprint articles. Making the content you create do double duty is a great time saver and helps you maximize your time.

2 – Create a Page on Your Site That Addresses “Frequently Asked Questions”

Now, it depends on what type of business you have as to the appropriateness of this idea, but if you have a service based business, a list of FAQs can be a really helpful bit of info to offer. This also saves you time, because potential customers can find answers to their questions immediately and there’s no need for you to answer the same question repeatedly for each individual person.

3 – Create a List of Helpful Sites and Link to Them

It may seem counterintuitive to link to other sites (won’t that make people leave your site?), but actually the opposite is true. Your job as the site owner is to provide information that is helpful to your readers. Many times there are websites that provide complementary services to your own that people would benefit from (let’s say you’re a real estate agent, and you provide a link to a mortgage calculator). When you compile these resources for your readers, you are creating a more valuable website.

4 – Add a Web Page That Tells About Your Niche

Some people arriving at your website may have very little information about what you do or what your niche has to offer them. It is worth your while to compile some basic information that will act as an introduction to your field.

5 – Create a Web Page That Catalogs Your Articles

When you start publishing articles, they will be very helpful to your readers. Why not let the readers of your website know about the articles you’ve written and give them an easy way to find them?

You can separate your articles into sub-categories to help your readers find the information they need. This “library” of your articles can be a web page containing the title of the article, a short description and a link to the article.

If you want to create a site that your readers love, anticipate their needs and put content on your site to satisfy them. Really, the more you create a website that your readers appreciate, the more you’ll be pleasing Google as well. Google just wants to send their search customers to websites that offer the information that they’re looking for. You can put your website in position to satisfy that need by creating a website full of helpful information.

Steve Shaw is a content syndication specialist. Do you own a blog? Need content? Join thousands of other blogs and get free high-quality, niche-focused, human-reviewed content from quality authors sent on auto-pilot – and it’s all 100% free! Go to http://www.autoblogit.com for more information.

By Tamara Jacobs in Featured

socialnetworkRecently Google’s latest social network, Google+ opened to the public. In an effort to create a little fun around the subject, College Humor created a two minute video about Not Google+, which encourages people not to join Google+ as we have too many social networks already. Do they have a point?

Google+’s most obvious competitor is Facebook. While Google+ offers certain advantages to its users that Facebook lacks, a lot of Facebook users were resistant to switching networks for no other reason than the hassle of it. Our friends are on Facebook, our pictures videos, links and info and the thought of having to build all of that up somewhere else didn’t quite seem worth it. Twitter or Foursquare, however, are so different in their offering, setting up accounts with them does seem worth it, depending on one’s interests of course.

Between news aggregation, social bookmarking, and social networking sites we are already elbow deep in platforms we have to log into and keep up to date with. Do we really need another one? Consumers and the general public love social networking sites, but with so many available, information is getting lost, their influence means less, privacy issues are being questioned, and our ability to interact face-to-face is slowly diminishing. And while most brands are eager to join social networks, they have yet to see a real return on investment. Just as a brand is starting to become familiar with one platform it seems another one becomes available. And there is this pressure to have a presence on all of them, even though it might not make sense for your company or campaign. Moreover, developing a sound marketing strategy involves time and consideration and half the time brands aren’t even entirely sure how these platforms work and how consumers interact with them.

The issue isn’t whether or not Google should have developed a social network – the issue is what are we, consumers and brands alike, trying to prove? We have entered the ‘look at me, look at me’ culture, where everyone is shouting about themselves. They are making videos about how much fun they’re having at the office, they are posting pictures of themselves showing the world how much fun they were having that weekend and more. Public profiles are important of course, but please, one thing at a time. Instead of throwing a million things up online, think about what you stand for, who you are, who you want to be associated with and how you want to be viewed. And only then, start hiring the best people, the most creative minds to build up something really, really good. Something that will have the world going ‘wow’.

Adaptive Consultancy is a London-based digital agency specializing in web development, design, ecommerce and internet marketing. Services include search engine optimization, paid search, email and social media marketing. For more on digital marketing agency London
visit http://www.adaptiveconsultancy.com/

By Andrea Berretti in Featured

spn_exclusiveEverybody agrees that ecommerce software is invaluable in any online business. However it can even be more useful to you if it is SEO (search engine optimization) friendly.

And that is one of the reasons why it is very important for you to find out whether your ecommerce software is capable of attracting traffic from popular search engines like Google, or not.

These days we have lots of ecommerce software on the market. Some of it costs a fortune while we even have free software or at least where you can use it for free on a trial basis of 30 days. Sadly most entrepreneurs who purchase this software are just concerned that the very basic functions work. We are talking about functions like the shopping cart and ability to process credit card payments online. Once they satisfy themselves that the software can achieve these basic requirements then they are completely happy about their ecommerce software and will never raise any other questions.

However they miss the point completely. The most important function in your ecommerce software is its’ ability to allow your pages to attract valuable targeted traffic from search engines. How else will you be able to achieve and sustain a high volume of prospects landing on your web pages? Like any other business, online enterprise is a numbers game. Meaning that the more people who land on your pages, the higher the number of those who will ultimately purchase something from you.

Being SEO friendly starts with your URLs. You will have a huge advantage if your urls can be keyword filled so as to boost you rankings with search engines. Improving your rankings will obviously increase the targeted traffic landing on your pages directly from search engines.

The shopping cart is also very important.. Most ecommerce software packages use query string parameters to display all products through a single page. This is disastrous as far as search engine traffic goes. For starters it dramatically limits your Google rankings and indeed rankings with other leading search engines. What you need is ecommerce software that includes relevant keyword text in the separate product pages generated.

Ecommerce software that is SEO friendly should be able to automatically generate page titles, meta tags alt text and URL of every page that ensures the best search engine placement. It should also allow you to skip automatic settings. This is the best environment for SEO to thrive and win you ecommerce site valuable traffic directly from search engines. Equally important a function should be an ability to “remove” long control names in the HTML mark up. What this does is that it usually results in a higher keyword to mark up ratio which will definitely impact negatively on your SEO and traffic from search engines.

Many online entrepreneurs have experienced the horror of suddenly losing all their traffic. The reason being that Google will always drop all existing links if visitors receive a 404 File not found error when they try and access your pages. You need ecommerce software that allows for easy re-directs.

Andrea Berretti – Marketing Manager of eBizzers International. www.ebizzers.net. Taking the trouble to ensure that ecommerce software is SEO friendly is definitely worth the trouble. Try eBizzers Cart for free 30 days, your new Seo friendly E-commerce solution at www.ebizzers.net

By Hannah Du Plessis in Featured

webdesign4Is your website bringing in at least five new inquiries per day? If not, you need to look at its functionality.

Your website acts as a “storefront.” You should put as much thought and care into your website as you would to the display in your store’s window. Your website needs to attract customers and keep them coming back for more. The following should give you a place to start and a guideline of what a good website should have and what it should do:

1. Where Do Your Eyes Go First?

You only have a few seconds to catch a visitor’s attention. That means you need to make sure that you capture their interest immediately. You need a headline that stops them thinking whatever they’re thinking, and think instead: “hey, this looks interesting! I need to read this.”

2. Do You Know Right Away What This Website is About?

Don’t have any distractions from the message you are trying to get across. If you start talking about how great your company is instead of what the visitor is interested in, you lose them.

By Scott Buresh in Featured

SEOptimizationYes, you read the title right. My company recently performed extensive search engine optimization on a client website, and the results were staggering. Within a month, organic search traffic had dropped by over 60%. Inbound leads from organic search had dropped by over 50%. And the client was absolutely thrilled with the results.

So when is less organic search traffic better? And when are fewer leads from organic traffic better?

Less traffic from organic search traffic can be better when the site attracts the wrong kind of traffic, and fewer leads can be better when the site attracts the wrong kind of leads.

To give you some background, this particular client offered a highly-specialized service to B2B companies. The reputation of the company and the quality of the service commanded a high dollar figure per engagement. They were THE major player in an industry that they had practically invented. However, their prior search engine optimization company did not factor in any of these very important considerations while optimizing the website.

The firm in question was clearly from the “traffic-at-any-cost” school of search engine optimization, and they never engaged the client with the type of questions that you would expect from a real business partner, including the most basic questions, such as “Who is your target market?” They were not a marketing partner – they were a traffic delivery mechanism. They were not actively involved in the client’s success, because to them, increased organic search traffic was the sole measure of success.

By Kalena Jordan in Featured

gumby-doodleNot many people will recognize the name Art Clokey. But a lot more people will recognize the green clay animated character Gumby that he created.

Art Clokey was the pioneer of stop motion clay animation, bringing to life Gumby and his horse Pokey, who first appeared on the American kid’s show Howdy Doody. Art Clokey died last year, but to celebrate what would have been Clokey’s 90th birthday yesterday, Google’s home page featured the tribute doodle you see pictured.

The initial image shows a toy block and 5 balls of colored clay representing the letters in GOOGLE. Clicking on any one of the clay balls launches a delightful animation of the clay taking the shape of one of Clokey’s famous animated characters. A link above the doodle takes you to SERPs for Art Clokey and his life.

One of Google’s better doodles!

By Alesya Krush in Featured

SEO2I bet all SEO’s have faced this problem at least once – a client looking up their target keywords on the Internet and seeing different website rankings than the ones stated in the rankings report. How do you explain to clients that you are not trying to cheat them?

Users may get different search results for one and the same search term because of their:

1. Web History

Personalized search results are no secret to anyone. We know that nowadays search engines (particularly Google and Bing) custom-tailor your search results based on the queries you make, websites you visit and search results you click. What’s interesting is that your results get biased by default, unless you specifically opt out.

Search engines collect users’ browsing history in 2 major ways:

(1) by tracking signed-in users’ activities and
(2) by planting cookies into signed-out users’ browsers.

By David Jackson in Featured

googleyticsLike millions of other website owners, I use Google Analytics to analyze my website stats. And while I actually like GA a lot, it isn’t perfect. My biggest pet-peeve with the software is the fact it doesn’t provide real-time results. It has a lag time of at least an hour or two before you can view most of your data, and a full 24-hour lag time on full data reporting. With all the brilliant engineers Google employs, that particular flaw has never made any logical sense to me.

That negative aspect of GA has been bugging the heck out of me for years. Well, finally, that’s all about to change and fast.

How fast? By the time you read this article or shortly thereafter, GA will be providing real-time analytics. All I have to say is, it’s about time!

Google Analytics Announces Real-Time Reporting

On September 29th, John Jersin of the Google Analytics team announced:

“Today we’re very excited to bring real time data to Google Analytics with the launch of Google Analytics Real-Time: a set of new reports that show what’s happening on your site as it happens.

By Kalena Jordan in Featured

QuestionHi Everyone

From early days learning SEO, I went ahead and did all my meta descriptions with a bit of blurb about the page but my *Guru* has told me this is incorrect and I should include only the title of the page in the meta description, eg “Antique Dining Chairs” whereas I had put in “Antique Dining Chairs – over 500 chairs on display at the Glebe Antique Centre.  Dining chairs to match your table, occasional chairs for that special place in your home”.

Any thoughts before I go and change everything yet again?

Christine

————————————–

Hi Christine

From where I’m sitting, your *guru* is wrong. Remember, your meta description tag is often used as the snippet on the search results pages to describe your site.

So apart from including keywords, it has to do the job of convincing people to click on it. A nonsensical list of keywords is not going to convince people to click so you have to balance it out with an appealing sentence, preferably including a call-to-action or reason to click.

Yes, it’s important to put your keywords at the start of the tag if you can, but you have up to 160 characters in that tag indexed by search engines, so you should use the space to your advantage. Having a short, unimaginative meta description or simply copying your title tag is not going to make any difference to your overall rankings and is more likely to turn your potential visitors off.

Google admitted that it no longer considers the meta description tag in their ranking algorithm anyway, so, other search engines aside, the main job of the tag in Google SERPs is to convince people to click on the link and visit your site.

Put it this way: if you were in the market for an antique chair and you saw the following two listings in Google, which one would you click on?

  • Site1.com – “Antique Dining Chairs.”
  • Site2.com – “Antique Dining Chairs – over 500 chairs on display at the Glebe Antique Centre. Dining chairs to match your table, occasional chairs for that special place in your home.“

I’m thinking Site2.com – am I right? And – oh look! The longer tag managed to include *dining chairs* twice and a whole bunch of other keyword phrases as well: *dining chairs Glebe*, *chairs Glebe*, *occasional chairs*, *Antique(s) Glebe*.

Case closed.

————————————–

Got a Reader Rescue question of your own? Post it in the comments and you might see it featured here on the blog.

By Donna Anderson in Featured

spn_exclusiveThere’s been a lot of talk lately that article marketing has gone the way of the Do-Do bird, especially since the Google Panda update. As I see it though, the value of article marketing hasn’t diminished at all, the process itself has just evolved. Add guest blogging to your article marketing strategy and bring it back to life.

Most webmasters don’t realize it but guest blogging is another type of article marketing, one which produces much better results if done properly. After all, what’s a blog post? It’s just another article, only it’s published on a blog. And what’s a blog? A blog is another place to publish said article – just like an article directory but with better quality traffic.

How Does Guest Blogging Help Your Traffic?

Submitting articles to online directories is fine if you’re only after the link juice. But directories are not destination websites. The only time someone reads your article when it’s posted on a directory is if they come across the link while conducting a search. That’s all well and good if you have the number one spot, but if there are other articles that outrank yours on the index, the chances of someone reading your article are reduced.

An established blog, on the other hand, is a destination website, which means there are people who visit that blog directly, and repeatedly, to see what new information has been posted. Your guest blog post will be seen by all of those regular visitors, whether they were searching for that information or not.

Essentially, when you publish an article on a directory, your traffic is hit-and-miss. If it’s a hot topic and/or you rank well, you’ll get readers. But when your guest post is published you have a ready made audience arriving every day, ready to read the latest news.

How To Make Guest Blogging A Vital Part Of Your Article Marketing Strategy

Obviously, since you’re not just haphazardly submitting dozens of articles, it takes a little more effort to include guest blogging in your article marketing strategy. Here are some tips to make it well worth your while:

Choose Carefully: It’s important to choose your blogs carefully or you’ll just be wasting your time. You certainly don’t want your guest blog posts to be published on any questionable blogs. But even more important, you want to choose blogs that attract relevant traffic.

For example, it wouldn’t make any sense for you to submit a guest post on dog training tips to a blog about SEO practices. First of all, they probably wouldn’t accept it. But even if they did, none of their followers would read your post because that’s not the kind of information they’re looking for.

While traffic numbers shouldn’t be your main concern, the quality of the traffic coming into that blog is important. Look for activity in the comments section but also take a look at the SEO that’s been done. Are they pulling in targeted traffic that will be beneficial for you or are they using Justin Bieber and Britney Spears to drag in readers from all corners of the Web?

Don’t Worry About Traffic: Comment activity is usually a good sign but quantity doesn’t necessarily equal quality. A lot of blogs have lower traffic or activity levels but the traffic they do receive is highly targeted. Never underestimate the power of SEO.

Read the Blog: Now that you’ve narrowed your search, read the blog. Get a feel for the type of content they use, how they address their audience, and the type of information the audience is looking for. Is there a certain topic they talk about more than others, etc.

Read the Comments: Before I submit a guest blog post I always cruise the comments section. Sometimes you can pick up a really great idea from the regular readers of that blog. At the very least you’ll learn what they like to talk about.

Make Your Article Relevant: This is the hard part. Your first inclination will be to write an article just like you’d write for one of the directories, an article that gently leads people to click on your link. In some cases, that will be fine. But most bloggers won’t appreciate your self-promotion.

Concentrate instead on writing an article that showcases your expertise as it relates to that particular blog.

Write a Great Resource Box: Your resource box on your standard directory articles may seldom, if ever, be read. The reader arrived at your article looking for an answer to a specific question. If you answered it in your article, he’s satisfied and he’ll click away. If you didn’t answer it, he’s not satisfied, and he’ll click away in anger.

However, your resource box in your guest blog post will get a lot more attention, especially if you’ve written a good quality, informative, relevant post. Make sure you include these 4 things in your resource box:

1. Your name – Use your real name to establish credibility and authority
2. Your website URL – If you have the opportunity to include more than one link, make one of the URL and the other an anchor text link. Some readers still feel safer clicking on an actual URL.
3. Your USP – Tell the readers why they should click on your link. What is it that makes you special?
4. Your Call to Action – Tell the reader exactly what you want them to do. Click Here isn’t enough. You have to tell them what they’ll get if they do – Click Here to read my article about XYZ Now!

Think Outside the Box: There are thousands of guest blogging opportunities out there so it’s important to learn to think outside the box. It’s not necessary to look for blogs in your exact same niche. In fact, the whole point of guest blogging is to increase your visibility, so branching off into a related niche isn’t a bad idea.

For example, maybe you normally blog about vegetarian recipes and you come across someone looking for a guest blogger on their Baby Care blog. What a great opportunity for you to attract new parents who might be interested in a vegetarian diet for their babies. Write a guest blog post about homemade vegetarian baby food and you’ll attract a whole new audience.

Donna Anderson is a freelance writer specializing in SEO web content and article marketing techniques. Visit her blog at http://whitehatwriting.com for writing tips and article marketing advice and read her Squidoo lens to learn How to Write a Perfect Resource Box.

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