@BasilPuglisi

Content & Strategy, Powered by Factics & AI, Since 2009

Search engine optimization

How to Write Great Web Content if You’re Not a Writer

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We’ve all heard it before: Content is King. And your website needs it. Your site’s content is what tells your customers who you are, what you’re offering and why your business is better than the rest. It tells them where to go, who to call and what the next step is. It drives traffic to your site from Google. Your business cannot afford poorly-written content, but unfortunately, not everyone can afford a professional copywriter to convey their message for them.
There’s good news: Writing great Web content, even if you’re not a great writer, is not impossible. Here are several tips to get you started.
Less really is more.
Yes, your business is awesome, and you want everyone to know it. Yet there’s also something to be said about the guy who talks way too much about himself. Be brief with your website content. This can be tough when there’s a lot to say, so the first step involves understanding what your audience needs and giving it to them. No more, no less. If your company offers credit card processing for non-profits, outline the best services for accepting donations, but don’t go into too much detail. Long chunks of text that are loaded with jargon can get confusing and turn customers off.
Use call to actions.
A call to action gives your visitors direction and encourages them to take that next step to connect with your company:

  • Call now to speak with a representative.
  • Download our PDF to learn more about vehicle tracking using GPS.
  • Make an appointment to start improving your smile today!

Call to action text is usually linked to another page that brings visitors to a contact form, or it can be a single-word phrase within a button that downloads a program or PDF. Don’t hide your call to actions within the copy – make them clear and easy to see so your visitors know exactly what to do next.
Subheads and bullet points are your best friends.
While content is king, your website visitors probably aren’t spending too much time reading every single word. Instead, they’re scanning the copy to find what they’re looking for – benefits, product details, services, rates. Make it easy for them by breaking up your content into short paragraphs with clear subheads, as well as bullets that outline key points.
Add keywords with caution.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is crucial to helping your website get ranked and found through search engines. Optimizing your content with relevant keywords will help drive users to your site as they search Google for certain products and services.
However, it’s not as simple as stuffing your headlines and body copy with keywords and calling it a day. Your visitors can tell when you’re adding keywords just to add them, especially when you put no thought into how the keywords affect the flow of copy. More importantly, Google values quality content and penalizes keyword stuffing. Your site will rank higher when your content provides truly valuable information to your visitors.
Do you have any tips for writing great Web content?
Author:
Jacqui MacKenzie is a writer for Straight North, one of the leading Chicago Web design companies specializing in Internet marketing, social media and SEO. She writes for a wide range of clients, including providers of vehicle tracking using GPS and credit card processing for non-profits. Check out the Straight North blog! @ straightnorth
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Why Blogs Matter More than Ever for SEO

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I recently showed a college student a blog post I was working on, and he asked me what percentage of the content I dedicated to keyword phrases. He had taken a course in SEO, and he understood keyword density. So do I. But even as an SEO copywriter, it’s not really something that I take into account when writing content anymore.
Rather than give him a percentage, I explained to him that the number of times a keyword is placed within an article isn’t as important as it used be. Yes, keywords still play a big role, but the quality of the content has become a more critical factor in getting higher search results. That’s where blogs come into play.
The Rise of the Blog
Back in the day (1990s to early 2000s), blogs weren’t as widely accepted as they are now. Saying you had a blog was like telling people that you’re kind of a geek and you really like to talk about yourself. Last May, eMarketer reported that 53.5% of Internet users would read blogs in 2011. That’s 122.6 million blog readers. Today, blogs have become an effective way for people to share their opinions; stay updated on news, trends and topics that interest them; and have ongoing conversations with others who share those opinions and interests. For businesses, blogs have become a necessary tool for reaching customers on a higher level and improving SEO.
The rising value of blog content has not gone unnoticed when it comes to search results – Google wants to put the content that people read in front of them, and right now, that means blogs.
Keep Your Content Fresh and Relevant
Google favors new, fresh content, and in today’s fast-paced market, content can get outdated pretty quickly. Maintaining a continually updated blog on your company website allows you to keep adding new content to your site without having to completely rework product or service pages. In addition, the content must contain valuable information – Google Panda updates now put low-quality content created solely for link building at the bottom of search results.
Guest Blog, Guest Blog, Guest Blog
Writing guest posts on other blogs has a number of benefits, one of which includes SEO value. Guest posts often allow back links to your blog and website within your blogger bio. Good relationships with authoritative bloggers can be incredibly valuable for SEO, especially if the blogs have high page ranks, as Google is impressed by link quality and diversity. Networking also helps establish your own blog as an authority in your niche.
Social Sharing
The better quality the content, the more it’s shared through social media. Google recognizes social sharing, such as tweets, retweets, Facebook likes and Google +1’s. Internet users are much quicker to share a blog post, rather than a website page, through Twitter. With the rise of Pinterest, blogs that post quality images are also being shared more, resulting in increased traffic and higher search rankings.
Do you have a blog? Are you using it to improve your SEO strategy?
Author:

Jacqui MacKenzie is a writer for Straight North, one of the leading Internet marketing companies in Chicago. She writes for a wide range of clients, from providers of GPS for vehicle tracking to broadcasting equipment specialists. Check out the Straight North blog! @ straightnorth

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StumbleUpon’s New Front End Approach

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StumbleUpon is a very popular social media sharing and aggregation site with over 20 million users. They recently launched an immense user-end overhaul that changed pretty much everything about their site.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=F8DtI9e4xZ8]

Though they have just recently removed themes, groups, and blogs from their site, the new changes seem focused on directing users away from the site and back to using their toolbar, whether they have the iFrame or installed versions.

Direct Link Removal

One move that seems to have surprised many in the industry is the removal of all the direct links that point to content sources from within Stumbleupon. Now there is a single button for ‘Stumble This’ that when clicked transfers the user to an iframed version of the chosen content.

This reason behind the controversy is that now that all content from the site is iframed, once logged into the StumbleUpon system, there is no way to remove the toolbar, always leaving you in the iframed version of their site.

The Reaction

Although a bit before the change was launched, StumbleUpon employees discussed how happy they were that their pages had high SEO value for content owners, it seems they may not feel that way anymore.

Rebranding?

Although this may be a part of their larger re-branding plan, forcing users to browse in iframes may not be the best move yet. Before, users could simply X out of the StumbleUpon frame if they wanted to visit a site directly. Now viewers are forced to browse within the frame. Once logged out of the site, the toolbar is easily X’d out, which leaves many users wondering how useful the new change really is.

Author:

@BasilPuglisi is the Executive Director and Publisher for Digital Brand Marketing Education (dbmei.com). Basil C. Puglisi is also the President of Puglisi Consulting Group, Inc. A Digital Brand Marketing Consultancy that manages professional and personal branding for Fortune 500 CEOs, Hedge Fund Managers and Small Business Owners.

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The Path Less Taken: Google+

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We’ve all heard about Google+; but to be quite honest, Google’s social network seemed to fizzle out after its release. It’s certainly no Facebook or Twitter, but that hasn’t stopped several major marketers from switching gears lately to focus on Google+. But why? Not only is Google+ no Twitter and Facebook, but February reports showed that the average Google+ user spends a total of 3 minutes on the site monthly. This compared to Facebook’s 405 minute average and Pinterest’s and Tumbler’s 100 minute average demonstrates Google+’s deceptive shortcoming . However, the reason marketers are turning their attention to this social networking platform is because Google+ is imperative in the world of social media and SEO, and here’ why.

Social Web Experience

Google+ is so much more than a social network as it gives users something new: a complete social web experience. Unlike Facebook and Twitter, Google+ implements all of the services of Google into its social network: we’re talking Google Voice, Google Shopping, location filtered Google Search Engine Results, Google Video, photo sharing, and the list goes on. Google+ isn’t just about connecting with friends, it’s about connecting with the world. And in that connection, users share their personal and commercial experiences with the world, offering market researchers huge opportunities. And because Google+ is more than a social network, it is attractive and convenient to users. According to Google-plus.com, this is evident by the fact that by January 2012 Google+ was boasting 90 million active users worldwide, making it the 4th largest social networking platform in the world; and of course, one must take into account that this success comes only 6 months after the social network’s beta version was released.

Impact on the World of SEO

Two things make Google+ more important in the world of SEO than any other social network. First, because sharing and endorsing commercial items is both convenient and appealing to users, they are driven to participate; they this by utilizing Google+’s “+1” button. Through this utilization, users not only share public endorsement of products, services, websites, and the like on Google+ and websites, but through Google’s search engine; user’s Google+ friend’s +1 recommendations, if relevant, show up in their Google searches. Not to mention that the +1 button has been implemented into all results on Google’s search engine result pages; this is a big deal considering that Google holds more than 66 percent of the search engine market share, according to searchengineland.com.
Second, because everywhere we look features the +1 button, this means something big to SEO. Think about it. Google operates the majority of the search engine market. Millions of people flock to Google to query searches every day. Google+ and Google+1s directly affect SEO. Google owns Google+. Therefore it isn’t a far leap to assume that Google will give Google+ more weight in its algorithms than other social networks. So, put quite bluntly, anyone hoping to utilize SEO is completely and hopelessly dependent on Google and its secret algorithms.
Author:
Amber Paley is a guest post and article writer bringing to us information on why many marketers are turning their attention to Google+. Outraged by the prevalence of elder abuse in the U.S., Amber spends much of her professional life writing educational articles to help those affected by elder abuse find a good nursing home abuse lawyer. Amber’s social profile can be found at http://about.me/amberpaley
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Optimizing Your Landing Page for Better Conversions

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Your Landing page is the heart of your site. Irrespective of whether you have a product or a service to sell, landing pages can provide a subsequent boost to the conversion rate. Optimizing them is not hard if you know when and where to tweak the various elements. However, the hardest part is to find the elements that require some tweaks. This brings us to the fact that there is no rule sculpted over the stones which provides guidance towards the perfect optimization of landing pages.
Some ideas can optimize your landing page for better performance. They are:
Loading speed:
A landing page that loads faster has better conversion rate when put into comparison with a page that loads slower. Therefore you very first aim should be to increase the loading speed of your landing page. Factors that can be an obstacle to increase the loading speed are:
1. Images: Too many images over your landing page can be responsible for slow loading. Though images are eye capturers and are very much essential, it is necessary that you limit their usage. Cut down on any images that is irrelevant to the content. As far as possible try to eliminate the images of huge sizes as these consume more loading time. A single image at any specific fold of the page is the best practice.
2. Videos: Videos are widely used to replace written content. However, you should be aware of the fact that videos can never replace written content. Some people have completely stripped their landing page of written content and have replaced them by a long sales video. Users those who have a high internet speed connection will be sated whereas the users with slow internet speed will have no other option but to leave the page.
A smart marketer will tell you to balance your page in terms of written content and videos. A video clip should be used only when you are unable to explain a certain idea in written content. For example, let us say you are promoting your dancing lessons. The landing page can be a mix of written content which will be used to promote your product and the videos can be used to show clips of some complex dancing steps which might be impossible to put into written words.
Note: In many cases the loading speed of your page is attributed to your hosting company. Webhostingpad and register.com are some of the hosting companies that provide excellent hosting with fast loading speed.
Length of the page
What should be the length of the page? Should I provide the readers with just the basic information or detailed information about the product? These two questions spring simultaneously while designing a landing page. Again, there is no rule stating the length and the amount of the information that has to be provided as the answer to the above two questions depends upon the answer of the following question, how much information do your customers require to trust your product?
The amount of information provided should be enough for your customers to trust your product. The content in question can be of just a short paragraph or can be a never ending landing page. However, your copywriter should be talented enough to create a stunning copy so that your reader is adhered to the page until they make a purchase. Moreover, a balance between video and content will make your landing page look great.
Tone of the copy
Personalization is the magic word when it comes to marketing. The sad part is the overuse of the magic word. Imagine yourself to be looking out for a product and you suddenly arrive at a landing page where it is full of colloquial language sprinkled with emoticons. Would you like to risk your $40 in purchasing the product though the price seems to be reasonable? Hardly any of us will make a purchase from such a place.
When marketers mean personalization, they are telling you to write a copy that can be taken as personal without losing the soul of business. An image of yours is critical when it comes to personalization. The next part is to write a copy which appears to be a personalized one while still holding the nature of business. Once you get a good copywriter this shouldn’t be much of a concern to you.
Experiment
In some cases changing just a sentence can affect the conversion rate. Therefore, consistent experiment with your landing page is necessary. Split experiment can provide better results when using trial and error methods.
These few tips will, though trivial, when applied can affect the conversion rate in huge numbers.
Author:
Richie Richardson is a prolific writer on Internet Marketing and Social Media. He also writes for webhostingpad discount codes and register.com discount codes. You can make use of the deals provided by webhostingpad and register.com for your hosting needs.
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SES New York Conference and Expo 2012 [Event]

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March 19 – 23
Hilton New York
1335 Ave Americas
New York, NY 10019

The SES Conference and Expo is a series of conferences and events in which a special focus is given to best practices, tips, and trends in many different areas.

  • SEO
  • PPC
  • RTBEnglish: Avinash Kaushik
  • Demand Gen
  • Mobile
  • Social
  • Local

The SES events provide leadership instruction from some of the industry’s top experts. As usual, SES New York will have some highly recognized and respected professionals to educate attendees.

Just after morning coffee on Tuesday March 20th, Avinash Kaushik, Digital Marketing Evangelist for Google, will be a key speaker on the topic of balancing multiple media channels and leveraging the Clear Line of Sight model to help ensure business owners are optimizing across all important business drivers. Avinash is also the author of two bestselling books: Web Analytics 2.0, Web Analytics: An Hour A Day, of which 100% of the proceeds go to his favorite charities.  Be sure to come to the keynote to learn which top four business drivers Avinash believes are most vital to your growth.

After Avinash’s set there will be five simultaneous sessions that attendees can choose from.

The Tools of the Trade for SEO

This session will help if you are a party responsible for a business’s SEO. Attendees will learn about up-to-date tools that will help you more efficiently accomplish your daily tasks such as:

  • Diagnosing and Correcting Issues
  • Indexing
  • Competitive Analysis
  • On-Site Optimization
  • Site and Page Level Information

Paid Search Competitive Analysis

It is part of any essential business plan to understand the particular strengths and weaknesses of the competition. The knowledge can be invaluable when it comes to learning which links you should acquire, what to pay for ads, which content you should offer, and the customer base you would like to gain. With moderator Andrew Goodman,  of the SES Advisory Board, who is President of Page Zero Media and fantastic speakers Stephanie Bailey the Client Manager for Adlucent and Matt Van Wagner, President of Find Me Faster, attendees are certain to take away vital information about new trends in tools and analysis as well as other information critical to understanding your toughest competitors.

Crossing the Digital Divide: The Leap from Search to Display

In many cases, display advertising can lack in the areas of placement, targeted pricing, and ROI of search. Three notable speakers will share fresh takes on media models for your business.

These speakers will present an intro to DSPs and ad exchanges, overviews of new display optimization strategies, and give plenty of advice for those already experienced search marketers who would like to take the leap into exchange-traded display.

Search Engine Marketing 101

This intro session will supply attendees with a comprehensive overview of all of the key concepts involved in search engine marketing. The speaker will be Bill Hunt from the SES Advisory Board and President of Back Azimuth Consulting. Attendees can expect to have vital SEM questions answered such as:

  • How can my site be best optimized to attract organic traffic without excess costs?
  • What are the major search engines that I should be concerned about?
  • How can I achieve high ranking or placement with search engine ad opportunities?

The last session for this conference hour is soon to be determined.

DBMEi Subscriber Discount

The SES has an incredible agenda prepared so do not miss out on your chance to attend or the opportunity to get a great discount for doing so just for being a DBMEi subscriber. Head to the registration and pricing page for SES New York 2012 and be sure to enter the code DBM20 for a 20% discount on your price.

Author:

@BasilPuglisi is the Executive Director and Publisher for Digital Brand Marketing Education (dbmei.com). Basil C. Puglisi is also the President of Puglisi Consulting Group, Inc. A Digital Brand Marketing Consultancy that manages professional and personal branding for Fortune 500 CEOs, Hedge Fund Managers and Small Business Owners.

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The New Social Marketing Strategy with Google+

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As a marketer, your social profile must be thriving on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. But the important question is, ‘Is it thriving over Google+?’ I can assure you that most of you will answer in the negative. However, it is not too late. Grab a business page over at Google+ as soon as you finish reading this.
Google is smart and knows how to beat down its competitors. When Google+ was launched, none had the slightest idea that it will be used as a cutting edge in the market by Google. Yes, Google has merged the search engine and the social network as one. This attempt by Google can be described as ‘Social Searching’.

Search + Your World

It is the new Search plus Your World (Search plus Your World) I am talking about. When you do a Google search, being logged into your Google+ account, you will find that results are being personalized to match your taste. Let us consider that you are searching for ‘body building tips’ and if one of your friends within your circle has written about it then it will be shown to you in the search results. Seems good eh? Here comes the truth.
Google, in the name of personalizing your searches, is forcing the results of Google+ under your throat. How? Let me explain in a more elaborate manner. Suppose you wish to know about a certain brand or celebrity and you would like to give a search over Google. In the search results you will notice that the brand’ or celebrity’s Google+ profile is given preference. Now, do you understand what Google is up to? Yes, it is competing with other social networks taking advantage of its search engine.
Google gives less importance to other social network’s posts and therefore the more urgency in getting your business page over Google+ as soon as possible. A business page over Google+ will help people find your business over search results. However, just a page is not sufficient to boost your business to the required level. Here is one of my social marketing ideas that you can incorporate in your business page over Google+.

Ways to Win at Google +

It is more likely that Google+ posts are to be shown in the search results. Include the keyword in the title as well as the body of the post so that it will help the Google bots to index it and show over the search results. Here comes an added advantage to you as a marketer by including the keyword in posts. Instead of explaining it let me show you with a theoretical example.
Let us consider that you have a blog/website dealing with ‘Diet’ and you wish to optimize a certain article or page for a keyword. When doing a keyword search over any keyword tool you find the keyword ‘diet foods’ has high volume of search and with lesser competition. On the other hand the keyword ‘safe weight loss’ has the same value as ‘diet foods’ to a certain extent. Confused, you optimize your content for the keyword ‘diet foods’ and therefore leave the keyword ‘safe weight loss’.
After posting the article (optimized for ‘diet foods’) over your site, you generally share it to social networks by just pasting the link and allowing the social network to grab the first five lines of the content. In case of Google+ you can try the other way around. The article which was written around ‘Diet Foods’ can also be written around ‘Safe weight loss’, though the latter keyword cannot compensate wholly but it can at least be used as introducer to the content. Yes, write a title and a short description around the keyword ‘safe weight loss’ and manually paste it to the Google+. Later you can include the link of your content and let the social network have its way with it.

What are the Pros?

What is the advantage of doing this extra work? Let me remind you again that Google is going to crawl every post in Google+ and therefore your post which has a short description given by you manually as well as the short description which Google + has indexed for you over its network are both going to be shown over search result. Irrespective of whether a user searches for ‘diet foods’ or ‘safe weight loss’, the chances of your post appearing in the search result will increase.
The odd of the post being shown to the users increases if the user is within your circle. Therefore, it is better that you start focusing on Google+. At the same time do not abandon your audience over other network, because who knows what the future of social marketing will be.

Before I can wrap up, some of you might know that Google provides the ability of depersonalizing your search results. Yes, it’s true. But how many of you will depersonalize your search results and opt for a more global search? Maybe some of us would depersonalize the searches and would like a pure Google search. Will the common user care to do it? I do not think so. When most users find what they are searching for, none will care to depersonalize their search results.
Author:
Richie Richardson is a Social Marketing Expert and SEO Analyst. You can reach him over his blog www.zarrylyms.com where he discusses on current issues regarding Social Marketing, Branding, Affiliate Marketing, SEO and B2B.
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Understand the Basics of SEO: Why Geo and Subject Domain Names Rock!

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Search Engines are in the business of helping a user find the content they are looking for! If you keep this in mind you’ll start off with a great relationship with the Search Engines and the Visitors to your site.

Websites have three main areas you’ll want to really pay attention to:

  1. Structure
  2. Content
  3. References

[slideshare id=7181167&doc=seo101-110307150053-phpapp01]

As a website owner you’ll want this to be how you operate your lead generation through the search engines. Unless you’re an adult site, gambling or daily deal, people will not generally respond to a website about Plumbing when they were searching for Pizza.

Time and Money are important, you’ll get alot further if you concentrate your resources were they should be and where they will produce the highest rate of conversion. If you’re going to chase down multiple areas and categories do it in a way that provides unique, useful and provides a genuine experience for the user.

SEO Tip: Geo & Subject Domains > Brand Domains

An example of how this has been done is through domain masking and forwarding. Take the Domain PapaJohns.com, now that’s a great domain because people looking for “papa john’s” will find exactly what they are looking for, but will they still find it if they put in “MyTown Pizza” like “Brooklyn Pizza”, “Chicago Pizza”?

Here is an example of how we use forwarding on Digital Brand Marketing Education, the publically promoted domain is dbmei.com and that makes sense because it is short and simple. It makes for easy emails and sharing in social media without having to shorten the domain. However When you land on the site, you notice the actual domain changes to digitalbrandmarketing.com

Search Engines give a lot of value to domains, after all if you’re naming the site that, then those words must be relevant. In our case we want people looking for “Digital, Brand and/or Marketing”  to find our publication and those keywords fit perfectly with our content.

If you own Jerry’s Seafood.com, and your restaurant is in the town or geographic location of East Hampton, you might want to think about masking or forwarding the domain to easthamptonseafood.com or easthamptonseafoodrestaurant.com.

This is just one tip to help with your sites SEO, obviously you want the title tags, content, etc to all also fit this search term.

 

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New Google Newsletter and Mobile Adwords Features

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Google Adwords launched new features in September 2011. These new features are geared towards making site clicks and even subscriptions to site newsletters or blogs easier to accomplish. Being able to get signed up to internal site options from the external source of a Google browser could go a long way in increasing traffic for those who utilize these methods.

AdWords Subscribe Option

Adwords now provides an option to allow Google search engine users to subscribe directly from a PPC ad. The option to subscribe to newsletters or email lists can be displayed on top or side ads.

All ads are displayed with “Privacy Info” that lets the viewer know that information shared in the input boxes will be shared with the advertiser.

Mobile Landing Pages

A recent study found that 61% of mobile browsers are not likely to return to a site that does not provide a good mobile experience. In response, Google initiated a shift in their policy that will now reward mobile sites with good optimization. Users with good mobile optimization who promote their sites with Google Adwords will now receive better performance. The ads created will drive traffic at a lower cost if they directly link to your site that is optimized for mobile users.

How Will This Affect Me?

If you are a business owner, whether or not you use Google Adwords, the time to optimize your site for mobile users is now. Even without the use of Google Adwords to promote a site, knowing that over half of mobile browsers will never return to your non-optimized site should be enough to push you into sprucing up your site to accommodate users on mobile devices. Getting rid of flash heavy content is a great step towards optimizing for mobile usage.

How Do I Optimize My Site for Mobile?

Google has offered a few suggestions to help you get your site optimized for mobile usage.

  • Keep the layout and design simple
  • Prioritize your content
  • Use markedly mobile features
  • Make your site easy to convert

If you want to know how well your site functions on mobile devices, grab your device and load up your site. If it is frustrating for you to navigate, you may want to make the changes required to encourage mobile use of your web pages.

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