World of SEO

SEO Tutorial For Beginners in 2016

2016-01-13T06:53:00.000-08:00

What is SEO?

Search Engine Optimisation in 2016 is a technical, analytical and creative process to improve the visibility of a website in search engines, with the aim of driving more potential customers to it.

These free SEO tips will help you create a successful SEO friendly website yourself, based on my 15 years experience making websites rank in Google. If you need optimisation services – see my SEO audit or small business seo services.

An Introduction

This is a beginner’s guide to effective white hat SEO. I deliberately steer clear of techniques that might be ‘grey hat’, as what is grey today is often ‘black hat’ tomorrow, as far as Google is concerned.

No one-page guide can explore this complex topic in full. What you’ll read here are answers to questions I had when I was starting out in this field.

The ‘Rules.’

Google insists webmasters adhere to their ‘rules’ and aims to reward sites with high-quality content and remarkable ‘white hat’ web marketing techniques with high rankings.

Conversely, it also needs to penalise websites that manage to rank in Google by breaking these rules.

These rules are not ‘laws’, but ‘guidelines’, for ranking in Google; lay down by Google. You should note, however, that some methods of ranking in Google are, in fact, illegal. Hacking, for instance, is illegal in the UK and US.

You can choose to follow and abide by these rules, bend them or ignore them – all with different levels of success (and levels of retribution, from Google’s web spam team).

White hats do it by the ‘rules’; black hats ignore the ‘rules’.

What you read in this article is perfectly within the laws and also within the guidelines and will help you increase the traffic to your website through organic, or natural search engine results pages (SERPs).

Definition

There are a lot of definitions of SEO (spelled Search engine optimisation in the UK, Australia and New Zealand, or search engine optimization in the United States and Canada) but organic SEO in 2016 is mostly about getting free traffic from Google, the most popular search engine in the world (and almost the only game in town in the UK):

Opportunity

The art of web SEO lies in understanding how people search for things and understanding what type of results Google wants to (or will) display to its users. It’s about putting a lot of things together to look for opportunity.

A good optimiser has an understanding of how search engines like Google generate their natural SERPs to satisfy users’ navigational, informational and transactionalkeyword queries.

Risk Management

A good search engine marketer has a good understanding of the short term and long term risks involved in optimising rankings in search engines, and an understanding of the type of content and sites Google (especially) WANTS to return in its natural SERPs.

The aim of any campaign is more visibility in search engines and this would be a simple process if it were not for the many pitfalls.

There are rules to be followed or ignored, risks to take, gains to make, and battles to be won or lost.

Free Traffic

A Mountain View spokesman once called the search engine ‘kingmakers‘, and that’s no lie.

Ranking high in Google is VERY VALUABLE – it’s effectively ‘free advertising’ on the best advertising space in the world.

Traffic from Google natural listings is STILL the most valuable organic traffic to a website in the world, and it can make or break an online business.

The state of play, in 2016, is that you can STILL generate highly targeted leads, for FREE, just by improving your website and optimising your content to be as relevant as possible for a customer looking for your company, product or service.

As you can imagine, there’s a LOT of competition now for that free traffic – even from Google (!) in some niches.

You shouldn’t compete with Google. You should focus on competing with your competitors.

The Process

The process can be practised, successfully, in a bedroom or a workplace, but it has traditionally always involved mastering many skills as they arose including diverse marketing technologies including but not limited to:

Website design
Accessibility
Usability
User experience
Website development
PHP, HTML, CSS, etc.
Server management
Domain management
Copywriting
Spreadsheets
Backlink analysis
Keyword research
Social media promotion
Software development
Analytics and data analysis
Information architecture
Research
Looking at Google for hours on end

It takes a lot, in 2016, to rank on merit a page in Google in competitive niches.

User Experience

The big stick Google is hitting every webmaster with (at the moment, and for the foreseeable future) is the ‘QUALITY USER EXPERIENCE‘ stick.

If you expect to rank in Google in 2016, you’d better have a quality offering, not based entirely on manipulation, or old school tactics.

Is a visit to your site a good user experience?

If not – beware manual ‘Quality Raters’ and beware the Google Panda/Site Qualityalgorithms that are looking for low-quality content and other issues that Google classifies as a poor user experience for its users.

Google raising the ‘quality bar’, year on year, ensures a higher level of quality in online marketing in general (above the very low-quality we’ve seen over the last years).

Success online involves investment in higher quality on-page content, website architecture, usability, conversion to optimisation balance, and promotion.

If you don’t take that route, you’ll find yourself chased down by Google’s algorithms at some point in the coming year.

This ‘what is SEO‘ guide (and this entire website) is not about churn and burn type of Google SEO (called webspam to Google) as that is too risky to deploy on a real business website in 2016.

What Is A Successful Strategy?

Get relevant. Get trusted. Get Popular.

It is no longer just about manipulation in 2016.

It’s about adding quality and often useful content to your website that together meet a PURPOSE that delivers USER SATISFACTION.

If you are serious about getting more free traffic from search engines, get ready to invest time and effort in your website and online marketing.

Quality Signals

Google wants to rank QUALITY documents in its results, and force those who wish to rank high to invest in higher-quality content or great service that attracts editorial links from reputable websites.

If you’re willing to add a lot of great content to your website, and create buzz about your company, Google will rank you high.

If you try to manipulate Google, it will penalise you for a period, and often until you fix the offending issue – which we know can LAST YEARS.

Backlinks in general, for instance, are STILL weighed FAR too positively by Google and they are manipulated to drive a site to the top positions – for a while. That’s why blackhats do it – and they have the business model to do it. It’s the easiest way to rank a site, still today.

If you are a real business who intends to build a brand online – you can’t use black hat methods. Full stop.

If you have been penalised by Google, fixing the problems will not necessarily bring organic traffic back as it was.

Recovery from a Google penalty is a ‘growth’ process as much as it is a ‘clean-up’ process.

Google Rankings Are In Constant Ever-Flux

It’s Google’s job to MAKE MANIPULATING SERPs HARD.

So – the people behind the algorithms keep ‘moving the goalposts’, modifying the ‘rules’ and raising ‘quality standards’ for pages that compete for top ten rankings.

In 2016 – we have ever-flux in the SERPs – and that seems to suit Google and keep everybody guessing.

Google is very secretive about its ‘secret sauce’ and offers sometimes helpful and sometimes vague advice – and some say offers misdirection – about how to get more from valuable traffic from Google.

Google is on record as saying the engine is intent on ‘frustrating’ search engine optimisers attempts to improve the amount of high-quality traffic to a website – at least (but not limited to) – using low-quality strategies classed as web spam.

At its core, Google search engine optimisation is still about KEYWORDS and LINKS. It’s about RELEVANCE, REPUTATION and TRUST. It is about QUALITY OF CONTENT & VISITOR SATISFACTION.

A Good USER EXPERIENCE is a key to winning – and keeping – the highest rankings in many verticals.

Relevance, Authority & Trust

Web page optimisation is about making a web page being relevant enough for a query, and being trusted enough to rank for it.

It’s about ranking for valuable keywords for the long term, on merit. You can play by ‘white hat’ rules lay down by Google, and aim to build this Authority andTrust naturally, over time, or you can choose to ignore the rules and go full time ‘black hat’.

MOST SEO tactics still work, for some time, on some level, depending on who’s doing them, and how the campaign is deployed.

Whichever route you take, know that if Google catches you trying to modify your rank using overtly obvious and manipulative methods, then they will class you a web spammer, and your site will be penalised ( you will not rank high for relevant keywords).

These penalties can last years if not addressed, as some penalties expire and some do not – and Google wants you to clean up any violations.

Google does not want you to try and modify where you rank, easily. Critics would say Google would prefer you paid them to do that using Google Adwords.

The problem for Google is – ranking high in Google organic listings is a real social proof for a business, a way to avoid PPC costs and still, simply, the BEST WAY to drive VALUABLE traffic to a site.

It’s FREE, too, once you’ve met the always-increasing criteria it takes to rank top.

Google Penalties

In 2016, you need to be aware that what works to improve your rank can also get you penalised (faster, and a lot more noticeably).

In particular, the Google web spam team is currently waging a PR war on sites that rely on unnatural links and other ‘manipulative’ tactics (and handing out severe penalties if it detects them). And that’s on top of many algorithms already designed to look for other manipulative tactics (like keyword stuffing or boilerplate text across pages).

Google is making sure it takes longer to see results from black and white hat SEO, and intent on ensuring a flux in its SERPs based largely on where the searcher is in the world at the time of the search, and where the business is located near to that searcher.

There are some things you cannot directly influence legitimately to improve your rankings, but there is plenty you CAN do to drive more Google traffic to a web page.

Ranking Factors

Google has HUNDREDS of ranking factors with signals that can change daily, weekly, monthly or yearly to help it work out where your page ranks in comparison to other competing pages in SERPs.

You will not ever find every ranking factor. Many ranking factors are on-page or on-site and others are off-page or off-site. Some ranking factors are based on where you are, or what you have searched for before.

I’ve been in online marketing for 15 years. In that time, a lot has changed. I’ve learned to focus on aspects that offer the greatest return on investment of your labour.

Learn SEO Basics….

Here are few simple SEO tips to begin with:

If you are just starting out, don’t think you can fool Google about everything all the time. Google has VERY probably seen your tactics before. So, it’s best to keep your plan simple. GET RELEVANT. GET REPUTABLE. Aim for a good, satisfying visitor experience. If you are just starting out – you may as well learn how to do it within Google’s Webmaster Guidelines first. Make a decision, early, if you are going to follow Google’s guidelines, or not, and stick to it. Don’t be caught in the middle with an important project. Do not always follow the herd.
If your aim is to deceive visitors from Google, in any way, Google is not your friend. Google is hardly your friend at any rate – but you don’t want it as your enemy. Google will send you lots of free traffic though if you manage to get to the top of search results, so perhaps they are not all that bad.
A lot of optimisation techniques that are effective in boosting sites rankings in Google are against Google’s guidelines. For example many links that may have once promoted you to the top of Google, may, in fact, today be hurting your site and its ability to rank high in Google. Keyword stuffing might be holding your page back…. You must be smart, and cautious, when it comes to building links to your site in a manner that Google *hopefully* won’t have too much trouble with, in the FUTURE. Because they willpunish you in the future.
Don’t expect to rank number 1 in any niche for a competitive without a lot of investment, work. Don’t expect results overnight. Expecting too much too fast might get you in trouble with the spam team.
You don’t pay anything to get into Google, Yahoo or Bing natural, or free listings. It’s common for the major search engines to find your website pretty easily by themselves within a few days. This is made so much easier if your website actually ‘pings’ search engines when you update content (via XML sitemaps or RSS for instance).
To be listed and rank high in Google and other search engines, you really should consider and largely abide by search engine rules and official guidelines for inclusion. With experience and a lot of observation, you can learn which rules can be bent, and which tactics are short term and perhaps, should be avoided.
Google ranks websites (relevancy aside for a moment) by the number and quality of incoming links to a site from other websites (amongst hundreds of other metrics). Generally speaking, a link from a page to another page is viewed in Google “eyes” as a vote for that page the link points to. The more votes a page gets, the more trusted a page can become, and the higher Google will rank it – in theory. Rankings are HUGELY affected by how much Google ultimately trusts the DOMAIN the page is on. BACKLINKS (links from other websites – trump every other signal.)
I’ve always thought if you are serious about ranking – do so with ORIGINAL COPY. It’s clear – search engines reward good content it hasn’t found before. It indexes it blisteringly fast, for a start (within a second, if your website isn’t penalised!). So – make sure each of your pages has enough text content you have written specifically for that page – and you won’t need to jump through hoops to get it ranking.
If you have original, quality content on a site, you also have a chance of generating inbound quality links (IBL). If your content is found on other websites, you will find it hard to get links, and it probably will not rank very well as Google favours diversity in its results. If you have decent original content on your site, you can then let authority websites – those with online business authority – know about it, and they might link to you – this is called a quality backlink.
Search engines need to understand a link is a link. Links can be designed to be ignored by search engines with the rel nofollow attribute.
Search engines can also find your site by other websites linking to it. You can also submit your site to search engines direct, but I haven’t submitted any site to a search engine in the last ten years – you probably don’t need to do that. If you have a new site, I would immediately register it with Google Webmaster Tools these days.
Google and Bing use a crawler (Googlebot and Bingbot) that spiders the web looking for new links to find. These bots might find a link to your homepage somewhere on the web and then crawl and index the pages of your site if all your pages are linked together. If your website has an XML sitemap, for instance, Google will use that to include that content in its index. An XML sitemap is INCLUSIVE, not EXCLUSIVE. Google will crawl and index every single page on your site – even pages out with an XML sitemap.
Many think Google will not allow new websites to rank well for competitive terms until the web address “ages” and acquires “trust” in Google – I think this depends on the quality of the incoming links. Sometimes your site will rank high for a while then disappears for months. A “honeymoon period” to give you a taste of Google traffic, no doubt.
Google WILL classify your site when it crawls and indexes your site – and this classification can have a DRASTIC effect on your rankings – it’s important for Google to work out WHAT YOUR ULTIMATE INTENT IS – do you want to be classified as an affiliate site made ‘just for Google’, a domain holding page or a small business website with a real purpose? Ensure you don’t confuse Google by being explicit with all the signals you can – to show on your website you are a real business, and your INTENT is genuine – and even more importantly today – FOCUSED ON SATISFYING A VISITOR.
NOTE – If a page exists only to make money from Google’s free traffic – Google calls this spam. I go into this more, later in this guide.
The transparency you provide on your website in text and links about who you are, what you do, and how you’re rated on the web or as a business is one way that Google could use (algorithmically and manually) to ‘rate’ your website. Note that Google has a HUGE army of quality raters and at some point they will be on your site if you get a lot of traffic from Google.
To rank for specific keyword phrase searches, you usually need to have the keyword phrase or highly relevant words on your page (not necessarily all together, but it helps) or in links pointing to your page/site.
Ultimately what you need to do to compete is largely dependent on what the competition for the term you are targeting is doing. You’ll need to at least mirror how hard they are competing if a better opportunity is hard to spot.
As a result of other quality sites linking to your site, the site now has a certain amount of real PageRank that is shared with all the internal pages that make up your website that will in future help provide a signal to where this page ranks in the future.
Yes, you need to build links to your site to acquire more PageRank, or Google ‘juice’ – or what we now call domain authority or trust. Google is a link-based search engine – it does not quite understand ‘good’ or ‘quality’ content – but it does understand ‘popular’ content. It can also usually identify poor, or THIN CONTENT – and it penalises your site for that – or – at least – it takes away the traffic you once had with an algorithm change. Google doesn’t like calling actions the take a ‘penalty’ – it doesn’t look good. They blame your ranking drops on their engineers getting better at identifying quality content or links, or the inverse – low-quality content and unnatural links. If they do take action your site for paid links – they call this a ‘Manual Action’ and you will get notified about it in Webmaster Tools if you sign up.
Link building is not JUST a numbers game, though. One link from a “trusted authority” site in Google could be all you need to rank high in your niche. Of course, the more “trusted” links you attract, the more Google will trust your site. It is evident you need MULTIPLE trusted links from MULTIPLE trusted websites to get the most from Google in 2016.
Try and get links within page text pointing to your site with relevant, or at least, natural looking, keywords in the text link – not, for instance, in blogrolls or site-wide links. Try to ensure the links are not obviously “machine generated” e.g. site-wide links on forums or directories. Get links from pages, that in turn, have a lot of links to them, and you will soon see benefits.
Onsite, consider linking to your other pages by linking to them within text. I usually only do this when it is relevant – often, I’ll link to relevant pages when the keyword is in the title elements of both pages. I don’t go in for auto-generating links at all. Google has penalised sites for using particular auto link plugins, for instance, so I avoid them.
Linking to a page with actual key-phrases in the link help a great deal in all search engines when you want to feature for specific key terms. For example; “SEO Scotland” as opposed to http://www.hobo-web.co.uk or “click here“. Saying that – in 2016, Google is punishing manipulative anchor text very aggressively, so be sensible – and stick to brand mentions and plain URL links that build authority with less risk. I rarely ever optimise for grammatically incorrect terms these days (especially with links).
I think the anchor text links in internal navigation is still valuable – but keep it natural. Google needs links to find and help categorise your pages. Don’t underestimate the value of a clever internal link keyword-rich architecture and be sure to understand for instance how many words Google counts in a link, but don’t overdo it. Too many links on a page could be seen as a poor user experience. Avoid lots of hidden links in your template navigation.
Search engines like Google ‘spider’ or ‘crawl’ your entire site by following all the links on your site to new pages, much as a human would click on the links of your pages. Google will crawl and index your pages, and within a few days normally, begin to return your pages in SERPs.
After a while, Google will know about your pages, and keep the ones it deems ‘useful’ – pages with original content, or pages with a lot of links to them. The rest will be de-indexed. Be careful – too many low-quality pages on your site will impact your overall site performance in Google. Google is on record talking about good and bad ratios of quality content to low-quality content.
Ideally, you will have unique pages, with unique page titles and unique page descriptions . Google does not seem to use the meta description when ranking your page for specific keyword searches if not relevant and unless you are careful if you might end up just giving spammers free original text for their site and not yours once they scrape your descriptions and put the text in main content on their site. I don’t worry about meta keywords these days as Google and Bing say they either ignore them or use them as spam signals.
Google will take some time to analyse your entire site, examining text content and links. This process is taking longer and longer these days but is ultimately determined by your domain reputation and real PageRank.
If you have a lot of duplicate low-quality text already found by Googlebot on other websites it knows about; Google will ignore your page. If your site or page has spammy signals, Google will penalise it, sooner or later. If you have lots of these pages on your site – Google will ignore most of your website.
You don’t need to keyword stuff your text to beat the competition.
You optimise a page for more traffic by increasing the frequency of the desired key phrase, related key terms, co-occurring keywords and synonyms in links, page titles and text content. There is no ideal amount of text – no magic keyword density. Keyword stuffing is a tricky business, too, these days.
I prefer to make sure I have as many UNIQUE relevant words on the page that make up as many relevant long tail queries as possible.
If you link out to irrelevant sites, Google may ignore the page, too – but again, it depends on the site in question. Who you link to, or HOW you link to, REALLY DOES MATTER – I expect Google to use your linking practices as a potential means by which to classify your site. Affiliate sites, for example, don’t do well in Google these days without some good quality backlinks and higher quality pages.
Many search engine marketers think who you link out to (and who links to you) helps determine a topical community of sites in any field or a hub of authority. Quite simply, you want to be in that hub, at the centre if possible (however unlikely), but at least in it. I like to think of this one as a good thing to remember in the future as search engines get even better at determining topical relevancy of pages, but I have never really seen any granular ranking benefit (for the page in question) from linking out.
I’ve got by, by thinking external links to other sites should probably be on single pages deeper in your site architecture, with the pages receiving all your Google Juice once it’s been “soaked up” by the higher pages in your site structure (the home page, your category pages). This tactic is old school but I still follow it. I don’t need to think you need to worry about that, too much, in 2016.
Original content is king and will attract a “natural link growth” – in Google’s opinion. Too many incoming links too fast might devalue your site, but again. I usually err on the safe side – I always aimed for massive diversity in my links – to make them look ‘more natural’. Honestly, I go for natural links in 2016 full stop, for this website.
Google can devalue whole sites, individual pages, template generated links and individual links if Google deems them “unnecessary” and a ‘poor user experience’.
Google knows who links to you, the “quality” of those links, and whom you link to. These – and other factors – help ultimately determine where a page on your site ranks. To make it more confusing – the page that ranks on your site might not be the page you want to rank, or even the page that determines your rankings for this term. Once Google has worked out your domain authority – sometimes it seems that the most relevant page on your site Google HAS NO ISSUE with will rank.
Google decides which pages on your site are important or most relevant. You can help Google by linking to your important pages and ensuring at least one page is well optimised amongst the rest of your pages for your desired key phrase. Always remember Google does not want to rank ‘thin’ pages in results – any page you want to rank – should have all the things Google is looking for. That’s a lot these days!
It is important you spread all that real ‘PageRank’ – or link equity – to your sales keyword / phrase rich sales pages, and as much remains to the rest of the site pages, so Google does not ‘demote’ pages into oblivion – or ‘supplemental results’ as we old timers knew them back in the day. Again – this is slightly old school – but it gets me by, even today.
Consider linking to important pages on your site from your home page, and other important pages on your site.
Focus on RELEVANCE first. Then, focus your marketing efforts and get REPUTABLE. This is the key to ranking ‘legitimately’ in Google in 2016.
Every few months Google changes its algorithm to punish sloppy optimisation or industrial manipulation. Google Panda and Google Penguin are two such updates, but the important thing is to understand Google changes its algorithms constantly to control its listings pages (over 600 changes a year we are told).
The art of rank modification is to rank without tripping these algorithms or getting flagged by a human reviewer – and that is tricky!
Focus on improving website download speeds at all times. The web is changing very fast, and a fast website is a good user experience.

Tips for Producing Direct Mail Copy That Sells

2015-08-30T04:56:00.002-07:00

SEO, Learning SEO, Search Marketing, Best SEO experts, Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, SEO news, Best SEO, Real World SEO.

In his book The Direct Mail Solution, direct marketing expert and entrepreneur Craig Simpson provides easy-to-follow solutions for creating direct mail campaigns that work! In this edited excerpt, the author describes how to write a direct mail piece that captures your readers' attention.

Good copywriting creates exciting pictures in the reader's mind. Here are some easy tricks to producing copy that sells.

1. Make it easy to read. When people pick up a sales piece, they'll start by quickly glancing through it. To grab their attention, your copy must be interesting, and at the same time, it should be easy to read.

Keep paragraphs short.
Don't use convoluted sentence structure.
Use bullet points so they can easily see your main benefits and features.
Keep repeating the main point in different ways. That way the message is sure to sink in.
Guide the reader with subheads that tell a story.

2. Use images and magic words. Draw pictures of how the reader will feel with that beautiful new car. How they'll feel on their luxury vacation and how relaxed they'll be. What they'll look like with fewer wrinkles and youthful skin. Offer specific images but not so specific your readers won't be able to tailor the images to their own fantasies.

Certain words are proven to sell: Free, New. Use them wherever you can. Stress benefits, not features. Tell readers how their lives will be improved with your product.

3. Have an angle. One day you receive two sales pieces in the mail. The headline on one says:

"My Course Will Teach You Everything I Know About Trading Stocks"

The headline on the other says:

"Learn the Stock Secret I Used to Make Six Figures in Six Months"

Which piece are you more likely to read? I'll bet it's the second one. Why? Because it has an angle--a clever way of presenting the information that makes it clear what the unique advantage is that the seller has to offer the reader. The first one just says
"I'll teach you how to trade stocks." But who am I and why should you care?

In the second headline, the angle is that the information I have to share is "secret" and it made me a sizable amount of money in a short amount of time.

You need a hook that will get attention and appeal directly to your target audience. What is it about your product that makes it of special interest and value to them? That's the point you want to stress throughout your piece. With the right angle, everything else about your piece will fall into place.

4. Have a story. Long sales pieces can be great. Long, dull sales pieces can be a complete waste. To be successful, your sales piece has to keep the reader's interest.

One technique to make a sales piece interesting is to play up "the story." It could be the story of the person who developed the product. Or the story of someone who used the product and whose life was changed as a result. The idea is that the reader identifies with the person in the story, becomes involved enough to keep reading to find out what happened, and comes to the conclusion, "I'm just like that person, and there's no reason I can't have the same experience using this product."

People especially love a rags-to-riches story. "I was poor (sick, lonely, etc.). Then I learned this secret, and now I'm healthy, happy and rich. And now I'll share everything I learned with you." Some of the most effective sales pieces have taken that exact approach.

This is your opportunity to sell yourself (or whomever created the product). Why are you an expert? Why are you the one to provide the solution to the reader's problem? Often a personal story about the individual who created the product makes for a very compelling sales piece.

Of course, the story isn't really about you. It's about the product and what it will do for the reader. So always bring it around to that. What is it about this product that is so unique and so much better than anything else out there?

5. Keep them guessing. It helps to add a touch of "intrigue"--you want the reader to feel compelled to keep going, wondering what great revelation is coming next.

Your task is to get the reader interested and keep him moving through the piece, all the way to the close. You don't want to lose the reader along the way. One method is to keep hinting at what's about to be revealed, so the reader keeps following the "trail of crumbs." For example, maybe you want to make sure the reader gets through a relatively boring part, so you keep him involved by saying, "I'll tell you about how I had my big breakthrough in a minute, but first, I have to give you some background information so you can understand the genius of it."

Another technique is to structure the piece around a series of subheads. The proper use of subheads acts like that "trail of crumbs" and pulls the reader along nicely. Before the reader sits down to read the piece word for word, he'll likely flip through the piece and read the eye-catching subheads which, by themselves, will tell a story. If that story sounds related enough to the reader's interests and goals, the motivation will be there to read the entire piece.

Your Marketing Message Getting Muddled

2015-08-30T04:50:00.001-07:00

When it comes to formulating your marketing message, it is imperative to be clear, concise and thoughtful to make the largest impact. If you sway the other way by providing too much information in a complicated manner, your message may get lost. For instance, in "When Three Charms but Four Alarms: Identifying the Optimal Number of Claims in Persuasion Settings," authors Kurt A. Carlson and Suzanne B. Shu suggest marketing messages with more than three claims trigger consumer skepticism and disbelief.

This statement can also be bolstered by the fact that having too many claims (or options) can confuse people, resulting in consumers just giving up and walking away. Daniel McFadden, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley, told The Economist that consumers find myriad options disturbing because of the "risk of misperception and miscalculation, of misunderstanding the available alternatives, of misreading one's own tastes, of yielding to a moment's whim and regretting it afterwards." This combined with "the stress of information acquisition" can result in what is known as shopper's paralysis, a situation where consumers find the decision too difficult to decide and therefore buy nothing.

To make sure your message doesn't get lost in the shuffle, keep these tips in mind:

Pick three attributes. What are the most important strengths or stand out qualities of your product? Make a list, whittle it down to the three essential or most compelling ones and have these be the consistent centerpiece of your messaging.

For example, Wells Fargo's message emphasizes experience, ethics and forward movement. While it offers many technological benefits, including online banking and smart phone apps, those are not the prominent features it markets. Instead, they choose to focus on timeless qualities to maintain its base and lure consumers who may be weary -- and leery -- of trendier banking campaigns and promises.

Another example is J.C. Penney. One reason for the retailer's downturn was they tried to send too many messages to their core customer. For instance, the store's new home department was supposed to bring in customers who could help lift it out of a financial death spiral, but instead valuable selling space filled with home goods from high-end names like Jonathan Adler, Michael Graves and Sir Terence Conran sat empty. These high-end furniture items weren't cohesive with its other focuses: family friendly, great prices and affordable brand names. With too many messages, the consumers got confused and gave up.

Don't disappoint: You're counting on three ideas to capture your audience's attention. Not only should they be forceful, easy to understand and beneficial but also true. You want your satisfied customers to tell their friends or colleagues, "It really works" or "It's a really good product."

The Kindle Fire HDX is another story. It was one of the most successful products of 2013, as it provided users a desired level of media to consumer, at a low price and in a beautiful format. And all it claims happens to be true, at least according to numerous tech reviewers and consumers. No disappointment there.

On the flip side, the opposite reaction can do serious damage to a business -- and sometimes it's permanent. Many business pundits predicted the fall of Suzuki, and indeed, in January they announced they would stop selling cars in the US. One reason is they lost share to other car manufacturers who have plenty of low cost fuel-efficient vehicles that compete with Susuki's lower-end or relatively inexpensive cars

Another reason? Suzuki has trouble selling cars because its reputation among drivers doesn't compare to the company's reliability message. A 2012 J.D. Power survey of car dependability in the U.S. put Suzuki's scores for power trains, body and materials, features and accessories below almost every other brand -- foreign and domestic.

How Understanding Your Customers Can Help You Create Copy That Sells

2015-08-30T04:46:00.000-07:00

SEO, Learning SEO, Search Marketing, Best SEO experts, Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, SEO news, Best SEO, Real World SEO.

That's why sales pages are so important. With the right copy, you can give visitors a clear understanding of what they'll get and why it's valuable.

Not too long ago, our company, Feast, was failing in that regard. We offer a program to help busy people get into the habit of cooking. Late last summer, I asked a well-respected content marketer for feedback on our homepage. Following a lengthy pause, he remarked, "It's clear to me that your homepage reflects a lack of customer research."

He was right. Our homepage offered little to no context explaining why someone should feel compelled to purchase a class. Our sales, accordingly, were lacking.

With this in mind, my cofounder, David, and I returned to the drawing board.

After a lot of research, including surveying existing customers and looking at their Facebook likes and interests, we made a list of products and businesses that we thought overlapped with our potential customers. As a company focused on health and behavioral change, these included Weight Watchers, CrossFit, Tim Ferriss's 4 Hour Workweek and 4 Hour Body, and Ramit Sethi's I Will Teach You To Be Rich Earn 1K and Find Your Dream Job.

To learn how to write an effective sales page, we dove into the copy of these similar content-focused programs. We took a good, hard look at the language the websites use to sell products, and we found there are 5 techniques consistent among all of them.

We incorporated all 5 of the techniques into a new, long-form sales page.

It's still early, but after relaunching with the new sales copy, we saw our sales increase tenfold in the first month (over the average of monthly sales in the previous 11 months).

1. The Hook - Use the customer's words, not yours, to describe their problem

You know what it's like when you're reading something and you realize,"Whoa, this describes me to a T." Seeing yourself in the text compels you to read further. Maybe pass it along to a friend. Maybe share it with all of your friends.

We like content that feels tailored to us. We want our opinions to be validated (or changed through education) by what we read. The New York Times's "Psychology of Sharing" study found that 68% of medium-to-heavy social sharers share content "to give people a better sense of who they are and what they care about."

This is why BuzzFeed writes articles like "26 Things That Only Anxious People Will Relate To" or "21 Things That Inevitably Happen When You Work in an Office."

The best way to keep a potential customer from immediately exiting the page is to talk about them, not you. A good mental check is to look at how many times you use the word "you" instead of "I" or "we."

Look at the following examples. Notice that the customer, not the company, is the focus. Also, notice that you can imagine who this language is tailored to just by reading the opening sentence.

2. The Buildup - Be transparent about your product's R&D

Your first instinct when you've worked really hard on a product might be to hide all of the work it took to get there. You want customers to feel like it just magically appeared for them, right?

Wrong. People like to hear about the work you put into the thing they're about to open their wallets for.

Think about it. As a customer, how does it make you feel to know that someone spent hundreds of hours crafting the class you're about to pay for? That your car was crash-tested in thousands of scenarios? That each and every piece of your pasta was shaped by hand?

Time invested in a product signifies quality. When you give to your customers, they want to give back to you. By investing in each other, it also helps build a two-way relationship of trust.

Each of the examples below discusses the time and energy that was put into creating the product, sometimes quantifiably, sometimes using visual language such as "obsessive" and "fetish."

At Feast, on our old homepage, we didn't talk about the time we spent developing our product at all, but now we realize we actually have a great story to tell. The fact is we experimented with (by my count) four other products over a year and a half to try to pin down what it was that actually got people to cook. But each time we relaunched, we would strip everything away and not show any of the love and work we had put into developing the next solution.

3. The Branding - Align yourself with a higher principle or mission that goes beyond your product
If CrossFit positioned itself as "this one weird trick" to get a ripped body, it would be easy to write it off as another fad among a million other options that supposedly get you in shape.

CrossFit knows you're coming to their website with these suspicions. So they sidestep them elegantly by opening with: "CrossFit begins with a belief in fitness."

In other words, if you're anti-CrossFit, you're anti-fitness.

Instead of trying to be special or faddish in some way, boil down your company to something everyone can agree on. At Feast, we played too hard on people's desire for elitism around food. We alienated potential customers by teaching things like fermentation or salt roasting, even though our intention was to make those things feel not scary. We thought of elitism as an enticing reward, but really, it just made our company hard to relate to.

Framing ourselves that way also put us into direct competition with every other cooking education company that had a similar approach. When we rewrote our copy, we decided to align ourselves with something much simpler and relatable:

4. The Solution - Use specific and measurable terms to describe your solution

Do you remember that, as discussed above, you want your customers to read a description of their problem and think "Whoa, they're talking about me"? You want the same thing with a description of the solution.

Use the customer's language to describe the solution. If you don't know what their language is, identify some potential customers and ask them to describe their ideal solution. Pay attention to the specific words they use, and then use them in your sales copy.

The other part of this is to be as measurable as possible with your solution. Promising someone they'll earn "more money" is less convincing than promising they'll earn an extra $1000 per month starting in 3 weeks. They have something to hold you to, and that accountability helps build trust.

Using specific numbers also suggests you've done this once or twice before, so you've seen it work with other customers to the extent that you can predict effects.

If you don't have metrics to stand behind, at least use numbers wherever you can to build a more concrete picture. For example, "monthly five-figure income with zero management" is better than "make money on your own."

5. The Close - Anticipate their hesitation and call out their excuses

I think this strategy is often overlooked, but it can be very powerful.

After you've made your pitch, you'll have some people who are immediately sold and ready to buy. Others will be totally uninterested and exit the page. Still others will be on the fence.

For those on the fence, understanding exactly what their hesitations might be, and calling out their excuses, can tip them into making a purchase.

This may seem weird if you think acknowledging the most common excuses might cause people who were leaning toward buying to walk away. The goal here is to acknowledge potential excuses while turning them into compelling reasons to buy the product anyway.

Again, this requires getting to know your potential customer and finding out the EXACT language they might use to explain why they aren't willing to make a purchase.

Hooking customers into your product can sometimes feel like a shot in the dark, but many successful companies are using the same techniques to sell their product. Instead of trying to reinvent the wheel, start with what's working for other products, and see how it can improve your conversions.

How To Save On SEO Without Being Cheap

2015-08-30T03:44:00.002-07:00

SEO, Learning SEO, Search Marketing, Best SEO experts, Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, SEO news, Best SEO, Real World SEO.

Good SEO does not come cheap, but columnist WORLD OF SEO has some tips for beginners on how to save on future SEO costs with a bit of streamlining and advance planning.

A wise person once said that if you think search engine optimization (SEO) is expensive, you should see how expensive cheap SEO gets.

There are few shortcuts when it comes to sustainable search engine optimization. As with any other professional service, quality SEO comes at a price — and premium services are more likely to deliver desired results. But regardless of your online business’ size and marketing budget, there are many ways to save SEO resources.

Don’t Waste Crawler Budget

Few site owners can tell how many pages of their site Google has to crawl in order to index and eventually rank a single page. Let’s assume the ratio is close to ten to one.

For many large sites, the actual ratio is closer to one hundred to one or higher. That means search engine bots have to find and crawl more than a hundred pages of a site before they can rank one — if it ends up ranking at all.

If the crawl-to-useful-content ratio tends to be unfavorable, chances are that the Googlebot is not exclusively crawling pages designed to perform best.

Using the meta noindex tag on pages with little or no content — pages that make a site a potential Panda algorithm candidate or pages that do not perform as expected — is a seasoned technique to help direct major search engine bots to crawl pages that matter (and crawl them more frequently).

One way to estimate how well your sites crawl budget is managed: Google Search Console Sitemaps ideally shows little discrepancy between submitted and indexed patterns.

Abandon The Rel=”Nofollow” Attribute

There is no reason to apply the rel=”nofollow” attribute on a website’s internal links or on links pointing to associated social media channels such as Facebook, Twitter or Google+.

The rel nofollow attribute — for a short time believed to be the “magic bullet” for PageRank sculpting — indicates to search engines just one thing: There’s no reason to trust the page the link is pointing to.

Despite countless speculations in that regard, there’s no hard evidence that selectively applying rel=”nofollow” to links on your page causes PageRank to be preserved and distributed among other links on the same page. Unless there are user-generated outgoing links pointing to unverified sites, it’s best toabandon using the rel=”nofollow” attribute once and for all.

File Size Matters

Minimizing page size — and thereby improving load time for search engine crawlers and user alike — is a top priority. Remember, site speed has been a ranking factor for quite some time now.

While there are several ways to reduce page size, a good place to start is by getting rid of page elements that are remnants of a past long gone. Meta keywords, for example, are obsolete. Major search engines have been ignoring them for years.

Using meta keywords serves no other purpose than providing an insight to competitors for which commercial terms a page is meant to rank. It is high time to remove meta keywords.

Major search engines ignore meta keywords — and so should you.

Download & Document Your Backlinks

When it comes to evaluating backlinks — for example, while assessing risks associated with link building — complete data is essential. The sample provided in Google Search Console (aka Google Webmaster Tools) is limited, but it is being updated on a regular basis.

There’s no guarantee how often that happens, but a few times per week appears to be the average frequency for most sites.

That link data is not only free of charge, it is also temporary — unless you constantly download and preserve it. It may seem like a laborious effort, but documenting your links over time will prove extremely useful for ongoing backlink profile maintenance, especially if you wind up dealing with a manual spam action from Google.

Having that backlink data available when it’s urgently needed will make it much easier to initiate recovery efforts in the event of a Google penalty. If you don’t have this information on hand, you’ll have to spend time crawling your entire backlink portfolio — which, depending on volume, may take up to several weeks in order to build a sample complete enough.

Not downloading the backlink sample provided in Google Search Console is a missed opportunity. There are no good reasons not to download and save the backlink sample on a daily basis.

Download links to your website regularly and frequently.

Document & Amend

Thorough documentation of all ongoing website updates, technical or otherwise, offers the potential to soften any rollbacks if they become a necessity. Documentation is required with any link-building activity, whether in-house or conducted by trusted business associates. In fact, any ongoing link-building activities require two important steps:
A commitment to 100% transparency, including full disclosure on the volumes and time frames of links built and a complete list of all URLs and associated anchor texts
A guarantee that specific (or all) links built will be removed on request and without incurring additional cost

Both steps can be part of an amendment to an existing contract and will help foster mutual trust in the quality of ongoing link-building initiatives. They can also significantly lower the cost of a backlink audit and speed up the reconsideration request process if it should become necessary.

Collect Log Data

The value of server logs is frequently underestimated and sometimes ignored altogether, despite its tremendous potential for audit evaluation (and as a bargaining chip driving up the sale price tag for a successful website).

While initially associated with some nominal cost, the potential benefits of collecting and using log data to understand Googlebot and user behaviour alike is unparalleled. There are a number of effective tools aiding log analysis, including (but not limited to) Botify Log Analyzer, Logentries, Logsearch, Logz and Splunk. All of these can be greatly supplemented by Google BigQuery.

Avoid Snake Oil Salesmen

Lastly, one great way of avoiding unnecessary SEO cost is making well-informed decisions and avoiding bogus or dishonest (often automated) search engine optimization services that at best have no impact at all and at worst can jeopardize a site’s reputation with search engines.

Merchant platforms show countless suspicious SEO service offers, not all of which are easily recognized for what they are. That is why continuously following established information sources (such as Google Webmaster Guidelines), as well as leading SEO industry authorities (like Google’s John Mueller) is time well spent.

Save money by avoid wasting SEO budget on dubious shortcuts.

What are your favorite cost-saving methods when it comes to SEO? Your opinion matters. Please share your thoughts and suggestions in the comments down below.

Get 5 Making Your Support Content More SEO Friendly

2015-08-30T03:30:00.000-07:00

Get 5 Making Your Support Content More SEO Friendly
Does your website have a support section, community forums, Q&A content, or similar?

If so, columnist Tom Demers has tips for using this often valuable content to get more search visibility.

GradeSEO - SEO Friendly

In light of Google’s recent algorithm updates, many businesses have looked hard at ways to flesh out existing pages and create new, SEO-friendly content in an effort to grow organic search traffic without running afoul of any angry animals.

Despite this increased focus on “Google-friendly” content, I still see a lot of sites neglecting some fairly easy SEO enhancements on potentially valuable content that already exists on their site: support and community content.

Building and maintaining a community is an art in and of itself, but once your company has a base of loyal users and community members, that base may be creating extremely valuable content that you’re ignoring. If you have existing support documentation and community Q&A materials, this article will walk through how you can get more SEO value out of that content.

Identify Your Best Performing Pages & Untapped Opportunities - As with the process of optimizing your most important pages for SEO, the first step here is to understand the content you have on your site.

What content is performing well? By looking at your most heavily trafficked pages and the pages that are currently ranking (either with Google Analytics via a custom report, in Search Analytics within Google’s Search Console or with a tool like SEMrush — all outlined in my last post), you can uncover the best opportunities to drive significant gains in traffic with a small push.

What content is the most frequently linked to? Even if these pages aren’t driving traffic currently, you’re likely featuring them because they’re useful and popular with users, so again, some slight tweaks could lead to significant increases in traffic.

What’s missing? A tool like MarketMuse can show you relevant terms you don’t currently use within your support content (that are both related to your core topic and frequently searched for). These may not all be a fit, but some may be natural topics to create a tutorial around, or maybe a synonym for a topic you’ve already got a thread or support document created for.

Once you have the “lay of the land” and understand what’s happening and where the opportunities exist within your support content, you can go about making optimizations that will help drive more SEO traffic to these documents.

Update Title Tags & Meta Descriptions For Key Pages - An important thing to note before you make any changes to your existing support and community content:

The primary goal of the content is to serve as support and community content, not to drive traffic to your site via organic search. None of the changes you make should make your tutorials more difficult to understand or find, and nothing you update should make it more difficult for your customers and prospects to ask questions and have them answered.

That said, there are often opportunities to tweak existing content to make it more SEO-friendly. Looking at the pages that are currently ranking well (but could still improve) in SEMrush or Google Search Console, you’ll likely find lots of good information to help inform: Title Tags. Your title tags for support content might not have paid any mind whatsoever to SEO, and may have room to (naturally) include a valuable term or modified version of the core term the page is ranking for.

Meta Description. Again, it’s often the case that little to no attention has been paid to meta descriptions on support and community content (if they’re even included). For key pages that are driving traffic and ranking, you can craft a specific meta description that speaks to the searches that the page is showing in response to.

Link To Your Support Section & Support Content From Other Parts Of Your Site

Again - and as Shari Thurow correctly pointed out in response to my last post - any changes you’re making in the way you link internally (particularly with regards to primary navigational elements) should be driven by the overall user experience and business goals of your site, not by SEO. As with title tags and meta descriptions, however, there may be opportunities to link to your support content from other areas of your site that would help this content rank better in search results, such as:

Linking to the support or community sections of the site from your site’s footer or top navigation (again, assuming this is something that makes sense within the larger context of how folks are using your site).
Linking to specific, relevant tutorials and community threads within popular content in other areas of your site (such as popular, well linked-to blog posts and articles).
Leveraging widgets in areas of your site where they would be relevant and useful. For instance, if your community produces a ton of great informational content on similar topics to those covered in your blog content, adding a “related questions” widget to your blog may make a lot of sense, particularly if your blog content gets linked to frequently and can help flow link equity back to your community content. (More on widgets later in this post.)

Implement A Related Questions, Tutorials & Threads Widget - Google itself highlights “similar topics” with links to related threads in their Webmaster forums:

Linking internally within different support documentation and community content can be very beneficial in flowing link equity throughout these sections of your site. It is frequently helpful for your users, as well. Often, the initial document being viewed may not offer a solution for their specific problem, and similar tutorials or threads might be valuable. Your content management system should either have a plugin that offers this functionality, or if not, it’s likely something your development team can build.

Implement A Popular Questions, Tutorials & Threads Widget - On their help center home page, Best Buy highlights a number of “commonly asked questions.”

Not unlike a related questions widget, highlighting popular questions and tutorials either on the support home page or as a “Popular Questions” or “Popular Tutorials” widget that features key tutorials and threads can also be an effective way to both push more link equity to key pages and surface common issues for your users. How you define “popular” could be determined a number of different ways (and could be something you test), including:

Most commented on or responded to tutorials or threads
The most-visited pages based on your analytics data (either all time, or in the last 30 days)
Hand-picking specific tutorials you want to feature or push link equity to (These could be topics that are important to your product and/or specific pages you identified in your research from step one.)

Once you have this widget, you might also consider including it in other portions of your site that are frequently linked to in order to flow more link equity into these pages, as I mentioned earlier. Your most popular Q&A content may be a great fit to be featured in your blog’s navigation, for instance.

Thanks - Get 5 Making Your Support Content More SEO Friendly