It’s been 10+ years since I built a website for my first client and I’m not ashamed to say that back then I was a terrible web designer. I was terrible for many years and for many different reasons. In fact, everything you’ll see below, I was guilty of. However, I eventually learned how to perfect the web designing process the hard way, through determination, research and lots of experience. Today, I think it’s safe to say I’m a very good web designer. If you don’t believe me, ask Inc Magazine, Crain’s Business, CBS, ABC, and NBC. Because they’ve all asked for my opinion and advice multiple times on this subject.

I constantly see many web designers making the same mistakes I made 10 years ago so I hope this article will help web designers and those who have or are going to hire a web designer. So, if you’re building a new website for your company, here are 20 ways to tell if your web designer is terrible. If you’re a web designer, pay close attention, print this blog post, email it to yourself, or bookmark it as a reference, because here are 20 ways you can tell if you are terrible.

1. The price is under $1,000 bucks

If your website is costing you less than a $1,000 bucks, then chances are your web designer is terrible and your website will be terrible too. We all wish we could spend $1,000 dollars and make millions, but if it were that easy everyone would do it.

Stop being cheap, because, you get what you pay for. You could easily buy a car for $1,000 bucks but again, you get what you pay for. If you still think your website should be under $1,000 bucks, eventually you will come crawling back to the web designer that was too expensive. Only now you’ll have to pay for a good web designer + the costs of your really cheap web designer.

Common Question:

How much to build a website?

My common answer:

Well, how much does it cost to build a house?

2. The “Headset Hottie”

A Headset Hottie is a joke amongst digital marketers. It’s a stock photo of an attractive female with a headset on, ready to take your call. This photo can usually be found on your contact page, in a sidebar, or sometimes even in the header. Terrible web designers have been adding images like this to websites for years. A Headset Hottie won’t increase sales or phone calls. It will only make your website look cheap and silly. So be careful, because your website could end up featured on a website like headsethotties.com.

3. No weekly call

Momentum is the energy and excitement that every new website project starts off with. It’s critical to maintain momentum throughout the course of a web design project. The second your web designer loses regular contact is the second you lose the project’s momentum. Your web designer should be in contact with you weekly if not daily, and if they are not, demand it and agree on a meeting time and day each week until the project is complete.

4. You found ‘em on Craigslist

I advertised for business on Craigslist about 6 or 7 years ago when I was still a terrible web designer. From my experience, I learned that Craigslist is where cheap people can find other cheap people. Of course, every rule has it’s exceptions and I do occasionally post on Craigslist’s job board to see what’s out there but very rarely do I get the quality I’m looking for.

So, if you found your web designer on Craigslist you’re probably also breaking rule #1, by being cheap.

…sorry Craig

5. No copywriting solution

Creating content for your new website is the biggest challenge every client faces. It’s also the #1 cause for delays (in my 10 years of experience). A good web designer will be prepared with a solution and warn you about this at the kickoff meeting.

Possible copywriting solutions:

6. Your web designer’s #1 goal is creativity

Creativity should not be the #1 goal for your website. In a survey by HubSpot, 76% of users said that the most important factor in the design of a website is that “The website makes it easy for me to find what I want.” Only 10% of users said, “beautiful appearance” was the most important thing to them. Organization of content was their number #1 concern for websites, not creativity. The more organized your content is the longer users will stay. The longer users stay, the more likely they will buy. So, make sure your web designer’s priorities are correct.

7. Your web designer is related to you

“Never hire anyone you can’t fire.” You should know better than to hire a relative to work for you in the first place, let alone build your website. However, if you do decide to hire a family member to build your website, they will probably give you an “unbelievable” discount. If they’re a pro, that’s great news; however, the bad news is that the project eventually won’t be worth their time, and you will eventually end up on the back burner.

8. Your web designer is YOU!

Peep author at conversionxl.com says, “If you designed your website yourself and you’re not a designer, it sucks”. It takes years of experience to perfect what we do. You can’t learn this trade in a few hours.

Peep, I couldn’t agree more!

9. You built it using a web design tool

Anyone can learn how to use a cheap web design tool in an hour or so but you can’t learn what a good web designer has learned with years of experience. In other words, learning how to use a website builder won’t teach you how to design a web site that will get targeted traffic, conversions, and sales.

In addition, just because you learned how to use Photoshop doesn’t mean you’re a good web designer. I’ve received so many resumes with people who know the Adobe Suite like the back of their hand, but their work sucks. Again, it takes years of experience to not be a terrible web designer.

10. No project management software

basecamp Project management software keeps everything organized and in one central location for everyone to easily find. It assigns tasks, keeps timelines, organizes assets and holds everyone accountable for their responsibilities. I couldn’t imagine a web designer not using project management software. But if this is the case, dump your web designer, because he or she is terrible.

11. They don’t ask enough questions

Your web designer should ask you lots of questions, especially before they start working on your project. They should ask everything about your 3C’s (Company, Competitors, and Clients). Questions should start during the initial sales meetings and kickoff meeting, and then continue throughout the strategy phase of your project. No questions is a RED FLAG and the sign of a terrible web designer.

10 sample questions:

1. What are your primary and secondary goals for your website?

2. Who is your target audience?

3. Describe your typical client.

4. Who are your online and offline competitors?

5. Are you doing any marketing offline?

6. Where is your target audience (local, national, global)?

7. Do you have brand guidelines?

8. Do you have a content writer available?

9. What kind of assets will you provide? (photo, videos, images, brochures)

10. Can we access your current site analytics?

12. They have too many clients

I used to be guilty of this a lot. I had way too many clients and I could not focus properly on any of them. Therefore, they all suffered. I would jump back and forth on different projects, while ignoring others. It was horrible and stressful. Projects were constantly late and clients were not happy.

Solution:

If you’re a web designer and your goal is to make $500,000 this year, focus on getting 10 clients at $50,000 per project, rather that 50 clients at $10,000 per project. This will give you the same revenue, but with less clients, less phone calls, less personalities, and less headaches.

13. No scope of work

A wise man in project management for 20+ years once told me that 80% of the problems that occur during a project occur because of a poor scope of work. A good scope of work details all work to be performed and delivered. It is critical that both parties agree to the scope of work before the project is executed.

14. No architecture strategy

Let’s say your family decides to build a dream house. Well, before you start actually building this house, you’re probably going to hire an architect to blueprint the house and all the rooms. Custom web design is very similar to building a house. Before designing any pages, your web design team should map out and wireframe (blueprint) each page of your website and get your approval before designing and developing.

15. No conversion strategy

Has your web designer helped you define what your primary and secondary conversions are? A conversion can be a phone call, email sign up, contact form, e-commerce purchase or a button being clicked. Your web designer should help you define what your conversions are.

Primary conversions are actual sales made on the site or inquiries for sales discussions through a contact form. Secondary conversions are typically forms that capture emails. Your web designer should ask how you want to be contacted and how clients typically prefer contacting you. After all, this is why you built your website.

17. They’re in your IT department

I blame clients and web designers for this one. Nothing is more frustrating than someone in IT calling our agency to inquire about a new website. Shouldn’t someone in marketing be calling us? I will never understand why companies associate IT departments with web design. As Ben Hunt of scratchwebmarketing.com and webdesignfromscratch.com “Web design is marketing”, not IT.

Do us all a favor. If you’re in IT and someone in your company asks you to help build the company website, humbly decline and recommend they talk to someone in the marketing department.

17. The handshaking image

This is a big red flag. If you see this on your site take it down. I’m speaking of course about the infamous hand shake. This is usually a simple picture of two men shaking hands. It’s cheesy, a waste of space and draws wasteful attention.

19. No SEO strategy

Let’s say you wanted to open a new store that required lots of foot traffic. Would you let your real estate agent sell you a very nice storefront without knowing or telling you anything about the neighborhood? Me either. In other words, if your web designer doesn’t do SEO, they are terrible.

19. No CMS

I can’t think of any good reasons why your web developer wouldn’t build your website on a CMS (content management system). Not using a CMS is not going to save you money. In fact, it could be more expensive because a good CMS like WordPress is built on a framework that has prebuilt functionality saving you time and money.

20. They’re in a different country

I’ve been developing professional websites for about 14 years and I promise that you will need experience to work with web designers and developers in other countries. Yes, they speak english and yes they are cheaper but if you don’t understand how to properly vet designers and developers in other countries you will most likely find a terrible web designer who doesn’t do any of the 19 items above, giving you a very frustrating and infuriating experience.

Conclusion

If you’re a web designer and you firmly disagree with anything I’ve said, there are exceptions to every rule. However, in my experience the above hold true a vast majority of the time. If you hire or fire your web designer by the above set of rules I can safely guarantee your website will be more successful and make you a lot more money.

Author: Marvin Russell

Courtesy of www.blog.seogroup.com

Many of my clients tend to start out an engagement by making various website changes, and often they are even already in the middle of, or about to embark on, a complete website redesign.

There are numerous articles and books about how to optimize website designs, but for SEO and Paid Search, there seem to always be some issues that perenially come up (the “usual suspects”) – all well worth highlighting.

Here is a standard, quick checklist I’ve developed for use with new and existing websites, to ensure the website is optimized for SEO and PPC purposes.

1. Content Management System Choice

The two leading CMSs are WordPress and Drupal. Joomla is a close third, but several people I know who have used it have told me that the first 90% of the job is very easy if you’re using Joomla, but the last 10% is a killer. If you’re a small or medium business, I see no reason why WordPress is not an ideal solution – after it’s designed, it’s easy for even a relatively inexperienced person to add pages, make changes, and so on.

B-to-B companies seem to be partial to Hubspot for lead management as well; my suggestion would be, rather than using Hubspot for your entire site, use WordPress and the Hubspot WordPress plug-in – that way most of your site is not “locked in” to Hubspot, so if it’s not working out for you, you still have a website.

If you’re agonizing over which CMS to select, just go to trends.google.com and search on [wordpress, drupal, joomla] and whatever else you’re considering – you’ll see that WordPress has them all beat by a wide margin.

2. Install SEO Plug-ins for your CMS

If you do choose WordPress, make sure you install either the “All-in-One SEO Pack” plug-in (poke around the WordPress Plug-Ins area and you will find it), or even better, you might try Yoast’s plugins for WordPress. These plug-ins make things like SEO-friendly URLs and writing Meta-Descriptions and the like easier, among other features. I use the “All-in-one SEO Pack” plugin myself on this blog, but @dan_shure over at EvolvingSEO has been raving about Yoast for WordPress, and Dan’s one of the sharpest guys I know so I’m confident it’s great.

Yoast also has a nice Google Analytics plug-in for WordPress you can install, to make integration with Google Analytics easy – you can download both plug-ins here:

3. E-Commerce System Choice

There are hundreds of E-Commerce/Shopping Cart systems out there; with many you can do your entire site. If you have a store section of your site, get one of these, but try to limit its use to only your “Store” section (if applicable), they usually are not that great for making entire websites. Instead, use WordPress for as much of the website as possible and only use the E-Commerce system where absolutely necessary.

I don’t have a particular favorite as far as these go; I would say do some research, and when you’ve identified a few you like, check them out in trends.google.com (as above), to see how often people search on their brand names. Selecting the one that is more popular is usually a safer move than selecting an obscure one.

4. Have A Place For Your Blog To Live

Make sure you have a section on the new site for a Blog (ideally, a menu item). If you don’t have a blog – you probably will down the road – leave plenty of room for a “Blog” menu item for use at a later date!

5. Have a Place, or Several Places, for “Evergreen” Content to Live

Have one or two menus that you can use to place new SEO content in as you come out with it- they could be named “Solutions”, “Technology”, “Our Services”, “Issues”, “White Papers”, “Application Notes”, etc. You will need to place “evergreen” (i.e. content that will live forever) somewhere – try to have two separate menus if at all possible. I am also partial to menus that let you drill down to two levels. This approach can accommodate numbers of content pages, but if you only plan on having 20-30 pages, two levels may be overkill.

Just make sure you have plenty of places to put content later as you expand your efforts.

6. Have Separate Privacy Policy and Terms of Service Pages

Make sure you have a page for each of these, and footer links on every page of the website to them. Why?

Well, if you ever do PPC down the road, trust me, you’ll want these; Google actually examines your website for them, as part of its assessment of “Landing Page Quality” and not having them can actually negatively impact your keyword “Quality Scores”. Quality Scores are used to adjust what you pay after each auction – so you can actually end up paying more for clicks, and may be shown less, if you don’t have these in place. I have seen this repeatedly with clients and can’t emphasize this enough – put them in place! Also, it’s just good business to set proper expectations with your users.

The next question I usually get is, do I have a “standard” Privacy Policy and Terms of Service I can recommend? Well, I’m no lawyer, so you’re completely on your own on this – but the Better Business Bureau has a privacy policy mix-and-match build-your-own page here worth checking out:

< a href="http://spokane.bbb.org/privacyhelp/" target="_blank">http://spokane.bbb.org/privacyhelp/

As far as Terms of Service, I’ve never been able to find a nice standardized one – my sense is most people just find a site with one they like (maybe in the same or a similar market) and craft something along those lines.

As long as you have “Terms of Service” in one page’s Title and “Privacy Policy” in the other title, and you have links to them from every page on your website….from a Quality Score standpoint that’s the main thing. It’s not thought that Google does much analyzing of the actual text of these pages – just focus on whatever makes the most sense from a business standpoint for you.

7. Have Your Phone Number In A Large Font At The Top Right

This may seem obvious, but you’d be surprised how often people miss this key item. Make your phone number noticeable – if you can get it somewhere on the right, near either the top, or have it be the first thing on the right below the menu bar, and of a larger font than the rest of the page, that will encourage callers (if these are important to you). Ideally have it on every page.

8. Have Two Separate “Contact Us” Pages, With Two Separate “Thank You” Pages

Ideally, you would have a primary “Contact Us” page, for Organic Traffic, and a second one (can be identical but with a different URL) for Paid Search traffic. If you do that (and put a “noindex” tag on the Paid Search one, and block it in your robots.txt file), this will make tracking much easier. The “noindex” tag can be added as follows (add it inside the “head” section of the page you want Google to leave out of its index, i.e. both the “Contact Page” for Paid Search and its Thank-You page:

In both cases, having a separate “Thank You” page that comes up when someone submits their information, *with a separate URL*, will make tracking an absolute cinch – one need merely list the endings of the URLs in Google Analytics later and expose that data to Adwords. I like web developers to do Contact Pages this way because then they don’t have to add any special code anywhere for tracking, other than the Google Analytics code that will go on every page of the site.

So make sure you noindex the Paid Search “Contact Us” page and its corresponding “Thank You” page, and block them both in robots.txt.

9. Put Redirects in Place for WWW and Non-WWW Versions of the Site

Basically, before you get going with Google Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics, you should figure out, is your primary website URL going to be http://foo.com/ or is it http://www.foo.com/ – put 301 redirects in place to ensure the proper behavior, before you have to tell Google Webmaster Tools etc. which version of the site to track (that way there will only be one site, conceptually, rather than possibly two. I have one client who who ended up with separate GWT setups for the two different versions, which can make analysis difficult.

For more on this issue, see my article: The Highest ROI One-Line SEO Change You Will Ever Make

10. Add Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools Tracking

Google Analytics (GA) will be useful for tracking activity on the website, and if you set up its tracking, you can actually use that as your tracking for AdWords as well. This allows you to skip the additional hassle down the road of setting up Google Adwords tracking. Note – Google Analytics credits the *first* click that brought a visitor to your website – AdWords credits the *last* click – but unless you’re planning on being a huge AdWords spender, you probably don’t need to worry about the difference in their behavior.

In the case of Google Analytics (which is free), you’ll add a snippet of code to every page of your website (perhaps in a header for instance).

Sign up and go through the process to create the snippet here:

http://www.google.com/analytics/

Google also has a free tool called Google Webmaster Tools (GWT); this allows you to see if and how Google’s spider, (“googlebot”), is spidering your website, and whether it’s having any problems. GWT can use the Google Analytics tag to authenticate (i.e. connect) your account to the website, or alternately you can drop a Google Webmaster Tools code snippet on just the home page of the website, just for Google Webmaster Tools.

To sign up and get started, go here:

https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/home?hl=en

11. Place a Customer Testimonial “Above The Fold”

This can simply be a square callout with a quote along the lines of “Company X did a great job for us – Joe Smith, Acme Co.” – and by “Above The Fold”, I mean, the region of your web page that is visible, without scrolling down, for most customers.

Don’t underestimate the value of prominently showing a customer testimonial (typically either on the far left, or the far right of the screen). At least do so on your home page, or more ideally, on every page.

If you’re late in the design process, a simple way to cheat at adding one is to take the (typically) large image on the home page and simply edit the image and drop the callout into the image itself, then load the new image. If at all possible, it’s far better to have one on every page though – ideally through the use of CSS style sheets etc.

12. Keep Directory Levels in URLs Shallow

The best URL for a document on “squeaky floors” is simply

http://www.foo.com/squeaky-floors

It’s best to resist the temptation to list a directory in there as well (such as /content/). If you have to have directories (say, to match up with your menus, that’s fine) just make sure they make sense, like

http://www.foo.com/whitepapers/debt-consolidation.html

13. Use Dashes, not Underscores in URLs

This is an SEO best practice that Google itself explicitly recommends, in its search optimization starter guide. So for instance, don’t use

http://www.foo.com/squeaky_floors

but, rather, use

http://www.foo.com/squeaky-floors

14. Make Sure Your Name/Address/Phone are Consistent

Many firms put these in a footer on every page, and also on their “Contact” or “About” pages. If you do put them in multiple places, make sure you have the same addresses and phone numbers in each case.

Don’t list your local phone number in one case and an 800 number in the other, or if you do, show both, with the local number showing first. This has the potential to impact you later in optimizing to rank for “local” searches (i.e. [keyword geographic area] combinations).

15. If It’s A Website Redesign, Prepare a Redirect File Prior To Launch

Redirects allow search engine spiders to credit existing links that are pointing at the old versions of pages, to the new URLs. You don’t want to lose all the PageRank value of all the links you’ve built up previously, so be sure to address this. Use “301? (permanent) redirects, and point the most relevant pages to their counterparts when doing so. Avoid blanket redirects (like redirecting the entire old site, every page, to the new home page).

If you want to prioritize, you can use tools like Majestic-SEO or SEOMoz LinkScape to figure out what pages have links (at all), or which ones most links to them, and you can perhaps reduce the size of your redirect file significantly by just focusing on the high-runners. But my preference, if there are’ few enough pages, is to try to account for all of them.

16. Advanced Architecture Considerations

For the most part, if you’re doing a website in WordPress, your design is probably going to be fine – most companies seem to be migrating towards the standard menu-bar-at-the top, three blocks in the middle (or one large picture), and three blocks of content/links at the bottom (or one block) approaches. I see the three block design quite often now, and it does look quite sharp – people like thinking in threes, and this also breaks the page up in a pleasing way.

…but if your site is for a Small or Medium Business – you probably don’t need to obsess over the level of detail explained there. Your web designer or web development firm might learn a few things from it though, it may make sense to have them check it out.

Conclusion

I would caution many of you out there, I often see clients who “hate their website” (and usually their previous web development firm or designer as well).

In many of these situations, what is needed is not a new website at all – often the website is quite functional – but it simply needs an updated look-and-feel, with better graphics, fonts, menus, and the like. This can often be accomplished simply through some updated designs, CSS template changes, and updated HTML.

It’s human nature to always wants to start fresh to avoid problems of the past (and “really get it right this time”), but if you already have a functioning website with decent customer traffic, analytics in place, and content to attract organic users – don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater – consider just a website “refresh” project, rather than a complete website replacement.

If you do a “refresh” though, run through the checklist above – you may be surprised how many items you have never paid attention to, that could put you in a better position to capitalize on SEO and PPC traffic.

Author: Ted Ives

Courtesy of www.coconutheadphones.com

SEO tools are the much beloved First Children of the search engine optimization industry. It’s hard to find someone who doesn’t have a favorite tool, a list of favorite tools, or who doesn’t have some anecdote about some SEO tool. Sooner or later everyone tries one or more tools. Many people fall in love with them.

We turn to tools to save time, money, and frustration. Every tool vendor tells you they are solving a problem and giving you a critical advantage. Every tool tutorial is trying to sell you something. It’s the tutorials, reviews, and recommendations you have to be most skeptical about because people who write them are often looking for links, leads, or commissions.

I can’t give you an unbiased review of SEO tools. I have enjoyed using some and I have often said that I think most suck. So here, instead, is my checklist of types of tools and what you should expect of them. What I hope you take away from this post is an innate sense of sketpicism. Just because 100 people write “Great post! I love this tool!” doesn’t mean they know what they are talking about. All the endorsements in the world won’t make a crappy, time-wasting SEO tool any better.

Keyword Research Tools

There are three types of keyword data that you can look at: the keywords search engines publish, the keywords your analytics record, and the keywords someone’s “third-party tool” reports. Third-party tools grab their data either from search engines or search analytics (or both).

Search Engine Keyword Data: This is the most commonly mined data. It also tends to be the largest data set. Google makes it easier to look at the data than Bing does.

Most Common SEO Mistake: Thinking that the keyword data for Google is good enough for Bing or vice versa.

Second Most Common SEO Mistake: Thinking that organic clicks are represented by PPC clicks. Yes, various studies have looked at possible correlations between PPC and organic listings in super-relative contexts that instantiate consumer-driven FUMDUDDY-WHATEVAH-JUSTSAYIN-WHOA! Be careful about drawing too many conclusions from comparative studies. Although most of the PPC-versus-Organic studies that I have read come from pretty credible sources (in my opinion), they can only provide limited insight into search dynamics.

CLICKS are not always CLICKS. I’ll just leave it at that.

Analytics Data: This is the most commonly available data but thanks to secure-server search many Websites no longer see all their keywords in their analytics data. Of course, Google and Bing will give you Webmaster reports showing your keywords if you authenticate your site with their Webmaster tools dashboards. Google Analytics did give you the ability to integrate Google Webmaster Tools data into their dashboard.

Most Common SEO Mistake: Thinking that Google is preventing you from seeing your keyword referral data. They just made it harder to see the data, not impossible.

Second Most Common SEO Mistake: Failing to study and understand the cyclical nature of Website analytics. We need to segmentalize (segmentize?) the analytics data by section, by timeframe, by source, by every-possible-combination.

Third-party Keyword Data: These tools provide limited data that may be aggregated from multiple sources. The biases these tools may introduce into their data reports can be frustrating. However, the fact these tools have skewed data means they can sometimes be used for deeper analysis of long-tail traffic. Even meta search engines have their loyal users and those users may look for information and products in very different ways from Google and Bing’s users. After all, they chose to use meta search tools instead of Google and Bing.

Most Common SEO Mistake: Assuming these tools are worthless. The value they provide will vary from site-to-site, vertical-to-vertical.

Second Most Common SEO Mistake: Assuming these tools are using Google data. Some of them may be scraping Google’s Adwords Keywords API but Google has been cracking down on those guys.

Unethical Keyword Analysis Practices: Some malware specialists and spammers are compromising breaking news by injecting keyword-related crap content into the search indexes. They have tools that identify newly trending topics in social media and/or news search and they use these tools to generate new Web content.

It doesn’t take much of a leap to think, “If the spammers can do it then we can do it, too.” Yes, we can all jump aboard the band-wagon and look for the latest, coolest, trendiest keywords. Some large Web publishers have been doing that for several years. But ask yourself: Can you evade the Panda forever if you’re chasing trending keywords?

It’s unethical for any SEO provider or employee to mislead a company into thinking that chasing trending keywords is a good business practice. This is a Web spam practice and it will be treated as such by the search engines. Your penalty may vary.

Content Publishing Tools

Yes, Virginia, there are content publishing tools for SEO. They come in the form of custom content management systems, custom blog themes, blog plugins, “desktop software” that you run from your PC, Python scripts you install on your Web server, and a myriad other forms I may or may not have run into.

If there is a way to squeeze time out of the content publishing process, someone has figured out how to implement it.

These tools fall into several categories:

Presentation Management: Most presentation managers are custom content publishing systems but you can buy some off the shelf (especially in ecommerce) and/or find them in open source. To a 1, with absolutely no exceptions, I have found that these tools pretty much suck the wind out of your SEO sails. The more they are “optimized” for Google, the more they screw up your optimization.

Cookie-cutter SEO just doesn’t cut the mustard. Naturally, about 60-75% of the top 1000 Web publishers are using these dashboards to monitor title length, force the inclusion of meta descriptions and/or keywords, generate keyword-rich URLs, and other formulaic on-page SEO stuff. I blame bloggers like me for setting the expectation that every Website has to do this stuff in order to succeed in Google. That was never the case but we sure made it sound like it was.

Most Common Mistake: Allowing Web developers to take charge of the process.

Second Most Common Mistake: Relying on “sprints” for development rather than scheduling regular product feature upgrades for every six months. Nothing has ruined software development more effectively than “sprints” (and unless you have 30+ years’ software development experience like me, don’t even hope you can draw me into a debate on this).

Automated Optimization: You find these tools in various blogging platforms. I’m talking about the so-called “SEO plugins” (or SEO-friendly themes) that promise to make your site “Google-friendly”. These tools might generate internal links based on your keyword usage, they might create “unique” meta tags for you, they can help you manage 301-redirects, create XML sitemaps, and do all that other stuff that you use SEO plugins to do.

WordPress is not my 1st choice for a Web publishing platform but it’s obvious I use it and that is because it’s easier to use than my 1st choice (static HTML files). Hence, every once in a while you come across a WordPress site that really, truly can benefit from a random SEO plugin.

Most Common SEO Mistake: Installing an SEO plugin on every blog as if that is a requirement. WordPress already optimizes your page titles and URLs and you don’t need meta descriptions so if that is all you’re doing with the plugin, leave it out of your installation and improve your site performance by using 1 less plugin. Every plugin adds processing time to serving a Web page.

Second Most Common SEO Mistake: Using the same SEO plugin for every Website. Sometimes, your favorite SEO plugin doesn’t do what you need it to do and you have to break ranks and install a different one. Don’t become emotionally attached to any SEO plugin no matter how good it is (and, yes, I agree that some of them are actually very good at what they do). Always strive to pick the best tool for the Website while avoiding the consequences of making the most common SEO mistake with plugins.

Scrapers and Aggregators, Oh My!: There are good scrapers and bad scrapers. A good scraper is a search engine that sends me traffic. A bad scraper is anything else that grabs my content off my server and does NOT send me traffic. Aggregators are a little different. They are (mostly) built to make use of the RSS feeds we publish. If you don’t like the fact that aggregators are republishing your RSS feed then stop publishing RSS feeds. I only publish partial feeds and I leave it to people to decide if they’re going to be snotty and ignore me or if they’re going to read my site anyway.

It’s my job to make it YOUR loss if you don’t come to my blog. It’s YOUR job to figure out which blogs you need to be visiting.

On-the-Web aggregators can be useful and they can send traffic to Websites. Some aggregators are actually NOT driven by RSS feeds. These tend to be human-powered, almost always crowd-sourced services.

Most Common SEO Mistake: Assuming that all aggregators and scrapers are bad. That foreign-language Website sending visitors to your site just might be a search engine you never heard about. If it’s not republishing your content but just indexing it, then you need to make a business decision about whether the traffic is worth acquiring.

Second Most Common SEO Mistake: Assuming all aggregators are spam. Believe me, you would NOT turn down being listed at the top of any AllTop or PopURLs page. You would LOVE that traffic. Give every aggregator a fair chance to prove its worth to you before you write it off as spam.

Social Media Platforms: The Vulcans have a saying, “Only Ralph Tegtmeier knows how to automate for Twitter.” Okay, we love to automatically publish stuff to social media platforms. We give our visitors lots of buttons to do that, we tinker with various scheduling tools (although all the good ones seem to be gone, now). We can pump our RSS feeds into social media. And some of us actually spend time on social media trying to have meaningful discussions where questions and answers are separated by hours and thousands of irrelevant comments.

Some day, someone is going to release S.E.T.I.: the Search for Extra-Twitter Information. But I digress.

GET the full picture. Start your Reflective Dynamics marketing campaign now.

Most Common SEO Mistake: Blogging about the importance of social media when it is so obvious from the fact that no one has ever heard of you that you are NOT ready for social media guru stardom (yet). This is a tough crowd to write for and they tend to be rather unforgiving. I guess incentivizing your customers to cheer your social media efforts has its place (Make Your Social Media Se– … oh, never mind).

Second Most Common SEO Mistake: Believing that “inbound marketing” actually means something. Maybe “Digital Audience Relations” is too new and clinical to become popular, but it actually means something. You cannot have an “inbound marketing” that is distinct from an “outbound marketing”. Marketing must find an audience to deliver a message to; that’s NOT a unidirectional experience, so throw away your copy of OVERHYPED BUZZWORDS TODAY and learn what REAL marketing is all about.

Link Research Tools

A lot of people have come to me in various conversations and for various reasons and asked me how to do “link research” or “what are the best link research tools”. I always ask them, “What is the purpose of your link research?” or “Why do you want to do link research?”

I cannot count the number of times I have been rewarded with blank stares from the Faithful who could not fathom why an “SEO expert” would ask such a question. Link Research underscores exactly the problem with the SEO industry: hardly anyone stops to think about what they are doing or why.

If you’re going to do some link research you should have a search optimization reason for doing so. You’re not optimizing for search if you’re just chasing links and you’re not optimizing for search if you’re trying to get links from the same sites your competitors get them from. In fact, chasing competitor links is a classic example of true negative SEO. If you get enough of those links sooner or later they won’t count much and they may eventually result in a penalty for your competitor (maybe you, too).

So before we get into types of tools, let’s look at good reasons for doing “link research”:

Whimper…sniff…I have a PENGUIN PENALTY! Waaah!: Assuming you are correct, and that you have been downgraded by the Penguin algorithm (technically, it’s “not a penalty” but rather “a change in how the search engine ranks your site”), it may not be link-related. Penguin also went after on-page keyword spamming but, okay, we’ll assume you cleaned up that mess and you still need to find all the bad links. Yes, this is a legitimate reason for link research. Now go look for bad links and don’t spam again.

I am Doing Due Diligence on a Website: You have to be one of the smartest people in the industry because, frankly, I still see a lot of forum discussions where people admit to buying domains without looking at their history. Yes, you must do link research for due diligence.

I Am Doing an SEO Audit: ‘Nuff said.

I Am Learning How to Be an SEO: Okay, this is a requirement of the process, but don’t let your link research teach you how to acquire links. Look at all the “A List” SEO bloggers out there who complain about Google penalties, updates, algorithms, downgrades, brand-favoritism, etc. Now look at how many of THOSE people tell you that “links are the most important thing for SEO”. Do you see a connection? Let me spell it out for you: People who focus on links create the biggest SEO problems in the search index. If you are learning to be an SEO then learn to tell the difference between bullshit peddled by people who are making their money from selling you bullshit and advice from people who actually make money from SEO. Sometimes you run into a whimsical character who has managed to combine the two concepts, in which case learn to recognize how confused people can be in this industry.

I Want to Report my Competitors’ Obviously Spammy Backlinks to Google (or Bing): This is tedious work but, who knows? It might pay off. Then again, maybe the obviously spammy backlinks just aren’t helping your competitors. It’s possible you may do some good by reporting bad backlinks but the search engines generally don’t need our help to find the obvious spam. That said, even I have filed a few link spam reports on occasion. Your mileage may vary. Set your expectations low and manage your time wisely.

I am Freaking Clueless and Don’t Know Where to Get Backlinks: In this case, I suggest your cluelessness will work against you because the chances that your backlink research will lead you into obtaining the wrong links are about 10 times higher than the chances that you’ll do a good job. You would do better to go find all the articles from people like Eric Ward and Debra Mastaler where they share specific case studies about hard-to-obtain links they helped their clients get.

And stay off the “Help A Reporter Out” Website / mailing list. I seriously doubt that those journalists want to hear from clueless budding link builders. Worse yet, I would hate for one of them to use a clueless link builder as a source for a news story.

If you took a job to go out and build links and you don’t know how to do it and your boss is too lazy, slimy, or clueless to teach you how to do it right then just go find another job ASAP.

Okay, on to the types of tools we can use for link research:

Any Analytics Package: A few people have pointed out the obvious about link research. That is that you can look at who is sending you non-search traffic and see if you can find more sites like them. Or maybe you can get more links from them (but learn to do it without asking or leaving comments on their blogs and forums).

Most Common SEO Mistake: Spending too little time looking at this data.

Search Engines: Some people spend a lot of time searching for linking resources in Google and Bing. ‘Nuff said.

Most Common SEO Mistake: Searching for variations on “powered by WordPress”.

Third-party Tools: You know these guys. Most of you subscribe to 2 or more of them. I oppose the unethical crawling of Websites for link data. If you operate a crawler that runs behind one of these services, I will only love and appreciate you if you publish your crawler’s user-agent and honor my robots.txt directives. Technically, no SEO worth his salt should allow one of these tools onto a Website. They earn money by selling YOUR data to your competitors; and they eat up your bandwidth while NOT compensating you for it.

But go ahead: give your outbound link data to all your competitors.

(NOTE TO PEOPLE WHO PUBLISH THESE SERVICES: Much though it pains me to say this, you’ll improve the quality of your data vastly if you require your customers to ban your robots from their sites.)

Most Common SEO Mistake: Getting into SEO pissing matches and arguments over which is the best link research tool. You pays your money and you picks your horse but none of these services can tell you which links have been indexed by Google or Bing and none of these services can tell you which links are passing value in Google or Bing. NONE…OF…THEM.

Blog Directories and Similar Services: You know, I am kind of surprised this type of tool isn’t abused by the SEO industry more often. Once in a while I catch a “guest blogging” guru advising his or her readers to go raid the blog directories for ideas. This kind of tool doesn’t provide much help in forensic SEO.

Most Common SEO Mistake: Failing to do due diligence to see if anyone links to the directory or uses it.

Social Media Platforms: Yup. This one has made the front page of “SEO SPAMMING TODAY”. Just go search for people sharing links on social media sites. Surely they’ll be happy to create links for you — maybe even at no expense! ;)

Most Common SEO Mistake: Using social media platforms for “link research”.

Link Building Tools

Most Common SEO Mistake: Subscribing to, signing up for, buying, leasing, renting, or otherwise using any tool that is being openly promoted on a Web forum or blog.

Second Most Common SEO Mistake: Failing to line up 1,000 previously unused domains to take the place (in succession) of the one you’re about to spam into Google and Bing oblivion.

Auditors and Ranking Analyzers and Beyond

This is a broad category of tools, although they seem to come and go. BrightEdge and their competitors like Conductor and Covario (to name just a few of these companies) help clients collect and organize a LOT of data.

Large publishers can use tools like these to help drive their editorial calendars. And they talk about other benefits. I don’t want to get into a detailed analysis of any of these big data platforms. Each has its strengths and weaknesses.

My chief disappointment with big SEO data service bureaus is that they don’t do the kind of trend analysis I would LOVE to see them do. I had several long conversations with one vendor in particular and I just could not sway their business model toward the trends analysis that we really need. It’s not easy to build a business case for a future tool because you can’t predict demand.

Ironically, predicting demand is exactly the kind of modeling we need — and it’s not like there are not resources available today for this kind of work. There are certainly companies that offer predictive modeling services and tools based on social media analysis and monitoring. These kinds of tools are (so far as I know) priced beyond the scope of the SEO industry. The missed opportunities in these types of services include Deep Web Interferometric Analysis, which proved crucial in my research into Google’s Panda algorithm. Based on what Google has disclosed about Panda, it IS an interferometric algorithm.

We will see more of these tools. Many post-market SEO tools could implement simple interferometric analysis relatively cheaply. They have the data. They just need the right kind of statistical modeling tool (preferably one that is user-configurable through an interactive interface).

We have limited modeling capabilities today. The company that allows you to manipulate data metaphorically so that you can identify proper correlations stands to reap a huge financial reward as the implications of that kind of analysis are fully explored.

Until then, SEO practitioners must continue to stitch and weave the data together, creating their own trends analysis outside the scope of these tools. Hence, you need whatever big data tools you can get access to but you need to look beyond their assumptions.

Author: Michael Martinez

Courtesy of www.seo-theory.com

My blog turned seven years old on Thursday.

It began on April 18, 2006 with a poorly-optimized and completely forgettable blog post that I titled not after a U2 song, but after a Rolling Stones song: Start Me Up.

That same day, I posted a second article — about the blogroll I used to maintain. Another lame blog post. In fact, if you want to see the lamest blog launch in publishing history, just look at the eight articles I posted in April 2006. You’ll see a guy who knew he was talking to a brick wall.

I’d like to think that things have gotten a little better since then and, even though I’ve never done a birthday blog post before, I felt compelled this year. This was supposed to post on the 18th — Thursday — but the events in Boston kept me glued to the television and I didn’t finish it. So, seven years and two days later, here are seven things I’ve learned from seven years of blogging.*

What 7 Years of Blogging Has Taught Me

1.) Blogging is hard.

My friend Ed Reese has made this line one of his mottos, and he’s right. It’s tough. It’s tough getting started (what do I write about?) … it’s tough to attract comments and conversation (you won’t get any for 6-12 months) … it’s tough to keep a blog going for years (what else is there to write about?) … it’s just tough.

(By the way, I was raised on this motto: Nothing worthwhile in life ever comes easy. Blogging can be very worthwhile.)

When I speak to small business owners about the benefits of blogging, I make sure to emphasize that blogging is a serious commitment — and that it’s okay to say “we’re not quite ready right now.”

2.) There’s no substitute for passion.

I’ve been writing about small business marketing now for seven years. I can’t imagine keeping a blog alive that long if I didn’t love the topic.

I had a blog about pro and college sports teams in the Pacific Northwest. I love pro and college sports, but didn’t have the passion to keep that blogging going for seven years.

I had a blog about hyperlocal blogging that stayed alive for about two years before the passion ran out.

I’ve shut down many blogs over the years; the ones that are still alive are the ones where my passion is.

3.) Inspiration comes in cycles.

You will have weeks and months where you have more ideas to write about than time in the day, and other weeks and months when you have no idea what to write about whatsoever.

You must … must … find a way to collect and save all of your ideas, even if it’s just a great headline that comes to mind, a sentence, an analogy, whatever. You’ll need these ideas eventually. (A lot of folks use editorial calendars for storing ideas and scheduling posts. I also just store a lot of ideas as drafts in WordPress.)

4.) Nobody’s gonna read your blog for a couple months.

Remember those lame posts I did early on? No big deal. No one knew about my blog. No one was reading. Unless you’re planning some huge press junket to announce that you’ve launched a blog for your small business, no one’s gonna read your blog at first, either. You’ll be talking to an empty classroom.

So just write and publish and develop a habit that will last. That’s what counts the most in the beginning. Don’t add pressure on yourself by thinking anyone will read what you post on day one. There’s no pressure there. But there is pressure in the next lesson…

5.) Trying to make money adds pressure.

I think the first time I put ads on this blog, it was affiliate ads for a site that offered free business magazines. Then I think I put Google ads on the site. Neither amounted to more than lunch money, but earning a buck was never the point.

Then when more people discovered this blog, companies started wanting to advertise. I decided to accept ads probably 3-4 years ago and it’s been extremely educational to play the role of a publisher with advertisers.

One of the main lessons I’ve learned is that you can’t stop blogging because you’re tired or out of ideas — not when you have advertiser(s) that are paying for visibility and expecting your blog to send them traffic.

Since I find myself with less time for blogging, I won’t be accepting paid ads on this blog when the current advertiser — Local Market Launch — contract ends in a couple months. I’ll switch to Google ads, in all likelihood. Because I can’t promise future advertisers that my blogging will be consistent enough to make ads worth their while.

6.) Always remember who you’re writing for.

speaking-audience-200pxThis is really important to me. I sometimes write articles that my SEO/marketing peers criticize as too basic, too simple or too repetitive. They’ve been reading SEO blogs for years and they bitch on Twitter or somewhere else about seeing basic or regurgitated content on so many blogs, and there’s nothing new out there, and life sucks, and stop blogging if you don’t have anything new to say, yadda-yadda-yadda … and I just want to tell them:

In seven years, I haven’t written a single word for you.

This blog is for small business owners. Nobody else. If that’s you, you’re my audience. Thank you.

I’m surrounded by small business owners: my wife, sister, and most of my friends have their own businesses. I speak with small business owners when I go do Local U workshops. I speak with them when I attend local events a few times every year, and when I go to real estate gatherings with my wife.

I write what I think small business owners should read, not what the SEO industry is looking for. And sometimes it may seem basic or repetitive to someone who’s been doing SEO for a couple years, but it’s not repetitive or boring to the people I’m writing for.

When you know your audience, you’ll find it easier to come up with things to write about. So before you start, decide who you’re writing for. And never forget.

7.) Blogging is great.

Nevermind the SEO benefits. Nevermind the traffic and leads.

The process of taking something from idea to article, creating something that helps others (while it also helps you build trust and authority) is an absolute joy once you get the hang of it. And if you don’t quit too soon, you will get the hang of it. In less than seven years.

And you’ll love it. Trust me. I speak from experience.

Author: Matt McGee

Courtesy of www.smallbusinesssem.com

Blogican.com is live and accepting orders!

After so many delays, trials & errors, hundreds of betatest blogs, our service is finally launched for general public. Our squad is ready to help you with any task related to your blogging activity:

• WordPress Blog Turn-key Installation & Setup -  with premium theme, logo, set of plugins and extra services.
• Blog Updates - monthly service to keep your blogs along with theme and plugins up-to-date.
• Blog Content Creation & Publishing - human written articles, articles republishing, news posting, related video posting with relevant images to your blog on a monthly basis.
• Blog Monetization Services -  to help you earn with your blog.
• Blog SEO & Promotion Services - to help you deliver your blog to your readers and rank it high in search engines.

Blogican.com offers very flexible service packages. You may order basic or premium blog setup package with additional monthly services, or order blogging services separately for your existing blog(s).

Your Early Bird’s Discount

Your advantage of being one of the first to join Blogican community is that you can order any of our services with 20% discount.

For the following week, ending next Monday April 29th, 2013 you can use the discount below. The only thing here is that it’s valid for the first 100 orders only!  You should make your decision very quick.

If discount code does not work it means you are late. But don’t worry, our prices are very affordable and won’t break your bank.

Proceed to Blogican.com »

Blogican is BLOG I CAN where you can blog because you want to!

1. DO YOU NEED A GREAT BLOG?

We are about to launch a new website called Blogican.com with services that a lot of people wanted forever.

Do you have a great idea for a blog, but don’t have time or skills to creat one, so it looks top notch? Or, may be, you need to quickly add another WordPress blog to your blog network and make sure everything is setup right? Blogican squad of professionals will install and setup from scratch a great looking, SEO optimized WordPress blog on your or our hosting account with premium theme, logo and set of great plugins IN ANY NICHE YOU LIKE. We will fine-tune everything the way it is supposed to be.

There will be basic and premium setup packages available, where premium one offered with original content, premium plugins and lots of other extra goodies.

Blogican.com is launching on Monday, April 22nd, 2013. If you want a good discount, you need to sign up for an early bird’s notification list:

Sign up for early bird’s list »

2. DO YOU NEED HELP WITH EXISTING BLOG(S)?

Blogican.com will be also offering some great monthly services for existing blogs, new or old, for very affordable fees:

• Blog updates – where we will keep your blog’s WordPress software, theme and plugins always up-to-date and functional
• Blog hosting – unlimited WordPress optimized hosting
• Blog content – human written articles – researched, created and published to your blog with relevant images on a monthly basis. Or, existing articles, republished from popular article directories with relevant images. Or News Sets in any niche regularly posted to your blog. Or related videos from YouTube or other video sites posted to your blog with titles, descriptions and even comments.
• Blog monetization – e-commerce products with your affiliate links from popular marketplaces or datafeeds autoposted to your blog.
• Blog SEO & Promotion – various services to help you promote your blog and increase quality traffic.

So, if this is something you might be interested in (I know a lot of people are), make sure to sign up for the early bird’s list to get a discount:

Sign up for early bird’s list » 

Otherwise, stay tuned for our launch blog post on Monday. 

Blogican is BLOG I CAN where you can blog because you want to!

We see dozens of guides and tutorials on how we should make our websites better to rank, convert, and perform. On the other hand, there’s so much wrong-doing, it can be easier for you to STOP doing some things to get better results with your online presence. Below I’ve outlined the 17 most popular “sins” I’ve identified on my customers’ websites within the last 2 years.

1. Stop posting pathetic useless promotional content

I do realize, some “boring niche” companies find it pretty hard to create a content strategy and produce fascinating content on a regular basis… But it’s not an excuse for publishing something-of-no-use to anyone. The frequency doesn’t matter that much, focus on the needs of your users, customers and followers. Need inspiration? Take a look at these companies creating great content on “boring” topics.

2. Stop stealing lame stock images – they are not so super effective anyway

Yes, you got me right – there’s not much sense in stealing stock images. On the one hand, you are abusing someone’s copyright. On the other, many stock photos look rather lame and boring.

Dozens of studies and experiments prove that users are more attracted by amateur pictures that look true-to-life, though they can miss a polished glamorous look. As James Chudley put in his guide on using photos to sell:

3. Stop ignoring your readers

I’ve seen it everywhere – an interesting post with great points and a dozen of user comments that are left unnoticed. Isn’t the author interested in what readers think? Why not answer their questions, if any? Or, if you didn’t plan to spend time on comment discussions, why did you decide to have a commenting module in the first place?

Talk to your readers, appreciate their opinion, ask them questions, give them links to the related content – this is the way to build up a healthy community!

4. Stop using big words

If your target audience comprises mostly PhDs, then I may be wrong. If not, consider using simpler wording for your website copy and blog posts. Here are just some examples to give you the idea:

And since I mentioned the topic of words, don’t forget the mighty five: you, free, because, instantly, new – they won’t do any magic to your pages, but they proved to be more effective regarding conversion rates.

5. Stop writing “novels”

Users scan texts – it’s a well-known fact still ignored by the majority of bloggers and website owners. Why? Sometimes, because they’ve heard that for the sake of SEO, they should have a lot of text… Or they wanted to write more than their competitors…

Whatever the reason, the result can be pretty sad – your page bounce rates will escalate with the amount of plain unformatted text.

But what to do if you need to cover a large topic? First of all, think of a Wikipedia style and use:

Additionally, you can split really large articles into parts – just don’t forget to link the posts with one another.

6. Stop using tiny fonts

Well not only tiny, the yellow text on the blue background would make me close the page even faster. The thing is that many websites are designed by designers (and it is logical), however some designers underestimate the importance of text and implement smaller fonts. As a result, we get a beautiful page, but a page we don’t want to read (and even scan).

Did you know that making your content font size a bit larger can even impact the conversion rate?

7. Stop requiring a registration unless it’s really necessary

Users naturally avoid situations they feel might compromise their privacy. Asking them to register is one of such situations they feel skeptical about. Mike Fisher makes a very good point on registration in his post:

If you need to require registration, make sure that users

Offering users to register with their existing Facebook/Twitter accounts can be a good idea, as it simplifies the procedure, however you should still remember the three points mentioned above.

8. Stop overusing Flash

Just a couple of days ago I discussed a website redesign with the owner of a small dog food shop. When I asked how she wanted the website to look like, she replied:

“I guess there should be some long red curtains and you have to click to open them. After that you’ll find yourself in a cinema hall where dogs and cats are sitting and watching a film about the food for cats and dogs.”

Well, the idea itself may be not so brilliant, but we realize that in most case we’ll need to use the Adobe Flash technology to create something of this kind, which is NOT search-engine-friendly. On the other hand, will this fascinating Flash intro persuade me to purchase more items? I think a smart offer or a coupon discount would work much better!

9. Stop blending advertising within the content

It’s a little bit frustrating to be lured by an interesting guide or a case study to find out you are just being offered a new copywriting course, an SEO e-book, or paid consulting. Even when you run a pay-per-click campaign, do not lie to users in ad copies – their frustration will fire back so hard.

10. Stop testing your website in 1 browser only

Pretty self-explanatory. No matter how rare you use IE, it’s still very popular with users.

11. Stop using unreadable captchas

There are some horrible captchas out there…

12. Stop being afraid of linking out

We should blame the search engines for this one – there were times when people where linking out to the related useful content they wanted to share with the users. Now, what we have today is the COMMON belief in BAD external links. How much PR am I going to lose? What kind of anchor should I choose?

Does this website link back to me? Or maybe I’ll just mention it in text without inserting a link?! Now take a look at Wikipedia articles and you’ll get the answers. Linking out is totally fine.

13. Stop ignoring the social mentions of your website

Here’s the big truth: even if you don’t have any website-related accounts in social media, you can still be discussed there! Sometimes, you just need to search for your website mentions (either directly or setting up specific alerts with the tools, e.g. BuzzBundle) to discover positive, neutral and negative comments and discussions.

14. Stop cluttering pages with badges and counters

Well, you can showcase your awards and achievements on the “About” page, but it’s not a good idea to clutter all pages with this information. And most users do not care if they are number 159,780.

15. Stop lying to customers

This one’s crucial: when you lie to your customers (for instance, do not disclose full payment details), it can cause a catastrophe, burst out on dozens of forums and blogs where people would describe you as a scammer and discourage others from using your service/product.

16. Stop auto-playing video and audio

That’s annoying and feels like my private space is being violated – I want to decide myself whether I want to watch or listen to anything on your website.

17. Stop planning – start doing

There’s a lot of internet marketing and strategy dropped on you daily – dozens of ideas and plans to implement. The big question is – are you doing it? Some people take planning so seriously, they never get down to actually implementing the useful stuff. If this is about you – stop planning and start doing something right away, this is the only way to see what really works and make things work better for you.

Author: Inessa Bokhan

Courtesy of www.searchenginejournal.com

With the explosion of sites like WordPress, YouTube, Pinterest and Facebook, content can go viral very quickly. By creating high quality, engaging content your brand can be shared around the world within minutes – something that would have cost hundreds of thousands of dollars in marketing costs ten years ago. The social media revolution has changed the way we market content. Here’s some numbers that support the revolution:

But the shift towards content marketing can also be credited to Google. In February 2011, Google launched the now infamous Panda update that penalized websites for low quality and thin content.

An if that wasn’t enough Google launched Penguin in April 2011, an update to the algorithm that penalized websites with low quality links and over-optimization.

Both of these updates lead to a change in the SEO industry. Pre-2011, SEO techniques may have involved automating content and links in order to get websites to rank higher in search. Post-April 2012, these techniques no longer work. Now links need to be acquired naturally through websites and social sharing, and the only way content will be shared on the web is if it is of high quality.

Content marketing is a must-have if you are an online marketer, and it is fast becoming the most valuable way to increase brand awareness and nurture leads. At the end of 2012, Content Marketing Institute released a report titled “B2B content Marketing: 2013 benchmarks, budgets and trends”. The report found that:

If you don’t have a content marketing strategy, you are losing business to your competition.

The report also covered the biggest challenges that B2B Marketers face with content marketing, with 64% citing the biggest challenge was producing enough content. This post aims to reduce that percentage.

20 Ideas For Content Marketing

These 20 ideas for content marketing cover a range of media for you to promote your brand with. They include video, audio, white papers, blog topics, surveys and more. Let’s get started!

1. Interview industry leaders

Interviewing industry connections provides a great source of content that is engaging to your audience; insightful content from industry leaders. By displaying this content in the form of blog posts or webinars, you are generating high quality, link-worthy content and increasing industry leader’s exposure.

Tip: Use LinkedIn to network and ask connections to appear on your blog or in a webinar. Using my own personal network on LinkedIn, I was able to feature Neil Patel, Linda Bustos and Rank Fishkin on my blog.

2. Conduct a Survey

Make the most of your online community and conduct a survey. Use Survey Monkey or other online survey platforms and gather important data for free. Survey questions can include:

Using the data in the example below from Marketingcharts.com, you are able to share insight such as ‘42% of marketers will increase mobile marketing spend in 2013’. Once you have collected enough data, create a summary in the form of a blog post and share this with your readers.

Tip: Get started immediately and use Facebook, Google+ or Twitter to survey fans and followers.

3. Report news in your industry

For each whitepaper you read or webinar you attend, create a blog post to summarize key-takeaway points. And if possible, follow-up with the author of the whitepaper/ host of the webinar with questions and include in the post. Stay ahead of the competition and start subscribing to:

Tip: Alternate takeaway posts between webinars, whitepapers, industry events or books to keep content fresh.

4. Share presentations

Each time you give a speech, presentation or hold a webinar you will most likely use a presentation for support. Use this presentation (remove sensitive information) and share it with your community. SlideShare makes it quick and easy to share presentation slides and this is a great opportunity for displaying your expertise and increasing awareness for the next time you hold an event.

Tip: Get your subscribers engaged with your content from day one by including a link to your most viewed slideshare presentation within the newsletter sign up welcome email.

5. Build a knowledge base

FAQ’s are found on most websites, yet are not particularly useful. Create a more content driven FAQ section by identifying the top 10 complaints or questions customers wrote about in 2012 and build a content program (or knowledge base) to help answer those questions.

Tip: Find the most asked question of the week and turn it into a weekly Q&A blog series.

6. Host a webinar

The easiest way to find a topic for a webinar is to create a webinar about your company and what you do. Webinars can be created using services like WebEx or GoToMeeting. Set a date for the webinar, create a landing page for participants to register and then send out a newsletter to your customer database and inform them. Make sure you support the webinar with a PowerPoint presentation and record the webinar.

One of the benefits of holding a webinar is that you can use the webinar content to promote in several channels. For example, instead of archiving the landing page for registration, update the content to include the webinar video and copy and paste the transcript below it.

Tip: Make sure you post the webinar presentation on SlideShare and send a newsletter all participants of the webinar and link to the updated landing page and SlideShare presentation.

7. Share reports, charts and white papers on Pinterest

There is a lot of data out there. From industry trends, company reports to usage statistics. It’s difficult to stay on top of them all and read through the hundreds and thousands of reports created each year. One way to remain on top of this is for your brand to create a Pinterest account and each time an employee reads a white paper, they can share key information on Pinterest. Set the account public and you will be the go-to Pinterest account for industry trends.

Tip: Make sure this information is shared with your sales force for them to use the data when meeting prospects.

8. Create an Infographic

Any B2B marketer will have an Infographic in their arsenal of content marketing tactics. One of the biggest struggles is finding content to create an Infographic on. An easy way to get started with an Infographic is to summarize long blocks of content you have on your website and turn them into a visually appealing infographic. Examples of content you can turn into an Infographic can be:

You can also use Infographics to create a ‘History of…” topic within your niche. Infographics prices can vary and I have found prices anywhere between $500 and $4000.

Tip: Infographics should contain no more than 5-6 statistics/ points of information. Research by KISSmetrics found that any more than 6 and it becomes too much for the reader to consume.

9. Create a newsletter sign-up series

More than likely, you have either seen or signed up to an online email course. You enter your email address and for the next seven days, you will receive tips and tricks on a specific topic. These newsletter series are goldmines for lead generation and increasing your subscriber base, but just make sure you get the subscriber to double opt-in and re-confirm their email address – you don’t want to send the course to spammers or bots. All you need to do is collect at least 7 pieces of content (all of which could be on your website or blog), include a link to the content and send an email each day to those who have signed up.

Tip: On day 7, include a link to a free trial or free demo of your software to turn those readers into buyers!

10. Live blog a seminar/ conference/ event

If you attend a seminar this year, conference or event, live blog the entire thing on your blog or Twitter account. The way to live blog is to publish updates on key findings, important data and research. Each time you publish an update, include the time, the speaker (either by name or Twitter handle) and the key piece of information.

Tip: If you live-blog an event on Twitter, make sure you include the hash tag (#) for the event to increase your reach.

11. Create a “Top 10 bloggers to follow” list within your industry

Industry leaders and experts exist within each industry. A great way to create share-able content is to create a list of the top 10 bloggers to follow within your industry. Everyone loves to be recognized for their vision and expertise. Include a link to each blog and an image, and follow the bloggers on Twitter – When you publish the post, the bloggers will most likely re-tweet it for you.

Tip: Before you publish the post, send a short email to the blogger and inform them that they made the list. It’s a great ego-boost and in return they might blog/ tweet about your company.

12. Publish an e-book

You no longer need a publisher to launch a book into the market. Sites such as Blurb and Amazon publishing allow you to create an e-book with ease. Instead of trying to write a biography or the entire history of your brand, take your most read blog posts (Between 20-25 posts), condense them into one booklet, create an introduction, table of content and cover page and launch as an e-book.

According to research by Statista e-book spending continues to grow. Not only can an e-book increase your brand awareness but it could also add another revenue stream to your business.

Tip: If you have enough content on your blog, make the e-book an annual event and collect the most read posts each year. And submit your e-book to DocStoc, Calameo and GetFreeEBooks to increase awareness and inform your customer base of the publication.

13. Launch a Beginners Guide

Beginners Guides are always well-received pieces of content. Within your website visitors, you will have beginners, those who are just getting started and looking for a product or service, the intermediate who has perhaps bought or subscribed to your product/ service and the advanced user who has years of experience.

Most company websites are written by the advanced users, but there is a huge opportunity to turn the beginners into advanced users by creating a guide. By capturing beginners at the top of the funnel, you can guide them through the entire sales cycle.

Tip: Make the content freely available on the website and create a downloadable PDF for those who want to print out the entire guide.

14. Top 10 FAQ to sales teams

You’re sales teams are out on the road meeting with prospects and customers. They know the product very well, and they know a lot of the answers to questions asked in these meetings. Ask your sales manager the top 10 frequently asked questions and publish the questions and answers on your website.

Tip: Complete the same process with your customer service teams and gain insight into what questions your customer base is asking.

15. Make your content available in audio format

Eric Schmidt once famously said that “there is more content being produced in the last 48 hours than between the beginning of time and 2003”. That’s an incredible amount of content that you will have to compete against. In 2011, approximately 25% of Americans listen to podcasts regularly and this number continues to grow. Instead of being added to yet another “read later” list, why not turn your blog posts into a podcast?

Tip: Use iSpeech to automatically convert your blog into a podcast. You don’t need to record it yourself as iSpeech does that for you.

16. Video testimonials

Getting your customers to spread the word about how good your company is priceless. Using social networks, you will be able to pinpoint who brand advocates are; the fans who comment and share each post, the followers who re-tweet your tweets and the users who +1 your Google+ posts. Ask these users to create a video testimonial in return for a free product or gift and post the video on your website. Offer an incentive such as a free month’s subscription or free consultation to increase the number of testimonials you receive.

Tip: Use these video testimonials on your home page, thank you emails to share the positive feedback you have received from real people.

17. Build on existing content

Recent research has found that content with more than 2,000 words ranks higher in Google than content with less than 2,000 words – That’s great insight for your content marketing strategy – Aim for lengthy-written content and you will do better in search and attract more traffic.

Instead of trying to think of a topic for a white paper, you may already have a white paper that is currently written as a blog post. If you have a blog post that is more than 1,500 words, you can turn this into a white paper. All you need to do is create a cover page, a table of contents and a summary.

Tip: When creating white papers, you can also summarize the key findings into an Infographic and a blog post to turn one piece of great content into three pieces of content.

18. Top 10 blog posts of the month in your industry

Like most B2B Marketers, you will catch up on the latest news in your industry by reading a wide-range of blogs. If you find that you visit the same blogs daily, and the content provided is high quality, there is no harm in sharing this with your readers. By creating a top 10 blog posts of the month, you are able to further spread the good work of others in your industry.

Tip: Create an alltop.com board or bookmark an existing one to follow the latest blog posts and reports from your industry. At SuperOffice, we use crm.alltop.com to stay up to date on all CRM trends.

19. Host a Meetup in your area

Meeting decision makers face to face and understanding their needs is the best way to increase your client base. A great way to connect with hundreds of potential customers is to host an event or seminar in your area. Promote your event on websites like Meetup.com, which allows you to create a page for your event that includes date, location, organizer and attendees. With more than 13 million members, Meetup.com users can then search for events/ conferences in their area and register.

Tip: Remember to create a landing page on your website in order to promote the event to existing web traffic and use social channels to spread the word that you are hosting the event.

20. Accept guest blog posts

Once you have exhausted all of the suggestions listed above and you are a content marketing expert, a great way to reach a new audience is to offer guest posts on your site. Create a form on your website that guest bloggers can complete to reach out to you. Ask for examples of blogs they have previously written and make sure the blogs are in tune with your blog strategy and are high in quality. If your form doesn’t generate the quality guest posters you need, you can sign up to MyBlogGuest or BloggerLinkUp and access thousands of guest bloggers.

Tip: Ensure that the guest blogger has a Google+ profile so you can provide author rank for them. It means the guest blog they write stands out in the Google search results, which means more traffic for you.

Benefits of content marketing

Organizations are slow to adopt to content marketing. Whether it’s due to resources or budgets, you need internal buy-in before you start creating a lot of content. Many brands have had great success with content marketing. Here are just a few reasons why you should invest in this tactic.

Not only are brands seeing an increase in traffic, customers and revenue but content marketing has a wide range of benefits.

And according to HubSpot, businesses with websites between 400 and 1000 pages received 600% more leads than websites with less than 400.

How to measure the success of content marketing?

You now have twenty suggestions on how to create content in 2013, case studies of how brands have used content marketing to increase their bottom line and additional benefits that come with a successful content marketing strategy. Before we wrap up, 33% of the respondents to the 2013 benchmarks, budgets and trends report said that the biggest challenge with content marketing was the measure the effectiveness. To get started you can measure four key areas:

Conclusion

Content marketing is still in its infancy yet has been widely adopted by marketers worldwide. The growth in content marketing usage, spend and importance means that if you are not implementing a content strategy, you will be left behind by your competition.

Build content in a way that puts your brand top of mind. Your industry expertise needs to be shared in a way that can be accessed by your audience. By focusing on creative content, you will be able to attract visitors, links, social shares, referrals and an increase in your revenues. A low-cost tactic for a high-income reward so start creating content now!

Author: Steven Macdonald

Courtesy of www.searchenginejournal.com

As a bit of psychology fiend I just wanted to share this video I found a few days ago on Youtube which explains the different ways in which advertisers use persuasive psychological techniques in their advertising campaigns.

The video covers peripheral messaging and it got me thinking about it’s correlation with inbound/content marketing.

The concept of peripheral advertising is essentially what the term implies; the marketing is conducted as a secondary effort to the main project, promoting the product or service tangentially.

The other element of the video I thought would be useful was the way in which people are influenced by colours and the associations we have with them. Something to consider the next time you are designing a landing page or infographic.

Anyway it’s only a few minutes long and you never know you might learn something new :)

Author: Chris Dyson

Courtesy of www.tripleseo.com

Google Reader has one foot in the grave, and some believe this signals the death of RSS. But does this mean the end of RSS for ecommerce?

If you aren’t familiar with RSS, this video explains it “in plain English.” Essentially, RSS is a way to syndicate content like blog posts, video or new product listings (though not the only format for syndication). A content publisher makes a feed of this content available for consumption through an RSS reader, email, widget or other application that can turn it into a friendly format.

Though these may be fringe use cases, some practical example of RSS on ecommerce sites include:

Site personalization

Netflix offers public and private RSS feeds. Members can personalize suggested content within their account, or subscribe to public feeds such as top 25 by genre.

Orbitz launched its RSS collection in 2006, they still exist today along with the option to add to your Yahoo portal page (hey, it was the 2000?s!)

Though it’s not obvious, Zappos offers their geek-savvy customers the option of subscribing to a brand’s new listings by RSS in addition to email notifications from brand category pages.

Ebay has long enabled users to save their search terms and opt into daily email summaries of new listings.

Recently, Ebay redesigned its US home page to include saved searches in a Pinterest-style, personalized feed that updates in real time.

While the general population may not “get” RSS, they certainly are familiar with the idea of following feeds, thanks to Facebook, Twitter and their social cousins. Ebay suggests similar feeds to follow (based on saved searches), and enables users to connect with Facebook to import interests from profile information.

Affiliate development tools

Developers can also pull Netflix’ public RSS feeds to power apps like Instantwatcher, which alerts users to expiring Netflix titles, among other tools.

Ebay uses RSS feeds for affiliates, who can create a customized feed of new products that fit a set of Advanced Search criteria.

New product or deal alerts

RSS vs API

Web users are much more familiar with the concept of following micro-streams of content a-la-Twitter than subscribing via RSS. With Google Reader’s exit, even the geekerati will be hard pressed to subscribe to ecommerce feeds, though there’s opportunity to continue to offer RSS updates through Zite, Feedly and similar apps for sites where RSS is a popular feature.

RSS still has value for on-site personalization like Netflix, where members can use it to tailor content they see when logged into a site.

But the question is, should you use RSS or an API to build this functionality?

The difference between RSS and API

Though RSS feeds may be delivered as part of an API, RSS is used to push fixed content updates, such as new product additions, daily deals or latest product reviews. If your feature requires more interaction by the user other than subscribe and watch the content updates roll in, or if you want to slice or mash up your content beyond what RSS can do (including integrating with Facebook Connect), and API is your better option.

RSS or API for developers and affiliates?

Developers are a different breed than your typical non-technical consumer, and offering them standard RSS (alone or as part of an API) enables them to pull your data without having to write any code themselves. But again, RSS has its limitations, and if it’s important for you to offer developers such as affiliates a way to create more complex features with your data feeds, consider an API.

Author: Linda Bustos

Courtesy of www.getelastic.com

With video ads on the horizon, we can only wonder if this will be the end of Facebook. They have slowly rolled out additional ad products in attempt to monetize their free service. Mark Zuckerberg, Chairman and CEO, also expressed their eagerness to venture further into mobile during a recent earnings call:

“…comScore put out a report saying that Facebook is now 23% of all time spent on apps in the U.S., and one of the next biggest apps is Instagram at 3%. So, put together, we’re now more than a quarter of the time spent in apps. Today, there’s no argument. Facebook is a mobile company. As I’ve said before, there are three main parts of our strategy; build the best mobile products, build the platform and services that leverage the social graph, and build a really strong monetization effort engine.”

What does this all mean? In Facebook’s eyes, mobile is an untapped revenue opportunity. Now, monetization efforts will no longer focus solely on desktop ads.

With the advent of the “new” News Feed, the emphasis is clearly on visual content. According to Ad Age, the video ad product will be targeted to users’ News Feeds on desktop and mobile devices. The ads are expected to be capped at 15 seconds and will autoplay.

Are marketers excited? Absolutely. This opens up a whole world of opportunity for advertising to Facebook users. Are Facebook users excited? This one is up for discussion. Facebook has to be wary of introducing another new ad product for fears that it might be viewed as intrusive.

Author: Erika Barbosa

Courtesy of www.seo2.0.onreact.com

Writing effective web copy is both an art and a science. There’s a degree of artistry to a perfectly composed sentence that can’t be reduced to a set of simple instructions. However, when it comes to persuasive writing, certain strategies have a proven track record of success. If you want to write good copy that will resonate with your readers and drive traffic to your website, take note of the following tips.

1) Sell it in the title. You can write the greatest copy in the world, but if your headline is weak, no one’s going to read it. On average, 80% of people will read just the headline – only 20% will read the rest. This is why a solid headline is so important. There’s no one magic formula for writing a good headline, but some time-tested strategies include the direct approach (e.g. “Free Coupon”), the how-to approach (e.g. “How to Use Google Analytics”) and the list approach (e.g. the title of this post).

If you’re running an ad, be sure to come up with more than one headline and use A/B testing to see which one works the best.

2) Tell stories. Humans are suckers for a good story. Stories resonate with us – statistics don’t. Journalists have known this for ages. A newspaper headline about 50,000 people killed in an earthquake in a foreign country will barely give readers pause. It’s just a number; I can’t picture a number. A headline about a small child who’s been trapped under the rubble for three days, on the other hand – suddenly you have my interest. I can visualize the scene. I can empathize with the family. I can relate.

If you’re writing marketing copy, the same rule applies. You can bombard your readers with impressive statistics and technical details about your product or service, and they’ll smile and nod. If you really want to get their attention, however, give them a good story. Open with a compelling anecdote. Provide case studies. Highlight testimonials from your customers.

Tell me a story, and I’ll give you my attention.

3) Be specific. You may think that speaking in general terms covers more bases, and thus maximizes your potential readership. Not so. The visitors to your website who are the most likely to convert are the ones who are looking for something specific. Don’t speak in generalities about how your company sells “high-quality fishing gear,” or “software that will maximize your business’s conversion rate.” What kinds of fishing gear do you sell? How does your software maximize conversion rates? The more questions you can answer for your reader right off the bat, the better.

4) Avoid jargon. Every industry has its jargon. In my industry, for example, we talk about SEO, SEM, PPC, and ROI. Jargon serves a purpose as convenient shorthand for those in the know, but you can’t always expect your readers to be familiar with it. Even if you’re marketing to other businesses in your industry, a more colloquial approach often works better. Compare “This online course will optimize your ROI and mazimize your conversion rate” with “This online course will get you more leads for less money.”

5) Use persuasive language. Gregory Ciotti at Copyblogger has written a great article about the 5 most persuasive words in the English language. It’s even backed up – with science! The words are “you,” “free,” “because,” “instantly,” and “new.” Readers want to feel like they are being personally addressed (you) they want to know what’s in it for them (because), and they like things that are free, new, and instant (who doesn’t?). Some other words you might want to add to that list are “win,” “how”, and “save.” Just make sure that these words words are used in an appropriate context, and that they accurately describe what it is that you’re offering.

6) End with a call to action. This is Marketing 101. The conclusion of your copy should always answer the question “What next?” If you’ve done a good job with your copy, I’m going to be ready to pursue next steps. Tell me what those steps are. Maybe you want me to sign up for an email list. Maybe you want me add an item to my shopping cart. Maybe you want me to Tweet your article. In any case, the call to action should be clear and definite. If there’s no call to action, what was the point of the copy?

Adopt these simple strategies for your marketing copy and you’ll start seeing better results. Good copy takes a while to produce and even longer to master, but it’s well worth the investment. If you write persuasively and deliver on your promises, both you and your customer will end up happy. And everybody wins.

Author: Brett Langois

Courtesy of www.poweredbysearch.com

One of the very important metrics that counts in for a Google penalty, especially in the post penguin, panda era is bad links. Bad links comes in all shapes and sizes, no really.

Any link could be a bad link if you don’t understand it properly. Which is why its important to look into your backlink data once a while and make sure things are looking good there.

But, what are bad links?

Well, generally, low quality links are bad links.

Any link built for the sake of link building is a bad link.

Any link that comes from a bad neighborhood website too could be a bad link.

Any link that come from a website that has been selling links also could be a bad link.

Any link that follows a typical, unnatural pattern in its out bound links could be a bad link.

Any link from a website that was built entirely or partially for the sake or writing articles that carried paid links too could be a bad link.

Essentially, any unnatural and artificial effort put in to “generate” links pointing to a site could leave behind many trails that could classify them as bad links.

Here’s my recommendation.

what to look for in your back links that might identify them as a “bad link”

- Scan the website for the articles published on it.

Do you see articles with no traffic, no comments or unrelated content? Like insurance and Gold Mining together? It clearly was not written for benefiting someone looking for information. But possibly for selling links.

- Look for obsessive linking patterns.

Are there several lesser-known, untrusted websites being linked to from the articles, sidebar or footer? Typically, link builders purchase site-wide links or footer links as they are cheap. Having couple of them on the sidebar is a clear signal of unnatural linking.

- Thin content.

Look for thin content. Does the site have articles that looks like written for the engines? If there are not “meaty – content” it might be a signal that the site is built to sell links from within their articles.

- Anchor Text repetition.

Look for repeated anchor texts. Link builders typically buy links based on anchor texts, which are basically their primary or secondary targeted keywords. A genuine reviewer might not link to the website more than once with the same keyword. If you see an excessive use of the same anchor text from the same website, it could be manipulated.

- Linking to landing pages.

Link builders, in an effort to gather authority to their landing pages for their targeted keywords, try to buy links that point to the same landing page. This is a clean signal, unless the page is organically authoritative otherwise, that the links are bought to point to the page.

- Nature of the website.

Although there cannot be pattern predicted here, use your judgment. Is it a forum signature link, or a spam directory or a blogspot blog with stemmed and machine written articles? Is it one of those websites that you would trust for information? If not, try to avoid it.

Author: Mani Karthik

Courtesy of www.dailyseoblog.com

Thanks to technology, the world moves at lightning speed. Business done solely in an office is a thing of the past, and staying on top of your work in real time is essential to making your company a success. This rings especially true for those in internet marketing, and pushing your business forward on the go is as easy as having the right marketing apps, literally, at your fingertips.

Over five million iPhone 5?s sold in the first weekend of sales, and over 100 million iPads have been sold in the past two and a half years. Although many of these sales were for personal use, most successful companies are using the popular smartphones and tablets to do everyday business. In fact, Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO, stated that 94 percent of Fortune 500 companies were using the popular iPad “in an official capacity.” With growing demands for these tools come increasing sales of apps, with over 700,000 available apps causing 35 billion downloads. 9.3% of apps fall into the business category, and your business can’t afford to be left behind as technology pushes the business world forward.

The Social Connection

Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram – We all know how to use these by now, but managing your social outreach on the go is easier than ever. Staying on top of what’s trending, and consistently engaging with followers is as simple as downloading the apps.

Hootsuite – Posting socially has never been easier, whether it be to Facebook, Twitter, or Google+. Timed posts and tracked feedback allow for quickly tracked and easily managed social media outreach. Figure out the best way to increase your traffic and see what’s working (or not working) through your social networking.

Marketing Material Creation

YouTube and iMovie – Over 500 years of YouTube videos are watched every single day on Facebook alone, so using iMovie to create worthy content and YouTube as an uploading platform can give your marketing tactics a real boost. Dr. James McQuivey of Forrester Research found that one minute of video is worth 1.8 million words, so if you’re not using video as a marketing tool for your business, you’re missing out.

WordPress – Having an engaging blog is a key element to boosting online presence and building your brand, but blogging requires consistent updating to be successful. The WordPress app allows for quick penning and posting, keeping your blog followers satisfied and loyal.

Piktochart – Humans are visual, and putting your information into an infographic has proven to be an excellent marketing tool. Easily shared and visually pleasing, creating an infographic on the go is simple with the piktochart app.

Business Connection

Skype – Many users find Skype to be a wonderful way to stay in touch in their personal lives, but Skype is also an excellent source for staying connected in your business life. Many interviews and meetings are held through Skype, and your busy life doesn’t have to slow down to have some face time with your employees, even if you’re out of the office.

Dropbox – One of the best ways to get your files and folders on the move. By storing your data in the cloud, you (and your team) can easily access your information remotely.

Podio – Working together from different locations is a breeze with Podio, allowing users to create workspaces and collaborate on specific projects. Being on the same page with your marketing team from afar is more than possible with platforms like Podio.

GoToMeeting – Gone are the days of conference calling. GoToMeeting allows you to hear and view presentations in real time, so your time out of the office can be more efficient. Meet quickly with your marketing team or with existing or potential clients. You can even offer webinars like we do at Vertical Measures, speaking on a different and relevant topic each month that your fans and followers will be interested in.

Eventbrite – Putting on an event, workshop or conference? Eventbrite is the most trusted and easy to use event management system out there. Plus, they have a free app where you can track your registrations, prices, etc., in addition to finding relevant events in your industry.

Financial Matters and Marketing Analytics

Paypal – The Paypal app is so simple, you’ll wonder why you ever dealt with cash or cards at all. Manage your online transactions quickly and receive instant receipts when there are payments or deposits in or out of your account.

Analytics Pro – This app provides quick, easy access to Google Analytics, allowing you to track your online endeavors and set up goals for your business. You can access multiple accounts and get clear visuals of your progress through logical graphs.

SEO Analysis Tool – This provides technical details about domains, and also offers tips on how to improve your own SEO ranking. And it’s a free app!

SEO Pro – An easy-to-use app that allows you to track your online ranking efforts, including your Page and Alexa rankings.

Marketing Tips and Tricks

Internet Marketing Speed – Staying in tune with the latest in internet marketing is made possible through several well-followed podcasts, such as Internet Marketing Speed by James Schramko. Learning from each other is valuable, and podcasts by the pros are a good way to stay in tune.

Marketing Online Live 2.0 – Another excellent podcast for internet marketers, by Alex Mandossian and Paul Colligan, podcasts are offered twice a month on hot topics in the internet marketing field.

Mashable – Another popular information site for those in social media, this app offers news and information for those who want to stay on top of trending internet news.

Keeping up with new technologies is half the battle in internet marketing, and apps are the best weapons in the fight. Many apps are available for free, while some can get pricey. Regardless of your budget, there is an app out there that can take your internet marketing endeavors to new levels…and all at the touch of a screen.

Author: Laura Holloway

Courtesy of www.verticalmeasures.com

Dear friends,

RSS Ground has recently added a new poster to its system of RSS tools.

RSS to Facebook Poster will now be available together with WordPress, Google Blogger and Twitter posters.

With the help of RSS to Facebook poster you will be able to automatically update your Facebook timeline or timeline of any fanpage you have administrator rights to.

Freshly generated targeted RSS feeds for any niche, affiliate RSS feeds, RSS from Datafeeds now can be sent to your Facebook right from the same interface.

There is no limit with a number of RSS feeds or a number of post in this Facebook tool. It is fully under your control. You may also update several Facebook pages simultaneously.

To learn more about this tool, please refer to RSS to Facebook manual or sign up to RSS Ground Professional membership.

Enjoy RSS to Facebook Poster from RSS Ground.

Many aspects of web design are very subjective on the surface. Should we use a shadow on that text or a solid border? Should we use this image on our homepage slider or that one? However when it comes to making a truly high quality website, there is a method to all the madness. Whether it’s the color scheme, layout, use of specific images, or placement of calls to action, a truly high quality website built by a marketing focused company has everything in a certain place for a specific reason.

Now I won’t claim to have all the answers — I along with any marketing focused web designer am still learning through trial and error, A/B testing, and meticulous data scrubbing. However over the years, I have learned a thing or two about what truly makes a high quality website. Here are 25 website elements that I have learned are critical to truly having a quality, marketing focused website.

Element 1: Clear Navigation:

A website needs to have a clear navigation menu. That navigation menu the majority of the time falls on the top of the webpage in the form of a horizontal bar, not because web designers are lazy, but because this is where people expect it to be. It needs to be easy to navigate a website. Yes, cool designs are fun and unique, but at the end of the day if the user can’t figure out how to navigate your website they’re going to bounce.

Element 2: Multiple Navigation Menus:

Clients often struggle with determining what to highlight in their navigation menu, so we often revert to having multiple navigation menus in the form of vertical menus or horizontal sub-menus. We understand many businesses are extremely complex, so if you’re in a complex industry, a complex business, or have an extremely large website, multiple navigation menus depending on what part of the site you’re on will be critical in assisting visitors with finding what they’re looking for.

Element 3: Easy To Find Objectives, Clear Calls To Action:

The content that falls in the site’s main navigation menu should contain the core pages of the website. This doesn’t necessarily need to be the traditional “Home, About Us, Sign Up, & Contact Us” but rather is unique to your business and industry. We recommend having a clear contact button and clear service/product button in the navigation menu, and often times we’ve found that less is more when it comes to navigation. Sites that have easy to find objectives in the navigation menu tend to convert and perform better than those with cluttered navigation menus or navigation menus with endless drop downs.

Likewise, clear calls to action are extremely important. This isn’t just on certain pages, but rather throughout the entire website. The homepage, blog pages, category pages, sales pages, and every page on the website exists for a purpose and needs to have a clear call to action to properly funnel traffic to where it needs to be.

Element 4: Site Search:

Every single website needs an easy to use and accurate search feature. Many sites have a search feature, but they return terrible results or worse yet don’t work at all. Often times a content management system or e-commerce platform will come with a strong search feature, but if your business has an extremely large site or is an extremely large e-commerce store, the importance of a quality search feature becomes increasingly important. Custom search bars can be utilized, predictive search can be incorporated, or Google Site Search can be utilized to provide quality search results within a specific website.

Element 5: Core Content Highlighted (Cornerstone Content):

Often times businesses have fantastic pages outlining their business, their processes, and core information about why they’re the best, but its hidden. Every business should have a value proposition explaining why someone should pick them over another company, and that should be considered the business’ cornerstone piece of content. That piece of content should be well written, clear, concise, and highlighted properly in the overall web design.

This is more important in certain industries, especially service based industries or industries where the product/service is virtually a commodity, but no matter what the nature of the business it’s important to have a strong value proposition that is properly worked into the website’s structure.

Element 6: Thought Out Contact Process:

How many times do you find a website contact form that doesn’t ask for your phone/email? Or a contact form that is so long you feel like you’re applying for a second mortgage? Or the worst — you have to dig and dig and eventually Google search for the contact page for a company.

Every website needs to have a clear contact process with a simple contact form. That form should ask for Name, Email, and Message. Optional fields are phone number and a drop-down for Reason for Contacting. Anything beyond that needs to be collected on a secondary form or after you contact the new lead as the shorter and sweeter the contact forms the greater the chance they’ll be filled out. This is always a struggle with business owners as they want to ask 15 questions in a contact form, but in reality a marketing focused site will have a short contact form.

Element 7: Blog/News Area:

Every website needs a blog/news area. You don’t want a blog/news area, you say? Well, if you want a quality, marketing based website then you’re getting one. Let’s be realistic, anyone who knows anything about online marketing knows how critical a blog and news area is. Not having a blog/news section to a website is basically like not even having a website these days — seriously.

In addition to actually having the blog/news area is the importance of updating this critical section of the website, but we’ll touch more on that in another element.

Element 8: Information About Your Company:

If I’m searching the web, stumble upon a new company, and can’t find out anything about that company, I will likely leave. It’s important to post information about the business . This consists of information about the company’s history, the management team, employees, location, structure, and any other important or unique information about the company. Not only is this good information to have, but it also helps build trust in the company and helps show the company is established and not a fly-by-night operation.

Element 9: Testimonials & Reviews:

Every website needs testimonials and reviews. I don’t care if its a SEO company, a car dealer, a dental office, or a trash collection company. Every website needs testimonials and reviews to build trust. Let me throw out a little statistic I learned through another website I own — years ago we didn’t have any testimonials or reviews posted, and we had about an 11% contact rate on the site. After we added testimonials & reviews, that soared to 17% and our close rate on those that contacted us went up dramatically.

Ideally a video testimonial is the best, however a text testimonial with an image or on stationary from the individual is nearly as good. And if you can’t get those, then a simple text based review is still far, far better than having nothing at all.

Element 10: Case Studies & Data:

Much like testimonials and reviews, every website should also contain case studies and data. Many business owners say “I don’t have any case studies or data” and our response is “Because we haven’t put any together yet”. No matter what industry you’re in, you can put together some sort of case study or other business specific data. Doctors can publish success rates, an e-commerce site can publish customer satisfaction surveys, a law firm can publish their success rates or work on a specific case, and so on. No matter what industry you’re in, working with a good marketing focused individual can help you come up with case studies and data to publish on the website to establish yourself as an industry authority.

Element 11: Quality & Unique Content:

This is key. Your website is essentially two things: images and text. We’ll talk about the images later and the text now. Every website should have high quality, unique content that was either written in house or written by your web design/copywriting team. This content needs to be clear, concise, and focus on helping inform your website visitors while funneling them to your goal. This content is one of the most important elements of your website and is one of the things that will ultimately decide if a visitor becomes a “bounce” or a “conversion”.

And likewise, this content should be unique for three reasons: First off it needs to be unique for SEO purposes due to Panda, secondly it needs to be unique so you don’t look the same as your competitor who you stole it from, and third it needs to be unique because it’s just the right, ethical thing to do. Don’t copy content from someone else, rather take the time to formulate quality, unique content for your website that represents the quality you strive for at your business. It is an investment in the website that will pay off.

Element 12: Fresh & Updated Content:

Unique, quality content isn’t enough anymore, it needs to be fresh and updated. This comes in two forms: overall content as well as blog content.

Overall content should be updated and changed as needed. In some industries, copy can stay on the page for years. If a product/service is extremely static, the content may remain the same for years which is fine. But in the majority of businesses, things change constantly. New products/services are introduced, changes are made to existing products/services, and other elements may change from time to time. Make sure someone routinely goes through the website to make sure all the content is fresh and updated to reflect the current state of the business.

And secondly, blog content needs to be fresh and updated. Companies should blog an absolute minimum of once per month. We prefer if they blog at least once per week, and ideally companies would blog as often as humanly possible. Companies with a blog that hasn’t been updated for months are going to have a higher bounce rate and convert much poorer. And likewise blog content attracts links, social following, and long tail traffic, all of which will assist with the website’s ultimate goal: Driving new business to the company.

Element 13: Marketing Based Content:

And lastly, content needs to be marketing based. Many business owners and content writers know very little about marketing or selling a product/service. They’re great at what they do, but not so great at marketing what they do. The content on a website shouldn’t be dry, boring, and lifeless, but rather it should encourage the visitor to want to learn more or purchase the product/service.

Yes, this is easier in some industries than other, but when you have a passionate business owner, a good copywriter can extract information from them that can be lively and leave the visitor wanting to learn more.

Element 14: Clean Coding:

Many websites have terrible coding. When a web developer (or search engine) views the coding of a site, they can often tell extremely quickly how well a site is coded. Why is this important? For starters it’s important so the website displays properly, more importantly its important so the website is easy to change when needed, and perhaps most importantly its important so the site loads quickly. Having website coding that is messy is like that big tangled bunch of cords we all have hiding behind our desks, whereas a nice clean website is like having a glass desk with a laptop and just one little power cable leading to it.

Element 15: SEO Friendly Coding:

This is one of my biggest pet peeves, when a business hires a web designer who doesn’t have a clue about SEO. As a company that offers both SEO and web design, this is pretty high on our list of critical website elements. SEO friendly coding means many things, including but not limited to proper headings, proper titles, proper placement of coding in the HTML structure, clean and concise coding, ability to change SEO related elements, ALT/title tags, and much more. It takes an extra step sometimes to make a website SEO friendly, but the end result always pays off for the business.

Element 16: Great Graphics & Images:

We mentioned earlier that a website is essentially two things: images and text. We already went on and on and on about how important the text is, how about the images? If you think about it, the images on a website and color scheme of the site are really what ultimately grab your attention or not. A site that has fantastic content but terrible design/graphics isn’t going to do any better than a site with terrible content but great design/graphics. In my opinion they’re both needed, and having good, high quality graphics, images, and design help show that your business is credible, offers a high quality product/service, and enhances the usability of the site.

Element 17: A Unified Design:

Ever see a website with a great header/navigation bar but the rest of the site looks like an after thought? Often times web designers spend a great deal of time on things like the header and homepage, and put very little thought into the interior pages and footer. It’s important to have a unified design on the website, and this means that every page and every element of every page is unified (using the same style, fonts, color scheme, etc.). A site with a well thought out, unified design truly will do better, look better, and give visitors a better first impression of your business.

Element 18: Seamless Transitions:

It drives me insane when a website is coded in one platform, the blog is in another, and the e-commerce platform is in a third, and all of them have a different “theme” or design to them. It makes the business look “cheap” — it’s like going to a restaurant and part of the room being carpet, the other part tile, and the third part concrete. Websites can become very complex very quickly, which is all the more reason to work with a professional web designer to make sure you identify the best solution for your situation to ensure seamless transitions across all elements of the website.

Element 19: Cross Browser Compatibility:

This is extremely important these days. Gone are the days of having one web browser to design for, and in comes 2013 with dozens of different browsers by different companies that all render a little differently. Make sure your site is designed for cross browser compatibility and tested in multiple browsers before launch. This will help ensure that everyone sees what they should be seeing and can easily navigate and utilize the website without technical errors. This is also important if you have an old website as it likely isn’t displaying properly in a majority of web browsers today.

Element 20: Smart Phone Friendly:

I know very few people these days who don’t own a smart phone, and out of everyone who has a smart phone I can almost guarantee the majority of them use it to visit websites from time to time. A website doesn’t necessarily need to have a mobile version anymore (in my opinion dummied down mobile sites infuriate visitors more than anything since they can’t access your full content/site) but you should have either a responsive website (one that scales to the device size) or a website that renders properly in tables and mobile devices. This will continue to be more and more important as time goes on, and if you have an old website there’s a great chance it doesn’t work right in smart phones or tablets.

Element 21: Good User Interface/Content Management:

A website used to be a collection of HTML files that only your web developer could edit, however today the vast majority of websites are built in some sort of content management system. Make sure you pick a content management system that fits your needs and has a good user interface. What does that mean? Well, it depends on your business. If you regularly want to update your page content and blog content, WordPress is a great choice. If you need to be able to have a portfolio to display your images, then a customized gallery in WordPress is a good choice. There are numerous content management systems out there (WordPress being the most popular and our favorite) and it’s important to work with your web developer to identify what you need to change the most often so they can build and modify the user interface to facilitate your needs.

Element 22: Opt In Form:

Email marketing is critical in lead nurturing for both product and service based businesses, and every website should have an opt in form for email marketing. No, it shouldn’t be “thrown” onto the page somewhere just to be there, rather it should be designed to fit the look of the site and incorporated in a well thought out location. Some sites use the footer, others use the sidebar, and others use pop-ups, it all depends on how important email marketing is to your business (and in nearly every business it should be pretty darn important).

Element 23: Feature Rich Add-ons:

Make sure your website has all the elements you need! This sounds like a no brainer, but if you can benefit from having an e-commerce platform then opt to spend the few thousand more on having your developer set it up! You’ll make that money back after a few weeks or months of having the platform in place. If you’re spending the time to re-do your website, don’t cut corners on the functionality and add-on elements of the site, it will just leave you feeling like something is missing after the fact and will also leave you not earning as much as you potentially could through the site.

Element 24: Easy Traffic/Conversion Tracking:

Building all these great elements on a website will be useless if you can’t track the traffic. Whether a 3rd party software or Google Analytics, it’s important to have some sort of traffic reporting software in place to monitor critical website metrics. And likewise it’s also important to setup goals and events to track contact form submissions, e-commerce sales, and email opt ins through a website to understand what marketing channels are delivering the best ROI.

Element 25: Personalized For Your Business:

Sounds crazy, but a lot of businesses use template websites that aren’t customized for their business at all. These look cookie cutter, generic, and make the business look cheap. Have a website that your business can be proud of, that is customized for your niche, that is unique to your company, and that your competitors are envious of. Your website is the first impression the majority of your customers/clients will have, make sure your site represents your business well.

And there you have it — the 25 elements that truly make a high quality website stand apart from a mediocre website. These elements will not only help make the website look good, but more importantly well help the website fulfill it’s number one purpose — to help your business make more money.

Now, as a small business owner, you might be saying to yourself ”That’s all great, I would love to have those 25 elements, but we simply cannot afford it” and I would argue that you’re 50% right, you can’t afford something, but what you can’t afford is continuing without having these elements on your website. A true high quality website will pay for itself hundreds of times over and over again.

Author: Brendan Egan

Courtesy of www.simpleseogroup.com

With companies caught up in social media, it can be easy to forget about email marketing. Email marketing gives companies a unique channel to broadcast their company and content.

However, not all companies execute email marketing correctly. One of the biggest mistakes they make is they think of it as a sales channel. They charge right out of the gates with the intention of selling products, instead of providing value to customers and occasionally promoting.

Let’s take a second look at email marketing and dive into some tips and counter-intuitive thinking…

Asking Questions and Having Goals

Like any new venture, it is necessary for a business to ask questions and have goals. Questions like:

Why should we do this? Does it need to be done?

What do we hope to get out of this?

What would success look like?

What is the cost?

What milestones should we set?

Who will be in charge of it?

Once you have questions like this nailed down, you can then figure out if these approaches are right for your company, and if so, use some of the tips provided in this blog post to help guide you through the process.

How to get Subscribers

A newsletter is nothing without subscribers. To build your email list, you’ll need to put a signup form on your website. Many companies will leave this email signup form on a landing page or their blog.

It’s common for many websites to tell how many subscribers they have. Hubspot says to join over 54,000 subscribers.

Others will tell you how often the emails go out.

Notice how they also emphasize the “FREE” in the headline. Notice the wording and color of buttons companies are using. They emphasize the word “free”. Check out the wording and coloring for the buttons:

Subscribe (Navy Blue)

Join Us (Red)

Join (Green)

Yes, Sign Me Up (Blue)

Sign me up (Blue)

Sign Up (Light Green)

Details matter, so it’s important how you choose your words and colors that you use. Test combinations and see if one converts better than the other.

Some websites have multiple newsletters.

In my opinion, it would be beneficial for companies to tell how often emails go out. It’s helpful when the prospect knows what to expect. You can also show what previous newsletters look like.

Whatever message you choose and wherever you choose to place the newsletter signup (preferably homepage and/or blog), the key is to get the emails opened.

Email Open Rates

Many factors can influence email open rates, some of which are out of your control. One factor you can control are your titles.

Most people receive over 100 emails a day (including email from work). Needless to say, it can be difficult for people to open your newsletter if it has a boring title.

Here are a few tips to keep in mind when crafting your email titles:

Don’t make it about you: “It’s not all about you” may be frustrating to hear, but it’s important to keep in mind. Subscribers probably like your brand, but avoid sending out your latest press release. Product launche emails are a good idea as long as they’re not sent out too often. You should outline some kind of benefit for the reader in the email subject line.

Here is a bad title with no benefit for the reader:

“Our company, XYZ Widgets, just passed Widgetry Inc in Sales”

A title like this will likely garner a less than stellar open rate because it makes the email about the company, not about the reader.

Here’s a better one:

“How Widgets Inc increased sales by 5% with this simple greeting”

The reader will feel compelled to open the email because it’s about benefits for the reader.

Tell a story: People love to hear stories. Many of the best newsletters will lead with a story as the headline/title. For example, if you sell nutritional advice or supplements you wouldn’t want to write “How Jim lost 100lbs in 2 months” as that would wind up in the spam box and/or be totally ignored. Instead, go for “How Jim’s 2 week vacation lead him to lose 10lbs.” This sounds much more like a casual story and less like a spammy “magic pill” weight loss story.

Make it exciting: Part of having a helpful email means giving the reader actionable advice. It all starts with the topic. When writing the topic, ask yourself “Will the user know what they can do?” Maybe pass your title to a few colleagues and ask, “Without opening it, do you know what you can do in this email?” Give descriptive words when writing your title. For example:

Boring:

“How XYZ company increased their email open rates from .5-2.0%”

Improved:

“How XYZ company tripled their email open rates.”

“What XYZ company did to improve their email open rates by 300%”

1.5% is not an exciting number. In fact, it’s rather depressing to think of such a small open rate. By giving words like “tripled” or “300%”, you’re polishing the title up a little bit.

Here’s another example:

Boring:

“Why I like the new Ford Taurus”

Improved:

“How Ford just made Toyota’s job much tougher.”

“Why the Ford Taurus will become America’s best selling car.”

“Why the new Taurus will add $10 billion to Ford’s bottom line.”

“Why I like…” is not exciting. Unless you’re really important, no one is going to care what one person thinks about a car. These improved titles think bigger and beyond the writer. It makes you think there will be real analysis in the email instead of just an opinion.

Keep it short: Almost everywhere you have to keep your message short. Billboards shouldn’t be more than 7 words, slogans shouldn’t be long, Twitter has their 140 character limit and SMS limits you to 160 characters. So what about email? The rule of thumb for subject lines is 50 characters. Remember, people get a lot of emails everyday and long subject lines may not get read. Do your best to keep it as short as possible.

Avoid spammy words: “Free”, “Act now” & “Limited time” all should be avoided in your email subject. Not only do people see these words everyday, they also correlated with spam. If you’ve ever seen a late night infomercial, you’ve undoubtedly heard these words many times. Be more creative and thoughtful with your titles. Hubspot has a great list on spam trigger words.

Consistently have great content: A great title helps, but if your email has bad content then that reduces the chances that they’ll check out your newsletter next time. Or worse, they could unsubscribe. We’ll get into how to write great content later.

Rethinking the Welcome Email – A Case Study

MarketingShepra featured a company that increased their CTR by 450% by changing their welcome process. Instead of one long welcome email, Savvymom sent three welcome emails spread over ten days (one email every 10 days). They also did a few other tactics which increased engagement. Here’s a quick synopsis:

1) Savvymom gathered user feedback and found that moms (like most people) tend to experience email overload. So they decided to send three welcome emails. All three messages gradually introduce them to the Savvymom website. They had a list of the latest content that Savvymom spent the most time working on. From there, they narrowed it down to get the content that was most enjoyable to the Savvymom readers.

2) They personalized the content to fit with how the user signed up for the newsletter.

3) Savvymom made it pretty and emphasized important elements of the email.

4) Had a format fit for scanners and; kept the call-to-action above the fold. They also kept the design similar to their website, knew who their audience was, portrayed the correct images to them and made sure the email was viewable on all devices.

5) At the bottom of the newsletter, Savvymom had a few visual links that went back to their website. These links were not related to the email subject, but rather general advice and content in their niche. To give a separate example, if you sell outdoor equipment and your email subject is about water bottles, the bottom links would be links to content about surviving in (enter season) months, instructional videos, or any other content on your site. These links make one last attempt to get the reader to click on something in your newsletter.

In short, doing three welcome emails improved their CTR and on one of those three emails, improved their open rate versus the original welcome email. They also improved their long term engagement.

Segmenting Your Email List

Segmenting your email list is important because it works. By segmenting your marketing emails, you are sending out more relevant emails. You can segment by geography, interests, behavior, Klout score and more. Typically you should use segments based on your business goals. For example, if your company is holding an event or speaking in Chicago, you can segment your list to just let people in Chicago know, instead of emailing your entire list. Or if you see a trend that 5% of your readers click on a certain item or download a white paper, you can segment to those people and send them content similar to that.

Segmenting takes a lot of time and work, but it can pay off in the end.

Writing Great Content

You must be helpful in your email newsletters. Think about email newsletters as a book or a movie. Rarely does someone read or watch a movie to hear promotions or information about a company (unless it’s corrupt). Your newsletter is the same. Provide some kind of benefit for the reader. Helping them can go beyond their personal finances; think about the unique value that you as a brand can provide.

For example, if you’re a social media consultant, you’re newsletter should consist of tips for engaging with users, answering recent FAQ (i.e.: is Pinterest right for me?) and the latest stats and research on social media. You could also feature a company or two that are using social media in the right way.

The content must also be relevant. You must also know your audience. Markingsherpa reports that 4 out of 10 subscribers press the spam button on newsletters simply because the content is irrelevant. One survey showed that 63% of respondents unsubscribe from e-mails to avoid irrelevant messages that were sent too often.

Having a Call-to-Action

Your call-to-action should be above the fold and clear.

On top, Amazon shows recommendations. Then there is “Learn More” button featuring organic snacks. All of this is kept above the fold, so I don’t have to scroll down to see it.

Environmental group called 350: there are four links, with the middle one telling the user to “click here”. All four of these links direct to the same website. The author of the newsletter is hoping readers just click on a link, he gives multiple options, all of which send the reader to the same site.

When writing your call-to-action, you have to tell them what you want and give them a reason why. Don’t be vague. Political organizations are very good at this when emailing supporters. Here’s one from Barack Obama’s presidential campaign:

This well-formatted newsletter gives two bold sentences, both of them asking to donate money. It’s very clear what they want from the reader. A call-to-action near the top and a call-to-action near the bottom.

Romney’s campaign has to call-to-action, one button that asks to donate, clearly well above the fold. The other one, below the fold, asks for a donation.

Best Time To Send Out Emails

The best day(s) to send out emails appear to be Tuesday or Wednesday. The best times appear to be a little after noon. You’ll always hear conflicting info and advice, so it’s best to test it for yourself.

What To Do When People Unsubscribe

When people unsubscribe, this is a great opportunity to get feedback.

When a reader unsubscribes, ask why and get their feedback. If it’s because you email too often, that may be a hint that you should give readers an option to receive email a little less frequently. You should give readers this option at the bottom of every email you send (i.e. link that says, “Send me these emails less frequently”) and on the unsubscribe page. This could help save you from losing them as a subscriber. One survey showed that 41% of respondents are open to receiving less email rather than totally unsubscribing.

If it’s because the emails they were receiving were irrelevant, then you may want to start segmenting and ask them what kind of content they were looking for.

Should You Bother A/B Testing Email Headlines?

Since most email campaigns use a different headline each time a campaign is sent out, how beneficial is it to test headlines? The only thing you really get out of testing email headlines is you get an idea of what language leads to more opens and conversions. It’s not like testing a home page headline that will be used throughout the year. And you don’t really need to A/B test headlines to get a good idea of what language works with what email.

What’s probably more important, is to A/B test your email layout, call to action text and button colors. Chances are you will be using the same layout and button styles in each email you send out. So testing these elements will give you much more beneficial insights. This is obviously a more effective use of your “testing time”.

Don’t Just Test, but Compare

Here at KISSmetrics, we constantly urge you to test every marketing activity you engage in. But that can lead to very microscopic, laser focused analysis. At some point, you need to take a step back and look at the bigger picture. How are all your marketing campaigns doing? For instance, is email marketing as effective as Pay-Per-Click advertising or SEO? Do you have the budget, and perhaps even more importantly, the time to continue to run email marketing the way you are currently doing it? Is it even producing a return for your business?

We would never advise to completely shut down your email marketing activities, but sometimes it might be wise to scale it down or make adjustments as to how you are going about it to make sure it’s beneficial for your business.

When NOT To Do Email Marketing

For years marketing experts have been pitching the benefits of email marketing and how to get more out of your campaigns. But the real question is: Are you ready to commit to a regular email marketing routine? One of the worst things you can do is start an email marketing campaign and then stop it, returning to it at random intervals throughout the year. Your email marketing list will hit more spam boxes and become much less effective if you don’t keep a regular frequency.

One easy way to see if your business is ready for email marketing is to start blogging. If you can keep a regular blogging schedule, chances are you can keep a regular email marketing schedule. If you can’t keep a regular blogging schedule the effects are far less damaging than losing steam on an email marketing initiative. Another nifty thing about blog articles is that they can also be used as content for your email marketing campaigns (or as backup material). In essence you can kill two birds with one piece of content!

Email marketing is not something all businesses should do. As mentioned, you must start with what you want to get out of it. If you’re only goal is to push sales, you have the wrong intentions and won’t be successful. Focus on making great, relevant content first.

Author: Zach Bulygo

Courtesy of www.blog.kissmetrics.com

Video can provide four distinct values for SEO. Rich Snippets can improve your click-through-rate, a presence on social video platforms can improve your brand awareness, product videos on commercial pages can help to increase conversion rate and lastly, video can be used to increase the number of links and social shares back to your site. In this post, I’m going to focus on the last of these and explain the methodology behind using video specifically as link bait.

There are essentially only two ways in which people commonly link to video content:

1) Link out to the page – when the page offers a credible source of information, entertainment or features resources that will be valuable for the audience of the site linking out.

2) Embed the video – When the video adds value for the audience within the specific context of the page in question.

Because the motivations behind the links in these two examples are distinct, so are the strategies you can implement in order to successfully build them – you can either create a “linkbait page” that will garner links through recommendations in a traditional manner or you can produce a video that you will outreach to people with the aim of getting them to embed it on their site. In this post, I’m going to explain the form of the content and the technical implementation required for each strategy.

Creating a “Link Bait Page”

Video is a media type, a form of content delivery, rather than a “type of content” as such. As the old adage goes, “form follows function” and this is exactly the approach you should be taking when building out content for link bait purposes. While video may be part of the sum, the page itself is the overall creative and so your task should be thought of “building a content driven mixed-media page”, rather than building a “video” per se.

An example of this approach executed successfully is The Simply Business Guide to WordPress, where a series of videos are interspersed with links to articles and presented in a step-by-step interactive flowchart. While the videos themselves are reasonably useful, the real value is in the structure and presentation of the page – which drives links rather than the YouTube videos themselves. This type of content gets links because it is a useful resource for those unfamiliar with WordPress and meets the need of educating a non-technology savvy business owner audience about creating a website.

Creating a Video That Others Will Embed

If someone embeds a video on their site – it has to be because they want their readers to stop looking at their own content and spend time watching yours instead. If you’re a company trying to build your presence and reputation online, rather than individual promoting the latest humorous cat video, this means that your content has to be exceptional. Mediocre isn’t going to cut it.

With video, exceptional does not necessarily mean that the production quality has to be ground-breaking, but rather that the content must meet the needs of a specific user base and do so exceptionally efficiently and creatively.

This could be as simple as providing a tutorial for something that others’ have been unable to work out – or it could be an exceptionally creative way of delivering a message that provokes thought or action. Video infographics are a typical form factor for this kind of content, and generally work best when the video and audio tracks counterpoint each other to deliver a multi-layered narrative.

Hosting and Outreach Strategy

If you’re building a multi-media web page which utilizes video as one of the form factors – then the hosting methodology ultimately doesn’t matter. If the video isn’t valuable outside of the context of the page (as with the Simply Business example – the value is the curated guide and step-by-step process), then few individuals will choose to link to a specific video – rather preferring to link to link to entity as a whole. Your outreach process will broadly consist of contacting site owners for whom the content will be valuable and asking them to link out to it.

Conversely, If you’re trying to get links to a specific video – then the hosting platform you use matters a great deal.

When people embed videos from YouTube, Vimeo or any other social video platforms, they don’t typically link to the domain of the creator in the process, but instead the profile of the user on the YouTube/Vimeo domains. This is fantastic for the platforms themselves, but clearly sub-optimal for any business trying to do SEO and build links back to their site in order to improve rankings. Whilst these social video platforms are a fantastic way to seed your content and get it in front of a wider audience, you don’t want the likes of YouTube taking your link equity.

10 Steps to Maximize the Use of Video as Link Bait

I therefore recommend the following hosting and outreach methodology for this kind of video linkbait.

1. Self-host your videos (or use a secure third party provider) and put it in a big frame (I recommend 720 x 405 for most desktop sites) on a dedicated page on your site.

2. If you’re using Vimeo Pro, Vzaar, Viddler or any other platform which allows you to publish your video outside of your domain – turn this functionality off for now

3. Create a custom embed code for your video, using the following free tool. So the video has an “embed” call to action at the bottom of a page (NB ensure the in-built “embed” button is turned off for any hosting platform you may be using, as this typically won’t include a text link back to your site)

4. Include social share buttons on the page, with a custom message specific to your campaign (depending on your video hosting platform, you may also need to disable the standard social buttons included with the player and include customized versions separately)

5. Outreach to sites who may be interested in linking to your video, ensuring you include the above embed code within the email (to make it easy for the outreach target to link to you)

6. 3-4 months later, or once the return from your outreach work has dried up – put the content on YouTube, Vimeo and any other social video platforms relevant for the content you’ve created.

7. Seed the content socially and try to get as many shares and links as you can to the YouTube/Vimeo versions of your video.

8. After the buzz dies down from this – mark the content up “private” on YouTube and set up domain restrictions on Vimeo (so it stops working for anyone who has embedded it).

9. Outreach to all the people who embedded/linked to the YouTube/Vimeo versions of your video, explaining that this link now doesn’t work and ask them to link to the version of the video on your site instead. You won’t get a 100% return from this, but most of the leads will be fairly strong – as after all, they’ve already linked to your content.

10. If your video is still relevant and valuable six months down the line, then you can always rinse and repeat steps 6-9

Ultimately, the core principles behind using video as linkbait successfully are simple:

1. Allow form to follow function: only use video as your medium when it’s the best way to tell the story in question

2. Carefully target your audience: create something that’s going to be valuable to a specific group of users around the web

3. Avoid leaking link equity – Ensure you minimize the amount of links pointing to domains outside of your own.

Make no mistake, getting these three things right consistently is not easy and it can take many attempts to see a reasonable return on investment. If one element is missing, the campaign will inevitably fail to deliver, but the rewards are there for those with the creative nous and technical understanding to give it a go.

Author: Phil Nottingham

Courtesy of www.reelseo.com

For everyone in the digital marketing industry, the big news of the day is the launch of Facebook’s new Graph Search.

In a nutshell, the new tool allows you to search for people, pages, businesses and other services based on the information shared by other Facebook users.

Dodgy name aside, it’s an exciting announcement that might cause a few worried conversations at Google.

But what are the opportunities for marketers, and is it going to kick off a new race to drive up the number of ‘likes’ for brand pages?

To shed a bit of light on some of the key issues, I asked several search and social media experts for their views…

1. What do you see as being the main opportunities for brands?

Matt Owen, Social Media Manager at Econsultancy

Active outreach will be at the forefront of everyone’s minds, but this will largely come down to privacy settings.

If brands can reach out directly to individuals then there’s potentially a huge payoff, but also a massive opportunity to spam, which could lead to more users upping their privacy settings.

I can’t see Facebook being particularly tolerant of this behaviour though, so I imagine the main opportunity will be to more accurately target ads and updates based on very specific bio information, rather than just area, gender, etc.

If Facebook can provide a genuinely accurate ad targeting system then the payoff will be far better.

I can certainly see the opportunity for local search increasing massively. If Facebook can also integrate this properly across mobile then it could be a huge threat to Yelp! And Google’s business listings. I’m sure that restaurant reviews by people you know would carry far more weight than anonymous ones.

Kelvin Newman, Strategy Director at SiteVisibility

I think the biggest advantage for brands is this is going to surface people who have liked you in the past to their friends more frequently.

This is good news because often someone will have liked you, but then not really interacted with so your brand will never appear in the newsfeed.

Now that connection lives on and potentially helps you appear in searches more frequently, so it certainly increases the value of dormant ‘likers’.

Interestingly though, content created by brands, such as photos, won’t appear which does seem an oversight.

Robin Grant, MD at We Are Social

If Facebook evolves Graph Search beyond the current limits of ‘People, Photos, Places, and Interests’ and in turn users warm to it, it could succeed and therefore become relevant to brands.

This would mean that Facebook’s sponsored result ads would become more relevant for advertisers, and ultimately it would mean that raw fan numbers would be much more important to brands (or more accurately, the number of fans they have that match the profile of their customer base), as to appear in Graph Search results a brand will need to have a friend of the searcher as a fan.

It would also make it essential for retailers, or any business with physical locations, to maintain Facebook place pages for each of their branches.

Will Francis, Director at Harkable

The product looks to be of immediate benefit to location-based brands such as shops, restaurants, etc. – ‘where do my friends go for pizza?’ – and content providers such as publishers and film studios – ‘what films do my friends like most?’.

It will be interesting to see how the product comes to be used and how brands exploit those common uses to appear in users’ search results.

2. Is Facebook’s data accurate enough for searches to actually be valid? i.e. does the average user actually keep their profile information up-to-date?

Matt Owen:

I think for brands this is a good thing, as they’ll be encouraged to provide more relevant business information, which in turn should improve the user experience.

Currently I’m often forced to scroll through 50 results to find the right one, even if I’m looking for a specific brand by name.

On a personal level, if professionals are encouraged to use it as a data mine, then we could see a resurgence in Facebook as the social network.

Twitter’s search has never been the most reliable when looking for contacts, so the ability to search by bio keywords would be incredibly useful. It might be something that LinkedIn should also be concerned about.

That said, my own ‘about’ info contains far more references to Martinis than it does Econsultancy…

Kelvin Newman

I’d expect the data to be sparse for most people, but that might not be such a bad thing for Facebook, as it might give people the little nudge to tend their information up-to-date.

And also don’t underestimate how much data is created frictionlessly, i.e. if you’ve got Spotify connected to Facebook (check out https://www.facebook.com/music) most of that data is being created frictionlessly and could potentially be informing Search Graph.

Robin Grant

Users in their early 20s may have a circle of friends that will be providing enough data for Graph Search to be useful.

However, it seems likely that for most users at the moment that won’t be the case, and there just won’t be enough data in your social graph.

Will Francis

Some data is more accurate than others, with ‘likes’ for brands and products fairly patchy while photos, tagging and basic profile info is more reliable.

So we’ll find users initially gravitate to the searches that are most reliable and we may even see people become more diligent about updating their profiles and reflecting their lives even more faithfully online.

3. Will it kick off another race for ‘likes’ among brands so they show up more in search?

Matt Owen

It’s certainly possible. I’ve never been convinced about Facebook promoting the value of a ‘like’, simply because many businesses (Econsultancy included) don’t scale that way.

Of our own 10,000–odd fans, it’s unlikely that many of their friends are also digital marketers. Brands will need to think more deeply about who they approach and why, which should ultimately help improve the current state of measurement and ROI.

I think Facebook will need to be careful not to create a closed-loop search. Of my friends, very few share my taste in music, so searches that are based on their preferences won’t be relevant.

On Facebook people do tend to search with intent (“Virgin Atlantic” rather than “Cheap Flights”), so being well ‘liked’ will certainly be a factor for many companies to counteract this.

Kelvin Newman

Initially as the system lacks data you’ll be able to reap the rewards on merely having lots of likes just to appear on searches, but it won’t take long for there to be competition, and once that competition is in place the order in which results are returned will become important.

This order will presumably be more sophisticated than simply who has the most likes.

My gut feel is that it will probably work in a similar way to the Newsfeed Edgerank algorithm which is based on Affinity and the Weight; so priority will be given to businesses with strong interaction from people you are connected to or businesses you’ve interacted with in the past.

Robin Grant

If Graph Search takes off, then it’s certainly possible. Although, brands should remember though that even in this instance, it’s not about raw numbers of fans, but the number of relevant fans.

Will Francis

Once brands work out the metrics and overall uses of the system there will certainly be a new set of targets that become prioritised, and agencies will need to be ready to realise these new opportunities to gain visibility and engagement with consumers.

4. Will it result in an increase in spam requests if people are easier to find?

Matt Owen

I’m sure it will, but only at the level of spam tweets. There will always be a few unscrupulous (or uneducated) marketers out there blasting spam, although in the main they’re too useless at it to target properly anyway.

I’d expect to see a rise in friend requests from people I’ve never heard of, but as mentioned it really will depend on whether or not pages can contact directly, something I can’t see happening.

It’s more likely you’ll see a rise in irrelevant ads as Facebook tweaks its settings after launch. I’m sure I can rely on my existing friends to share enough spam as it is…

Kelvin Newman

If LinkedIn is anything to go by, yes! But that’s most likely to affect the tech recruitment sector and eligible singletons.

However in the announcement they talked a lot about Facebook being about meeting new people as well as staying connected to existing friends, so Facebook probably see that as a good thing.

Robin Grant

Possibly, but I think in this instance Facebook is only replicating what LinkedIn’s search already provides, so perhaps we’ll just see those spam requests spread across networks.

Will Francis

Facebook was keen to stress that privacy functions would be at the heart of the new product, with users able to define what does and doesn’t turn up in search results.

We know from past experience though that most users don’t bother tweaking these settings and it’s likely there will be (yet another) minor backlash when people start receiving spam friend requests.

On the flipside, we may see Facebook do what MySpace did and what Google+ Communities is doing well – connecting strangers around common interests.

Along with becoming the world’s social knowledge engine through Graph Search, this seems a natural progression in Facebook’s unstoppable march towards its domination of the web.

Author: David Moth

Courtesy of www.econsultancy.com

It is a well known fact by most of those who own or operate a website that having links to your website on other companies or people’s websites is beneficial for a few reasons:

- They can provide relevant traffic to your website, if for example a news article is written about your company.

- They can provide great PR; the more visibility that your company can achieve the better.

- They can benefit you in regard to Search Engine Optimization, as long as they are high quality.

But many people wonder, “How do I find out who is linking to my website?” Google provides a tool to see when your website has been linked to, what websites are linking to yours, and what pages on your website people linking to.

All of this data and more can be found in your Google Webmaster Tools account. If you are unsure if you have an account, check with your webmaster or IT team in order to verify that you have access. If you do not, it is very simple to set up. Have your webmaster or IT professional visit this link to the help article from Google about how to verify your website with Google’s Webmaster Tools.

Now let’s go over how to find out who is linking to your website. Once you have verified your website with Webmaster Tools, visit www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ to log in to your account dashboard. If you are managing multiple sites, they will all be listed in your home dashboard once you log in.

Next, select the website that you wish to collect your data from and you will see a more detailed dashboard than the previous one. This dashboard is specific to the website that you have just selected.

The next step is to click the option that reads “Traffic” on the top left side navigation of the page. This option will be the third possible choice below “Messages.” A drop down menu will appear that gives you the following 3 options:

- Search Queries

- Links to Your Site

- Internal Links

Note: They will not be numbered in your webmaster tools account.

Select “Links to Your site” and you will see 4 separate sections of data.

1. The first is “Total Links” which will be located near the top of the page. This includes the current total number of links that Google has found on other websites that point to yours. Not all links to your site may be listed; however this is the most accurate source available.

2. The second is “Who Links the Most.” This data includes the list of domains that contain links to your website. It is also sorted in order from domains that contain the most links to your website, to domains that contain the least number of links to your website.

3. The third is “Your Most Linked Content.” This section displays the specific pages on your website that have the most inbound links pointed toward them.

4. Finally, the last section is “How Your Data is linked.” This section displays the anchor text found within the inbound links to your website. Put plainly, anchor text is the visible text that a person can see when clicking on a link. For example the proverbial “click here” text.

Lastly, the data for numbers 2, 3, and 4 above can be downloaded to a .CSV or Google Docs file. This is done by clicking the “More »” link beneath any of the sections then selecting “Download this Table” near the top of the page.

You also have the option to:

- “Download More Sample Links” which will download the data from Google about specific pages on other websites that contain links to your website, and will not sort them in any specific order.

Or

- “Download Latest Links” which will download the data from Google about what links have been recently found that point to your website along with the date that Google discovered the link.

Now, take this data and make use of it. What pages on your website have been more popular than others? Is everyone only linking to your homepage, and not specific internal pages? Are there websites linking to yours that would make a good partnership?

Author: Matt Crowley

Courtesy of www.morevisibility.com

The beginning of the new season our SGW development team decided to celebrate with an experimental offer: SGW Pro version for $147 and SGW WordPress edition for $97.

SGW Professional edition includes all 18 modules. One of the modules was just released:  Facebook Links module. Every time you make a post to your website or blog, Facebook Links module will automatically add link to this post to your Facebook timeline letting your friends know about recent updates. The same way any Facebook page, or even all of them, may be updated  simultaneously.

Unlike many other autoblogging solutions SGW can work not only with WordPress but also with Joomla, Drupal, Blogger blogs and any template based websites. If you run your websites on several different platforms you don’t need to install SGW Control Panel multiple times. All the magic can be done from one single installation.

Together with this advanced output system SGW contains various content modules, a whole lot of content monetization opportunities, different SEO and promotion instruments including automatic Twitter and Facebook updates, content spinning, insertion of related images into your content and others.

Go to SGW solutions page to reserve your discounted copy of this powerful system.

With 2013 already well underway, it’s time to make some bold (and some not-so-bold) predictions for the year in search!

1) A new competitor emerges.

With Google at about 70% of the search market, big G is the dominant monster. But that won’t always be the case, and with so many smart minds in a free market, it’s more likely that Google’s share drop closer to 50% than bump up to 90%, right? I’m not saying google won’t be the leader in 2013, but some search engine is going to emerge to cause rumblings in Mountain View. Remember, Yahoo and Altavista used to be powerful presences too, so the mighty have fallen before. In 2013, a new real competitor will emerge that will take the market by storm, like Google did in the early 2000’s. Will it be DuckDuckGo? Will it be Facebook? Will it be some company we’ve never heard of before? We’ll have to wait and see.

2) Bing will stop screaming that it’s better than Google.

You have to admit, it’s starting to get pretty annoying. Every quarter there seems to be a new campaign from Bing begging people to try it – or telling people about how Google is giving them less than stellar results. The bottom line is that search engine users don’t really care about all the noise as long as they get the results they’re looking for. In 2013, Bing will come to this realization. It will stop shouting about how much better or more ethical they are than Google – and start focusing on actually becoming better than Google.

3) Yahoo will get its own algorithm again.

Yahoo hasn’t had its own search algorithm since August 2010 when Bing started powering Yahoo results. 28 months and counting without an algorithm is pretty pathetic for a once powerful search engine. With the stock price going down the tubes, in 2012 Yahoo decided to steal Marissa Mayer away from Google. A real viable search engine can’t be too far behind right? Which leads to my next prediction…

4) Marissa Mayer will become a household name.

The new CEO of Yahoo will bring it back to relevance (but not quite prominence) and will be appropriately applauded for it. You’ll see her on many business and tech magazine covers.

5) More Google updates are on the way.

Not exactly a wild prediction here. 2012 was a crazy year with Google updates. Pandas, Penguins, Exact Match, and Page Layout were the bigger names, but there were hundreds of shifts and tweaks overall. There were winners and losers with each update, but overall, site owners who didn’t adhere to best practices for Architecture, Backlinks, and Content were hit pretty hard. Don’t exhale yet because there’s more on the way. My guess is the next one is called the Porcupine (starts with “P” and it’s black and white, just like Panda and Penguin). Is your house in order and ready for the Porcupine update?

6) Google takes a step back, becomes a search engine again.

Google grew rapidly because it was easy to use and provided great results. Now, we’re a long long way away from the 10 blue links with results that you could count on to be relevant. What’s changed that? Some have accused Google of having a brand bias. Some have accused Google of trying to crowd out the real results with pay-per-click and shopping results. If and when users start to get annoyed with this, they’ll move on to other search engines. And Google will have to refocus and get back to what they do best – being a search engine.

7) Google finally figures out local.

You were warned before. With the shift from Google Places to Google Plus Local, it was easy to predict that there would be bugs and you might get a little frustrated. I never imagined it would be this maddening. From taking forever to approve images to multiple (non-existent) locations to “We do not support this location”, Google local needs to get it together. I could go on for hours, but Mike Blumenthal has already ranted like no one else can about the subject. Read what he said. I concur.

8) You (and your mom) will know what Google Authorship is.

You’ve been wondering why some faces show up with some websites and some don’t. Like why does Carson Thorn’s picture show up in the screenshot below when searching for “carson thorn cpa”?

Well, that’s Google Authorship, and it basically connects his Google Plus account with the website, identifying him as the author. You’ll start to see that more and more in 2013.

9) Link farms will start to fade away.

The very essence of “web-trash”, link farms have become ineffective at best and hurtful at worst. Link farm site owners will stop getting the money they need to maintain the site, so sites will start to come down.

10) Comment spam will start to fade away.

Please please please let this prediction come true! You know you can’t stand seeing all of the non-sensical comments on your blog, no matter what comment spam blocker you’re using. Just like the prediction above, comment spam links are considered web-trash. If they’re not nearly as effective, they’ll stop happening. Unfortunately I feel less confident about this prediction than others on this list because comments technically come from fresh content sources, which are the kinds of links you want. So maybe instead of comment spam fading away, we’ll see more sophisticated (and genuine) comments.

11) You’ll still get solicited by less-than-reputable SEO companies – but much less.

As a site owner, you probably get at least 3-5 emails a week from SEO companies who promise the world but have no idea what they’re talking about – and the email isn’t personalized to your business in any way. I especially love the emails that mention MSN as one of the major search engines (they probably should have updated that email template to say Bing back in 2009). Anyway, just like the two predictions above with link farming and comment spam fading, that means less companies will be selling those links, which means less ineffective SEO companies, and less email clutter!

12) Link building (the right way) will be more valuable than ever.

Links are a major part of Google’s algorithm and always will be. To rank, you need those votes to your site from other sources on the web. When some types of links are causing problems rather than improving rankings (see predictions 9 & 10), those links that do help (ie fresh unique content links) will become more and more valuable.

13) SEO tools to audit your SEO firm will become commonplace.

With many SEO companies (even legit ones) practicing what I like to call “SEO Voodoo” (you know, where they don’t tell you what they’re doing, you just hope it works), site owners will start to audit what their SEO firms are doing. Whether that’s checking rankings or checking on-page issues, marketing managers and site owners will need to see exactly what the SEO firm is doing.

Author: Jason Gillikin

Courtesy of www.blog.triangledirectmedia.com

Dear friends!

We would like to wish you a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

May these holidays bring you fresh emotions and moments of joy.

We will be glad to meet you again in new season and promise to provide you with our best quality services and support.

All our current projects will be continued. RSS content sharing, automatic websites and blogs update and video logo and video presentations will be gradually updated and upgraded.

A new service – Blogican – is planned to get started at the beginning of the year. It is aimed at helping all types of users, advanced and novice, to easily start and maintain their blogs. Installation, web hosting, automatic update, SEO and many other major and minor features will be offered for those who wish to try themselves in blogging.

And of course we will be here to provide you with all needed information and share our advice.
Once again Merry Christmas and Happy New Year from all the Paytory team!!!

If we’ve learned anything in 2012, it’s that Google isn’t letting up on low-value tactics. We’ve had the Penguin update, 13 Panda updates (so many that we needed a new naming scheme), and a crackdown on low-quality Exact Match Domains (EMDs), to name just a few. While I can’t tell you Google’s next move, I can tell you one thing with absolute certainty – there’s more to come. So, how can you protect what you’ve built in 2013?

I was going to write a long list of suggestions, but I realized that they almost all boiled down to just one idea. I’m not going to toy with you – my top tip for 2013 SEO is this:

1. DIVERSIFY

If at any point in 2012 you asked “What’s the best [X] for SEO?” (link-building tactic, tag, directory, etc.), you’re already in trouble. Any single-tactic approach is short-term at best. Real companies, real link profiles, and real marketing are rich with variety.

So, what does that mean, practically? I’m going to cheat a bit and split my one tip into five kinds of diversity that I think are critical to your SEO success in the coming years.

1A. Diversify Anchor Text

Let’s start with an easy one. We’ve all known for a while that overly aggressive inbound link anchor text was pushing the envelope, and the Penguin Update definitely reinforced that message. If every link to your site reads “buy best Viagra cheap Viagra today!”, it might as well read “spam spam spammity spam,” especially if it’s in a sentence like:

“If you’re looking for the best price on the new iPad and iPad cases, then buy best Viagra cheap Viagra today! and get a free bag of Acai berries.

It’s not natural, and you know it. What’s the best way to make your anchor text seem “natural?” Stop obsessing over it. Yes, anchor text is a signal, but any solid link profile is going to naturally use relevant text and appear in the context of relevant text. If you want to tweak the text on some of your high-authority links, go for it, but I wouldn’t break out the spreadsheets in 2013.

1B. Diversify Your Links

Are guest posts the one true answer to all of life’s questions or are they a scourge on our fragile earth? To read the SEO blogosphere in 2012, it’s hard to tell. Any link-building tactic can be low quality, if you abuse it. The problem is that someone reads a tip about how guest posts make good links and then they run off and publish the same slapped-together junk on 15,000 sites. Then they wonder why their rankings dropped.

Nothing screams manual link-building like a profile that’s built with only one tactic, especially if that tactic is too easy. At best, you’re eventually going to be doomed to diminishing returns. So, take a hard look at where your links came from in 2012 and consider trying something new next year. Diversify your profile, and you’ll diversify your risk.

1C. Diversify Traffic Sources

There’s an 800-lb. Gorilla in the room, and we’re all writing more SEO blog posts to avoid talking about it. Most of us are far too dependent on Google for traffic. What would you do if something changed overnight? I know some of you will object – “But ALL my tactics are white-hat and I follow the rules!” Assuming that you understood the rules 100% accurately and really followed them to the letter, what if they changed?

The more I follow the Algorithm, the more I realize that the changing search UI and feature landscape may be even more important than the core algorithm itself. What happens if your competitor suddenly gets site-links, or you’re #8 on a SERP that drops to only 7 results, or everyone gets video snippets and you have no videos, or your niche shifts to paid inclusion and you can’t afford to pay? Even if you’ve followed the rules, your traffic could drop on a moment’s notice.

You need to think beyond Google. I know it’s tough, and it’s going to take time and money, but if you’re dependent on Google for your livelihood, then your livelihood is at serious risk.

1D. Diversify Your Marketing

There’s been a very positive trend this year toward thinking about marketing much more broadly – not as a tactic to trick people into liking you, but as the natural extension of building a better mousetrap. I think this is at the heart of RCS (not to put words in Wil’s mouth) – if you do something amazing and you believe in it, everything you do is marketing. If you build crap and you know it’s crap, then marketing is sleight of hand that you hope to pull on the unsuspecting. You might score twenty bucks by stealing my wallet, but you’re not going to gain a customer for life.

Stop taking shortcuts and make a real resolution in 2013 to think hard about what you do and why it has value. If you understand your value proposition, content and marketing naturally flow out of that. Talk to people outside of the SEO and marketing teams. Find out what your company does that’s unique, exciting, and resonates with customers.

1E. Diversify Your Point Of View

I recently had the pleasure to finally see Michael Dorausch (a chiropractor and well-known figure in the local SEO community) speak. Dr. Mike arrived in Tampa for BlueGlassX and built his presentation from the ground up, using photography to tell stories about the neighborhood and local history. It’s hard to explain in a few sentences, but what amazed me was just how many ideas for unique and original content he was able to find in less than 48 hours, just by having a fresh perspective and passion for the subject. I’d like to say I was inspired by the presentation, but to be totally honest, I think the emotion was embarrassment. I was embarrassed that he was able to generate so many ideas so quickly, just by coming at the problem with the right attitude.

In 2013, if you tell me your industry is “boring,” be warned – I’m going to smack you. If you’re bored by what you do, how do you think your prospects and customers will feel? Step out – have someone give you a tour of your office like you’ve never been there. Visit your home city like you’re a tourist coming there for the first time. Get five regular people to walk through your website and try to buy something (if you don’t have five normal friends, use a service like UserTesting.com). The New Year is the perfect time for a fresh perspective.

Author: Dr. Pete

Courtesy of www.seomoz.org

Greg Jarboe is the president and co-founder of SEO-PR and author of YouTube and Video Marketing: An Hour a Day. He is also one of the 25 most successful online marketing gurus profiled in Michael Miller’s “Online Marketing Heroes: Interviews with 25 Successful Online Marketing Gurus”, published by Wiley in 2008.

Eric Enge: Hi. I’m Eric Enge, CEO and founder of Stone Temple Consulting. I’m here today with Greg Jarboe, co-founder and president of SEO-PR and author of the book, “YouTube and Video Marketing: An Hour a Day,” and we’re going to have some fun talking about some things that people don’t really necessarily know about success in video marketing, and YouTube in particular.

Greg Jarboe: You want me to give away the secret sauce?

Eric Enge: I do.

Greg Jarboe: Oh, man. OK.

Eric Enge: (Said with a smile) I mean, I invited you to our facilities for that explicit purpose. So, let’s dig in. You were telling me just a moment ago about this guy – I apologize, I forget his name – that has this really unique spin on marketing on YouTube. Why don’t you tell me that story?

Greg Jarboe: The guy is named Ray William Johnson, and if you don’t know Ray, that’s OK, you should find out about Ray. Part of the reason why I use Ray as an example in the courses that I teach at Rutgers, for example, is Ray made a million dollars last year in selling advertising on YouTube next to his channel.

Eric Enge: That sounds like a pretty interesting sum of money, and I think you mentioned to me that he had this really unusual insight into how he got people to respond to the ads.

Greg Jarboe: Right. So, Ray has done a number of things right. First of all, he’s funny enough that people watch his videos (and let me put the emphasis on “funny enough.”) They’re also interested in subscribing to his channel partly because he does two new, original videos a week on Tuesdays and Fridays, and he’s got 5.8 million subscribers.

Eric Enge: Wow.

Greg Jarboe: People who say, “Please send me an e-mail the next time one of Ray’s new videos goes up,” so that’s a following. And then what Ray figured out ahead of everybody else is that if people were watching his videos, laughing at his humor, and then going on and doing something else, Ray would remain a poor, starving comedian for the rest of his career. So Ray’s innovation, the one that I show in the classes that I teach that wakes the students up, it’s like, “Say what? He did what?” is Ray has got a couple of things in the middle of each video called “Cool Transition.”

So he does a video that is broken into three parts. And between part one and two, and part two and three, there’s this quote, “cool transition,” and the cool transition is anything but. It’s actually quite boring. It’s actually quite monotonous. It’s actually quite predictable. It’s the part of the video where you start glancing around and seeing what other things are there.

Eric Enge: Right.

Greg Jarboe: And oh, by the way, among the other things that are there are advertisers, and it’s either next to his video, or underneath his video, wherever they have decided to advertise. And what Ray discovered is that when he was slightly boring for a couple of seconds, people would glance around, the click-through rate on the ads next to his videos or superimposed on the bottom of his videos, would go up, and Ray would make more money.

So, as he explained it, it’s like, “If they’re all rolling on the floor laughing, I stay in the poor house.”

Eric Enge: Right.

Greg Jarboe: “If I’m slightly boring… If there’s a speed bump in-between the episodes, where they glance around, that’s money I can take to the bank.”

Eric Enge: So this is where we pause for a second to be boring so people will click on the ads. Oh, wait. I’m actually not running any ads for this video.

Greg Jarboe: Why not? You know, in the old days it used to take a certain threshold before you could become a YouTube partner. It was hard to do.

These days, all you have to do is fill out a form. YouTube is really interested in monetizing more and more of the videos. You could become a YouTube partner this afternoon.

Eric Enge: There you go. That’s great. So the insight, if you are trying to make your money by advertising on YouTube, is to allow the opportunity for the person to get distracted, because if your content is continuously compelling from end-to-end, they don’t click.

Greg Jarboe: That’s right. And so it’s like the equivalent of the bathroom break in television.

Eric Enge: Right.

Greg Jarboe: You’ve got to give people a moment to come up for air, look around, and that is a programming discovery I don’t think most people understand.

Eric Enge: That’s awesome. Well, great. Thanks, Greg. I appreciate the opportunity to get that great tip from you, and we’ll shoot another video real soon.

Greg Jarboe: OK.

Author: Eric Enge

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