Choosing the Right Content

You already know that content is an important piece of your marketing campaign. You need to dedicate time to creating fresh, informative content that will get consumers buzzing about your business. But that doesn't mean your content must be limited to written articles. There are many ways to include content on your website, and you need to determine which works best for your needs.

The bottom line is that all your SEO efforts will be meaningless if your content can't keep people interested. The goal is to engage your audience and if you're not doing that you won't keep new prospects interested. So figure out what your audience really wants, and make that happen.

The most common type of content is written. Written content allows the writer to demonstrate their knowledge and worth in the industry. It's informative and easily recognized by search engines. From blog articles to status updates, written content can accomplish many marketing goals and can open doors of communication. Unfortunately, because it's still the most widely used content type you might have to put in extra effort to make your content stand out.

Another versatile content method is video marketing. People enjoy the ease of watching a video, and videos add more opportunity to be entertaining, which means they're great for drawing people in. You can record a question and answer session, make a webinar, or create a traditional ad. Though more difficult to rank on search engines, videos are great for reaching consumers.

Perhaps the most popular form of content is online images. People want to share things and sharing photos online is easy for them to do. Think about all of the options: still shots, artwork, memes, and more. You can turn anything into an image, from a fun collage to an information chart. The versatility of images makes them advantageous to all marketers, especially as image sharing websites like Pinterest become more widely used.

Audio content comes in the forms of podcasts, recorded interviews, or even songs. Though not as accessible as video content, audio has been slowly gaining popularity over the years. Audio is great for drawing in people who want something to listen to, without having to commit their full attention to watching a video.

Remember that it's probably not wise to pick one form of content and stay with it. Written content might always be your strongest point, but you can still benefit from adding the occasional video. Variety will get consumers to notice you. It'll keep them coming back to your website. By exploring more than one media option you'll be able to reach a more diverse group of people, meaning that you'll see your business steadily expand.

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When’s the Last Time Your Site Had a Tune-Up?

 Just like a car needs regular tune-ups, so does your website. A lot of time and effort went into building the best site possible, so don’t squander all of your hard work by letting it fall into disrepair. Going back to the car analogy for a moment—when you buy a new car, it’s in pristine condition, with everything working perfectly. In order to keep it in tip-top shape, you need to be vigilant with oil changes, washes, repairs, etc. Well, your website is the same way—it may be perfect to begin with, but it needs constant monitoring and upkeep to stay that way. Keep a close eye on the following areas of your site to ensure that it keeps functioning in optimum condition:

Technical Issues

First and foremost, you need to check for technical problems like 404 errors and broken links. Having a bunch of errors and links that no longer work is very damaging to your site—with the search engines AND human traffic. Because websites are dynamic creatures with content constantly being added and taken down, constant vigilance is required in order to avoid 404 errors and broken links. If you have social share buttons for Twitter, Facebook, Google+, etc., you will also want to periodically check them to see if they are doing what they should. Act like you are a first-time visitor to your site and fill out any and all forms you have to test whether or not they work and if they are easy to navigate. Lastly, check your page load speed and adjust it accordingly so you won’t lose traffic because your page loads at a glacial pace.

Feedback and Analysis

Once you’ve made sure that your site is in good working order and is firing on all cylinders, it’s now time to focus your attention on what can be gleaned from any customer feedback you’ve received, unsolicited or not. This data really is your bread and butter and can provide you with valuable information that can have a huge impact on the success of your site. For example, you may think your site’s layout is intuitive and easy to navigate, but the actual users may think otherwise. Whether or not you choose to implement this feedback is, of course, your choice, but this raw data can be your best friend for determining what is and isn’t working on your site. You will also find it helpful to study your analytics data (you DO have some sort of analytics program running on your site, right?) to find out where your traffic is coming from, what pages are the most popular and which ones have the highest bounce rates.

SEO

Last, but certainly not least, you should keep current on the latest happenings with search engine optimization. If the whole Google Panda debacle has taught us anything, it’s that SEO best practices are constantly changing and evolving; just because doing things a certain way took you to the top of the SERPs in the past doesn’t mean it will always be the case. Therefore, it’s vital that you stay on top of the latest changes and developments in the SEO world so you can make sure that your site is easily found by humans and indexed by the major search engines.

While checking under the hood of your site may not be the most glamorous or sexy of tasks, it’s something that you can’t afford NOT to do. A successful, highly functioning website, much like an exotic sports car, requires a lot of TLC, maintenance and monitoring, so don’t neglect these much-needed tune-ups and calibrations.

You ARE Optimizing Your Product Descriptions, Right?

Given the recent Google Panda algorithm change, it’s now more important than ever for businesses to take steps to insure that their content is fresh and original and not just copied verbatim from other sources. Retailers may have unconsciously been publishing unoriginal content by failing to optimize their product descriptions. Instead of taking the time to write their own unique product descriptions, a lot of retailers either copy from their competitors or use the exact same verbiage from the suppliers. While it may be tempting to do that, it can penalize your site for scraping content, so it really is worth the time to go through and start replacing any copied product descriptions you may have with fresh, original copy. Even though it may seem difficult to come up with new and interesting way to describe the products you offer, there are ways to accomplish this rather easily.

Learn All You Can About the Product

This may seem like a no-brainer, but a lot of retailers really don’t take the time to know the ins and outs of the products they’re selling. They will just copy down whatever description supplied by the manufacturer and call it a day. Instead of doing this, take the time to dissect the verbiage that came with it and rewrite it in a way that will be easily understood by your customers. Oftentimes, manufactures use jargon that is vague or unclear to the average person. If you run across copy like this, put yourself in the mind of whom you are marketing to and use terminology that’s easy to understand. You should also take this opportunity to address common questions customers may have had in the past about a particular product and to build the answer into the description.

Establish a Voice and Personality

Most product descriptions are dry and boring, yet they don’t need to be. This is your chance to establish a definite voice and personality for your brand. Weave in a little story about how the customer could use a particular product and describe how it could make them feel. Tapping into someone’s emotional state and mind and showing that by buying your product they can fulfill a certain need or provide a sense of security can be some very powerful stuff. Before writing descriptions, it might be very helpful to first write down information about your typical customers and how they might sound. By taking the time to do this step, you will find it easier to write creative content that will not only inform your customers, but will draw them in emotionally.

Implement SEO into Your Descriptions

Another benefit to rewriting your product descriptions is that it gives you the chance to optimize your content for the search engines in addition to your customers. Make sure you’re using keywords in your product titles and descriptions, but don’t overdo it. As a rule of thumb, use the keyword, or product name, once every 100 words. For each product description, you will want to link the most important keyword to the home page, preferably the first link within the description. Try and make your copy at least 250 words for maximum SEO benefit. It has been documented that search engines value variety, so, if appropriate, consider using a video to demonstrate how to use your product or highlight certain features. This is your chance to get creative so that you can showcase your products in the best light possible in a way that’s unique, exciting and attention getting.

Although the prospect of rewriting thousands of product descriptions is certainly daunting, you need to tackle the project one step at a time. First, identify your most popular, best-selling, highest-margin items and start with them. Then, after taking care of your most important accounts, tackle five products a day and, before you know it, you will have it done in no time and will be increasing your sales AND your search rankings!

SEO and Usability — What’s More Important?

We’ve all heard the old question, “What came first, the chicken or the egg?” When it comes to creating a successful website, it’s easy to get bogged down by a similar issue; specifically, is it more important to create an amazing-looking website that dazzles visitors and is easy to navigate or is implementing SEO the most valuable use of time? If you want your website to be a success, it’s necessary to find the ideal balance between these two very different elements so your site is findable and engages visitors and converts them to buyers (or, whatever else it is you’re trying to accomplish with your website).

Another old adage comes to mind surrounding the SEO vs. usability debate: “If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?” In other words, you could have the greatest website in the world, but if no one is able to find it, it may as well not exist. Therefore, it is very important to optimize your site with the use of keywords, links and quality content so it can be easily found when someone performs a search.

While there’s no denying the importance of getting your site to rank at the top of search results, it’s essential to make sure once users find your site, they will want to stay there. Having a well-structured, easy-to-navigate site is crucial in being able to convert visitors into consumers of your brand or product. Now that you have people in the forest to hear the tree fall, so to speak, you have to make sure your website will make them want to stick around.

Even though it can be a delicate balancing act to get SEO and usability to work well together, by following a few tips, you will get started down the right path. For one thing, these two components of your site should be weighed equally from the very beginning of the creation of your website. At the outset, if your SEO and design teams are considered equally important and work well together, you will be saving yourself from a lot of problems down the road. Also, at certain times, SEO will need to take top priority over usability and vice versa, so the ability to recognize this fact and make adjustments as time goes by will be key to your continued success. It takes careful planning to please both your human visitors and search engine spiders and with some experimentation, you will be able to accomplish this goal!

How Squidoo Can Boost Your Site’s SEO

There are tons of social service websites out there, each with its own unique interface and tools to help with link building and online promotion. It is easy to get them confused and to be unclear on what, exactly, these different websites have to offer, especially in terms of search engine optimization. Squidoo is one such site that can positively influence your SEO.

Squidoo consists of a collection of lenses, which are pages on a wide variety of different topics. In order to use Squidoo to your advantage, you need to come up with an appropriate topic pertaining to your area of expertise and write your lens using well thought out and researched keywords. The name of your lens will be reflected in your URL, so take care when naming it to glean the most beneficial ranking results. You can add eye-catching modules to your lens, such as videos, images or infographics, to attract attention to your lens.

Each individual lens is ranked on Squidoo, with a higher ranking earning more visibility, so it is a good idea to take some time to really make sure that your lens looks thorough and professional. Make sure to add a photograph and a biography frequently update your lens and make comments and “favorite” other lens that you find relevant. Once you have created a high-quality, relevant lens, you will then want to promote it through the usual channels of link building, social media and the like. Since Squidoo contains a PageRank of 8, it is a very effective tool for gaining quality links back to any page of your website.

Although it will take some time and effort on your part, Squidoo is worth experimenting with to boost your SEO by attaining free link juice.

Targeting Moderate Relevance Keywords in PPC

Much of the job of a search engine marketer is finding the perfect balance between competitiveness and value in keyphrase choice. Much has been said about utilizing the long tail (including by us here at FindYourSearch), and of course most SEO/SEM articles focus on how to rank for and profit from nearly any keywords, including those in high-competition, if you have the time and money and find them worthwhile in terms of return on investment. In PPC, in particular, it is usually accepted that highly targeted, highly relevant terms provide the best ROI. One article contends differently, however.

The basic premise is that, although some level of relevance is necessary (e.g. cat breeders shouldn’t market to people looking for roofing companies), sometimes a bit of cross-marketing can be profitable. For instance, a business just outside a city can profit by marketing to people looking for hotels within the city, as long as certain care is taken. The article outlines three steps.

First, separation of the ad campaigns is essential. Ads targeting the most relevant keywords should not be the same as those going for the less relevant. In fact, you should have a few campaigns of varying specificity going at any one time. This makes tracking much easier and allows you to properly refine the ad copy for the keywords being targeted.

Secondly, the messages of the ad campaigns need to cater to the audiences they target. Less relevant keywords need more qualification. If someone is searching “purebred puppy breeders” it’s impossible to know whether they want to buy puppies or simply research breeders, or what breed of puppy they’re looking for in what location. Therefore, an ad for a dog breeder selling Golden Retriever puppies in Las Vegas needs to specify all that information in the ad to ensure only qualified click-through.

The third and final key is persuasion. Since you are targeting people who are not directly searching for your product, you need to explain the reasons they should choose you. If you’re promoting a hotel just outside an area being searched for, you should express how easy it is to get to the area. That way, you weed out people unwilling to consider something nearby before they click your ad and cost you money.

As you can see, it’s important to be extremely careful with ads targeted for moderate relevance. When proper care is taken, however, it’s possible to get returns even for these terms.

Building an Outstanding Brand

When you are starting a business or building up an existing brand, you need to make it your goal not to be simply “good,” but to be absolutely amazing. You need to think big, plan big, and design your entire branding strategy around blowing your competition out of the water. As the saying goes, “Shoot for the moon; even if you miss, you’ll land among the stars.” So how, exactly do you go about this lofty goal? Here a few things to keep in mind as you build your brand.

From Oskay on Flickr

First and foremost, develop a solid core company value and belief system. Far more important than logo and design (and foundational to them) is the core driving force behind your company. Once these are established, the rest flows more naturally. Not only that, but the people working on other aspects of the company will be encouraged to protect the brand on a deeper level than simply following color and style guides.

Once you have a core value system, you can be bold with your vision. Put aside your fears and dream big. Don’t just dream big, however -- act big. When you embark on a marketing campaign, you need to put forth a message of confidence through every channel you choose. This doesn’t mean you should pour every dollar you can access into your every campaign until your business has been bled dry; it does mean that whatever avenue you choose to pursue should be done with gusto and confidence.

Finally, don’t be afraid to be strict with how your brand image is being handled when it is in your control to do so. Don’t let people off the hook with “good enough” when it’s your business that’s being represented. Make sure everyone working for you puts forth only their very best efforts.

These suggestions only just scratch the surface of the intricacies of brand management, but they should give you a beginning from which to start building a truly outstanding brand. Let FindYourSearch partner with you in getting that brand more exposure and helping you find success!

3 Common Types of Link Bait

When you're working on SEO for your site, you'll quickly learn that the most important step is link building. Once you have the basics in place for on-site SEO -- proper title tags, keyword optimized content, and so on -- you'll begin the process of building links. The more influential the site you are linked from, the more value the link will provide. One link from the front page of CNN.com would be worth more than a considerable chunk of links built from commenting around on various small do-follow blogs. The trouble is, you can't plant links on CNN.com or other major sites yourself; they have to want to link to you. So, what can you do to encourage this?

The key is to create content others want to link to, aka link bait. The higher quality of content you create, the more likely people will be to share it with others, first through social media, but eventually by creating content of their own linking to you. Link bait is content developed specifically to attract links. Infographics, "how to" guides, and "best of" lists are some of the most frequently shared content on the Web, and so are often created as link bait.

Infographics are particularly popular at the moment (so much so, I believe the market is nearing saturation, so be careful). These are visually pleasing representations of data. They're a step above charts and graphs, usually incorporating cartoon-like characters, silhouettes, or vector art scenery. They must be both pleasing to look at and contain accurate, interesting data which is clarified by the visual enhancements.

"How to" guides answer the obvious, often in steps. How do I build a website? How do I build a deck? People will always need instructions, and "how to" or "how do I" are common phrasings for this style of query. Just don't stick a question mark at the end of "How to build a website" -- that's just a statement. The question form of this phrase is "How do I build a website?" or "Are you wondering how to build a website?"

Finally, "best of" lists are another common form of link bait. You might collect a group of the funniest cat pictures from I Can Has Cheezburger, the most useful SEO tools on the Web, or the most valuable marketers to follow on Twitter. There is a lot of content online, and people are constantly looking for quick and easy distillations of their favorite subjects to help them quickly digest top quality content.

From Talking-Cats.com

Just because this kind of content is often created with link baiting in mind doesn't mean it loses its value. If you do real work to find your top list of funny cat pictures or create the best how-to guide you're able, you are providing a service to your readers, old and new. As long as your link bait is high quality, relevant to the rest of your content, and interspersed with other articles less obviously "link baity," your readers will appreciate your efforts, and you'll be inviting backlinks.

SEO: The Essential Blueprint of Any Website

There really is no overstating SEO’s crucial importance in a website’s overall effectiveness and success. Just as you would not rush into building a house without first having a clear plan and blueprint in place, you shouldn’t start building your site without a plan in place. Before you buy that domain or start debating the aesthetics of your page, you need to tackle the “nuts and bolts” of your site so that it will operate optimally.

(Image from Peg Syverson)

The foundation of any website, no matter the industry, lies in SEO. It is crucial you take the time to research the terms that people are searching so that you can formulate a list of keywords you can build into your site from the get-go. Implanting these terms is a vital step that must be taken, the same way that it is imperative to build a strong, lasting foundation when building a house.

Once you have taken the time to lay out the necessary groundwork, it is then time to address the structure of your website. You need to decide upon the levels of navigation you want to present to the viewer, keeping in mind it is integral to present just the right amount of information. You don’t want your visitors to be underwhelmed, yet care needs to be taken to make sure that they aren’t overloaded, either. It is also essential to structure your site in a way that is logical so that visitors can follow a path through the sales process.

Just remember: building your site is a lot like building a house. If you were building a house, you certainly wouldn’t go off, willy-nilly, building aimlessly with no clear plan in place. By the same token, you need to approach the website building process in the same manner. Take your time to do the research and planning and you will be well on your way to success!

Don’t Forget About the Images

As important as it is to optimize your website’s written content, your website contains more than text. As such, it’s also vitally important to remember to optimize your images as well.

Search engines view Web pages as a series of text and code only; they do not “see” images like we do. When using images on your site, it is important to take time to optimize them so the search engines recognize and index them.

One extremely simple, yet amazingly effective, step is to give your image a relevant name, even using a keyword if possible. While it is crucial to not use a generic, meaningless name, such as ‘photo 1’, you must not stuff in too many keywords, either, as your craftiness will be recognized by the search engines. Just be sure the name you choose is relevant to the image and not overly long, and you should be fine. It’s also a good idea to replace any spaces in the title of your images with dashes.

HTML tags are another great feature that can be adjusted to increase your image SEO. By adding keywords into the tags for your title (the words that pop up when your mouse hovers over an image) and alt text (the text that is displayed when an image cannot be displayed), you’ll be strengthening your site for those phrases. As always, don’t be spammy about it - the search engines will catch on and it will be useless to any visually-impaired users who rely on those tags to experience your content.

Although these steps are very simple to carry out, they are massively effective and the necessary time should be taken to ensure that your images are optimized. You will be amazed by the results!

A Quick Look at Optimizing for YouTube

Do you have videos on YouTube or another video hosting channel? Videos are a great way to engage viewers and build fans, as well as provide links back to your company. However, with millions of videos already posted, how can you make sure yours gets found? SEOptimize has published a great guide for optimizing your YouTube videos. Their checklist of ten steps can help ensure your video gets the best possible exposure.

Writing descriptive titles and relevant tags is perhaps the most basic step in video SEO. As with blog posts and site titles, careful crafting and keyword inclusion is a must. Internal linking, important in any campaign, can be achieved on YouTube through video responses and playlists. Link out to your main Web site through the video description, and don't forget to build external links as you would in any campaign. Comments and ratings are another important factor, so consider adding an annotation reminding users to leave their feedback. Finally, perhaps the most frequently forgotten step when posting a video is to remember YouTube isn't the only online video hosting service; don't forget to post to various places like Google and MySpace.

Be sure and check out the original article for more in-depth information about each of these steps, and remember to treat your YouTube channel with as much care as any other site in your SEO campaign.

Optimizing for the Long Tail - A Brief Overview

While it can be tempting for the SEO to focus on a few primary or “trophy” keywords, this ignores a significant chunk of all keyword referrals known as the long tail. The long tail is made up of those key phrases that are only searched a few times, but collectively make up a significant portion of searches.

Those trailing keywords, which can be thousands or tens of thousands strong, are actually responsible for far more traffic than the head keywords because of their sheer numbers. Bill Tancer of Hitwise concluded they make up nearly 90 percent of search traffic.

Clearly, the long tail should not be ignored in optimization. Should an SEO attempt to focus on thousands of individual keywords? Returns diminish quickly when optimizing for too many keywords. Even a thousand is too many to effectively cover, but according to Tancer’s research, even the top 10,000 keywords only bring in 18.5 percent of searches. So what is an SEO to do?

The key is to focus on keyword groups. By targeting one primary keyword and its variants per page, that page can be optimized for thousands of related tail keywords all at once.

Start by carefully planning the site with keyword grouping in mind. Mark Nunny of Wordtracker suggests categories as a great way to build around primary keywords. Each category then targets a specific primary and secondary keyword. Write a long article (1,000+ words is suggested) focusing on each of these keywords and their variants, and the tail keywords will appear naturally in the copy. Be sure to put the primary and secondary keywords in prominent locations such as the page title, headlines, and links.

By targeting the long tail, you probably won’t rank first for any trophy keywords. You will, however, gain access to considerably more potential customers through a broader variety of searches.

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