Last Update Nov 26, 2024 @ 11:24 pm

When you are using social media platforms to promote your business, more exposure is always better. Sometimes, however, you may feel as though your posts are invisible.

If you aren’t getting much engagement, or if your engagement rate is not reflected in your organic traffic, it may be time to find more ways to ensure that your posts are seen by people who are looking for the goods and services you offer.

There are many ways to accomplish this, but an important way is to get search engines to index your social media posts.

Social media users are hunting for information and connections that are relevant to their lives. They routinely search their chosen platforms for the goods and services that will help them achieve their goals and satisfy their needs.

As in every area of the internet today, any good social media marketing strategy needs to include search engine optimization.

If you want your business page to appear when users search for the goods you offer, you need to figure out how Google chooses to index social media posts.

What is Indexing?

Google uses automated processes called crawlers to explore website content, looking for search-relevant keywords and other attributes that signal interest for users seeking specific information.

When Google crawlers find your website or social media posts they categorize your content.

This categorization is called indexing.

How Your Social Media Marketing Strategy Can Utilize Search Engine Optimization

Many search engine optimization techniques can be translated directly to social media marketing. Keywords, links and meta tags are all used by the search engines to put the right content in front of the users who want to see it.

Start employing SEO strategies in your social media efforts to get more organic traffic and generate leads.

How Does Google Index Social Media Posts?

If you have been working on search engine optimization for your website content, you may be familiar with the concept of creating content that ranks by using keywords, creating backlinks and optimizing meta data.

Translating these concepts to social media marketing is not exactly the same, but many of the same principles apply.

The savvy social media manager won’t just be watching social media trends (although that can be a crucial aspect of the task); they will also be meticulous in making sure there are plenty of links, accurate meta tags, and optimized keywords to take advantage of social media usage.

Social Media Platforms: A New Frontier for Key Metrics of Search Engine Optimization Strategy

General SEO strategy centers around content within your website, creating posts and pages that are easy for the Google crawlers to index and filled with relevant keywords that users are looking for.

Joining Forces

Adding social media marketing to your overall SEO strategy requires cooperation between your SEO team and your social media manager. Ensuring that each new blog post is announced with an optimized social media post that utilizes good tagging is just the start.

How Can the Savvy Social Media Manager Leverage SEO?

There are many ways to rank on the search engines with your social media posts and pages. Some are common to all aspects of SEO strategy, while others are unique to social media marketing strategy.

Relevant Keywords: The Foundation of SEO

When it comes to search engine optimization, making good use of keywords that rank will always be central. While finding ways to place keywords where the crawlers will find them can be less straightforward, the need for timely and specific keywords cannot be overstated.

Finding the right keywords within the relevant social media data is equally important. And once you choose your keywords, they need to be placed in ways that will catch the eye of users and crawlers alike.

Meta Data: Become the Crawler Whisperer

Using metadata, such as creating a meta description for hyperlinks and images, is a way to talk directly to the search engine crawlers without cluttering up your content with extra keywords. Embedding information in the code of images and links will improve your SERP rankings without calling the average reader’s attention to the fact that the post has been optimized.

Hashtags: Join the Conversation

Adding hashtags at the end of a post will help associate your post with other websites that are discussing similar topics. Users may find your post when they are browsing posts that use the same tag, and it is also a good way to sneak in another keyword or two for the crawlers.

Social media marketing relies on placing your content where interested social media users will be certain to find it.

Choose Your Tags Wisely

To use hashtags most effectively, a little research may be in order, as tags that are used more frequently will likely also be followed more frequently. Social media statistics for different tags will give you needed insight into which ones to use.

Linking Back: Bring Interested Internet Users Back To Your Site

Make sure your insightful and engaging posts include a link that will bring users back to your site, where you can then continue to enlighten and entertain while hopefully making conversions.

Where On-Page SEO and Social Media Marketing Converge

Making social media content that ranks is an important step to improving your site’s visibility. It will improve customer sentiment, broaden your target audience and drive traffic to your site.

Don’t underestimate the importance of social media marketing to your SEO strategy. When your posts or video content on Facebook and other platforms is properly optimized, you will find that your traffic and visibility improve.

Watching your social media statistics will also give you valuable insights on relevant social media trends, letting you change your content strategy to take advantage of changing interests.

Look into optimizing your social media posts and find out how to multiply your web traffic today.

The post Get Your Social Media Posts Indexed By Google first appeared on SEO Optimizers.

Last Update Jan 16, 2024 @ 10:37 am

Did you know that there are many specialized Chrome extensions for SEO?

Search engine optimization is an invaluable tool to ensure that your website is among those that search engines show. It can reduce the need for advertising, bringing your site traffic from people who are truly looking for what you are selling.

But it is also a very complex project to get your site optimized and to keep it that way, since your competitors are trying to optimize for many of the same keywords that you are using. Fortunately there are many ways to get an edge in this competitive field, and some are low-cost or even free.

If you use Google Chrome, and want to optimize your site and content, you would do well to familiarize yourself with these Chrome extensions for SEO.

How Chrome Extensions for SEO can Help You

Whether you are just building your first website or trying to get traffic to a site you have had for years, Chrome extensions can give you invaluable data that will take away the guesswork as to what your customer base is looking for.

Whether your seo strategy focuses most on page optimization, social media marketing, or competitor research, you can find a Chrome extension that will show you up to date data that will inform your next steps toward full optimization and mastery of the market.

Eleven SEO Extensions For Your Online Visibility

Chrome’s open source nature allows users to create new extensions that serve many useful functions beyond just browsing web pages. As a result there are thousands of extensions available for a host of purposes. Dozens of these can be useful in SEO.

Below I have listed several that are easy to use and very useful for anyone doing search engine optimization, whether they are working on keyword research, running seo analysis or finding broken links. SEO Chrome extensions can cut back substantially on the time and effort involved in reaching the top of Google rankings.

Keyword Help: Chrome Extensions for Keywords

Keywords are a major focus of almost all SEO efforts. Whether you are trying to find keyword ideas, assessing keyword density, or assessing keyword difficulty, there are SEO extensions to help you do this research quickly and effectively.

Keywords Everywhere

This powerful tool lets you use your google search console to find related keywords, track google trends related to the keywords you are searching for, and assess keyword related traffic for specific sites. All this power at your fingertips is worth much more than the small monthly fee the service charges.

Pro

While this is an excellent tool for evaluating keywords in a high volume of content while browsing, it may not be the best choice for more detailed analysis.

Con

Some users report that credits expire one year after purchase so it may be wise to buy credits that you are certain you can use in a short timeframe.

Keyword Surfer

If you want a free tool that gives you search volume data at a glance every time you use your Chrome browser, here’s your chance. Keyword Surfer puts global and regional keyword traffic right where you can see it, with an easy user interface that makes keyword research a breeze.

Pro

SEO data at a glance makes this tool an easy win, especially since it is free and doesn’t even require an account.

Con

It has no measure of keyword difficulty, which means it won’t be your only keyword research extension.

Ubersuggest

This tool pulls together information from search data, social media sharing and seasonal trends, and gives excellent keyword suggestions tailored to your needs. The easy to read keyword data includes keyword difficulty and cost per click, letting you make a good selection of keywords to optimize while staying within your budget.

Pro

Great for analyzing your site versus competitors’.

Con

The Basic plan only lets you track comparative data for two other websites; to track more you will have to pay more.

Google Chrome Extensions for SEO Analysis

Your website’s meta descriptions may be invisible to most people, but they are of huge importance to getting good traffic. Learning to use meta descriptions and fix a flawed meta description can mean all the difference between lots of shares and no social media traction at all.

Meta SEO Inspector

This tool lets you get under the hood of your website and fix problems that are not obvious at first glance. Faulty SEO meta tags can make your page invisible to Google–and all the organic traffic that uses Google. They can also make your site seem poorly run if shared links show a blank screen due to a faulty tag. Use Meta SEO Inspector to quickly find and correct problems in your SEO meta tags.

Pro

This tool makes fixing website problems easy and intuitive.

Con

Many users complain that the extension opens a new tab to announce each update, but this option can be turned off in the app settings.

SEOQuake

For an easy overview of your SEO for your site, run page analysis with SEOQuake. This tool lets you see an overview of your optimization, and then to investigate further with analysis like an SEO audit function and a keyword density report.

Pro

This is an excellent source of one-click SEO data for your site.

Con

Some users complain that the user interface is not particularly attractive or easy to use.

Mangools

Want to understand how your competitors rank on Google, and why they land where they do in search results? Mangools will show SEO metrics for every page you visit, including trust flow and domain authority. Find out what the competition has to offer so that you can tailor your strengths and surpass their rankings.

Pro

Excellent customer service and simple user interface ensures a good experience during use.

Con

There are cheaper services offering similar functions.

SiteChecker

For analysis of any page you visit, use SiteChecker. It will assess and offer suggestions regarding your headings and descriptions, discuss improvements to indexation, and reveal whether you are using images in an optimal fashion. Comparing these SEO metrics to those of your competitors may reveal exactly what it takes to get an edge.

Pro

Comparative data from other sites combined with analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of your own site may be just what you need to edge ahead of your competition.

Con

Some suggestions, such as keyword rankings, are offered with little explanation as to why they need to be improved or how to fix them.

Checkbot

Checkbot helps you evaluate your website’s user interface as well as helping with on page SEO analysis. It will point out duplicate content and page titles, as well as security issues and elements that impede loading speed.

Pro

Checkbot offers easy site evaluation for functionality and security.

Con

Some users complain that the free version is too limited to be useful.

Extensions to Help You Find and Fix Broken Links

Broken links are frustrating for potential customers and also damage your rankings so the customers can’t find you in the first place. Keeping all your links up to date and working is a time consuming process, but there are tools that make it much easier.

LinkMiner

This Chrome extension flags broken links and shows link data while you browse. This allows you to gather data about competitor’s links as well as making sure all your links are in working order.

Pro

Quick and easy backlink analysis makes fixing backlink issues much easier.

Con

It does not show any data for page authority or domain authority.

LinkClump

While not specifically designed for SEO, this tool lets you open several links in different tabs at the same time, making backlinks easier to check. It also makes keyword and competitor research more streamlined, opening several sites from your Google search results with one click.

Pro

An easy, efficient way to open many links at the same time is invaluable for backlink checking and other aspects of SEO optimization.

Con

There are multiple recent reviews stating that the extension isn’t working correctly for some people. This could indicate that a recent update introduced a bug that may be fixed soon, but be aware before downloading.

SEO Minion

If you want a tool that will help you assess your links and links on other pages SEO Minion is a great place to start. It will highlight all links on a given page, both internal and external, and can color code them based on whether they are redirects, 404s, or working properly.

Pro

This is a great tool for checking links, as well as keyword research while you browse.

Con

Many users are displeased that this is not a free tool.

Taking Charge of Your Site’s SEO Elements

There are many top SEO metrics, and trying to understand and optimize them all can seem very complex and intimidating. But just like any important task, having the right tool can make even the most difficult task achievable and even easy.

A good SEO extension will make your optimization efforts much easier and more successful, taking the guesswork out of keyword metrics and highlighting problems with SEO meta descriptions. Using Chrome extensions for SEO can be a force multiplier by maximizing the impact of your SEO efforts exactly where they are needed most.

The post 11 Of The Best SEO Chrome Extensions first appeared on SEO Optimizers.

Last Update Aug 16, 2022 @ 11:18 am

Although some business owners believe that marketing is all about spending enough money for advertising, the truth is that you can accomplish a lot, even without a huge marketing budget. The trick is to engage your audience and make them care about your message. However, if you want to have a compelling message, you will need to learn how to create a narrative that will get users interested in what you have to say. To help you out, we have put together a step by step guide to using storytelling as a marketing tool. You can use these tips to improve your marketing by increasing user engagement and retention.

What Is Storytelling As a Marketing Tool?

Storytelling is an age-old art that allows us to use words to share our experiences, thoughts, and emotions with others. From a young age, we use stories to learn about the world around us. Although storytelling is an art form as old as civilization, we have gotten very good at it over time, and now we have surefire ways of telling an exciting story. If we pay close enough attention to the best stories, we can see that they often have common patterns of piquing our interest and stirring our emotions. The better you get at telling stories, the easier it will be to tell a compelling narrative and engage your audience.

You have to realize that modern audiences don’t want to be advertised to. Nowadays, users are bombarded with more ads than ever, yet traditional marketing is becoming less effective. The drop in effectiveness is because users want to be entertained and engaged. Users don’t want to hear how efficient your products are, not until you get them to care about the message itself. Without a powerful message, users will scroll past your ads and never look back.

However, a witty and creative message in your ads isn’t going to be enough to get you noticed. Your competition will also attempt to draw a following through their marketing. Therefore, you’ll need to have a way to stand out in online spaces. SEO techniques can help you optimize and streamline various facets of your online presence, including your marketing.

Step by Step Guide to Using Storytelling as a Marketing Tool:

1.     Create a Detailed Marketing Plan

We suggest you start by planning out your entire marketing campaign and how you will use storytelling to reach your desired audience. Of course, there will be differences based on the size of your company, the type of products you offer, and the demographics of your customer base. However, you can plan most marketing campaigns with a similar outline. While you are in the planning stage, you should go through the following steps:

• Define your goals. Not every marketing campaign aims to achieve the same results. Think about what your goals are since that can significantly affect the style of storytelling you will be using. Generating new leads for your sales department and building up interest for a new product launch will require different storytelling approaches.
• Set your marketing budget. Although storytelling is a reasonably affordable tool in any marketer’s repertoire, you will still need a way to deliver your content. Thankfully, there are forms of marketing that don’t require significant investments, such as PPC advertising. Pay Per Click ads are generally cheap and have a good ROI, making them perfect for testing new ads.
• Get to know your audience. We will discuss how you can use storytelling to appeal to different audiences further down in this article.
• Create a unique storytelling stylethat you will use in your marketing. Admittedly, not every marketing executive is a great storyteller; however, there are ways to get around this problem. Namely, you don’t need to do everything yourself, and you can outsource the creative writing to a copywriter. Remember that you should still give them an outline of your marketing campaign and what you want to achieve through the use of storytelling.

2.     Who Do You Want To Appeal To

Before you start optimizing every aspect of your marketing, it would be helpful if you knew who you are targeting. The type of storytelling you will use is going to vary depending on who your audience is. You won’t use the same language or themes to appeal to 18-year-old TikTok-ers as you would for a B2B email marketing campaign aimed at CEOs. You’ll need to define your target audience and their interests accurately. Make a profile of your ideal customer and get to know everything about them.

It’s advisable to research even if your products appeal to several demographics. You’ll probably need to use different storytelling styles for the same product if you target different demographics. For example, you won’t market your tech and gadgets the same way for college students and families with children. While you can develop a unique storytelling approach for each demographic, you should still try to remain consistent with your brand values.

Most businesses neglect to take into account users from their area. Depending on the type of products or services you offer, local customers could make up a large percentage of your business. If you want to appeal to those users, we suggest looking into local SEO, which can help you improve the effectiveness of your marketing for users in your area.

3.     Find Your Voice

It’s crucial to use the right tone to make your storytelling more effective. When discussing literature and written content, the author’s ‘voice’ refers to the tone and style of writing they use. This can also include vocabulary, sentence structure, and even inserting a personal point of view. For more complex marketing campaigns, you can even develop the characters you will feature in your advertising. You can give those characters unique personality traits and use them as audience stand-ins to appeal to your chosen demographic.

Another essential thing to remember when finding your storytelling voice is that it should be consistent with your brand values. Many inexperienced marketers make the mistake of trying to appeal to new audiences in a way that does not correctly convey their company’s brand values. This approach can be particularly problematic for well-known and established brands. While it is sometimes necessary to re-invent your brand, it is something else entirely if you are tonally inconsistent in your marketing.

Finding your voice and using it across all of your marketing is a great way to build trust with your audience. Once you establish what your brand is about, a consistent tone will help your followers create an emotional connection. Users will already know what to expect the next time they see your marketing, making your job much easier. It will also be easier for users to remember your brand if your marketing and branding are consistent.

4.     Get Creative

One of the best ways to stand out from the competition is to channel your creativity and use it to tell an engaging story. In many ways, marketing is similar to comedy. Both are constantly exploring new and creative ways of telling stories and are known to push the boundaries of their respective mediums.

For starters, you can look at what your competition is doing. Remember that you don’t need to re-invent the wheel if you want to start using storytelling as a marketing tool. After all, every story has already been told; the only thing you can do is tell them in a way that is unique to your brand. Checking out what your competition is doing can be a great source of inspiration. Think about what they are doing right, and take notes. Also, consider which elements of their storytelling you think you can improve on.

A critical lesson you must learn is that storytelling doesn’t have to be confined to a written form. Use visual storytelling to your advantage since most modern platforms are primarily visual. Creative images and promotional videos can be even more effective at telling your story in online spaces.

5.     Know Where to Spread Your Message

Traditional storytelling relies on the audience sticking around long enough to hear the whole story. Unfortunately, the same rules don’t apply when using storytelling as a marketing tool. Audience attention spans in online spaces are ridiculously short. Therefore, the stories you tell need to be concise and dynamic. The exact length or format will depend on the platform you will be marketing on. Thankfully, there are set trends you can follow for specific formats.

Here is how to adapt to the needs of each specific platform:

• Posting on your website. Create a blog section on your site where you can post long-form articles. However, it would help if you didn’t neglect to analyze your entire website to improve optimization. This process includes having a strong copy for your CTA and well-written descriptions and tags for your articles and images.
• Social media. Posting on social networks is imperative if you want to stay relevant. However, it would be best if you catered to each network’s specific needs. Twitter is good for fostering discussion, while you will get more engagement on TikTok if you tell your story through vertical videos. Social media marketing can help you stay in touch with your audience, but you will need to post regularly and update your profiles.
• Guest write on other sites. Talk to the webmasters of the website you are writing for about inserting links to your site. They will probably let you place a link or two in the article you are writing. Backlinks are an essential part of any SEO strategy. Guest writing can also lead more people to your site.
• Hire influencers. Having a real person spread your message can be a total game changer. Nowadays, you can find influencers catering to every niche. It would be best if you hire an influencer whose audience overlaps with your target demographic.

6.     Track User Engagement Metrics

Just putting your content out into the world isn’t going to be enough. Most marketing experts know that they must keep a close eye on how their campaigns are performing, and the same is true if you are going to be using storytelling as a marketing tool. To gain insight into user engagement metrics, you’ll need to concentrate on the right data. If your audience isn’t responding to your storytelling efforts, you can reassess what you are doing wrong and make corrections to your marketing.

Don’t get discouraged if you have trouble finding your voice and building a following. It might take you several attempts to find the correct form of storytelling. That’s why we suggest experimenting with cost-effective forms of marketing before you commit to an expensive campaign.

7.     Use Social Proof in Your Storytelling

If your business has been around for a while, you may have plenty of satisfied customers. Consider asking them for feedback and reviews and placing their comments on your website. Listen to what your users are saying and take the time to respond to them.

By taking a proactive approach and solving customer issues in a timely fashion, you will be able to get a large number of satisfied customers. Positive reviews can sway your website visitors to become paying customers. However, you can also implement social proof and user-created content into your storytelling.

Share the accomplishments of your employees and customers on your social media profiles. Organize contests for your audience and share the best submissions. Online audiences will be excited if you make users the stars of your marketing campaigns. This is a great way to build empathy and get the goodwill of your community.

Closing Statements

Most types of digital marketing are never truly finished. You should always check how your campaign is performing and make slight adjustments where they are needed. Continual optimization is the name of the game, and if you are going to be using storytelling as a marketing tool, you will need to constantly explore new storytelling methods.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: How do I use storytelling as a marketing tool if I don’t know how to write?

A: Thankfully, this problem has a reasonably easy solution. You can hire a copywriter. Look into freelance writers that have experience writing about the topics you are interested in.

Q: How long should the blog posts on my website be?

A: Blog posts should, on average, have more than 1.000 words. Recent SEO trends indicate that Google’s algorithm prefers long-form content, so you can aim for articles that are upwards of 2.400 words.

Q: What video length is ideal for storytelling on social media?

A: This greatly depends on the platform in question, as well as the preferences of your audience. Generally, avoid making videos that are longer than 1 minute. Sometimes a short, 5-second clip is enough to make your marketing campaign go viral.

Q: How do I deal with a negative response from my audience?

A: We have found that it is best to be sincere and truthful. Don’t ignore or delete negative comments. Instead, you should try to resolve any issues and win over the sympathies of your audience by showing them you care.

The post Step by Step Guide to Using Storytelling as a Marketing Tool first appeared on SEO Optimizers.

Last Update Aug 24, 2022 @ 6:18 pm

The Skyscraper Technique has been around in the SEO world for quite a while.

It was coined by Brian Dean of Backlinko and it became popular among SEO practitioners.

Why so successful?

The answer to that question is this guide. We’ll explain what the Skyscraper Technique is, how it works and the results it can bring to your content creation efforts.

And to your link building, too.

(And we’ll also make a note on how to use the Skyscraper Technique ethically.)

Read on!

What is the Skyscraper Technique?

The Skyscraper Technique takes its name from the magnificence of tall skyscrapers, and from the fact that an existing building can always get overtaken by a higher skyscraper.

Not only higher, but a better quality skyscraper, you want to hope!

The Skyscraper Technique work in the exact same way — it’s about building better, more useful content than your competitors, and letting readers decide which one they like best.

(Most probably yours, since it’s outstanding!)

In Brian Dean’s words:

“Have you ever walked by a really tall building and said to yourself: “Wow, that’s amazing! I wonder how big the 8th tallest building in the world is.” Of course not. It’s human nature to be attracted to the best. And what you’re doing here is finding the tallest “skyscraper” in your space…and slapping 20 stories to the top of it.”

The technique in a nutshell

1. Browse the SERPs for your target keywords and note down the top 10
2. Find the backlinks for these results (using tools like Monitor Backlinks’ Link Checker or Buzzsumo)
3. Choose the ones with the highest number of backlinks and read them start to finish, noting down what they’re doing good and the common topics they talk about
4. Create content on the same topic as your competitor, but make it 10X better (not necessarily longer, even though a Semrush study found that long form articles get top results in terms of performance and traffic)
5. Promote that newly created content and pitch it even to the people who are linking to your competitor’s content.

This is where things can get unethical…

Building your content on the same topic as another person’s is not the problem. It happens every time in book and scientific publishing: it’s competition, which you study, of course.

The problem happens when you approach people who are linking to your competitor and ask them to replace their link with yours. That’s where things get nasty.

Keep the practice ethical by suggesting your link as additional value to that page, not as a replacement. Your goal is to ethically compete with your competitor, not to destroy them.

Now let’s see how to go through those 5 steps we listed above.

1. Finding High Quality Competitor Pages with a Lot of Backlinks

Your goal is to build upon the best available content in the SERPs and create something better that users (and search engines) will love.

Now, there are several ways to do that. Let’s list a few.

Google SERPs

This is the most important method: to make a list of content pieces appearing in the top 10 of Google SERPs.

In fact, because links play a critical role in Google’s algorithms, you can be fairly sure that these pieces have at least a few quality backlinks.

Collect these links in a spreadsheet. You will analyze them in the next step.

Competitor Backlinks

Analyze your competitor’s content and check backlinks for the best pieces.

You can use a backlink tracker for this scope.

Below is an example:

Some pretty good backlinks in the mix, right? Like that quoted statistics from Adjust.com.

You will analyze competitor pages that got great backlinks like that in the next step. For now, just collect the URLs.

Buzzsumo

Buzzsumo is a good tool to find topics that people want to read — they’re the ones with the most shares and backlinks!

In the example below, for the topic “SEO copywriting”, we found some good pages that got at least a few backlinks and a lot of Facebook and Twitter shares:

Give this method a try and collect the best pages for the next step.

Ubersuggest

You can also use Ubersuggest to find top linked competitors for a target keyword.

Look at the example screenshot below:

When you look up a keyword or key phrase in Ubersuggest, you’ll be shown a number of sections in Keyword Overview, that includes Content Ideas.

In the Content Ideas section you can find a list of suggested content you can get inspiration from for your article, and each piece comes with the number of backlinks.

You can see immediately which content has the most backlinks.

Alternatively, you can click on Content Ideas on the left sidebar under Keyword Analyzer and get many more content… with all the backlinks!

It becomes easy to see who’s your competitor here, and what they are doing well, so that you can replicate their success and build upon it.

Forums

Forums are another great tool for going topic hunting.

Give Quora, Reddit, and Stack Exchange a try.

Once you have your topic ready, search it in Google and focus on the top 10 results in the SERPs: those are the ones you want to outrank!

2. Analyze Top Performing Competitor Pages

No matter what method from the previous section you used, nor if you used a combination of them, now that you have your list of competitor content handy, time has come to analyze them one by one.

• Start with the best page (i.e. ranks #1 in Google or has the most backlinks)
• Read the page beginning to end and note down the topics and angles it covers (leave out original findings if you can’t cite and link back to your competitor’s work)
• Proceed to the other pages and do the same work until you reach the end of your list. Also, note down common topics between the pieces you read
• Create an article outline using the topics you found in your analysis and note down where you could expand and build upon — you will use this outline later when you work on your Skyscraper content.

That’s a lot of work, we know, but analyzing top performing competitor content is critical to creating your 10x content.

3. How to Make a Piece of Content 10x Better with the Skyscraper Technique

As you have done in the previous section, creating awesome Skyscraper content involves studying your competition to see what’s doing well and replicate that.

But at the same time, you add more value and new sections with ideas or interviews that are unique to you.

Let’s see what areas you can add your “touch” to.

Headline

Start with your headline. You want it to be magnetic!

Get into your ideal reader’s mind: what type of language and approach would attract their attention?

A word of advice: refrain from copying your competitor’s headline. You want your content to be unique! Make your personality shine starting from the headline.

Length

You can make your content longer, but the smart way — not by filling it with fluff, but by adding a lot of value.

As an example, you might add extra hacks. Or more tools. Or more data.

The end result should be a compelling read that readers feel like it’s a go-to gem in the niche or industry.

Freshness

You also want to make sure your content is up to date.

Maybe the competitor content you analyzed dates back 2015 and it hasn’t been updated since.

You can do much better!

Scour the web and libraries for the latest research articles and statistics in your industry and build your content upon the new findings.

Readers will feel they can trust you because you bring current facts to the table.

Visuals

Also, make sure to add images and screenshots.

Not many websites do that, often they only have one or two images, if they have any at all! You want to be a champion of visuals!

Just remember to add descriptive alt text to make these visuals accessible even by visually impaired people.

Examples and Tutorials

Finally, make sure every section in your content comes with practical examples and guided tours so readers don’t have to guess what they should do to apply your advice — be a great not just a good teacher!

4. Promoting Content Created with the Skyscraper Technique

The hard part is promoting the content using as many channels as possible.

You have to get as many eyes on your content as you can reach, and email website owners who are likely to link to it.

Like resourceful or curated blog posts and resource pages.

Make a list of people who might potentially be interested in linking back to your content.

Find link prospects among:

• People who already link to your competitors
• Bloggers in your niche (search “niche + blog” in Google)
• Resource page and resource articles
• Broken link building

Finally, reach out.

Below is an email template you can use for your pitches:

Hey NAME!

I stumbled upon your fantastic article/resource page/roundup while searching for NICHE TOPIC.

Can’t believe how many of those resources I did not know! I learned so much from your piece.

You know, I have recently published a resource on the same topic, specifically on YOUR TOPIC/ANGLE HERE. Would you like to take a look?

This is the URL:

I’m open to feedback!

Also, if you happen to like it, would you consider adding it to your list of resources? Maybe my text can give your readers some more data to work on.

Let me know what you think. I’m all ears.

Cheers,
YOURNAME

Remember to always tell your link prospects why you’re reaching out but avoid telling them to replace a competitor’s link that they find helpful.

Not only this is unethical, it’s also upsetting to the link prospect who will see their own decision on what to link and what not questioned.

Always be kind to your prospects, and never pushy.

5. Monitoring Your Backlinks

You can use a backlink tracker like Monitor Backlinks or Linkody to track your backlinks. It’s also useful to setup a Google Alert for your content.

But don’t look for overnight success.

Mind what Neil Patel says about branding: until your brand takes off and gets recognition, it’s harder to build backlinks.

It’s certainly harder to build links for an SEO guide on a small blog, even if the quality is high, than one on Brian Dean’s blog.

10x content is great, but if searcher satisfaction happens at 1x, you won't beat the big brand who commands the first click.

— Ross Hudgens (@RossHudgens) December 20, 2016

Why Is the Skyscraper Technique So Effective?

Mostly because Google swears by its three ranking factors:

• Content
• Links
• Rankbrain

With the Skyscraper Technique you create awesome content, right? Check!

And awesome content easily attracts backlinks, you know? Yes, so — check!

That means that the Skyscraper Technique allows you to create great content that Rankbrain will read and understand (for search intent) and that people are more likely to link to because its quality is high (the go-to resource in the niche).

See? You caught three birds with one stone.

What If You Don’t Want to Build Links?

Brian Dean created the Skyscraper Technique as a method to acquire backlinks, but you can also use it to just create top quality content that will naturally rank better in Google.

Just remember to always play it smart with your keyword strategy and search intent which are essential to rank well.

Conclusions on the Skyscraper Technique

Whether you use the Skyscraper Technique to acquire links or just to come up with great content, this is a great method to increase the quality of your website.

Epic content always gets rewarded, both in the SERPs and among users, who are more likely to share it and link to it.

Over to you: Have you ever tried the Skyscraper Technique? If yes, how did it go?

Share your experiences in the comments below.

The post Skyscraper Technique: What It Is and How to Use This SEO Goldmine first appeared on SEO Optimizers.

Last Update Oct 15, 2024 @ 5:00 am

When it comes to running a business, there’s a lot involved. From looking after sales, employees, and customers, it can be hard for you to get ahead and work out key areas that can boost your long term sales. When you take your business online, however, this is an entirely new ball-game. In order for your website to be successful, you need to know how to build a great SEO digital marketing strategy that can be implemented as soon as possible to get the best effect.

If you’re unsure of how to do this, let’s take a look at this search engine webmarketing123.com guide on how you can achieve this overall. Let’s get started.

Steps On Creating An SEO Strategy For Your Business

Step 1: Define Your Target Audience

Before you can create the bulk of your campaign, you first need to know who your target audience is. How do you do this? This can be done by narrowing down key demographics. If you’re a business that specializes in fishing, for example, you could do something like this: 

As you can see, this shows you who your target audience is and who you’re trying to target with your SEO campaign. Understanding your target audience can then help you to know where to spend your money and where to avoid wasting it.

Step 2: Define Your Keywords

The internet is run by keywords. When you Google something, you place keywords into the search bar. Google will then give you optimized results. This is why choosing the right keywords is important. How do you find which one is right, though? This can be done through keyword tools such as Google Keyword Planner.

When searching for the right keywords, you need to look into the different types of keywords. These include:

• Broad Match – Broad match keywords are generic keywords that are usually single words like, basketball, toys, cows etc. These are very broad and are generally used by many people but also have high competition.
• Exact Match – Exact match are keywords that are exact matches of what a person might be looking for. These can look like shoes for men, land for sale, kids toys for girls, christmas gifts for grandparents. These types of keywords are more popular when choosing keywords but do have high competition as well.
• Long Tail Keywords or Phrase Match – These keywords are very specific and don’t have a high search result each month but also don’t have high competition. These can be something like: Cannon H143 High Definition Camera, X-files Season 9 Blu Ray DVD Box Set etc. These are long specific keywords that people use when trying to find a specific type of product.

When choosing keywords, it’s a good idea to have a mixture of all three with Exact Match and Long Tail keywords being on top. They should also be relevant with what you’re selling as well, so people aren’t disappointed when they click through to your site after Googling specific keywords.

Step 3: Audit Your Website

The next step is to audit your website to make sure it’s up to date. When auditing your website, here’s some things to consider:

• Check the length and age of your content on your homepage, about us page and other pages that are key. Generally, sub-pages are 500 words while your homepage should be around 1000 words. Make sure the content you have is always unique and not copied. It should incorporate some of the keywords you want to rank for.
• Check how fast your website loads. A slow-loading website not only affects your SEO but how long your visitors are on your website. Make sure to keep your website speed under 3 seconds of less otherwise you can lose traffic.
• Is your website mobile-friendly or has a responsive design? If not, it needs to. A responsive design means it will shrink or resize to the screen-size when your website visitor is viewing your site.
• Do any of your pages have an error? If so, this needs to be fixed. You can find broken link checkers online to use. This will help you determine if any pages have this error.
• Are you continuously updating your blog on a weekly or monthly basis? If not, creating a content strategy and calendar is a great option.
• Are login areas, forms, and your checkout process working well?
• Do you offer social-sharing icons to help people spread the word about your business?
• Does your site meet expectations when visitors view it after clicking through based on their keyword search?

These are just some of the key things you should look for when auditing your website. By updating your content, especially when using your keywords and using fresh, unique content, you will have a higher chance of getting indexed better in Google.

Step 4: Decide On The Best Strategy To Get Your Message Across

There are multiple ways on how you can market to your audience. However, not every marketing channel will be best for your needs. This is where you need to decide where your audience hangs out the most. Some marketing strategies and channels include, but aren’t limited to:

Social Media Marketing

With the rise of social media, it’s no wonder many businesses tend to use social media marketing as part of their SEO strategy. When looking to market on social media, you need to work out where your target audience is hanging out. This may be in certain groups around a particular niche, with influencers in your niche and more. Once you’ve narrowed down where they hang out on social media, you can start to infiltrate into this area by marketing to them more effectively.

Video Marketing

Places like YouTube offer a great platform for people to really up their game when it comes to video marketing. To create engaging content, you don’t necessarily need expensive tools. Using a free video editor can help you get started without the cost barrier. Some people don’t like to read but they do enjoy watching videos. This is where incorporating video marketing strategies around your niche or what your target audience likes is key. Look at what other competitors do when they work on their video marketing. See whether you can create a video that’s more enticing than your competition to get their attention.

Content Marketing

Many people like to read blogs and other content to get some good information. These people tend to hang out with blogging influencers. Because of this, it’s a good idea to try partnering with influencers in your niche to guest post or gain a review from them with a backlink to your business. This can help with referral traffic and can also help target more specific audience members as well.

These are just three of the most powerful content marketing channels you can use. Others that can help include, but aren’t limited to:

• Email marketing
• Search Engine Marketing
• Affiliate marketing
• PPC advertising

By incorporating one or more of these into your strategy and A/B testing, the results over a period of time you have a higher chance of getting better overall results from your marketing efforts.

Overall

When it comes to digital marketing strategies and where to start, these tips above can help you get started. There’s a lot involved in this type of marketing, however, with patience and the willingness to learn, you can create a powerful SEO strategy for your business. Are you ready to get started?

The post SEO Digital Marketing Strategies For Every Business Owner first appeared on SEO Optimizers.

Just because you’re running a business, it doesn’t mean that you don’t need the services of a digital marketing agency. If there’s any aspect in your business that you should spend on the most, this has to do with marketing. Specifically, the focus is on digital marketing since the trends are getting more competitive.

Finding the right digital marketing agency for your business might seem like a difficult task, but it shouldn’t always have to feel that way. When you know where and how to begin your search, you’re one step closer to finding the digital marketing agency that’s right for you. To start with, here are some of these tips:

1. Know Your Budget

Before you jump right into looking for the right digital marketing agency for you, remember not to be too ambitious. You’re still a new and small business. This means that you have a limit when it comes to your budget. Hiring a digital marketing agency will allow you to reap benefits later on. However, you must also be realistic with the amount that you can afford to spend. If you’re constrained financially, worry not as there is a digital marketing agency for every budget. And, spending lesser also doesn’t necessarily equate to poorer quality.

2. Assess The Needs Of Your Business

No matter how good a marketing agency is, they can never really succeed according to your standards, if they don’t know your needs. Every client is going to be different. Hence, it’s going to be wrong for you to expect that the digital marketing agency is going to know right away what you’re expecting. As you narrow down your options, you have to assess your specific needs.

For instance, take note of the following considerations:

• Are you looking to redesign your brand?
• How far are you willing to go to meet your needs?
• What are you looking to achieve with the agency that you’re hiring?

Identify your needs and know what you’re looking for exactly so you can better choose among the many digital marketing agencies that are available. To start your search, visit https://www.caffeinemarketing.co.uk for a reputable digital marketing agency.

3. Be Diligent With Your Research

There are many resources for you to find digital marketing agencies. You’ve only got to do your part by being diligent with your research. If you’re not satisfied with your first results, then research even more. Give yourself the time to search for options. Then, assess every digital marketing option that you have. Get to know each choice very well. Study their track record. And, if there’s anything that you may consider as a red flag, then follow your instincts. Go ahead and look for other options instead.

Examples of places where you can start your search includes:

• Asking around from colleagues in the business industry
• Seeking the advice of family and friends
• Looking through the Internet through sites and social media sites

4. Ask Questions

When you schedule a sit-down meeting with a digital marketing agency, what questions can you possibly ask? And, is it even the right time to ask your questions? Yes, as this gives you the chance to get to know the digital marketing agency better. Remember that when you hire a digital marketing agency for your business, you’re going to be bound by a contract. You’ll regularly be meeting. Hence, it’s important that you’re comfortable and happy with the one that you hired.

Examples of questions that you may want to ask, even if it’s this early include:

• What results can you bring for the growth of my small business?
• Can I see some examples of your previous work?
• How long have you kept a client, on average?

Especially with the last question, this can give you an idea as to the overall outlook of your relationship with the digital marketing agency. The longer you’re able to maintain a good relationship with each other, the better.

5. Ask For References From Previous Clients

Before you even give your final “yes” to a digital marketing agency, take the time also to ask for references from your previous clients. Remember that as a small business, you’re going to be spending a lot of money on this marketing effort. That might comprise a massive chunk of budget right now. Hence, it highlights even further the fact that you can’t afford to make any mistakes.

Ask for feedback from their previous clients. It’s here that you’ll have a better idea as to whether or not you’re going to be happy with the services of the digital marketing agency that you’re looking to hire. Else, move forward, and look for another one instead.

6. Request For A Sample Proposal

When you have at most two to three options narrowed down from your choices, send an email or a message for a sample proposal. This proposal should contain its proposed digital marketing plan for your business. For instance, how they propose to apply SEO strategies for your business. Then, take the time to compare and browse through each of the three proposals. From there, you can choose the final digital marketing agency to go for.

7. Ask For The Field Of Specialization

Digital marketing is a very broad field. And, different businesses also have their respective needs. What area of digital marketing will work best for you? It depends on your needs, and on the type of business that you have. This is precisely the reason why you have to familiarize the respective field of specialization of a digital marketing agency when choosing one. It has to be parallel with the needs of your business. Otherwise, if your needs and their specialization don’t match, you’re only going to be wasting time, money and effort.

Conclusion

The right digital marketing agency can have a positive impact on your small business. It’s here that growth can start. You’ll start seeing more positive results and start earning more. Basically, everything about your small business is going to improve. If this is a goal of yours that you wish to achieve, then it might be worth all the effort for you to find a digital marketing agency now. The tips enumerated above can help you jumpstart your search.

The post How To Find A Digital Marketing Agency For Your Small Business first appeared on SEO Optimizers.

Getting your header tags right is easy, and it can have a major impact on your overall efforts.

What are Header Tags?

HTML Header tags are used to differentiate headings and subheadings from the rest of the content on a page. They are styled differently from the other content, so they grab the reader’s attention. The tags also work as a sign to tell Google that the text within is a headline or sub-headline.

From an SEO perspective, the headings help Google grasp the main topics of an article. The more Google understands what a post is about, the better chance it has of ranking high in search results for targeted key phrases.

There are six HTML header tags, but most people do not use them all. If you have ever viewed the source code for a site, you may have seen that they look like this <H1>, <H2>, <H3>, etc.

How to Use Header Tags

Most webpages use headlines and sub-headlines to separate content. If the page has been SEO optimized, these headlines make use of header tags.

When you’re writing your own headlines, keep the headline text in between two header tags. Anything you put between the header tags will be considered part of your headline or sub-headline.

A headline may look something like this:

<H1>This is My Headline</H1>

<H2>This is My Sub-Headline</H2>

Header Tag Hierarchy

Header tags follow a natural progression. <H1> is the first and most important tag. The tags that follow are <H2> through <H6>, with <H6> being the least important. There’s no need to use all of them. In fact, many websites only use the first two or three.

In addition to communicating importance to Google, the various H-tags may be styled in different ways. Being the most important, the <H1> tag will likely have the largest font with bold styling. The remaining tags may get progressively smaller.

Header Tag Hierarchy

Header tags follow a natural progression. <H1> is the first and most important tag. The tags that follow are <H2> through <H6>, with <H6> being the least important. There’s no need to use all of them. In fact, many websites only use the first two or three.

The various H-tags are usually styled in different ways. Being the most important, the <H1> tag will likely have the largest font with bold styling. The remaining tags may get progressively smaller.

Hierarchy for SEO

Header tags are often incorrectly used for styling alone. And while styling is important, it’s crucial to organize your header tags in a way that makes sense to the search engines. To do this, follow these guidelines:

• <H1> is used for your page’s title and only your title, and should be used only once per page
• <H2> is a sub-headline that supports your title and you can have as many as you need.
• <H3> is a sub-headline that supports the <H2>
• <H4> is deeper-level sub-headline that supports the <H3>

In practice, it may look something like this:

<H1>10 Best Excuses for Being Late</H1>

<H2>Excuse #1: My car broke down</H2>

<H3>I had a flat tire</H3>

<H4>All about nail punctures</H4>

<H4>All about low air pressure</H4>

<H3>I had a dead battery<H3>

SEO Best Practices

Again, it’s best not to overcomplicate things here. There are two very simple rules to follow when optimizing header tags.

1. Write headlines and sub-headlines that make sense for the article – Whenever you’re writing for SEO, it’s important to keep the reader in mind. Google likes to see content that is well-written and flows naturally. Your headlines should follow the same flow as your article. Use them to call attention to your content.
2. Use your target keyword at least once – There’s no need to use your target keyword in every single header tag. This is a mistake that many people make, and it usually goes against the first rule above. Mentioning a keyword once in your header tags is enough to let the search engines know what your page is about. You can mention it in headers more often if it helps with clarity, but it’s not necessary for SEO.

Now that you have a better understanding of header tags, it’s time to optimize your website. Although it’s a simple thing, it’s important enough that you’ll want to spend the time and effort necessary to ensure all pages are making good use of header tags.

The post How to Use Header Tags for SEO first appeared on SEO Optimizers.

Conversion rate optimization, or CRO, refers to practices and techniques that are used to increase the number of users that reach your landing pages and convert into paying customers. It’s a wide field with a lot of different practices, but there’s a major divide here: mobile and desktop users.

The techniques that work for a desktop user don’t necessarily work for someone on-the-go using a mobile device. That’s why today I’m going to show you 7 actionable techniques you can use to optimize your mobile landing pages and earn yourself more customers.

Desktop vs Mobile CRO: Why The Difference?

Before we dive into today’s techniques, let’s take a moment to look at some reasons why there should be a divide between your mobile and desktop CRO practices. The main differences are the following:

• Available space is vastly different between the two.
• Attention spans on smartphones are much lower.
• Mobile users like instant-gratification and solutions.

Catering to the mobile crowd is absolutely worth it when you consider that 63% of people expect to be doing more shopping on their mobile devices in the coming years. Mobile ecommerce is already a multi-billion dollar industry and growing by the year.

As a basis for these techniques, your website and specifically your landing pages should be mobile responsive. It’s time to find out how you can start optimizing for your mobile customers. Check out this product roadmap guide for eCommerce.

1. Fast Website Loading Time

When your business starts a website or blog, the first thing you’re going to do is test and see how fast it runs. Speed, after all, is crucial to your success as a company. According to studies, a single second delay in your loading time can cost you up to 7% in conversions.

Mobile users expect websites to load fast, or they will go elsewhere. In fact, 73% of mobile users have also said that they’ve encountered website’s that were too slow.

The bottom line is that when you’re company is looking to start a blog, you’ll need to look for great hosting as a basis for your website’s speed. From there, you can use these tips to further increase your speed.

We don’t want your website to be counted as one, so here’s how you can check:

• Start with a check on Google’s PageSpeed Insights
• Take a look at your hosting company. Are others have issues with speed as well? You may also need a better/more powerful hosting plan if you have a lot of customers.
• If you’re using WordPress, make sure you have a caching plugin (W3 Total Cache is my favorite)
• Make sure you’re optimizing images by compressing them with a tool like Optimizilla so they load faster.
• Limit redirects by sending mobile users directly to the mobile version of the landing page instead of redirecting from the desktop version.

2. Descriptive Headers and Scannable Content

Mobile users don’t have the time or patience to read through massive chunks of content or complicated explanations. For this technique, simply imagine yourself on-the-go and create your content to match that type of rhythm.

Internet users have an attention span of eight seconds now on mobile devices. Follow these best practices to keep your content scannable:

• Use headers to organize content, keep them descriptive so it’s easy to find specific information.
• Features and benefits can be conveyed via bullet point lists.
• Text paragraphs should not be more than 3 lines in length.

Creating content that is easy to scan and digest is one of the many habits of successful bloggers that you’ll want to learn for your mobile content.

3. Key Information Above the Fold

The term, “above the fold” refers to print newspapers and the content above the crease in print. For online users, this term applies to what can be seen without scrolling on desktop or mobile device.

A study done by Nielsen Norman Group found that users will scroll down your page, but only if what they see above the fold is promising enough to keep their attention. Here’s how this translates to your CRO:

• Start with great headlines that grab attention.
• Immediately provide value and set up expectations for the content below the fold.
• In short, above the fold is reserved for your value proposition and a promise of more value beneath it.
• In some cases, it’s appropriate to place your CTA (call-to-action) above the fold when your value proposition is strong enough.

In essence, your information above the fold you should be the key valuable content that visitors need to see to keep them on your page.

4. Clear and concise CTA

Your CTA (call-to-action) is the final step users have to take before they go from a lead to a customer. In order to facilitate this conversion, you need to have a clear and concise CTA that doesn’t beat around the bush.

Here are some tips for a mobile-optimized CTA that convinces leads to convert:

• Start with a verb (i.e “Buy” “Shop” “order”)
• Use emotional and exciting language combined with an exclamation point.
• Provide a reason to take the action (your unique selling point), tell them what they’re getting out of the deal.

5. A/B Testing

No single landing page layout is going to be perfect. When you’re faced with a huge number of design decisions, A/B testing can be used to try out multiple layouts and gather data on how you can improve and optimize your design.

Let’s take a look at how that process works:

• Start with an analytics tool like Google Analytics to measure metrics like traffic, bounce rate, and conversions.
• Combine this with an A/B testing tool like Optimizely that can send the results to your analytics platform.
• To further examine your landing page effectiveness, consider utilizing a heat map that shows how customers are interacting with your landing pages.

By creating two versions of your landing pages and recording the variations between the two, you can utilize A/B testing to see which factors are performing better.

6. Easy Access to Support

If your mobile customers encounter an issue, they should be able to reach support quickly and without delay. This means that simple contact information isn’t enough. Instead, you should include the option to click the support line and instantly connect them to a call.

This isn’t very difficult and can be done using the following HTML code:

• <a href=”tel: +(telephone number here)>(telephone number)</a>

You should include the full international number which will ensure that the call goes through regardless of the user’s location.

7. Removal of Navigation Links

Our final technique is simple, yet effective. When someone hits your landing page, the last thing you want them to do is leave. By removing any external links to your homepage or your products page, you eliminate the possibility of them clicking away from the page before they engage with your CTA, and ultimately increase your conversions according to studies.

If your landing page software allows it, you can simply remove the navigation links in your header and footer. If you need to do it manually, you can modify your eCommerce site’s HTML file with some simple code:

For an ID:

<style type=”test/css”>

#(name of id){display: none;}

</style>

For a class:

<style type=”text/css”>

.(name of class){display: none;}

</style>

Final Thoughts

Your conversion rate optimization efforts should be divided between desktop and mobile to make the best use of your time and energy. Try out these techniques and watch how they influence your  conversion on mobile devices. How do you optimize for mobile users? Let us know in the comments!

The post 7 Conversion Optimization Techniques For Mobile Friendly Websites first appeared on SEO Optimizers.

The situation is even more tragic if you are a blogger on a budget, because you need servers that are both reliable and reasonably priced.

Here is a short review of 6 small web hosting companies bloggers love (real bloggers’ opinion, not made-up reviews).

1. NameCheap

URL: https://www.namecheap.com

NameCheap’s Value Hosting (Shared) package is affordable for all bloggers and it is sold at $9.88 the first year against the standard (and renewal price) of $38.88/year. The package comes with 20GB SSD disk space, unmetered bandwidth and you can host up to 3 domains on it.

I have used NameCheap’s Value package for two years as I needed a stable host with up-to-date MySQL for my blog and forum community. I experienced seldom downtimes and database issues over the time I was with NameCheap, but the staff resolved them promptly. Support was always responsive and available to help me, so I was satisfied with the service no matter the small issues I ran into.

Cam Secore’s review of NameCheap hosting at Reviewpon adds more information you may want to keep in sight before you choose NameCheap as your host.

2. Phastnet.com

URL: http://www.phastnet.com

Phastnet is a small business hosting provider that sells packages starting at $4.21/month.

THGM Writers president, David Leonhardt, says about Phastnet:

I’ve been with Phastnet.com for over a decade now.  After a while, I consolidated all my sites and some client sites to Phastnet because I could count on personal service when I needed it.  Prior to that, I had been spread across three or four hosting companies, and I had a negative experience with one of the biggies, who shut my site down and were unreachable by phone or email.

3. ASmallOrange.com

URL: https://asmallorange.com

A Small Orange is a US-based hosting provider that serves mostly small bloggers and webmasters on a low budget. In fact, its cheapest offer — 500 MB of diskspace and 5 GB of bandwidth — comes at only $2.92/month.

Thiru Kumaran talks very well about A Small Orange in his review at Techatrons.com:

ASO has excellent uptime, and according to my experience I’ve hosted my 8 blogs on it.. and didn’t face a downtime still now. (…) Their ticket support never betrayed me.

4. Linode.com

URL: https://www.linode.com

Linode offers unmanaged VPS hosting, so you will need to be an expert at configuring your own VPS and possibly manage it via command line in order to use the service. The smaller package starts at $10/month.

Bill Patrianakos wrote feels positive about Linode’s services:

If you put a gun to my head and made me choose one over the other I’d go for Linode still. They’ve been around longer, I trust them more

WhatsWP’s review by Joyce is also based on real experience.

5. LittleDancer.net

URL: http://littledancer.net

I’ve been a client of this small hosting provider — run by a fellow blogger and friend — since 2014 and it has proven reliable for all my blogs, and efficient with support. There were downtimes for maintenance but the admin always did her best to bring the service back online as soon as possible. Issues fixed themselves once she moved her service to new servers. Note: the relationship is not a bias for my satisfaction as a customer

LittleDancer.net offers free Shared packages in addition to paid packages (Shared, Reseller and Alpha Reseller).

6. IceGlow.net

URL: http://iceglow.net

Iceglow.net is a privately owned small hosting provider that mostly serves bloggers and graphic designers. The owner is a graphic designer, blogger and web developer herself and she is now a friend and part of my network. Note: the relationship is not a bias for my satisfaction as a customer

I have had a good experience with Iceglow.net since I decided to use it to host two of my character blogs. The admin was always available to respond to support tickets and I am still satisfied with the overall service. There are no more downtimes since the service was moved to another, more stable server.

The hosting provider offers a free package (500MB, 100GB of traffic) in addition to shared and reseller packages, starting at $15.00/year.

IceGlow.net was also recommended here.

Who is your hosting provider? Would you recommend it to other bloggers?

Share in the comments.

The post 6 Small Web Hosting Companies Bloggers Love first appeared on SEO Optimizers.

 le Liz via Compfight

Are you afraid of your weaknesses?

People see weakness as something to avoid at all costs, something to get rid of because it brings shame to their lives.

If we had to listen to Seneca when he wrote that “All cruelty springs from weakness”, then yes, we should fear weakness.

But the truth is that nothing makes us more human — and credible, relatable.

So this post is not insane, and even though other professionals and bloggers may try hard to hide their weaknesses, I hope you’re not going down that route —  if you let your clients know about your flaws, you are going to earn their trust, not their blame.

Surprised? Here are 6 reasons for you not to be.

6 Ways Your Weaknesses Are Not Really Weaknesses

Photo Credit: ROSS HONG KONG via Compfight cc

1. Behind every weakness lies a strength

Think about it — when you are weak, you try to compensate. What is it that you can’t do well? How does your approach change?

For example, you may have problems with getting traffic with just SEO strategies, but you are a genius at getting traffic via social media. Your weakness doesn’t make you a less competent professional, just a different professional, with different winning assets.

2. Believe it or not, people want to see how human you are

Your customers or readers are not interested in a cold, “planned” blogger without a personality. They want to see you for who you are! And that includes your flaws.

The more you show both your weaknesses and your strengths, and how you deal with them, the more credible and trustworthy you become in their eyes.

For example, it would be a winning move to tailor the About page for your healthcare writing business around the story of how you were touched by people’s need for health-related, trustworthy education, how it reflected in your family life and how you decided to write for healthcare as a way to help people get the knowledge they need to feel better.

3. What did you produce to help others with the same weakness?

For example, if you run a stationery business online and you have a problem with using lined notebooks because you can’t write straight but you go out of borders with those, you can use that problem to make a section of your online shop entirely dedicated to tips on what types of notebooks are better for people who have issues with lined sheets and which products out of your inventory are better suited for customers who have your same problem.

4. Ways your weakness made you closer to your customers

Look at how your flaws — not just your strengths — brought you closer to your customers. What is it that they love about you? Most likely it’s your weaknesses, what they can relate to — and your ways to turn your flaws into success.

What human trait brought you the most success? Think about it. The next time you market your services, make sure to bring that up.

5. Your weakness may be another person’s strength

Something you are weak at may be something another person’s winning point, and viceversa. Look at the professionals in your network — is there anyone who is strong where you are weak at? Can you collaborate to bring out the best of both of your strengths and help each other open new business doors?

You can’t know unless you let others know about your weakness, just like they let you know about theirs.

6. Your (unusual) weakness may sell more than your (usual) strength

If your weakness is in an area that resonates most with your clients, it may work better to your prospecting goals than your strengths.

For example, you may be very stubborn in all things life, but that it’s that personality trait that brings you clients.

How do you use your weaknesses in business?

I also recommend you read Dave Kerpen’s post about how to turn your weaknesses into strengths.

The post Why Market Your Weaknesses? Here Are 6 Reasons For You first appeared on SEO Optimizers.

Ello.co was on everybody’s mouth in 2014. Someone even ‘dared’ to say the newborn social network would replace Facebook in the long run.

Ello was born from the dream of a group of artists and designers who wanted a minimalist, essential social network that respects user privacy and doesn’t sell ads — a dream for many Web users, right?

This is what encouraged people to request an invitation when Ello first came out, but along with personal users, marketers and businesses were interested in ways to use the new social network to attract users to their business.

How to do that on a platform that offers nothing like other popular networks a la Facebook and Twitter?

The Hard Truth: Ello Is Not A Business-Friendly Platform (Unless…)

I asked TGHM Writers president David Leonhardt if he thinks Ello may be a good social platform for businesses.

He says no and here’s why:

David Leonhardt

I did a comparative review of Ello, along with two other social media upstarts, a few months ago.  My conclusion was that Ello is not a friendly platform for marketing one’s business. Here is what I wrote:

As for Ello, I really cannot see the value unless you are trying to reach the very niche communities that populate Ello, those being “artists and musicians”, as Mark Mars explains. The culture is anti-marketing and it is so sparse and stripped down that it is hardly even useful.  And of course there is no paid marketing feature on a platform that promises to remain ad-free.

I recommend you read David’s and Mark Mars’ posts. David’s position is realistic and spot-on: Ello is free to use for either personal or business purposes, but it’s not a marketing-friendly platform. You can’t pay for ads (Ello is ad-free by principle) and there are no extended functions like groups or blogs or even advanced (user) search.

Unless your target audience is already there and somehow potentially receptive of your business initiatives, Ello is not a good platform for business.

Try Ello If Your Business Is In The Art & Music Niche (3 Ideas)

If your business approach is to consider customers and partners as “collaborators” and not as “products” (Ello’s mantra is “You are not a product” and they stick to it), you can give Ello a try.

I will give you an example.

In addition to being a freelance blogger, I’m also an artist who seldom draws robot art for clients and I do that even a bit more often for fun.

What do I get if I search Ello for ‘robots’?

Ello search for ‘robots’

Suppose I wanted to reach out to each of these artists and writers to start a collaboration, sell my sets of bookmarks or gadgets based on my robot artwork, or find partners who will help me promote my work.

This is how it would work on Ello:

1. Follow and engage with users before sending out proposals

I would follow these artists and writers right away and just be quiet for a few days, studying their posting patterns, their work, the personality that shines through from their work.

Then I would start to write comments on their work.

In other words, get myself known as a fan before I send out an interested proposal.

2. Get in touch with users, one by one

Once I got to spend a week following them, I would get in touch with each of the individual artists and writers, first by writing an interested comment on the work they posted on Ello, then by asking for a contact email to talk collaboration details.

My plan would be to get in touch at least once per week to keep a genuine communication channel open.

Ah — personalized messages, of course. No standard templates. It’s why I spent a few days to know the artist or writer better before I even wrote a comment.

3. Find users’ websites

Find artists’ and writers’ websites and get in touch from there. I would let them know I found them on Ello and what sparked my interest in their work.

I may do this in alternative to getting in touch on Ello only.

This is how I would approach my prospective audience on Ello. If you were me, what would you do?

How To Get the Best Out of Ello – 5 Tips

1. Don’t stop to your personal profile: register an account for your business

If you only have a personal profile on Ello, also register a business profile, like Marketing Land at https://ello.co/marketingland

2. Start with your followers (friends) to promote your business

Invite followers and friends from your personal Ello profile to follow and engage with your new business profile, as well as to invite their own friends to join the discussion.

Networking starts small.

3. Post interesting content that can spark discussion

Your friends, followers and new fans will not stick around if you don’t provide interesting food for discussion.

Keep good content coming.

4. Take advantage of the header and image feature

Like with Twitter, take advantage of your Ello header to send a message to followers and visitors — what’s your USP? How do you help your customers? Where can people get in touch?

This is a good area to display your logo or brand character/mascot, too.

Also, use the image feature to share infographics whenever you can.

5. Stay up to date with Ello features and use them

Ello regularly asks users to provide feedback on new functions they want to see implemented, so make sure to give your feedback and use as many new features as you can to your advantage.

As David Leonhardt wrote in his post, Ello is ‘sparse’, but you can still get creative.

Are you an Ello user? Have you thought about using it for business?

Share your experience and views in the comments below.

The post Using Ello For Your Business? Yes and No (3 Ideas & 5 Tips) first appeared on SEO Optimizers.

Are you still wondering what domain extension to choose for your new blog or your new project?

Registrars tend to stress the benefits of a certain TLD over another in terms of SEO, but should you listen to that advice?

Actually, NO. There are plenty of myths around the role of TLDs and domain names in SEO and I wrote this post to dispel the most known and talked to help you make informed decisions and avoid damage to your branding and SEO.

TLD Doesn’t Make Ranking

It has been debated over and over in the years, but Google has always denied any benefits of a certain TLD over another in terms of SEO.

Last time it was in July 2015, when John Mueller said on Google+ to clear any doubts and misconceptions: “if you spot a domain name on a new TLD that you really like, you’re keen on using it for longer, and understand there’s no magical SEO bonus, then go for it.”

Also, on the Google blog, Mueller adds:

Q: Will a .BRAND TLD be given any more or less weight than a .com?
A: No. Those TLDs will be treated the same as a other gTLDs. They will require the same geotargeting settings and configuration, and they won’t have more weight or influence in the way we crawl, index, or rank URLs.

Your chosen TLD won’t make or miss any future Google rankings for your website. What it really takes for you to rank is to work smart on your content, marketing and networking efforts.

As Neil Patel says in his blog, “The major factor in whether TLDs have an effect on SEO is whether the domain contains keywords. Of course, you and I know that Exact Match Domain names risk getting penalized.”

What really makes the difference, indeed, is keywords in your domain name, regardless of extension. In fact, Google has been penalizing EMDs (exact match domains) since 2012, so you should by all means avoid exact keyword domain names (like cheap-payday-loans.com) and instead focus on branding (think google.com, walmart.com, etc.).

When Does A TLD Count?

The problem may arise when certain TLDs — as well as certain IPs — are blacklisted or look suspicious because of spamming (mostly email spam), but in general the domain extension of your site does not play major role in your SEO efforts. gTLDs and the new TLDs are no exception. As long as you play it white hat and don’t spam, you’re fine to go.

Ensure that your site is on an IP that is not associated with spam and thus is not blacklisted. You can use WhatIsMyIPAddress.com to find out if your site IP is blacklisted.

Beware of free TLDs, however — because these have been massively used for spam and infection (like CO.CC and CZ.CC), Google has these in blacklist so your website would never get a chance to rank. Always research news about your chosen free TLD to see if it makes a viable choice while you wait to buy standard TLD.

The post Are TLDs Really Relevant for SEO? first appeared on SEO Optimizers.

Image courtesy of Stuart Miles at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

It’s a tough nut to crack for bloggers, businesses and brand managers.

Online reputation is totally outside of control — it’s in the reader’s and customer’s hands, they can push a company to the highest ranks or lead it to sink, online and offline.

But does it have to be so tragic? Is reputation really something you can’t do anything about and you should just bear with?

“You should never underestimate the cost of a poor reputation,” Cheryl Conner wrote at Forbes last March, reporting an interview with Don Sorrensen of BigBlueRobot.com, “For example, Sorensen notes he once consulted with a company that had a severe online reputation problem. When potential customers searched the company’s name, 7 of the top 10 Google results were negative. After careful review of their rankings and prior-year revenues, he estimated the venture was losing nearly $2 million a year in sales because of negative search engine results.”

I feel that Dan’s most important contribution to Cheryl’s interview is this question:

“Why are people saying bad things about us on the Internet?”

Finding this out is exactly where it can go from tragic to enlightening and where you can do something to keep your brand’s reputation at its best no matter the hiccups.

Managing Online Reputation? Absolutely Possible (In Practice)

Here is a short checklist to guide you in online reputation management.

1. Check social comments

• Are there users who speak with hatred about the company?
• Are there some who could be considered fans or influencers?
• Do positive or negative comments attract the most reactions from the following? If so, in what ratio?

Social media can offer plenty of elements to assess your company’s reputation and what elements to work on, so don’t ignore them.

Respond to users who share negative feelings about your blog or company, reassure them and offer to help them. Get in touch with fans and influencers to show your appreciation of their efforts. Join user discussions on social media and forums and offer advice and clarifications wherever needed.

2. Check personal reputation of executives and important people in your business

Your reputation or that of people working under you in executive roles or any other public roles does count in business.

A scandal hitting you personally or one of your subordinates may hinder the image users or customers have about your brand — brand and person association happens and it’s difficult to erase. Also, it is a time-consuming process.

Make sure to talk to your subordinates and collaborators about their public image and to keep private things private wherever possible. See tip #6 in this checklist.

3. Check search engine results

Website mentions and backlinks, and the context surrounding them, are important factors for your business reputation.

Is the context positive or negative? Is it a news article, an opinion piece or a review? Are there comments or reactions to the content piece? If there’s any, does it favor your brand or not?

Reputation also depends on the authority of the linking or citing source: the higher the authority, the heavier the weight of the opinion for your brand’s overall reputation.

4. Tackle ethics and quality issues as soon as they arise

Don’t wait for discontent and disappointment to sink in and create damage in your brand image: if you or your team committed a mistake that lead users or customers astray and created discontent, act promptly to fix the issue and restore the image.

Also, make sure these issues are appropriately addressed in the media, especially on the company blog. Respond to interviews and explain what you did to fix any temporary ethics or quality issues.

5. Check review sites (like Yelp) and respond to reviewers — kindly

Review-centered websites like Yelp or Amazon make it actually easy to manage your company’s online reputation.

Take some time every week or two weeks to read reviews and respond to them. Thank reviewers for the time spent to leave feedback and let them know about your latest discount or another offer they might be interested in. Also, let them know how helpful their feedback is for your efforts to improve your offerings and how you communicate with users or customers.

6. Keep private things private (and work for it)

Read what Susan Adams says in her article at Forbes. It’s easy to tell too much online, to show too much, but when you have a business image to protect, you will want to be moderate in how you speak and behave in public and avoid all those situations that will put your persona and your business in trouble.

Also, make sure anything you put out for public view outranks and outnumbers anything negative other people (or even you, inadvertently) put out before.

What A Business Owner Says…

David Leonhardt, president at THGM Writers, agreed to share 3 tips with me about how to manage a business’ online reputation:

The post How To Manage A Company’s Online Reputation first appeared on SEO Optimizers.

You see this often on your partners’ and competitors’ websites.

A page, a paragraph or a line stating the mission (or the values) the company plans to fulfill and how. When done in detail, a mission page will cover everything from business ethics to B2C relationships and HubSpot event lists 12 inspiring company mission statements in this post.

• Should your company display a mission statement on the official website, too?
• Would it help customers or users understand your business better than if you had no mission page?

I asked 3 experts if they believe a company website really needs a mission statement or if it’s just a waste of time.

I got 2 positive responses and 1 negative.

Read on to find out what these experts think, and whose thought you align with.

In Favor Of Mission Statements

Cormac Reynolds (www.myonlineMarketer.co.uk)

Cormac Reynolds

Yes, I think it should. It showcases what a business is setting out to do, this in turn will set expectations from clients – always a good thing. Additionally, it is also a good way for a business to keep focus on what they have set out to do – which is in no way a bad thing and can have a positive impact.

David Leonhardt (President, THGM Writers)

Against Mission Statements

Tim Fehraydinov (Online marketer at Texterra web agency)

The post Should Your Company Website Have A Mission Statement? first appeared on SEO Optimizers.

It’s easy to forget your own blog when you spend a lot of time searching for traffic opportunities elsewhere.

Off-site traffic is definitely good to have, BUT—

• What about your current visitors?
• How do you keep them on your blog instead of driving them outside?
• What about your bounce rate?

Believe it or not, the most important traffic source is your blog. That’s why an optimal internal linking strategy can only bring benefits on both your on-site and off-site traffic.

Let’s see why.

It’s Traffic, It’s SEO

The vitality of your blog starts on your blog itself.

When you take care of your blog and you put your visitors first, you will do anything in your power to make your blog irresistibly interesting and to offer your visitors all you can to keep them from visiting other resources but the content you offer.

That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t add outbound links at all, only that your own content is your priority instead of outside resources.

A clever use of keywords and inter-posts linking will help you achieve this goal and keep traffic on your blog.

As Cormac Reynolds says:

Cormac Reynolds

Internal links are a great way to pass juice from other pages on your site to those you want to rank. Using internal keywords to interlink pages naturally and allow users the chance to navigate in a natural manner helps lower bounce rates and keep people on-site. Additionally, using keyword anchor text within the site is no hard either once done naturally and may also help distribute juice and rank pages.

Your search engine and traffic optimization starts on-page, with a clever internal linking strategy.

It might sound obvious, but believe me, it isn’t — many bloggers look for outside traffic and backlinks first and only turn to internal links when they realize their efforts are not paying off.

No amount of off-site strategy will make it without a great on-page, site-wide strategy first. If your users can’t find what they are looking for on your blog, they will look elsewhere and they might not come back.

Choose your anchor text keywords wisely. Don’t overoptimize and keep your anchor text natural and flowing well with the remainder of the content.

It must make sense, too.

Do NOT use nofollow tags on internal links. For example, Wikipedia links out with nofollow but never uses it to link to internal pages.

Use as many links as needed, but don’t link twice to the same page — I see this tactic used often on overoptimized blogs but it doesn’t make sense for the user and it might wind up being a trigger for search engine penalties.

Play it safe for your user and your SEO.

How To Organize Your Internal Linking For A Winning Blog Traffic Strategy

Start with your blog posts posts and find correlations. Make it a to-do to audit your entire blog to find which posts relate more to each other, then interlink them.

You may need some time to do this if your blog is very populated.

Interlink PDFs with blog posts. Don’t just link to your PDF content from blog posts and pages, but also link back to your relevant blog posts from within PDFs.

PDF is a format that search engines can scan for content and links and often convert in HTML for HTML-only viewers, so the advantage is great in this sense.

Find posts that go in detail about something mentioned in pages or comments, then link to them. Your pages and your helpful comment replies

David Leonhardt, president at THGM Writers, does it, too:

Homepage links are important (but other blog elements are more). Homepage links help navigation, but they can’t be the focus of your internal linking strategy for traffic, because these links are introductory and will rarely change.

It’s links between posts, pages and other contents (PDFs, etc.) that count (see previous points).

Not one page or blog post of your blog should be isolated — your blog is a small network, a Web in miniature! Make sure every piece of content gets found.

Lukasz Zelezny from Zelezny.uk summarizes the internal linking strategy pretty well:

Once your blog is well linked inside, you can leverage this aspect to help new visitors jump from a post to another in order to find what they are looking for.

Now is the time to increase your incoming traffic from the outside Web!

Resources

• 5 “Panda Proof” Internal Linking Strategies by Joe Hall at MarketingProfs
• The Hitchhiker’s Guide To Internal Linking Strategy by Erin Everhart at SearchEngineLand

How do you link internally in your blog? How did you improve your overall blog traffic? Share your views and experience in the comments below.

The post Increase Your Blog Traffic With A Clever Internal Linking Strategy first appeared on SEO Optimizers.

Even more controversial after the mass penalty on MyBlogGuest.com and the “all nofollow” reaction from eConsultancy that followed. Guest blogging really seems like a gray area to find your marketing and link building efforts in right now.

But it’s a question everybody keeps asking: “Does guest blogging still help with SEO?”

The answer is neither yes or no, but actually slightly more complicated.

I got two writers to share their ideas for this post. Their insight makes it clear that things have changed, but not so much to the smart (and honest) business.

Read on and take away.

Guest Blogging Doesn’t Help With SEO Rankings As It Used To…

Deborah Anderson from Social Web Cafe recalls when it was easier to rank with guest blogging and why it doesn’t work as it used to:

Previously, there was some SEO benefit with guest blogging because of the “dofollow” links.  Of course, there is no such thing as a dofollow link.  What it really is is the absence of the “nofollow” rel tag connected to the link.  This told Google to follow the link (dofollow) and that provided SEO benefit.

What happened is that some people were putting up very inferior “crap” articles and the search results (SERPs) were reflecting poor quality content.  Therefore, Google singlehandedly put a stop to that benefit, to stop people from putting up poor quality articles only for the purpose of the SEO benefit.  That move hurt the rest of us who didn’t mind the SEO benefit but were guest blogging for the other benefits.

What I just described is the direct benefit.  The indirect benefits of guest blogging still exist.  Those include branding, exposure, building the writing portfolio, networking, etc.  Also, there are some sites that do not use the nofollow tag (in other words, dofollow), but those are becoming fewer and fewer.  What happened back in March of 2014, to MyBlogGuest’s clients (basically all of them) resulted in everyone changing their links, site-wide, to nofollow.  Those who did not remained under penalty from Google.  That caused other sites to also change their links to nofollow so that they would not be penalized by Google.

It was a brilliant move by Google, to inflict fear across the globe, for publishers and writers on the Internet.  In one fell swoop they were able to make a statement about the type of content they want to show in their search engine.  We, as consumers of Google products, are to blame, as well, because we gave them the power to be the top dog for search.   And, what can I say.  I love their calendar and I am the “hangout queen” using the Google hangout product.

There are still indirect SEO benefits to guest blogging (i.e. a viral article that happens to do well in the search rankings), but it is not the SEO benefit that it used to be a couple of years ago.  If you are a writer, your best bet is to write for other reasons and then count the SEO benefits as icing on the cake.  If you are a publisher, your best bet is to nofollow the links that are contained in the guest articles that you receive.

It follows that guest blogging as a way to build links and help with SEO is no longer a viable strategy, even though guest blogging always helped and still helps with your branding efforts and it definitely helps to pull links from the Web in indirect ways, like Deborah suggests, which the next paragraph is all about.

BUT You Can Still Guest Blog To Indirectly Help Your SEO Rankings

Not all is lost with the “guest blogging penalty”. Here is what David Leonhardt from THGM Ghostwriter Service has to say about it:

Anything that spreads your name is good for SEO.  Every time you put your name out there, there is a greater chance that people will look for your website, find something they really like and link to it or share it on social media, and that’s good for SEO.

If there is a hyperlink, even a NoFollow one, that serves the same purpose.  If the link is DoFollow, even better.

The value of guest blogging for SEO depends greatly on the quality of the content on your website.  If lots of people read your amazing guest post, then rush to see what’s on your website, only to ding boring stuff, forget earning links and social shares from them.

When you get nofollow links to your blog posts and articles, users will still find them and link back to them as helpful resources in their posts (editorially) if they deem your content trustworthy and authoritative. That is what I do here at Bosmol as a writer anytime I stumble upon an amazing resource that fits into a post I’m writing— I go ahead and link it, whether that link was originally nofollowed or not.

Continue to guest blog and let users find you, if not search engines. In the end, like the say “all chickens come home to roost”, you will still get backlinks that are beneficial for your SEO efforts.

Do YOU guest blog? Has your opinion of guest blogging changed over time or are you still a fan?

Share in the comments below.

The post Does Guest Blogging Help With SEO Rankings? first appeared on SEO Optimizers.

Last Update Mar 20, 2020 @ 3:14 pm

It gets tough when you are a total beginner at the technical sides of running your own blog or website. I remember it took me a while to figure out the difference between the .htaccess file and robots.txt

Even though I always loved anything IT and computers, the first time you encounter a new object or concept, your mind needs a bit of time to absorb the workings of it.

And .htaccess and robots.txt are the two files in the root folder of your website that you really can’t live without, so learning what they are and how they work is critical.

In this post, I will explain to you what they are, why they matter and how you can use them to your advantage, with a few examples to make learning easier and faster.

The Difference Between .HTACCESS and ROBOTS.txt File

A first general definition of this difference is that .htaccess is used mostly for internal access, whereas robots.txt manages external access.

“Internal” because .htaccess tells your Apache server how to handle page and file names, URLs and a user’s way to access these resources; it’s for your site to handle its own features.

Robots.txt, on the contrary, regulates “external” access, because it tells search engines and other web tools what to read and index and whatnot (but a human user can still browse and read).

Some examples:

.htaccess for a WordPress installation with “nice” permalinks:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>

Robots.txt for a WordPress blog that disallows Googlebot but allows other search engines, but also allows none to crawl their /familypics folder:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /familypics

User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /

In other words .htaccess protects your site from people, robots.txt from machines.

Why You Can’t Live Without .HTACCESS and ROBOTS.txt

Without .htaccess, your site will behave in its default way or may not work at all, depending on the software you use. For example, the standard installation of WordPress doesn’t include an .htaccess file: WordPress automatically creates the file when you configure your permalinks under Settings -> Permalinks. If you don’t set your permalinks, the default configuration for your URLs will stay the “unfriendly” http://example.com/?p=203, with “203” being the post ID in the MySQL database.

Without robots.txt, search engine and tool crawlers (and scrapers) would index or copy your entire website without exceptions, including files you want to keep “private”. See the example from my previous paragraph about this.

The modern Web user doesn’t like “unfriendly” URLs and search engines don’t want to find any “junk” present on your website when their spiders meet it, so having your .htaccess and robots.txt files correctly configured only works to your advantage.

How You Can Benefit From These Two Files

The technical side of these two files is only a small portion of the benefits they can bring to your table. There are also benefits connected with UX (User Experience) and SEO.

With .htaccess you can:

• Create user-friendly URLs
• Redirect users away from specific files and directories
• Manage 301 redirects (you can use a generator tool)

With robots.txt you can:

• Tell search engines what (not) to index
• Disallow crawlers from other services (like Archive.org)

Takeaway:

Configure your .htaccess and robots.txt files as soon as you set up your website or blog. They are critical to the wellbeing of your site in the search index and from a user’s viewpoint.

More resources to check out:

• Introduction to URL Rewriting by Paul Tero at Smashing Magazine
• Robots.Txt: A Beginners Guide by Boris Demaria at Woorank
• Robots.txt Tutorial by Aaron Wall

The post Difference Between .HTACCESS and ROBOTS.txt File first appeared on SEO Optimizers.

Problem:

Their problem was that they had a relatively new website, with little traffic and exposure.  The wanted us to come in and optimize their website and brand their company on the internet to make it easy for users to find.

Solution:

Our solution was a six month project where we came in and made some significant changes to their website.  We began by researching and understanding their industry and their potential customers.  We wanted to get inside the company owners head to see what he envisioned.  From there we researched keywords that will best suit their website, targeting customers that are ready and willing to make a purchase.  Once the initial website analysis took place we began to make on-site optimization changes.  This means setting up analytic tracking tools, adding keyword rich content, changing the HTML, internal website linking structure, and adding new pages.  After all the pages were optimized we submitted the website to all the major search engines.  We waited until the site was SEO friendly before submitting to the search engines because we wanted to make a positive website impression to the search engine spiders.

After the on-site optimization was completed we began to make off-site optimization changes.  Starting off with local business searches and extensive link building we were able to properly optimize Hass Libre.  We built their inbound links through articles, press releases, directory submissions, forum posts, and more techniques.  We created a blog for Hass Libre to generate new content, inbound links, and to interact with their customers.  The blog was syndicated to the major site feeds, thus gaining even more exposure through each blog post.

We created a positive brand image through the social networking sites.  We set up accounts with the major networking sites and built a Facebook fan page, Twitter account, and LinkedIn profile.  These accounts let Hass Libre interact with others interested in the same industry.  We maintained a positive image throughout these sites and with their customers.  After a few months we were able to hand off the social networking accounts and the blog to Hass Libre to manage.  We taught them how to make status updates, new blog posts, and how to make them SEO friendly and keyword rich.

Outcome:

The final results are that Hass Libre dominates the search engines for competitive keywords in their niche such as “Eco-Friendly Clothing”, “Organic Clothing“, “Latin Grammy Gift Bags“, “Organic Clothing and Accessories”, and more!  As they continue to update their blog and social networking pages on a constant basis, they watch their traffic grow by at least 15% monthly.  Initially, the website traffic doubled within the first month and since then has continued growing.

Their return on investment turned out well!  They say an influx of new customers that they never could have expected.  They invested only a few thousand dollars and saw revenues that were triple this amount.

The post CASE STUDY: SEO Optimizers Improves Keyword Rankings and Traffic for Hass Libre first appeared on SEO Optimizers.

Get Mobile Friendly                                                             

This is absolutely necessary these days. It’s becoming the new standard actually and Google made that pretty clear with its last update. Many marketers think they have to revamp their entire websites.  This is not the case. You will find plenty of SEO services in Montreal that will help you optimize your website for mobile users and it won’t cost you a fortune. Even if money is a concern, you will ultimately lose more money in the long run by not having your site be mobile friendly than you would pay to make it mobile compatible.

Create Quality Content

Google easily detects well-written content.  In the same token, it can also detect poor quality content as well or plagiarized content. To be successful with SEO, you have to create content that is high quality only for your site. Websites are actually rewarded by Google when they consistently provide quality content and those rewards come in forms of higher rankings, more traffic, more sales and more profits.

Encourage +1’s

Stepping up to the plate and becoming a serious player in social media is Google +.  It is also becoming a big deal with search engines as well. If you do not have a Google + page for your business yet, you need to stop what you are doing and go create one now. Once you do that, you can expect Google to pay more attention to your webpages. Begin encouraging people to +1 your content and pages and to join your circle. The bigger your Google circle becomes, the more likely your site will be found by users performing searches.

Page Speed Time

Millions of dollars has been spent by Google for creating quicker load times for its search results. If they are taking this seriously, why wouldn’t you? Reducing your page speed load times by a few seconds can have a huge impact on the popularity of your site with both users and search engines.

Get Social

Social media is huge and is here to stay.  With SEO in mind, it is a huge part of a marketing strategy for any business. Social media signals are already being included in search engine algorithms to factor in rankings and will be skyrocketing from now on.

The post Improving your SEO Marketing Techniques first appeared on SEO Optimizers.

Last Update Jun 4, 2024 @ 1:06 pm

When you first walk through the Internet Marketing door, you’re bombarded with so much information it can become a little overwhelming. Sometimes it can takes weeks or even months to figure out who is giving great practical advice, to the wannabes who are just in it to take your money. Whether you’re just starting out or would like to improve on your Internet Marketing knowledge, we have listed 10 well respected Internet Marketing blogs you must follow.

1. Moz
If you don’t already know about Moz, thank your lucky stars you came across our site. Moz is considered the biggest authority site relating to all things SEO. Over the last few years, Moz has created an unlimited supply of fresh information for digital marketers to improve on their SEO strategies. A must follow site for any Internet Marketer.

Website: http://moz.com/blog
Twitter: https://twitter.com/moz
Best for: Learning SEO

2. Social Media Examiner
Whether it’s Facebook, Twitter or any other social media site, everything you could possible want to know is on Social Media Examiner. This blog focuses solely on social media marketing, helping you understand the best way to use paid ads, providing case studies and tips and tricks you won’t find anywhere else on the Internet.

Website: http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/smexaminer
Best for: Understanding social media marketing

3. John Chow
John Chow is the poster boy for the blogging scene after he took his blog from $0 to making well over $40,000 a month in less than two years. The impressive part? He spent less than 2 hours a day working on it. Looking to start a blog and make money? Look no further than John Chow.

Website: http://www.johnchow.com
Twitter https://twitter.com/johnchow
Best for: Blogging

4. Niche Pursuits
Want to build your own business online but don’t know where to start? Follow Niche Pursuits and you will have more ideas than you know what to do with. From buying and selling websites, starting your own niche business and understanding SEO, Niche Pursuits is the site to follow for all future online business owners.

Website: http://www.nichepursuits.com/
Twitter https://twitter.com/nichepursuits
Best for: Creating niche websites

5. Mailchimp
Every Internet Marketer will tell you the money is in the list! They are right so you better start following a blog that tells you how to create kickass newsletters. Mailchimp is the go to website for all things email marketing, they constantly put out new blogs showing users how to make the most of email marketing.

Website: http://blog.mailchimp.com/
Twitter https://twitter.com/mailchimp
Best for: Email marketing

6. Digital Marketer
Head over to Digital Marketer for the most up-to-date tips on how to drive more sales, increase your conversions and boost social engagement overnight. What makes Digital Marketer so unique is their blogs are written by actual Internet Marketers, who run their own online businesses rather than ‘researchers’.

Website: http://www.digitalmarketer.com/blog/
Twitter https://twitter.com/digitalmktr
Best for: Getting information on how to increase sales and conversions for your websites

7. MarketingProfs
MarketingProfs probably have the biggest online library of amazing reports and case studies relating to writing content and digital marketing. They are constantly releasing new blog posts, market studies and guides to help you plan your perfect content strategy. Want to know what works? Head on over to MarketingProfs.

Website: http://www.marketingprofs.com/marketing/library
Twitter: https://twitter.com/marketingprofs
Best for: Content marketing information

8. Occam’s Razor
Understanding metrics, results and leveraging them to improve your online strategy is what Occam’s Razor is all about. Hundreds of blog posts, videos and podcasts are uploaded regularly to help you better understand the results of your Facebook ad, website visitors or why your website is not performing the way you’d like.

Website: http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/
Twitter https://twitter.com/avinash
Best for: Understanding online analytics

9. Matt Cutts
Not heard of the name before? Well you better get used to it. Matt Cutts is currently head of Google’s Webspam team, this is the department that controls how content is ranked in Google. Follow Matt Cutts to get an inside peak into Google’s soul. He may not be an Internet Marketer, but his advice and knowledge is invaluable.

Website: https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/mattcutts
Best for: Understanding Google

10. Bosmol
Get the latest news related to social media marketing as it changes on a daily basis. New sites arise making it difficult to hone in and focus your marketing efforts on one channel. Bosmol.com breaks it down and lets you know how to find the right audience for your products and services.

Website: http://bosmol.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/bosmol
Best for: Social media marketing

11. Socialwatch.co
Last but not least on our impressive list is SocialWatch. They focus solely on how to optimize every aspect of your social media feed, from the way it looks, how fast it loads to increasing conversions. If you only follow one website optimization blog, make sure it’s Socialwatch.co.

Website: http://rich-page.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/richpage
Best for: Website optimization

And there you have it ladies and gentlemen, 10 world-class Internet Marketing blogs in a plethora of online niches. Whatever your goals are, the blogs above will provide you with a suitable framework to get you on the right path to making you a successful Internet Marketer.

The post Best Internet Marketing Blogs first appeared on SEO Optimizers.

Once you have chosen your business and purchased a domain name the next step before submitting your site to search engines is to find useful and relevant keywords. Without this step your website will get lost in the millions of websites competing for your business.

To start our keyword research we need to utilize some very useful tools. The first website viewed should be Google Keywords which is a free tool that displays the amount of searches and competition for specific keywords. It allows you to download the data in Excel so that you can sort and filter it. This guide to Excel for SEOs will show you how if you’re not sure.”

A better tool would be to purchase some type of software such as Word Tracker which offers detailed information about keywords. Unfortunately word tracker is not free, but there are other services that are.

2) Find a Niche Market

This cannot be stressed enough as it is much harder to receive top search engine rankings for a new site than an established site. A new site will have to fight amongst web sites that have established high search engine rankings.

To compete with these web sites you would be crazy! You first need to find a niche market, and then build up your website to a position as to where it can compete with these generic terms. For example let’s say you have a web site geared towards weight loss. You would not use the keyword weight loss because it has too much competition. You can use one of the keyword tools to find suggestions of related keywords that you will be able to compete against. You may find the keyword “weight loss surgery” or “weight loss techniques”. These phrases are much better keywords than generic terms like “weight loss”.

Use the list of a few keywords and check out the competition that word/ phrase has on Goggle. Look at the number of competitors. If this exceeds a few million, then you need look for a more specific keyword. The next step is to observe the top listed pages and see how well they are optimized. You can download Google Toolbar and add Page Rank to your browser for free.

A low Page Rank between 0 – 3 means that you can easily compete with these web pages. A web site with a Page Rank of 4 – 6 is a bit tougher to compete with, but is manageable using my guided steps and expertise. You do not want to compete with web sites that have a Page Rank above 7. Check the domains homepage, not a sub page to get an accurate Page Rank!

3) View Competitors Source Code

It is important to view potential competitor’s source code to see if they have efficiently performed on page search engine optimization. To do this on your Brower click “view” and then click on the “source” option as displayed”

This will bring up a page with all the html code on it. You do not need to be an expert with html to understand what we are looking for. We need to see if our competitor’s web site is properly optimized. We look to see if they are using their keywords in the header tags, the title tags, and the image alt tags. These should all be located near the top of the source code.

If you cannot find these then go to the toolbar and chose “edit” and select “find” and type in h1 or title, etc. to see if there are being used for the keywords. If these do not exist or are not being used to hold keywords, you have found an easily beaten page. This means that with some proper optimization you will be able to outrank this page. The last thing you want to look at is the body content and to see if the keyword is used a few times in the body content. A site lacking in keywords in the body context is a poorly optimized page. You should always make sure your web page is keyword rich with relevant content.

4) Keyword Placement

After you have selected a few keywords to use we want to combine the ones that have like terms. For example if you have selected three keywords:
Weight loss story; Weight loss picture; Safe weight loss
As you can see that all three keywords contain the words “weight loss”, therefore we can combine the words to better optimize your page.

For the title tag the fewer the keywords used, the better the search engines will rank your page.

When we create the page it should NEVER have “Welcome to our website!” in the Title Tags.

It should NEVER have “weight loss story and weight loss picture and safe weight loss” in the Title Tags either.

The way the title tags should look is: “Weight Loss Story | Safe Weight Loss Picture”
(Note: You can add this character | by holding the shift key on your keyboard and pressing the backslash key above the enter key.)

should always remove prepositions such as “and” as this will only hurt your search engine optimization. The fewer, more relevant the words are the higher your search engine ranking will be.

Header 1 tags should be placed above your body content. This should contain your most relevant keyword in this tag. Ex) “Weight Loss Story”
This main keyword placed in the H1 tag will substantially increase your page ranking! The Header 2 tag should contain your second most important keyword. The header 3 tag will have your least important keyword placed in it. These header tags are often overlooked, but make a significant difference in your on page search engine optimization.

The body content of your webpage should be rich with keywords and relevant content. You should have each keyword appear at least once for every 1-2 paragraphs. Do not stuff your body with keywords, as this will only hurt you. You want to give your body a clean natural look, meaning do not over or under use keywords!

Image tags alt tags should also be keyword rich. Search engines often look at the alt tags of images on your web site to get a feel of what your web site is about. If the alt tags do not have your keywords then you will be ranked lower than if you had keywords in your alt tags.

5) Homepage Organization

We want the search engines to notice your keywords and index you according to those keywords. In order to do this you should start your body and end your body with your keywords. This gives the search engine spider information that your page is highly relevant to your keywords.

When the spider looks through your web site it reads through your content from top left to bottom right. Below is an example of how the search engine reads your page starting with 1 then 2 then 3.

Rather than creating a table that looks like this:

You should create a table that looks like this:

Now search engines will view your body content before it views your navigational menu. The search engine will see the top of your page then see a blank area and skip to your body content then move onto your navigational menu.

6) Search Engine Submission

The best way to achieve high search engine rankings for new web sites may not be what you expected. You should not submit your site directly to the search engines as this process can take weeks or even months to get your site listed. Instead you need to get listed on top ranking pages that are relevant to your web sites content. These high-ranking pages are often optimized on a weekly or even daily basis. Every time the site is indexed your link will appear and the search engines will automatically list your site in its index. It is as simple as that to get listed on top search engines in only a few days!

To do this we need to search for web sites that that are indexed by search engines and get them to link to us. This can be difficult to do unless you give the site some incentive to do so. The incentive you need to give them is to write some sort of article that is relevant to your line of business. At the bottom of the article you include your web page URL to get picked up by the search engines. You submit the article to popular article directories on the web and you will be indexed by the search engines in a matter of days rather than months!

Here’s a list of the most popular article directories you can submit your website to

1. GoArticles.com
2. Ezinearticles.com
3. ArticleCity.com
4. Certificate.net/wwio
5. Amazines.com
6. Articledashboard.com
7. Article-directory.com
8. Submityourarticle.com/articles
9. Magportal.com
10. Isnare.com
11. Pubs.acs.org/hotartcl
12. Article-hangout.com
13. Webarticles.com
14. Articlecube.com
15. Article-buzz.com

The other option is to perform a search of the most generic term that is related to your business. Click through these web sites looking at the Page Ranks. Contact the web site and by sending them an email asking them to link to your site and in return for you linking back to their web site. Always contact sites that are relevant to your line of work and always offer them something their visitors can benefit from once they add your link.

You can purchase a link in top Page Rank sites through link builders. A few of the good web sites (secret SEO tips) that can do this for you are: textbrokers.com or text-link-ads.com or linkadage.com.

Remember that you only need to purchase a link for one month, since it will take less than one month to get you indexed by the major search engines. Continuing to pay for the link after a month is a waste of your money. Basically you are paying a onetime fee to instantly get indexed in the major search engines.

7) Off page Optimization

This is just as important, if not more important than on page optimization. To do this we need to study the linking strategies of the top 10 websites for your keyword. We want to copy their model, but do things slightly better to achieve the top rankings. First open up a spread sheet in Excel and list the following columns: Linking Website, Anchor Text, Page Rank, Link Popularity Page Title, and Number of Outbound Links. Then we search your keyword on Google and fill in the information for the top 10 websites.

To discover the linking websites go to Google and type in the websites URL “link:www.thewebsite.com” Then count the number of sites that are listed to get the link popularity.

Anchor text is whatever follows the .com or .org of a website URL.

Page Rank is the rank Google gives to websites. You can download it for free at Google’s web site.

Page Title is the title of the page that appears on the top left of the screen. If the title does not contain the keywords then the site is not well optimized and easy to surpass in rankings.

Number of Outbound Links is the number of links located on the webpage linking to the site you’re checking.

Once all this information has been collected you can see what needs to be done to your site to beat the top ranking sites.

8) Search Engines and Capitalization

Capitalizing different letters in keywords brings up different results in search engines. Search engines are case-sensitive so it is important how you use capitalization. The problem with listing every variation of a word results in the search engines thinking that you are spam and deleting your URL. This gets worse with singular and plural words!

The solution is to stick with lowercase listings rather than trying different variations. Studies have shown that most people search in all lowercase and this has the most relevant listings. Not using every other variation means you lose out on 18% of traffic. This is not worth the risk of being banned from the search engines.

Lowercase searching has dominated all the search engines ranging from 85 percent to 90 percent of the total terms used. Now most search engines are not case sensitive anymore.

9) Search Engine Spamming

Spamming does not take well with current search engines. Search engines have discovered ways to fight keyword stuffing and other search engine tricks. Search engines can detect your spam and will act accordingly by penalizing or banning you from their listings.

Search engine spamming is attempting to achieve top ranks for extremely popular keywords. You can attempt to fight that battle against other sites, but you ought to be ready to fight a long and hard battle defending your ranking. All that wasted effort can be better spent for finding other ways for internet marketing.

There is no need for search engine spamming if your website has been optimized correctly using the above methods. The risks are not worth the temporary rewards. Search engine spam should be considered the same as email spam. Nobody likes or wants spam! We want spammers removed from the internet, so why would customers want to work with you, a spammer.

10) Hire a Professional SEO

Hiring a professional seo optimizer is a great idea if your business relies on internet sales. Search engine optimization is something that is time consuming and requires lots of research. Most businesses do not have time to optimize their web sites. They have better things to take care of, like making sure their products are selling and keeping good customer relations. At SEO Optimizers we make sure everything is in line at your site and fix any problems that may be holding you back from reaching the top ranks. If you really want to be at the top of any searches you need professionals to come in and help solve the problem.

The post 10 Easy Ways to Get Top Organic Search Engine Optimization Rankings first appeared on SEO Optimizers.

Many new web directories are not known by the mass users of the internet, but this is likely to change as the directory becomes a respected and highly visited site. Why wait for the directories that are full of listings, when you can have your site listed clearly and in visible sight. As the directory matures more sites will clutter the directories listings, but your site has a better chance of remaining at the top.

2) Many new directories are free

This speaks for itself. We all want to save money when advertising and free web directories are the answer. Free directories are a great place to showcase your site to potential clients. Directories are an abundant force in the internet and can give your website that extra boost of advertising that is needed to reach valuable clients.

3) All relevant links are valuable in SEO

Links have and continue to be a dominant force in the search engines algorithms. Directories offer a page on a website that is completely devoted and related to your sites content. This makes the link a relevant link. Sites with many relevant links often achieve higher rankings than sites with fewer links. This has been and continues to be true today.

4) Many directories do not require a link back

Many new directories do not require a back link which is a great thing for building up web presence and search engine rankings. As of recently Google and the other major search engines have edited their algorithms as to not place as much emphasis on reciprocal links. Reciprocal links are two way links in which both sites have a link to one another. This is not as valuable as a one way link, where one site places a link to another site.

5) New directories are not cluttered with links

Directories can become full with hundreds of sites advertising on a single page. This lowers your sites visibility along with credibility obtained by having your site link on the page. Since new directories do not have many web links it is easier to view your sites advertisement. It is easier to find a site on top of a directory, rather than school through hundreds of links on the same page.

6) Potential clients can find your site through directories

Directories are a great place to let potential customers find your site and ultimately make a purchase. Directories list your site offering more web visibility and more ways to reach your target audience. The more advertising your site has the better off it will do in the World Wide Web.

7) Web directories are highly useful resources for SEO

When optimizing websites it is important to have as many back links as possible and directories offer this to sites. Every directory listing is seen as a back link to your website, so the more directories you are listed in the better off you are. Directories will boost up a new or established websites search engine rankings. Remember to submit, submit, and submit again to as many directories as possible.

8) Qualified visitors will find relevant information

When users perform a search, often directories related to the search phrase appear at the top of the rankings. These sites are often visited and used to find relevant information. Why waste your advertising budget on places that are hard to locate on the web, when you can use free directories that have high rates traffic.

9) Less time to edit and approve listings

Because many top directories receive hundreds of requests to be added into the directory it can take quite some time to have your request approved. New directories on the other hand are looking for as many new web sites to add to their directory as possible so the wait time is much shorter.

10) Directories help search engines gather information

Directories are a great place to combine tons of useful information about websites in one convenient place. This makes it easier for web users to find what they are looking for on the web. It is like the Yellow Pages, but made for the internet. With so many web sites listed in the directories it can become a highly used factor for many web users’ searches.

The post Why New Web Directories Are Valuable To You first appeared on SEO Optimizers.

Articles are also used for SEO (search engine optimization) purposes. Writing and distributing articles throughout the web is a great way to increase your company’s exposure. The more information posted on the web about your company, the better off your company will be. This is because more people will see your website and be inclined to learn more about it.

Each article that is written can be distributed through out the web. There are hundreds of thousands of web sites that host articles for free; or you can publish them on your own website. Either way you are getting adding new content and receiving a one-way link from the article. For those of you not familiar with SEO, one-way links are extremely valuable. The search engines as votes view links. The more votes you have, the higher you will be in the natural search engine results. Link can either be reciprocal (I link to your site and you link back to my site) or one-way (you link to my site only). The more one-way links a site has the higher up it will be in the search engine rankings. Every article has a section about the author where a link can be placed. Some article sites even allow you to post links in the article. All these links will help you increase your websites exposure and search engine rankings.

Articles also add fresh, new content to the web. The search engine spiders are constantly looking for fresh, new content throughout the World Wide Web. Once the spider discovers new content, it will be indexed in the search engine results (usually getting on the first page). You can tune your articles around highly competitive keywords for SEO purposes. This will get you the top rankings on the search engines (more exposure) for on highly competitive keywords that you would otherwise not be able to compete with.

After an article has been written it is time to submit it. There are different options, you can use an article submission site, article submission software, or manually submit articles. With the recent developments in the web (Web 2.0) articles can now be shared or Feed through RSS Feeds. This offers even greater reach and exposure for articles. Websites such as Digg allow users to “Digg” or vote on articles. Articles receiving the most votes achieve the exposure coming from the first page of such a high traffic site. Readers can also comment on articles, something new to the web. Readers can agree or disagree with you and their responses can be seen by anyone reading the article. This means you must be careful when writing articles, to be accurate and not copy anyone else’s work.

Writing articles is a good way to inform potential customers about the benefits of a specific product or service. Many shoppers would like to get more information about a product or service before making a purchase. Articles give readers the information they are seeking out before making a purchase. You will help them make an educated and informed purchase. It also looks good when visitors can read useful information and it leads back to your website.

The best part about articles is that they are free to submit and can really help promote your website and business. So get to it and start writing quality, keyword rich, new articles for the search engines and your new customers. You will see the benefits, as your websites traffic increases and your websites search engine rankings increase as well. Your article and website will soon show up all over the web.

The post Why Writing and Submission of Articles Benefits You first appeared on SEO Optimizers.