Successful Blog

How to Use Both Content Marketing and SEO to Amplify Your Blog

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SEO and Content MarketingOver the last few years, it has been drilled into the brains of digital marketers everywhere: content is king and an important part of any search engine optimization strategy.

Consumers are looking for unique information that teaches them something new. The right piece of content marketing can drive sales. However, if your content is hard to find online then, naturally, your prospects can’t convert.

Dominating Content Marketing in 2020

This year, expect content marketing to dominate SEO.

Content marketing and SEO go together like peanut butter and jelly… if you are trying to grow your qualified search traffic, you have to combine your content marketing with your SEO efforts

The best way to combine the two effectively is to use the new generation of tools that go beyond keyword matching and assist you in topic and context research. Text Optimizer is one such tool that applies semantic analysis against Google’s search snippets to break any search query into the cluster of related and underlying concepts:

textoptimizer

Use Text Optimizer to create both well-researched and well-optimized content to boost your SEO and content marketing efforts.

Since content marketing is taking over, let’s examine how to get ahead in the space this year.

Blog or Bust

If you don’t already have a blog, you need to have one created and tie it back to your website before you can begin integrating content marketing into your SEO strategy. Here’s a solid guide on choosing the best blogging platform.

You can improve your conversion ratio and SERPs with images and a blog. A business blog is typically the best place to publish your primary marketing content. Put a content marketing plan of action in place, which needs to include developing informational material.

Strategic Content Development

As noted in Pay Anywhere’s article “The New SEO”, a blog is not a place for you to be super promotional. Save the sales promotions for email marketing. Instead, show

how your business is going the extra mile to help the community, or focus on a new product that is unique to your business or area

Search Engine Land suggests, “You’ll sell more by not selling.” Behind every good piece of content marketing is a good brainstorming session. Break out your notebook and some colored pens and consider these suggestions:

  • Feel your customers’ pain.
  • Tune into your customers’ passions and emotions.
  • Take a direct and indirect approach to crowdsourcing.
  • Feed off popular news stories.
  • Eavesdrop on your customers’ and competitors social media channels.

All About Videos

At one point, adding an image to a piece of content marketing was good enough. With the recent explosion of video marketing, images alone are not going to cut it.

While videos deployed on YouTube or Facebook can be considered a form of content marketing alone, kick things up a notch by embedding videos right into your blog posts. Did you know?

  • 78 percent of people watch videos online every week
  • 55 percent of people watch videos online every day
  • By 2017, experts believe that video will take up 69 percent of consumer Internet traffic
  • 52 percent of marketing professionals worldwide name video as the type of content with the best ROI

Source: HubSpot

Quality Beats Quantity

Last year Google released its Quality Update. The update rewards websites that have quality content and punishes those that do not. Google update or not, it’s always best to focus on delivering quality content. In assessing whether or not your content is up to par, consider what Forbes Contributor Jayson DeMers suggests:

  • Use an appropriate length.
  • Supplement with videos, images, infographics, and other media.
  • Be sure to use proper grammar and spelling.
  • Format pages and text accordingly.
  • Achieve an appropriate readability score.
  • Tie back to a qualified professional in the space — expertise matters.
  • Integrate content marketing with social media.
  • Utilize good internal and external links.
  • Provide value.

Marketing for Your SEO and Content Marketing

Your job as a content creator does not end after you create a piece of content. Content marketing is one part content creation and two parts content distribution and promotion.

You already know you should be sharing your content on social media, but what are some other places to promote it? Try using these locations:

  • Email communications
  • Email signatures
  • Search engine advertising

If you want to dominate in 2020, you need both SEO and Content Marketing.

Filed Under: SEO

Four Essential SEO Plugins for Bloggers

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Search engine traffic is the most reliable and in many cases top-converting traffic for many websites. That’s the reason most people ask for tips and plugins that can help them boost SEO of their WordPress websites.

If you are looking to increase your search engine rankings, you will need to use some of the best WordPress SEO plugins. Fortunately, there are a plethora of SEO plugins to help you get that higher search traffic that you are dying to achieve. In this guide, we shall share with you some of the best SEO plugins that will improve SEO of your WordPress website.

1. WordPress SEO by Yoast

WordPress SEO by Yoast

Yoast SEO is the most popular and holistic SEO plugin on WordPress. To date, it has more than 4.5 million downloads with an average rating of 4.7-star over five from 1,418 users. Developed by SEO specialist Joost de Valk, this plugin has features that ensure optimal success for your site when it comes to SEO. The plugin is used by some of the most famous online magazines and websites such as the next web, Mashable, and others.

WordPress SEO by Yoast plugin can assign keywords to a blog post so that the user can focus on using it in the entire content. It also has a snippet view where users can see how their post will look like in search results.

Another important feature of this plugin is the Page Analysis. Powered by Linkdex, this feature allows users to check whether all the keywords, meta description, images and post title or subheadings are in place. The list of features for Yoast SEO is extremely long, check out others here. This is a great productivity-boosting plugin for writers.

2. Text Optimizer

Text Optimizer

Text Optimizer is one of the most advanced SEO plugins built for online business, eCommerce, bloggers, and magazines. This plugin offers you an easy way to use Text Optimizer to get your content rank higher in Google.

It is perfect for everyone with little knowledge of SEO or rarely cares to perform on-page optimization. It uses semantic analysis to generate related concepts and terms and helps you include those in your content in the most meaningful way.

The best thing about Text Optimizer plugin is that it lets you optimize your site for search engine while improving your content quality. In other words, the default installation is good enough to serve. But as you interact more with the plugin, you can play with the settings as per your requirements.

3. Broken Link Checker

A broken link is a horrible nightmare for bloggers or SEO enthusiasts. Having broken links will earn your site a bad reputation with Google. Eventually, that reputation will degrade your search engine rankings to the point that you may no longer be regarded an authority in your industry. Google is trying so hard to better web experience for everyone. So they will not direct users to websites with broken pages.

This is where tools, such as the Broken Link Checker come in. The name speaks for itself; this plugin allows you to check for any broken links and missing images. If there is any, it will alert you and give you the option to customize the link(s) either by deleting it completely or by placing the correct one.

Here is a summary of its features:

  • Ability to detect links that don’t work
  • Option to deter search engines from following broken links
  • Monitors links in pages, comments, posts and even custom fields
  • Option to change broken links

4. SEOPressor

SEOPressor

SEOPressor covers every possible aspect of SEO and puts the same attention to all of it. It offers you a number of useful features which help you optimize your images, blog posts and your site for social media.

It also allows you to use its drag and drop function allowing you to easily use your chosen keywords in your content. With this feature, you won’t have to spend so much time conducting keyword research on other tools or services.

After posting your content, this plugin goes ahead to analyze your post and give you a score based on the analysis. In the analysis, it checks your subheadings. SEOPressor also comes with a reliable internal linking feature. This feature makes your work easier since each time you re-publish content the phrases you linked on the first content will be hyper-linked automatically.

Wrapping up

These are some of the top WordPress SEO plugins. Tell us which one is your favorite among the ones discussed here. If there is any plugin that you feel we should include in this guide, please let us know in the comments section.

Outside of SEO, there are more useful SEO plugins for you to try… Let me know your pick!

Filed Under: SEO

How I Achieved a Tenfold Increase in Organic Traffic with Text Optimizer

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I have been in the blogging / marketing / freelancing business long enough to lose trust in any “get rich quick” or “triple your traffic in a week” headlines. I would never even click those unless I see them on a trusted resource.

Therefore when I came across this article, I was skeptical but being an avid reader of the blog, I decided to give it a read. I admit it all sounded a bit overwhelming: “semantic search”, “related concepts”, etc. But I still went ahead and gave the featured tool a try.

Text Optimizer does what it says: Helps you optimize your text. In essence, it shows all kinds of words and phrases that somehow relate to your main keyword, i.e. the one that you’d want rank for in Google search.

The idea is, if you cover more concepts that constitute your topic, you have more chances to meet your readers’ expectations, and thus will achieve both better engagement and higher rankings. You can get a better idea of this by playing with the tools’ demo here.

The tool is based on semantic analysis which is what I decided to start researching.

What is Semantic Search?

According to Wikipedia:

Semantic search seeks to improve search accuracy by understanding the searcher’s intent and the contextual meaning of terms as they appear in the searchable dataspace, whether on the Web or within a closed system, to generate more relevant results. Semantic search systems consider various points including context of search, location, intent, variation of words, synonyms, generalized and specialized queries, concept matching and natural language queries to provide relevant search results

What I could understand from this definition is the following:

  • Semantic search tries to understand the context (versus an isolated query)
  • Semantic search tries to understand intent (i.e. what searchers expect to find when performing a search)

Both sounded very good to me, so I decided to give the tool a try.

How to Use Text Optimizer

The first step is registering for free trial. Once you are there, simply provide your target query, choose Google, and then copy-paste your URL you want to rank for that query. The tool will grab Google’s search snippets for that query, applies semantic analysis to them to better understand context and then identify which terms are missing from your text:

Your job is to pick 15-20 of listed concepts and naturally include into your content to optimize it better. Don’t overdo: You don’t your article to sound weird or artificial. If you need to write more content to cover those concepts, go ahead and do that. After all, this makes your content better, which is a beauty of using this tool.

Text Optimizer also helps you build sentences:

As well as target your audience to certain territory:

Text Optimizer and My Process

I started going through my old content, article by article and optimizing them to achieve minimum score of 70

Luckily, I ddidn’t have to much client work, so I was able to delve into the tool almost full time. I actually enjoyed using it because I liked what it did to my content: I felt like my blog was becoming much better.

This took me about two works of work.

Now, looking back at my organic traffic, I was excited to see my time wasn’t wasted. I went from ~100 users a day to ~1000 users a day and growing! Whether it’s semantic SEO or simply making my content better (longer, more in-depth, etc.) but Text Optimizer definitely worked:

Now, it’s not a magic button! Optimizing content using Text Optimizer takes lots of time: You need to run the tool, write content and then re-run the tool, then rinse and repeat. But if you can dedicate at least an hour a day to this, you may have great results over time!

Good luck!

How Bloggers can Succeed with the Power of Technical SEO

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By Ted Chong

 

The vast majority of online experiences start with a search engine.

You probably don’t need another person to tell you about the tremendous benefits of ranking on Google search results.  Many bloggers however, place too much emphasis on content and neglect the technical aspect of SEO.

Anything with the word “technical” sounds scary – we can attest to that. However, nobody said it had to be! Embracing the technical aspect of your SEO might be one of the best business decision you’ll ever make. It lays the foundation of any content or links you built for your blog by making it easier for Google spiders to crawl your site.

Here’s the good news: WordPress is wonderful for helping to boost your technical SEO. It’s one of the best content management systems in terms of SEO. It offers many useful plugins that can help support and improve your SEO while serving as an effective guide.

One great example is Yoast, which is known as the most comprehensive and stable SEO plugin that exists today for users. In fact, leading sites like SearchEngineLand and WooCommerce use it. The best part is that it literally makes technical SEO idiot-proof for the layman.

It doesn’t mean that you can ignore the technical aspect of a website simply because you use WordPress. There are other tools outlined in the infographic below that can help you give that extra boost to your technical SEO. However, in the world of SEO, change is the only constant. Therefore one has to ensure that his  website’s technical SEO is always updated. For example, most recently, the use of interstitials is said to raise a red flag with Google. Webmasters who are not in the know could risking getting penalized.

Bloggers using WordPress often find problems in these areas:

  • erroneous sitemaps
  • duplicate content
  • malware
  • lack of mobile responsiveness
  • sluggish site speed

These problems make it difficult for search engines to crawl and rank your website, and create frustration for users as well. On top of ranking poorly, you might even be penalized by Google for failing to adhere to their guidelines.

For example, if your website takes more than 3 seconds to load, 40% of visitors will abandon it. Simply put, the greater the loading speed, the greater the abandonment rate. Your page loading time is also part of Google’s search ranking algorithm! That’s even more reason for you to buff it up.

If you’re unsure about how to start, worry not. Google provides help and guidelines for WordPress users, including tips on how to be more mobile friendly, here!

If we’ve piqued your curiosity, check out the infographic below for a detailed explanation to help boost your site’s technical SEO.

For more elaboration and recommendation of technical SEO best practices, visit https://icecube.asia/technical-seo-101-getting-website-ranked-google-infographic/to find out more.

 

About the Author:

Ted Chong runs Ice Cube Marketing, a digital marketing agency in Singapore that helps local small businesses acquire leads from channels such as Facebook and Google.

See full infographic below:

technicalSEO

 

Filed Under: SEO Tagged With:

4 Tips for Better Brand Marketing

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google-76517_640Are you more than a tad concerned about where your brand marketing efforts are headed (or not headed for that matter)?

In the event the answer is yes, what do you plan on doing?

For many business owners, it isn’t necessarily an issue of not attempting the right brand marketing initiatives, but more of a matter of being reluctant to do them in the first place.

That being the case, step back for a few minutes and look at how you’ve approached brand marketing up to this point. Are you simply not connecting with your target market, a market that undoubtedly is your key to making more revenue?

If you’ve been reluctant to move full-steam ahead, is that because of a lack of money, thinking that possibly brand marketing isn’t your strongest forte, or maybe even just not finding the right people to do the job?

It All Begins with SEO Plan

Before you can even begin to mount numerous effective brand marketing initiatives, you must make sure you have the right people in place to launch them.

With that being said, stop and look to see if the time has indeed come to reach out for assistance.

If so, that assistance might very well start and end by working with a San Diego SEO agency or one closer to home.

Keep in mind that search engine optimization (SEO) can do so many positive things for your business, things that you likely have been missing out on up to this point. In the event you do reach out to an SEO agency for help, how do you know which one is best suited to your needs?

Before just working with anyone, be sure you look for these qualities in an SEO partner:

  • Years of experience
  • Proven record of results
  • Open lines of communication
  • Pricing that is fair for the work in return
  • Honesty about how SEO really works

Once you’ve decided on an SEO partner, the next step is of course to improve your brand marketing initiatives.

Content is a Great Starting Point

So that your business can nail a number of key areas in the SEO brand marketing process, focus on these four for starters:

  1. Blog content

When was the last time you assessed your website’s blog? If it was recently, were you happy with what you came across?

For many business owners, their blogs unfortunately rank at or near the bottom of importance on their list of things to do. As a result, they miss out on a number of opportunities to connect with consumers.

In working on your blog, not only write content that is authoritative and informative, but that also connects with consumers. By doing so, the doors to increased revenue opportunities are certainly opened up.

  1. Drive off with better keywords

As part of that winning blog content strategy, it is imperative that you select winning keywords for your blogging content efforts.

One example would be for those in the auto selling business, specifically offering used cars for sale.

Sure, many used car dealers rely on TV commercials, newspaper ads; even word-of-mouth etc. in order to bring in business, but their websites shouldn’t be taken for granted.

With that in mind, your focus when writing content for this industry should include long-tail keywords, keywords that emphasize the auto industry and selling used vehicles.

Lastly, make sure you avoid any keyword stuffing, something that can send your Google search engine rankings into reverse sooner rather than later.

  1. Social media outreach

Just as lackluster efforts towards blog content can hurt your brand, the same holds true with mediocre social media outreach.

Given the fact millions of consumers are on various social networking sites at any point and time of the day, shouldn’t your brand be there too?

With the answer being of course so, make sure you are active on a number of social media sites, but with that activity, also be sure to make your time there count.

Along with posting links to your blog content and other relevant industry content (whatever line of business you are in), also take the time to engage consumers. Remember, the more engagement possible the better.

  1. Review your website regularly

Finally, do you take the time on a regular basis to review your website? If not, you could be hurting your brand more than you’ll ever know.

In reviewing your website; look for any and all glitches that could be hampering your efforts to make better inroads with consumers.

Such glitches can include:

  • Long downloading times
  • Pages that are broken
  • Hard to locate contact information
  • If you have an online store, difficulty for consumers in completing sales

Those are but some of the SEO website issues that could easily be curtailing you from better brand marketing, not to mention making more sales.

When it comes to better brand marketing, has the time come for you to invest some more time and energy in what you do?

Photo credit: Pixabay

About the Author: Dave Thomas writes for Organic Media Group on SEO and marketing topics.

Use this one simple tip to improve your content marketing

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There’s a behavioral phenomenon called “mirroring,” in which you subconsciously mimic your conversation partner’s body language, establishing rapport and making them feel more at ease.

He leans forward, you lean forward.

She steeples her fingers, you steeple your fingers.

Subconsciously, it connects the two of you, and makes you feel “in sync.”

That “in sync” feeling can lead to business relationships where you are a trusted resource, rather than an adversarial “salesperson.”

Today’s tip is the written version of mirroring.

Mirror Your Prospects’ Language to Improve Your Content Marketing

  • Write down precisely what your new client tells you when you open the conversation with “tell me about your project and how I might help.” Let her talk until she’s done, and take note of the exact words she uses to describe herself and her pain points. Important—don’t paraphrase, just write down exactly what she said, in her own words.
  • If you use a formalized support system or live chat, perform a monthly review to extract phrases that customers use to describe their problems, their situations, and themselves.
  • Tap into the words and phrases your prospects and customers use whenever you’re writing web content, social updates, and email newsletters. Use that same language when you’re talking with potential clients face to face as well!

That’s it. Simple and effective.

Are you mirroring your customers?

 

 

Author’s Bio: Rosemary O’Neill is an insightful spirit who works for Social Strata — makers of the Hoop.la community platform. Check out the Social Strata blog. You can find Rosemary on Google+ and on Twitter as @rhogroupee