Gain All The Benefits Of A Blog Without Publishing A Blog
Blogs can be a great search engine optimization tool providing links, traffic and social media exposure. However, at a time when businesses are trying to reign in costs, publishing a blog may be the last thing on your 'to do' list. Cost wise, blogs are inexpensive tools that deliver more than what they cost when it comes to out-of-pocket expenses. You can, however, gain a lot of the benefits of publishing blog even though you don't have a blog. For a blog to be effective, it needs a steady flow of content. You can buy that content, use guest writers, or use employees/family to write it for you. If they are not options and you cannot justify the time in maintaining a blog, can you justify CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Do You Target Moms, Dads, Or Just Everyone?
The brick and mortar and retail world has known for decades that the best people to target are moms. They generally hold the purse strings and are also the one who generally do the shopping. Of course, it's not true in every aspect of marketing, but you would be surprised at how much marketing is designed to influence moms. It seems the online world has not been as fast to pick up on this aspect of ecommerce. Can you target moms when it comes to your website, your content and the way you market your business and part of your search engine optimization efforts. I believe you can and in a big way if you go about it the right way. The long term benefits CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Great Content Should Be Your No. 1 Concern
While reading an article on keyword stuffing I came across a sentence that is extremely gratifying to me. It expresses a sentiment you don't see much online any more, though at one time it was gospel. Most people today consider link building to be the holy grail of SEO, and I do admit that there are strong benefits to it. But link building won't turn a bad site into a great site. All it can do is bolster rankings, but if you have a site that shouldn't rank in the first place, what good will that do? The sentence I'm talking about is this: So, as near as I can tell your top rankings were so high because you had built an awesome CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Should You Use Acronyms In Your Content?
Here's a good discussion on the use of jargon and acronyms in marketing content. The discussion is just as relevant for search engine optimization efforts, maybe more so. After all, with good quality content you are not just selling, your are selling and optimizing. And if you are using acronyms for your optimization efforts it means that you expect searchers to perform search queries for those acronyms at the search engines. Will they? If they do, will they search for the acronym more often than the term it represents? I like Grok's blog post because it shows a little bit of both sides of the argument. On the one hand, jargon (or acronyms) can be a turn-off. On the other hand, it can be CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
How To Move A Subdomain To A Stand Alone Domain
There's nothing wrong with turning a subdomain into a stand alone domain. You want to capitalize on the success of the subdomain by expanding your options. I highly recommend that. But there are pitfalls. The following list should be your checklist to make sure your transition from subdomain to full stand alone domain goes smoothly: Don't simply copy/paste the page from the subdomain to the new domain. Rewrite the content with the idea of improving it. You may want to run an A/B test on your content before you build the new domain. If the new content doesn't beat the old then rewrite. Tweak the rewritten pages until they outperforms your subdomain then upload it to your new domain. Don't take the subdomain down. Redirect it instead. CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
A Simple Way To Increase Page Views
I'm going to share a very basic, simple way to increase page views. It doesn't involve adding new pages to your website or rewriting content. All you really need to do is add one element on each of your web pages that will get people to click over more and visit your other pages. You can hard code this element in HTML or provide a widget. Either way and you can increase your page views. There are two ways that are very effective in doing this and which one you use depends on what you want to accomplish, but here they are: Popular pages method - With the popular pages method you highlight your most popular content on each page of your website. A version of this CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Can Duplicate Content Still Get Ranked?
Does Google still rank duplicate content? How about the other search engines? With all the talk of duplicate content and penalties and such and such, you'd think the search engines would have just stopped ranking it completely. But they haven't. And all the evidence you really need that they haven't is Google's recent (within the past 6 months) announcement of a new recognized tag - the canonical URL tag. The canonical tag - attribute, if you will - is a relationship attribute that you can append to your URLs so that Google knows which one you want indexed. That is, which version of duplicate content on your own site that you prefer to be found in Google's index. If Google wasn't still ranking duplicate content then such CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Is Link Consolidation An Improvement?
In June, Google's Matt Cutts announced that PageRank sculpting would be affected by a change in the search engine's nofollow policy. It wasn't really a change; it really an enforcement issue. But it got a bunch of SEOs to thinking, scheming, and dreaming. Evidently, Rand Fishkin was one of them. The gold-old Rand came up with an alternative to PageRank sculpting and he's calling it "Link Consolidation." It works like this: You take several pages that are somewhat related, but not identical (such as About, Press, Contact, etc.), and you turn them all into one page instead of giving each its own unique page Assign each section of your page a bookmark, designated by # Point your internal links that before would have been pointed to those CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Is Your Blog Called “Fluffy”?
While scouring the Web looking for great content I have noticed that there are generally four levels of content. You could probably break down those levels into sub-levels within them, but for the sake of this blog post I'm not going to do that. I'm just going to keep it at four broad levels. Here are the content levels that I've seen across the board: Super Content - This is highly charged blog content, the type that you'll just about every day on any A-list blogger you'll find. Examples include Problogger, Copyblogger, and several others that are considered A-listers. This is the cream of the crop. Excellent Content That Builds Readers - This type of content isn't quite what you'd find on an A-list blog, but it's CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
What Is Keyword Stuffing, Actually?
Search engine optimization best practices can get confusing if you don't understand the terms, or if you do understand and you employ incorrectly. Of course, it can be confusing even if you do everything right. Let's take a look at keyword stuffing, for instance. It seems like a pretty straightforward concept and in many ways it is. But a webmaster can get confused trying to figure out just how their content ended up with too many keywords even though they tried their best to avoid that happening. Unfortunately, the discussion around keyword stuffing is often mixed in with discussion on keyword density. But it doesn't have to be. Keyword density if often described as the proper amounts of keyword compared to the amount of text on your web CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Why Autorun Videos Will Kill Your Trust Factor
The most important thing about doing business online isn't search engine optimziation or social media marketing. It's building trust. In fact, no matter how good you are at marketing through search engines or social media sites, if you can't make your site visitors trust you then they won't do business with you. But there are some things you can do that will drive your visitors away and kill any chances you have of earning their trust. One of those is autorun videos. An autorun video is a video that runs when a visitor lands on a web page. The visitor has no choice. They must either watch the video or leave. Guess what? A lot of them are going to leave. The reason is simple. People want CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
How To Turn Fleeting Moments Into Timeless SEO Treasures
If you are a local business or non-profit agency that frequently sponsors events and you promote those on events on your website, what do you do with the web pages after the event has past? Do you take them down so that they are no longer publicly visible, leaving in the wake a 404 page or a dead end for search traffic? Or do you revise those pages to make good use of them after the event so that future searchers can benefit and increase your influence? If you answered B then you get a passing grade. If your approach is to take the page down and not replace it with anything then you need to get back to the drawing board. You are losing money CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
How To Reach All Three Types Of Searchers In One Page Of Content
If you weren't aware of search taxonomy then you should probably read this article by WebProNews and follow the links to the other great articles it references. It's good reading. But I have just a few thoughts on the three types of search queries and how you can reach the different types searchers using those queries. So what are the three types of searches? The article defines them as such: Navigation - The user is looking for a specific site. Informational - The searcher is looking for specific information without regard to site specificity. Transactional - The searcher is looking to conduct a specific type of transaction (e.g. buy something, sign up for a newsletter, etc.) Which Type Of Search Is Most Popular (And CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
The Different Shades Of SEO
Effective SEO comes in different shades. There is black and white, gray, and a myriad of colorful colors. Sometimes they contrast, sometimes they compliment. But SEO is not simply optimization. It never is. It's always something else hiding under an SEO hat. (In case you are wondering, I tend to stay on the "what hat" side of things!), anyway... If that seems a little mystical to you, that's because it is. It was intended to be mystical. SEO is not a trick or treat. It's not some magic bullet or fairy dust. There is always a point beyond the keywords and links. In other words, there's more to it than meets the eye. Here's what I mean: If you are building a site for AdSense, you will CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
What Is Content Marketing And Does It Work?
Content marketing is a fairly new term, but it is apt. If you're not familiar with it I think now would be a good time to define it. It consists of more than just putting up a blog or a website and calling it marketing. Content marketing is anything that you do that creates content - on your web properties and off of your properties, even offline. For instance, if you write an advertorial and purchase ad space in your local newspaper to drive traffic to your website, that's content marketing. You are marketing your content and using your content to market your business. But it's more than just advertising. Purchase an ad in a local newspaper with nothing more than a marketing message and CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
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Nick Stamoulis:
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