Content Marketing and News

News results are being given a more prominent role in results as timeliness is incorporated into search engine algorithms. However, a high placement due to timeliness alone will fade quickly. Good content marketing will promote more than just the timely event and include both timely and timeless information.

Content Marketing and Social Media

Using keywords in social media just became much more important. However, companies employing a good keyword research strategy for other website promotion content such as blogs or articles will find that the same keywords can be used in social media to help make their overall strategy more effective.

Content Marketing and Blogs

Content marketing and blogging seem to go hand in hand but it is important that the best tools be used so the blog can reach as many people as possible with every post. There are many blog subscription services and directories as well as services that provide RSS feed buttons for the wide variety of blogging platforms.

Jennifer Gniadecki loves to write. You can find her on any given day writing lists, blog posts, articles, assignments, outlines or fleshing out story ideas on her laptop

Image from blogs.ubc.ca

Did you click on the first page or two of search results and ignore the rest? Most users do just that, ignoring deeper results in favor of pages one and two. If your company is showing up on page three or lower, you’re missing plenty of potential B2B attention that could be helping your bottom line—potential you can still tap into if you can achieve better search placement.

To compete, your firm should dominate the search engine results by giving Google a large database of SEO writing for it to discover when users conduct keyword searches. The secret to getting on page one? It’s a combination of factors all working in concert with a large database of SEO content to put you ahead of other sites competing with your business.

Joe Wallace has been a writer/editor since 1992 and is always open to fun new ways to market online businesses. In addition to running Freelance-Zone.com, he blogs about music at Turntabling.net and runs a small press specializing in snarky t-shirts.

Image courtesy of www.networkingwave.com

The two hottest trends in web marketing right now are search engine optimization and social media marketing. As someone who writes a lot of content for the Internet, I usually find that I’m focusing on one strategy or the other, but rarely both at the same time.

So what’s the difference – and how do you know where you should invest your time and money?

The easiest way to explain the difference between search engine marketing and social media campaigns is by comparing how quickly you see results.

SEO writing works, but it usually takes time to see an increase in traffic. No matter how good of a job you do at incorporating keywords into your web content, it takes a while for search engines to notice you. You also need to spend time building links to your content if you want to improve your rankings and subsequent traffic.

In general, it will take longer to see results from search engine optimization, but you’ll likely reap the benefits of your hard work for a much longer period of time with little maintenance.

Social media campaigns, on the other hand, can bring a quick spike in traffic and – hopefully – sales. You can build a contest that you promote through Twitter or Facebook and begin to see results almost immediately.

The down side to social media campaigns is that they have a short shelf life. Twitter and Facebook are constantly being renewed with fresh information and content and it doesn’t take long for your message to get buried by more recent content.

Ideally, you’re working with a content marketing expert who will help you use search engine optimization to reach your long term goals and build a solid foundation for residual traffic AND put together timely social media campaigns to help you with time sensitive promotions.

Britt Reints is a freelance writer living in Orlando.  She’s much more interesting on Twitter than she is on Google.

Image taken from www.copywritinghut.com

Content marketing is all about positioning your business as an authority within your industry. But it’s not enough to just put a bunch of words on a web site. You need to create content that is useful to your readers and attractive to search engines. When people search for information that your company can provide, the goal is to make sure your web site shows up as high as possible in the search results. The better you are at SEO writing, the more likely the information you’re putting out there will be seen.

Guess again!

Metadata is simply “data about data.” In the SEO world, it’s condensed data that helps search engines understand the data on webpages so that they can categorize and index them appropriately—helping you and me find what we’re looking for on the web. There are three primary metadata tags to optimize in the head section of your webpage HTML:  the page title, description, and keywords attributes.

Page Title

Go to Google.com in another tab/window. Type the keyword phrase “content marketing agency” into the search box. You’ll see that the webpage that got the number-one position on the search engine results page (SERP) has “Content Marketing Solutions For Your Business | Content Marketing Agency” as its page title (in blue). (And guess who it is! IdeaLaunch!) Google places rather significant importance on the webpage title tag; make sure you follow these tips when crafting one:

• Use primary keywords that the landing page is optimized for. There should be content on the page that features these keywords.
• Check to be sure the keywords have a high search volume (we use the Google AdWords Keyword Tool) so that they will apply to a high number of searchers.
• Phrase your title in a way that will make a person want to click on it.
• Use initial caps so it looks like an official title.
• You only have space for roughly 64 characters (including spaces) in your page title, so choose your words wisely!

Page Description

Entice searchers to click on your website with the page description. This is where you get to have a little fun and exercise your copy-writing muscles. The description should describe what’s on the landing page in an engaging way—its intended use is more for humans than it is for search engines, confirming the page’s relevancy with the searcher’s query.

• To increase click-through rate (CTR), use keywords in your description. You’ll see that Google bolds keyword matches in the title and description copy.
• Write unique descriptions for each page on your site.
• Do you change content on your site frequently? Update your page descriptions (and page titles, for that matter) accordingly to reflect the new content. It may take the search engines some time to show the new data on SERPs depending on how often they index your site.
• Descriptions should be about 150 words in length. While 200-250 words will be indexed by the search engine, anything past 150 won’t make it onto the SERP for people to see.

Keywords

The keywords attribute is the red-headed middle stepchild of the metadata family. No one pays much attention to it anymore. Because of widespread abuse (spammers were keyword stuffing in meta tags so search engines readjusted their algorithms), major search engines don’t rank your page according to which/how many keywords are listed in this tag. However, other search engines may use this data for relevancy and SERP placement purposes, so you still want to make sure you fill in the appropriate keywords.

• Choose meta keywords that have high search volume and a competitive PPC price, and be sure to include head and tail keyword phrases.
• Use keyword suggestion tools such as Google AdWords Keyword Tool, WordTracker, and WordVision for ideas.
• Between 10 and 15 keywords are plenty. Make sure they’re relevant to the landing page!

The Drink of Choice at Google? Image from Redbull

It seems that if you work at Google, weekends are for chumps. Instead of lazing immobile on the couch watching The Hunt For Red October (again) going to farmer’s markets, having brunch with friends and running errands like the rest of us did this weekend, the Google team was hard at work.

On Wednesday, Google had announced it was joining the likes of Bing in its ability to search for content on social media platforms like Twitter. The launch of this search engine feature wasn’t expected for a few weeks.

It launched this afternoon.

We’re guessing Google’s programming team is hooked up to IVs of Red Bull.

Social Search is a search method that allows a user to “more easily find relevant blogs, reviews and other public content from your social circle.” It should be noted that this is different than Bing’s current search, which allows you to search all public profiles – not just those of your “social circle” (friends, those you follow, people in your address book – Facebook, however, is not yet included but FriendFeed is). Here’s a nifty video from Google on how it works:

Google’s Social Search feature is still listed as “experimental” within Google Labs – so there’s a good chance the average Google user won’t yet be using this search style. That said, incorporating your content marketing techniques via social media wouldn’t be a bad decision (like using more weighted keywords and expanding your fan and follow base) – you might see some lift in traffic if you do.

The problem: Whether they’re in a hurry, don’t give a hoot, or don’t know any better, people often type keywords into search engines with complete disregard to appropriate punctuation. Case in point: the apostrophe. Why should it matter if someone types “bachelor’s degree” or the grammatically incorrect version “bachelors degree” into a search box? It matters because it can affect your organic search engine ranking, and therefore sway how you optimize content on your website. This exact scenario happened with a client who hired us to develop a Tip & Advice Center for their website and sponsor BachelorDegree.LifeTips.com.

Let’s start by examining the volume of each phrase, i.e., how many people are searching these two terms.

Data source: AdWords

The incorrect spelling of the word has more than three times (301,000) the monthly search volume of the correct one (90,500). And if you do a Google search typing in each of the phrases, the top three listings will be the same, but after number four the results are different. You’d naturally want to optimize the content on your site to appeal to as wide an audience as possible to get the most traffic to your site. This would essentially mean using the misspelled keyword in the tips, articles and other content on your site.

Stop there! How could any self-respecting web editor knowingly corrupt the English language like this? Sell out our dignity for higher traffic? I don’t think so.

There are a few reasons why we don’t have to sell our souls to the anti-punctuation devil. First and foremost, you never want your web content to contain misspellings. Let’s say you get lots of traffic to your site with the misspelled version and your visitors now notice the discrepancy because they read the word in context, say in your homepage copy. You, my friend, have just lost your credibility. (Especially if you’re in the business of education—educated people tend to notice these things.) Furthermore, I learned in a heated online forum debate that you can optimize your page in places that readers don’t see and search engines do—in your metadata. That means you can put “bachelors degree” in the <meta name=”keywords”> tag in the <head> section, which is distinct from the text that appears in the <body> section that visitors read. But because search engines now place little importance on meta keywords in response to widespread misuse, you’ll want to use the misspelling along with the correct spelling in the <title> tag too.

There’s another way that we’re harnessing traffic generated by the misspelled keyword phrase. We optimized the <body> copy on the LifeTips sponsorship page to contain various forms of “bachelors degree” and linked these keywords to the client’s website. This way our client gets back link popularity from higher-volume search terms without any pesky grammar faux pas living on their website and diluting their image.

Have you ever encountered grammar and punctuation conundrums when optimizing the content on your site? What’s your reaction when you read web content that contains misspellings?

Before I begin, I want to state loud and clear that the method I’m going to walk through is NOT the most effective way to develop keywords for your web content or keyword-based ads. There’s actually a lot to SEO and keyword strategies – and like all worthwhile things – these take time, expertise and a bit of cash. This isn’t it – but, well, it’s better than nothing.

If you’re not sure where to start, it’s a good idea to look at who’s doing it right.

Ok – let’s pretend you have a cupcake shop in Santa Monica (and it’s right next to Jack’s Bistro!). What do you think a customer would enter into Google if they were looking for cupcakes in Santa Monica? Start with the obvious: “cupcakes” and “Santa Monica.” What sites come up in the top five ranked spots of your search? Take these sites and analyse them:

• Enter those urls in Alexa.com or another web monitoring site and see what main keywords people use to find those sites.
  • This gives you an idea of the kinds of things people are searching for (and the phrases you need to include in your web copy).
• Now, go a step further and enter the keywords you find in a keyword suggestion tool.
  • This will give you keyword searches that are related to what you’ve entered. For example, “cupcake” may come up with “cupcake flavors,” “icing flavors” “custom cakes” and so on.
  • If you’re using the Google keyword suggestion tool, you’ll also see additional data – like the higher they’re valued at, the more they’re being used by websites. This means you have a lot of competition with this keyword. It may be wise to focus on ones that are less frequently used / valued by similar websites (it will increase your chances of being listed higher on the results page when people enter them in a search engine).

Take your list of keywords and see how often they appear in your current website – and if they are there, how frequently are you linking them to your different sections or blog posts that deal with these topics?

Start pumping up your content by injecting these topics and keywords – with internal links – into you copy (be it your static web content or blog posts). Remember, your web content still needs to appeal to humans – not just web crawlers!

Again, this is simply better than nothing – but if you want better than better than nothing, contact an expert in content marketing.

Google Trends, a search that lets you see what’s captured the fleeting interest of the interwebians now has “Hot Trends” – a to-the-hour snapshot of what inquiring minds want to know.

And that’s not the only change: As Mashable and others have reported, today Google launched a “search by the hour” option on information. This means that if a specific topic interests you and you want the very newest of info on it (and not, say, a Wikipedia entry which would typically come up first in your standard search), you can get it with just a click. Fresher, up-to-hour content will spill you’re your search results. It’s practically a real-time engine now (and surely an evolution brought on by competition from Bing). Yowza.

What does this all mean for your web content and content marketing strategy? If you’re on the ball, you may just see more traffic your way as newer posts will get higher rankings when searched with this option. However, some things to keep in mind:

• Keep your messages on target. Just because “breast cancer awareness month” – or whatever the hot trend is – is spiking at the moment doesn’t mean you should be writing about it for traffic. If there is a truly suitable tie-in to your brand’s work on a trending topic – go for it – but make sure your blog or site doesn’t suffer from multiple personality disorder from jumping topic to topic.
• Most users of Google just use the “regular” search engine feature. For a while we have had options to search by different filters (like news, blogs, videos, etc.) but the majority of users haven’t utilized these fully. The same can likely be presumed about the “by the hour” search option. Therefore, it’s likely a smart idea to keep on track with SEO techniques developed for the typical search.
• One adaptation you can make fairly easily is to schedule your updates to coincide with peak Internet times (the most likely time someone will be on the Internet and possibly searching Google for the latest information). A recent study from Arbor Networks found that the usage peak was at 11pm (really!?) as well at 4pm (more expected – it’s clearly The Farting-Around Hour at most workplaces). If you’re writing your pieces ahead of time (even by a few hours) a bit of automation when it comes to publishing might be worth looking into.

Regardless, get going with that content. Clearly, there’s no time like the present!