Wednesday, 29 April 2015
Why digital Marketing
Digital marketing is marketing that makes use of electronic devices (computers) such as personal computers, smartphones, cellphones, tablets TV and game consoles to engage with stakeholders. A component of Digital marketing is Digital Brand Engagement. Digital marketing applies technologies or platforms such as websites, e-mail, apps (classic and mobile) andsocial networks. Digital Marketing can be through Non-internet channels like TV, Radio, SMS, etc or through Internet channels like Social Media, E-mails ads, Banner ads, etc. Social Media Marketing is a component of digital marketing. Many organizations use a combination of traditional and digital marketing channels; however, digital marketing is becoming more popular with marketers as it allows them to target and track many aspects[1] including their Return on Investment (ROI) more accurately compared to other traditional marketing channels.
According to the Digital Marketing Institute, Digital Marketing is the use of digital channels to promote or market products and services to consumers and businesses.
Tuesday, 28 April 2015
How To Create Quality Content For Website and Optmize seo Friendly
Quality Content Factors: A List That’s Actually Helpful
We’re all chasing “quality content,” but what does that actually look like? Columnist Nate Dame explores 20 concrete characteristics of great content.
We’re all chasing “quality content” — but what does that actually look like? In an apparent effort to help publishers cope with Google’s intensified focus on “content quality” as a ranking factor, the search giant released a notoriously unhelpful list of questions that publishers should ask themselves when developing content.
Bing was a little more resourceful with their more recent guidelines for quality content. But there are still plenty of holes.
So, here’s my attempt to one-up Google and Bing — a list of twenty concrete, proven characteristics to help content creators hit the formerly-elusive Quality Content mark.
1. Help The User Complete A Specific Task
Create content geared toward a clearly defined keyword + user intent combination, rather than a list of arbitrary keywords. Understanding how to discover user intent, and organizing that data, will enable you to design content that leads the user quickly and efficiently to his/her next step.
2. Organize Thematic Subsections
Google’s fight against keyword stuffing has led to smart algorithm updates that recognize authoritative topical content by identifying keyword synonyms and related terms and phrases.
Help search engines decipher your page by identifying the most important related keywords, and structuring each into its own subsection.
3. Make Sure It’s “Made To Stick”
In Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Take Hold and Others Come Unstuck, authors Chip and Dan Heath outline a framework to identify if an idea is “sticky.”
The six concepts central to “sticky” content (central to “SUCCES”) ask if it is Simple, Unexpected, Concrete, Credible, Emotional, and/or uses Stories.
4. Write A Strong Title & H1
It can be tempting to get creative and/or clever with your titles, but readers don’t have time to decipher subtleties. Be clear and concise, and make sure to use a tool like Moz’s Title Tag Preview Tool or Portent’s SERP Preview Tool, to make sure it’s not too long.
5. Make Sure It Inspires, Educates And/Or Entertains
A combination of two or three of those qualities is even better, but — especially for starters — identify the primary purpose of the content and be faithful to it.
This one has a lot to do with titles too: make sure the title and headers set the reader up for the kind of content you’re providing.
6. Ask Yourself If You Would Share It
Great content has inherent, spreadable value. Intentions aside, does the content actually speak to you? Would the people in your social networks — friends and/or industry contacts — be interested in it?
7. Make Sure It’s Relevant
Hopefully this doesn’t really need to be said, but I’m sure I’m not the only one who has been caught off-guard by clever media, or a guest post, that doesn’t seem to have much to do with a brand’s niche or a website’s topic.
Don’t sacrifice relevancy in an attempt to be entertaining.
8. Watch Your Word Count
There are no hard-and-fast rules here, of course, and the very best thing you can do is test different content lengths with your unique audience. In general, longer content seems to be the favorite. In terms of ranking, about 1000 words seems to be ideal, according to Searchmetrics’ 2014 ranking factors study.
For social shares, 1500 words is even better, according to a piece written by Neil Patel on the Quicksprout blog.
But user experience is always priority #1. Don’t compromise quality in an effort to hit a certain word count, and don’t take any study results as the final word for your particular audience.
9. Write For Your Audience (Not Your Peers)
This is a special challenge in tech and niche industries. SEO, for example, written for SEO experts is much different from SEO written for business owners and traditional marketers.
If your audience is industry professionals, don’t talk down to them. If your audience is not familiar with the details of your expertise, don’t get fancy and lose them in technical jargon.
10. Proofread!
(My editorial team made sure I included this one.) It doesn’t matter how long you’ve been doing this, everyone misses a keystroke or reverses characters once in a while.
Double-check for spelling and grammatical errors. Nothing erodes professionalism and credibility like a simple mistake that you were too lazy to correct.
11. Ease Up On The Primary Keyword
Keyword stuffing was never a good idea, and Panda keeps knocking it down further. Still, lazy writing can lead to unintentional keyword stuffing too, especially in headers.
Once your content is written, do a Command+F/Ctr+F search for your primary keyword(s) to make sure it’s not saturating the page. Rewrite or replace with synonyms as needed.
12. Fact-Check
Click those links one more time and just make sure that a digit didn’t get copied incorrectly, andcheck the date on any study you’re citing.
Every topic and industry will have different definitions of “old,” but don’t cite social media statistics from 2008. This goes for new and existing content.
Check your analytics periodically, and look for old content that may still be performing well. Go back to those blog posts and make sure they’re up-to-date!
13. Clearly Define Author(s) On The Page
Google Authorship may be a thing of the past, but Author Rank is still a factor.
A picture and a short bio on every piece of content will give search engines the information they’re looking for and enhance the user experience.
14. Check The AlchemyLanguage API
Make sure the AlchemyLanguage API is identifying entities, keywords, and concepts as expected.
AlchemyAPI offers a great tool that displays what Google’s crawlers probably see when examining your website.
15. Don’t Send Mixed Messages
Make sure each page stays on-topic. This ties in with understanding user intent — and creating unique content to help each intent complete a specific goal.
But if you haven’t gotten that far, it applies to existing content as well. Don’t throw a sales pitch in the middle of resource content.
16. Link To Good Sources
Practicing SEOs know this, of course, but it deserves to be on any content checklist. Make sure the content links out to a reasonable number of reputable, high-quality sources.
17. Link Natural Phrases
Make sure those outbound links are using natural phrases. Don’t stuff the <a href> with keywords, and don’t hyperlink the word(s), “here” or, “click here.”
18. Avoid Bad Sidebar Content
There is reason to believe that supplemental or sidebar content that is useless or distracting can cause an adverse reaction with a certain Panda.
19. Make It Visually Appealing
Text on the page should be broken up into bite-sized pieces: no long paragraphs, use headers consistently, indent quotes, use bullet points for lists, etc.
And make use of images and video wherever reasonably possible to add color and visual interest. (Just make sure your page design is supporting your SEO strategy.)
20. Offer Unique Value (Not Just Unique Content)
Any good writer can rearrange words on a page to create content that doesn’t technically appear anywhere else on the internet.
But good content offers a unique value by providing readers with insights and actionable takeaways that no one else does. Does “unique value” sound difficult? Well, it is, but it must be done.
Bonus: What Makes Content ‘Thought Leadership’
Moving from high-quality content to thought-leadership material doesn’t necessarily mean going wider as much as it does going deeper. The checklist doesn’t get much longer, but each element becomes weightier. If you haven’t had enough yet, Bob Buday from The Bloom Group shared his team’s eight requirements for thought-leadership material.
- Relevance – Addressing a burning issue for your target audience
- Novelty – Having a fundamentally new way to solve a problem
- Depth – Possessing substantial knowledge about the problem and how to solve it
- Validity – Proving your solution works through real examples of companies that have solved it your way with measurable benefits
- Practicality – Demonstrating you have a well-thought-out approach to solving the problem, and understand how to overcome the obstacles to adoption
- Rigor – Having hard-to-dispute logic about the problem and the best way to solve it
- Clarity – Communicating the point of view in words your target audience understands
- Coherence – Having frameworks or models that simplify the problem and/or solution
Does every blog post need to meet all eight of those criteria? Does every content asset you publish need to reflect all 20 of the factors above? Perhaps not, but the more you can hit, the better chance you have of appeasing (Google head of Webspam) Matt Cutts’ (and the real world’s) demand for quality content.
Some opinions expressed in this article may be those of a guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.
Your First Steps In Content Marketing
Your First Steps In Content Marketing
New to content marketing and not sure where to begin? Columnist Eric Enge provides a helpful outline for SEOs (or anyone) looking to start incorporating this crucial digital marketing tactic.
Any successful SEO strategy still requires a promotional component — something that builds your business’ reputation and visibility while also netting you links to your website. Yet, we still live in a world where most businesses don’t truly engage in content marketing. In today’s post, I am going to outline how you can get started with such a campaign.
Whether you are in a large enterprise or a small business, it can be difficult to launch a large-scale campaign. While the enterprise has a larger overall marketing budget, the money in that budget is tightly allocated and is likely already spoken for. Pulling a big pile of dollars out to spin up a major content marketing effort is just not going to happen overnight.
The big advantage that a small business has is that once the decision to pursue content marketing is made, making it a priority is quite a bit easier. However, the total number of dollars in the budget is probably still limited.
In either scenario, it’s inevitable that the great majority of businesses will need to start slowly. With that in mind, let’s take a look at the first few priorities in getting going with a content marketing campaign that also has a major impact on SEO.
Your Top 4 Priorities
When pursuing content marketing to support your SEO needs, just be aware that directly chasing links with it can turn into a big “uh-oh.” This often leads to the type of behavior that caused Googler John Mueller to say this about link building: “In general, I’d try to avoid that.”
To be fair, a lot of what is driving John’s response is the pursuit of links for links sake. Let’s back up, and instead look at the key priorities you can set for yourself so that your content marketing will head in the right direction. Here are your top four:
- Build Your Reputation. When people think about your brand, you want them thinking good thoughts. You can use content marketing to help build that image on your behalf.
- Build Your Visibility. Content marketing can help build your visibility in many ways. The basic concept is to create content that people are going to want to share with others (via social media and other means), and this gets you exposure to new people.
- Build Your Audience. As I discuss below, there are many ways to build your reputation and visibility by publishing content on other platforms (other people’s websites and social media, for example). In the long run, though, this is rented real estate. You need to build your own set of fans who will look for your content wherever you may end up publishing it.Audience growth is incredibly important, as your audience will help you gain exposure to more and more new audiences. Every time you post and share you will get a ripple effect like this one:
- Be Approachable. Reputation, visibility, and audience are all great, but you also need to be perceived as approachable. You can have thousands, or millions, of raving fans, but if they are afraid to engage with you, it will limit the business benefit of what you have accomplished. Make sure you engage with others — influencers and non-influencers — so the audience at large understands that you are not sitting in some ivory tower.
Getting these four parts of your strategy right is essential. Over the long run, it’s what will lead to the best quality links with the least possible risk. It’s one of those odd things that sometimes happens in life — the less you focus directly on what you want (in this case, high-value links), the more of them you will get.
Guest Posting Is A Great Place To Start
As I laid out earlier, new content marketing campaigns don’t materialize out of thin air suddenly staffed with five full-time people. Inevitably, you will be given limited resources and asked to prove its value (and to prove your ability to execute it).
Getting started with a simple guest posting campaign may be the best way to get off the ground. To me, this means establishing one or two monthly columns on some of the top sites that cover your market (and that reach your target audience). Note the emphasis on columns here.
Writing a column on a high authority site that reaches your target audience is a great way to start working on the four priorities I outlined above. It enables you to build your reputation by publishing content that helps solve problems for others. Your visibility increases for the simple reason that you are being given a platform on someone else’s website — in front of their audience.
This content can build your audience because some of the people on that third-party website will hunger for more from you. This is the first step in them becoming your audience. This graphic gives you some idea how guest posting in the right places leads to growing your audience:
Finally, provided that you respond to comments and questions about your content, it causes people to see you as being approachable, too.
Note: Yes, I know that Matt Cutts said to “stick a fork” in guest blogging for SEO — but. per our top four priorities, that’s not what we are doing here. Remember our focus: Reputation, Visibility, Audience, and Approachability.
Social Media Visibility Is A Great Place To Start, Too
The other easy place to get engaged early on is with social media. Like guest posting, this is not going to immediately cause money to come pouring into your business, but it will help you get started on each of your top four priorities.
As with guest columns, you need to focus on using social media to help people, not simply turn it into a broadcast medium where you spout your old-world marketing messages. This will help grow your reputation, visibility, and audience all at once. Here is a visual for how social media helps you develop your own audience:
Provided that you respond to comments and interact with others via social media, it will show people that you are approachable as well.
Beyond Guest Posting and Social Media
Guest posting and social media are a great start because they give you exposure to other people’s audiences (OPA). In other words, you are going where the crowds of your prospective customers and future fans are already present. You’re publishing your content in front of that audience, helping solve problems for them, and starting the process of building your own audience.
But these are rented audiences. As we have seen with Facebook, when their need to generate revenue became paramount, they started taking organic visibility away from brands to drive traffic into their ad platform. Other social media platforms have begun to follow suit. Even that guest column could potentially be taken away from you in the future.
For that reason, it’s important to evolve into other types of content marketing campaigns and work on building an audience directly on your site. This is the key shift from addressing OPA to addressing your own audience.
A detailed description of how to do that is beyond the scope of this particular post, but if you have done your job well with guest columns and social media, you will have established a strong foundation that you can use to bring your campaigns to the next level.
Some opinions expressed in this article may be those of a guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.
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