Friday, April 5, 2013

Content Strategy - An Important Aspect of Marketing

It is not that simple to entice visitors towards the online destination of merchandises, oodles of search engine marketing efforts are desired to attract their attention. However, amid all those verticals of this improvised form of marketing that claim their credit in luring the potential visitors, it is perhaps the quality content that ultimately steals the show, let us know why.



Importance of content:
In the domain of online marketing, content could be deemed as a sensible stuff that could motivate the people towards buying a particular product. Having said that, it could be anything but gibberish; intelligently blended with the material that never seems like an advertisement yet manages to gather a respectable customer base. Whatever is its form, whether text, audio, video or image, it ought to be interactive. This evidently fuels the necessity of chalking out a sound and soothing content strategy that could appeal masses.

Content strategy:
Three effective points lead to the formulation of a thriving content strategy that could really lift the reputation of a website:
•    Creation of gripping content
•    Assuring increased search engine rankings
•    Mustering quality backlinks from other sites

Gripping content:
 An engaging content is one that could attract the potential visitors and at the same time could also be indexed by search engines more often. Intense use of keywords is likely to distort the originality of the content thereby making it more search engine friendly rather than user friendly. It is therefore necessary to design content that is appealing enough both for the users as well as search engines. After all, the ultimate goal is to make the most of a web page in the form of high end monetary benefits and only an informative, readable yet SEO friendly content could do the honors.

Enhanced search engine rankings:
Significant traffic boost together with high search engine rankings comprise of the most important ingredients of a thriving content strategy. Needless to say, quality content paves its part significantly towards helping these ingredients striking the right chords. Though, including good Meta tags is definitely a good practice that helps the web page to be identified by search engines. But yet again it is the actual text on a web page that enhances the chances of indexing, which is a must to make way for enhanced traffic and better search page rankings.

Mustering quality backlinks from other sites:
Search engine rankings are heavily influenced by high quality inbound links. If a particular web page is linked to multiple authoritative pages that own a higher credibility over the search engines, the chances of former to secure enhanced traffic and therefore high ranking, increase excellently. However, the number of inbound links could witness an appreciable surge only if the content is genuine, to-the-point and relevant.

Additionally, the number of social media websites such as StumbleUpon, Delicious Digg, Magnolia and so on has increased heavily in the recent times that have contributed towards assuring bigger and better customer base online. The importance of fresh and flawless copy that could enthrall the attention of these millions of online visitors has therefore grown to manifolds. Most of the big companies attain this coveted targeted by producing more articles, press releases and blog posts on regular basis and they have indeed got success in mustering high quality inbound links.

Content strategy in the post-panda and post-penguin era:
Google keeps on updating its algorithms so as to bar the low-quality content from getting any attention on the search pages, this instantly work sin the favor of websites that possess high grade content. Abiding by this fact, many of the SEO companies have been targeted that used redundant, keyword stuffed, and unattractive content, both with respect to the readers as well as the search engines since the past one year, thanks to the advent of Google Panda and Google Penguin algorithm (announced on April, 2012).
Implementation of these algorithms have left the room for only superior content to break the ice while those with lower grade no more share the space of search pages. Owing to this fact, certain important amendments in the content strategy are worthy to be taken care of the prominent of them being avoiding ‘thin content’ and combating the occurrence of LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) issues. In short, attention to details is a must while drafting out a copy, such as:
  •     Reduce grammatical mistakes to all time minimum
  •     Avoid writing crap copy, full of keywords and devoid of real meaning
  •     Use keywords as well as the words that relate to them, such as synonyms in balanced proportion.
  •     Do not overuse or under use keywords
  •     Avoid redundant copy that conveys same intent repeatedly

What is Local SEO? A Complete Guide to promote Locally

In this article I will cover following questions:-
1.    What is local SEO?
2.    What is the need to do it?
3.    How to do it?


What Is Local SEO?
        Basically local SEO can be defined as various strategies required to be performed on website to make it rank first on local Google searches. Either you have small or large business with target on a particular country, state or region you need to optimize your webpage according to local SEO for serving the purpose to rank well in local searches.

No business owner wants his words to be heard or seen by non- interested eyes and ears; this is where local SEO helps in focusing on right customers and particular area for your business according to your services you provide. 

I will discuss various local SEO strategies and web page optimization further below.


What is the Need of Local SEO?
       You have understood What is local SEO, now it’s time to reveal its need. Before understanding its need first we need to understand what happens when we enter our search in search bar of Google and hit enter, Google basically uses your IP (internet protocol address) as a factor to give you results, it will only show you those results which are appropriate for your area. In simple words Google takes physical location of searcher in to the consideration before showing results. For example if someone is searching “restaurants” in California Google will show restaurants in California only and if someone is searching for restaurants in India it will show “restaurants” in India only, which states that Google results matters according to the country or region. Now if you search for restaurants from your mobile Google will not search according to your city then it will search for places near your current location so that you can reach their fast and easy. To make it understand I will use following example to make it more clear.

If I search for “pub” in Google it shows me this:-


Type the same in your search bar of Google and look the difference between the results.

Suppose you have business of a coffee parlor in California and think how much beneficial it would be for your business when someone searches for coffee parlors in California and your website comes at first place locally. So this is how if you are a business owner with particular region in target then you need to do local SEO to your website, above example disclose the need of local SEO.

How to Do Local SEO?
    The answer of this question always remains dark or unclear but today I would like to answer this question with best of my experience and knowledge.

Have a look on the following points.
1.    Optimize Your Website
    Start local SEO by first optimizing your website for having good ranking in local search results.
•    Make sure your website has clear and accessible WebPages and links so that Google or users won’t face any problems to accessing it.
•    Link important pages to home page.
•    Have proper XML and HTML site maps so that Google crawlers can go where ever they want.
•    Introduce robort.txt in your website. 
•    Internal linking will add plus point in your website.
•    Find and Repair broken links.

Fill Your Website with Quality and Good Content:
    Make sure your website has good content which describes services offered by you and other related information. Make your each web page loaded with title and description.
Be sure to add “alt” tag in your images and never over use a particular phrase this can harm your website, just be descriptive about what you offer.
Give Google a reason to come back and crawl your website aging up updating it frequently and give your visitors authority to have contact with you by giving them your email.

2.    Make Your Visitors Contact You Easily
    Provide complete business address details and other related contact information so that your visitors can reach you easily and display it on each web page of yours. And if you have a physical address, add a Google sitemap on your website. You can also add comments so that your visitors can comment also; the main thing is let your customers join you.

Spread Your Business Information
    Let Google and Visitors know you. Internet is a means where you can spread your business fast by listing your business in following sites:-
1.    Local Directories or Local Citations Sources
2.    Google Local

•    Local directories and citations:-

        Internet is about information more you spread about your business more Google will know about you. There are thousands of local directory websites are available, submit and list your business there with your business name, postal address, phone number, description of services, photos, working hours and other related details. Make sure to provide only correct information. Because of these directories Google as well as visitors will know you.

•    Google Local:-
Basically Google places for business is a high authority website by Google itself it lets you to register your business with related images and details of your business and sends you a post card for verification. This will help Google and customers to know about you more.
If you don’t have a proper physical address or you work from home you can hide your address but still have to verify your details but the difference will be people won’t come and knock your door.

Take Control of A
ll Your Business Information:-
    If in any case you face change in your business address or phone number then be sure to update your directories also. Don’t let any barrier to come in-between you and your customers. Frequently update your contact and related information if any occur.

3.    Social Media
Never forget to promote your business, promote your- self and got promoted by your customers. Register your business with most famous social websites like
1.    Google+(first preference)
2.    Facebook
3.    Twitter
4.    LinkedIn
Let your customers to get engaged and interact with you. Add share buttons in your websites. Let your customers to leave reviews about you on Google+ and related top social channels media. Frequently add latest updates on your business in these websites and even tweet them. The main thing is to get interaction with your customers because a good word from your customer can get you lots of business and will help to earn trust easily.

Social media is very powerful weapon in Local SEO. Once you are promoted here it will promote you automatically. Do simple but effective. More you let your customers engage with you more popularity you will get.