7 Types of Content to Get Traffic, Links and Social Exposure

I’ve spent quite a bit of time recently working with clients on their content strategies for 2012.  Its something I’ve been keen to evangelise and get them to invest resource into, some clients have been harder than others to convince!  I can see why its sometimes a hard thing to buy into, but I firmly believe that having a solid content strategy in place is essential for the majority of sites we work with.  Tom wrote this post on content marketing yesterday which I’d urge you to go and read.

Why companies struggle with content marketing

Two of the common problems that many companies have with content production are -

• Resource to create content – many do not have time or specialist writers in-house
• They lack ideas of what content they can create or their industry is “boring”

There are more, but these are probably the consistent ones that I hear.

I am hoping that the rest of this post helps solve these problems.  I’ve given the following examples for a few reasons -

• Most of them can be used across most industries – boring or not
• They don’t all require hours and hours of resource to get done
• They will help you get traffic or links or both

Getting Inspiration

Before diving into examples, I wanted to give some pointers and tools for how to get inspiration for your clients content. It can be difficult at times, particularly if you have a client in an industry that doesn’t seem particularly interesting at first glance.

Brainstorming internally and with the client

First step should be a bit of a no brainer. But remember some key points to running a good brainstorm session and don’t overlook the opportunity to brainstorm with your client if that is an option. This can have lots of advantages, one of which being that the client can veto or approve edgy ideas straight away. So the outcome will be a list of ideas which you know you can get sign off for which makes the time you send researching more focused.

Non-competitor analysis

You all know to look at what competitors are doing, again thats a no brainer. But make sure you look outside your vertical too and see what cool stuff other people are doing, sometimes you’ll come across an idea that can be easily applied to your own niche or a concept that can be applied to your own content.  For example, with the right data, could you become the Ok Cupid of your industry?

Spezify

I’ve mentioned this before but its worth mentioning again. I love Spezify. If you are ever in a jam and have a bit of brain freeze, plug a keyword or two into it and leave it for a few minutes. It will go off and aggregate loads of tweets, images and all sorts of other results to give you an idea of what is being talked about right now.

For some extra fun, plug a friend or colleagues name into it and see what it finds 

So what here we go with seven types of content you can produce for traffic and link building.

Video Content

This is something which is getting bigger and bigger within Google SERPs at the moment and I think that websites that get on board with this now can dominate in the future. For me, there are two ways you can leverage video content to help your website.

As a link building tool – I’ve written before about getting links using your YouTube videos which is something I’d highly recommend. The other way you can leverage videos is to create your own and use them as link bait – but this is hard. If you have the resources, then go for it and create your own videos.  Just take a look at Zappos who have over 50,000 product videos!

This leads me onto the second way you can leverage video content.

To increase click-throughs from SERPs - Take a look at this result from Zappos:

This puts them a step ahead (see what I did there) of their competitors.  If they can get to a point where their product pages are ranking well and have these snippets showing, then they will most likely see an increase in click through rate from search results because they stand out so much.

We’ve been doing some testing lately on a client site where we are trying to get a video showing in SERPs which when clicked, go straight to the client site rather than somewhere like Vimeo or YouTube.  So far its been working well and I’d recommend using something like Wistia to help you with this.

Infographics

I’ll say it, I don’t really like them that much.  The reason being that I see so many terrible ones that can’t even be classed as infographics.  I also think there are sometimes easier and more efficient ways to get links.  That being said, they can (and do) get links.  If you have the time and resource to do them well, then infographics can be a good way of getting links.

I’ve stolen a few principles from Mark which I’m going to put here.  Really, infographics should do the following if they are to be successful -

• Answer a question or solve someones problem
• Be based on real data that can be backed up
• Make data or facts easier to digest than written content
• Show the user something they didn’t already know

If you do have a good infographic to promote, there are loads of sites out there which are dedicated to just infographics, I published a list here of the ones which I know of.

I know what some of you are thinking, infographics are mega expensive to produce.  Yes they can be, but they do not have to be.  Take a look at this one which Mark did on his personal site which attracted 115 linking root domains.  All he used was a camera and some nice cake mix!

Interactive Content

This excites me a lot more than static infographics.  For me, the companies who find a way of bridging the gap between their product and interactive content will win in the long term.  Lets take a look at an example.

I love this World Cup planner by Marca.  Imagine if you were a retailer of tickets for the World Cup and you produced this.  Imagine you could click through and purchase tickets for the game of your choice, but rather than the standard way of finding them, you use this interactive selector?

This is a perfect use of interactive content because it attracts people to your website for being genuinely useful, but it doesn’t end there, you can convert these people into buyers with the right integration and calls to action.

The next step of link building and content marketing is the integration of this interactive content onto product and category pages – solving the age old problem of getting links to ecommerce pages.  Do this and you’ll win the internet – its hard though!

Q&A Content

If you are tight on budget, this can be a great one to use.  Chances are that whatever product or service you sell, you get common questions about it.  If you have email support staff, they probably have standard copy and paste answers that go into emails – is that content on your website and indexable?  If not, get it on there.

The beauty of this type of content is that it has the ability to attract traffic as well as links, in particular in technical fields.  Also, it is obvious that Google are moving towards becoming a better place to get direct answers to questions, searches such as this prove it -

The trend for users searching using a question rather than a keyword is growing too, look at the insight data for “how can” and “does the” -

If you can position yourself as a site where you provide direct answers, you will not only get good long tail traffic, but you will also move towards becoming an authority in your field.

Make sure you take a look at the Wordtracker Question Tool which can give you some ideas of what people ask related to your keywords.  Also look at your keyword data in Google Analytics and filter for keywords which include things like “how” “what” and “can” etc.

Bonus for ecommerce sites – if you can tie Q&A content into your product pages, you have a massively scalable way of getting good quality, relevant content onto your product pages.  Here is an example of how Jessops are doing this -

I don’t believe this content is currently crawlable, but if it were, long tail traffic would most likely increase.

User Generated Content

You’ve all read about customer reviews as user generated content, but what about other forms of content such as images or videos?  Amazon have been doing this for a long time now but smaller retailers are doing this too, even this retailer that sells garden sheds -

You may need to add an incentive to get customers to go to the effort of this, but even if its just a 10% off voucher, some will do it and you have another sale.

Pro tip – make sure you are asking these customers if they have a blog, Facebook or Twitter accounts.  If they do, send them appropriate calls to action to get them to share the images once they are live on your site.

Guest Blogging

I bet most of us have spent time guest blogging to get links for clients, but how many of you have invited guest bloggers onto your blog to write for you?  It has two main advantages -

• Allows you to get good content if your own resource or time is short
• The writers will naturally share it and link to their article

You will need to dedicate some time to quality control, but this will not be anywhere near as much as you writing the content yourself.

Taking things a step further, you can also use a few principles of gamification to motivate your guest bloggers.  For example you can reward bloggers who get the most traffic, most links or social shares with a random prize.  The key is to make this reward publicly visible and be super transparent about how bloggers can win these prizes.

Competitions

Don’t dismiss this one.  If you can get creative enough, this can not only be a content win but also a link building one.

If you can find a way of coming up with a competition which involves people producing content in order to win, you are onto a winner.  Here is an example of this on PostGrad which involved getting entrants to visualise a piece of data.  The best visualisation won the competition and was featured on the blog.  This not only got links but provided great content for their site -

You can be pretty flexible on the type of content you ask for -

• Written content such as a blog post
• Images – e.g. baiting photographers for their best photos
• Videos – e.g. record a video of yourself singing a song

Some thought it needed to make sure the barrier to entry is low but the quality of the output is high, but this is definitely possible across most industries.

To wrap up, I know that producing great content is not easy.  But you need to at least make a start on the path to getting it right, online brands who are not investing in content are going to get left behind.
Written By: Paddy Moogan Source: Distilled.net

Top 10 WordPress Plugins Every Blogger Should Know in 2012

How can you wow your readers when they visit your blog, so that they never want to leave again?

With over 900,000 new blogposts that are freshly published every day, the competition is fierce for each and every author.

Yet, making your articles the ones that readers want to come back to check out isn’t so hard. On each and every occasion I would argue that providing amazing content is absolutely key.

For this post though, I want to focus on how you can greatly improve the number of shares and awesomeness of your blog, with some of the latest WordPress Plugins.

Here are my top 10 picks for you, to increase Social Media sharing of your articles and blog performance:

#1 Digg Digg – Powerful and simple social sharing buttons

The first plugin I want to introduce is the well known Digg Digg sharing bar, which recently received a major face lift. Social Proof of sharing is one of the most important things for blogpost I found. From BrightEdge’s research, it has proven to increase Social sharing by up to 7 times if included.

Digg Digg makes it super easy to add a floating share bar to your blogpost, just like Mashable for example. You can also choose to add buttons either before or after your posts with the plugin.

Best part: Digg Digg also features the latest sharing button options such as Pinterest andBuffer.

#2 Hello Bar – Convert more readers with a powerful call to action

Another very powerful plugin every blogger should know about is called Hello Bar. It adds a simple line above your articles that you can fill with any message you wish. Personally, I have been using Hello Bar to promote products, events or simply evergreen blogposts.

The plugin is used and trusted by some of the biggest bloggers out there, including Tim Ferris or Eric Ries. It also offers some great customization options, to be either displayed at the top of your page or at the bottom.

Best part: What is most impressive about Hello Bar is the analytics options, allowing you to track exactly how many clicks you are getting on your promotions.

#3 WP Touch – Make your blog mobile friendly

As we are going forward in 2012, not having your blog optimized for the millions of iPhone, Android and other smartphone users is definitely not an option I found. One of the best solutions out there is definitely WP Touch.

Within a split second of installing this plugin, anyone arriving at your blog from a mobile phone will have a wonderfully formatted site in front of them. It gives you some great customization options so you can truncate titles, hide excerpts and other things that are a pain to get working on your mobile normally.

Best part: What I like best with WP Touch is that it has advertising options built in right into the plugin, so you can capitalize more on mobile traffic.

#4 Sexy Bookmarks – Easy sharing of all social bookmarking sites

An awesome plugin solution to add a ton of different social bookmarking buttons to your blog is Sexy Bookmarks by Shareaholic. Especially if you are looking for a plugin that covers some not so well known buttons, this one will be providing them for you.

The plugin also comes with the option to be installed for a great number of other blogging platforms such as tumblr or as a standalone for any website. It is overall a most solid solution for your blog.

Best part: What I like best is the customization option to add a small line of text, that adds that extra amount of personalization to your blog.

#5 W3 Total Cache – Make your site 10 times faster than before

To be quite honest, I have always forgotten about the importance of performance plugins for my own blog. Yet, some great research from KISSmetrics, showing how loading times can affect visiting times of your readers. In fact, half a second of longer loading time would lead to 20% traffic decrease for Google.com.

With W3 Total Cache, you have one of the most powerful caching plugins out there, that will increase the loading time of your blog up to 10 times. It will cache each and every element of your site and readers will be able to read your posts in a split second.

Best part: What I like best is that you are able to individual turn on or off Object Caching, Database caching and other options so performance is absolutely optimized.

#6 The Slide – Suggest related posts to your readers

There have been many attempts of products that aim to keep readers on your site after they have read one of your articles. The Slide is a simple plugin that slides into your page, halfway through an article, just like the New York Times has for example.

What I like about this plugin is that the article suggested is not just any article. The Slide uses a sophisticated algorithm to pick the most relevant and related content for your readers. You can also check out a related plugin called upPrev, as The Slide is currently in private beta.

Best part: An amazing part is that the Slide also allows you to place sharing buttons right on the widget and get more social traffic for your blog.

#7 Twitter Follow Button and Facebook subscribe buttons

Of course, strictly no wordpress plugins, the Twitter follow button and Facebook subscribe button are two of the most indispensable things for bloggers still though I believe.

Although mentioning the two buttons is quite an obvious tip for many, as they are quite well known, there are still a lot of blogs, who don’t make use of them. Both can easily be implemented by copy and pasting the code snippet into a sidebar text widget on your blog.

Best part: What I like best about the two buttons is that the process of following or subscribing is so seamless and doesn’t cause the reader to leave the page.

#8 All in one SEO Pack – The only SEO plugin you will need

Although there exist a ton of great SEO solution out there, one of the most reliable and well maintained plugins is the “All in one SEO Pack”. Especially if you aren’t too familiar with any SEO tactics, this plugin makes it dead simple to understand the most important ones.

The plugin automatically generates Meta tags, optimizes your post titles for search engines and helps you to detect and avoid duplicate content. Even if you have very little SEO knowledge, this plugin will be of great help for you.

Best part: A goodie to mention from this plugin is that it enables you to manually include META tags (title, description and keywords) for each page and post on your site.

#9 Social Metrics – Track how well your posts perform on Social Networks

Another handy solution every blogger should know about is a plugin called Social Metrics. It gives you a slick dashboard inside your WordPress interface, and allows you to track and compare how well each of your posts perform on Social Media.

By being able to track each of your posts in comparision to each other, I found that I could focus a lot better on improving my content. It is also interesting to see, that some posts perform better on different social networks.

Best part: What I like best about Social Metrics is that there is no setup involved for you and you can start tracking seconds after you install the plugin.

#10 Social Media Widget – Display all your Social profiles in one place

A lot of the times, you might want to display larger amount of your different Social Media profiles, especially as Pinterest and others are being added to the mix and official buttons aren’t available yet.

With the super easy to handle Social Media widget, you will be able to do exactly that and display any Social Networking profile you can think of.

Best part: What is super handy with this plugin, is that you are even able to create your own icons of Social Media accounts and personalize the look and feel much more.

Those are the 10 most indispensable WordPress plugins for 2012 I believe. Each of them has definitely given my blog a huge boost. I hope some of them are helpful for you too. Which plugin is your favorite of the above?
Written By: Leo Widrich Source: JeffBullas.com

Avoid 5 Common Mistakes When Writing For The Web

Writing for the web is a unique style of writing. It’s easy to make mistakes that drive the audience away and you only have a very small window of opportunity to grab their attention. People skim when they read online, so online writing needs to be punchy to draw attention. Here are 5 common mistakes people make writing online. If you can avoid these you’re on the way to web success.

1. Not Grabbing Attention

You need to grab the attention of your audience when they visit. Sounds simple but when you are dealing with a few seconds to accomplish this, the task becomes a bit more difficult – and even more important.

Short and Sweet

Keep your paragraphs short and pack every word with value. Your titles and subheadings need to catch the eye and speak directly to what the section deals with. Whatever you do, don’t sacrifice content in favor of short blurbs. You want your reader to read them and come away knowing something new, not wondering what the point was.

For emphasis in content paragraphs, make things stand out. Use bold tags for keywords. If you’re using links, give them descriptive text instead of just a hyperlink. All of these are ways you can grab the attention of your readers and hold it while they browse your content.

2. Not Utilizing Formatting

Formatting is important in web reading. There are a number of mistakes that can be made in formatting. Make sure everything is aligned properly in different browsers. You don’t want your text to create a horizontal scroll bar. Make sure everything wraps properly.

Create Breaks in Content

Use line breaks for paragraphs. Break up long paragraphs into multiple smaller paragraphs. List information in list format with numbered lists or bullet points. White space in your text is just as important as the text itself. If you have giant walls of dense paragraphs, the average reader’s eyes will glaze over and they’ll skip over the page.

3. Not Being Relevant

Your content above all needs to be relevant. Think about your audience. Who are they? Make sure you’re writing content that your readers will actually want to read. That’s what separates online journals with blogs. Journals are personal information that means nothing to anyone else, blogs are of public interest and relevancy.

Stick to the Subject

You need to be honest with yourself about your writing. You can’t delude yourself into thinking your content is important when it’s not, or that your readers care when they don’t. However, that doesn’t mean you need to write everything in a far-off impersonal tone. Write personally, directly to the reader, and entice them.

4. Not Obeying Grammar

Grammar rules are incredibly important online. It seems like everywhere you go you spot people writing with u instead of you and other chat shortcuts. That might be fine for texting, but web writing is entirely different. The more work your readers have to do to read, the less likely any of them will. Write properly.

5. Not Being Specific

This comes back to knowing your readers. If you use business terms, specific medical terms, acronyms or other esoteric words, define them. If your readers don’t understand what you’re writing, you’re not writing well enough. Anything that might not be commonly known to your readers deserves a definition.

Once you realize that writing for the web is almost the opposite of academic writing, it all falls into place. Every word needs to be important to your readers. Put some effort into it, know your readers, and your web writing will succeed.
Written By: Brendan Schneider Source: Business2Community.com

Content Marketing Wisdom: “Any Content…Has to Be More Than Just an Occasional Exercise.”

Weidert Group is a full-service marketing firm that has established its employees as thought leaders in the field of inbound marketing via the Whole Brain Marketing Blog. The Weidert team also develops content marketing strategies for its clients, covering a range of industries that include alternative energy, healthcare, food service, and various others.

We recently spoke with the crew behind Whole Brain Marketing—editor Sean Johnson, account executive Frank Isca, and creative director Meg Hoppe—about how their content marketing program has progressed, as well as their advice for companies looking to develop their own content programs.



We blog five days a week. For this we have five regular contributors and a part-timer. When blogging so frequently, burnout is inevitable. We prevent this by having weekly meetings to talk about ideas and themes to keep the content fresh and moving. We also ask our sales department about the questions that are frequently asked by customers and compile the answers into a blog.

In the beginning, we were blogging because it seemed like it was something that should be done. We weren’t very dedicated to it and, not surprisingly, we didn’t see a lot of feedback from the blog. Now our goal is to publish information that answers a need, and to create opportunities to convert prospects into leads and eventually into customers. We regularly review our content to see what types of posts are driving reader responses.

We keep our topics to a 70/20/10 rule. Seventy percent is informational content on inbound marketing, 20 percent is geared toward tools and how-to, and the last 10 is content designed to promote us. Our content integrates a call-to-action, which we leverage through HubSpot, in order to gain new leads and new business.

We’ve had steady growth in our blog’s readership since we committed to publishing each business day. There are some topics, such a Pinterest, where we see large spikes in readership, and others that do not get much traction. We review those results regularly and are always trying to refine how we present information in our blog. We want to make sure we are providing information that is useful, as well as links to additional and more detailed information.

Content marketing and inbound marketing need a commitment if you expect to see positive results. Any content, whether it is a blog or tip sheet or a Facebook post, has to be more than just an occasional exercise. You need to provide quality information on a regular basis to keep prospects interested and see any benefits in your search results.

A good blog can support many other things—from tip sheets to e-books to content for your social media—and it can function like a backbone for your content marketing.
Written By: D.T. Pennington Source: Business2Community.com

See The History of Content Marketing [Infographic]

Like this infographic? Get more content marketing information from the Content Marketing Institute.

Search Engines vs. News Sites - Optimizing News for Searchers

While content is central to news publishers’ value proposition, you could say that distribution is a close second. Before the Internet, consumers either got their news from a newspaper, a magazine, or a TV broadcast (and word of mouth, but for our purposes, we’ll stick with the media versions).

These media channels are essentially “push” distribution vehicles delivering, at scale, a produced and edited unit – the news – for mass consumption. Even if consumers wanted to engage with multiple news sources, it's difficult to read five newspapers in a day or watch three separate news broadcasts simultaneously.

This paradigm changed dramatically with the advent of the Internet, as readers could now easily read snippets of news from various sources with a few clicks of the mouse. You could scan the front pages of several newspapers, or even more simply, scan the headlines on a news aggregation site in a matter of seconds to get a quick feel for what is happening in the world. Furthermore, if there was a single big story that day, you could read through dozens of articles on the same subject for different angles and tidbits.

With this paradigm shift, news distribution has evolved into being more of a “pull” mechanism, where consumers are in greater control of what news they consume and how they consume it. News discovery has evolved beyond deciding which TV station to watch; consumers can request information on particular subjects and they’ll come right to your computer screen. Search plays a critical role in this discovery process, and when analyzing the data, some notable patterns emerge.

News Search Optimization – Search Engines vs. News Sites

Keeping up on news search optimization is a daunting task for any news publisher or marketer. With the news business being so dynamic, it's hard enough keeping up on all of the latest news stories, let alone optimizing your search campaigns to capitalize on breaking news at a moment’s notice.

SEO and SEM professionals at these organizations are constantly trying to come up with evergreen architecture and techniques to maximize their exposure as events unfold. Although this is often the most pressing concern with news search, there is an overlooked area worth paying attention to as well:

• Is the way that searchers look for news on search engines any different than the way they look for news on news websites? 
• Is there anything we can learn from this that would allow us to better prioritize our marketing efforts?

News-related searching has ballooned over the past few years, both on search engines and on news sites, but how people search on these different sites and what they search for differs greatly.

For the purposes of this research, search engines are defined as the big 5 web searches – Google web search, Yahoo web search, Bing web search, AOL web search, and Ask web search – while news site search includes the six largest news sites based on their search totals – Yahoo-ABC News Network, Google News, Bing News, NYTimes.com, CNN.com, and MSNBC.com.

In February 2012, U.S. searchers conducted 371 million news related searches on search engines, as defined by comScore’s intent categorization methodology, which accounted for 2.3 percent of all search engines searches performed during the month.

But searches performed on non-search engine news sites actually outdistanced search engines news search, totaling 581 million searches in February. Although search engines play an integral role in the news discovery process, the actual news providers and aggregators are still leading the pack.

Behaviorally speaking, it appears that consumers of news data are still more likely to go directly to a “news” specific search engine than they are to run news searches on search engines themselves. The vertical nature of these sites appears to resonate with the searchers, as news searchers are less interested in extraneous results for their news searches that they may get on the broader search engines (e.g., Whitney Houston CDs being sold right next to the news article they want to read regarding her funeral).

News Search Behavior Reflects Search Context

With a review of the actual terms that news searchers use on these different types of search sites, we can see a distinct difference in the intent of the searchers. Search engine news searches focus heavily on a particular news destination.
Within the top 25 search terms driving traffic to News/Information sites in February, half referred to specific news destinations, such as “CNN”, “TMZ”, “Fox News”, and “MSNBC.” The searchers clearly want to be taken to a news specific destination to consume their news.

Search terms driving traffic to news sites from search engines – February 2012

News site searchers, on the other hand, focus almost exclusively on the content they’re interested in because they are already at their intended news destination. The search term lists pulled from news site search isn’t cluttered with branded news destinations, they are solely about stories and topics of interest.

Celebrity name searching is a particular favorite, dominating the Top 25 list. If this data is any indication, it becomes abundantly clearly why the Paparazzi follow celebrities everywhere they go, U.S. consumers are obsessed with reading about them!

Using Search Intelligence to Win Long Term News Brand Loyalty

Based on the intelligence available, there are opportunities for news publishers and marketers to better allocate their advertising resources that could drive better click-through rates and engagement.

When searchers are on search engines, they focus very heavily on finding a branded news destination first, before searching for a particular news story. So anything that can be done to better brand your news destination site could potentially drive much greater long term value with search engine searchers. This is not to say that optimizing your news stories to be found on search engines isn’t valuable, but the behavioral inference that they rely heavily on branded news destination search terms can impact your broader marketing efforts.

News searchers type in a news destination first, and then search for specific news stories after arriving on those news sites. Being that the branded destinations are key to the way searchers navigate to news stories from search engines, you have to allocate your marketing resources accordingly across search, display, and video. You don’t want to just be their news destination for today’s stories, but for every day’s stories.
Written By: Eli Goodman Source: SearchEngineWatch.com

3 Key Questions & Answers - Small Business Blogging should have Values

Earlier this week Frank J. Kenny did a Skype interview with me about small business blogging and why or why not it makes sense. Frank’s audience is the network of Chambers of Commerce across the U.S..  I think it’s a timely question considering the ongoing “blogging is dead“, “no it’s not“ debate that’s been going on for the past 5 years or so.

As a small business owner myself, I’ve been blogging here at Online Marketing Blog for over 8 years and can testify as to the pros and cons like few others can. In our case, we’ve had great success with our blog as a way to achieve industry awareness and credibility, attract new business, employees, media coverage, speaking opportunities and many other benefits.
In the interview with Frank, he asked 3 key questions about blogging and social media that I wanted to share here since it’s had such a huge impact for both our clients large and small, as well as on our own small business.

Why should small businesses blog?

Blogging is a method of creating and publishing conversational content. Blogs are an easy to use content management system. The value is in the content and ability for companies to leverage the inherent promotion and engagement capabilities of the blog publishing platform. Blogging offers a few key advantages:

1. Easy to use platform to create sharable, linkable content that addresses specific prospect and customer interests
2. Serves as a hub to a hub and spoke model of content marketing and promotion
3. Creates a promotable SEO and Social Media asset – every post is a potential destination for a link and an entry point through search engines.

Through multiple channels of discovery, blog content can reach:

• Prospects
• Existing customers
• Potential employees
• Marketing partners, investors
• The media: journalists, bloggers

What is the impact of Google+ on search and how does it affect business blog marketing?

Google+ personalization and it’s impact on search is the hot topic and any company that wants an advantage in Google search results needs to consider Google+ and other social media participation. The behaviors of content creation, sharing and engagement are incredibly rich signals that search engines can use to improve search results quality and search user experience.

The more people that have included your Google+ profile or page in their circles, the more likely content that you’ve created, shared and engaged with will appear in their Google search results while they’re logged in. Google+ optimization should be an essential part of any business blog effort.

At the same time, social media content, whether it’s text, images or video is content that can be crawled and ranked in search results. Social media optimization can improve search visibility of that social content for people that are actively looking for solutions.

When we make optimization recommendations, we go beyond search keywords and have our clients consider social topics as well. Understanding what keywords consumers are searching on as well as the topics they’re discussing on blogs, twitter, and other social networks can inform an editorial plan that does a much better job of attracting new customers because it’s focused on their language and the things they care about. Incidentally, I go deep, deep into this within Optimize.

How much emphasis should small business bloggers place on SEO vs social media?

The consumer journey through the sales funnel is increasingly weaving through a social and search experience. Our model of optimization focuses on how consumers Discover, Consume and Share content so the notion that people will come across a small business solution because of a social connection to a friend that then leads to a search on Google or Bing to get more information is entirely likely and common.

When people use specific words in a search they are segmenting or qualifying themselves to a certain degree because the words they use indicate intent to a particular purpose or outcome. Creating, optimizing and socializing blog content according to those purposes or pain points can be very powerful for any sized business that wants to be found or talked about where relevant customers are looking.
There’s so much more I can say about this (and I will – see my upcoming speaking schedule)

Here’s the video version of the interview:

Despite the success we’ve had with our own business blogging efforts at TopRank Online Marketing, we’re probably only realizing a fraction of the potential benefits from business blogging. If that’s the case, why do so many other companies with significantly greater resources fail at blogging for their business? They quit, lack vision, underestimate resources and timeframe, and fail to understand where blogging can be integrated with achieving multiple business goals.

Hopefully you’ll find the advice above useful to help your business blogging effort. If you have specific biz blogging questions, please ask them in the comments.
Written By: Lee Odden  Source: TopRankBlog.com

Quality Link Building Needed - Its Necessary to Check for Low Quality Links

I’m tired of this conversation:

“We’ve been working with an SEO agency for about 6 months now. We ranked quite well for a few weeks, and then the rankings dropped. We don’t know what they do, exactly, but they send us 4 directory links and 2 article submssions a month. Oh, and they do a PR release for us, once a month”

It’s a starting point in a sales discussion I experience all too often. It’s often a precursor to the part of the conversation where we discover the business is being bled dry by a more-than-substandard SEO product that is completely ineffective and alarmingly expensive. No rankings, gone. No traffic. And, still paying! In some cases being told to pay more!

Crapola. Of the weapons grade kind.

Wil got frustrated with Google, specifically how they make liars out of the good guys. We’ve all done our tests, and, in the past, experienced SEO’s would tell you exactly what types of linkbuilding and SEO practices would (and still might) work. That’s fine – if you’re looking to generate a fast buck on a throwaway domain then I have no issues with that – it can be lucrative, fun and a challenging learning curve. Eventually Google will catch you, and you’ll move on. Noone loses.
If you’re that SEO agency, I don’t know how you can feel good about what you do. If you’re an ordinary, everyday on-line business, and that discussion feels weirdly familiar, fire that SEO company.
Stuff like this does not wash:

Neither does this:

Wait, what?!

It seems that Google are beginning a new wave of attacks on spammy linkbuilding practices, and I’m personally pleased to see it. There, I said it.

Detecting bad link-building practices – it’s extremely easy

Tom Anthony wrote a long post on detecting bad link activity with SEOmoz’s metrics. That’s a reasonable methodology to profile back links according to SEOmoz metrics, but if you really need to weed out the bad stuff, I recommend getting back to the old school and adding Domain PageRank to the mix. Niel’s SEO Tools have a =GooglePageRank function, which works really nicely for backlink weeding:

Which can lead to this with a simple pivot table:

Here’s what I did to make that table (excuse the voice over, I have a *slight* cold):

Please, think about where your links are coming from

Anyway – rant over, I suppose. Bad link building makes our whole industry look bad. Don’t help perpetuate it by casually brushing your due diligence aside. You’ll end up paying to reverse the damage being caused in the long run.
Written By: Richard Baxter Source: SEOGadget.co.uk