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Key Questions to Optimize Your Content Marketing Strategy

Posted by under Pay-Per-Click

I’ve been thinking about how entering the content marketing space is not for the faint of heart. It can be a signifcant undertaking both in terms of resources and a change in an organization’s approach to marketing and sales. Obviously, content marketing is better for some companies and industries than others. Outside help also makes a difference. While increasing numbers of companies are realizing they  must provide more than product information to satisfy customers, many of those same companies fail by implementing random tactics and missing out on benefits like better search visibility. In order to take full advantage of the significant gains in search traffic that are available with a content focused marketing effort, it’s essential to answer some key questions: What do you really know about your customers? I put customers first before company goals because a social media and content focused marketing effort must emphasize the needs of those you’re trying to reach in order to meet your own. Think of it as, “Give to get”. Who are you trying to reach? Have you developed Buyer Personas ? How well do you understand your customers’ goals? What are your customers preferences when it comes to content discovery, consumption and sharing? What keywords do they associate with your products or services? Who are they influenced by? In what communities do they spend their time on the social web? What business objectives are you trying to achieve? What are your goals? What is your social media strategy ? What must happen for your customers before you meet your business objectives? What are teh key performance indicators that will help you measure the buyer persona’s path towards conversion? Do you have the measurement tools in place to properly monitor and measure for research and to determine the effectiveness of your marketing efforts? What does the competitive SERPs landscape look like? What does the search engine results page look like for the keyword phrases you’re after? The SERPs page is a big part of the competitive landscape for SEO. What types of web sites appear in first page results? Who is linking to them and not linking to you? What type of Universal results are triggered? (News, Blogs, Real-time, Books, Products, Local) What types of media are included in the SERPs for your target phrases? (Images, Video). Will the new Google design have any impact on the SERPs landscape for your target keyword phrases? What other types of search engines should you focus on besides Google.com, Yahoo.com and Bing.com? What resources will you need to succeed? Most companies are not in the publishing business. In order to achieve longevity for an optimized content marketing effort, it’s important to outline the resources available to implement including: content, people, processes. Content . What content do you currently have available for optimization? What content will you need to create according to your keyword glossary and customer needs? Know what digital assets you have available for publishing online and indentify what new media you may need to create, and who will be creating/promoting it. People . Who will create that content in your organization? What in-house content development resources do you normally use? What new content resources, including other departments, could you leverage for SEO? What other groups in your organization will you need to coordinate with in order to execute on promotions? Processes . what is the current content creation and promotion process? Identify how can you make optimization a baked-in part of established content publishing processes. Determin whether manual keyword glossary sharing is applicable or if the content management system can be modified to dynamically pull in keyword options when adding new content. Can SEO be made part of the corporate identity standards and incorporated into the style guide? What is the right tactical mix to help you reach your goals? Based on customer preferences, your goals, the SERPs and resources, what channels will you optimize? What mix of content creation will be used? Web pages, press releases, white papers, case studies, online newsroom with press releases, articles, video, images, audio, rich media, sharing content on social sharing web sites.  How will you get the content creators within and external to your organization trained on content optimization? What oversight and monitoring methods will you use to ensure quality and avoid unfortunate overwrites? Also, what link building tactics will be emphasized? How can you leverage existing communications and relationships to increase relevant links? Can you tap into existing dealer networks, affiliates, branch office web sites and marketing partners for quality links? Can you get public relations on board with using links that are more likely to be included in placements? Can links be better optimized for SEO within other online documents such as press releases? How will you measure success and what tools will you use? Measurement is the most critical piece of an optimized content marketing program. Measurement with social media monitoring tools up front can be essential in defining the social conversations driving content creation, sharing and consumption that are consistent with your marketing goals. Once a program is implemented, analytics will help measure key performance indicators (KPIs), conversions and anything in between. There’s a lot you can measure so here are a few examples for SEO, Social Media and Online PR. SEO related measurement often includes search referrals and keywords that drive traffic to the web site, what search engines send traffic and what the visitors do once they visit. Relative measures of rankings and links can be useful as well. Ultimately, conversions are an idea measurement for SEO, whether it’s a white paper download, webinar signup or an actual product/service sale. Social media measurement often includes engagement metrics such as fans/friends/followers, comments, brand mentions & sentiment, referred traffic and links. Tracking buzzing topics on the social web can create opportunities for real time content creation/optimization and promotion. Online PR measurement often depends on determining the effectiveness of press releases distributed via email directly to a short list of journalists or to a newswire service for broader exposure online. Blog and publication mentions (unsolicited) as well as links and sentiment are also important. Do no underestimate the value and importance of using social monitoring and web analytics to help inform the ongoing content marketing opportunities and the creation of specific types of content in order to attract trending search traffic. Social conversations fuel search traffic. Understand the keywords most often used in social conversations and you may get a leg up on your competition by creating, optimizing and promoting content that’s being discussed and popular. © Online Marketing Blog , 2010. | Key Questions to Optimize Your Content Marketing Strategy | No comment | http://www.toprankblog.com

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Key Questions to Optimize Your Content Marketing Strategy

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SEO with Feeds & XML

Posted by under Internet Marketing, Pay-Per-Click

Much of the search engine optimization advice found online at at conferences centers around keywords and links. A lot of the spotlight on internet marketing has focused on content and social media. There’s no question that Online Marketing has been a strong proponent of these tactics, sharing many, many posts on SEO topics Content and link based SEO relies on the search engine crawlers to find web pages and digital assets on their own. Search engines are far from perfect at this, so the opportunity to provide search engines with structured lists of content via feed, can provide some companies with a competitive advantage. At SES New York I moderated a session on Pushing Feeds and XML with  Brian Ussery , Amanda Watlington and Daron Babin . Much of what we share on SEO is focused on content and links so I thought I’d share some of the rich insights shared in this very useful session with you by asking the panel a few follow up questions. How much of an advantage can supplying a XML feed offer a site for indexing and search visibility? Brian: It’s really difficult to quantify in terms of a percentage but, I’d say the larger your site and more images you have the better it is to provide an XML Sitemap. How important is it for a new site to supply (or make available) a XML sitemap for search engines? Brian: Sitemaps are one of the best ways I can think of to let engines know about your new pages and images. Amanda: A new site has no inbound links hence there is no way for a search engine to find the site. A Sitemap not only provide a point of departure for the crawling of a new site, by putting one together a site owner can include the most important pages. This is particularly useful if the site is quite large. The Sitemap can cue to spider to pages that in fact link much deeper into the site. This jump starts the indexing process. Would you ever advise a company NOT to use sitemaps? Amanda: There are very rare occasions where I would not use a Sitemap. Those instances are when the contents of the site are very problematic. When there are lots of duplicate content issues that are in the process of being resolved, it makes little sense to urge the search engines to grab a Sitemap that will only bring them to the site’s woes even faster. Once the issues are settled then the Sitemap becomes an important weapon in the SEO’s arsenal. Brian: If you have pages that you don’t want indexed, it’s probably best not to include those URLs in your XML Sitemap. Other than those kinds of situations though, I’d say Sitemaps are the way to go. I would suggest however, not including XML meta data in Sitemaps unless it’s accurate, correct and up to date. It was interesting to learn during our session, the variety of feed types that could be used from those associated with web pages to news to video and I recall one for NASA? Do you have any examples that have called for unusual solutions or use of feeds? Amanda: Structured data such as the Sitemap is fascinating in that it provides so many opportunities to communicate data information in a machine-readable format. There are two feed types that we did not discuss during the session. First, there are product feeds, such as those used by Google Base and other comparative shopping search engines. These allow merchants to draw product information quickly and efficiently from their databases and submit it to a shopping engine. Once formatted, a site owner can submit thousands of products with little or no intervention. The second type of feed was just announced this past week. It is now possible to submit image information (to Google). This has been long awaited. I’ve not yet had a chance to use this, but I have been eagerly awaiting image Sitemaps. Brian: While this kind of XML isn’t my forte, it’s my understanding that the code below is used by NASA to “move” telescopes. This is just one example of the cool stuff you can you can do with XML… Either way, it’s kind of interesting to see! You can find out more at NASA . How important is the protocol Pubsubhubbub being promoted by Google? Does it replace the need for autodiscovery? Brian: Great question Lee, Pubsubhubbub, PuSH or hubbub for short, in case you haven’t heard is an open protocol for turning atom or RSS feeds into streams. Because it requires real feed URLs, autodiscovery isn’t really necessary. So, I don’t see Pubsubhubbub as a replacement for autodiscovery per se, but rather as a more efficient method. Some folks I’m sure will continue to use autodiscovery for their feeds but I think PuSH provides additional advantages that will be favored by most. Is there a threshold for how many pages/items should be included in a sitemap feed or how often data is updated to determine whether providing a sitemap is worth it? Amanda: It is difficult to give an across the board threshold for when and how much to include. With retailers, we clearly must look at their seasonality and time the Sitemap submissions to be sure that any new products or category level pages have been spidered and indexed prior to the season’s start. How much to submit is really tied to how complete is the site’s current indexing. I personally believe that it is possible to strategically manage the process making sure that key pages which direct to deeper pages are included. As I mentioned in the session, Sitemaps are not a blunt object, a club, to be used to batter one’s way into the index, rather they provide a method for strategically informing the search engines of what you want found. I love to fish, salt or fresh water, and I think of Sitemaps with a fishing metaphor. They are bait. Whether you submit a Sitemap or not, it is important to have a Webmaster Tools account. The Google team that is responsible for developing this resource continues to make it a much richer and more informative. Today, I consider it a powerful resource for knowing just what the most powerful engine is seeing in a site. © Online Marketing Blog , 2010. | SEO with Feeds & XML | No comment | http://www.toprankblog.com

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SEO with Feeds & XML

Internet Marketing & Seo Tips: 2 Ways To Effectively Target Your Audience Online

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It’s far from a secret that the internet is the place to be seen as an advertiser these days. The worldwide web is absolutely awash with pop up ads and branded content, rightly so given the millions of consumers surfing, searching or sharing on this platform at any given time. As a marketer, therefore, it has become vitally important to not only know your audience, but to reach them successfully. Every advertising dollar counts, and they must be invested in the places where your target consumers can be found. As such, this article will address two targeting techniques for improving the effectiveness of your online marketing efforts: day-part targeting and events-triggered targeting. Day-Part Targeting involves marketing to consumers at certain times of the day. Having identified your target customer, it is important to build up an idea of their online habits. Specifically, this involves determining exactly when can they be found online. If they work full time, it is perhaps not the best idea to send them emails about your latest product offers at 9am, especially on a Monday. A shrewder choice might be to send these types of messages at lunchtime on a Wednesday, when your targeted audience would be more likely to be on a break. It is also important to think of what your consumer may want at a specific time when they are online. For example, a 24 hour deli should post paid search ads that appear after midnight looking to attract hungry students after a night out. The concept is very simple: consider who your target is and when they might be online in order to maximize conversion. Events-triggered Targeting is a method that seeks to take advantage of different events in the world, from birthdays to Valentine’s Day, from rainy afternoons to political crises. These events can be divided into scheduled and non-scheduled. Scheduled events such as birthdays present an opportunity to engage with your consumer; it provides an opportunity for a marketer to sell the companies’ latest promotions without being invasive. Unscheduled events should be quickly acted on whenever they occur. Utilize cold weather in your advertisements even if your company does not sell heaters. ‘Beat the freeze with these hot new deals’ could be a slogan for any company, but it becomes more relevant given an appropriate climate. The advantage with unscheduled events is the opportunity to leverage current events and use them to drive traffic toy your conversion pages. Online ads can be created and published within minutes; a feat that few other media can rival. The key factor with each of these approaches is presenting an opportunity to your audience at the optimum point at which they are most likely to buy.  If a marketer can identify the moments when consumers will be most likely to make a purchase or seek more information – and create touchpoints that correlate with those moments -  their online conversion rates will almost certainly increase. – About the Author: Tim Kennedy writes on behalf of inSegment, Boston’s leader in  search engine marketing , internet marketing , and the home of  Boston SEO . Article Source

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Internet Marketing & Seo Tips: 2 Ways To Effectively Target Your Audience Online

Are Seo Packages A Good Investment?

Posted by BlogPostman under Pay-Per-Click

When you own a website, your primary focus is to attract a constant flow of new (organic) traffic.  You will likely have a set of established, returning visitors whom you can count on to make purchases, but the success of any company is marked by its growth.  When you are seeking to make your website bigger, better, or more popular, the simple fact is that you need more visitors.  While Pay Per Click advertising is a common method of attempting this, the development of bots and companies that would click just to generate income or make your numbers look higher than they really are caused this market to largely decline.  Ultimately, without visitors to your page you have no sales.  Furthermore, if your page hits are being generated by ad clicks, then the people visiting your page likely don’t understand or have interest in what it is that you are actually offering.  SEO packages are different that they offer a chance for you to get organic, unpaid traffic flowing to your website.  With these packages, you are able to commission a steady stream of articles that provide important and relevant content, ensuring that readers know exactly what you have to offer and that they visit your site because they are genuinely interested. Not to mention how happy it makes the search engines to feed them on a regular basis. When it comes down to it, quality SEO packages are an investment in your company.  Article marketing takes a bit longer than standard click based advertising to really show its full potential, but ultimately it is the best option for your site.  When paid clicks lead people to your site, they are apt to simply click away when they realize they are not where they thought they would be.  Article marketing, however, ensures that every click and every follow through is from someone who is looking specifically for your page.  This greatly increases the chances that the visitor will purchase your products or services. SEO packages also offer the distinct benefit of remaining available to readers for as long as the directory is active.  This means that an article can continue to generate new readers and new business for many years to come.  For only a single investment, you can easily provide yourself with long term organic traffic and other benefits, while pay per click advertising brings in traffic only as long as you are still paying for your ads to remain active. Another thing that makes an SEO package a true investment is that it enables you to commission a large number of expert written articles that will be submitted over time.  This spacing ensures that readers are always being offered new content and new answers.  It also offers the chance to present your company as an expert in the field, using your expertise on your product matter to help answer common questions or solve common problems. At the end of the day, SEO packages are simply the smarter way to go.  They work far more efficiently than standard pay per click advertising, and offer readers much more benefit than the keyword stuffed articles that flooded the market only a few years in the past.  Search Engine Optimization today is about providing necessary content that solves a problem and that provides information relevant to the keywords and topics chosen.  If your website is in need of a long term boost in traffic and you are seeking a way to bring in organic traffic and interested parties, an SEO package makes a great choice.  More visitors certainly equates more sales, especially when they are going to your site because they are already interested in your content. – About the Author: Words You Want is your one stop resource for all of your writing needs.  Words You Want offers a variety of services including SEO packages , article directory submission, SEO article writing , ghostwriting, eBook writing, travel writing, equine writing and more.    Article Source

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Are Seo Packages A Good Investment?

Setting and Measuring Goals for Business Blogging

Posted by under Blog Marketing, Pay-Per-Click

As companies that realize the value of online marketing understand the need to publish engaging content, one of the most common considerations is a company blog.  Blog software is fundamentally one of the easiest content management software systems to install and use. Of course the software isn’t magic. The content and ability to reach and engage with customers is a big part of what makes a business blog successful. For those companies that are thinking of starting a blog or reinvesting resources into a company blogging effort that has gone stale, some of the most important questions to ask are:  Have you identified specific goals for the blog? How will you measure success? In sports you can’t score if there isn’t a goal and it’s no different with business blogging.  There are a variety of reasons why publishing ongoing communications that allow readers to interact adds value to a business. Add to that the distribution via RSS that extends the reach of your message and  it’s easy to see why so many companies start blogging. The failure for many business blogs is centered around not making a connection between business goals, blog specific objectives and most importantly, how meeting customer needs leads to the first two. Here are three key questions to consider as you design your plan for business blogging success: Why start a business blog? What end goals or outcomes can you reasonably expect? There are many good reasons to start a blog. But are those reasons good enough to start and stay blogging for the long haul? Our survey on blogging and SEO showed 90% citing blogging as important, significantly important or a primary SEO tactic. 94% of bloggers reported seeing measurable SEO benefits from blogging within 12 months. Initiate and foster customer engagement Improve coverage by media and bloggers Improve search engine visibility Increase mentions on other blogs, social networking, news, bookmarking and media sites Build thought leadership Provide an informative communication channel Recognize employees, clients, marketing partners and especially brand evangelists How will you know your blogging efforts are successful according to those goals? How are you measuring blogging success? We ran a poll last year with our readers that ranked their most important measures of blogging success. Here is the distribution: Engagement: comments, links 36% Improved brand recognition 31% Build thought leadership 31% Search engine rankings 31% Better communicate with customers 30% Traffic to the blog 27% Coverage by media and other blogs 18% Traffic to the corporate web site 16% Sales leads 16% Industry Recognition 13% Sell products 2% Improved customer satisfaction 11% Page views 9% Time on Site 6% Ad revenue on the blog 5% What tools are you using to measure blog performance? Goals for business and the blog are great but it’s essential to have the right tools in place for analytics. One of the biggest mistakes is to rely on things like Google Alerts. Web analytics (Google Analytics, Woopra, Clicky, etc) Feedburner Social media monitoring tools Link analysis tools Comment tracking tools Clipping services Forum conversation tracking tools It’s fundamental, this notion of setting goals, understanding outcomes and the tools needed to measure. But you know the saying, “Common sense is the least common thing on Earth.”  Companies can achieve great return on investment with the right plan and leadership in a blogging effort. The key is to do the baseline work to build a foundation upon which it can grow and succeed.  Stay the course and leverage both listening and engagement tools to guide content. Develop networks and distribution channels to grow readership and reach. Take the time to really understand the impact of data provided by reporting tools and create reports for executives that highlight business goals. What are some of the challenges you’ve faced with setting, measuring and reaching business goals through corporate blogging? Have you started a business blog only to shut it down? Have your company blogging efforts been successful beyond expectations? © Online Marketing Blog , 2010. | Setting and Measuring Goals for Business Blogging | No comment | http://www.toprankblog.com

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Setting and Measuring Goals for Business Blogging