Industry Forums: Posting content on respected industry forums adds a level of authority and brand reach your company may not have had before. Sites like Business Insider or Forbes are ideal for a more general business management audience, but niche publications that are exclusive to your industry can be even better channels through which to target your core audience.
With Google Tag Manager, however, it’s easy to combine schema and JSON together to further boost the strength of your schema, resulting in a higher CTR and visibility, without having to spend precious time and lines of code. Granted, the learning curve is a bit steep for those who aren’t familiar with Javascript or another basic programming language, but once set in place, JSON injections can help execute and put structured data in place simply and efficiently.
Testimonials. If case studies aren't a good fit for your business, having short testimonials around your website is a good alternative. For B2C brands, think of testimonials a little more loosely. If you're a clothing brand, these might take the form of photos of how other people styled a shirt or dress, pulled from a branded hashtag where people can contribute.
What's the point of creating content if you don't know whether it's working or not. This lesson will help you understand various metrics and data points to track and measure to see whether or not your initiatives are successful. This way your business is constantly growing and learning as opposed to doing the same ole' thing because it's what you've always done. You'll also learn how to communicate the results of your content efforts with the rest of your team.
Most marketers spend more time creating content than actually getting the word out by promoting it. When it comes to promoting content, you should spend about 40% of your time creating it and 60% of your time promoting it. In this lesson, you'll learn how to promote content through your distribution channels, like email and social media. We'll also show you specific tactics on how to promote your content to make sure you're effective in approach.
It’s critical to create engaging and interesting titles for your web pages. Be sure they grab your target market. If they don’t, people are not going read all the great content below. I find that answering “What’s in it for me?” for my visitors helps me focus on what to highlight. Ask yourself: What’s the benefit they will get from the content on this page and why should they care? Once you have that nailed, shorten your title, use strong words, and make it sexy (try a little alliteration for fun). As you’re creating these attention-grabbing headlines, ensure your keyword is in the headline (the H1) and/or the subhead (the H2). Using the solar financing example above, your H1 might be “Solar Financing Made Easy.”
SEO is short for "search engine optimization." To have your site optimized for the search engines means to attempt to have top placement in the results pages whenever a specific keyword is typed into the query box. There are many search engine optimization services to choose from, so here are some things to keep in mind when seeking SEO services or developing an SEO strategy of your own.
There are as many types of content marketing as there are types of content--far too many to cover here. My intent is to give you an introduction to content marketing and get you thinking like a content marketer so you’ll see the opportunities all around you. Soon you’ll be coming up with 50 content marketing ideas every day. You won’t be able to stop seeing opportunities to create content. Here are five examples to help your mind start percolating.
Now imagine you had that brochure on your website instead. You can measure exactly how many people viewed the page where it's hosted, and you can collect the contact details of those who download it by using forms. Not only can you measure how many people are engaging with your content, but you're also generating qualified leads when people download it.
If you’re ready to jump into content production and want to start writing right away, I understand. But at some point, you’ll need to define why you create content and what you’re trying to achieve with it. The decisions you make in this chapter will give you a strong foundation for your content marketing plan — and make you stand out as a content publishing guru.
Be sure you don’t overlook your page URLs because they’re important for your SEO. This is where your keyword research comes in handy. For example, if a page talks about your solar financing product, then the URL for that page should be products/solar-financing. Focus on the most common and most searched appropriate keywords. If you are trying to decide between “solar financing” and “solar leasing,” choose the one with the highest search ranking.
Basically Google uses a complex mathematical formula called an algorithm to give a score to every website and every search people to do in Google to figure out which website should rank best for what people are looking for. Think of the algorithm like a collection of empty buckets. One bucket gives you a score for the quality of your site, one bucket gives you a score for how many sites link to you, one bucket gives you a score for how people trust you. Your job is to fill up more buckets in the algorithm than any other website. You can affect your search engine ranking by having the highest score in terms of quality of your site, of having the highest score in terms of authority of your website, of having the highest score in terms of the most trusted store for that search that people are looking for. The good thing is that there are hundreds of buckets, and for every single one of these buckets these scores put together in the algorithm to figure out where you rank is an opportunity for you to fill it up and rank better. So optimizing your site for search results really means getting the highest score in as many of these points as you can.
From top to bottom, on-page content and its metadata should be optimized to inform search engines as simply as possible why each page of your site exists and what you are hoping users get from it. And as algorithms evolve to understand human search behavior, they become smarter at ranking content in search engine results pages (SERPs) in a way that serves users the best content every time.
3. Interviews: While many media companies use interviews as the core of their content offerings, take a page from Comedy Central’s Jon Stewart, who specifically extends his on-air interviews to be used as unique web-only content....Consider talking to key people related to the topic. For many businesses, this means your employees, as well as outside experts.
There’s obviously a huge number of reasons why a website might link to another and not all of them fit into the categories above. A good rule of thumb on whether a link is valuable is to consider the quality of referral traffic (visitors that might click on the link to visit your website). If the site won’t send any visitors, or the audience is completely unrelated and irrelevant, then it might not really be a link that’s worth pursuing.
Robots.txt is not an appropriate or effective way of blocking sensitive or confidential material. It only instructs well-behaved crawlers that the pages are not for them, but it does not prevent your server from delivering those pages to a browser that requests them. One reason is that search engines could still reference the URLs you block (showing just the URL, no title or snippet) if there happen to be links to those URLs somewhere on the Internet (like referrer logs). Also, non-compliant or rogue search engines that don't acknowledge the Robots Exclusion Standard could disobey the instructions of your robots.txt. Finally, a curious user could examine the directories or subdirectories in your robots.txt file and guess the URL of the content that you don't want seen.
What is search engine optimization, then? It's not secrets or tricks — just ranking methodologies to follow in order to help a site that offers value to users beat the competition in search results. Today, you must be committed not just to optimizing your domain, but also to making it a quality site that attracts links naturally and is worthy of ranking.
A navigational page is a simple page on your site that displays the structure of your website, and usually consists of a hierarchical listing of the pages on your site. Visitors may visit this page if they are having problems finding pages on your site. While search engines will also visit this page, getting good crawl coverage of the pages on your site, it's mainly aimed at human visitors.
The digital marketer usually focuses on a different key performance indicator (KPI) for each channel so they can properly measure the company's performance across each one. A digital marketer who's in charge of SEO, for example, measures their website's "organic traffic" -- of that traffic coming from website visitors who found a page of the business's website via a Google search.
