Tag Archives: SEO Content

Ideal Blog Post Length for SEO

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Ideal Blog Post Length for SEOWhat is the ideal blog post length for SEO (Search Engine Optimization)? The answer as it turns out is quite complicated. There is no minimum number or maximum number that you need to aim for. The answer is that every post must address the reader’s question. If you can do that in 100 words, great. Other situations or questions might take 2000 words.

In today’s environment where people are looking for fast answers, you are better off answering the question in the first paragraph. More detail can be provided in subsequent paragraphs if the reader wants more detail.

Ideal Blog Post Length for SEO – More Detail

The right content for every reader is different, but the blog should address the following:

  • Serves visitors needs by answering their questions and helping them complete their goals
  • Delivers an easy, pleasurable, accessible experience on every device and every browser
  • Gets the right information and experience to visitors FAST
  • Does all of the above better than any of the competitors in the space
  • Provides more detail if needed by the reader in subsequent paragraphs

If you can meet all of these goals in 100 words, great. If it takes more, then write the post accordingly. But do not add filler content or keyword stuffing words just to meet some apparent SEO guidelines.

Nurture SEO and Blog Content Relationships

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Nurture SEO and Blog Content RelationshipsIf you are writing strictly for SEO purposes i.e. the search engines, then you are most likely missing out on actual customer contact relationships. If you write strictly for your customers, there is a really good chance they will never see the content. Search engines will not refer them to your pages. The message we want to pass along is that writers and bloggers as well as website owners is that they need to nurture SEO and blog content relationships to enable the best of both worlds.

Writing blogs is really meant to provide your customers with information using keywords that they typically would search for if they were looking for products or services that you provide. Blogging every day or at a minimum weekly will increase traffic to your site as well as sales from added contacts with customers. For this reason alone, blogging must be part of your marketing strategy along with traditional marketing activities.

Nurture SEO and Blog Content Relationships

Here are ten steps to nurture SEO and blog content relationships to achieve the balance that makes the most sense for your business:

  • Develop your marketing program with blogging as one of the tools
  • Establish writing standards that meet SEO guidelines
  • Create a list of keywords with a solid query volume for your industry
  • Develop a writing schedule at least 2 months in advance that is reasonable and meets your needs
  • Determine the number of writers and editors you need and hire them part-time or full time as needed
  • Create the pages with SEO in mind
  • Create internal links within your blog
  • Add social sharing links for your users
  • Cross-promote related posts
  • Develop a marketing plan to promote posts using email and social channels

If you are able to achieve the above, then your website will have a much better chance at competing with others to bring customers to your website and your business.

Write Content for Your Readers

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Write Content for Your ReadersThere is no question that good content is the only way to go when it comes to creating a website. Whether you are writing to advertise products or services, always write content for your readers. Your customers need to be able to figure out what you are selling and why they should consider taking the next step with you. At the same time, bloggers know that unless they have great content that meets SEO guidelines, that content will never be found, much less presented to your potential readers and customers. The bottom line to the question in the picture is that you are writing content for your readers, i.e., people and also search engines. i.e., Google, Yahoo, Bing, and a host of lesser-known search engines. Writers, bloggers, and website owners, including this site, need to find the right balance between content that is interesting to readers as well as achieves a high enough indexing level by the search engines for them to present your site to people searching for services or products that your company provides. If your site is on the 5th page of search results, there is little probability that readers will ever go to your page.

Write Content for Your Readers and Search Engines

If you are not blogging, focusing on keywords, etc, then your pages will not be indexed. Studies show that when you incorporate blogging into your mainstream marketing activity, they derive 13X positive marketing return on investment. That is pretty significant and difficult to ignore.

Here are some statistics that might interest our readers:

  • Blog traffic increases 53% once you accumulate 53 posts and continues increasing as you add more posts
  • Daily posting attracts five times more traffic than weekly posts
  • Longer posts attract more quality backlinks
  • Good design and good content increase the credibility of your blog
  • Adding images to your posts increases the number of backlinks
  • Monday morning posts attract the highest blog traffic
  • Over 70% of people discover a company by reading an article

If you are thinking about blogging or need help with your web site, let us know and we can develop a blogging program for you at reasonable prices with relevant keywords. For more information about optimizing your site for SEO, click here.

 

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SEO Ranking Factors in the Future

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SEO Ranking Factors in the FutureThe best experts in the business every year try to identify the most important SEO Ranking Factors in the Future for webmasters, content writers, and advertising managers.  If you get it right, your site will be indexed on the 1st page of the search engine results. If you get it wrong, then you could be buried low on the SERP/s and never seen by your customers. There are however basic requirements that seem to stand the test of time and the ongoing changes that Google and other Search engines regularly make.

This is a very competitive industry on many different levels. We are all fighting to get on that first page of search results and then get picked by the reader. We are going to identify a few of the basics in this post that will withstand the test of time. As well as ongoing updates by the search engines.

SEO Ranking Factors in the Future

Relevant Content – find out what your customers are looking for and then make sure that the content is there to answer their questions.

Answer the Customers Questions – Show the customer where he or she can get the answer if you cannot answer it on your page. Give them alternatives and most of all do not point them to links pages that are unrelated.

Provide Value to the customer – value to the customer really depends on what they are looking for. Can they find the product they are looking for and can they order it seamlessly? Does the content answer a question? Does your website bring value to the customer’s life?

Mobile Adapted – The majority of searches are now being conducted using mobile devices. Your website must be readable. It must have all of the functionality your customer needs on a mobile device or tablet.

Website Response – slow website response time will cause your customers to move on to another page or SERP result.

Titles that Attract Readers

Even if you are on the first page there are still at least 20 other titles and paid advertisers for the customer to click on. Make your title compelling. Provide a snippet of what the customer is looking for to attract them so they click on the SERPs for your website.

While there are many more ranking factors that can determine a post’s eventual page rank, if you do not get the above right, then you may as well not bother. Focus on quality content that addresses the customer’s needs, do it quickly, and do it on a mobile device. If you can do these parts, then you have a running start of having an excellent website that attracts customers and sells the product.

Set Editorial Due Dates for SEO

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Set Editorial Due Dates for SEOMuch has been made about generating the content, lots of content for your website that is original and attractive to the reader. Yes, you need all of these things and much more to create a successful website. However, in this post, we wanted to talk about a topic that is often overlooked. That is “set editorial due dates for SEO. What do we mean by this term? And how do you go about setting dates, schedules, etc. for SEO purposes? The bottom line, you need to be organized and produce content, edit content, and update content regularly. Your website is going to suffer in both quality and attractiveness if you do not follow these steps.

Set Editorial Due Dates for SEO

All of your writers need to be assigned tasks, and schedules, i.e., due dates, and expectations set. Without this either for writers you hire or even yourself, content management for your website will be haphazard at best. Here is what we mean!

New Content Generation – set a schedule for content generation, i.e., new pages that will be added to your site following all of the rules for SEO that are needed. Your writers should know the dates and expectations and meet these dates.

Refresh Old Content – some of your pages will be stale and even out of date factually just due to changing circumstances in your business. Establish a program with due dates, expectations for updates, and quality levels for all of your pages. Update them regularly so that make sense for your business.

Product / Service Updates – if your business changes, so must your online content. This needs to be completed rapidly. Otherwise, you will have very frustrated customers and even employees. Establish a task force if necessary to make this happen quickly.

The important message here is to establish and set editorial due dates for SEO purposes for your business website that makes sense for the business you are in!

Three activities that may put your website at risk

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website at riskMany websites are penalized by poor content management and linking strategies. There are a number of symptoms to look for to determine if you have been penalized by search engines.   Your website is at risk if your site has been penalized in the last year. Your ranking has declined or your traffic has declined then you might be suffering from one of the following three items:

Website at Risk – Poor content

We cannot emphasize the quality of the content of your website enough. If you have low-quality content, content that would be considered spamming, or content that is not useful to the reader then both the readers as well as the search engines will not be ranking your website very well. Write for the reader and try to answer the question that you believe the reader is searching for. Make it useful and informative. Make sure that the Content is unique and don’t use someone else’s content. You should also avoid duplication on your own website even if you wrote it. Some areas that are easily overlooked on websites is the content on the header page as well as the footer page. this could cause you some problems. keep the content new and exciting, refreshing old content, and keep it interesting and useful for the reader.

Website at Risk – Poor on-page optimization

Avoid packing your title and content full of keywords. This typically will get you penalized by search engines including Google. The easiest way to test whether you becoming spammy or not is by looking at the content, tag lines, etc., and ask yourself does this look spammy? Is it natural? Also, avoid linking content since it is frowned upon by search engines. Write for the users and readers of your content and don’t write for the search engines. You will be much better off in the long run.

Low-quality backlinks pointing to your website

Back links are particularly problematic for many website owners. Back links are links from other websites to your website which you have really no control over. However, if you have a lot of backlinks from other websites that are spammy, then it will bring your website down as well. Investigate tools that will help you within identifying back links and contact the webmasters to determine how you can have the back link removed. Alternatively, you can implement a no follow approach telling the search engines that those back links are not valid and should not be included in the analysis.

These three activities, when followed, will significantly improve your website optimization and ranking in search engine indexing. It takes a bit of work. Particularly with large sites so be prepared to put a lot of effort into this. From the get-go focus on quality content.

Improve Customer Satisfaction – WebSite Health

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Improve Customer SatisfactionOur last post discussed web site speed i.e. the time it takes to load a page once the reader clicks on a link to your site. There are added aspects to consider. For example, if your site uses a contact form.  Some templates come with a built-in contact form. While others will need a plugin to add this feature. Test the contact form for speed of response, for ease of use, and results in terms of customers and readers filling in the form. Remember to respond to them immediately.

Even if it is an automated response it is better than nothing at all. You will need to follow up within 24 hours with a real response. Otherwise, you risk getting bad comments on various boards, etc. This includes those people who post comments on various topics. Respond to them, even the negative ones. Other readers will gauge your response and decide if they wish to contact you after reading how you handle even the negative responses.

Improve Customer Satisfaction – Digital Books

If it applies a digital book might be the answer to retain loyal customers and keep them coming back. For example, we have not done this yet on our site, we are just getting started, but stay tuned we will have one sometime in the future. We also blog consistently talking about various topics that are of interest to our readers and to small business owners who are looking for information about building, maintaining, and operating a web site.

Improve Customer Satisfaction – Test after Every change

Operating a blog or a web site involves changing content, upgrading plugins, and themes all of the time. As these elements change, they sometimes stop working the way they should and the only way to find this out is to always test after making a change to confirm that everything is still working the way it should. Set up a regular testing methodology to ensure that the content is being delivered the way you wish and the plugins are doing what they are supposed to. Fix any negative test results immediately to minimize the impact on your customers.

Check the Time it Takes Web Pages to Load

We thought it is important to emphasize web page load speed one more time. There are many locations along the path between the server where your website is hosted and the user or person loading your page. There are a multitude of hops that have routers processing yours and millions of other bits of data. If one of those routers is overloaded or running a bit slow, your page will not load quickly. Same thing if your server is overloaded.

The first thing to do is to run a test called Tracert. Basically it will check the response time for all hops between your website and your location. If there are locations including your server that are responding slowly, it will be shown. You can then decide if any action should be taken and where to focus your efforts!

For more topics on customer satisfaction, click here.

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Get Rid of Bad Content

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Get Rid of Bad ContentDo you have bad content on your website? What is bad content, and how do you identify it? Many web site owners do not even realize that their content might be considered bad, who gets to decide if content is bad or not. Turns out there are two major groups who will decide if your content is bad, and they both will have a significant impact on the results that your web site is intended to deliver. Results meaning traffic to your web site and customers that convert to revenue for your business. Get Rid of Bad Content Now.

Who are these two groups, and how do you identify them? What can you do to fix the bad content and how do you verify that the results you are looking for are being delivered to your web site. We will try to answer these questions and more in the following narrative.

Get Rid of Bad Content – What is Bad content

Anytime you have content that is  original, well written, uses keywords and phrases that people might search for, is regularly updated and kept current, you probably have great content. Web designers get into trouble when their content is copied. If it is old and out of date and the web site is not easy to navigate it can be rated lower by the search engines. There are many more criteria, however these are probably the main ones to focus on.

Get Rid of Bad Content – Major Groups

Well, it turns out that there is an obvious group and one not so obvious. The obvious one is your customers. If they are not finding what they are looking for, they may tell you and if they do you had better do something about it.

The other group is the search engines. They use their private algorithms to rate and index your web site pages and then rank you in search results. If you have bad content in their estimation, your web site will be well down the list of search results. Chances are people searching for subjects you cover will never be seen by them.

Get Rid of Bad Content – A Program

One way to address your web sites content is to develop a regular maintenance program that will over time, keep your web site up to date and current for both your readers, your customers and the search engines. For example develop a schedule to complete the following:

  • Update the oldest content once a week
  • Add content to the shortest post once a week
  • Update your content based on what readers are reading
  • Add new content on a regular basis
  • React immediately to customer comments

Your regular addition of new content based on new products and services will keep your content looking fresh. It will be up to date for the search engines and your customers.