Content Strategy |Brand Development |Organic SEO

I don’t feel guest blogging is bad, nor that all bloggers who do it will be penalized by Google.SEOMOZ.org allows guest blogging and their rankings increased during the Panda update. But when SEO companies start to abuse any link building tactic, you need a preventative plan in place because an update from Google will be coming.

Before you get started, spend time planning the new site.  It’s going to be time well spent, I promise.  Why go through all the effort and cost of a redesign if you aren’t going to ensure everything is set up properly?  Plan your site structure to ensure you have all the pages you need and to ensure it’s all organized logically and cleanly.  This will be beneficial for the engines and for your site visitors.  You don’t want anything to be more than 1-2 clicks from the homepage.

To be effective, I had to think differently. My client sites already had large volumes of traffic, but tracking visitor counts without studying Web analytics led to an illusion of being in control — when really, they weren’t. I determined that it wasn’t just about getting more traffic. I had to get the right kind of visitors — people who would buy!

I had to adjust my strategy by stepping back to ask critical questions:

Where is Google headed?Where will Web search be in the next few months? Or years?What could I expect to blow up or become important?

Three Steps to Creative Content Marketing Success

Successful creative content marketing strategies have three distinct considerations, as Lee has often pointed out:

Discovery – Businesses understand how does their audience finds content.

Consumption – Brands optimize for an experience that resonates with their audience.

Action – Companies inspire their audience to take action, effectively converting social fans and prospects to buyers.

While optimizing for Facebook Graph Search is not the same as optimizing a webpage for search, there are several techniques you can use to optimize your Facebook page based on SEO best practices. Once optimized for search, you can then focus on how to optimize for social engagement on these pages. It is a great example of the importance of social signals and the convergence of search and social media best practice.

The big key to this is to find sites where the editorial policy is highly respected and the search engine trust for the site is likely to be very high. If you historically pursued guest posts solely for purposes of getting links, most probably with rich anchor text, than chances are that the sites you posted on don't have that high a level of trust with the search engines.

As Eric Enge (Stone Temple) stated this is An #SEO Gold Mine

1.    Copy

If my students at the local college saw this, they'd choke. Heck, if many of my former professors saw it, they'd choke too.

One wouldn't though – the one who regularly reminded us how much great authors borrow techniques, literary conventions, and themes from the great writers of the past.

Great headline writers do too. I'm not joking. And you can learn this from an illustrious publication of style known as Cosmopolitan magazine.  Or Enquirer. Or whatever. Look at the headlines and, if you can get over the lurid content, look at the formulas. Chances are, you'll begin to notice a pattern.  There are some really well paid copywriters who came up with those headlines. Borrow the formulas and write your own. 

The most common worry about international SEO is that it will be too expensive for the ROI it requires. Yes, the investment can be costly, but if you do the right research first, your business will likely recoup your losses quickly.

Well today you’re in for a treat because I’ve put together a complete list.

Some are proven.

Some are controversial.

Others are SEO nerd speculation.

But they’re all here.

Google is working towards the search of the future with the functionality unveiled yesterday at the event. Singhal forecast the three primary functions search will need to evolve. In his presentation, he stated search will need to:

Let's go over a couple of the developments announced yesterday that demonstrate Google is working toward its vision of the future of search.

I’m going to keep this simple and use a pretty conclusive description of content marketing from the Content Marketing Institute:

Content marketing is a marketing technique of creating and distributing relevant and valuable content to attract, acquire, and engage a clearly defined and understood target audience – with the objective of driving profitable customer action.

Content marketing is about understanding your audience – what motivates them, what interests them, and what doesn’t. It’s about using this intricate knowledge of your target audience to interact and engage with them through content to reach an end goal.

Today content is the focus of many news articles and SEO how-tos, in fact to the point where erroneously, people have been told to forgo everything but content development and content marketing. While content is important, so are all the other hundreds parts of the algorithm.

Overall, content is a positive SEO practice. However, many sites are still just trying to fill in content spaces with well content by quantity, not quality. This is not good.

The holy grail of content marketing is to make the process as predictable, repeatable, and scalable as the 30-second television spot or the banner ad without giving up the organic authenticity that distinguishes good branded content from marketing noise. What has been so dramatically and irrevocably disrupted is the narrow control over distribution.

Google Now is likely to be an important factor in the transition from tactical to strategic SEO. Google Now serves up results based on personalization, geo-localization, public sources and its users' search history. More specifically, it aggregates information from:

When someone converts on your website they are filled with hope, and that is a precious commodity. Whether someone purchases a new gadget, or requests additional information about a service that could change their business, or snags a free trial for software that could cure a specific woe – they are in a heightened state of excitement. And you are the source of that excitement!

Heightened traffic volumes can be a great sign that your business is gaining more industry cred, but increased traffic doesn’t always result in increased conversions. It’s important to understand which channels support more traffic, and which ones supply the most meaningful metrics to ensure you’ve got a balanced strategy.

Turning to social media channels, the study reveals that 52% of respondents acquired a customer via Facebook last year, with LinkedIn and company blogs following, each at 43%. More than one-third acquired a customer through Twitter, although fewer marketers had success with Google+ (15%) and Pinterest (9%), although that is likely related to lower adoption of those sources.

Much of the key information for a website SEO assessment is available for free on the web and by inspecting your site’s source code. But to make it even easier and avoid having to look through website source code, you can use Firefox Toolbars that give you all of the information you need instantly.

Combining SEO and PPC

A little extra elbow grease and hard work can allow you to combine both SEO and PPC into one integrated online marketing model for your business. Allowing for both an SEO and PPC system that you can divide equal attention to over time might be the way to go; this means working hard and thoroughly looking at each process. You can read up on what is current with SEO and what keywords or optimization techniques are out there now, while also looking into the top 10 PPC campaigns to see what you can learn from them for your own business.

Landing pages have historically been the domain of paid search marketers seeking improved conversion rates.

User experience, site usability, and onsite engagement have become more important for major search engines in their assessment of a site's "rankability", so SEO practitioners need to ensure SEO landing pages have CRED as a key to SEO success.