Advertorials have been around for quite some time, originally used in newspapers/print media, dating back to the 1940’s, eventually transitioning over to the web. This post will look into why advertorials are used, past controversies and what should be taken into account if you plan on running an advertorial campaign.

Benefits of Advertorials

A key purpose of advertorials is to drive traffic to your website. Their purpose isn’t to increase search visibility (I’ll speak more about that later), but if your advertorial is engaging and generally well done, it can prove to be a huge boon for your site traffic-wise, which has the potential for further conversions/sales.

A big positive of advertorials is that they are much more extensive and informational than other forms of commonly used advertisements, such as banner ads. The editorial piece can provide a plentiful amount of information about what you’re offering, giving the reader a greater idea of what you can provide for them.

It is well known how beneficial it can be for your business if you have a community/strong social following, and advertorials can help you build these. If you have done proper research and have specified a target audience who will be interested in what you offer, you can increase your overall following with ease.

What to Remember

There has been a fair amount of negativity towards advertorials, most of which stems from Google’s punishment of sites that have ran paid link/advertorial campaigns in the past.

The most notable of these would be the recent Interflora saga. To sum it up, UK flower delivery company Interflora were punished by Google due their mass amount of advertorials put out during the Valentine’s Day/Mother’s Day period. On top of this, the sites who hosted the advertorials saw their PageRank plummet to zero.

This was seen by many as Google making an example out of a large site, as head of the web spam team Matt Cutts took the time during this to reiterate Google’s staunch stance against paid links which pass PageRank, saying this:

“Please be wary if someone approaches you and wants to pay you for links or “advertorial” pages on your site that pass PageRank. Selling links (or entire advertorial pages with embedded links) that pass PageRank violates our quality guidelines, and Google does take action on such violations.”

More recently, in a recent video uploaded by Matt Cutts about the upcoming Google Penguin update, he spoke about advertorials:

“If a link in a paid post would affect search engines, that link should not pass PageRank (e.g. by using the nofollow attribute).”

The key point of all of this is of course PageRank. If you have paid for a link which hasn’t been attributed as a nofollow link, thus passing PageRank, Google certainly won’t be too pleased. Advertorials aren’t there to increase search visibility, and using them to garner dofollow/natural links to your site will see your site pay the price.

Another key part of Matt Cutts mention of advertorials is that there has to be a clear disclosure. This means that there must be some part of your advertorial designated to letting the reader know that it is indeed a paid-for post.

Your Thoughts 

It would be great to get your thoughts on advertorials. Have you used them before? Are they still a viable part of an SEO strategy, or should we steer away from them? Feel free to leave your comments below.

Valuable 404 Pages
Ben Cook
Follow @Skitzzo
I’m sure that we’ve all seen 404 pages that are entertaining, creative or funny, but you seldom see 404 pages that can convert, which is what this post is all about.
Ben Cook ended up implementing a contact form into the 404 pages of his client’s website, which also contained a small apology, stating that the user can send an email and receive a link/file in regards to what they were looking for originally.This can help create a rapport with the user, whilst showing a fine level of customer service.

Ben’s idea ended up proving profitable, as said rapport opened further talks, which eventually led to sales. This is a fantastic post, offering a very simple, actionable idea which can be a huge boon for your company.

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Viral Marketing: The Short Story Of A Targeted Email Campaign That Went Viral
Tzvi Balbin
Follow @tybalbin
This guest post on the Vero blog is a very interesting, quick story of how Tzvi Balbin’s targeted email campaign ended up being a rousing success. After checking out which domains his company’s customers were using, and decided that the more niche, company based domains could be the equivalent of long-tail. For these customers, Tzvi sent emails containing personalised coupons in the hope that these people would share the email, beginning the virality of the email.

Well, it certainly paid off, as Tzvi noticed that click-through rates had increased by 55%, and conversion rates had risen by 86%. As well as this, the virality of the emails meant that revenue figures were 35% higher than the analytics reported. This post is certainly worth a read if you’re looking at implementing a targeted email campaign, which as you can see, can pay dividends.

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How My Mom Thinks Search Engines Work
Rob Toledo
Follow @stentontoledo
In light of Mother’s Day, Rob Toledo had a quick conversation with his mum, all about SEO and how search engines work. Whilst this is a really entertaining, interesting read, Rob’s point in this post is that it can be valuable to remove yourself from the “SEO echo chamber“, being able to bridge the gap. He does raise a point, SEO-related jargon probably sounds completely mental to those who aren’t as well-versed. I mean, imagine asking a non-technical client “how do you think the Penguin update will effect SERP clustering?” for example. Anyway, Rob wraps up the post by offering three items to take into account: Take non-SEOs out for coffee, get active in non-SEO communities, and follow non-SEO folk on Twitter.

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Penguin 2.0: Breaking the News to Clients
Joel Klettke
Follow @cstechjoel
According to Google’s Matt Cutts, the second coming of the Google Penguin update will be implemented rather soon. In light of this, Joel Klettke has taken the time to lay out a couple of template emails for you to send to your clients in case things haven’t gone as smoothly as expected. A few of these templates include blaming the intern, taking the money and running, getting angry, etc.
This post is a nice, light-hearted way to wrap things up for the week, and any post that ends with “Dear client, surprise! We’re dickheads!” is probably a winner.

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That’s all for this week’s round-up. I hope that you’ve enjoyed reading, and have enjoyed the content that has been mentioned. Feel free to leave your thoughts in the comments section, and if you fancy sharing the content which has been cited, click the corresponding “Tweet” buttons.

If you’re suddenly presented with this message when you try to access your website, don’t panic, simply follow these steps.

Scan Your Website to Find Out the Issue

The first thing to do is to pop on over to the Sucuri SiteCheck tool. You can then input your URL into the ‘scan website’ field and the software will scan across your site to identify the problem. Once the issue has been found, take a screenshot of the results page and drop an email through to your hosting provider. Once they receive this they should be able to get to the root of the problem and get the malicious code removed.

Request a Review from Google

Even when the malware is completely removed, you will probably still see this warning showing up on the site. The reason for this is that you need to alert Google to the fact that you have cleaned your website and it is ready to have the malware warning removed. To do this, follow these steps:

1. If you have a Google Webmaster Tools account set up for your website then go to your website dashboard. If you don’t, create a free account here.
2. Go to Health>Malware on the left-hand navigation bar.
3. Select the ‘Request a Review’ button and agree to the terms and conditions (only once you’re sure all the malware has been removed).

Once you’ve followed these steps you should be back up and running within the next 24 hours. It can be pretty annoying having this happen to you (I know from first-hand experience) but as long as you have a process in place to handle these issues then you should be okay.

@mrjamiedodd we do expect to roll out Penguin 2.0 (next generation of Penguin) sometime in the next few weeks though.

— Matt Cutts (@mattcutts) May 10, 2013

What Will The Penguin 2.0 Update Target

There’s been a lot of speculation around what the new update will actually target, but to quote Matt Cutts:

“Penguin is a web-spam change that is dedicated to try and find black-hat web-spam and try to target and address that. This one is a little more comprehensive than Penguin 1.0 and we expect it to go a little bit deeper and have a little bit more of an impact than the original version [of Penguin].”

In a nutshell, it’s going to bigger and better than the original update, whilst targeting a similar criteria as Penguin 1.0. The original Penguin update focused primarily on spammy links, as opposed to the likes of Panda which focused more on page content. Here’s a brief overview of the major focuses that we can expect from this latest algorithm update:

Irrelevant Anchor Links

Websites that have a load of links from websites that aren’t related to their site, using completely irrelevant anchor text are a prime target for the latest instalment of the Penguin update. An example of this could be that there are links with the anchor ‘cheap laptops’ bedded into an article that is talking about ‘the best ways to improve you fitness’.

image source: http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Ct8q_RAxrFY/T5bafaCjA4I/AAAAAAAAAOc/ehd5krRkUks/s1600/link-spam.png

Link Profiles With High Concentration of Commercial Keywords

As Google’s web-spam team are regularly stating – they want to see natural looking link profiles. If the links pointing to your website are comprised primarily of commercial keyword anchor text then you could be in danger. For example, if you have small amount of links that contain your brand name within the link anchor text and then the rest are just your target keywords.

Link Networks

A link network is essentially a group of websites that cross-link between each other on a mass scale in order to manipulate the search engine results. Link networks took a huge hit during the first Penguin update and I would expect to see even more improvements here.

Dofollow Links From Advertorials

Interflora were huge news earlier this year when they had a Google penalty imposed on them for using advertorials in a way that violates Google’s guidelines. Matt Cutts commented on the use of advertorials, stating:

“Clear disclosure of sponsorship is critical, and that includes disclosure for search engines. If link in a paid post would affect search engines, that link should not pass PageRank (e.g. by using the nofollow attribute).”

In short, Google aren’t against the use of advertorials as long as the links within them do not pass link equity, and also that there is clear disclosure within the article to let readers know that it is a paid-for editorial. I would envisage that we will see a few casualties from these types of links over the next update.

Spammy Site-wide Links

This was an old technique that I, sadly, still see used today. Links bedded into ‘blog rolls’ and within footer areas that are completely irrelevant to the site itself. These are another big target for the Penguin 2.0 update so be sure to analyse the number of links coming from your site and take action before this next update hits.

Example of a link profile from a new client we took on.

What Else Can We Expect From Google

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

 
In the next few months there are going to be further changes that we will start to see from Google related to SEO. Matt Cutts talks briefly about them in the video above but here’s a brief overview of the key things he mentions:

Identifying Authority Figures

Google are going to be looking at ways to identify authority figures, i.e. through authorship, and reward content written by influential authors with higher SERP rankings. Google Authorship has been a huge topic over the past 12 months and it looks like AuthorRank is going to be playing a big part in near future.

Hacked Websites

There will be more advanced ways to find hacked websites and an increased level of support offered to webmasters that have been affected by the activities of hackers.

The Next Instalment of the Panda Update

Google have confirmed that a further Panda update will be coming over the next couple of months that will focus on “softening the effects” on websites that fall within the ‘grey areas’ of the Panda update.

Reduced SERP Clustering

Matt Cutts has made a vow to reduce the number of clustered search results appearing within Google, i.e. one website appearing multiple times in the same SERP for a given keyword. This is something that I’m pretty happy about because it isn’t the best search experience when you have ten results all pointing to Yell.com.

More Information for Webmasters

Any SEO should be happy about this. Google are trying to give webmasters more support and metrics to work with which can only improve online visibility and search. There were some recent additions to Google Analytics that were great and I would expect more to follow.

Share Your Thoughts With Me

I’m always keen to hear the opinions of others when it comes to new search algorithm updates, so leave your comments below and I’ll give you my thoughts!

How Guest Bloggers are Sleepwalking Their Way into Penalties
James Finlayson
Follow @JamesFinlayson
Ever since Google released their Penguin update just over a year ago, guest blogging has arguably been the most recommended methods of accruing links in a post-Penguin world. This post on the SEOmoz blog from James Finlayson looks at this, and warns us of the possible dangers that can arise from guest blogging. Whilst all guest bloggers won’t get punished of course, this post looks at possible troubles that may occur.
James covers 4 topics in this post; Link Quality, Link Type, Link Location and Authorship.

There are also several takeaways to, well, take away from this, one being that you shouldn’t rely on one type of site for the predominate amount of your links. It looks unnatural, and you should include all types of links in your strategy anyway. This is a very interesting read, providing a different take on guest posting.
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How to become an Influence through Content and Relationship Marketing
Jason Acidre
Follow @jasonacidre
One of the largest advantages in the SEO industry is influence. Being a respected, reputable figure in your industry can lead to a plethora of further opportunities, expansion of your business, as well as being a major boon in regards to getting content out there, especially with the possibility of Author Rank. Speaking of content, Jason Acidre’s latest post is all about how to gain said influence utilising content, as well as building relationships.
This post looks a few areas in particular, some of which being:
Peers – Network with known people in your industry to help garner a stronger reputation
Influence other Influencers – Look at what other influencers learn from and enjoy, provide content
SEO – If your content is optimised for search, new people will read/follow your work
This is a very interesting, informative piece which is certainly worth a read.
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Ugh! Is Your Site Suffering from Duplicate Content?
Justin Deaville
Follow @justindeaville
One thing you certainly don’t want on your site is duplicate content. If you have content on your site which appears multiple times on your site, search engines can’t decipher which of these is the most relevant. So, a search engine won’t know where to direct link metrics, and most importantly, won’t know which version to rank.

This post looks at how duplicate content can occur on your site, how you can find out if there is duplicate content on your site, and what you can do to remedy it.  In regards to remedying duplicate content, Justin speaks about a few options which you could implement, such as 301 redirects and canonicalization. If you’re worried about duplicate content on your site, this is certainly a recommended read.
Tweet Justin’s blog: Tweet

Why Your Company Needs a Hashtag Strategy
Wallaroo Media
Follow @WallarooMedia
Social media should certainly be a massive part in any online marketing strategy, and in these social media outlets, hashtags are a big part of overall engagement. This post from Wallaroo Media looks at a couple of examples of how the use of hashtags has generated plenty of engagement, interaction, traffic, etc.

The previous social media campaigns mentioned are AXE’s “Susan Glenn” campaign, Matt Damon’s “Strike with Me” campaign, as well as Charmin’s “Tweet from the Seat” campaign. This post looks at what these social media campaigns entailed, and how they have proved to be a success for the company that created them. Also, Wallaroo Media have provided us with a few tips regarding how you can implement a hashtag in your company’s online marketing strategy.
Tweet WallarooMedia’s blog: Tweet

That’s all for this week’s round-up. I hope that you’ve enjoyed reading, and have enjoyed the content that has been mentioned. Feel free to leave your thoughts in the comments section, and if you fancy sharing the content which has been cited, click the corresponding “Tweet” buttons.

16 Marketers on the Metrics That Matter
Jeremy Rivera
Follow @ravenjeremy
The first post in this week’s round-up looks at the subject of metrics that matter. In other words, what you can show to your client in regards to your work, and showing your value to them. In this post, Jeremy Rivera has spoken to a selection of SEOs/marketers, asking what their views are on the matter, and what metrics they feel are the most important.
The group who responded have also spoken about quarterly/monthly milestones, how to explain the value of your work to clients, what to report to them, as well as how and when to send reports. This is certainly a fantastic read, and on the subject of this, Raven Tools have released a white paper on this topic, which can be found here.
Tweet Jeremy’s blog: Tweet

Google Author Rank and Authorship: What We Know So Far
Mark Traphagen 
Follow @marktraphagen
There has been plenty of discussion about the impact of Google+ on SEO, specifically Authorship and Author Rank. Though the author of this post, Mark Traphagen, says that there is a lot of misunderstanding regarding these topics, and has written this article to offer clarity on these subjects. Mark speaks about a myriad of benefits that come from Authorship, cites statements from Google re: Author Rank, and goes on to speak about the number of difficulties that have been associated with the implementation of Author Rank.
Tweet Mark’s blog: Tweet

Google Plus is Outpacing Twitter
Thomas Watkins
Follow @thomaswatkins
On the topic of Google+, there’s been a gathering of data recently by GlobalWebIndex, and the figures they’ve released this week have stated that Google+ is outdoing Twitter, and is fast becoming the world’s #2 social network. According to the report, Google+ now has 359 million active users, an increase of 33% from this time last year.
With its impact on search, as well as the introduction of things such as Communities, it’s easy to see why its popularity is rising. Although, there are plenty of people who are sceptical about these figures though, considering that if you want to use one of Google’s services, you’re going to have to register for all of them.
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Bill’s Most Excellent Top 10 SEO Rules
Bill Slawski 
Follow @bill_slawski
The final post in this week’s round-up is a Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure inspired list of SEO rules, all compiled by Bill Slawski of SEO by the Sea. There are 10 rules which Bill follows, including:
“Meta Describe the Page” – Adding a meta description provides a description for a page, helping both the user and the search engines.
“Madlibs is a Kid’s Game, Not a Content Strategy” – Having duplicate content bar a few keywords on several pages on your site should certainly be avoided.
“Lack of Speed Kills” – If your site’s pages load slowly, visitors to your site are likely to leave immediately.
This is quite an enjoyable read, providing some simple yet solid advice, in an entertaining way.
Tweet Bill’s blog: Tweet

That’s all for this week’s round-up. I hope that you’ve enjoyed reading, and have enjoyed the content that has been mentioned. Feel free to leave your thoughts in the comments section, and if you fancy sharing the content which has been cited, click the corresponding “Tweet” buttons.

Periodic Table of Google Analytics
Jeff Sauer
Follow @jeffsauer
Starting things off is certainly one of the more creative things I’ve seen in recent times, this is an interactive period table which displays the options available within Google Analytics. Created by Jeff Sauer, this very clever feature on his site lets you hover over each of the ‘elements’, displaying something available to you within Google Analytics, complete with a short description. From Adsense Reports and Bounce Rate to Visitor Flow and Webmaster Tools, this table contains a myriad of helpful tools. Also, if you fancy a physical copy of this, Jeff has mocked up a version ready for print, with all of the elements/options listed.
Tweet Jeff’s blog: Tweet

Link Building Stories
Emma Still
Follow @mmstll
A really fun, interesting post here provided by Emma Still, who has accrued responses from a handful of SEO experts, all about how they got their first ever link. It’s really interesting to read these, taking into account just how much things have changed since some of these links were built, with some of these stories dating back over 10 years! With some of these stories including testimonials, infographics, outreach, and yes, even those dirty directories, this is a great article, and a very entertaining read.
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How Valuable are NoFollow Links?
Josh Hansen
Follow @joshhansen14
On a similar note of crowd sourced posts, Josh Hansen of the Electric Dialogue blog has spoken to a selection of SEO experts about one topic: NoFollow links, and more specifically, their value. He asked these experts (Gianluca Fiorelli, Jon Cooper, Ruth Burr and Paddy Moogan) a set of questions, and this post contains their responses to the following questions:

1. On a scale of 1 to 10 (10 being incredibly and 1 being not at all) how valuable are nofollow links to a link builder?
2. What does, or doesn’t, make nofollow links valuable?
3. When is the most effective time for us to use nofollow?
4. How has the value of nofollows changed in the last 3 years?
5. What do you predict for their future in link building?

This is a very interesting article, as it’s highly interesting to see what these experts think about NoFollow links and their value.
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The Latest 5 Tools I’ve Added to my SEO Toolbox
Craig Bradford
Follow @CraigBradford
The final post in the week’s round-up takes a look at a range of SEO tools, which have all been used and reviewed Craig Bradford of Distilled. It’s always interesting to see what tools the SEO experts use in their day-to-day routine, especially when they’re more niche, unheard of choices. He goes through a selection of tools, those being:
Chart Intelligence Plugin – A plugin which overlays Google Analytics data with Google Updates to see if you’ve been affected.
Link Research Tools – These are a suite of tools, but Craig speaks specifically about Link Dtox, a tool which will point out any dodgy links going to your site.
Rmoov – A very helpful tool which will help you get rid of those aforementioned dodgy links.
Optimizely – This tool will be very useful for your Conversion Rate Optimisation endeavours.
Deep Crawl – This will enable you to crawl a website.
Scrapebox – Craig speaks about how this tool can help you check if toxic links are still live, check page rank and work as a sitemap scraper.
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That’s all for this week’s round-up. I hope that you’ve enjoyed reading, and have enjoyed the content that has been mentioned. Feel free to leave your thoughts in the comments section, and if you fancy sharing the content which has been cited, click the corresponding “Tweet” buttons.

On top of using it as a content management system/blogging platform, it can be massive in your SEO strategy.

A vanilla WordPress site can be well optimised for search engines, but there are an absolute plethora of methods and plugins out there which can vastly improve your WordPress SEO, and help get the most out of your site.

This post will run through a list of methods that you can introduce to your WordPress website/blog, and as well as that, I’ll also mention various plugins which can play a big part.

Permalink Structure

Permalinks are, simply put, how URLs of your site’s pages will appear. A badly formatted, non-SEO friendly permalink structure can certainly prove to be detrimental. You’re going to want to optimise this, so that users and search engines can attain a better grasp of what the page is about. From the get-go, WordPress’ permalinks are more robotic, adding things such as the date of the post, which of course nobody wants. So, in order to quickly rectify this, you can go to the Permalinks section, found within the Settings.

Now, as you can see, the default option isn’t the most ideal, nor is anything numeric really, so we’ve gone with Post Name. You can of course create your own structure, such as “/%category% /%postname%/” or just “/%postname%/”.

Your URLs will now contain your chosen URL, as opposed to garbled numbers, making things much more user and search engine friendly.

XML Sitemap

One of the most important things you should do when running a site on WordPress is to create an XML Sitemap. Sitemaps are what the search engines recognise they peruse your website. They give search engines a way of viewing all pages on your site, ensuring that the crawling process is further improved, and can provide information of newly updated pages.

A very simple way of going through this process is to use the WordPress SEO by Yoast plugin, widely seen as the finest all-round WordPress SEO tool out there.

Once you have this plugin, you can find the XML Sitemap area under the SEO tab.

There’s nothing difficult here, just tick the box to enable XML Sitemap functionality, and there will be a Sitemap created under yourdomain/sitemap.xml. You can also create Sitemaps via the Google XML Sitemaps plugin.

1 <?php if ( function_exists(‘yoast_breadcrumb’) ) {
2 yoast_breadcrumb(‘<p id=”breadcrumbs”>’,'</p>’);
3 } ?>

Page Title Optimisation

Sorting out your page titles and ensuring that they’re fully optimised is one of the most integral parts of your on-page SEO strategy. It’s the first thing that people will see in search results, and it’s a major part of ranking in said search results. Ensure that your titles are relevant, poignant, and contain any keywords which you’re targeting.

As pictured above, the character limit for a title is 70 characters.

When planning your titles, one thing you can do to give yourself a bit of a boost is to ensure that your keywords are near the front of your title. Search engines seem to prefer when a keyword is near the start of a title, so doing so can aid you in your site’s ranking. Also, people who have searched will see your targeted keyword at the start of your title, and will be more enticed to go to your site.

Image Optimisation

Optimising the images in your blog posts is something that is often overlooked. Though standard image search may not be the biggest source of traffic, blended search can certainly prove fruitful if you’ve optimised your images properly.

To start off with, you’re going to want to make sure that your targeted keyword(s) can be found in the actual file name. Your file name has to help describe what your image is about. Also, make sure to separate all words in the file name with hyphens as opposed to having one block of a file name.

The ALT attribute of your image plays a big part as well, so you have to make sure that your keyword(s) are in the ALT attribute.

One final thing to consider is the image file size. It’s been stated that load time is a factor in search rankings, so you can aid things by resizing your image before uploading it to WordPress. Also, there are plenty of plugins out there that can help you in this process.

Google Authorship

When you see an image (usually the author’s headshot) accompanied alongside an article in search results, that’ll be Google Authorship. Setting up Google Authorship is a must these days, with Google pushing Author Rank and Google+, as well as the marked increase in click-through rate and general visibility. The overall process is quick and easy, and I’ll quickly guide you through how to implement it via WordPress.

Start off by taking the URL of your Google+ page and entering it into the Google+ section of your WordPress profile.

After this, all that needs to be done is to add a link to complete the circle and add a link to your WordPress blog in your Google+ profile, under the “Contributor To” section. You’ll notice the change within roughly a week.

Social Media Integration

Making sure that your site and its content can be shared throughout various social media platforms is one the most integral parts of an SEO strategy. The most common way that people implement this into their blogs has to the Sociable plugin. This plugin can be downloaded here completely free of charge, and contains plenty of customisation.

There it is, a list of methods which if you implement into your WordPress site, you’re certain to see improvements.

Of course, these are a selection of a myriad of things you can do to your site. Which methods/plugins do you think is integral to WordPress SEO? Feel free to leave your thoughts in the comments.

The Second Most Creative Link Building Post Ever
Jon Cooper
Follow @PointBlankSEO
The Most Creative Link Building Post Ever was one of the most popular posts of the past few months, and is currently the highest rated article on Inbound.org. Jon Cooper of Point Blank SEO asked a group of SEOs “What was the most creative way you, or someone you know, got a link?”, and listed their responses in the aforementioned post. This post is a follow up to that, due to the sheer flurry of responses that he got, and the popularity of the post. This is a fantastic read, which contains very creative, inventive link building methods from some of the finest SEOs around.
Tweet Jon’s blog: Tweet

Big-Ass List of Link Building Resources
Paddy Moogan
Follow @paddymoogan
On the topic of link building and methods you can implement, we’ve got Paddy Moogan’s absolutely gargantuan list of link building resources. As his post on Link Building Book states, this is a massive collection which he has accrued over the past few years. It’s not just a list thrown together either, there are a plethora of different categories you can peruse, including everything from Outreach to Link Analysis and Case Studies. Another interesting feature which Paddy has added to this is that there is a form where you can submit links to content that hasn’t been mentioned here.
Tweet Paddy’s blog: Tweet

7 Things to Think About Before Designing Your Next Landing Page
Jason Delodovici
Follow @jdelodovici
Ensuring that your landing page is efficiently put together is one of the most important that you can do. This in mind, people can tend to go for a more aesthetically pleasing, artistic landing page, and not necessarily take efficiency into account, and end up creating something with no effect on conversion. Jason Delodovici’s latest post on his eponymously named site takes note of this, and has listed 7 things you really should consider when creating your landing page. He speaks about how you should consider your business objective, your audience, your product, etc. Considering the importance of optimising your landing page, this is certainly worth a read.
Tweet Jason’s blog: Tweet

How to Build an Online Community for Your Business
Mackenzie Fogelson
Follow @mackfogelson
The final post in this week’s roundup is all about building a community for your business. Mackenzie Fogelson states that there is an array of reason why you should do this, and how it could benefit your business. For example, she that building a community will prevent you from focusing your business around what Google will do next, though an online community will help focus things on your business. Though, the main crux of this post details how you can go about attaining an online community. Mackenzie’s post on the SEOmoz blog looks at a 9-part strategy which you can implement to build a community around your business, and wraps things up with some helpful tips.
Tweet Mackenzie’s blog: Tweet

That wraps up this week’s roundup. I thoroughly hope that you enjoyed the work of the creators of the content who have been mentioned. Feel free to leave your opinions in the comment section. If you’ve enjoyed the work which has been cited, you can share it via the corresponding Tweet button.

When you’re first developing a strategy for your new blog it’s really important to set yourself some targets that have time-scales placed upon them. More importantly, these targets have to be achievable. There’s no point in setting yourself the task of achieving 10,000 unique visitors to the blog within your first couple of weeks unless you are prepared to dedicate some serious financial resources toward it. A lesson that I have learnt very quickly during my time within online marketing is to be prudent in your predictions.

If I Make Great Content Then People Will Pay Attention

This statement is true in the sense that once someone is presented with your content in front of them and they get a chance to actually see it and enjoy it then yes, people will certainly pay attention to it. The only issue lies in the visibility of the content itself. Having good quality content that is genuinely interesting to your target audience is crucial to the sustainability of visits to your blog, however quality content isn’t always enough.

Depending on the time-scales and general objectives that you have for your blog, there are a number of activities that you can engage in. To make for an easier read I’ve broken these different activities up into short-term and long-term methods of pulling in traffic.

Methods for Bringing in Blog Traffic in the Short-Term

• Banner Advertising – This can end up being quite costly but if you take the time to hand-pick the best locations for your banners then you will see much better results. What I mean is that instead of simply going through the Google Display Network where, although you can select relevant genres of websites for your ads to be displayed on, you can’t pick the exact website for it to be placed within. By going through and finding other websites that your target audience regularly visit and then getting in touch directly with the webmasters of these sites can often result in better quality traffic coming through to you. Not only this but you will often be able to negotiate a much better price and start a relationship with the webmaster that could result in future opportunities, like guest posting.

 

• Guest Posting - This is another great way of building relationships with other blog owners and a way of driving through some extra traffic, plus some valuable links, to your blog. I’ve personally found this to be really effective in growing your social network as well, which you can leverage as a major distribution route for your content. Some blogs will charge you to post on their site, which is known as an advertorial, and is often considered black-hat within the SEO community. I personally oppose this opinion and think that, like many other marketing activities, this is a completely legitimate way of getting your brand in front of your target audience. Using this method just for the purpose of gaining back-links, on the other hand, is not necessarily something I agree with.

 

•  Pay for a Tweet – Yet another questionable tactic that many people within the marketing industry criticise. What it involves is paying someone to send a tweet from their account (often with a large and relevant follower base) that links to your content. This can be done through a number of legitimate websites, such as Buysellads.com.
   
  Like having a banner on someone’s website that will be exposed to a large audience, paying someone to tweet your content can be a great way of driving some traffic to your blog, whilst also helping you to increase your own social following (if you append your Twitter handle to the end of the tweet).I’ve tested this method out in the past and it has had mixed results so make sure you have weighed up the trade-off between the cost of the tweet and the potential traffic influx. My advice would be to try it out on a small scale first before committing to something larger.

 

• Collaborative Posts - Getting other bloggers to collaborate with you in your posts will help you to utilise their distribution routes alongside your own, which can often help drive larger volumes of traffic to your content. This can be in the form of interviewing influential bloggers within your niche, quoting them on a subject or just using each other’s data (if applicable) to create a piece of content.With collaborative posts you will find that anyone mentioned within your content will be eager to share this with their social following and maybe even link to the piece of content on their blog. This is what we call ‘egobait‘.

Methods of Bringing in Blog Traffic for the Long-Term

• SEO - Anyone who has read my articles before knows that I am an advocate of search engine optimisation as a sustainable long-term online marketing strategy. Depending on what your blog is focussed on will largely dictate the direction that you head in for the SEO. For example, I recently started a travel blog to write about my journeys around East Asia and spent a lot of time on creating a solid architecture to the site in order to rank well for a wider number of long-tail keywords related to each individual post. If I tried to rank on the first page of Google for ‘Travel Blog’ then I would be going up against some serious competition that my resources just wouldn’t stretch to.In short, your blog’s search engine optimisation efforts should be focused around maintaining a steady flow of traffic through to your site through appearing for regularly searched for phrases.

 

• Build a Community - This strategy can come in a variety of forms, whether it is specifically registering on your blog or through a flourishing social media following. Building a community is an important aspect of any blog and since the dawn of social media we’ve seen a colossal rise in the success of the individual blogger. Things can, or should I say will, be slow at the start but over time your social following could become instrumental in the building of traffic through to your website. Make sure that you have an appearance on social media website that your readers are likely to be a part of and focus heavily on them. For example, there’s no point in placing all your time into Instagram if your blog is focused around law. If your have a photography blog then I’m sure that Instagram, along with Pinterest, will be one of your first ports of call. Alongside this you should make it easy for your readers to find more of your content in the future by letting them subscribe by RSS or sign up to your newsletter.

 

• Create Genuinely Interesting Content – People often say that your content has to be fresh and original for it to be read but I don’t think this is always the case. Half of the stuff that I read on the internet is very similar to the last thing I read but would I say I didn’t find it interesting? Certainly not. If this was the case then all the news outlets in the world would really have to rethink their strategies! Give your content something that is truly unique; give it a bit of yourself. Add your own views, write in your own style and in a way that would most appeal to your target readership. If you just go onto Google’s keyword tool and find what loads of people are searching for in order to find out what to write about then all you are going to be doing is writing about what loads of people have talked about anyway. Find something that you and your readers would be interested in and then make it interesting to view.
   
  Making your content ‘genuinely interesting’ doesn’t necessarily mean that it has to be about a traditionally interesting topic. Over the past two years, during the infographic craze, people have been finding ways of making traditionally boring information very exciting. This example from ‘Trucker Classifieds’ that displayed some statistics from America’s trucking industry in an amazing scrolling infographic is a prime example.

 

• Website Acquisition - This method involves acquiring someone else’s website, usually for a sum of money, in order to capture the website’s existing readership. Once you have acquired a website, there are a number of different approaches that you can take towards filtering traffic through to your personal blog. This could be that you simply redirect the blog and all its content over to your website, integrate the existing website’s content into your own or you could simply run the acquired site as usual and link through to your blog within articles or through banners, etc.
   
  Website acquisition can be a very expensive tactic to use but it can often yield great results. Make sure that you inherit the social media accounts of the website as well in order to further boost your online community. You can find websites that are for sale on sites like Flippa. A little tip that I have though is to search for blogs that have slowed down in the regularity of their posting. For example, if a site used to post a blog every day and now only posts around once a fortnight it could be a sign that they are getting a bit bored of the whole venture and would be a good target to approach privately to get a better deal.

These are just a few of the different methods of driving new traffic to your website and I haven’t mentioned many other strategies, for example PPC advertising through Adwords, primarily because I could go on writing all day if this was the case! Hopefully this has given you a few ideas though and can help you to bring in some more traffic to your shiny new blog.

Have you got any great ideas for increasing the traffic on your blog? If so, I want to know so drop me your suggestions within the comments box below