All posts by Sam Hall

Samantha Hall is a content specialist at SEOptimise. She ensures that all content produced at SEOptimise is delivered to the highest standards and works with the SEO team to create strategies for client content. She holds a BA in English Language & Literature from Oxford University. Get in touch with Sam on Twitter

A link from a high-authority news website can do wonders for SEO. But do you know how to appeal to journos?

The boundaries between SEO and PR are becoming increasingly blurred. In fact, for many small businesses, any PR work is carried out by their SEO team or agency.

Links from top news websites and popular bloggers are incredibly valuable online. But do you know how to get positive press mentions?

We’ve been speaking to a journalist who regularly writes for high-authority news websites, including Yahoo! UK and the MailOnline. What are her tips for getting mentions – and even links – in the press?

content is king

New year, new you – but is it time for a facelift of your website’s content as well? To stay ahead of the competition and to win moments that matter to your customers, recognising the growing value of good online content is the first step; whether it’s launching a new blog, writing some guides, or revamping your landing pages and paid search text.

If you still need some persuading from the higher-ups, here’s our list of reasons for you to make content your king in the new year and beyond:

Web marketing is a constantly developing challenge and it can be useful to have staff who specialise in particular areas. That’s certainly true with online copywriting – there’s such a lot to consider that having a dedicated copywriter can make a real difference to your overall online performance.

But whether you’re a writer trying to perfect your online capabilities, or an SEO exec needing to brush up, there’s a wide range of issues to consider. Online copywriting poses its own challenges, from knowing the basics of HTML to understanding the ever-changing world of SEO.

So what help is available?

Sometimes it can seem like the demands of SEO and clickability are fundamentally opposed, but this isn’t true. Your SEO team may want you to use keywords in the header and subheaders, but that doesn’t mean they have to be lengthy lists of keywords. With the right care and attention, your headlines can still be interesting, clickable, and amusing.

So, whether it’s for a blog, press release, or article, here’s what you need to consider:

The Benefit of Brevity

First, remember that a headline should be brief – this is not the place to target that eight-word long-tail keyword phrase. Stick to the basics and pull out the most important point of your entire article, as this is most likely to engage with the reader.

There’s no reason why you shouldn’t include a short keyword phrase if appropriate, but remember the article needs to be read by people, and not just search bots – so if it looks too forced it’s going to be a huge turn-off for your audience.

Even if you have the best intentions in the world, coming up with a constant stream of new ideas for blog posts can be pretty intimidating. All too soon, the corporate blog lies empty because the company has run out of ideas. Don’t let that happen to you! From company brainstorms to new ways of planning copy, we are going to provide you with some great tips on how to generate ideas for blog content.

WARNING: This is a long post, but we think it’s worth the read (and hopefully you’ll agree). If you really don’t have time then there’s a list of our top tips at the end!

We are live from Brighton, and we’re really looking forward to hearing the insights and thoughts of all the speakers (all 19 of them!) Doors opened at 9:00am and the first speaker is scheduled to speak at 10:00 am. Stay tuned.

We don’t have fancy auto-refreshes so you’ll need to refresh your browser to see the updates :-)

10:01 am: The first speaker is on stage, Dave Trott – Executive Creative Director at CSTTG will be talking about “Predatory Thinking”. Sounds intriguing. Must be similar to “Guerilla Marketing”. Dave’s using an analogy of pure maths and applied math with pure creativity and applied creativity.

Since Google released the Panda update in February last year, the importance of having high-quality content on your site has increased hugely.

In May 2011, Amit Singhal published a post aimed to help people build better quality websites. One of the most important points to take away from it was, as I’m sure you’ve guessed, having good-quality content. Here I’m going to go into detail over some of his points and explain what you really need to do if you want to rank well.

Content strategy has always been a valued part of SEO and, with Google’s recent updates, it’s become increasingly important. No matter what size your business is, having a regular flow of good quality content on your site is essential.

However, content does take time to produce and, when you’re a small business, it can be hard to find the time or people to produce regular content for your site.

There are several options for small businesses to make the most of their resources and create a site with a steady stream of relevant, useful content. We’ll go through some of them here in order to help those of you who are finding it difficult to know where to start.

Online reviews can be a divisive idea among marketers. Some welcome the user-generated keyword-rich content and increased transparency. Others argue that they have to be censored or you risk negative comments and even legal challenges.

So who’s right? This article takes a look at why you’d benefit from publishing reviews, what the risks are and how to mitigate them.

The rise and rise of UGC

UGC, or user-generated content is a fairly recent phenomenon of web marketing, and serves several of the major demands of SEO (at least in terms of how Google defines ‘optimised’ website content).

For a start, reviews are helpful to other visitors to your website – as long as they are honest. They offer an independent assessment of the quality of a product or service. No material written directly for marketing purposes can inspire that much trust.

Updating a page by posting a new review onto it shows Google (and other search engines) that the page and the website as a whole are still ‘alive’. Regularly updating a website is still one of the best ways to get it to the top of the search rankings.

On top of all of these things, like any text content added to your website, reviews contain plain, search-visible text; it may not be professionally keyworded or optimised, but it can still help you to rank higher for product names, and associated technical terms and phrases.

What are the risks?

One of the reasons why UGC is so popular is that it seems very low-risk – once you’ve added the capability to write reviews to your website, each user who posts their opinion is effectively providing you with search-visible content for free.

News stories, blog posts, dedicated product pages… Any SEO agency will tell you that you need compelling content on your site to boost your rankings.

But if you think your website already says everything you need it to then you might be a bit unsure about where you can add content, and how it will add value. Here’s a rundown of some of the main options so you can see which will work best for you:

Landing pages

Landing pages have been around since the very first days of search engine optimisation (SEO). At their most basic, they simply consist of a description of a particular product or service, using the relevant keywords in prominent places.

With significant research done by conversion rate optimisers (CROs), including test creation, design, and understanding buying psychology, we know that there is significant return on investment in allocating resources in developing fresh landing pages.

Many website owners allocate a significant chunk of their budget to online advertising which help drive traffic, but with little or no consideration as to where traffic is directed. Therefore, it is imperative that website owners allocate resources in developing the most effective landing pages, which get visitors to take desired actions once they’ve found your site. Also, it helps keep your website content fresh if you regularly update product listings and prices.

Websites that make their revenue purely from advertising don’t really have landing pages in the traditional sense. This is particularly true for news and entertainment websites, where static content doesn’t play a huge part in winning them traffic.