All posts in content creation

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.

The recent integration of social and search at Google marks a huge change in how information on the internet will be presented to us. When a logged in user now performs a search, they will be given two types of search results: the anonymous search results that we are all used to and personal search results, which are generated from information shared within that user’s network of Google+ circles. This new platform presents a major marketing opportunity for brands and it requires a developed strategy just like other social media platforms. It would be daft for brands to consider Google+ as just another fad, and, in the same breadth that brands define strategies for Facebook and Twitter, the same now needs to be done for Google+.

While it is apparent that Google+ is not yet fully developed, it would appear a good time for brands to set up their Google+ page, start uploading regular content and playing about with the different features on Google+. What should you as a brand be doing now?

1. Grow Your Circles

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Like most people, SEO practitioners reflect on the past year and attempt to improve their skills in the new year.

If you haven’t made up your mind what exactly you want to change in the coming year, check out these suggestions for 30 SEO resolutions for 2012 that draw on modern industry best practices and growing trends.

In recent months, Google has made a distinct effort to publicly communicate the small changes they have been making to their algorithms.  In a bid to appear more transparent, Google has published monthly updates on its blog with regard to these changes. With special attention on these updates, and taking into consideration yesterday’s big social search announcement, this post ponders the signals being sent to us around Google Image Search.

The first mention of these subtle changes came in November, when Google cited one change as:

  • “Retiring a signal in Image search: As the web evolves, we often revisit signals that we launched in the past that no longer appear to have a significant impact. In this case, we decided to retire a signal in Image Search related to images that had references from multiple documents on the web.” It would appear that by Google is trying to reduce issues of duplicate content by making sure the same image doesn’t appear twice.

It was during this month that Google also rolled out the +1 button to Image search. Its social media offering opens up to integrate photos, allowing +1 users to highlight favourite images. This marks the start of a personalised web experience and reinforces the growing sentiment that social and search are becoming increasingly intertwined.

Running an SEO project smoothly and effectively requires juggling many skills:  creativity, proactivity, effective time management and organisation, to name just a few.

But I would argue that one of the most important attributes of a successful SEO campaign is communication of knowledge – within an agency, of course, but also (perhaps less obviously) with clients. Many clients have little or no knowledge of SEO, and why should they? That’s what we’re here for, after all. But it’s unfortunately a fact of life as an SEO that algorithm updates and other external factors are not the only risk posed to a successful SEO project. Without at least a minimal level of SEO education, actions taken by a client can actually be detrimental to the SEO efforts of their agency or consultant.

One of my SEO New Year’s Resolutions (more Resolutions from SEOptimise in a forthcoming blog post by Matthew Taylor) is to help clients to help us by ensuring they have enough knowledge to understand our work, its aims and methodologies, and what they can do to ensure that we’re able to get them the best results possible. So I thought I’d kick off the New Year by taking a look at the top ways in which an SEO project can be sabotaged by a client. This is not me ranting about my lovely clients by the way – it’s more a retrospective look at some of the bottlenecks I’ve encountered in otherwise smooth SEO projects over the last year or so.

1. Changing the website without telling us
Whether it’s launching a new section, rolling back to an old version of the site, rewriting copy or even a full blown redesign, it’s really important to get the SEO perspective before any changes are made, to ensure that a) new material is optimised from the word go and b) prior SEO efforts are not damaged or lost. There’s nothing worse than finding that your client’s rankings have plummeted because the site has been reverted to an old, unoptimised version without your knowledge.

The solution:  emphasise to your client the importance of liaising on potential website changes before they happen, and in plenty of time. If there’s a redesign in the offing, ensure you’re involved from the outset to ensure that the new site is structured in an SEO-friendly way. It’s much easier to make changes in the planning stages than it is to change things once it’s live.

Agent 007

Recently I’ve written about Klout score optimisation. Since then I and others who outed themselves as actively using Klout have been attacked by self proclaimed SEO stars and other people who seemingly “hate Klout”. Can you hate a metric? Obviously people get very emotional when it comes to Klout.

Klout measures the social media influence of people. While it fails at determining your real life influence, it’s quite accurate for measuring how active and influential you are on social media, including Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Google+.

That’s why some people hate Klout:  they are only influential within a small closed group, while they have never shared enough with the general public on social media to get appreciation from the masses.

What did I say when people ridiculed me for using Klout to determine people’s influence? I said that I am quite sure that Google internally has a similar system of finding out who exerts influence on the social web and who does not. It wasn’t a very daring prediction, it was just an extrapolation based on the steps Google has undertaken in the past. Google has already been focusing on authorship, real names and the social graph for a while.

Now Bill Slawski has written an article on the reputation systems Google uses, might use or will use in the future. There are three mentioned in the post. The most interesting one is the Agent Rank. Not only does the name sound familiar and self-explanatory to some extent, but it’s also a patent Google has filed. It most probably gets or will be used for Google +1 votes.

Here at SEOptimise we’ve been thinking a lot about copywriting recently. More than usual, that is! As the person responsible for overseeing copywriting at SEOptimise, I thought I’d share a few thoughts on the frankly quite lamentable state of what has become known as “SEO copywriting”.

Any copywriter worth their salt will doubtless share my opinion that so-called “SEO copywriting” gives the world of copywriting a bad name. Despite using the name “copywriting”, it couldn’t be further from this highly skilled profession. As we all know, this lesser species of copywriting has evolved because once upon a time, it was considered acceptable to throw together a quick article on “the secret to cheap international calls” or whatever, and submit it to a dozen or so article directories for a few quick links. But Google quite rightly recognised that that kind of rubbish was not remotely helpful to its users, and has been banging on about high-quality content with renewed vigour ever since.

New York*

On SEO forums one of the most often discussed topics are Google penalties. Webmasters seek help to determine whether and why they have been penalised by Google. They also want to know how to deal with the penalty once it’s established that they have been hit by one.

What is a Google penalty and what isn’t? There seem to be different definitions floating around.

While Google employees will tell you that many SEO issues described as penalties aren’t actually penalties, most people seem to consider sudden and unexplained ranking and/or search traffic drops as a penalty. They at least suspect they have been subjected to a penalty.

Today I’d like to assist webmasters in determining whether they have been hit by an actual Google penalty by listing common reasons for getting penalised by Google.

Some of them are simply Google filters that deal with overtly manipulative SEO techniques. Some of these aren’t penalties at all, but I list them here as well because they are often mistaken for a penalty.

So just check out this list of ways to get penalised by Google. Many of them are high risk SEO tactics considered to be black hat by some.

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Most of traditional SEO link building is still centered around the idea of actually building the links as if on a construction site. The idea or metaphor that links are like bricks and you can use them for building has been successfully contested recently by Ross Hudgens in his essay “Please exit the link building“.

It was an excellent write up, but in the end it failed to offer a solution that is not really about building links. The alternative to link building is of course getting links.

Getting links implies that you do not manually build the links like a house in the real world, but people from outside who you may not even know link to you.

This is of course the logical way to get links, and was the way the Internet worked even before link building was considered to be part of SEO.

As the importance of SEO becomes increasingly widely recognised, millions more marketers have started churning out press releases. Unfortunately, many seem less concerned about the potential media coverage than about the optimisation benefits.

A good press release, when it’s picked up on and used by the media, can do wonders for your brand awareness and corporate authority. But it’s also great for optimisation, and if your agency is writing slapdash articles, calling them press releases and distributing them to a bunch of websites where nobody will ever read them, then you’re barely scraping the surface of your press release potential.

By creating press releases that writers and bloggers will actually use, your effort can pack a far more powerful punch both in online and offline marketing.  Here are some of my top tips for dramatically better releases.

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