SEO

Last week, I visited the topics of basic content strategy and blogging. If blogging is your tortilla, then content is the filling – nobody wants to read a blog (or eat a burrito) without some tasty content. As I previously touched on, blogging and content creation are much easier when you set a content schedule. When you plan ahead, you ensure not only that you stay on track, but also that you are never without ideas for content. The next step is creating the content that ranks highly with search engines, and that’s where I’m picking up this week. Thanks to our friends over at CopyBlogger, I bring you your fresh weekly burrito: content creation with a side of salsa and sass.

An Overview of Your SEO Burrito
You know the age-old saying, “If a tree falls in the forest and no one’s there to hear it, does it make a sound?” Similarly in blogging and content creation, if you blog and no one read your content, are you relevant? The answer is no, in case you were wondering. That’s part of the magic of Google and Search Engine Optimization (SEO): connecting billions of people to billions of sources of information by only typing in a few words into a search bar. SEO is a website’s content’s relevance on search engine results. What determines content’s relevance? The number of users finding the content “organically” or without a website using paid keyword search to appear at the top. “Organic” or “natural” search results typically represent a website that offers both meaningful and useful content for the majority of users searching keywords that website mirrors.

SEO doesn’t stop there: it is not limited to being found organically on Google, but also reflects social sharing, such as linking in blogs, tweeting, posting to Google+, sending to friends through Facebook chat, and the like. Because we are all emotional beings, we are compelled to share things that hit a chord, be it funny, sad, disturbing, or inspiring. The purpose of SEO is to help people find answers to the questions they type into search engines: the focus is on the value that certain websites or pages bring to consumers. While consumers must follow the yellow brick road of keywords to find their answers, there are many misconceptions about SEO, content creation, and keywords.

Content: The Protein
Compelling content is the meat (or beans if you’re vegetarian) of your burrito. You want your content to be useful for thousands of readers, not just you, and you want your readers to share your content with thousands of other readers. Though normally I don’t like to share my food, a great SEO burrito is something I would want to share with the world. Furthermore, when curating your content, it is important to remember one thing: you are writing for people, not for search engines. A common misconception is that truly great SEO content is ugly and littered with keywords and other unreadable mumbo-jumbo to trick search engines into ranking them higher. The truth of the matter is the best content is content that people can benefit from and easily read. Remember: search engines are not the ones sharing your content; people are. Search engines only help lead people to your content. Though there are many technical aspects to blogging and content creation, emotion should never be forgotten.

Keywords: The Salsa
As previously stated in last week’s blog, finding a niche for your content and blog is one of your first steps. Additionally, you must use the correct keywords and keyword phrases for your audience. Keywords are the salsas in your burrito, and you need to find the right spiciness that best suits your taste. You don’t want salsa that is too bland or too spicy for your tastes because then you can’t enjoy the burrito to its fullest extent. Similarly with keywords, if readers can’t find you using their search terms, then you won’t be relevant. Ideally, you want to be as specific as possible in your use of keyword phrases – if you’re too general or vague, you’ll be outranked by a high-traffic competitor. In other words, do your keyword research. It is smart to include variations of keyword phrases in the event a higher-traffic site on a particular phrase outranks you.

A common misconception about SEO is utilizing “keyword stuffing,” or using a certain keyword as many times as humanly possible to have your page rank highly on search engines. We can relate this to saturating a burrito with salsa: when your burrito has too much of a good thing, it falls apart. Google has algorithms that sniff out people who overuse keywords on their websites, and punishes them by essentially removing their ranking. Why? Because mindlessly using a keyword is not going to help the consumer find their answer: think of it as search engine spam.

Titles and Headlines: The Cilantro Rice
Headlines are your one shot to communicate to the consumer that you have all the answers to their question they just searched. They are the cilantro rice in your burrito, and influence the initial bite into a burrito. Some people don’t like cilantro (what freaks) and may decide they don’t want to eat the burrito. Similarly, a person may not be grabbed by your headline and surpass your article. However, you don’t want to overload your burrito with too much rice, just as you don’t want a super long and heavy title for your content. Furthermore, it is ideal to work your keyword phrase into it while remaining compelling and while also promising to answer their question. If you write a great attention-grabbing headline peppered with relevant keywords or keyword phrases, people could link back to you using just your headline, also called “anchor text.”

Link Building and Linking Out: The Guacamole
Link Building
When you’re the new kid on the block, you need clout, and as a new website or blog, you can get that clout by having older, popular blogs and websites link anchor to your website. How do the cool kids notice you, you ask? You write better than them, you make them look twice at your blog and go, “WOW! That person can write well! I want to link them to my blog!” This strategy is “link building,” and is obviously used to increase inbound traffic on the site or blog. Link building is the guacamole in your burrito, because who even wants a burrito without guacamole? It’s essential and boosts the burrito’s overall taste. Similarly, when you develop your clout as a smaller, newer blog with the help from older, more popular blogs, your search engine results improve, and you’re on your way to a higher ranking (or better tasting burrito). You can also link build by guest blogging on a more popular blog. By choosing to contribute to an already established blog, you can attract attention to your writing and in turn, your blog.

Linking Out
Similar to link building, “linking out” is defined as engaging readers and bloggers on other websites with your content or other relevant content. There are multiple ways to link out, including through your blog posts and on social media. However, the key is how you share it. As previously touched upon in last week’s blog, you want to engage social media influencers to read and share your content to build clout. Get the influencer’s attention and share your work, but don’t go about it in a spamming or obnoxious way, as you may get the wrong kind of attention.

Social Interaction: The Jalapeno Peppers
Search engines like to provide users with the newest, most-updated links as these are seen to be the most relevant. Search engines also like to know that you interact with other websites and social platforms (clearly this whole thing is a popularity contest). When you update your blog or website frequently, you are opening the social forum to anyone who stumbles upon your content. Staying active and encouraging social interaction is equivalent to the jalapeno peppers in your burrito – they give the taste a little kick and oomph. By encouraging participation, you develop your general website’s authority and open the floor for discussion. Free discussion also allows for opportunities for you to plug your related content, also known as older, previously written blog posts. Getting readers to stay on your website through related content is better for your page, allowing you to lower the bounce rate and keep around potential customers longer. Furthermore, never assume your readers know what you’re talking about, because if they’re just joining in for the first time, chances are they don’t. Linking to previous posts in blogs can convert your new readers to repeat readers.

Conversions: The Grande Finale
While seeing spikes in traffic can be a great indicator that you’ve created successful content (or a delicious SEO burrito), it should not be viewed alone as a measure of success. Chances are, you’re trying to sell something, which is why you created your content in the first place. Furthermore, a consumer likely landed on your page because they are looking to purchase what you are selling. Therefore, unless you see an increase in your sales conversions, then you cannot truly say your content is successful based on page views alone. Before you can even begin with your content campaign, it is crucial to know your base point in order to measure your successes.

How do you know when you’ve made a truly delicious SEO burrito? When you’ve combined the protein (compelling content), salsas (relative keywords and keyword phrases), cilantro rice (attention-grabbing headlines and titles), guacamole (link building and linking out), and peppers (social interaction). If you are selling more SEO burritos than you were a month ago thanks to some savvy new burrito content you’ve created, then you indeed are successful. Keeping these things in mind, do you think you’re ready to create your own SEO burrito? Or do you want to make a quick trip to Chipotle first? I’m kind of hungry!

One of the largest sources of online traffic for many brands comes from “Direct” visits to your website. Direct traffic is one of the few metrics that gives you insight into how your branding is actually doing in terms of your marketing efforts. The problem that many people run into when they see drastic increases or decreases in Direct traffic is figuring out what happened and its cause. Here are some helpful tips on how to analyze the change in Direct Traffic.

Campaign Annotations

One of the most under-utilized features of Google Analytics is the annotation tool. If you’re launching any campaigns or ads, it’s crucial to make annotations to gauge their performance. Utilizing the annotation tool helps keep things organized and may answer any questions as to what caused the change in traffic. It’s best practice to annotate when you run print, radio, or television ads due to outside forces influencing the amount of direct traffic to your website. Determining which external ad that can’t be tracked with parameters usually makes for big changes in Direct traffic.

Landing Page Analysis

You should also be studying what landing pages people are arriving onto directly. Your homepage more than likely will be the highest visited page opposed to your internal pages. If there are any other URLs that are generating large amounts of traffic, you’ll want to figure out what is causing traffic to be directed to that particular URL. You’ll want to compare different date ranges to see if the traffic fluctuation is being caused to these internal URLs instead of the homepage.

Traditional Advertising

External forms of traditional advertising play a major role in the fluctuation of visitors coming to your website directly. Be aware of the bumps in traffic that can result when using direct mailers, billboards, radio ads, newspaper ads, and the like. Also note how much of an increase the advertising created for organic and possibly even direct traffic. You will generally see a rise in both direct and organic traffic when running traditional advertising, but, forecasting how much of an increase the traditional advertising makes to Direct traffic helps demonstrate how a specific change in ads may have performed.

Location of Users

Getting information about fluctuations is difficult, but one of the best areas to look for answers is analyzing where the visits came from. You may be targeting a specific city heavily and wonder why direct traffic may have dropped after all the effort you’ve put into that market. When looking at a breakdown of locations, direct traffic may have increased in visits in that targeted location.  However, the overall drop of visits outside that target market accounts for the bigger drop in direct traffic.

Device Trends

The rise of mobile devices such as tablets and cell phones is occurring dramatically. One way to get more insight about your direct visitors is observing what type of device they are using when typing your website into a browser. If you’re running physical banners or billboards on the highway, for example, you could see a major increase in mobile visits for that particular month due to people driving in their car and using their phone (we don’t recommend). لعبه القمار Another example commonly seen is when there are increases in brand mentions in an online article or announcements of partnerships but there are no links listed for your site. The lack of a link online is often the culprit of people directly typing in your brand name into their browser with  “.com” at the end, causing the direct traffic to rise via desktop.

URL Parameters

We LOVE tagging our links with parameters and highly recommend using them, because it gives you insight about which campaigns drove the most traffic and conversions. Unfortunately, sometimes tools like Google Analytics are confused about what to do when a parameter is used in a URL. شراء يانصيب اون لاين If Google Analytics doesn’t know how to handle a specific parameter, you’ll usually see it appear under “Direct traffic.” It’s a great exercise to see if there are any odd URLs that contain parameters that fall into the Direct bucket. It is common to see a successful piece of content fall into Direct traffic due to sharing via social media. The reason is simple: we are social beings and we take links we find on social media platforms and share them directly with others via any chat program or e-mail. When the user visits the link we share, there could be a parameter in the URL. However, Google Analytics will designate that user’s visit as Direct instead of using the parameters defining its source or medium. كيفية اللعب في bet365 It is also possible for certain tools and applications to cut off parameters at the end of the URL and record those visits as Direct.

Organic Traffic

Recently, Search Engine Land conducted a study to test how much of Direct traffic was actually being accounted for as Organic traffic. The study determined that as much as 60% of Direct traffic might actually be misrepresented as Organic traffic. We don’t recommend you running this test, but it’s something that you should be aware of.