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July 6th, 2011 Nick Stamoulis Posted in Article Marketing, content marketing, Marketing Videos, optimization, video marketing No Comments »
Content needs to be optimized to help it rank well in the search engines. However, there is a very defined line between spamming and optimizing. While it is important to include appropriate keywords, stuffing those keywords not only detracts from the overall user-experience, it is also considered black hat and can result in a penalty. Components of your content to optimize include: titles, summaries, descriptions, linking and contact information.
May 27th, 2011 Nick Stamoulis Posted in Blog Posts, Blogging, Content Development, optimization No Comments »
Anyone who has been operating a blog for a while is bound to have a few posts they aren’t particularly proud of. Maybe you couldn’t think of anything to write about that day. Maybe you were under deadline. Maybe you had a lot of other projects going on, so you focused more on the word count than what you were actually saying. Somewhere, in the recesses of your blog (whether personal or business) are diamond-in-the-rough posts waiting to be rediscovered.
Breathing new life into your old blog posts can help them re-index in the search engines, potentially driving more traffic to your blog. It also tightens up the overall value of your blog, since low-quality content will be replaced with valuable content. This can remove any red flags/penalties the search engines are using to rank your blog.
Add content
See if there is any new information that you can add to an old blog post to make it more relevant. Did you make a prediction in that post? Has it come true? Are there any points you can expand further upon that you just left untouched the first time around? Look at your old blog post like a first draft. What is missing? What kind of content needs to be edited/added/changed to make it as good as the rest of your posts? Oftentimes our less successful blogs are shorter and only provide a surface-level amount of information. Really dig into the post and make it worth the effort.
Re-optimize
Maybe the post is well-written, but it didn’t seem to do as well in the search engines as your other posts. Go back and re-optimize that particular post. What different keywords can you incorporate into the title, H1 tags and post content to make it search spider friendly? You might even consider changing the URL of the post if it isn’t doing well. If the post has an image, incorporate an image tag so the search spiders can “see” it and pull it into the search results.
One year later
Right a follow-up post to one of your older posts and link back to the original. Was there a post you wrote a year ago that got a lot of attention? What about that posts was so captivating to your audience? What has happened since then?
Push old posts in new ways
I’d bet the scope of your online networking as grown substantially in the last few years, maybe just in the last few months. Some of your connections may have never even seen your older posts. Push those posts (provided they are still relevant) through your social networking channels and engage new connections with older content. Just because you wrote it 6 months ago, that doesn’t mean everyone knows it exists.
April 20th, 2011 Nick Stamoulis Posted in Keyword Research, keywords, optimization No Comments »
For most websites, the page that draws the most amount of traffic is the home page. It makes sense; the homepage is you introducing your website to the visitor. It’s the face of your online brand and is often the page that gets linked to by outside sources. But you shouldn’t put all your eggs in one basket and stuff all your keywords onto the landing page. You shouldn’t be putting all your keywords on any one page at all.
Keywords should always be page specific and based on the content of that particular page. Let’s say you run a dress boutique that sells wedding and prom dresses. Why would you try to incorporate prom dress keywords into the wedding dress page? A girl looking for her prom dress is probably in high school and marriage is a long way off. She isn’t looking for “the dress,” she’s looking for the latest is prom dress fashion. Bringing the prom dress shopper to your wedding dress page provides a bad user-experience and might make the visitor feel like they’ve been tricked.
A good rule of thumb is to identify and incorporate 2-5 keywords per page. Again, they have to be based on the content of that page. Back to our dress boutique; they may offer custom tailoring services, but those keywords should only appear on the tailoring services page of the site. They may talk about their tailoring services on the homepage content, but those keywords shouldn’t be the main focus.
If you aren’t sure what keywords you should be targeting on each page, take at look at your analytics. This will tell you what people are searching for that drew them to that page of your site. Pick a few of the top ranking ones and plug those into the Google keyword research tool to find appropriate variations to consider incorporating. Take your big list of keywords and scrub them down until you get the 5 best options.
Don’t over-stuff your content with keywords, regardless of how relevant. They should be seamlessly integrated into the content in a way that feels natural for the reader.