Posts tagged Better
How To Leverage Google AdWords Placement Reports For Better Performance
Sep 8th
If search engine marketers are only using AdWords Placement Performance reports to exclude sites, they’re seriously under-utilizing the information Google is giving them. Read on for additional ways to leverage the goldmine of data in placement reports.
The basics: add site exclusions & managed placements
The AdWords Placement Performance report is available in the Reporting tab in [...]
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View full post on Search Engine Land: News About Search Engines & Search Marketing
Marketing Firm and SEO Firm Brings Your Business Better Results Now – FPRD (press release) (blog)
Aug 27th
 Live-PR.com (press release) |
Marketing Firm and SEO Firm Brings Your Business Better Results Now
FPRD (press release) (blog) The Amazing Thing In Any Business and In Any Economy Is That With The Right SEO Firm and Marketing Firm…There Are Marketing Strategies That Produce … Affordable and Economical SEO Expert India – BSolutions Website Marketing SEO Firm – Seo Hawk – SEO Expert |
View full post on SEO – Google News
SEO Services India Is One of the Better Ways to Provide Effective Ranking on … – SBWire (press release)
Aug 20th
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SEO Services India Is One of the Better Ways to Provide Effective Ranking on …
SBWire (press release) Wild net Technologies is an SEO company by which You will be hard pressed to choose the right company that will satisfy your SEO requirements. … |
View full post on SEO – Google News
Three Ways to Create a Better Performing Website (Using One Sneaky Tactic)
Aug 1st
Posted by RobOusbey
Let’s start with a sneaky tactic.
I know that SEOmoz blog readers are an internet-savvy crowd, so many of you are probably familiar with the ‘browser history sniffing’ techniques that exist. (Bear with me, we’ll get to internet marketing advice in a moment.)
In case you’ve not come across the concept before, it’s probably best exemplified by the site Start Panic – just hit the ‘Let’s start!’ button to watch it trawl through your browser history, and start listing sites that even you forgot you’d visited.
StartPanic uses Javascript to do the dirty work, but it’s also possible to do this completely using CSS, and without Javascript. (There’s advice about implementing the technical side of this in a popular post by Niall Kennedy.)
I wanted to show how you can use this to help your website perform better – let’s begin with the least controversial, and work on from there
1 – Customize the User Experience
Niall’s post – linked above – suggests one very sensible use of this technique: offering your users links to the social sites they use, and hiding the ones they don’t. In this bottom of this live example page, you’ll see a ‘Digg It’ button if you’ve been to Digg, a ‘Share on Facebook’ button if you’ve been there, etc. By limiting the set of sharing buttons, you can remove that ‘social clutter’ that is prevalent on some sites – this doesn’t just give a cleaner page to the user, but may have a much higher ‘sharing’ rate for your page.
Customization can also be made is to the content of your site: use the browser history sniffing technique to see the kinds of blogs and news sites your visitors are reading, and then adjust your content based on the results. For example: I might consider writing a weekly post about PPC for the Distilled blog. We could check to see how many of the Distilled visitors had looked at PPC Hero, the AdWords blog, and the AdWords support pages. If the number was high enough, we might consider adding content to satisfy that niche.
Likewise, if you find that a high proportion of your readers visit KittenWar, then you might consider adding a little more ‘cute’ to your posts.
2 – Retarget Your Publicity
Traditional ad-network retargeting works in the following way:
- a visitor comes to your site, and leaves without making a purchase
- your advertising network drops a cookie onto that user’s computer
- the user visits a different site which displays ads from that network
- the network recognizes the user, and shows them an ad for your product
- hopefully they’re reminded of you, and come back to the site to make a purchase.
However, this retargeting only works when you can cookie people once they’ve visited your site. I’d propose using this technique to alter the copy on your site, based on what the user has already seen about you elsewhere.
For example: check for new posts about your brand each morning (or can I assume you do this already?) If your company had three product reviews on blogs and news sites today, then record these URLs, and check to see if each visitor to your site has already read one of them. You could then display a prominent content box on the front page with information about the exact product they saw reviewed, and a link to your page for that product. You might even acknowledge they’d seen the review: "Initech wants to offer you a 10% discount, as a reader of The Daily Bugle"
You could use the same technique for Reputation Management. If a site has published a negative article about you, there’s a potential that people will come to your site to find out more. However, you may not want to simply have a message on your front page that reads "The Bluth Company has NOT committed treason – read more" – but you could choose display this headline only to people who’ve read about the story already.
3 – Find Your Competitors’ Customers
This is where you could really up-the-ante with your CRO efforts.
I recently saw a bank who offered $100 to people who closed their account at a competitor’s bank and switched over. This would be a perfect opportunity to sniff each visitor’s browser history, to see if you should promote this offer to them on your site. You can even avoid showing it to people who have been shopping around (and looking at every bank’s website homepage) by checking to see if they’ve visited the URLs for logging in and out of the competitor’s online banking to see if they’re actually a customer of that company.
For e-commerce sites, you could check to see if your visitor has visited your competitor’s site, but could also check if they’ve looked at the competitor’s product on Amazon or other retailers. Your product page could then include a comparison between the two products. That could increase conversions, but you’d avoid comparing your product to a competitor’s for anyone who’d never seen the competing product.
To Conclude
So, the practice of checking to see if a visitor has already been to particular pages might seem a little shady at first – but this part of the way that the web and web browsers are designed, and people can block their browser history if they’d prefer.
Executed in the right way, it could be a very powerful technique for creating high performing, high converting websites. Use it wisely.
(Thanks for reading; you can follow me on Twitter: @RobOusbey, and I’m pleased to be speaking alongside some of the best SEO practitioners around at this year’s Pro Training Seminar – tickets are still available.)
View full post on SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog
Why Guest Blogging Works Better Than Article Marketing
Jul 26th
A week ago, while I was perusing some marketing forums, I found a thread about the effectiveness of article marketing today. Halfway through the thread, there was a post about which one was better – article marketing or guest blogging.
Benefits of Guest Blogging
For me, I have found guest blogging is definitely more effective in getting traffic back to my site, as well as getting links on pages that are usually guaranteed future PageRank. Why is guest blogging more successful for these two purposes?
1) Guest blog posts usually stay on the homepage longer.
Unless you are guest blogging for sites that produce several articles a day, like Mashable, your guest blog post is likely going to be on the homepage for a while. On this site, posts are usually on the homepage for at least two days, whereas sites that only post once a day will likely have your post on the homepage for a week.
Articles on article directories, on the other hand, will likely not make the first page unless it is featured, or the site posts latest articles on their homepages. But chances are, with the volume of articles that a directory receives, even those will not stay on the homepage for that long.
2) Blogs have their own subscriber base.
Most blogs have their own subscribers, meaning there are people that will get every post on that blog delivered to their email or their RSS reader. Plus, there are subscribers who follow blogs on social networks – they will see the blog’s latest posts through the blog’s Twitter stream, Facebook page, Stumble shares, and so on.
When it comes to article directories, some do offer RSS feeds for particular categories or, if you’re lucky, you might have someone who follows your articles directly through your own RSS feed. The latter is likely to have fewer followers than a blog though.
3) Blog posts are promoted by both the poster and the blog itself.
What really separates guest blog posts from articles is the promotion. Whenever a blogger places a guest post on their site, it is in their interest to promote the post to their network to drive traffic to their site. The guest blogger (9 out of 10 times) will likely be promoting their guest post to their network as well. This will drive two different follower bases to the post, leading to much more social sharing (assuming the content is good).
Article directories generally do not promote articles, with exception to featured articles, due to the high volume of articles being posted daily. Many article writers, especially if they are mass producing articles, generally do not promote their articles either.
4) Guest blog guidelines are usually stricter than those on an article directory.
Bloggers typically have higher standards (or guest blogging guidelines) when it comes to what they will allow as guest posts on their site. They want more words, photos, resourceful links, and sometimes even fully formatted posts ready to drop into WordPress. And because they do not receive a high volume of guest post submissions (in comparison to the number of articles entered daily on popular article directories), the blog owner will spend more time reviewing the submission and is likely not to accept anything that does not meet their high standards.
Article directories typically have a shorter article length requirement, and many do not allow pictures, links or other embedded content – just text. So long as your article doesn’t set off any automated checks in their computer system, lower quality articles will get approved easily. And, of course, if the article content itself is lower quality, it is less likely to get featured by the article directory or promoted by others.
5) Networking opportunities created by guest blogging.
One major benefit of guest blogging over for article writing is the networking opportunities and relationship you build. If you produce great content for a guest post on a blog, the blog owner will probably be very appreciative, especially if it does well.
How does this help you in your link building efforts? Simple – it the blog owner owns other sites, you have a prime opportunity of getting featured on those as well.
An example of this happened just recently. I was emailing different infographic gallery sites to suggest inclusion of a fun, animated SEO infographic that visually explains quality link building and PageRank value.
One of the infographic sites got back to me surprisingly fast – it turned out the owner also runs a blog that I regularly contribute articles to. They added the infographic I suggested the same day in a new post!
Making Article Marketing More Effective
Now that you know some of the benefits of guest blogging over article marketing, what can you do to make your articles just as valuable as guest blog posts?
1) Write higher quality articles to get featured.
Do a little research to see which articles get featured on the article directory you are submitting to, preferably in your category. Or look at some expert blogs on your topic – Postrank, for example, will give you the top blogs on almost any subject. Writing better content will make it more likely that a directory will find it valuable and feature it on the homepage and even tweet it (which would be great on EzineArticles, since they have almost 60,000 followers).
2) Get involved with the article directory’s community.
After providing great content, another way to get featured is to get votes and comments from other members of the article directory’s community. Did you know that HubPages and Squidoo allow you to follow other users as well as interact in forums and answers? EzineArticles also has their own forums. Interacting in these forums and with other members will most likely lead to opportunities to promote your article (especially in the forums, be sure that your article answers a question that another member asks before promoting it). Squidoo also offers “Squidcasts” so you can send a message to all of your followers about your latest articles, or lenses.
3) Promote your articles.
Social promotion of your articles on article directories is likely to get your article more exposure, especially if you are networking with other article writers on your preferred article directories. Find people on Twitter and Facebook that would be interested in the topic you write about and connect with them. Be sure to interact with them often (by retweeting their posts, answering their questions, liking their links, etc.) so that they will get to know you better and would be then likely to promote your content with their network as well.
Another way to promote your article directory submissions is by blog commenting – you can either leave the link to your article as your website URL (assuming the site doesn’t have a comment policy against deep links) or use blogs that CommentLuv enabled to get a link to your author bio and to your latest article.
4) Build links to your articles.
Along with building links to your articles via blog commenting, there are other ways to build links to your articles.
- There are independent directories where you can submit articles from Squidoo, HubPages, and other site’s articles.
- Some Squidoo lenses allow you to add your lens links to theirs – just Google your keyword “add to this list” site:squidoo.com.
- If your HubPage fits well with another, you can leave a link to it in your comment on another hub (this borders link/comment spamming – be sure your hub really adds value to the hub you are commenting on).
- Assuming the article directory hasn’t been banned, you can bookmark your article on social sites such as Delicious, Digg, and other social bookmarking networks.
- If the article directory has an author RSS feed, you can submit your author feed to RSS submission sites.
5) Connect with top article writers.
Going back to getting involved with the article directory community, be sure to also try to network with some of the top article writers on the site. Getting in good with other writers may help you get your article get linked in one of theirs as well, giving you exposure on top rated articles on a particular network.
Even a friendly link request to another author can pan out successfully. After writing an article on how to promote Squidoo lenses, I messaged a few related lens writers to suggest mine as a good resource for their readers, which resulted in getting a dofollow link on an existing PR 4 lens on SEO tips.
Using these techniques will help your articles become more powerful in terms of ratings, rankings, and traffic.
Your Article Marketing vs. Guest Blogging Strategy
What do you find more beneficial for driving traffic and building links to your website – article marketing or guest blogging? What other tips can you think of to help promote your articles on directories to make them more valuable?
Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.
Why Guest Blogging Works Better Than Article Marketing
View full post on Search Engine Journal
Topsy Launches Twitter Expert Search; Better Options Exist
Jul 15th
Topsy, the Twitter-focused real-time search engine, has launched a new tool aimed at helping users find the right people to follow called Topsy Expert Search. The blog post seems to suggest that this is a “labs” product, but there’s a prominent link to Expert Search right from Topsy’s home page.
Either way, Expert Search seems like [...]
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View full post on Search Engine Land: News About Search Engines & Search Marketing
SEO Paradox: Web Design Companies Have Better SEO Opportunities – The Brainchild Group – Marketing News (blog)
Jul 5th
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SEO Paradox: Web Design Companies Have Better SEO Opportunities
The Brainchild Group – Marketing News (blog) By creating websites for high-profile clients and strategically choosing the credits at the bottom of the site one can achieve a level of SEO zen. … |
View full post on SEO – Google News
Split FireFox into Several Frames for Better Productivity and More
Jul 2nd
As an active Internet user, I browse hundreds of pages daily. Sometimes I have dozens of tabs open and I have to switch quickly between them.
To enhance my productivity I am now playing with a couple of screen-splitting tools that are aimed to help me:
- Quickly compare search results (of various (local) search engine versions, of different search engines – e.g. Google versus Bing, – etc.)
- Quickly switch between tabs (especially for reference notes, quoting, note taking, etc);
- Easily read, keep notes, summarize – everything in one window.
Now, let me share the two tools:
1. Fox Splitter
Fox Splitter is an option-rich FireFox addon that offers you the various splitting features:
- Split current tab;
- Tile all tabs;
- Tile all tabs vertically / horizontally;
- Access recently closed panes;
- Collapse / Expand all panes:
It can be accessed in various ways:
- Choose the “Split Browser to” menu in the context menu.
- Choose the “Load in Split Browser” menu in the context menu on link.
- Click popup-button on top/bottom/left/right edges of the content area.
- Drop links, bookmarks, tabs, etc. to popup-button on top/bottom/left/right edges of the content area while dragging.
2. Tile Tabs
Tile Tabs – this one is also really rich in features and settings (and I can’t still choose between the two actually). The menu options include:
- Tile Tab – adds an existing tab as a new tile above, left, right or below the currently selected tile.
- Tile New Tab – opens a new tab as a new tile above, left, right or below the currently selected tile.
- Tile Duplicate Tab – opens a duplicate tab as a new tile above, left, right or below the currently selected tile.
- Tile Link in New Tab – opens a link in a new tab as a new tile above, left, right or below of the currently selected tile.
- Untile Tab – removes a tile and the corresponding tab reverts to normal operation.
- Expand Tile – expands a tile and collapses all the other tiles in that group (or use F2).
- Tile All Tabs – adds all tabs as tiles together horizontally, vertically or in a grid.
- Untile All Tabs – removes all tiles and all tabs revert to normal operation.
The toolbar button is really nicely done and requires no extra instructions:
The result looks cool in both the cases – definitely a time-saver!
Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.
Split FireFox into Several Frames for Better Productivity and More
View full post on Search Engine Journal
What SEO software is better? SEO Elite or SEO Spyglass (NO AFFILIATES)?
May 1st
No answers providing affiliate links to either will be selected. Please detail whether you have used both softwares, and the benefits and downfalls to each.
