4 Simple Tactics For Increased Exposure On SlideShare is a post by SEO expert TJ Welsh. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

As more marketing moves from off-line to online distribution channels, there are a number of outlets that can help generate traffic to a company’s website and increase brand awareness. In order to get the most benefit from their online efforts, companies need to understand where their customers look for information about their services or products and then provide valuable content on those sites.

By placing content on external sites, companies can reach their target audience and maybe even get their content ranked in search engines for specific keyword phrases. This, in turn, will help increase brand exposure and drive more traffic to the site.

Slideshare is a content site that has a lot of potential to increase exposure and send targeted traffic to a company’s site. Slideshare is a popular platform for uploading and sharing PowerPoint presentations, and you can start building traffic to your site by using these four tactics:

Tip #1- Optimize Each Presentation

When you upload a new presentation to Slideshare you should create a title, description and tag your PPT presentation. Make sure you use keywords in each of these fields. For example:

It is a good idea to “Allow viewers to download file” as well. That way Slideshare can track how many times an individual saves or downloads your presentation.

Tip #2- Use Keywords Throughout the Presentation

Once they’re uploaded, Slideshare creates a transcript of the slides which appears below the presentation. Google and other search engines can crawl and index the transcript and create an association (via co-citations) between certain keywords and your brand. Pratik Dholakiya explained co-citations as:

“Google is placing less emphasis on anchor text (and perhaps links in general), and is leveraging its massive data set to look for statistical correlations that it can use to determine relevance and influence on the web.”

For more information about co-citations, you can check out Pratik’s article on Search Engine Journal.

Tip #3- Promote Your Presentation

After you upload your presentation to Slideshare, spend some time on sites like Quora or LinkedIn Groups to promote your content. Chances are you have answered someone’s questions with the information in your slides, so this is an opportunity to link to your presentation.

EX.

When looking on Quora for the phrase “create images using PowerPoint,” I came across the following opportunity:

This simple question provided great opportunity to build links naturally to the following presentation:

Find relevant places to link to your Slideshare presentation and you will be able to increase the amount of views to your slides. Further, you should also promote your presentation on social sites. Social sharing like Tweets, shares, likes and +1s can also increase the amount of views to your slides.

This will, in turn, increase your chances of being featured on the homepage of Slideshare:

Image source: slideshare.net

Slideshare features 16 presentations on a given day. While two of the featured presentations are paid listings the other 14 are editorial picks, and one of the criteria Slideshare uses to select which content to feature is the highest number of views in a given day.

Promoting your presentation through link building and social promotions can increase the amount of views to your presentation substantially, which in turn increases your chances of showing up in the featured section of the homepage.

Link building, social shares and additional views helped SEO.com increase views to the following presentation:

 Tip #4- Begin with the End in Mind

Like any piece of content you produce it should have a purpose. If you define that purpose upfront it will be that much easier to create an effective strategy. Before building out a Slideshare presentation you should have a keyword phrase in mind so you can easily optimize the presentation (that is keyword rich), create value, and promote it through link building and social channels.

By taking advantage of the tips above, you can drive valuable traffic back to your site and possibly even rank your presentation in search engines for key phrases. A well-thought-out SlideShare presentation may be easier to rank rather than your own blog since it gets to use SlideShare’s domain authority. Sometimes, though, there are just certain topics that are best covered with a visual presentation instead of blog post.

I would love to hear how you are using Slideshare for your online marketing efforts.

4 Simple Tactics For Increased Exposure On SlideShare is a post by SEO expert TJ Welsh. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

SEO & PPC: Working Together To Maximize Returns is a post by SEO expert Shay Wright. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

SEO & PPC. Friends or foes? And which one really is more effective in an online marketing campaign? The truth is that they are not only friends but “coworkers” as well, and one is not necessarily more effective than the other. They serve different purposes but working together they create a synergy not possible as two independent parts.

PPC is great because you can be up and running in a matter of minutes. SEO, on the other hand, is more of a long term investment that takes some time and patience to finally start paying off. When you do get good organic placement through your SEO efforts though, the return on investment can be quite remarkable. Even when you do achieve top organic rankings, this still doesn’t mean you should just drop your PPC campaign altogether. There are some real advantages to maintaining both a strong PPC and SEO campaign together as outlined below.

1. The Best Keywords

PPC can be a great testing ground for potential keywords to target in your SEO campaign. You can run multiple PPC ads and target several different keyword phrases to see which ones not only drive traffic to your site, but actually convert. With this information, you can then target only the highest converting keywords in your SEO campaign. It takes a lot of time, effort, and money to place a competitive keyword at the top of organic search results, so you want to be sure you’re targeting the best keywords possible before you embark on your SEO campaign or target new keywords in your current SEO campaign.

2. Higher Click Through Rates & Conversions

When sites eventually achieve top organic rankings, there is a tendency for the site owners to cut back on PPC spend because they feel they’ll get the click in the organic results anyways. However, studies show that the sum total is worth more than the individual parts. In other words, the additional benefits of having both PPC and organic placement more than pays for the PPC outlay.

As you can see in the example below, Hotels.com ranks #1 in organic search results for the search term “hotels”, but also pays for the top spot in the paid search results.

When your paid and organic listings show up together on the same search result page, users tend to place more trust in your site, and they will be more inclined to click on your website. And when they do, there is a higher probability that they will actually convert when on your site because you have already gained a slight boost in credibility in their eyes. They already see you as an established presence in that particular market.

3. Build Brand Recognition & Trust

When your site appears in multiple places on a search result page, you will start to build brand recognition and gain consumers’ trust.

4. Drown Out The Competition

As you start to gain a strong presence in both organic and PPC search results, your competition will struggle to get any sizeable share of the pie, and when you eventually dominate both the organic and PPC market, you may very well eventually drown out your major online competitors.

5. More Data to Analyze

If you run organic and PPC campaigns simultaneously, you will have twice the amount of data to analyze, to make educated and insightful changes, and then capitalize on.

6. Repurpose The Best Ad Copy

As you study your PPC campaign, you can determine which ads result in the best click through rate. This will help you in writing the best title tags and meta descriptions for the pages you’re targeting with your SEO campaign. The great thing about PPC ads is that you can figure out pretty quickly what ad copy works best pretty quickly.

Keep in mind that title tags are an important search engine ranking factor, so be sure to keep your key keywords phrases for a page in the title tag. Meta descriptions on the other hand have no real influence on organic rankings, so feel free to change your meta descriptions to whatever ad copy works best.

7. Improve Adwords Quality Score

A page that has been properly optimized for SEO should help improve your Adwords Quality Score for your targeted pages. This will result in better PPC placement for your ads as well as lower cost per click.

8. Maintain Site Traffic

When you launch a new site, it may take a short time for search engines to put their trust back into your new content and site. A PPC campaign can help maintain traffic to your site during this time period and help build legitimacy to your site once again. Increasing PPC spend can also help fill in for lost traffic due to a Google algorithm changes that may cause your organic rankings to drop. There may also be times when the PPC bidding for certain keyword phrases just goes too high, and when this occurs, you can start putting more emphasis on your SEO efforts for these keyword phrases while cutting back on your PPC budget for these phrases.

9. Target Competitor’s Brand Terms

If you were solely running a SEO campaign, it would not make much sense to target a competitor’s brand terms because this would require creating content focused around your competitor’s brand which in turn could benefit your competitor. However, it can make sense to target a competitor’s brand in a PPC campaign.

Just be sure your product or service really is superior to your competitor’s because if a user searched out your competitor specifically, your competitor is likely already one up on you. You’re going to have to convince them that their initial thought was wrong and that you actually have the product or service they really want.

10. Combat Negative PR

Sometimes bad things happen to even good companies. Employees do stupid things. Cars have to be recalled because of bad parts. Machinery goes bad and causes accidents. A good example of this is with the Gulf Oil Spill. During this time, BP bought several PPC ads relating to the term “oil spill” in order to address the public directly instead of relying on the press. The PPC ads help fill in until SEO efforts can place your website in a better organic position, and then together, you can properly address bad press head on.

Conclusion

To run an effective search marketing campaign and truly maximize online exposure and returns, a site should have both a good SEO and PPC campaign in place that work together to benefit the overall marketing campaign. SEO and PPC each serve different purposes, but when used together, they create a synergy that is not possible as two separate units.

What other advantages do you see for having both a SEO and PPC campaign working together?

SEO & PPC: Working Together To Maximize Returns is a post by SEO expert Shay Wright. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

Why Your Business Should Be On Foursquare Now! is a post by SEO expert Darin Berntson. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

This is not your parents Foursquare.

Remember the days playing this in school? Foursquare means business now!

Nor is this another rendition of Kick-The-Can!

This, ladies and gentlemen, is one of my favorite SoLoMo (Social Local Mobile) apps out there, and as a business it should be one of yours too! Let me ask you something…

Do you have a local business that thrives on needing new walk-in customers, and a business that values, more than life itself, repeat customers?

If you answered yes, and you better have, Foursquare is an application that you should deploy and use to help market your business immediately.

I keep hearing from business owners, looking for easy and inexpensive ways to get the word out about their business, and one of my go-to answers is always Foursquare.

They often look at me as if they have no clue as to what I am talking about, so I educate them on the value and opportunity, and in the end many still think it is too much work, or it may not work, or it may not be worth their time. Well, I say (shaking my fists in the air) YES it is!

Now let me ask you Mr. or Mrs. small business owner… How much real money does it cost you to run an ad on TV or radio? How about an ad in a local paper? How much are you spending on other marketing initiatives? Do you know how much Foursquare costs? Here is a hint… it’s FREE! (that’s less than air!)

The Basics of Foursquare:

Foursquare is a mobile (and desktop) application that allows patrons of your business to check-in to your location, and by doing so also alerting friends they are there. Users may also share their check-in to Facebook and Twitter, and they may leave a comment about your business and maybe even upload some photos as well. Social word of mouth does not get any better than this.

There is somewhat of a game element to Foursquare, and it all started out by allowing users to become “Mayor” of a business. I bet many of you:

• Did not know you were already on Foursquare (bet if you look will find your business)
• Did not know you probably have a Mayor of your establishment (shame, as you should treat your royalty well)
• Did not know you are ignoring this valuable platform (it’s OK, that is why I am here to help you)

At the moment, Foursquare has a lot of FREE tools they offer, and all you need to do is claim your spot, and start offering specials.

As I mentioned earlier, you may already be on the platform since Foursquare users create the locations. So get going! Claim and verify your location and you will be off to the races.

This is what the dashboard looks like for SEO.com.

Get a special at Jiffy Lube – Save some money? OK!

While we do value repeat business, we do not have walk-in traffic, so I am usually the mayor (where’s my crown?). But let’s say you are a resturaunt, a dry cleaner or a flower shop… from here, you can create specials such as:

• Discounts
• Freebies
• Loyalty Specials

Where Foursquare has hit he nail on the head is with their search capabilities. Foursquare has one of the most up-to-date local listing directories out there. Some may say it rivals Google. In fact Foursquare’s local listings power many other mobile phone applications such as Path (and many others).

Listings are first created by users. Superusers keep tabs on things like address changes, or if a business has closed, and can suggest changes be made to the listing etc. There are different ways to search:

• Best Nearby
• Specials
• Food
• Nightlife
• Coffee

But you can search for whatever you want… so let’s look at a couple of searches:

As a pure discovery engine, Foursquare is amazing. One night I may want to try a place friends rave about. And on another night I may want to try something new. Maybe it is a new pizza joint with a check-in deal to make it more enticing. And to you dear business owner, entice myself and others to try your place out and folks like me will spread the good word!

Foursquare is like having in-store Google analytics, but for humans!

Back in your admin area of Foursquare, you get some pretty cool data. You can see all sorts of visitor activity such as:

• Check-Ins at your venue
• Unique customers
• First time customers
• Top Visitors
• Recent Visitors
• People who liked your Venue
• And more

Do you get it? This is VERY valuable data! You can use this information to engage with your customers, learn what you do well, see where you can improve etc. But most of all listen, thank, and engage. If you have a great business, word will spread!

As an avid Foursquare user, I am always bummed because I do not see as many local businesses taking advantage of this platform. I am a “check-in-o-holic”, and I am always looking for a good deal, or a reason to try someplace new.

I know I may live in the Internet bubble, but I am not hearing your ads on the radio or TV, nor am I seeing them in the paper. Reach out to me where I am, where many more customers are. Build a legion of raving fans for your business, and  watch what can happen. And you can start doing that right now with Foursquare.

Now do not just claim your spot, and set up specials and call it good. Train your staff so they know to expect people coming in. Also, let current customers know you are on Foursquare. Maybe have a POP display at a table. Have staff let them know that if they check-in there is a discount. Get people engaged with your brand!

As with anything, there is no magic bullet. If you build it they will not necessarily come. Take advantage of Foursquare and other tools to help make your company more top of mind when someone says to themselves… “I want to try ___________, where should I go?”

I hope you enjoyed this post and, and I hope you now see why your business should be on Foursquare! Now get out there and start using this awesome platform.

If you have any other questions regarding Foursquare, leave them in the comments below and I will do my best to answer them for you.

You can also hit me up on all the major social networks.

Until next time…

Doc

Why Your Business Should Be On Foursquare Now! is a post by SEO expert Darin Berntson. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

How Your Small Business Can Find Time For Social Media is a post by SEO expert Matt Nickle. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

The title of this article could also be “How WILL Your Small Business MAKE Time for Social Media?”, but I thought I would keep it how it is to prove a point.

With social media growing exponentially and becoming more popular for businesses (and for staying in touch with your BFFs) you can’t afford not to take advantage of it as a small business owner.

Here are several reasons why you need to jump on board with social media and ways to find time for it. Trust me, if you want your business to increase and your brand awareness to jump through the roof, you will make time for it.

Social Media Stats

First of all, I want to quickly give some facts to convince you about the growth of social media and the impact it can have on your business.

• Facebook – The average person spends 1 out of every 7 minutes on Facebook (ZDNet)
• Twitter – Each and every day there are at least 340 million tweets (Twitter blog)
• LinkedIn – Financial customers on LinkedIn are more affluent than Facebook users (comScore)
• Pinterest – Predominantly used by women (All Twitter)
• Google+ – Predominantly used by men (CircleCount)

If you are a small business owner, you already understand the concept of “time=money” and may feel that there isn’t any room in the schedule or budget for social media. What if I told you there was a way to have a successful social media campaign that will make your brand more visible online without spending more time and money? Would you be on board? Well, here are some great tips that will help you squeeze in the time needed for you to benefit from the social media world.

Time to Make Time

You don’t necessarily have to cut out certain programs or work tasks to make time for social media. One of the easiest things you can do is include it while you are checking your daily emails first thing in the morning. Every business will have emails coming in and emails going out that need to be taken care of on a daily basis. Why not send out a Google+ post or like a Facebook status that someone else posted that relates to your business?

Fail to Plan, Plan to Fail

Effectively utilizing social media in your small business doesn’t have to take up a whole lot of time, especially if you take the time make a plan and stick to it. Figure out a time and schedule that works with your time and budget, while keeping in mind that it doesn’t need to be an exponential number.  You would be surprised at the results you can get from even doing an hour a week at the beginning. Effective planning, prioritizing and organization will help save time.

Consistency is Key

Well, not just consistency, but consistency while looking natural is key. It’s important to post on a consistent basis, but if you are only posting about things related to your company and posting them at the same time each day, it can look extremely unnatural to people. Even being active every other day and at varied times throughout the day will give you some great results.

Don’t Spread Yourself Too Thin

I quickly learned this lesson growing up while playing the board game “Risk”. The goal is to outsmart your opponent and conquer every country with your little armies.

I was so concerned with taking over every country in the world, that I would spread my armies out too thin and end up losing the game, getting mad, and storming out of the room (after flipping the board game over so the pieces flew everywhere of course. I hate losing to my sister).

Anyway, the point of that awesome story was to teach you that you don’t need to be active on EVERY single social media platform. Nobody has that kind of time. The smarter thing to do is to find the platforms that fit your industry niche and where you will find specific customers for your business.

The platforms you post on obviously depend on what you are selling and the audience you are trying to reach out to. So, do some investigating and you will quickly discover which social media platforms you could benefit from. Then, listen to the users in your industry and create some unique content around the things that the users want to hear/talk about.

Planning an effective content campaign is a completely separate beast on its own, but definitely start by listening to your potential customers and making lists of things you could write about.

Be Professional – Your Brand and Expertise Will Shine Through

Respond to posts, answer questions, retweet, repost, be involved in the social community, and write articles in a manner that makes you sound like you are a professional in your industry.

This will gain your users trust and will help with spreading the word about your brand. I know that I would be much more likely to share a post, status, or article from someone that I thought was a professional in that industry. Even if you are quickly responding to someone’s article, rather than saying something like, “Bro, this article was totes awesome! YOLO!” you should sound more professional like, “Gentleman and friend, this particular article has deeply touched my soul and every fiber of my being.” (It helps to have a British accent as well) Also, be sure to add any particular knowledge that you can share with people that would help you come across as a professional in your industry.

I think you get my point.

Get Started Today

The basic social media campaign can take very little time and very little effort to get started, but the benefits it can have in the long run will be well worth your time. With the recent changes and additions that Google has made, including the implementation of the rel=author/publisher tag, the heavy push towards Google+, and the consistent increase in social media, it’s safe to say that you should begin, or should have already begun, your own social media efforts for your small business.

How Your Small Business Can Find Time For Social Media is a post by SEO expert Matt Nickle. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

Image Optimization Tips For Online Stores is a post by SEO expert Andrew Johnson. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

Image optimization is an important part of running a successful eCommerce website. Since people usually begin their search for a product online, your products will have as good of a chance as any to end up in front of a customer, as long as your images are optimized.

Here are some tips for getting your images to display in Google’s image search:

1. Optimize image names

If you have hundreds (or thousands) of photos in your store, optimizing each one can be a daunting task.  There are distinct benefits to spending the time to do this, though. In the same way the right proportion of keywords in the content of a web page can help that page rank for the keyword in the search engines, the proper use of keywords in your images can help them rank as well.

Let’s take this particular photo as an example:

The file names for your product images should be descriptive, and include the right amount of keywords. Consider the:

• image file name
• image alt tag
• image name

For this product example, instead of keeping PRODUCTIMAGE22.jpg for the file name, a better choice would be to name the file: Gray-3-Button-Mens-Suit.jpg.

There are a few variations you could use to name this file, but generally it’s best to look at your web analytics to see how your customers are searching for the product. This thread on the SEOmoz Q&A section explains some best practices for image file names.

The alt tag for the image is also important, since a browser will display the alt text when the image can’t be displayed properly. Alt tags are also important for the visually impaired, as they rely on software programs to read the image alt tags to communicate what the images are.

Every image should have a corresponding alt tag. For simplicity, you can use the file name for the image’s alt tag, without the hyphens.

2. Optimize image load times

It may not seem like much, but a few extra seconds of load time on your website can cost you customers. According to Kissmetrics, most consumers wait about 5 seconds on their mobile device before they leave the website. Desktop users are even less patient, waiting 3 seconds on average.

Here’s a good rule of thumb for images: the larger the file size, the longer it will take for the page to load. To combat this problem, you can decrease the size of each image by compressing them.

If your eCommerce site has only a handful of images to compress, you can use any of these image editing tools:

• PicMonkey
• Pixlr
• Pic Resize
• Gimp
• FotoFlexer

If you have hundreds (or even thousands) of photos, compressing them one at a time is probably not a viable option.  If that’s the case for you, there are a few tools that can compress images in batches.

If your eCommerce platform runs on WordPress, download any of these plugins and run your images through:

• WP Smush.it
• Cloudinary
• EWWW Image Optimizer

There are other, similar tools and extensions for platforms like Magento and Joomla.

3. Choose optimal image file types

Different types of image files can affect the performance of a website, so it’s important to choose the right file type for the right situation.

Three of the most common image file types are:

• JPEG
• PNG
• GIF

JPEG formats typically offer a low file size and good image quality for products, while GIFs are better for smaller icons. PNGs can show more colors than JPEGs and GIFs, but file sizes can be considerably larger.

Here are examples of each type of file:

.PNG file at 195.3 KB

.JPG file at 68.7 KB

.GIF file at 51.3 KB

4. Create an image sitemap

Google says their goal with image search is to display the most relevant results to users, and that statement is no different than their goal for web search. Along with optimizing your images, you can increase the chance of having your product images indexed by creating an image sitemap, and uploading it to Google Webmaster Tools. This is especially important if your product images are served using JavaScript, and aren’t showing up in the page’s source code. You can also add images to your main sitemap.

There are a number of tools that can generate a sitemap:

• XML-Sitemaps.com
• Inspyder
• Google sitemap generator

5. Integrate social sharing into product images

Social media is an integral part of digital marketing, and social signals do play a part in search engine rankings.

There’s an opportunity for products to gain traction on bookmarking sites like Pinterest, especially if they’re products for the home and garden, or related to the beauty, fashion or food industries. The larger the net your brand casts, the greater chance your website has at attracting new visitors.

To increase the likelihood of your product pages being shared and linked to, social sharing buttons should be added to each page of the website, including product pages and product category pages.

I have always been a fan of Zappos, and they do a nice job of integrating social sharing buttons on their product pages:

“If your product images are beautiful and unique, your potential of achieving additional traffic from the [social] networks alone will be incentive enough to utilize this approach,” says SEO consultant Preston Van Dyke.

“For instance, Everlane.com takes a really unique approach to their product category pages. Check out their Oxford shirts page as an example. Rather than just laying out their shirts in the boring table, like so many eCommerce  category pages do, they take an infographic-ish approach with images. I love these pages for a lot of reasons, but they need social sharing integrated right into the experience on the category page.”

Don’t invest time in a social network that isn’t producing any fruit, however. If your customers are not using Pinterest, and Pinterest doesn’t provide any value, don’t incorporate it into your strategy. You should focus time and effort into the social networks that your customers are spending time on, and are will to share and engage with your brand.

–

With any process, greater insight comes with testing, so continually test and refine the layout and design of your product pages. Conduct interviews, commission surveys and see how customers react to changes. How can changing the angle of the product views increase revenue? Would multiple angles and colors increase conversions? How about increasing or decreasing the number of product images on a page?

Continually ask how you can bring traffic to your products through different means. While image optimization is a part of inbound marketing as a whole, you can increase the opportunity for conversions and revenue with a solid strategy behind your product images.

Image Optimization Tips For Online Stores is a post by SEO expert Andrew Johnson. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

Prove The Value of SEO With These Free Google Analytics Dashboards is a post by SEO expert Andrew Johnson. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

Every once in a while, you come across a piece of information that revolutionizes the way you perform. I had that epiphany the other day in Google Analytics as I was experimenting with custom dashboards, and I want to share these downloads with you. Hopefully you can glean some information about the performance of your website through these custom dashboards that you otherwise wouldn’t have noticed.

What are custom dashboards?

There is so much data to be discovered in search Analytics, that it can sometimes be difficult to find the KPIs that can prove the value of an SEO campaign.

With custom dashbards, you can segment the metrics you need at a glance to understand how visitors are interacting with your site. All the important information is there in once place, and you can export that data into a PDF report to share with your company’s decision makers.

You can either set up your own custom dashboards in Google Analytics, or you can search for pre-made dashboards that will import into your Analytics profile with a few clicks.

The importance of website Analytics

For humans, introspection is an important component to being effective in life. We can’t ever begin to understand how other people view us unless we take the time for self-reflection.

The same is true for businesses and their web properties.

Analytics is all about discovering and tracking patterns in data, and how visitors interact with the pages, products and services listed on a website.

“One of the beautiful parts of using any clickstream analysis tool is the ability to segment data that provides actionable insight,” says Brian Jensen, an SEO Manager with SEO.com. “Data and metrics presented by themselves really don’t tell much of a story without some point of comparision. By providing this context we can get a better understanding of what’s really happening.”

So, without further adieu…

Here are some of my favorite Google Analytics custom dashboards:

To download these dashboards, open your Google Analytics profile, and then come back to this post, copy the URL for the download and paste it into the address bar. You can download the dashboards directly into your profile.

1. Personal blogger dashboard by DashboardJunkie.com

With this custom dashboard, you can see the basic metrics of you blog, written in plain, jargon-free English. View search terms, screen resolution, links, mobile traffic, visitor locations, visitor source, mobile metrics and popularity of content among others.

Download here >> http://www.dashboardjunkie.com/getdashboard/50

2. SEO monitoring dashboard, by Mike Meisner

Download this custom dashboard to see how well your site performs in organic search. You can view metrics related to non-branded search terms including conversions from keywords, organic visits and organic search referrals.

Download here >> https://www.google.com/analytics/web/permalink?type=dashboard&uid=qBF59OdCT26RW9DtjiPbpg

3. Brand monitoring dashboard, by Koozai

I love this dashboard. Are you keeping track of your brand in the search engines? With this dashboard, you can see information like the number of people coming to your site through a brand name search, which social sites are sending visitors and the important hubs for your brand.

Enter your brand name into each of the widgets to track these metrics.

Download here >> https://www.google.com/analytics/web/permalink?uid=5naWKM71TeChQ2-lyYfseA

4. Social media dashboard, by Justin Cutroni

Track the important metrics from your social media strategy, like revenue, shared content, visitors from social, actions taken, referral traffic and more. This is a great dashboard to show how effective your efforts in social media are, and where to improve your campaign.

Download here >> http://troni.me/GASocialDash

5. Mobile Ecommerce dashboard, by Google

If you want to see how mobile users interact with your Ecommerce site, download this dashboard. You can see actions taken by visitors from social media, the bounce rate and average visit duration, mobile revenue and average order value, bounce rates for specific mobile devices and more.

Download here >> http://goo.gl/W6Wki

6. Site performance dashboard, by Google

How is page speed affecting your visitors’ experience on your site? With this dashboard, you can bring useful data to your IT team, and identify performance issues related to the website or servers.

Download here >> http://goo.gl/oJ2MU

7. [not provided] analysis dashboard, by Google

Technically, this is a custom report (not a dashboard), but is a worthwhile download. You can drill down into the data coming from [not provided] keywords in Google search, and view metrics like bounce rate, % new visits and revenue.

Download here >> http://goo.gl/x6cl5

8. PPC dashboard, by Koozai

See the effectiveness of your pay-per-click campaigns in one, single dashboard. View visits from PPC, impressions, goal completions and CTR. You can also segment the data by campaign.

Download here >> https://www.google.com/analytics/web/permalink?uid=Q4mOwZEzR9eNFW8Y1Dtv0A

9. Top content & searches dashboard, by Blue Riot Labs

Here’s a quick view at your top performing site content, which is great if you need to pull out some wins for a report. Includes top-visited pages, keywords and top referral sites.

Download here >> https://www.google.com/analytics/web/permalink?type=dashboard&uid=7WuTTiykTZGHET_Srztb3Q

10 Visitor technology dashboard, by Justin Cutroni

I’ve saved the best for last! With this report, you can view visitor metrics like traffic from specific operating systems, mobile, browser popularity, screen resolutions, and conversion rates segmented by browser.

Download here >> https://www.google.com/analytics/web/permalink?uid=C8ug-THUTUeX-OA81X8G3w

As with any of these custom dashboards, you can rearrange the placement of the widgets, edit the data pulled within each widget, or even delete the ones you don’t need within each dashboard. All that matters is that you’re getting the information you need to prove the value of your SEO campaign, and focus on areas of your website that need attention.

What are your favorite Google Analytics custom dashboards? Share them in the comments!

Prove The Value of SEO With These Free Google Analytics Dashboards is a post by SEO expert Andrew Johnson. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

5 Creative Ways to Promote Your Blog Posts is a post by SEO expert Rebecca Babicz. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

If you build it they will come? False.

The online world is a competitive place. In addition to having a killer website, you also need to update your website with great content. Blog posts are the most popular and one of the easiest types of content to create. But just because you’re blogging, it’s not like teenagers are going to flock to your site like teenagers would to a Justin Beiber concert.

You need a comprehensive plan that entails more than simply posting to your blog posts to your company Facebook Page and sending out a few tweets. Here are 5 creative ways to promote your blog content that you might not have thought of:

1. Google+ Communities

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: Get on Google+.

If you’re not on Google+, we have a great eBook that can help you get started. In addition to posting your blog post to your company page, you can also add your blog posts to Google+ Community Pages.

If you aren’t familiar with Google+ Community Pages, they are basically forums to share posts, ideas, questions, trends and advice with people who have similar interests. You can even set up your own Google+ Community.

I like to add posts and engage with communities from my personal Google+ account, but you can also join and engage with Communities from your business profile.

So what kinds of people are using Google+ Communities these days? All different kinds of people, from runners, to soccer enthusiasts to tech geeks and everyone in between. Some communities have thousands of followers, which means you have the potential to share your blog posts with a great number of people who have already opted-in to learn more about the topic. Here are some examples of some booming communities:

• SEO and Internet Marketing Professionals (created by SEO.com)
• Skiing and Snow Sports
• Food Lovers Guide
• Real Estate
• Home Décor

When it comes to promoting your posts on Community Boards, here are some rules I like to follow:

• Make sure you’re not just dropping a link. Actually add value to the community.
• Provide a micro-post about what the reader should expect in the post.
• Make sure you post your blogs in a relevant community.
• Make sure you add it to the right topic (Moderators will delete your post if it’s in the wrong place).
• Be friendly and respond to those who comment on your post.
• Thank people for sharing your post.
• Don’t just promote your own stuff. Comment, like and share other’s posts too!

Here is an example of how I do it:

 2. Pinterest Community Boards

Pinning blog content to Pinterest is a great way to share your content, especially if it’s an inforgraphic or micrographic. At SEO.com, we create visually appealing images for our blog posts just to fit the Pinterest platform. Below is an example of an eye catching image we will use for Pinterest for this post:

Pinterest Community boards are little different that just posting images to your own Pinterest boards. These boards allow multiple (sometimes 1,000s) people pin images about a specific designated topic. The great thing about Community Boards is that your pins can reach a large audience. For example, SEO.com has 253 followers, but because we contribute to Community Boards with thousands of followers, we’re able to amplify our reach.

The Community Board we created, Everything Marketing has a greater follower number than our regular account. (If you would like to become a contributor to our board, feel free to leave me a comment or tweet @SEOcom).

3. LinkedIn

Some might think of LinkedIn as a place they only go when they need a job. If you think like that you’re missing a huge opportunity to connect with professionals and share you content with influential people. Here are a few places you should promote your blog posts on LinkedIn:

• Linkedin Groups
• Company Page
• Personal Page

LinkedIn is a place where people go to share content that they think is valuable and makes them look smart, (unlike Facebook where people tend to share “funny” content). LinkedIn Groups are a lot like Google+ Communities and the same guidelines I wrote about above apply.

4. Quora

I recently wrote a whole post about how great Quora is, and one of those reasons is because there’s a huge opportunity on Quora to establish yourself as an expert through content marketing. Using Quora to research topic ideas for blog posts is a great strategy because you’ll be blogging about questions that potential clients might have. You’ll also have an opportunity to go back and add a link to your post blog post for more thorough information and drive traffic to your blog.

5. Guest Blogs/Internal Blogs

Blog posts ironically are a great way to promote other blog posts. Linking to older blog posts in your newer blog posts will give your posts a new life, plus it’s great for SEO.  As a rule of thumb all internal blog posts your write should link to at least one other blog post. If you’re writing guest posts, it’s a good strategy to link to blog posts because they are the deeper links on your page that show Google and other search engines that you’re website is more than just a homepage. Linking to blog posts in your guest posts is also a great way to establish authority on a certain topic, and send signals about the connection between keywords, content and your brand to the search engines.

The side benefit of writing great content is that people will naturally promote it for you and link to you. If you’re spending a lot of time on content marketing, hopefully this post gave you some ideas about how to give your content the little extra push and love it needs to get in front of the people who will find it useful, read it and share it.

What creative ways do you promote your blog posts? Feel free to leave us a comment below and join our Google+ Community and Everything Marketing Pinterest Community Board.

5 Creative Ways to Promote Your Blog Posts is a post by SEO expert Rebecca Babicz. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

How To Create An Epic Slideshare Deck is a post by SEO expert Andrew Johnson. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

Content Marketing involves creating and distributing beautiful, valuable, click-worthy and share-worthy content as a means for attracting and retaining customers.

The concept of “Content Marketing” is nothing new, but the methods for delivering new and fresh types of content are evolving.

One of those methods is the idea of slide presentation, and walking the viewer through a set of instructions or process in a visually-enticing way. In simple terms, you create a slide deck with PowerPoint (which is probably the easiest and most common software platform for slides), and you can upload it to a number of websites that will display your slide deck. This approach can generate more awareness for your brand, more traffic to your website, and also some distinct SEO advantages, which we’ll talk about later.

For now, let’s discuss the process of creating a SlideShare presentation:

Plan your strategy

The most crucial step to any content marketing initiative is the planning process, and with SlideShare it’s also important to plan your presentation before you create it.

Before you begin, ask yourself these questions:

• Who is going to view my slide deck?
• What questions of theirs will I need to answer?
• Who are the key influencers in my industry that I should target?
• How will my viewers be motivated to share this slide deck?
• What are some specific calls-to-action (CTAs) that I can insert into the slide deck?

Once you have your strategy mapped out, you can create the flow and design of your slides.

Design your slide deck

A slide deck designed for a content marketing campaign is not like a PowerPoint presentation that you would run through in a meeting. Since you aren’t going to be narrating the slides for the people viewing them, it’s important to make each slide as self-explanatory as possible. Here are some things to consider:

1. Create an introductory slide

This first slide will be the only image displayed on SlideShare as people are browsing through decks, so it should be eye-catching and enticing. There are a number of sites that have a collection of free, creative commons images to use for your slide deck, including:

• http://commons.wikimedia.org
• http://www.flickr.com/creativecommons/
• http://photopin.com/

Use an eye-catching color for the background, and place an image in the slide to draw people’s attentions, like this:

2. Create a call-to-action template for the rest of the slides in the deck

This is something that I have learned through trial and error. As with any content marketing strategy, one of the areas of focus should be driving relevant and qualified traffic to your website, and you can do that with calls-to-action located in key areas within your slide deck. You can either do this by including links to related blog posts or linkable assets on the last slide of the presentation, or within specific slides throughout the deck. One method that has been particularly successful for me is to segregate an area of each slide to house a clear CTA. This maintains a look of consistency throughout the deck, and ensures each slide has an equal opportunity to send traffic to your intended destination.

3. Give just enough information away to make sense and invite clicks

You’re not “giving away the farm” here, but still giving enough info to the viewer that the slides can stand on their own. For example, if you’re providing instructions on how to properly harvest a crop, provide the basics of the process, but still encourage the viewer to click your CTA to see “the rest of the story”.

4. Encourage social shares to become “hot”

How do those decks end up on the homepage of SlideShare.net? It all begins with a solid promotion strategy for your slide deck. Here are some tips:

a.) Share it on social media

According to Kissmetrics, you have a good chance at having your slide deck featured under the “Hot on Twitter” section on the home page if you get 15-30 tweets. The same goes for Facebook and LinkedIn shares, and being featured under those categories on the home page. Once your deck ends up on the home page, it has the opportunity to go viral, and gain a massive number of views and additional social shares.

b.) Embed it in a blog post

You can gain additional views for your slide deck if you embed it into a blog post on your website. Viewers also have the option to embed the deck on their own websites, so you can encourage that as well.

c.) Build links to it

The easiest way to gain visibility for your SlideShare deck is to build links to it. You can do this within your guest blog posts, your own blog posts and through social media channels.

The links in your SlideShare profile page, and the links within the slides themselves are nofollow, but there’s still a definite advantage for your SEO campaign with a popular SlideShare deck. TJ Welsh, director of SEO with SEO.com explains the value of these nofollow links:

“While they do not pass on link juice, they do create relevance for a given topic. Slideshare creates a transcript of your slides, which Google and other search engines are able to crawl. As search engines crawl the Slideshare account, they can trace the content back to your website through the Nofollow link. The Nofollow link builds an association between whatever you publish and your brand. Google also creates an association between certain keywords and your brand, so include your brand name somewhere in the presentation.”

5. Track the wins

You can gain valuable insights into the effectiveness of your SlideShare decks by tagging the URLs in your CTAs, and tracking the traffic in Google Analytics. Create the URLs in Google’s URL Builder by providing the website URL, campaign source, medium and name. Once you have the tagged URL, shorten it with goo.gl or bit.ly and place those shortened URLs in the slides.

The best KPIs in Analytics to measure the effectiveness of your SlideShare deck include:

• Total referral traffic from SlideShare
• Time on site
• Conversions
• Pages per visit
• Bounce rate

There may be other KPIs you need to measure, so be sure to map your specific goals before you publish your slide deck.

There you go! Really, the best way to discover a winning formula for SlideShare is to experiment, test theories and track your results.

Have you had success with SlideShare? Post your comments below!

How To Create An Epic Slideshare Deck is a post by SEO expert Andrew Johnson. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

5 Ways To Improve User Experience Through Better Anchor Text is a post by SEO expert Shay Wright. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

Back when we were blazing through the Internet over a phone line, it may have actually been helpful to include the phrase “click here” in our anchor text to help people understand they could actually click on the text and be directed to another page. However, that time has long since passed, and it is now time to be much smarter about our use of anchor text.

When used properly, anchor text can really enhance user experience and entice users to actually take the action you want them to take. However, it is important to keep some basic ground rules in mind when using anchor text for optimal results.

1. Anchor text should be descriptive

Google’s Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide states that anchor text should be descriptive and generic terms such as “click here” and “page” should be avoided as anchor text.

When creating anchor text, always use good descriptive words and be straight forward so that your users will know exactly what they’ll find by clicking your link. Here is an example of some generic, non-descriptive anchor text that we should always avoid.

Here is an example of some great descriptive anchor text that lets users know what they’ll get even before they click on the link.

See how much good descriptive anchor text can improve user experience? It can really make a big difference. Wikipedia is the king of great descriptive anchor text. The site uses descriptive anchor text like no other, and we all know the success they have seen over the years.

2. Anchor text should provide information when read out of context

Users shouldn’t have to read a whole paragraph to figure out what your anchor text is about and where it will take them. The truth of the matter is that many people skim through pages looking for helpful resources, and what catches most users’ attention on a page is the anchor text. If a user is searching for a link to your newly released Pinterest eBook, will have a better user experience if you use anchor text like this:

Or, if you create anchor text that can actually be read out of context like this:

In the first example, the user has to go back and read at least part of the paragraph to figure out what “here” will lead to. In the second example, all the user has to do is skim over the anchor text to figure out what it’s about, thus providing a much better user experience.

3.  Anchor text should link to nouns when possible

It’s best to avoid linking to verbs simply because they are more abstract and vague, and users don’t always know exactly where they will end up when clicking on them.

On the other hand, a link to a good solid noun is something a user can relate to through their senses. It creates a visual picture in their minds, and they’ll know better what to expect when clicking on anchor text that is a noun.

4. Anchor text should be concise

The Google SEO Starter Guide also states that anchor text should be short, but descriptive. Anchor text containing a few words or a short phrase is perfectly acceptable, but making a full sentence or paragraph with all anchor text is strongly discouraged by Google.

5. Anchor text should stand out

CSS and other text styling methods make it possible to hide your anchor text and have it appear as if it were any other text. Google encourages site owners to make it easy for users to distinguish between anchor text and other normal text on a page. If you’re using a styling method to essentially hide your anchor text, you’re probably up to no good and creating a bad user experience along the way.

In the end, creating great anchor text comes down to user experience. You should create anchor text that will make your content better than content without links, and entice your site visitors to take the action you want them to take. Be descriptive, concise, and make your anchor text stand out on your page. If you do, I can’t guarantee you success, but I can guarantee your user experience will be enhanced and your likelihood for success will only increase. Happy anchor-texting!

What tips do you have for creating great anchor text?

5 Ways To Improve User Experience Through Better Anchor Text is a post by SEO expert Shay Wright. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

How To Grow Your Business With REAL Social Media Goals and KPIs is a post by SEO expert Rebecca Babicz. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

So you’ve started to invest time and money in social media.

Your followers are increasing and so is your website traffic. Your social media strategy is working, right? Well sort of. There’s no doubt that more followers, re-tweets and traffic are all good signs. But it’s easy for marketers and small business owners to walk blindly without having an actionable social media roadmap; a roadmap that tells them exactly which metrics indicate that they are getting closer to (or farther away from) their goals.

A Map to Growth

The first step to creating a social media roadmap is establishing your goals. Some common goals that companies hope to achieve through social media are:

• Increasing Brand Awareness
• Increase Leads/Sales
• Improve Online Reputation
• Retain Clients

Your goals for social media will vary depending on your industry and services. And to make sure your goals are on-point, you need to ask yourself why those are your goals, and what value they actually represent. Once you have established some good goals, you then need to set some realistic expectations.

“Social media doesn’t convert fans into customers!” Yeah, you’ve heard it before, and maybe read a post or two about it. Some of these posts are missing the point, so I created a graphic to explain how you should look at social media conversion so you’re able to set realistic expectations.

When it comes to social media, customers might jump right through the sales funnel and decide that, after they’ve had a positive buying experience with your brand, they want to opt-into your social media updates.

Social media can help people discover your product or service through a strong content marketing plan. Discovery of a service/product or company is at the very top of the conversion funnel.  This is where a lot of business owners and managers get confused. You see, just because someone likes your brand on Facebook, and RTs your content on Twitter, doesn’t mean they’re prospects; not yet anyway.  It’s a good start however, and by constantly engaging those who have already decided they want to hear what you have to say, you have a better chance of converting fans into customers.

The next steps for your social media plan should be to establish some metrics that help you understand how you are performing against your goals. We’ll call these key performance indicators (or KPIs). Here are 4 KPIs that will help you measure how successful your social media campaign is:

New Website Visitors

One of your KPIs that you should  track (using Google Analytics) is how many new visitors come to your website via social media outlets. Tracking new fans or followers is great, but tracking new website visitors is a better KPI. If new fans are taking action by clicking on your blog posts or other social content to discover more about what you have to say, it proves they are engaged. New website visitors is also a good KPI for expanding your reach, increasing brand awareness and increasing leads.

Repeat Website Visitors

Another great KPI to track using marketing automation software is repeat website visitors. Some might argue that this metric doesn’t matter if fans aren’t converting to customers. But if you take a look back at the social media conversion funnel, you’ll see that most social media activity starts at the top of the funnel, and the next step is “realization of need.” If you’re producing the right kind of content and fans are coming back to your website over and over again to consume that content, eventually (hopefully) a realization of need will occur and you’ve moved them further down the funnel.

The thing about Social media is that it doesn’t convert visitors to customers as fast as SEO does. When people are searching in Google, they know exactly what they want and already have a realization of need. They’re naturally closer to conversion than someone you acquire through social.

A great example of this for my current social patterns is HubSpot marketing software. I am not at the point in my career where I am making big company decisions about what software we should be using. But I like HubSpot’s content, I follow them on various social media platforms and I read several of their blog posts and eBooks each month. Maybe a few years down the road I might be in a position to make a decision about marketing software. Take a guess about which provider I’ll contact first?

People who continue to visit your website might simply think you’re smart and enjoy your content, but the bottom line is that repeat visitors shows you that your fans are actively engaged. And if they (or someone they know) ever needs your product or service, they’ll know where to go.

Time Spent on Website

With social media, or any form of inbound traffic it’s important that your visitors aren’t just clicking on your website and bouncing. This is a tricky metric because, if you’re website isn’t set up for conversion optimization, your visitors are likely to bounce no matter how much social traffic your bring in.

Time spent on website is an important measure to track because it will show you how well you are reaching your target audience through social media. It will also give you feedback about how effective your content marketing campaign is. If people from social sources are spending more time on your site, you’ll see how well you are integrating other parts of your inbound marketing campaign with social media.

Conversions

The last and most important KPI to measure are conversions from social media. You can track this by setting up proper conversion goals in Google Analytics. Some examples of conversions are:

• Opting into a newsletter list
• Downloading an eBook
• Downloading a Whitepaper
• Filling out a proposal
• Signing up for a free product trial (Our 14- day free trail of SEO Insight is a good example )
• Buying a product

Like I already talked about, you’re not going to have as many conversions from social media as you would from your SEO efforts, but backed with a solid content marketing plan, social media will bring in conversions.

Social media is all about engaging your followers so that when the need arises, they know exactly where to go. This need could arise a few weeks from now or take up to several years. These 4 KPIs will show you if you’re getting closer (or further away) from engaging your fans and reaching your potential of an effective social media campaign. Are there any other KPIs you would add to the list? Leave me a comment below!

How To Grow Your Business With REAL Social Media Goals and KPIs is a post by SEO expert Rebecca Babicz. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

5 Handy Chrome Extensions Any Digital Marketer Will Love is a post by SEO expert Brian Jensen. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

Browser extensions can make your life a whole lot easier. They’re a great way to personalize your browsing experience and make your digital marketing efforts more effective. With so many extensions available, I wanted to share five for Chrome that I use on a daily basis to increase my efficiency:

1. Clear Cache

This plug-in will quickly and completely clear your browser’s cache and cookies with a single click. The tool does allow you to customize how much information you want cleared, including form data, passwords, browser history, and also lets you select the time period for which you want this data removed (last hour, week, month, etc.).

Download here: http://goo.gl/6NPkp

2. AYIMA Redirect Path

This HTTP & redirect checker shows you the status codes and redirect path for all the URLs your browser visited before reaching your current page. This tool makes identifying all URLs in a redirect chain, as well as any temporary redirects (302s) that could be stopping the flow of juice to a webpage, a breeze.

Download here: http://goo.gl/ucHDo

SEO Tip – In a Webmaster Tools Help Video, Matt Cutts tells viewers that Googlebot probably will not follow any more that 5 redirects in a chain and also discourages using 302s and 301s together in a chain.

3. Canonical Inspector

A canonical tag is an effective way to prevent duplicate content issues by letting search engines know which version of a page is the “preferred” or “canonical” version. The canonical inspector plug-in is a big time saver for checking whether a webpage has a canonical version. It works by adding a small icon to your browser bar which disappears when no canonical tag is present, changes to gray when the canonical tag matches the canonical URL, and glows blue when the canonical tag detected on a page references another URL.

Download here: http://goo.gl/MGilE

4. Awesome Screenshot

This screen capture extension is great for capturing all or part of a webpage and makes, cropping, editing and annotating your screenshots incredibly easy. Having a visual example with notes and highlights is a great way to clearly communicate recommendations or a message by itself or in conjunction with other content.

Download here: http://goo.gl/Hl8Oz

5. Check My Links

This handy link checker tool crawls through a webpage and highlights all the broken links (404s) that it finds in red. This is a fantastic tool for any broken link or relationship building initiative. Find a broken link on a webpage? Throw it into Open Site Explorer and see where else it exists on the web for additional link building opportunities. Also, what better way to start an outreach email than by alerting a webmaster to a broken link on a page?

Download here: http://goo.gl/FhKnS

What extensions do you use on a daily basis that make your life easier?

5 Handy Chrome Extensions Any Digital Marketer Will Love is a post by SEO expert Brian Jensen. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

Get More Mileage From Your Content Through Repurposing is a post by SEO expert Jared Oldham. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

As good content continues to gain importance in the eyes of your customers and Google, it’s crucial to develop a process that optimizes your efforts and ensures that you reach the goals you have set for a campaign. I’d like to share just one step in my content marketing process that I have found to drive traffic and gain new customers. Even better, it is relatively easy to do.

What Is Content Repurposing?

Repurposing is the process of taking content and expanding its reach by modifying it to fit in as many targeted mediums as possible. No, I am not talking about article spinning. I am talking about taking a great piece of content and extending its reach by sharing it in other formats. You can start this process by doing market research to identify where your target audience goes to find information, and then adapt quality content to fit that medium.

For example, I consume most of my content in two primary forms of media: blogs and podcasts. During my commute each morning, I spend around 30 minutes listening to podcasts rather than music. Using me as the persona, it would be smart if marketers would take all of their quality PowerPoint presentations, webinars, white papers and/or ebooks, and repurpose them into quality podcast that I could listen to. It would greatly increase the chance of me consuming their content.

All too often we create a piece of content that is fantastic, but we limit its reach by only placing it in one medium. By producing only blogs or webinars, or some other form of content, you are missing out on great opportunities to reach new customers in the places that they like to hang out.

You can use content repurposing for the benefit of your own brand as well as a way to take advantage of client content that has already been created. If it’s difficult to generate brand new content on a regular basis, you cant often take your existing content and repurpose it for other channels.

So how do we repurpose content, and where can it be placed?

How to Repurpose Good Content

1. Research

Identify the piece of content you want to repurpose. Study your potential customers and identify where they are going for information. Make a game plan for how to get this content in front of as many qualified eyes as possible.

2. Repurpose

This is the fun part. Once you know what platform you are going to use, get creative on how you can repurpose this content. Blog posts can make great guides or, when combined, can also make ebooks. A presentation given at a conference can be repeated, this time in front of a camera, and the resulting video can be put on your YouTube channel or inserted into an email campaign.

Be creative and think outside the box. Does that whitepaper have information that may lend itself to an infographic? Can you take the juiciest bits of your recent webinar and turn them into a video series?

Once you’ve got the what and the how down, the next question is, how can you make a repurposed piece of content unique and not just a regurgitation of the past? Treat repurposing as an opportunity to expand your reach and add value to your original idea. Here are some ideas.

• Identify industry leaders who can be a part of the conversation who were not included in the initial content piece. Interview them and include their answers in video, audio, or written form. Invite them to join you in a webinar, Google+ hangout, or roundtable discussion, all of which can be shared in multiple mediums.
• Take the comments and feedback you received from the initial piece of content and address them, adding further insight and clarification.
• Use rich media to make it more engaging and more entertaining. For example if your original piece of content was a blog post, and many of your customers go to YouTube for how-to videos, create an interesting how-to video and put it on your YouTube channel.

3. Reshare

Share your newly created piece of content via social media channels again, but place an even greater focus on the best method of promotion for that specific platform. If you did your research properly and found the right medium to repurpose content for, chances are there are specific ways to promote content on that platform. Use best practices relative to that medium to reach your audience.

An example of repurposed content:

This blog post was repurposed into a PowerPoint presentation which we uploaded to Slideshare, and has several thousand views. Taking content within the actual post and repurposing it so that it fit in the format of a PowerPoint was easy and a great way to attract readers who like to consume content on Slideshare. It also gives us an additional medium to catch search traffic. You can find more examples on our Slideshare and YouTube accounts.

What Types of Content can be Repurposed?

Here are a few of my favorites, but I am sure you can think of more:

YouTube: Turn your how-to article into a step by step process with images, video, and voice over explaining each process. Creating high quality instructional videos creates reciprocity and builds brand recognition. You can use tools like Animoto to create montage videos in a few easy steps.

Instructables: Perfect for turning a how-to article into a step by step process with with pictures and instructions. Then make it into a YouTube video as well for 3 platforms out of 1 piece of content. The idea here is not to spam people with the same old content, but to contribute valuable information to new users and communities in the places they already like to visit.

http://www.instructables.com

PowerPoint Presentations: Repurpose content into a PowerPoint presentation and upload it to sites like Slideshare, Slideserve, and Docstoc. These often get hundreds of views and can rank for long tail keywords.

Podcasts: Interview experts on your team or within your industry. Record the interviews to help develop blog posts or other content down the line.

Webinar: If you have enough content to create an informative webinar, do it. Let potential clients download it for free. Webinars are great for building community and giving back to loyal followers, and they can also be great link bait.

Infographics: Do not limit a great graphic to one placement. Change the color and look of an infographic and find another website whose readers would like your content. Write a unique micro post to go along with the graphic and send it off.

Newsletters
Blog posts
Ebooks
Instructables
PDFs
Videos
White papers
Infographics
Micro posts
Guides
Case studies
Email marketing
…and more!

Tools to Make Repurposing Easier

Using tools that make the processes easier will enable your team to be more efficient and enhance the professional look and nature of your content. Here are a few tools I like to use:

Piktochart: If hiring a graphic designer for a particular piece of content is not an option, you can use Piktochart. This tool helps you create high quality, aesthetically pleasing graphics that can use either to enhance your content or as the content itself (as with a blog post-turned-infographic).

http://piktochart.com/

Animoto: This is a simple video editing application that turns static images into a great looking video montage. It is almost 100% dummy proof, and your clients will love it. If you have a client that has a lot of great images, take advantage of it.

http://animoto.com/

LSIkeywords: Add semantically related phrases and keywords into your repurposed content to help it gain the exposure that it deserves in the SERPs. This is a great way to attract long tail traffic with repurposed content.

http://lsikeywords.com/

Murally: Often described as a whiteboard on steroids, Murally is a great way to visualize your content and collaborate to make it better.

https://beta.mural.ly/

Capitalizing on great content and making it available to as many people as possible is what content marketing is all about. Internet marketers need to find scaling practices that offer VALUE to clients and company brand and drive qualified targeted traffic back to websites.

Resources:
http://www.e2msolutions.com/blog/content-marketing-is-not-rocket-science-the-ultimate-guide/

Get More Mileage From Your Content Through Repurposing is a post by SEO expert Jared Oldham. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

How To Add Schema Markup To Your Blog Content is a post by SEO expert Andrew Johnson. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

You’re probably thinking to yourself, “What is Schema, and why should I bother with it? I’m already blogging….what more do you want from me?!”

Having structured data is an integral part of a robust on-page optimization strategy, which is one of the pillars of an SEO strategy. While many of the tried and true on-page methods are still very much valid today, as Christian Arno says in his blog post, it’s still wise to think about ways to set your content apart from the others in the search results. One of the ways you can do that is through the use of Schema markup within your content, which can impact the click-through rates (CTR) of your listings in the search engines.

What is Schema?

Structured data is a way to add HTML attributes to the code of a page, in order for search engines to understand what the content on that page is about. The big search engines, Google, Bing, Yahoo! and Yandex, use this markup to enhance the display of their search results, which in turn help people find the right pages. A collection of these schemas are found on schema.org.

Now, search engines can do just fine understanding what your content is about without structured data, but search robots might pass over data that could set your web page apart from others in the search results.

Common Schemas

Schema.org lists hundreds of schemas for any type of situation, but some of the more common schemas include:

• Reviews
• Products
• Events
• Books
• Movies
• Recipes

Here’s an example of how schema markup can give rich snippets to the search results, as you can see in this screenshot of a search for the movie “Evil Dead”:

While using schemas in your content won’t necessarily lead to higher rankings, as explained in this video by Matt Cutts, Google’s head of webspam, this markup can increase the CTR of your listing in the search results. In fact, check out this case study on seo-chicks.com that shows how adding product schema increased the average CTR for one of their clients.

How to Add Schema to your Content

Let’s talk about a couple of ways to add schema markup to the content on your website. I understand coding to an extent, but I would usually rather find a tool to help me implement changes to my website with minimal effort. There are a couple of options when it comes to adding structured data to your content, including the Schema Creator and the Schema Creator WordPress plugin, both by Raven Tools.

Schema Creator

With Schema Creator, you can choose from six schema types, and simply fill out a few fields in a form to create the microdata. When all the fields are filled out, the right HTML will be provided to you.

Schema Creator from Raven Tools

Get started at schema-creator.org.

Schema Creator WordPress Plugin

If your blog runs on WordPress, Raven created an awesome plugin to help you add schema.org structured data to your content. A few of the features of this plugin include:

• Shortcode functionailty
• Editable schemas
• Form-based editor

With this plugin, you get an icon right above your text editor. When you click the icon, you can select a schema type, fill out the fields and the correct schema will be automatically inserted into the blog post.

This plugin is free, and can be downloaded at http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/schema-creator/.

Do you have any success stories from adding schema markup to your content? Share them in the comments!

How To Add Schema Markup To Your Blog Content is a post by SEO expert Andrew Johnson. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

How Has The Internet Changed Education? [Infographic] is a post by SEO expert SEO.com. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

If you want evidence of the way the internet is pervading every aspect of our lives, you need look no further than its effect on education. The internet and social media have dramatically changed both teaching and learning.

In fact, most students’ (an incredible 93 percent) first instinct when confronted with a research problem is to turn to Google or Bing to get information rather than going to the library, and despite the best efforts of faculty to discourage its use, Wikipedia is the research resource that is used most often. It’s not only students that are turning to the web, however. A whopping 90 percent of faculty uses social media in the courses they’re teaching, and 8 in 10 have used online video in class. In addition, colleges and universities are reaching out to students in a way they never could before—85 percent of admissions offices use some sort of social media, from video blogging to social networking.

The internet has also had a strong influence on the how, where, and what students are studying. Right now, more than 6 million students are taking at least one online course, and 11 universities across the country offer some sort of search engine optimization or search engine marketing curriculum.

Even with online learning being as widespread as it is, however, as many as one in three academic leaders consider it to be inferior to face-to-face instruction. As these online-trained students continue to enter the workforce, time will tell whether internet education can compete with traditional learning models.

Sources: 
http://sloanconsortium.org/publications/survey/going_distance_2011
http://www.pearsonlearningsolutions.com/educators/pearson-social-media-survey-2011-bw.pdf
slideshare.net/leighhouse/social-media-higher-ed
http://www.varsityoutreach.com/pagetracker/directory/topten.aspx
http://www1.umn.edu/news/features/2008f/UR_191308_REGION1.html
http://www.nsba.org/Services/TLN/BenefitsofMembership/Publications/Creating-and-Connecting.pdf
http://thesmt.com/sem-seo-courses-coming-to-portland-oregon-campuses/
http://www.thebestcolleges.org/the-10-best-e-commerce-e-business-degree-programs/
http://www.fastweb.com/college-search/articles/43-ten-majors-that-didnt-exist-10-years-ago
http://jobs.aol.com/articles/2010/01/14/careers-that-didnt-exist-10-years-ago/
http://old.diglib.org/use/whitepaper.htm http://www.alea.edu.au/documents/item/180

How Has The Internet Changed Education? [Infographic] is a post by SEO expert SEO.com. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

How To Create Killer Pinterest Graphics With PowerPoint is a post by SEO expert Andrew Johnson. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

I initially had some hesitation to join Pinterest in 2010.

It was an invitation-only site back then, and I didn’t really see the value in maintaining another “social network” in addition to Facebook, Twitter and, later, Google+. But Pinterest can be a great way to drive relevant traffic and prospective customers to your website, and since the addition of Pinterest Analytics, you can measure the success of your efforts like never before.

Pinterest is a visual experience by nature, so it’s critically important to keep this in the front of your mind as you’re developing your campaign. With that being said, there are a few ways to create high impact, click-worthy images for your pins, including various free and paid applications. But my favorite is PowerPoint for a number of reasons, but mainly because the learning curve is relatively simple. There are so many image editors to choose from, including Picmonkey, Fireworks, Pixlr and more. Each of these applications have their pros and cons, and I have used them all to some extent. While the features of PowerPoint aren’t as advanced as some of these programs, there are a couple of things you can do with PowerPoint that are, quite frankly, cumbersome on the other platforms.

One of the best examples of a click-worthy graphic for Pinterest is what’s called an “instructo-graphic”, which was first explained by Colby Almond over at the SEOmoz blog. It was a great post, and prompted me to create a few instructo-graphics for my own websites. I’ve had some time to hone the process, and think PowerPoint is the best platform to create some really killer graphics for your blog.

I want this post to be as actionable as possible, so let’s go through the steps of creating an instructo-graphic for this specific post.

Step 1. Open up Microsoft Paint

Ok, did I lose you? You’re probably thinking, “Microsoft PAINT? Should I lace up my Air Jordans while I listen to ‘Blame it on the Rain‘?” As much as I love the 90s, some things are better left in the past, but Microsoft Paint is only going to be used sparingly for the graphic.

First, edit the dimensions to be 600 px by 3000 px. This will ensure enough space to work with as you’re creating your graphic, but also entice Pinterest users to click through to see the full graphic on the website.

Step 2: Color the background

Pick a bold color, or something that will make the components of your instructo-graphic stand out.

Step 3: Copy & paste the background into PowerPoint

This is where the magic happens! Once you have that background image pasted into PowerPoint, you can add text and images and rearrange them as much as you want. Before you paste the background in, though, make sure to delete the text boxes, and zoom the window in to 100%.

Step 4: Create an eye-catching title for the graphic

The title should convey the main message of the graphic, and also relate to the content of the page it will be posted on too. Often, you can use the same title for the graphic as the blog post itself, and if you’re creating an instructo-graphic, anything titled “How to…” is usually enough to grap people’s attention and compel them to click. You can also repurpose the title area to create a pinnable title card to use instead of pinning the entire graphic. This can come in handy if you’re planning to pin to more than one board.

Draw a different colored box near the top of the graphic, and apply some effects like shading or perspective to make it stand out. These effects are found in the Picture Tools menu, and then under Picture Effects. As with any graphic, the goal is to draw the eye in and where to go next, so really make the title area pop from the rest of the graphic.

Step 5: Add images & text boxes for each step

Here is the meat of your instructo-graphic. Basically, you’re going to be walking the reader through the steps of whatever they’re going to be creating, but only highlighting the high level steps for simplicity. Don’t worry about spacing between the steps, because you can adjust when all the steps are added. The alignment of the elements in each step is important  however, as PowerPoint will superimpose guiding lines to help you determine where to place each element.

Step 6: Check for alignment

The easiest way to check for alignment is to zoom out to see the entire graphic in one window. That way, you can check the spacing between each of the steps, the alignment of images and text fields, and generally see how the graphic will look when it’s finished. Make sure there is enough space at the top and bottom sections of your graphic, and ensure the headings are properly aligned too.

Step 7: Proof the graphic

This is a critical step. Make sure you check for spelling errors, factual errors, or any other mistakes that could cost your website credibility in the readers’ eyes. Have someone look the graphic over for a second opinion.

Step 8. Copy & paste graphic from PowerPoint into Microsoft Paint

Yup, we’re back in Paint again. Once the graphic is pasted, align the top left corner to the paint area. Do this by hitting CTRL + A (which selects the graphic), and moving it into the proper place. See the screenshot below. Next, grab the width selector in the middle of the right side along the graphic, and resize the window to the correct dimensions. Finally, take the height selector at the bottom of the graphic, and resize to the proper height.

9. Save the graphic

Once everything is aligned properly, and you feel comfortable with your work, save the file in Paint as a .png, and in PowerPoint as a presentation. That way, you can come back to the template and edit without having to recreate it from scratch.

10. Promote!

Now that you’ve created this awesome, free graphic, write a blog post and add the graphic to it. Then pin the graphic, and the Pinterest users will land on your blog post for an increase in traffic.

Here are some other ways to promote your new instructo-graphic:

• Add an embed code on your blog post, and invite others to publish the graphic for links
• Write a guest post, and offer the graphic to go with it
• Submit the graphic to infographic aggregators. (NOTE: some of these sites may not accept the graphic, since it’s not a true infographic by nature, but it’s still worth a shot.)
• Submit the graphic to instructo-graphic aggregators and Google+ Communities.

Here is the finished product from our example. Feel free to use this on your own website, but please indicate the owner of the graphic is SEO.com.

Once you’ve built your graphic, I’d love to hear your feedback! Leave a comment below, or post about your efforts on our Google+ Community!

How To Create Killer Pinterest Graphics With PowerPoint is a post by SEO expert Andrew Johnson. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

Small Business Social Media 101: How To Get Started is a post by SEO expert Rebecca Babicz. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

Are you a small business owner that is currently not using social media effectively to market your business? You’re not alone. A whopping 76% of small business owners are not using social media, according to this study. That’s an unfortunate statistic because small businesses have a huge opportunity to retain customers and build relationships with new prospects through social media.

“I just don’t know where to start” is one of the biggest reasons small businesses aren’t active on social media. That’s just not a good enough excuse, and I’m here to help.

Social media can be overwhelming, there’s no doubt about it: Facebook? Twitter? Google+? Foursquare? And the list goes on. It’s hard to know which platform is the best for your small business. For starters you need to establish what your goals are for social media. Ask yourself, are your goals:

• Lead generation?
• Brand awareness?
• Customer service?
• To show up in Google maps?

Once you’ve established your goals you also need to understand where your customers are.

If you fit into the “mom and pop” shop category (let’s say a local restaurant, auto body shop, handy man, coffee shop or car wash) a lot of your social media strategy should be around showing up on Google Maps and gaining positive reviews that show up in Search Engines. The same applies for a local law firm, medical practitioner’s office, dentists etc. If your small business can benefit from online reviews, you should encourage your customers to write reviews. Social Media and Local SEO work together to increase your visibility online and bring a flood of new customers via the power of the internet.

Here’s a list of sites where you should claim your listing or “business citation”:

• Google+/Google Local
• FourSquare
• Bing Local
• Yahoo Local
• Yext
• Yelp
• City Search
• Local.com
• SuperPages

Not all of these are considered “social media” sites, but one social media site you should absolutely should be active on is Google +. We have an awesome eBook you can download here about how to create and optimize your Google+ Business Page. FourSquare is a social media site that encourages those who visit your business to “check-in.” Although Foursquare lost a little bit of its novelty because now you can also check in on Instagram, Facebook, etc. small businesses should still take a look to see if Foursquare can work for them.

If you’re in the travel/activities/hotels/restaurant industry there’s new potential with Facebook since they rolled out their new Knowledge Graph Search. Some of the ways people will be searching on Facebook graph search will look like this:

• Where are hotels that my friends have stayed?
• What’s a new restaurants within 15 miles from my house that has drink specials tonight?
• What bar have at least 10 of my friends been to?
• What wineries in Napa Valley have my friends been to?
• What do my friends do when they go to Canada?

As Facebook Knowledge Graph evolves, the opportunity to gain new business through social media is huge. Take a look at how to optimize your business page for Facebook Graph Search. Also don’t count out Pinterest and Instagram to promote beautiful photos of your destination or fun lifestyle photos.

If your small business is in the technology/IT/computer industry you should consider using Quora to answer tough questions that people need solved that pertains to your product or service. Although you might consider your industry “boring” there are still people who need your product/service. Your challenge will be finding where those customers are conversing online, so you can be helpful to them.

If your small business falls within the home & family industry there’s huge potential to market your product or service on Pinterest. Let’s say you’re a wedding planner or make custom gardening supplies, Pinterest is a great visual platform where you can grab people’s with images. Those who own boutiques, jewelry stores or any other kind of small business retail store should also get started with Pinterest.

Not all companies are right for every social media platform. There’s really no question that you should be on Google+, and I would suggest testing Facebook and Twitter and seeing how you can make them work for your particular business. When it comes to Facebook and Twitter, a strategic content marketing plan is what will fuel your success.

Twitter is also a great customer service tool and conversing with current clients by re-tweeting and thanking them for mentioning your business. When you start using Twitter, remember it’s a dinner table, not a microphone. Place a priority on answers tweets that mention your brand and all direct messages.

Hopefully this post gave you an idea where to start. Once you’ve set up your Google+ Places Listing and added business citation (your name, address and phone number) to the sites listed above you should then dabble with other social platforms to see which ones work best for you.  After you’ve got your start with social media, come back and check out our content marketing eBook to learn about the types of content you should be creating for SEO and social media.

If you have any specific questions about how your particular business can get started with social media, feel free to leave a comment down below!

Small Business Social Media 101: How To Get Started is a post by SEO expert Rebecca Babicz. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

10 Keys To A Successful Content Marketing Campaign is a post by SEO expert Shay Wright. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past couple of years, you have probably heard a lot of talk about the idea of content marketing.

While content marketing is not necessarily a new marketing concept, large and small businesses alike are beefing up their content marketing budgets in an effort to attract new customers and increase market share. But why all the recent focus on content marketing when it is a concept that has actually been around for years?

Part of the reason is because we have understandably grown tired of being bombarded with online advertisements and sales pitches. What makes it even worse is that they often come from companies that we have no prior relationship with. It’s like going in for a kiss before your date even finishes opening the door.

It’s About Gaining Trust Slowly Over Time

Consumers don’t want to be sold in a single pitch. They want to establish relationships with companies that gradually gain their trust and loyalty by consistently delivering the content and information they want. Content that entertains, answers their questions and resolves their concerns. Content that informs, educates, and inspires. This is what consumers really want, and this is why the whole content marketing concept has taken center stage in online marketing today.

Before you go out and start your new content marketing campaign though, you need to keep some things in mind and go about it the right way. Below I’ve outlined 10 essential elements to any successful content marketing campaign to help get you started.

1. Bring The Passion

If you’re not passionate about your product or service, you either need to find a different product or service to offer or find someone that is passionate about it to work for you. You simply will not be successful in any content marketing strategy unless you’re passionate about what you have to offer. Your passion will show in the content you produce, and it is that passion that will connect and engage your targeted audience.

2. Focus on Your Niche

The Internet provides a big enough market that you can afford to specialize in one specific niche these days, and the niche you choose should be one that you’re an expert in. You don’t have to be the old General Store in the Wild West that provided everything the town residents needed. In fact, online consumers don’t want you to provide everything they need. They want you to specialize in one thing and know everything there is to know about that product or service. And why do you know everything there is to know about your product or service? Because you’re passionate about it for crying out loud!

3. Understand Your Audience

Before you can create great content for your specific niche, you have to understand who your target audience is. Who are you talking to? Who is it that is most likely to buy your product or service or religiously read your blog? If your target audience is a group of electrical engineers, the content you create and the tone you use is going to be much different than a target audience of high school seniors trying to decide on a college to attend.

In times past, our target audiences were much larger and broader. I may have considered myself a savvy marketer before if I was able to focus my marketing efforts on a group of say men ages 28-50. Well, that’s great if I’m selling life insurance, but what if I’m selling something much more unique that doesn’t fit into any particular age group or demographic? Suppose, for example, that I’m selling a high end backpack specifically designed for ice climbing. Will my content marketing be more effective if it’s directed towards all men ages 28-50 or just towards those that are into ice climbing? With new marketing opportunities such as Facebook Ads, you can now direct your content to very targeted audiences, so figure out who your targeted audience is before you start to create great content.

4. Be The Right Person

One of the most important parts of content marketing is connecting and engaging with your online audience. How well are you going to connect with your audience if you’re a 50 year old man that wants to start an online bridal shop? Probably not too well unless you happen to be George Clooney or Brad Pitt. Assuming you’re neither of these guys, but your lifelong dream is to still own an online bridal shop, by all means do it. However, remember that if you want your content marketing efforts to be effective, you better get a nice, recently married, or soon to be married, young lady to be the face of your content marketing campaign and truly interact and engage with your audience.

5. Take Time to Listen

Don’t assume you know what content your audience wants. Take the time to listen to your targeted audiences’ questions, comments, suggestions, and reactions. Reading the blog comments on your blog can be a great way to understand your audience better. Studying your Google Analytics traffic can also help you see which topics your audience is reading and engaging with most. Use the information you gather to develop ideas for your content strategy.

6. Use Stories

Nothing resonates with your targeted audience better than stories, especially happy and inspiring ones. Personal stories and experiences as well as the stories and experiences of clients can be key to engaging your audience and having them just pace the floor waiting for your next update. People relate to stories and share in the emotions and experiences of others through stories. This doesn’t mean you should just tell a story to tell one though. Make sure it’s interesting and entertaining and that it is also in line with the overall message you want your audience to hear.

7. Use Employees and Customers

Don’t feel like you have to be the sole source of content for your campaign. Rely on your employees and customers to provide insight, stories, testimonials, and other helpful information to add to and improve your content marketing message. You might be surprised by how much content is available right at your fingertips if you just reach out and ask the people around you and your happy customers for help with your content.

8. Have a Plan

Putting together a good editorial calendar is essential to any good content marketing plan. Strategically plan out the order and timing for each new piece of content and understand what it is you want to accomplish with each post.

You should also create a marketing mission statement to help guide the direction and overall plan for your editorial calendar. Ask yourself why you publish the content you publish. What is your end goal? How do you want your followers to respond? What action do you want them to take? And how will your content motivate and entice them to do this? To help better organize your content goals and properly map out a great editorial calendar, please download our free content roadmap calendar.

9. Don’t Focus on You

The content you create should focus on your audience and not on you or your company. Even if you run the greatest company in the world and get daily recognition for your accomplishments, your audience doesn’t want to hear about how great you are everyday. Sure, drop in a real brief mention of something your company was recognized for here and there to build more credibility, but don’t let it get in the way of the content your audience really wants to receive.

Your content marketing should engage them, educate them, inspire them, and have them begging for more, and delivering that type of content should be your focus day in and day out. It’s awfully hard to inspire and educate someone when all you talk about is how great you are, even if you are pretty great (which I’m sure you are my friend).

10. Update, Update, Update

Don’t just get half way through a story and leave everyone hanging in cyberspace wondering how it ends, or write a great piece of content on a subject that you never update as things change over time. Always revisit your published content and make sure it’s complete and up to date.

This is especially critical if you work in an industry that is constantly changing such as SEO. Suppose I publish a great resource about effective link building strategies, and it’s a big hit. It generates a lot of natural links and is shared through various social networks. What if I never go back and update that post though? A year later when the latest Penguin, Panda, or Polar Bear (just kidding) update completely changes effective link building strategies, I’m not going to look real smart with links to my now very outdated link building guide all over the Internet.

I hope you enjoyed my 10 keys to a successful content marketing campaign guide, and I look forward to reading all the great content you’ll now deliver to the world. Are you still hungry for more? Download our free ebook 11 Types Of Content You Should Be Creating For SEO Right Now.

10 Keys To A Successful Content Marketing Campaign is a post by SEO expert Shay Wright. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

Beyond Blogs: Inject Variety Into Your Content Marketing Strategy is a post by SEO expert Paul Sanders. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

The SEO industry is (finally) getting the message that making content user-centric rather than focusing so heavily on outdated, over-optimized practices is the path to better rankings, more traffic and more customers. It’s not enough just to focus on onsite optimization anymore, and content marketing (whichever of the competing definitions of that term you use) has rightly moved to the forefront of everyone’s minds.

But in the rush to make content marketing part of everyday internet marketing practice, a lot of marketers are defaulting to the one type of content they’re comfortable with: blog posts. There’s so much focus on this single, narrow form of content-centric link building that professionals are murmuring how guest blogging could be the next bubble for Google to burst.

And while I think you can blog in healthy ways that make your brand more authoritative and get you in front of valuable audiences, it really should be only part of your overall content strategy.

Focusing Narrowly on Blogs is Shortsighted

The blog “bubble” is another discussion entirely, but the very fact that we’re having it indicates that a lot of marketers are relying on guest blogging pretty heavily as a marketing tactic, and it’s preventing them from branching out into more diverse types of content.

It’s time to move beyond blogs and expand the menu of content that you offer to your audience. New content types will expand your reach to new niches, engage your audience in different ways and inspire natural linking activity that is good for SEO and drives qualified traffic to your site, which is what online marketing is really about.

What Kinds of Content can You Focus on?

This is where SEO.com is stepping in to help you. We’ve just published a stellar ebook (which you can download here for free) that outlines the types of content, including blogs, that everyone should be considering, even though they may not have the bandwidth to do all of them right now.

Here’s a preview of what you’ll find when you download 11 Types of Content You Should be Creating for SEO Right Now:

• Images: Discover how to create images that give people an insider’s view of your company, inspire people to share them socially and are accessible to search engines.
• Video: Learn what a search-optimized video looks like and how you can create videos people love without a huge production budget.
• White Papers: Reach sophisticated B2B audiences with long-form, data-rich content at the right point in the research and purchase cycle.
• Case Studies: Harness your success with existing clients for content that showcases your products and services in a substantive way.

There’s a lot more inside the eBook  and I think it lays out a broader view of what a fully-fledged content campaign can look like. You can use many of these new types of content together, re-purpose old content into multiple formats and increase the impact of every great idea that comes out of your marketing department when you’re not limiting yourself to blog posts.

Building Healthy Marketing Campaigns

There are a lot of voices in the online marketing space that are offering tips and tricks, talking about various strategies and pushing services; it’s easy to get information overload, especially while everyone is still debating tactics. A healthy marketing campaign is diverse, but it still needs direction.

When you’re overloaded with info, it’s hard to know where to start. Remember, though, that you’re the owner of your individual content marketing campaign. It needs to fit your company, your products and your customers. And while you may want expert advice on content marketing tactics that deliver, nobody knows better than you what conversations you want that content to be starting. You are the expert on your business, and your input is essential.

Start with the basics. That may be a blog. It might be a few web videos or sharing product photos on Pinterest. Whatever it is, make it natural, and beware getting too comfortable with any one type of content. Try something new. You’ll be surprised by the results.

Beyond Blogs: Inject Variety Into Your Content Marketing Strategy is a post by SEO expert Paul Sanders. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

The Making of SEO.com – A New Hope is a post by SEO expert Derek Perkins. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

Do you ever feel like you need Jedi powers to get your website to rank? If Google is the empire, I’m going to peg Larry Page as Emperor Palpatine and Sergey Brin as Darth Vader, based on Page pulling ever so slightly ahead of Brin in Forbes March billionaire listing. They’re already trying to turn us into mini-Vaders with the impending Google Glass project. We’re the spunky Rebel Alliance, a hodge podge community of business owners, web developers and SEO specialists. We’re constantly testing, spying and prodding. Occasionally we’ll find an open exhaust port that lets us produce fantastic results. We love it when our metaphorical Han Solo’s tell us, “Great shot, kid, that was one in a million!”

Geekery aside, we’re all trying to get ahead in an increasingly digital world, to which search engines are the #1 portal. We embarked on a redesign late in 2012 for a number of reasons.

Conversion

Though our last site reboot from April 2012 looked great and performed well, it wasn’t built with an eye towards multi-variant testing. There was repeated code in a number of themes and templates that made it difficult to isolate and change specific site-wide items. We moved to the Genesis framework by StudioPress, and with Yoda Brian Gardner as our guide, the Force is strong with us.

Site Speed

The last iteration was very resource heavy, serving up lots of images per page plus self-hosted fonts and other bulky resources. We needed to make sure that our site would load in less than 12 parsecs, Millenium Falcon style. Through a mix of backend code optimizations, asynchronous resource loading, server tweaks and CDNs, we’ve already more than doubled our loading speed, with more on the way.

Integration

We launched SEOinsight, a brand new toolset we use internally to track rankings, to the general public. We use Pardot to manage our leads and SalesForce to help follow through, then transition clients to our very appropriately named in-house task management system, Deathstar, as we start fulfillment. Making sure that we take care of everyone through that whole process requires tight integration, and we’re now able to offer faster consultations and quicker turnaround times.

For all of you out there wondering if the top SEO companies in the world drink their own Kool-Aid, I want to give you a guided tour into the inner workings of the SEO.com website with this new column. There’ll even been some of my favorite code snippets thrown in for good measure.

Here are a few of the things that I’ll cover.

• Why we chose WordPress and Genesis respectively as the engine and frame of our site
• What plugins made the cut from 50+ down to 25
• SEO specific configuration of WordPress SEO by Yoast and other backend tweaks
• Our transition from dedicated hosting to the WPEngine managed platform + CloudFlare
• How I was forced to swear off mentioning cats in all internal communications and meetings and the ensuing disasters

Stay tuned for a new post each week, each with its own unique geek-fueled theme. Until then, Hoppy Easter!

The Making of SEO.com – A New Hope is a post by SEO expert Derek Perkins. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

5 Reasons Your Small Business Should Be Using Quora is a post by SEO expert Rebecca Babicz. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

If you’re looking for a platform that will help broaden your online visibility, Quora is a great place to invest some time.

Quora is a Q&A community that’s highly underrated and underused in my opinion. This platform is all about building your authority on a specific topic and building relationships by answering questions with people who share similar ideas and interests.

As a small business owner, you need a well rounded inbound marketing strategy that encourages people to discover your product or service online. Quora can help you build your online reputation and guide prospects to discover you.

There’s a conversation happening right now on Quora with or without you. Joining that conversation can only benefit you. Here are 5 reasons why your small business should be active on Quora:

1.       Quora is a great inbound marketing tool

Customers inhabit different spaces online. They’re looking for reliable information from people they can trust. The developers of Quora understand this, and that’s why they’ve integrated a DIGG-like voting mechanism for the quality of answers where users can vote up an answer. Also unlike Yahoo answers, Quora integrates Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, so it’s easy to follow your friends, which builds trust and legitimacy for the user. As the internet gets more convoluted with low quality content, users flock to the places they know and trust. It’s up to you to build that trust by sharing your expertise.

Quora allows you to give direct answers to anyone asking about your product or service. The more answers you supply, the bigger your influence on Quora will become. You also have an opportunity to share links to blog posts, product pages or other helpful pieces of content on your site. It should be noted that the Quora Community doesn’t like it when users leave shallow answers just to link back to their site. Make sure that if you are doing a little self-promoting, that you’re actually adding value and benefiting the community. Not doing so can hurt your online reputation.

Quora links are marked as “nofollow” which means they don’t pass any “link juice” to your site. However, adding links to answers on Quora is a great overall inbound strategy because you’ll increase your authority, drive traffic to your site and raise brand awareness. Plus no-follow links can help build a well-rounded backlink portfolio.

2.       Search Engines crawl Quora’s content and add them to search results.

Because people are asking questions that are similar (if not exactly the same) as they are on Bing, Google and Quora, your answers to topic-relevant, keyword-rich questions, on Quora have a good chance of showing up in search results. This is especially true for longer, more specific queries. Here’s how the two search giants use Quora:

• Bing & Quora: It’s been about 7 months since the red-headed step child of the search world, Bing, announced that Quora questions and answers have been added to their Social Sidebar. Bing is using Quora as a platform to pose legitimate answers to search queries to help provide a well-rounded search result for the user.
• Google & Quora: Maybe you don’t care about Bing, you never use it and don’t think your customers are using it either. Guess what? Google’s Quora integration is also quite advanced. Unlike Bing, Google simply might grab from Quora what they feel is the single best answer, based on its algorithm for any questions you might ask. 

 3.       Quora can help you do competitive and industry research.

Although it’s important to actively engage with the Quora community, it’s okay to sit back and observe what’s going on. Become an investigator; are your competitors using Quora? How do prospects weigh your competitors’ product or service against yours? What are their pros and cons, verses your pros and cons? Maybe there’s an opportunity to chime in about your product or service and explain your unique value proposition (remember: make sure you’re adding value and not just dropping a link). Are people expressing a common problem they need solved industry wide? Maybe there are ways to expand your product or service that you never thought of. It’s amazing what you can find out if you keep your ears open!

4.       Quora can help you manage your online reputation.

Just like you can use Quora to keep an eye out to see what people are saying about your competitors, you can also set up Google alerts to monitor what people are saying about your own brand. Simply set up a Google Alert for the query “Quora Your Brand Name.” You can also monitor what people are saying about your industry, product/service and competitors with Google Alerts. Typically Twitter and Facebook are outlets that you should be using for customer service, but there’s no reason why you shouldn’t be keeping tabs on Quora and answering questions and concerns and responding to negative or positive feedback.

5.       Quora is great for Content Marketing ideas.  

As a small business, writing high quality content that speaks to your prospects and answers their questions should be the basis of your inbound strategy moving forward. It’s easier said than done, getting into the head space of potential clients and understanding the problems that they want solved. That’s how Quora can help. By searching through topics that relate to your product you will have a better understanding of the questions your prospects have and the language they use. Do prospects use industry jargon or are they using other words to describe your product or service? Here at SEO.com, we’re always learning the words that prospects use to describe SEO. Some might use phrases like, “how to rank higher in Google,” while others might associate SEO with “inbound marketing.” There might be questions that people are asking that are obvious to you but aren’t obvious to those not heavily involved in the industry. 

When you see these types of questions a little bell should go off in your head. These are the types of topic ideas you should be crafting your content strategy around. (Pro-tip: write a micro post to answer questions for Quora and go in deeper detail on your blog where you can link to).

Quora has remained relatively spam-free due to the community they’ve built and their employees who monitor the site heavily. The reason why Quora is underused in my opinion is because it’s takes some serious time to answer questions intelligently on Quora, and people aren’t always willing to put in that time. The truth is that if your a small business owner you’re probably an expert in at least a few things, so don’t be shy about your expertise. The internet marketing strategies that won’t get wiped out by the next Google update are going to be the ones that provide value to those searching on Google, and these are the strategies that take the most time. Hopefully I’ve convinced you to at the very least check it Quora and see what you can find about your company, product or service.

Did I miss anything? How else do you use Quora for online marketing?

5 Reasons Your Small Business Should Be Using Quora is a post by SEO expert Rebecca Babicz. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.