Personal blog of Prasad Ajinkya
The real challenge to Content Marketing is writing content which is timeless. If you can truly put together a series of such content pieces, then you should be able to attract the attention of your niche audience. Continue reading “Link Building in the Content Marketing Era”
This month, Google rolled out a new help feature in their Webmasters tool. If you have been working on your site’s SEO, then probably you know most of this, however, its good to see how Google has nicely summarised this in one helpful page.
If you are not completely confident about your SEO fundamentals, then this is one thing that you should do immediately!
I was intending to write this post for some time now, however this brilliant infographic by Mervik Haums was available and its a great resource of tips of getting your Google+ Authorship setup.
To put this in a nutshell,
I did this the earlier day for Good Home Advisor, and it worked within the next couple of days.
PS – Google Authorship has been nerfed by Google and the data is no longer available. Just one more example in the SEO industry when everyone starts abusing a particular rule, Google nerfs it!
Once you launch a site, the work is not done … in fact the work of a webmaster has just begun! One clear metric for the success of your site (especially early on) is site traffic. Over a period of time as your site matures and you get a better sense of what drives your site, you will tend to discard this metric, but initially it is always traffic.
One good component of traffic is search, traffic that comes searching for content relevant to your subject. Yes! There are people out there who are actively searching for things about which you want to write!! Right from narrow niches such as Pathare Prabhu Recipes to broad gulches such as Being Awesome in Excel.
For content rich websites, Search is a major component contributing to the site’s traffic. For example, 70% of my site’s traffic comes from Google Search! This is actually higher than what I wanted it to be and I try to bring it down by driving traffic via other sources, however I will always want a good fat 40-50% traffic coming to my site via search.
In fact when I started working on my site on a regular basis around 6 months back (as part of my new year resolution), I hardly realized that it would make such a big difference to the traffic split.
There are a lot of agencies out there who promise that they will ensure that you would start ranking on your set of keywords. Here’s a starter for post for those who want to get into SEO, go read this and stop paying agencies a lot of money for barely scratching the surface.
If you want to acquire organic traffic, then write good content … write about things that move you, about things which you are passionate about. Write from the heart, and forget about those grammatical mistakes. If you have a friend who is a grammar nazi, get him/her to review your post later on.
So now that you have a stream of content on your site, how to ensure that people who are searching for your subject matter actually end up finding your website?
This is where your friends and social circle comes in!
Sharing your content with friends and getting them like/+1 the content is a social signal that search engines read. This acts like a testimonial for your site in the eyes of the search engine.
See this for yourself, take one article on your site and like this on Google+. Then search for this article via your friend’s Google id … note the before +1 Search Engine Ranking Position (SERP) and the after SERP.
Here is a list of things that you need to get setup on with Google+ –
Don’t simply take my word for this. Even Moz (erstwhile SEOMoz) says that there is correlation between Google +1s and Higher SERPs. In layman’s terms what this means is that the more +1s on Google+ your article gets, the higher will it rank on Google.
So get on this network and start using Google+! Instead of wasting time liking lolcats on Facebook, try and use your spare time
Today a comment by Analytics guru – Avinash Kaushik made me to pause and take a re-look at my perspective on Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO).
Conversion Rate Optimization is the science behind increasing the conversion rate of the pages of a website.
Let’s say that you are running an Adwords campaign for your website, then most likely you would use a specific landing page built purely for conversions (be it purchases or be it lead generation). With the interaction that I have had with the different Search Engine Marketing agencies in India, the default target conversion rate that is considered acceptable is a measly 5%. At EduPristine, we try for 30% and on an average generate a healthy 25% lead generation conversion rate.
However, the tactics that we ended up using were pretty much what Avinash has mentioned to avoid … most of the time when we conduct CRO experiments, it is with a short term focus of getting an incremental raise in the conversion rates. Here is an excerpt from the comment –
Then I realize that I’m sure someone tested this. I’m sure some “conversion rate optimization guru” was brought in to do this. I’m sure they got 10% more leads. I’m sure their lead conversion rate went from 1.67% to 1.84%. I’m sure to them this looks awesome.
But what about the other 98.16%? People who did not convert, many of whom, like me, might have thought this was distasteful? Some of the 98.16% surely thought “This is not the type of company I want to do business with?”
I used to think that 25% conversion rate is awesome (and believe me, it is! :-) ). However, what is happening to the user experience on the site … a modal pop-up here, a lead generation form there … do the visitors on my site really want to see that?
The pragmatist within me says that the purpose of the site is lead generation, and that it is doing brilliantly.
However, the idealist says that in the long run the site needs to welcome the user … it needs to provide that the same user keeps returning again and again for clear value that he gets from visiting the site. The %age of repeat visitors needs to increase … and that metric is something that a CRO specialist hardly looks at.
How about a metric which measures the number of unique visitors who visits your site more than x times? That could be a measure of customer retention.
Instead of focusing on incremental changes on the page to get a temporary raise in conversions, focus on user experience and ask yourself this question … would you visit your own site again?
What are your thoughts on this?
I always get into a quandary when it comes to setting up the SEO strategy for a site which spans across multiple geographies. What would the best course of action be, to use sub-directories and depend on the equity of the main site, or to spawn separate Top Level Domains (TLDs) and increase the quanta of work.
In fact sometimes this becomes a case of Analysis-Paralysis … inaction which comes from considering too many pros and cons.
This is where Aleyda Solis has shined through with a simple infographic for people like me. Here’s the gist of this, and that’s why I love this infographic –
If you have content for all the different TLDs, then go ahead with multiple TLDs since that’s the best approach. If you do not have that much content, then you can use language based sub-directories with the hreflang attribute and meta content language.
I have seen this question being frequently discussed amongst start-ups and content marketers. Here’s my small attempt to help decide between which content management system one should go for.
A Content Management System (CMS) is an application using which you can create, update and delete your Content. Now this is a very loose description, and any web application where you upload stuff and manage it falls into this definition. So let me narrow this down a bit.
A CMS is a web application using which you can easily publish content on your website.
Yes, it’s the backbone software based on which you create (or have just created) a rocking website.
You don’t. If your site is made of a few pages (5 or so), then perhaps you are better off with a static site. Plain Jane HTML. There actually is no need to hire an agency to create your site.
However, if you like me love writing on a regular basis on your site and keeping the site updated, with more and more pages … or have a site which is dynamic in nature (stuff keeps on happening on the site and there is never a boring time for you), then it is best to use a CMS to control what content goes live on your site.
There are more than a million Content Management Systems out there … no really! Talk to your average Joe, the web vendor and he would convince you to create your site in his awesome custom CMS. I know of Indian vendors out there who are doing this as their business model!!
But let me not talk about those, and focus on the ones which really matter. The ones which hold a significant share of the internet. The ones which are free :-), yes, since the free ones have a high share of the internet.
This is by far the most widely used Content Management System on the internet. At last count, WordPress has been powering more than 17% of the internet!
WordPress (yes the P is intentional, and has to be in caps!) is the proud creation of Automattic and is free to use. If you do not want to get into the technicalities and only focus on publishing, then simply head on over to WordPress dot com. If you can brave the tech part of setting up your own hosted WordPress (which is a breeze), then head on over to WordPress dot org and download the latest source.
Let me be honest with you, I am biased towards WordPress and it’s my defacto CMS.
One look at the search trends of Google will confirm this for you –
Unlike WordPress which started out as a blogging software and went on to become a full fledged Content Management System, Joomla started off as a CMS and was a fork of Mambo (forget about this CMS, it had its fair share of problems which Joomla fixed quite elegantly). During the initial days of Joomla, there was a lot of controversy between free software and open source (since it was formed from a CMS which was not exactly free). However the community that Joomla built was loyal and has since developed great support for it.
Although Joomla does pack a wallop when it comes down to meeting your CMS requirements, it does require a bit of getting used to and that’s why it powers 2.8% of the Internet.
This is the oldest CMS amongst the three, and must have seen a lot of attrition in its community base as the other two CMS’ would have been released. That also explains why this community is fiercely loyal. That also would explain the well documented help for this CMS (a developer’s paradise). This is the CMS of the techie which comes bundled with a lot of power.
But with all this power comes a complexity which becomes difficult to master, and hence lesser adoption rates. At 2.13% of the internet, I will not call it less, but the other counterparts are doing well.
I am not going to play safe and just stop at a CMS comparison, for that there are tonnes of other sites who have even done beautiful infographics on this topic. I am going to pick one of these CMS for you!! So help me out and ask yourself these questions (just pick the options!)
If your answer is mostly 1’s then go ahead with the CMS you already know … you have the time to learn it and you know what you need to implement. Ask around in the communities and people will help you out.
If your answer is mostly 2’s then just pick WordPress and start. It is easy to learn, fast to implement and flexible at the start (since you do not know what you exactly want, you would have to do a lot of tests to determine what works for you.
You can say that I am biased with WordPress. Yes, I am … since these days I make my living by working on the WordPress stack. However, you do not have to take my word for it, here’s a comparison of what the Internet has to say about these three different CMSs.