Writing articles/content on your website/blog has become a very powerful action in marketing your business. The thing is that sometimes people forget why they’ve started a website or better said they forget how to use their website to draw attention to their business. It’s very easy to get lost in the wave and write articles that will not bring anything in return.

In a brick and mortar business you never do things without thinking about what impact will have on your business. When it comes to real businesses people always ask themselves “how is this going to improve my business?”

This is the model every web-based business should follow. So, every time you want to write a new article ask yourself this question: “How it will help/improve my business?”. If you can’t answer this question you better drop that article and find another topic to write about.

Here are some 3 simple/basic things to help you establish a connection between an article and a real benefit for your business:

1. In most cases articles should target keywords. I say in most cases because there are some times when you just want to develop a really interesting title and present an interesting idea without thinking about keywords and search engines. But if your website is in its initial state when it was just launched you should create articles that target keywords with the goal of improving rankings for your website
2. Some articles are meant to get more business/clients while others are created to increase the subscribers number, for example, or to improve website functionality, or to be a feeder to other articles on your website and the list can go on
3. Goals are something that has to be in your mind all the time. Always set a goal for a certain article, page or set of articles. See if you manage to achieve that goal, measure the success and try to adjust it

The presence of keywords in your articles is crucial to the success of your website. The reason is because the highest amount of traffic should come from search engines. That is why having a keyword list for your website where you have a main keyword list with your most competitive keywords and some additional secondary lists for long tail keywords is very important.

A secondary thing related to keywords in your articles is that you also need a plan of how to use long tail keywords and how to link the articles to really help your website rank well on the competitive keyword.

What do you say?

What goals are you following with your articles? Do you think about getting something in return when writing every article? Share your ideas and opinions with us.

Many people do keyword stuffing. They think that if they’ll mention the keywords in every sentence they’ll rank well for that keyword. Wrong. Why? Simple: to rank well you don’t only need content that targets the keyword but also links from other websites.

If you stuff your content with your main keyword the result will be unnatural content: it will look bad and sound awful. The consequence: users won’t like it. If people don’t like what you write they won’t link to you so ranking for competitive keywords will be extremely hard, if not impossible.

Choosing what keywords to target in your content and deciding on how to use it can pose some problems. This is why I decided to create this article and talk about the process of deciding what to choose and how to use it. First of all I want to clarify a small detail: many people say that they’re targeting a keyword without knowing if that’s really a keyword. Here is what I mean by that.

A group of words can be called a keyword only if there is someone searching the Internet for that particular group of words. That is why be careful when paying for SEO service: don’t optimize and rank number 1 for group of words that either no one is looking for or there are only 10 searches/month. The only situation when you could try and target this kind of keywords with very low search volume is if the competition is really weak and your website has only few pages.

Despite what many people say that quality is the only thing that matters I think that only one extraordinary article won’t help you that much. I’ll offer you my suggestion on the relation between quality and quantity bellow in the list of things that you may want to consider when building a keyword list.

read more

General analysis on a website for SEO purposes is when you do a look from the top of the website. It’s just what its names imply: a general analysis. The purpose of such an analysis is to provide a quick report on a website and to identify week points, strong elements and things that need to be done. This is only the beginning of an SEO orientated look to a website and should identify the most immediate actions that need to be taken.

It will not solve the problems of the website.
You should not expect that a general analysis will provide full information. You have to realize that obtaining in depth info on every page of your website and what is the exact status of keyword targeting on every page, where your links are coming from and other things that are related to search engine optimization requires time.

Now, I want to talk a little bit about the key elements that are required (in my opinion – feel free to add some more of this in comments bellow) on a general website analysis.

read more

A while ago I wrote an article about 7 Tips of How to Write Good Titles and What the Benefits Are. I decided to write some more on this topic and to explore other ways to improve the quality of my titles. I read a recent article on How Book Titles Build Personal Brands written by Roger Parker and basically that was the moment that I decided to write some more about titles.

Although there are some rules to follow when creating a title, many times we overlook them. I think that in the case of articles written for the web the title should play a double role.
read more

Everything that is under the form of a link should serve a purpose. You don’t just place a link for the sake of it. You use it for SEO purposes or to improve user experience or to improve the indexing of your pages. Blog tags, together with blog categories are mainly used to group the content – to make it easier to access by users.

Things to consider when you think about blog tags:

-          If you plan the list of tags before you start writing content the result will be: better organized content. If you don’t plan a list of tags you’ll end up with different tags that basically mean the same thing

-          Good planning will lead to better understanding of your content by users

-          See if you can incorporate keywords in your tag list

-          Think about link architecture: the tag list can help your indexing process

-          The tag list should be an extension to your category list: particularities, common points for different categories, additional information, etc

-          Build it with responsibility: think about what the user will get by clicking a tag. What is the value? Why to click it?

-          When using a widget to display your tag cloud you have two options: different text sizes, depending on how much a tag is used, or equal text sizes. Think about what you need. If you want people to know that your content is more about a certain topic then go with different text size.

read more

If you go into a bar and try to sell SEO services how do you think people will react? If you go in a park and stop people that jog to present your product how do you think they’ll react? If you see a group of people sharing stories about their latest vacation and you interrupt them to promote your service/product how do you think they’ll react?

These kinds of actions based on interruption are the worst things you could do on any social network. You may think that since so many people use social networks for business it’s natural to expect a direct sell interruption. Wrong! Indeed many people use social networks for business but the word social makes all the difference.

The idea is to interact, build relations, let people know what you do by using your bio. When they go out to scout for new clients people are interacting first and present a business card later. When a person enters a company office or visits a business blog, there is the place where they expect to see direct sale.

You don’t have to tell people what you do. They can read your bio, visit your blog, see what you tweet or post on Facebook or what kind of videos you create. The only thing you have to do is think about how to establish a connection. How to gain their trust? How to build authority around you? How to brand yourself?

I was talking about proper link architecture and its advantages in a previous article. One of these advantages was improve indexing by search engines. We all want our websites fully indexed by search engines. Sometimes, because of bad linking architecture, some of our pages remain unknown to users.

A simple but effective technique to also improve the indexing process of your website is to have a sitemap. You have to know that Google doesn’t guarantee that all of your pages will be indexed just because you create a sitemap.

For those that don’t know what a sitemap is here is a simple explanation: an xml or html or php or asp file that contains a list of your pages under the form of clickable text links. If your website is built on a CMS or a blog you can have a plugin that will generate the sitemap for you each time you add new content.

read more

More and more people are using Twitter only as a broadcasting tool. Many of my followers are spammers, bots or people that use automated tools to build followers. The problem is that you may think you have an audience when in fact you’re talking only to a handful of people.

Now, with this feature of creating lists I think many of the problems will be solved. People will create lists with users that they trust, with people that tweet in a constant way, with people that add some kind of value. So, you’ll benefit from other people’s knowledge about other Twitter users. I think this is a big step for Twitter and a way to filter the spam.

Many people think design when they are planning to build their website. In fact they should think: functionality, user interface, goals, link architecture and how to implement it, keyword lists, target audience. The design is also very important but it should serve a purpose – I think about design as a coat that it’s meant to be wear in certain occasions.

This article is about the link architecture: how to plan it, how to incorporate it into the design process, how it can help your website.

First understand how search engines “look” at your website. The main page is the most important place where you should insert your most important content and links. This is where you should also target your most competitive keywords and give your best in terms of optimizing the page for search engine rankings and user interaction. So, if you consider a certain page to be very important try and place a link to it on the main page. If a user will have to click more than 3 times to access it then search engines will not consider that page to be that important.

read more