by Amber Miller | Apr 23, 2019 | SEO, Virtual Assisting
Interested in how to make SEO marketing more intentional in your blog posts? If so, you’re probably already sold on the fact that words by themselves aren’t enough (although they’re certainly important).
You have a valuable service or product that’ll help oodles of people. Now, what you need to make sure of is that they’ll actually find you. One of the best ways to get noticed is through organic search results. It’s not salesy yet screams credibility to potential clients and customers.
If you want your website to show up better in the search results, here are some key ways to do that by tweaking your blog posts.
Focus on Great Writing for Search Engine Marketing
SEO marketing has to start with high-quality writing. The “wild west” days of the internet are long gone—the days you could simply slap some primitive keywords into a semi-legible article and rise to the top.
Google continues to grow more sophisticated and has gotten way better at telling great content from junk. Grammar, semantics and articles without excessive use of keywords all matter.
What this means is that, like all good things, you’ll need to invest consistent time and resources into your strategy to see results. Shoddy sentences and poor grammar just won’t cut it anymore.
Use Ingoing and Outgoing Links
An often-overlooked way to boost your credibility in the eyes of Google is to provide hyperlinks in your articles. There are two hyperlink types: internal and external ones.
Internal links connect to valuable resources on your website such as your “contact” or “about” pages. They also link to relevant blog posts or other content.
When it comes to outgoing links, some business owners worry that adding them will make people go elsewhere and not come back. In reality, it’s riskier not to have them.
Google wants to see that you’re directing visitors to both useful content on your website and the internet at large. This provides credibility and higher rankings.
Consider Going Long Form in Your Posts
What’s long-form content? Posts that typically run in the range of 1,000 to 3,000 words. To give you an idea of the word volume, that comes out to between four and 12 pages in a print book.
Why is long-form content such a powerful SEO tool? Because most articles aren’t that length for starters. Provided these articles are well written, they look more authoritative to Google which means they tend to rank higher.
Primary keyword density should generally run one to three percent of the entire article text. Much more than that and Google could penalize you for being too spammy with your keyword usage.
The beauty of long-form articles is they allow your keywords to appear more frequently, since there’s more text, without them looking questionable to Google. The added keywords long form provides can give you a “bump up”. People tend to prefer longform content these days as well.
Use Longtail Keywords to Improve SEO Marketing
Longtail keywords are keyword phrases as opposed to single-word keywords. For instance, if you want to market sandals to your customers, using the word “sandals” as a keyword won’t help you much since it’s too broad of a topic.
You’ll need something more specific that’s being searched for but that your analytics tell you isn’t too difficult to rank for. That may mean something like “springtime sandals for teens” or any number of other possibilities.
You’ll also want to pay special attention to question longtail keywords phrases. In other words, these are the exact questions people have been searching for online and can be a useful aspect of ranking well.
Like any good thing in life, achieving organic search results that bring in clients and customers takes a lot of time and effort. Thankfully, the end results are well worth it—plenty of credibility and business.
More than ever, web content that works needs to be of high quality with attention to SEO details mentioned here and many more.
Are you sold on the fact that you need consistent quality blog posts for your business? Good!
What is a Virtual Assistant and Can They Help with My Blog Posts?
In short, a virtual assistant can help you with a variety of office tasks regardless of where your business is located. And, yes, we can help with content writing services such as blog posts!
At Smart to Finish, we understand just how busy businesses can be. The tasks that need done can be dizzying and, if not completed, crippling. We specialize in taking that heavy weight off of you and your staff so you can focus on the big picture with minimal stress.
If you’d like help, you can find out more about our blog writing services, marketing management and other virtual assistance options by scheduling a free consultation.
by Amber Miller | May 16, 2015 | Featured, Marketing, SEO, Social Media
Everyone knows that they need to track their marketing efforts. If you didn’t track your marketing you would not know what’s working and what isn’t. Now I know tracking and analytics isn’t really sexy and exciting, but it is a necessary evil that we have to do to determine if our marketing is paying off.
If you don’t already have Google Analytics set up on your website then that is going to be your first step. Google Analytics does a great job at tracking your visitors as they move from page to page on your website. But if you don’t know what you are looking at, Google Analytics can be very confusing and overwhelming.
The good news is that there are some free tools that can help simplify Google Analytics so you can understand the data that comes from this form of tracking.
Below are 3 free tools that will help simplify Google Analytics for you.
Need to know helps you find out what you need to know when it comes to Google Analytics.
So what does it do?
Need to know is relatively new and is definitely worth checking out.
N2K gives you a one-page overview of your Google Analytics data. This report will highlight your key information over the last month. It takes all of the complicated Google Analytics and presents it to you in a compressed format.
It is incredibly easy to use while still giving you a very detailed easy to read report.
What story will your data tell you?
Quill is another fairly new free service that will take the data that is gathered from Google Analytics and transforms it into an easy to read and understand report. Quill gives you the option to receive a weekly or monthly email that is written in plain English.
Take a look at this example report from Quill Engage
Why is Quill Engage Useful?
Quill Engage will literally take all of the data you get from Google Analytics and convert them to an easy to read, easy to understand report. This will allow you to take action on the data that is being collected.
Tracking webpages just got easier.
What does PadiTrack do?
Just like the other two tools shared before, PadiTrack connects directly to your Google Analytics account and displays the data in an easier to understand format. This tool especially works well when it comes to tracking sales funnels.
How is PadiTrack useful?
One cool thing that Paditrack shows you is the conversions for each and every step of your sales funnel. This allows you to quickly pinpoint “problem areas” in your conversion process.
PadiTrack also allows you to see how well your sales funnels are doing against specific segments. For example you could create a segment of users from a new email campaign, traffic driven from a specific keyword or from new visitors to your website who found you through Google search.
PadiTrack offers a ton of other great reports and comes with a free version and makes a great “add-on” to your analytics toolbox.
These 3 tools are just a few tools to check out that will assist in making those hard to read Google Analytic reports a breeze to understand and read. Smart to Finish offers website analytic tracking support that will help give you a leg up on your competition.
by Amber Miller | Oct 2, 2014 | Blog, Blogging, Marketing, SEO
We have been asked by several of our clients what the SEO best practices are that we use here at SmartToFinish as well as when we support them with their WordPress page setup. You asked and we have answered!
Here are on page SEO best practices for you to follow if you want your website to get better rankings in the search engines.
1. Keyword in post title
The title is perhaps the most important SEO element on a page. It has to be unique, and it should contain your main keyword for that particular page or post.
2. Subheadings for easy reading, with keywords in subheadings
Viewers will be scanning an article for words and phrases that jump out at them. The easy way to Get important point across to readers is to use subheadings, bullet points and lists. Subheadings are “mini titles” that are used in the body of the content to introduce a new concept or idea. Use keywords in subheadings. The best subheading to use are “<h2>” and “<h3>”. For some reason Google and the other search engines think that any text inside a code tag, like “<h2>” is more important than the rest of the words on the page. The same holds true for bolds, italics and links.
3. Use images and insert a keyword in the alt text area of the image.
Images are very good for SEO, but few people know how to insert them correctly. In order to comply with the on page SEO best practices, you need to always add an “alt” tag to your images. Write a description that makes sense and use the keyword in it. Make sure the image is also related to what you put in the alt tag because there are chances to rank in Google Images for that particular keyword.
4. Use an SEO plugin like WPSEO by Yoast.
These plugins allow you to optimize the Google search entry, which makes it more enticing for people to visit your website. Use a single keyword / keyword phrase for each post. That keyword needs to be in:
- the title
- keyword area
- meta description
of the SEO plugin editor. The plugin will indicate the level of on page optimization of your post, so you will know if you need to further tweak those elements in order to be in line with the most important on page SEO best practices.
5. Keywords used in the content on the page
You would think this is a given …. but it’s not. Putting a keyword in the post title and the description of the page is not enough to make that page relevant. You also need to use it in the page content. Try to include semantically related words in the context, as that increases the relevancy of the page for your particular keyword. As a general rule, it’s good to include your main keyword once in the first sentence of the content and in the last sentence. If you have a lot of content, you may consider adding it once or twice more. If you have too many instances of the keyword, you risk an over-optimization penalty from Google.
6. Link to different pages or posts on the same website and link to outside websites with a higher page rank.
Internal linking is very important if you want to improve your rankings. It’s good to make references to older posts and link to them naturally.
In order to improve the internal architecture of your website, you may consider adding a related posts plugin. There are a few good ones out there. Choose one and have three to five related posts displayed under each article. It improves the navigation for both people and search engines spiders.
Linking out should also be part of your on page SEO strategy. Unlike inbound links, outbound ones can be controlled by you. Take advantage of this and always try to link to websites with good authority and with higher page rank. Be careful, it’s best that all resources you link to are related to your niche and to the topic of your post. The best thing about such links is that some websites have the trackback function enabled, so it’s possible you get a good link back from them automatically.
When you are consistent and persistent with these SEO best practices, you will see a rise in your website traffic and your page rank.
If you would like us to support you with your SEO best practices, please schedule a call with us to find out more!
Recent Comments