Content Marketing Is The New SEO

If you’ve run a business at any point in the last ten years and browsed around online a bit, then odds are you came across the mention of “SEO.” SEO, or search engine optimization, is basically a strategy to help attract more traffic to your website by increasing your website’s ranking on search engines such as Google. It’s still a strategy used today, although it has recently become overshadowed by strategies such as content marketing and social media. Want to know why? SEO was a strategy that was easy to take advantage of. Tricking Google into ranking a poorly put together website high on their search results page wasn’t exactly rocket science. However, new algorithms not only make this very hard to do – but they’ll punish you for trying to take advantage of old SEO loopholes, instead rewarding websites that put effort into the creation of content. This means that some creativity needs to go into your SEO.

While all this talk about algorithms may make it seem like you can just automate everything, this is simply not true. The success of your website depends more on what I like to call “human being optimization” more than it ever has. Optimizing your website for humans before you optimize it for the search engines. Think of it as working with search engines instead of simply trying to trick them. You provide them with good content and a great website so that their search results page provides users with high quality search results, and they provide you with more visitors to read your content. It’s a mutualistic relationship.

Why Content Marketing Is Integral to Inbound Marketing

To answer this question, I should probably explain exactly what inbound marketing is. So, a long, long time ago – before the existence of the “Internet” – businesses relied on outbound marketing to attract customers. Outbound marketing is a nice term for basically shoving information into the faces of unsuspecting consumers. Examples would be TV commercials, radio ads, print ads, flyers and – the absolute worst offender of them all – phone calls. There was nothing quite like having dinner interrupted by someone attempting to sell you insurance. When it comes down to it, outbound marketing is the equivalent of being informed about a product or service without having asked to be informed about it.

This is where inbound marketing differs. Inbound marketing allows the consumer to do the research by him or herself. The process goes like this: you put your company out there and expose your brand and offerings so that it’s easy for consumers to find you. Once they do find you, you provide them with information about your company and your products or services that they can educate themselves on their own time. You supply them with the information they need to make an informed purchasing decision on their own. You are not informing them about your products or services, they are informing themselves. This has proven to be an incredibly effective way to market to consumers since it takes away the pressure levied against them to buy right away. Instead, you’re nurturing them before, throughout and after the sales process, which leads to more long-term customers – exactly what you want.

Now you’re probably wondering, “what does content marketing have to do with all of this?” Because your prospects are more informed, it’s easier for your sales team to have a meaningful conversation with them. You are basically setting up more than half of the sale. Your content helps to attract readers, educate them, and exchange some information or a special offer for their personal information (such as name and email address). This means that your sales team doesn’t have to waste resources on pitching a product to someone who not only knows nothing about your solution or product – but has no interest in it either. Instead, your sales team will be dealing with educated prospects. All because of your content! This also brings us back to “human being optimization”. The quality of your content has everything to do with the person reading it. Content is no longer just about the keywords you use being tracked by search engine algorithms. What is more important is what you are writing and whom you are writing for.

The Benefits of Content Marketing

So let’s break down how your content will actually get your leads to the point where your sales team is ready to convert them into customers. The following are some of the benefits that your content will provide that will assist in obtaining high quality leads for your sales team:

• Increase Brand Awareness – Obviously you want as many people to know about your company as possible. The more often you release content on your website, the more exposure you’ll be providing for your company. If someone reads a piece that they enjoy, they’ll probably come back to read more, thereby becoming more familiar with your brand. There’s also a chance that they will share that content with friends and family. Their friends and family could turn around and share the content with their social circles – and so on. Not to mention that the more quality content you release, the higher your web ranking will be, exposing you to more potential web traffic.

• Increase Brand Trust and Loyalty – There are some businesses out there that release a tremendous amount of content in an attempt to draw in more traffic. But if you are writing crappy content, then who is going to read it? Readers will be able to tell if your content is bad by the opening paragraph – and there’s no way they are going to waste their time finishing it. And they’re definitely not going to come back to your website. Your content has to be good. In order to be good, it has to provide value to your readers. By giving them something they want or need, you’ll help to build both trust and loyalty over time.

• Establish Yourself as a Leading Authority – Another reason that you should focus on the quality of your content is the fact that you’ll eventually establish a reputation for knowing what you’re talking about. Not only does this help build trust and loyalty in your brand, it also helps foster a reputation as being an authority within your industry. You know you’re putting out some good stuff if other websites begin linking your content to their website. Those links are going to help tell search engines like Google that your content is good, which will boost your website in search results.

• Increase Social Engagement – By putting up a blog on your website, you’ll allow readers to comment on your content. Even if someone disagrees with your content, it’s a great way to get people talking.

• Increase Lead Captures – Good content will eventually convince readers to fill out your conversion forms, thereby capturing them as leads. This isn’t happening if they don’t trust you or your content is just bad. And obviously, the more leads you are capturing, the more potential customers you’re getting.

Why Good Content Is Important

So I’ve kind of gone over this already in some respect. Bad content is going to drive away potential customers since nobody wants to ready crappy content. But what if you’re trying to take advantage of SEO by just stuffing your content with keywords in order to draw more web traffic? Well, that’s where Google’s (as well as other search engines) updated algorithms come into play.

Google’s new algorithm, which is called Hummingbird, is focused on finding websites that provide good content and rewarding them with higher search rankings. Why does Google care? It’s competing with other search engines, which means that it wants to provide only the highest quality websites on their search pages. If you search for something like “new movie reviews” and all the websites that are listed on its first page are terrible, there’s a chance you’ll try out another search engine.

So how does it decide what websites are worthy of a high search engine ranking? Basically, it’s implemented a few different features to spot good content and to filter out bad content. First of all is Google Authorship, which allows content to be recognized by a single author. This makes it easier for Hummingbird to sort through content that you’ve written. Additionally, it judges the quality of content by measuring social activity. Social media has become incredibly important in this day and age. If a piece of your content is shared or liked on social platforms such as Facebook or Twitter, then the algorithm will pick up on that.

Single word SEO keywords are no longer as effective anymore either. Instead, it picks up on phrases such as “how to.” Long-tail keywords, which are phrases that contain more than just 3 or 4 words, are expected to become much more valuable. An example of a long-tail keyword vs. a regular keyword would be “learn how to speak German like a pro” instead of “learn German.” The algorithm has become much smarter and will weed out keyword stuffing for the sake of SEO, rewarding content that uses relevant long-tail keywords instead.

The Elements of Good Content

Okay, so I’ve been driving home the point of how important “human being optimization” is in terms of content. Now you’re probably thinking, “give me some pointers already!” So here you go, a few tips for creating high quality content:

• Create eye-catching titles – Guess what? The very first thing a visitor is going to read is the title of the content. If it’s boring, they’re not going to bother with it. If it was shared on social media, nobody is going to click it. The title needs to not only provide information about what the content is, but also why the visitor should read it. Simplicity is key here too – a run-on sentence as a title will not work. Readers will forget what the title is trying to say by the time they finish reading it! Consider using numbers, something along the lines of “5 Elements of Amazing Website Content”.

• Break up your text – What’s the first thing you do when you stumble onto a website with a giant wall of text that you have to scroll down? If you’re like me, you’ll click on that back button like your life depends on it. Break up your text using headers, bullets and numbers to prevent your readers’ eyes from bleeding.

• Use visuals – Visual content is considered the most effective type of content – this includes photographs, videos, graphs and charts to name a few examples. They just make it easier for visitors to consume information instead of sitting there reading. Remember, people who use the Internet have short attention spans. Wait a second, where was I? Oh right…

• Create effective calls-to-action – At the end of every piece of content you produce should be a call-to-action. A call-to-action incites the reader to do what you want them to do, whether it’s to schedule an appointment with your company or fill out a form. The call-to-action should be no longer than a sentence and should use effective language that incites action, such as “download now”, “visit us”, “contact us”, and more. Words such as “now” and “today” also help to create a sense of urgency that can drive them to action.

• Provide incentives – To encourage readers to click your call-to-action, provide an incentive. For example, you can provide them with a free downloadable eBook, whitepaper, or special offer in return for filling out your form. If your content is good, then they’ll be tempted to do what you want them to do in return for more in-depth content – especially if it’s free!

The Biggest Misconception of Content Marketing

The benefits of content marketing are real – and they certainly look good when you look at them all at once. But one of the biggest misconceptions that businesses have is that they assume that all they will have to do is implement a decent content making strategy into their marketing campaign and sit back and watch while their web traffic increases exponentially, leading to more leads being captured than they know what to do with. What you have to keep in mind is that most content won’t go viral. In fact, it’s going to take time for your content strategy to show results.
Content marketing is a long-term strategy, which means you have to be patient and diligent. Even if your content is of incredible quality, it’s not going to suddenly jump from a dozen views to a thousand over night. Even if you’re doing everything right in terms of marketing your content over numerous channels, it won’t gain that type of readership. It’s going to take time for people to click your links and check out your content. And odds are they won’t fill out your form right away – the most you should realistically hope for is that they will return to read more content. Eventually, as trust and loyalty build, they’ll share your content and possibly sign up for one of your offers. But this is the foundation you want, and the success of your content marketing will only build on this foundation over time.

Using Other Marketing Strategies to Compliment Your Content Marketing

Just because content marketing has taken over as the go-to online marketing strategy does not mean that other strategies, such as SEO or social media, should be abandoned. In fact, SEO and social media are critical components to the success of your content marketing strategy. By optimizing your content using carefully researched and relevant keywords, you can further bolster your website’s web ranking. And because your content needs exposure in order to be successful, social media is a necessity. Not only can you post content or links to your social media channels, you can also add social media buttons to the content itself. This will help increase the chance of your content being shared, thereby increasing its exposure.
So there you have it, content marketing has become a vital part of any online marketing strategy. While SEO is still important, search engines have made it clear that they are focusing on the quality of the content provided. This means that optimizing your website for humans before search engines has become more important than ever. If you’re ignoring content marketing as part of your strategy online, its only a matter of time until Google sends your website back to the stone ages or keeps it there.

You can find origin of this stuff here - https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/20141119214951-128175282-content-marketing-is-the-new-seo

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Some Basic SEO Interview Questions & Answers

Here I am trying to help you by some basic SEO related questions and their answers which will help you in search engine technology.

What is SEO?SEO is search engine optimization or optimizer is a collection of techniques applied to optimize our site so that it ranks well in SERPs (Search engine result pages) like Google, Yahoo, Bing and another major search engines.

Who Do SEO?
They are the Webmaster, SEO Engineer and Website optimizer etc.

What tools do you use for doing SEO?
I use Google webmaster tools, Google Analytics, Open site explorer, Alexa, Website grader etc. But now a days there are so many paid tools are available in market like Seo Moz, spydermate, bulkdachecker etc.

What is Google Sandbox?
Google Sandbox is an imaginary area where new and less authoritative sites are kept for a specified time period until they establish themselves of being displayed on the search results. It happens by building too many links within a short period of time.

What is the difference between On Page SEO and Off Page SEO?
On Page Optimization means optimizing your website and making changes on title, meta tags, site structure, site content, solving canonicalization problem, managingrobots.txt etc.
Off Page Optimization means optimizing your web presence which involves backlink building and social media promotion.

What are the limitations of title and description tags?
Title tag can be between 66-70 characters and Meta description tag can be between 160-170 characters.

How will you increase the Pagerank of a page?
By building more backlinks from authority sites and high page rank webpages.

What do you mean by anchor text?
Click-able text written on an hyperlink is known as Anchor Text.

How will you treat Web standards while optimizing a website?
Google loves web standards hence I will apply the web standards provided by W3C while optimizing a web site.

If the meta robots tag has a value of “no index, no follow” what does it mean? Does Google uses keyword tags?
It means the search engine crawlers would not index the contents and would not follow the links present on the page.
No, Google does not make use of keyword tags.

What is 301 redirect?
It is a method of redirecting user from the old page url to the new page url. 301 redirect is a permanent redirect and is helpful in passing the link juice from the old url to the new url.

What do you understand by Cloaking?
Cloaking involves using deceptive techniques which presents the user with a different version of the webpage than that presented to the search engines.

What methods would you apply for decreasing the loading time of a website?
I would use external style sheets, less images (unless necessary), optimize the images and decrease the file sizes of the image without reducing the quality of the image, use CSS sprites to reduce HTTP requests etc.

What are the Social Media channels you have used for marketing?
I have used blogs like blogger, word press, tumblr etc, social bookmarking sites like Digg, Jumptags, Delicious etc., social networking sites like Facebook, LinkedIn etc., Video Sharing sites like YouTube, Vimeo etc.

What would you suggest to the client who has a website made on Flash?  How would you do Seo for that site?
Search engines find it harder to parse the contents presented using Flash. I would suggest the client to use an alternative to flash like HTML 5.

What do you understand by Frames in HTML?
A frame is a HTML technique which divides the content of a page onto several parts. Search engines see Frames as completely different pages and as such Frames have a negative impact on Seo. We should avoid the usage of Frames and use basic HTML instead.

Which is the most important area to include your keywords?
Page title and Body text are the most important areas where we can include keywords for the SEO purpose.

What are webmaster tools?
Webmaster tools is a free service by Google from where we can get free Indexing data, backlinks information, crawl errors, search queries, CTR, website malware errors and submit the XML sitemap.

A customer can give you an access to only one tool, which one will you choose, Webmasters or Analytics?
Of Course Webmaster tools, because these are almost the essential tools for the search engine optimization, we can have some analytics data in the webmasters as well. But now due to the inclusion of webmaster data in Analytics, we would like to have access to Analytics.

What is the main purpose of search engine spiders?
Index sites, because even though spiders visit sites, their main function is not only to visit them but to index their contents spiders do not monitor sites for unethical activities.

What is the best way to maximize the frequency of crawling of your website by search engines?
Frequently adding new, original and quality content on the website.

When do you apply for re inclusion in a search engine’s index?
If our website is banned by the search engines for black hat practices and if we have corrected our wrong doings we apply for reinclusion.

What aspects of a hyperlink are important for SEO?
The place from which the link originates, The anchor text, especially the keywords in it is very important. The place to which the link leads and for back links the reputation of the web site from which the link originates is also crucial, because if you link to link farms, this might get you banned from search engines.

What is robots.txt?
Robots.txt is a text file used to give instructions to the search engine crawlers about the caching and indexing of a webpage, domain, directory or a file of a website.

What is Keyword Difficulty?
Keyword difficulty identifies how difficult it would be to rank well for a particular keyword. and the value is higher for more popular words because it will be more difficult to compete with 1,000s of other sites for a popular word than with 10s of others for the less popular ones

Which of the options below is the best way to select the keywords to optimize for?
Use a tool to determine the theme of your web site, because it is the whole theme of a website that is more important than separate keywords. Selecting competitors keywords which have the highest density  is not recommendable because if your competitor has wrongly selected the keywords, or even if the keywords are right for them, this does not mean that they are right for you, so actually you get on the wrong trace from the very beginning.

Which is better Robots.txt or Meta Robots Tag?
Meta Robots tag is much better as it helps in forcing the search engine crawlers not to index and display the hidden pages in your server.

What is a landing page?
A landing page is a page in the website which is designed to attract the visitors to contact/subscribe/buy a service or the product by reading few lines of important information about that particular service or the product on that page.

If you have a site that is targeted at a particular country only, which of the following are recommendable to do in order to rank well in country specific search results?
Use the appropriate language attribute in the HTML code of the page, The web site should be hosted in the same country, so that its IP falls in the range of IPs that are specific for this country. Have the web site written in the language of the country. Submit the site to local search engines, search engines use their own algorithms to determine the language of a a particular sites, even there are SEO experts who say that no efforts on your side are necessary for ranking well in country specific search results.

Why are metatags important?
Because search engines still use them for estimating search relevancy. although search engines might not rely on metatags to generate search results, metatags are used (to a differing extend) by most of the search engines Because it is a professional approach to Web design to have complete and accurate metatags,  since metatags are part of the html code of a page, they must also be done professionally, as the rest of the code.

Do you know who Danny Sullivan is?
He is a Journalist who covers the field of web search, considered as search engine guru and editor at searchengineland.com

Who is Matt Cutts?
He is the head of web spam team at Google.

From SEO point of view, which is better – one big site or several smaller site?
If you have enough content in the same niche it is better to have it in one big site because first, this way the site is easier to maintain and the great number of pages is good for ranking high in search results. Many small sites allow focusing on specific niches, therefore competing for different keywords.

How do you know how much to pay for a text link from another site to yours?
The price of a text link from another site to yours depends on many factors, The price is often different because it depends on the current rating of the site that will back link to us. The most important of which is the Web Site the back link originates from, because there can’t be universal prices for text links. when you don’t know the real price of a link, negotiating to drop the price is pointless and generally, reputable sites are not going to negotiate the price of their links.

Do you use separate SEO strategies for Google,Yahoo and Bing?
Yes I use separate strategies for Google,Yahoo and other search engines.Morebacklinks are required for Google. It pays more attention to backlinks and site authority while Yahoo and Bing pays more attention to title and Meta tags. Hence, a site takes time to rank on Google as compared to Yahoo and Bing.

Which technique is unethical and can be a reason for banning?
Creating a doorway page instead a home page is considered as unethical because doorway pages are aimed at misleading search engines.

Explain some SEO practices?
Building back links. Rewriting the titles to include the target keywords, Rewriting dynamic URLs into static.

For which of the following file types a SEO expert needs to provide an alternative textual description?
(swf. – gif.) Since .html, .pdf and .doc are text file formats and spiders can read their contents directly, it is pointless to provide an alternative textual description. On the contrary, .swf and image file types, like .gif and .jpg, need alternative textual descriptions because spiders cannot read their contents directly.

What is Keyword proximity?
It measures the distance between two keywords in the text. Keyword proximity is used by some search engines to measure relevancy of a given page to the search request. The idea is that the closer two keywords to each other are, the more relevant the page , keyword density measures how many times (not how far) a given keyword appears on a page.

If you were a SEO for a technology web site, what would you do to build backlinks for it?
Four practices are a quite legal and recommendable way of building backlinks are:-
 Post in technology blogs.
 Submit articles to technology engines.
 Exchange links with other reputable technology web sites.
 Provide free syndicated content to partner-websites.

Explain onsite search box, and how it helps to attract traffic?
An onsite search box allows searching for pages that are inaccessible to unregistered users (i.e. search engine spiders). When you have an onsite search box, your visitors will get more search results than in comparison to using Google and the other search engines. If you have an onsite search box and see what users are searching for, you will be able to notice new keywords that are of interest to your audience.
Using the “site:” operator in search engines makes onsite search boxes obsolete is false because generally search engines do not index every single page of a site, even if these pages are not disallowed in the robots.txt or are password-protected. A good onsite search box is really valuable but it is a fact that occasionally onsite search boxes use so imprecise algorithms that using the “site:” operator in Google gives much more reliable results.

What are the advantages of submitting sites to search directories?
By submitting to a search directory, you get a back link to your web site. When your site is listed in search directories, this increases the chances that search engines will index it sooner, compared to when it is not listed. Submitting to search directories is a good Web marketing initiative. Because that increases the chances of having your web site index and when your site is listed in a search directory, you list its URL as well, so you actually get a valuable link
Submitting to search directories neither gets higher ranking nor gets your web site certified.

What are the criteria for the uniqueness of a page (unique as opposed to duplicate content)?
Code similarity, Text similarity, Page names. Titles, headings, page titles and metatags.

What does the abbreviation PPC stand for?
Pay per click, Pay per Click measures how much online advertisers must pay each time their advertisement is clicked on.

What is LSI?
LSI stands for Latent Semantic Indexing. It is a data retrieval technique which finds connection between words and the use of synonyms while fetching data from the index.

Will you use an ordinary html sitemap with Google?
Google has a special format for sitemaps rather than ordinary html format. So it is good to use special XML format that Google uses for sitemaps.

What is Page Rank?
This is the Google technology for measuring popularity among users. Yahoo has a similar technology, called Web Rank, and Alexa Rank is the Alexa technology. The way Google measures how popular a given page is based on the number and quality of sites that link to it.

You have just launched a new web site. Unfortunately, nobody visits it, even search engines’ spiders don’t notice it. What can you do for its SEO success?
Submit the URL of the web site to search engines and search directories.

If you own a web site and have a weekly newsletter that features the same content as the site, how can you include Google AdSense in your newsletter when you mail it to your subscribers?
We can’t include AdSense in our newsletter, because we cannot include Google ads in offsite content, as an e-mail newsletter.

Difference between exit rate and bounce rate?
Bounce rate is the percentage of people who leaves a particular website just after visiting a single page on this and exit rate refers to the percentage of people who leaves from a particular page.

Can search engines see password protected pages?
In most of the cases Search engines are not different from regular users. Search engines cannot go anywhere that a regular user cannot go. If we have a password protected area on our website that cannot be accessed without a login and password then the search engines also cannot see it.

For seo which is better text links or graphical links?
Text links are better for SEO. Text links can contain the anchor text that our web page wishes to rank well for and that is an important factor in many search engines, especially Google. Image links are still valuable but do have less benefits compared to text links.

What is Cross Linking?
Cross Linking- a strategy that can come in handy to get high search engine rankings, by leveraging multiple domains owned by you. Search engines value these links, as they are from relevant sites, with related content- and you stand a chance of getting a better rank

What is Google EMD updates?
The EMD Update – for “Exact Match Domain” – is a filter Google launched in September 2012 to prevent poor quality sites from ranking well simply because they had words that match search terms in their domain names. When a fresh EMD Update happens, sites that have improved their content may regain good rankings. New sites with poor content – or those previously missed by EMD – may get caught. In addition, “false positives” may get released

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What is the most important for On Page SEO ?

We will discuss about On Page SEO . But at first we need to know what is On-page optimization ??

The tasks which we have to do into a website to optimize are called On-page optimization. At the time of designing a website we need to finish some search engine related tasks to help search engine to find out website, and this term is known as On-page optimization. I think I have given a clear definition about On-page optimization.But If you think you haven't understood clearly , I recommend you to read out some blog sites to learn more .Then you will get a clear idea about On Page Optimization.It will be clearer when I will discuss it with some examples.

On-page optimization plays a significant role in Search Engine Optimization. As a result Iif you done any mistake in On-page optimization then the Search Engine will be unable to find out your website . So you need to utilize this term properly .Here are issues that are related to the On-page Optimization .

1) Keyword Research

2) Meta Tag and Meta Description

3) Content

4) XML Site Map

5) Google Site Map

There are more topics about On Page SEO but the uppers are more important for on page optimization . If you can gather knowledge about these mentioned topics you need not learn on page optimization

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