Search Engine Optimization

A lot of SEOs and internet marketers run article marketing campaigns in order to accumulate backlinks and leave a trail of breadcrumbs back to their site. But few website owners realize that guest posting on relevant blogs is another great way to promote their website and improve its SEO.

Although article marketing remains a common practice, it’s not nearly as effective as it once was. For one, everybody and their mother is an article marketer these days, so the search engines don’t value the backlinks on article directories as much as they used to. Furthermore, the quality of the writing on article directories has gone south over the years.

If you are looking for a legitimate way to build links that doesn’t require you to spend money, email people to request links, or engage in black hat SEO, consider guest posting. Guest posting consists of writing and submitting posts to relevant blogs. Guest posts typically contain a short bio about you that includes a link back to your website with anchor text of your choice.

Still not sold on the idea of guest posting? Consider the following 5 benefits.

1. More Traffic

Guest posting drives more traffic to your website than your typical article directory. Why? You’re tapping into the subscriber base of the blog where you submit your post. When you publish an article on an article directory, most of the traffic you get comes from the search engines, but on a blog, you get both search engine traffic and visits from regular readers of that blog.

2. Promotion

When you submit an article to an article directory, it doesn’t receive much exposure, but when you submit a guest post, it is promoted by the blogger as well as his/her loyal readers. Therefore, your article will be seen and read by far more people in the long run. It may even go viral on social media networks like Twitter if you get lucky.

3. Strengthens Your Online Reputation

The barrier to entry is practically non-existent for article directories, so they commonly feature poorly written content. On the other hand, bloggers usually have higher standards, so you won’t be able to submit any old article to an influential blog. You’ll either have to spend time writing a high quality article or hire a copywriter to do it for you. But ultimately, your online reputation and brand will grow stronger since your website will be associated with the quality and authority of the content on the blog where you submit your post.

4. Networking Opportunities

Another major perk of guest posting is that it allows you to network with influential people in your niche. If you submit an excellent guest post to an influential blog, the blog owner will be highly appreciative and that could possibly lead to other opportunities. Also, you open yourself up to new audiences when you guest post, which could lead you to meeting future business partners or collaborators. The opportunities are endless!

5. Front Page Exposure

When you submit a guest post, your article will be featured on the home page for anywhere from a few hours to a few weeks, depending on how often the blog is updated. As a result, your article will receive far more exposure and traffic. Conversely, it’s extremely difficult to get an article published on the home page of an article directory because of the sheer quantity of articles they publish.

Conclusion

Guest posting is a fantastic way to build links back to a content-rich site. Some bloggers rely on this promotional tactic alone to rank for competitive keywords in their niche. Even if you don’t consider yourself a blogger, you can leverage the power of guest posting in order to drive more traffic to your website and boost its authority in the eyes of search engines.

One of the most important components of any SEO campaign is link-building.  While link-building strategies like submitting your website’s link to directories and trading links with other webmasters still have their place, these tactics aren’t nearly as effective as they used to be.  If you want to attract high quality links from authority websites, try appealing to bloggers and getting links organically with these 5 tips.

1. Use social media

If you want to spread your content and socialize with influential bloggers, now’s the time to hop on the social media bandwagon.  Sharing links via social media is a great way to drive traffic to your site, but don’t treat it solely as a promotional channel, either.  Take some time to casually chat with bloggers and get to know them on a personal level so that they’ll be more likely to share your content with their followers and link to it on their websites.

2. Be helpful

Do you want to get on a particular blogger’s radar?  Then follow the blogger on Twitter or another social media channel and offer them help when they need it.  For example, if a blogger writes an update that says something like, “Agggh, I need a new designer!” take some time to handpick a few rock star designers and recommend them to the blogger.  The blogger will appreciate your generosity and possibly do something nice for you in return, such as link to your blog.

3. Be direct

Don’t be afraid to contact bloggers and ask them to link to your content.   They don’t bite (well, most of them don’t, anyway). The worst thing that could happen is that they’ll say no.  But don’t approach them with an attitude of entitlement.  When you contact them, explain why you think your content would benefit their readers.  Bloggers are always on the hunt for new, useful content for their audience, so if you can provide them with that, they’ll be grateful.

4. Do interviews

Doing interviews with influential bloggers in your niche is a great way to create quality content for your own website while getting the attention of key players.  Those bloggers might link to the interview itself, and even if they don’t, you’ll at least get your name in front of them so that they’re aware of you and are more likely to link to your stuff in the future.

5. Make lists of useful blogs in your niche

Not nearly as many people link out to other blogs as they used to, so linking to useful blogs in your niche is a great way to get some attention and traffic from bloggers.  For example, if you sell shoes online, you can create a top 10 list of the most influential blogs about shoes to get the attention of shoe bloggers.  The bloggers you mentioned will probably link back to your post because it sheds a positive light on their work.  So, not only will you be able to generate a few links with the post itself, you’ll also be able to get on more bloggers’ radars.

And last but not least, focus on creating useful, high quality content.  After all, you won’t attract many links from bloggers if your content isn’t worth linking to!

Search engine optimization (SEO) provides a fantastic return on investment for ecommerce sites.  It is a proven way to attract more targeted traffic to your website.  Here are 10 tips for improving your ecommerce website’s SEO.

1. Make sure that URLs consist of target keywords, not numbers or other meaningless ID’s.  This will make it easier for the search engine bots to navigate your product pages.
2. Your website’s greatest source of page rank is your home page, so your product pages should only be two to three clicks away from your home page.  You can do this by using rollovers or increasing the number of products that you display per page.
3. Create unique title tags for each page of your website, and don’t repeat the same keywords over and over to avoid diminishing their value.
4. Create unique keyword and description meta tags for your website to avoid the duplicate content penalty.  Furthermore, don’t add keywords to the meta tags for a particular page if they aren’t relevant to the content on that page.
5. Optimize product pages for singular keywords because they are far more popular with searchers than plural keywords.  Think about it: most people want to buy one product, not products in bulk, so they search for singular keywords.
6. Keep all of the pages on your website fresh and up-to-date.  One of the best ways to keep your website fresh is by adding user-generated content, such as product reviews, to each page of your website.  You should also consider adding a blog to your site if you haven’t already and then categorize the posts appropriately so that the feeds show up on product category pages, keeping them fresh and up-to-date.  In addition, regularly review and tweak the copy on product pages to keep things new and interesting for your website visitors and hint to search engine bots that your site is always being updated.  Taking these steps will ultimately help to boost your site’s ranking.
7. Use plenty of internal links within the textual content of your site.  Use relevant, keyword-rich anchor text to tell the search engines what the pages are about.
8. Make sure that the product descriptions on your site are unique.  Although it might be tempting to copy and paste the manufacturer’s descriptions, chances are that your competitors are doing the same thing.  You can make your website look unique to search engines and human visitors by writing original product descriptions.
9. Allow your customers to tag products on your website.  Tagging is a common social media strategy that will help you rank for keywords that you probably wouldn’t have imagined ranking for, such as slang words.
10. Optimize all of the images on your ecommerce website by ensuring that each contains unique alt text attributes.  You can add the product and brand names to the alt text in order to get more traffic from Google image search.

Most of you probably know about the algorithmic change that Google made on May 1^st of this year.  To ensure that higher quality pages would surface when people search for long-tail queries, Google made a few tweaks.  As a result, many sites have found that the rankings of their pages that target long-tail keywords have dropped significantly.  Long-tail keywords are keyword phrases that fewer people search for individually but that provide a significant amount of traffic over time.

Websites that were hit the hardest by Google’s Mayday change are large sites that have pages deep in their archives that don’t attract many inbound links.  Ecommerce websites, in particular, have product pages that don’t get many links or feature any unique content.  Essentially, pages that are several clicks away from the home page and that do not contain much useful, unique content are the most vulnerable.

Google’s goal in making this algorithmic change was to ensure that higher quality content would show up when people search for long-tail queries.  If you want to determine whether or not your website was affected, take a look at your analytics reports from the end of April through around May 3^rd or 4^th.  Was there a drop in traffic levels or a drop in the number of pages that were getting traffic?  If you noticed the latter, it’s probable that your site was affected.  You can also check your site’s crawl stats to determine if the update did some damage.

What to Do

If you’ve been affected by the Mayday update, there are several changes you can make to regain your site’s rankings and traffic levels.  First of all, you need to ensure that every page of your site contains a sufficient amount of quality, original content.  Also, make sure to do plenty of internal linking with relevant anchor text so your site’s content looks more important in Google’s eyes.  In addition, build quality inbound links to pages of your site that target long-tail terms, so you can boost their authority.

To find out which pages of your site were affected by the Mayday update, take a look at your analytics reports to determine which set of queries has been getting less traffic and then find out which pages are still ranking highly.  What makes the latter pages different?  Think about what you can do to make the pages that are getting less traffic more valuable.  When you work to improve these web pages by sprucing up their content and boosting their relevancy, you’ll find that your website visitors are also more engaged with your content and more likely to convert to customers.

Google’s Official Take on the Mayday Update

Matt Cutts of Google posted a YouTube video about the Mayday update here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJ6CtBmaIQM.  The video explains very clearly what the update is for and what website owners can do to recoup their losses.  Matt recommends adding great content, boosting your website’s authority, and making sure that your content for each particular query is highly useful and relevant to website visitors.  Basically, as long as you continue to focus on providing high quality content and following SEO best practices, you’re on the right track.