Apparently, on April 24, 2012 Google activated new ranking algorithm changes to take care of websites and blogs that indulge in:

• Excessive link building with no regard for quality
• Deceptive doorway pages
• Lots of keyword stuffing
• Publishing lots of meaningless content just to get traffic from search engines 

Which, basically, means all websites that don’t comply with Google’s SEO guidelines.

In terms of improving search quality, this is a good change. It is also good for businesses and entrepreneurs legitimately trying to get good rankings without the headache of competing with websites that try to game the system.

But, as happens with most “simple” changes like this, there has been some collateral damage. Although Google claims that the new update has affected just 3 percent of websites, there have been multiple declarations across the internet of it causing a bloodbath. People are even going to the extent of laying off their employees and considerably scaling down their businesses. 

Are you one of those negatively affected by the Google Penguin update? If you are, you can salvage the situation by taking corrective measures. If you’re not, you should also take preventive measures so that you do not get caught in the fray the next time something like this happens.

How do you do this? With effective content writing, of course.

What is effective content writing, and how does it help?

Effective content writing provides the true value. It is not done simply to improve your search engine rankings. Although there is nothing wrong in trying to improve your rankings, the problem comes up when you write and publish content for that purpose alone.

The days of cheap and low-cost SEO articles are rapidly going away — thankfully. With its successive updates, Google is trying to push forward content that really deserves its place in the ranking index. In turn, this means pushing down content that doesn’t carry much value: Content that just rambles on will not be ranked well no matter how brilliantly it has been “optimized.”

So how do you create effective content that Google and other search engines love? Here are a few things you can keep in mind while creating content for your website or blog:

• Use your keywords only when needed: Keywords are great, but don’t over-use them because this will make your content reek of spam. For instance, if I needlessly go on repeating “great content writer” everywhere on my website, not only will I fail to rank well for the phrase, I might even get penalized and removed from the rankings altogether. Use keywords but only when there is a relevant context. Don’t worry too much about keyword-optimizing your copy – just focus on quality and value.
• Make your content social: Create your content in such a manner that it gains some popularity on social media and social networking websites. This way you don’t have to depend solely on Google for all your traffic. Create compelling and meaningful headlines. Provide content that is bang on target. Develop an original style and focus on quality rather than quantity.
• Create a resource that is highly useful: An ability to write and publish content is a great privilege. There is so much you can teach and communicate to your audience. Make use of it. Whether you share your own information, or gather it from the internet, make sure you create content that addresses topics your audience is interested in and will have a use for. This will naturally make it irresistible for search engines, bloggers, and social media users, alike.
• Create content for other websites and blogs: Prepare an editorial calendar for writing articles and guest blog posts that can be published on websites and blogs other than your own. This helps you gain new exposure and earn quality backlinks – just make sure you only offer your content to trusted and reputable content publishers.
• Create engaging content for online forums and blog comment sections: Online forums are still alive and kicking, and so are blog comment communities. Great interactions go on at these places. There is a misconception that you interact on online forums and blogs just to get backlinks, and when you don’t get those link benefits, there is no use leaving comments there. Yes, sometimes you get some link juice, but even if you don’t, the added exposure you get — and the potential for greater traffic — is well worth the effort.
• Regularly publish a newsletter: Newsletter publishing still rules the roost, as evidenced by the many quality email marketing newsletter publishing services that have been cropping up. It is the best way of keeping in touch with your readers and subscribers, and once you have built yourself a mailing list of a few thousand subscribers, you can instantly broadcast your ideas and offers to these people without having to rely upon search engine traffic.
• Maximize your conversion rate: Re-examine your content and see how well it is working to convert your website visitors into customers. A higher conversion rate can compensate for low traffic periods, so look for ways to measure, analyze, and improve your content wherever necessary to make sure that those who do find your site (through search or through other means) are getting what they want from the experience. 

All the points mentioned above will not only help you improve your search engine rankings, they will also strengthen your overall online presence — both on your own blog or website and across the web.

Want more content marketing inspiration? Download our ultimate eBook with 100 content marketing examples.

Marketers have long been told by SEO consultants that long-tail search was ‘where it’s at’. What is your take on the quality of content vs. quantity of content—especially as it pertains to B2B and local business content marketers?

Both are important and can vary by the type of content considered.  An industrial distributor may have a massive catalog of SKUs with related content (pricing, specs, etc.) and should allow as many of those SKUs to be indexed for purchase-oriented searching. For professionals seeking knowledge, original/quality content such as research, in-depth reports, thoughtful analysis and so on will go a long way in achieving better ranking. 

In your opinion, what are the fundamental SEO initiatives B2B marketers should be undertaking?

• Do something cool: Make sure your site stands out from the competition in a good way.  For example, more professionals are looking for rich content online, so make sure your library of amazing video content is indexed using Rich Snippets.
• Include relevant words in your copy: Try to put yourself in the shoes of searchers. What would they query to find you? Your business name, location, products, etc., are important. It’s also helpful to use the same terms in your site that your users might type (e.g., you might offer “next-generation marketing tools” but most searchers might type “marketing automation software”), and to answer the questions they might have. It helps to know your customers.
• Be smart about your tags and site architecture: Create unique title tags and meta descriptions; include Rich Snippets markup from schema.org where appropriate. Have intuitive navigation and good internal links.
• Sign up for email forwarding in Webmaster Tools: Help us communicate with you, especially when we notice something awry with your site.
• Attract buzz: Natural links, +1s, likes, follows … In every business there’s something compelling, interesting, entertaining or surprising that you can offer or share with your audience. Provide a helpful service, educate people, be a thought leader and users will share and reshare your content.
• Stay fresh and relevant: Keep content up to date and consider options such as building a social media presence (if that’s where a potential audience exists) or creating an ideal mobile experience if your users are often on the go.
• Go mobile: Mobile searching and browsing in B2B is growing rapidly due to the adoption of high-end mobile devices.  Make sure you have a mobile-optimized site/content and that it is getting indexed accordingly.

We’ve seen Google search results start to show “latest posts” at the top of the list — but there’s some confusion about which posts will show up there.

So, to start, it sounds like you are referring to “Search Plus Your World” (see screenshot below), which as I’m sure you know, was Google’s latest update to the search results to make them more “social.”

1. Personal Results – Pictures/posts relevant to your search, which are your own OR have been shared with you via a circle.
2. Profiles in Search – People in your circles OR people we think you might be interested in following.
3. People and Pages – Any brand or people pages related to your search query that we think you might be interested in based on your search query. It sounds like this is the focus of the question and we’ve been seeing a lot of this lately with advertisers concerned that they see their competitors in this space and want to know how they can show. You have to meet a certain, undisclosed, threshold number of +1s in order to be eligible to show in this spot.

For Google+ posts, is it just publicly shared posts or will it show up for those in my circles?  And does this also affect Brand pages?

Both. It is any post shared publicly OR shared with you specifically by someone in your circle.  Yes, posts by Brand pages can also be included in this space.

How important is social for B2B and local?

I’d say it’s becoming more and more important. Two themes stand out with Local/B2B and social:

• Users trust recommendations – Personal recommendations are trusted more than any other source–90 percent trust these. Also, 77 percent of brand content is created by consumers – if people feel connected to a brand, they share that. So people want recommendations and we know they’re looking online. We also know now that this certainly includes B2B and Local. (Quick Plug: Google+ and “Search Plus Your World” are designed to share those recommendations with your potential customer at the right time.)  

• Market via conversation - A Public Storage or an Orkin will probably never have tons of Google+ or Twitter followers but those who are looking for that service and click through to their Facebook page or Google+ page can get an idea for the company’s identity and how it does business. Do they have good ratings? How are they engaging their customers? How are they handling complaints? Are most posts positive or negative?

What are some of the challenges you see marketers tackling in “closing the loop” between their Google-based marketing and their ROI from customer sales?

We are seeing progress.  This is probably the first thing we push with customers –  tracking.  We don’t want them to invest with us unless they have a sense of what traffic is worth to them.  Once they’ve built out a value model, any digital advertising can be compared to the expectations and then a customer can double down or pull back accordingly.  I’d say customers are getting better in this area, but it’s still the early days. Most of the issues are on the sales fulfillment process at a customer.  Once a digital lead is generated, how are they tracking it internally, how are sales people compensated, how do they round robin a lead, how do they pre-qualify a lead, etc. 

The pace of innovation in digital marketing vehicles — from Google alone, but then multiplied by all the other growing channels and services out there — is truly dizzying. How do you suggest that regular marketers keep up?

Keep it simple and focus on the big impact areas first.  Define your marketing or customer acquisition model for online or offline and then test certain platforms and determine how they work.  But try to compare all platforms on an apples-to-apples comparison as much as possible.  Then slowly build out your marketing mix focusing on the biggest impact components.  I have many customers asking me all about social, or advertising on Pinterest or Pandora, but they still don’t have a basic search engine marketing campaign built out or they don’t have the basic tracking in place.  Start with the basics, master the components that can have the biggest impact, define your value model, then test new areas once you have the fundamentals in place. 

What’s your favorite perk working at Google?

The people.  I think we hire the best people in the world and it’s a privilege working alongside smart, dedicated, disciplined and fun people, who always try to do the right thing.  

ABOUT SAM SEBASTIAN: For six years, Sam has been responsible for leading Google’s Local and Government Markets sales and operations organizations in North America. Sebastian’s Local Markets team helps locally driven marketers – such as real estate, coupon, legal and home services firms – utilize Google’s ad platform to realize greater efficiencies and returns from local advertising. Sebastian’s Government, Politics & Non Profit team helps the federal government, non profits and advocacy organizations, political candidates and causes execute multiplatform digital engagement strategies. Sam is also a keynote speaker at Content Marketing World 2012.

This article originally appeared in the May 2012 issue of Chief Content Officer. Sign up to receive your free print subscription.

Try these strategies for assessing whether your content marketing efforts are reaching the right audiences.

Analyze your referral traffic sources

Most business sites receive traffic from a mix of referring sources, which might include social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter; social bookmarking sites like StumbleUpon, Digg, or Reddit; and links from websites on similar topics.

Social bookmarking sites often send the most traffic — in fact, StumbleUpon accounts for more than half of all U.S.-based social media traffic, according to a recent report. But, even when the numbers are high, you may not be reaching the audience you’re seeking.

Consider the common audience demographics of your referral traffic sources: If you run a business-to-business site, does traffic from individual-focused sites like StumbleUpon and Digg fit your mission, or should you focus your promotional efforts on business networking sites like LinkedIn?

Likewise, while Digg may send substantial traffic to a particular article, its user base is male-heavy and not particularly wealthy: A typical Digger brings in less than $50,000 a year, according to Ignite Social Media’s 2011 Social Media Analysis Report. While exposure to a large audience can often boost your site’s SEO rankings, relying on such sites for traffic isn’t an effective long-term strategy when you’re searching for qualified leads.

Focus instead on promoting your content to related industry blogs, and through your company’s existing social media channels: Though traffic rates may not always be as impressive, visitors from these types of referral sources are more likely to engage with your content and achieve the conversions you’re looking for, such as newsletter sign-ups and e-commerce purchases.

Look at your keyword search results

You’re not done studying your site analytics, yet. Next, take a look at the search terms that are driving traffic to your site.

If you sell sofa-beds, but are posting about — and getting search hits for — your dog rescue efforts, you’re probably not using your blog effectively as a marketing tool. Rescuing pets is certainly commendable, but the people visiting your site to read about how you saved Shadow aren’t likely to shell out for a sleeper sofa.

If many of your most popular website search terms are for terms that are only tangentially (or not at all) related to your core business, it’s time to start thinking more strategically about creating content that relates to your business goals. Start a secondary blog for the side project or hobby that’s bringing in keyword traffic, and focus your main site on content based around keywords that your target consumers are likely to be searching for.

Pay attention to user engagement measures

Are visitors bouncing away from your site within a few seconds, or do they tend to linger for a while, browse through your archives, and maybe even sign up for your newsletter? If your website visitors rarely view more than a single page at a time, it’s a sign that they’re either not your target audience, or that the content you’re producing isn’t compelling enough to entice them to stay. (For tips on creating content that pops, read Heather Rast’s recent post.)

Take a survey

You can learn a lot about your website visitors from your analytics metrics, but the best way to tell if you’re attracting the right prospects is to simply ask them. Use a free survey tool, such as SurveyMonkey or KwikSurveys, to create a list of questions to assess your users’ demographics, and their likelihood of using or buying your product. Keep in mind, however, that most visitors who fill out surveys are already engaged, so they may not represent your audience as a whole.

The bottom line? High traffic is nice to have, but if it’s not helping you reach your business goals, it’s just costing you bandwidth. Take the time to analyze your content strategy and marketing approach so that you can target the right online prospects every time.

Email marketing and landing pages are two of the most popular marketing tactics that demand original, customized content. So I’ve compiled a list of tips that will help your content efforts in these areas to get noticed and be read.

Tips for email marketing content

1. Personalize content to suit differing interests. Chances are the interactions you have with prospects are not all the same. For example, some prospects may already be fans and follow you on social media, while others may have never heard of your company before. So, the messages you send to each of these customer groups will likely communicate different information — based on your various customer relationships and the information that each will expect to hear from your business. Highly targeted messaging will not only catch their interest, but will also help to position you as a friendly company that’s paying attention. Incorporating segmentation strategies can also help target campaigns to individual buyer needs. For example, lists can be segmented by demographic information, past behavior or even personal interests.

Email marketing is wonderfully customizable, allowing you to target your various audiences with different messages. Take advantage of this — and avoid blasting the same content to all contacts — by personalizing the content you send.

2. Build a relationship. We strive to build trust and create meaningful conversations in everyday relationships. The same applies to email marketing. To build trust, provide your recipients with opt-in opportunities, permissions, delivery preferences and privacy. In addition, avoid spam trigger words such as “free,” “discount,” or “click.” These words are not only spam triggers for email providers, but also for the recipients who read them. Instead, use relevant subject lines and to-the-point messaging that exemplifies your value to the reader in an honest, straightforward way. In an attempt to facilitate conversation, don’t ignore post-click engagements and opportunities to improve conversions. Give your email a “voice,” so it reads like one end of a great conversation. Ask their opinions, and present content that takes these interactions into account. It’s best if the email comes from a real person with an authentic interest in the conversation.

3. Track and test. The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Start paying attention to your response rates and you’ll prevent some of the head-banging insanity that can result from bad email marketing content. One method is testing two versions of your email message to a small group of subscribers in order to determine the most effective message. This method is called “split testing.” Split testing allows you to adapt your content based on response rates in order to achieve optimal results. The most common factors to test are subject lines, greeting and body content and the call to action. However, it would also be extremely helpful to test the day of the week, the time of day, the sender or any factors that might impact engagement. You can then use the superior message as the foundation for your next campaign, and continue to test additional elements – thus refining and enhancing your email campaigns one test at a time.

Tips for landing page content

A landing page is a single web page that visitors arrive at after clicking on a link. Landing page links often appear in email campaigns, advertisements, registration forms, or any marketing materials offering specific information. In marketing, landing pages are often one of the first interactions a company has with a sales lead. Marketers can use landing pages to deliver exactly what the prospect expected or hoped for rather than forcing them to navigate through multiple pages of a website.

1. Design content to suit short attention spans. The internet is a busy place, so make it easy for people to follow your message from the site where they found it to your landing page. For example:

• Keep the most important content “above the fold” – referring to the content immediately visible on the screen before scrolling down.
• Use bulleted text and crisp, clean language
• Make sure your offer appears completely on the landing page and doesn’t require the reader to scroll in order to find or follow it.

2. Don’t have additional navigation. It’s a common mistake to link to other products or offers on a landing page — these additional links can dilute your content or distract from your call to action. It’s also harder to measure the impact of your offer, messages, and page design when there’s more than one focus on a page. Concentrate on the purpose of the landing page and only provide information and links that will get your prospect to your intended end result. For example, do not include a top navigation bar that allows your audience to navigate off the page to unrelated content. Keep your landing page navigation as simple as possible, and it will keep your audience focused on the task you want them to follow.

3. Remember your target audience. Just like with email marketing, you will want to keep your landing page content focused to a certain target audience; don’t try to make it fit everyone. Half the value of landing pages is that they let you serve self-selected prospects with very specific needs. Getting traffic from people who don’t fit your target demographic won’t increase conversions. For example, if your company has created a landing page for a survey that specifically targets CEOs of large companies, the content and promotion will need to specifically cater to CEOs at large companies.

Are you engaging your audience through email marketing and landing pages? I’d love to hear what works for you below!

Definition of title tags

A title tag is a piece of meta information required for all HTML/XHTML documents. It should be thought of as the “title” of a web page, describing the overall theme of its content.

Theoretically, title tags can be of any length. However, length and composition are greatly influenced by the fact that Google displays only the first 65 characters or so in search engine results. Later we’ll discuss composition in detail, but for now just remember that each title tag on a website or blog should be unique, and completely relevant to the content of the page.

Besides appearing in search engine results, title tags are displayed in many other high-visibility locations, including in browser tabs and social media shares.

Title tags are the most important onsite ingredients for SEO because they explain to Google and other search engines what each page is about. Explain well and your pages will enjoy higher rankings; explain poorly and Google won’t know how to match up your page to search queries.

The many faces of a title tag

To illustrate where title tags appear, let’s look at a recent post from my blog, The Difference Between B2B and B2C Marketing.

The title tag for this page is:

The Difference between B2B and B2C Marketing | Straight North Internet Marketing Blog

And here is a behind-the-scenes look at what the title tag looks like in the page source:

(The page source can be found by going to your browser’s “view source” option in tools.)

Here it is in a browser tab:

In Google search engine results:

In a tweet:

On Google+:

And, finally, on Facebook:

Best practices for composing title tags

High visibility. In all of these examples (with the possible exception of the browser tab), the title tags are visually prominent and quickly attract the attention of the user. I’ll refer to them as I talk about best practices for composing title tags:

• Keywords. Title tags should display the primary keyword phrase for the page, and they should appear at the beginning of the tag. In my example, the long-tail phrase I optimized for was “difference between B2B and B2C marketing.” Packing several keyword phrases into a tag (keyword stuffing) is always a bad practice; however, if you want to include two or three short keyword phrases that are relevant, that is OK. 

• Character count. Keep in mind that Google only displays the title tag’s first 65 characters (sometimes less, sometimes more) in search engine results. Anything beyond that will be truncated: As you can see in my earlier example, my title tag’s entire branding message was invisible — but that’s OK because the name of our firm won’t influence searchers. Were our agency a household name, the tag’s branding message would influence click-throughs, making me better off with fewer keywords and more branding in the first 65 characters. 

• To brand or not to brand? As I just suggested, big brands can surely increase click-throughs by emphasizing the brand in the title tag. And while I used to be a proponent of putting a branding message on every title tag regardless of the level of brand recognition, these days it is better to be selective.  

Best practice for inserting a branding message is to position it at the end, separated from the thematic message by a separator element. I like the pipe bar, but a dash will do. (Note: Do NOT use underscores as space separators.) Here are examples of properly styled title tags — with and without branding.Twitt

Branding included:

Credit Card Processing Company, Merchant Account Services | BluePay

Chicago Parking Garages | Downtown Chicago City Public Parking

No branding:

The Essential Guide to Meta Descriptions that Will Get You Found Online

Web Design Chicago, Website Design Company, Chicago Web Design

(The second set of examples is interesting because the first uses conversion-oriented composition, while the second uses SEO-oriented composition. We’ll come back to this in a minute.)

Reasons to leave branding out. As marketers, our first impulse is to brand. However, keep in mind the branding message does not typically display in a search, and also clutters up social sharing.

1. Tactical issues. For instance, take another look at my tweet — you’ll notice how much real estate our branding message takes up. To maximize retweets, I should shorten it up, so it looks something like this:

Fewer characters make it easier for people to retweet, and increase the likelihood that retweets will not be truncated.

2. Strategic issues. More broadly, Twitter, Facebook, and Google+ already provide businesses with constant and consistent branding in the design of the pages themselves; any content you publish on your Facebook Page is displayed within the context of your firm’s branded Facebook Page, etc. Furthermore, if a continual stream of title tag branding flows through a firm’s social media shares, it could be regarded as excessive self-promotion, or even spam.

3. SEO issues. Title tags should always be unique. If the same branding message appears in every tag, there is a chance that Google will regard all of your tags as containing duplicate content. I think Google is smart enough to distinguish black hat SEO tactics from legitimate branding techniques, but when it comes to the pursuit of rankings, I believe in “better safe than sorry.”

The above are three good reasons, in my view, to limit branding in title tags to pages where it really makes sense, such as a site’s Home page or About page.

What do you think?

SEO vs. conversion in title tag composition

This is an extremely important issue that I touched on earlier. Do you want a provocative title tag to persuade people to click through, or a keyword-rich title tag to impress Google and boost your rankings?

To determine this, first ask yourself how people will discover your content. Answering this question helps you determine whether to go for click throughs or rankings. If your marketing strategy involves SEO, it’s obviously imperative to stress the right keywords in each title tag. However, be aware of reasons why this does not always hold.

In some situations, content is likely to generate more traffic from social sharing than search. For instance, from Twitter I regularly click through to blog posts about keyword research because a clever title sparks my curiosity. Such posts are not apt to rank well for the highly competitive term “keyword research,” so the bloggers are wise to concentrate on social traffic generation rather than beat their heads against the wall trying to move up from Google page 30 to page 29.

Consider, too, that Google is aggressively personalizing search results. This means that when users do a Google search, they will be seeing more and more content from within their social networks, giving us another reason to favor conversion over keywords in title tag composition. In my view we are heading toward an environment where social connectivity, rather than keywords, has greater bearing on search engine visibility.

Finally, consider the beauty of long-tail search terms. The ideal situation is when the search term and the conversion term are one in the same. I picked the “B2B versus B2C” blog post to illustrate this very point. For blog posts and product category sub-pages in particular, look for long-tail phrases that your content can address, such as:

• Definition of…
• Difference between…
• How does… work
• How to…

Building title tag content around these themes will generate human interest and search engine rankings — a great way to get the best of both worlds.

Title tags versus h1 tags

Bloggers sometimes use the word “title” loosely. We’ve already talked about the SEO definition of title tags, but web pages and blog posts also contain (or should contain) a single, unique h1 tag, which is something different.

The h1 tag is the page title that appears in text on the page. It carries some SEO weight, but much less than it did a few years ago. Most blog CMS platforms default to making the title tag the h1 tag, which is just what happens on my marketing post:

Strategic options for title and h1 tags

Most CMS platforms allow you to create an h1 tag that is different from the title tag before publication, and changing the composition of an h1 and/or title tag after publication is perfectly safe in terms of SEO.

In light of this, bloggers and SEO specialists frequently alter these tags in an effort to generate conversions and rankings. Common techniques include:

1. Composing a keyword-rich title tag to optimize search, and composing a provocative h1 title to generate clicks.
2.  Using a single, provocative title/h1 tag on publication to capitalize on an initial surge in social shares, and then rewriting the tags later with keywords to maximize rankings.

As for the first technique, I see less and less reason for it, as it is the title tag, rather than the h1 tag, that typically displays in social shares. If anything, the title tag should be optimized for conversion.

As for the second technique, this makes much more sense, since older blog posts tend to be shared less frequently over time.

As far as creating different content for a page’s title and h1 tags — I’m not a big fan, and the reason for my concern is user experience. If I click through a link displayed in connection with the page’s title tag, and the next thing I see is a destination page with a different title, I get confused. Did I click through to the right page? Does the content fulfill the promise of the link? Consistency is extremely important; any content disconnects that slow a user down or create doubt will increase bounces.

Generally speaking, uniform title and h1 tags are very important for blog posts. Greater flexibility is possible for site pages. For instance, a product page could be organized as follows:

• Title tag: Imported Beer | ABC Brewers (To hit the top keyword and communicate branding)
• H1 option 1: Low Prices on Imported Beer (To pick up a long-tail term and eliminate superfluous branding)
• H1 option 2: The Best Imported Beer in Wisconsin! (To convey a sales message)

 Five final title tag tips:

1. Length. Avoid over long title tags. They hog too much real estate in social shares. 
2. Indexed length. At the same time, keep in mind that while Google may not display more than 65 characters, they index title tags of any length (within reason). Therefore, un-displayed title tag text can still influence how Google ranks a particular page.
3. Brevity. It’s OK to use fewer than 65 characters, but make sure you give Google and humans enough information to grasp the essence of what the page’s content is all about.
4. Consistent style. For websites especially, you make the best impression on users when title tags are styled consistently. If, for instance, you use sentence case here and title case there, you’ll give users the impression that your site is haphazard and unsophisticated. This impression will quickly extend to your business.
5. Remain relevant. By all means update your site’s title tags as your keyword strategy changes. However, be sure to update page content as well, in order to keep it fully relevant to the new tag. 

Hopefully this was a thorough and useful analysis of how to optimize your title tags for better SEO results for your content. If there’s anything that’s still confusing, let us know in the comments below. 

This blog introduces the concept of the digital ocean and the need to locate and market to both fishers (those actively researching products/services) and swimmers (those who are just “hanging out” online, rather than actively seeking out your information).

Most likely, we are all beyond the trial-and-error phase of digital and have realized that an intelligent, synchronized, and aligned plan is needed to maximize our digital investment. We know that every content plan needs to start with a prime objective. For example, in the B2C world, it may be to collect marketable contacts (via a coupon or offer); for B2B, it may be to generate leads with a primary call-to-action of a signup for an online trial.

So the next challenge is how to stay on course with your targeted audience. This is where the analogy of the “digital ocean” can be helpful.

Think of the ocean as representing all the possible online channels and locations (e.g., search, websites, blogs, social communities, ads, articles, email, text, etc.) where your audience can be reached. Now, consider whether you are trying to reach targets who are actively looking for a product, service, or offer like yours (fishers), or those who aren’t actively looking but may respond to a discussion, or an ad, or a blog if it’s related to their interests (swimmers), or both.

Drop your anchor, and choose your bait

Take a look at the graphic below:  

The digital ocean — a B2B example.

If your audience is ready to go fishing, your job is to know where to go to catch them, and how to lure them toward you.

Ask yourself what digital mechanisms and places they would rely on to identify, research, and evaluate their choices. What is the likely journey they would take on the way to selecting your product, service, or offering?

Then, you need to create the appropriate fishing bait — comprising content, search results, and outbound campaigns — to attain consideration. The content and tactics you use here should focus on drawing attention and demonstrating your expertise, such as case studies, white papers, and product demos (you can see some additional content suggestions in the graphic).

However, the tactics used to attract swimmers can be very different — they need to be more educational and less promotional. Social media plays a bigger role here, as that is where your target audience “hangs out” and engages with people and content on their interests. With swimmers, creating or engaging in conversations is a natural fit as a content tactic, as it lets you add value and insight without being overly promotional. Advertising on social and industry sites using pinpoint profiling and targeting is usually possible and worthwhile.

Search keywords can also differ depending on whether your audience is fishing or swimming. Fishers tend to connect with more action- and competition-oriented search terms that are aimed at a product or service type (e.g., the cheapest airline ticket to London, the best performing mutual fund, etc.), where swimmers are usually more interested in education and discovering information that is related to their topic of interest (e.g., mortgage industry best practices, groups that discuss diabetes).

The digital ocean — a B2B example.

To work on this concept yourself, try printing and filling in the worksheet above to help you identify locations and search terms based on the intent of your target audience. (While this worksheet was designed for B2B, the concepts still apply to B2C content marketing.)

Research for your worksheet

You may already have conducted research on the digital locations and behavior of your target markets, which should make this task easier. You could regard this task as creating a persona with split personalities, one when seeking products/services and the other when interacting online without a purchase intention. If you do not have any data from prior research, there are a number of ways to approach this depending on your budget and timeframe. I have worked with companies who have brought in an agency to conduct a complete target market analysis, where other companies have leveraged a social listening service. You could survey your existing customers, or send this worksheet out to a selection of your own employees who spend time interacting in your digital ocean.

Once you have completed the worksheet, make sure that your content marketing efforts are focused on the search keywords and tactics that are most likely to drive engagement and response. Make sure your SEO practices mirror the intention of the audience, so that your content matches their requirements and desires. If you are marketing towards both swimmers and fishers, ensure your content, keywords, and tags include both names of and uses for your products/services. For example, a manufacturer who sells chemicals or plastics needs to include keywords for product names/categories such as “dibenzylamino ethyl acetate” or “performance polymers,” as well as more solution/fishing oriented keywords such as “top performing wiper blades” or “liquid polymer case studies.” Put yourself in the shoes of the potential customer to determine both the journey you would take toward a business relationship, and the keywords/content of value along the way.

I often see excellent content fail to reach its goals because it doesn’t align with the audience’s timing and intentions. So at the very least, the digital ocean worksheet activity can help you conduct a gut check on your digital- and content marketing-mapping efforts.

Image courtesy of Rosemary McCartney

Meta descriptions are little snippets of text (about 155 characters) that appear in search engine results and with links shared on social media and bookmarking sites. Although they have very little pure SEO value, meta descriptions are still important for communicating your brand message and for conversions — i.e., getting people to click on your links.

Meta descriptions in action

First, let’s take a look at meta descriptions in action with a recent post on my company’s blog, YouTube Video Optimization Best Practices. This post was originally published without a meta description. When the post cropped up on a Google search engine results page (SERP), this is what you would see:

Notice that for the snippet of text under the link, Google picked up the first 182 characters from the post. This is OK, but in my view not ideal for conveying the primary value of this post or motivating people to click through and actually read it. I added a meta description, and a few days later — after Google had re-indexed the page — the SERP looked like this:

The meta description above has three characteristics I shoot for in almost every situation:

• A quick summary of the content
• A reason to read the content
• Fewer than 155 characters

I’ll get into writing tips for meta descriptions later, but first I want to give you a feel for how meta descriptions look, and where they appear on the most popular social media platforms.

Meta descriptions on Google+

Google+, the latest and greatest social network, picks up meta descriptions on shared links. Again, let’s look at the difference. Here’s what people saw on Google+ before:

And here is the same post immediately after I added the meta description:

I hope you agree that the second version tells a better story, fits the Google+ format by eliminating truncated text, and does a better job of encouraging people to read and re-share the post.

Meta descriptions on Facebook

Facebook displays meta descriptions as well. Here is the post before:

And here is the post after:

Again, a meta description gives your social sharing more persuasive power and an all-around more professional look.

How to add meta descriptions to your web pages

If you’re not sure a published blog post or web page has a meta description, check your browser’s “View Source” option and look for the code contained in the red box (note: the box was added by me — you won’t actually see the box in your code):

If this line of code is not there, it means that search engine and social media text snippets associated with that page will probably default to:

1. the first several characters of text (as we saw above), or
2. text surrounding keywords from the page that matches up to the search phrase entered by the search engine user

Any decent content management system (CMS) allows users to add a meta description. We happen to use the All in One SEO Pack plug-in for WordPress, which looks like this in the post editor:

If your CMS does not allow you to add/customize meta descriptions and titles, I urge you to upgrade.

Tips for writing stronger meta descriptions

Use relevant descriptions. A good meta description provides an overview of the page’s core message and purpose. Descriptions should be fully relevant: There is nothing more detrimental to conversion and reputation than setting up people to click through to a link that contains content other than what they are expecting. You never want to mislead users and leave them feeling used and abused.

Highlight a reason to read. A gentle (or sometimes not so gentle!) call to action influences click-throughs. How will people benefit from reading your content? The meta description is an ideal place to tell them. Here are some examples:

• Learn the essentials about…
• Discover why…
• A complete guide to…
• Order by January 31 and receive…

Leverage your credibility. I once had a client that increased traffic to its remodeling services home page by adding, “BBB approved” to the meta description. For brands that are not household names, phrases such as “since 1975” and “more than 10,000 clients served” may strongly influence searchers to click.

Make it specific. The meta description examples above are powerful because they are specific, concrete and, therefore, meaningful. Empty words and phrases like “innovative” and “world class” are a dime a dozen. They do not inspire confidence and can even be counterproductive in terms of conversion. Make sure you speak to the real benefits that your content provides to readers, in terms of what they want — not what you want them to do.

Keep it short and sweet. Avoid your natural inclination to use all 155 characters. By virtue of its novelty, a short meta description may attract more attention in the sea of lengthy, keyword-stuffed descriptions that are out there.  

Other important considerations

Speaking of keyword-stuffing, there are other important things you should be thinking about when you create and execute your meta description strategy:

Keywords and SEO. While it’s a good idea to include keywords in the meta descriptions you create for pages that are optimized around high-volume terms, recent changes in search engine algorithms are making this a less important consideration. In many cases, Google and other search engines pull text from the page itself based on the search query, rather than displaying the meta description. Given this fact, along with the more consistent and controllable display of meta descriptions on social media sites, focus on persuasiveness over keywords.

Uniqueness and SEO. Every blog post and site page should have a unique meta description or none at all. Duplicate meta descriptions influence Google to ignore them globally on your domain.

Create “default meta descriptions.” As we’ve seen, Google and social media sites sometimes pick up the first lines of content on a web page in lieu or in the absence of a meta description. For that reason, it is helpful to write those first lines of content so that they can double as a strong meta description, if necessary. For example: Take a look at the first two sentences of this post, which were written with this idea in mind.

Rewriting meta descriptions. Here are some final tips:

• There is no harm in rewriting or adding meta descriptions to previously published content. If you come out with an exciting new offer, consider adding it to the meta descriptions of your high traffic pages.
• It’s also helpful to add persuasive elements to meta descriptions on pages with high search rankings but low traffic.
• You can recirculate old blog posts and web pages on social media with new meta descriptions — this will make them fresh to old and new connections alike. 

The latest change is actually designed to reward, not punish content writers (or at least the ones who are doing their jobs well). In a recent press release, Google states, “Search results, like warm cookies right out of the oven… are best when they’re fresh.” This time around, the algorithm change is designed to place relevance on the quantity of new content a site contains (remember, the focus of the Panda update earlier this year penalized low-quality content, and content farms). It’s been projected that these latest changes will impact 35 percent of all search queries.

For marketers who are constantly updating their blog, social media sites or website content, this is great news. For those marketers who know they should have consistent content but have been unable to produce enough, this change may seem daunting.

To help alleviate some concerns you may have, here are some ideas on how to meet the quality and quantity requirements Google has made mandatory for online marketers:

1. Organize your inspiration

High search engine ranking is driven by having content that’s current and relevant. This means you need to be equipped at all times to blog, tweet, post, and join discussions related to your products, services, and industry. Here are a few ways to stay organized and up-to-date so your content pieces can be as well.

• Sign up to receive Google News Alerts. I receive daily emails from Google containing the latest updates from the topics that interest me: Content marketing, online communities, search engine marketing, and social media marketing. From that email, I skim the article listings for something interesting and add it to an “articles” folder I set up in my inbox.
• Keep an inventory. I keep track of articles that I find interesting whether from Google Alerts, Twitter, Facebook, or other means as a potential blog post or social media discussion topic. To keep my inspiration organized, I keep a running list of relevant links and ideas in my “Marketing Planner” excel workbook (the “Ideas” tab). On a regular basis, and especially when I’m in need of inspiration, I go back to that tab, pull a link, and just start writing my thoughts, reactions, or ideas. This tab is also a great resource to help me organize ideas around white papers or other major projects I have planned because I know what the hot topics of the moment are.

SEO Tip: Whenever you reference an article, post, Tweet, or blog, you give the author a shout-out. This will build your following,  get your content shared more frequently, and add SEO value.

2. Add spontaneity to your strategy

Having an editorial calendar is one of the best ways for you to stay on track with weekly writing responsibilities. However, don’t let the plan get in the way of having a little fun! Since search engines love fresh, unique, and interesting content, let your inspirations get the best of you.

If you feel the desire to write a blog post off-schedule, or update your website with a breaking research report, go right ahead. Want to tweet a cool infographic you just saw, or write an article about a webinar you attended on a whim? Do it. Though calendars are amazingly useful tools, any project manager knows this familiar mantra: “Don’t let the plan prohibit progress.” Sometimes (OK, a lot of times) we can’t foresee when a great idea will strike us. It will only benefit your SEO if you take an idea and run with it before it (and your website) gets too stale.

3. Make your content meaningful, likeable, and link-able

Since you’re likely writing on a number of online channels (an online community, social media sites, company website, etc.), be sure your pieces follow three simple rules:

• Tie your messages together
• Use proper linking tactics
• Keep a consistent style and tone (powered by your keywords).

Here are some ways to do this:

Create, distribute and follow a message matrix. Decide early on within your organization what your main messages will be, and use them as a starting-point for all your content. A message matrix is a document that breaks down your target audiences and includes:

• 5-6 key themes you want to communicate to each group.
• Words that should (and should not) be used in communications
• A list of your keywords to ensure that you’re optimizing the SEO of each and every content piece.

The message matrix helps your style remain consistent because no matter who is writing content or when  they will all be following the same guidelines. Consistency will help you establish credibility with your readers, and the more credible your content the more likely it will be shared and rewarded on search engines with a high ranking.

A sample message matrix

Link less, post often. You want to include links to your content in all your pieces; however, make your linking meaningful. By cluttering your article with hyperlinks, you will only distract your readers and decrease the piece’s relevance. Let your original thoughts shine through, and gently direct readers to other stories that are related perhaps 2-3 at the most (fewer if they are brief blog posts). Since you will be posting content more frequently from now on, you will have plenty of opportunities to give link-love to your other assets on a regular basis.

Again, don’t forget to share the love. Not every link has to direct a reader back to your content; the more you link to another writer’s content, the more compelled they will be to return the favor in the future.

4. Use (but don’t abuse) your keywords

Any SEO-focused writer knows that keywords help you get ranked on search engines and are a great way to get your content in the hands of your target audience. However, keyword usage, like linking, requires a balance if it’s going to be reader and search engine-friendly. Readers may be deterred from reading your content if it’s blatantly riddled with keywords — an annoying distraction that devalues the credibility of your work.

SEO Tip: Do a quick search of your articles to see how many times a certain keyword or phrase appears. How balanced is it in comparison with the length of the piece? If it feels crammed back off a bit. Every content piece you write is part of a bigger marketing strategy, so be sure to look at how the piece fits in the bigger picture and supports that strategy. You may also want to read Jay Baer’s post on the ways SEO optimization tools can help with this process.

5) Proofread

Before you post any content piece, check your links, spelling and grammar. These things matter when your piece is being “graded” on its SEO friendliness. Even better, hire a professional proofreader to review all of your content (here are five reasons you need this).

There are many rules for making your content SEO-friendly, and this entry touches on just a few.  David Reich also has a recent post on when and why your keywords really matter for content marketing and SEO. What are some SEO-factors you feel are most important? Which do you struggle with the most? Post your questions and ideas in the comments section below.

The challenges and the new roles do not end there, however. As media publishers have evolved in the digital era, they have found that in order to succeed they need not only produce great content, but also must cultivate their community of influencers in their sector. These influencers serve the key function of providing content input, participating in the content production process, and supplying links, retweets, and Facebook “likes.” These contributions are critical to the development of content quality, site audience, and SEO rank, which in turn drive the core objectives of content marketing, including brand awareness and lead generation.

So, congratulations marketers. You now must not only transform yourselves into publishers but also into community managers! To better understand these evolving roles and excel in them, let’s look at the key interactions with influencers, the importance of these interactions, and how you can manage your communication within this community.

Influencer interactions

Here are the touch points at which your content marketing operation interacts with influencers across different stages of the process:

Ideation: An influencer may have provided you the idea for a post. Or you might have had an idea and bounced it off an influencer for their feedback and input.

Production. An influencer might be quoted or linked to in your post.  Or the influencer might have written the post.

Distribution:  You might publish your post on an influencer’s site or mention the influencer in your social distribution of the post (e.g., an @ mention on Twitter). Or the influencer might comment on the post on your site.

Promotion:  You may solicit a link or retweet on your post from an influencer.  This is particularly worth requesting if the influencer was already involved in the process in the preceding steps and they have a personal tie to the post (e.g., “I quoted you in this post I just published…”).

And of course different influencers may link, retweet, “like,” or share your post on LinkedIn.

Reciprocation:  Also key in the interaction is how you might do any of the above for the influencer’s content.  The world of links, retweets, etc., is driven by relationships and  reciprocity, so your actions on their behalf are just as important to the entire relationship as your actions on your behalf.

Influencer importance

Looking across these interactions, the impact of influencers becomes clear. The quality of your content can be strongly affected by the contributions of influencers in the ideation and production stages.

But the real importance of influencers comes in the promotion stage (and thus reciprocity too). To build an audience for your content marketing site, you must cultivate sources of traffic. The distribution you get from links, retweets, Facebook “likes,” etc., is critical to growing your traffic. In the post-Panda SEO world, these social shares and links are more important than ever in growing your SEO rank and increasing traffic that arrives through search engines. Thus, cultivating relationships with influencers and soliciting their promotion of your content becomes critical to your content marketing success.

Managing your influencer community

So now we understand the ways you can interact with influencers and the importance of these interactions to your content marketing efforts. How then do you manage the community of influencers you have cultivated?

First, you need to understand who these influencers are, develop a profile around them, and prioritize your interactions with them accordingly. Here are the main components that would make up typical influencer profiles:

Identity:  Identity includes their name, their organization/company name (if any), and their various internet identities:  website URL, email address, Twitter handle, Facebook account, LinkedIn account, etc.

Role:  The role indicates the position of the influencer in your segment.  An influencer could be a guru or thought leader in your segment (likely working as a consultant).  Or, they could be a customer of yours, a prospective customer, or perhaps even a competitor or vendor.

Influence:  Here we understand the power of this influencer in your segment through some quantitative measures such as:

• Website visitors (derived from a tool like Compete)
• Twitter followers
• Klout score

You can also include a simple score of your own based on the knowledge that the influencer carries in your space.

Category:  Across the spectrum of content that you produce, influencers might have more relevance in certain categories than others. This too should be noted.

Now you have a map of your influencer community, including their profiles. You can prioritize your set of influencers according to the level of influence they carry.

Then you can move ahead with managing your relationships with these influencers. And just like the management of all business relationships (e.g., sales, customer service, etc.), tracking all of your interactions is crucial to success. Of your top-prioritized influencers, which ones have provided you with ideas or have distributed your content (e.g., through a retweet)? Have you reciprocated with distribution of their content? Who have you reached out to looking for distribution?

Careful management of these relationships leads to successful development of an influencer community, which can lead to higher content, high traffic, brand awareness, and leads. As content marketers push forward as publishers, they cannot overlook the importance of influencer community management to achieve their success.

The function requires a significant dedication of time and resources. The tracking of the key information and interactions is quite complex and is typically either done in spreadsheets or Google Docs. Does anyone know of good tools for this function? Please leave your thoughts in the comments.

My thanks to DanWeisman, Marketing Manager at FlipKey, for his inputs on this post.

Image Kheel Center, Cornell University via Flickr

It’s very common in the news business for journalists to prepare different versions of a story to cover opposing outcomes. That’s great when it helps you scoop the competition; it’s not so great when you post the wrong version.

So with all kinds of organizations — from small businesses and large corporations to governments and non-profits — getting into the publishing business these days means  publishing errors are bound to happen. But they don’t have to detract from your reputation as a trustworthy content producer. Here are four tips for managing mistakes when and if they occur in your content marketing campaigns.

1. Be prepared to lose control

Whether it’s a company blog, guest posting on a third-party site, or a social media campaign, content marketing is often a two-way conversation. You need to accept that you won’t be able to control the messaging at the same level as traditional marketing channels. The idea is to get some engagement from your target audience, meaning other people will pick up and run with your messaging. As a content marketer, you are participating in a conversation not controlling a one-way dialogue.

The Daily Mail’s website, Mail Online, is one of the world’s most popular news sites, second only to the New York Times in monthly unique visitors. It has 30,000 Twitter followers and great levels of reader engagement.

The flip side of all this attention and buy-in is that when you make a mistake people notice. Not only do they notice but they tweet about it and take screenshots for their blogs. While that’s embarrassing, I’m sure Mail Online wouldn’t trade places with an anonymous news site where errors pass under the radar.

2. Don’t ignore your mistakes

Just as you shouldn’t ignore constructive comments on your company blog or questions posted on your Facebook wall, it’s important to respond promptly when mistakes occur. Mail Online reportedly had taken their rogue Knox story down within minutes. That’s quick, but not quite quick enough when you have 28 million unique visitors a month.

A prompt reaction when someone points out an error shows you value engagement from your audience. Your readers are more likely to comment on and share your content if they know you’re listening and see the results when they bother to get involved. This is not only great for growing affinity with your brand, but it will also generate ideas for new articles or campaigns. Marketers are always looking for insights into what their customers want, which means corrections and negative comments are not necessarily a bad thing.

In some cases though, you’ll need to take an article down at least temporarily. If there’s any hint of a legal problem with something you’ve written or commissioned, then it’s a good idea to remove it immediately while you investigate.

If your readers have pointed out a typo, then a quick correction and a private “thank you” will usually do the trick. If they’ve taken issue with something you’ve written (but aren’t threatening to sue you), I’d recommend getting a debate going. Replying publicly in your blog’s comment stream or via social media will do your reputation no harm and will encourage more readers to actively participate. You might also find that your reach improves as your readers point members of their own social circles to the discussions they’ve joined.

3. Know the law

Media law, particularly libel and copyright infringement, is often regarded as something for only newspapers and magazines to worry about. In the digital age, publishing is more accessible than ever, but even bloggers are not immune from its legal responsibilities. Content marketers need to know what they’re doing to avoid falling afoul of the law.

If you publish something that isn’t true or you use material that you don’t have the right to use, even if it’s a genuine mistake, you risk getting yourself into legal hot water. That applies to your blog or your Twitter profile just as it applies to global news brands like Mail Online and the New York Times.

To protect yourself, you’ll want to make sure that whoever is responsible for producing your content knows the law, and you’ll also want to be clear about exactly where the liability resides. One of the big risks of publishing content is not necessarily that you’ll end up in court, but that you’ll mishandle a complaint. How you deal with legal issues is crucially important both for swotting away spurious claims and for limiting the damage when you’re in the wrong.

Always start by removing the article from the public domain. In a lot of cases, that will be the end of the matter, but if it gets escalated, prompt removal will be a mitigating factor in your favor. You should always thoroughly investigate any legal issues, and if someone makes a complaint, you should aim to get as much information as possible without admitting any liability or apologizing. In the right circumstances, retractions, corrections, and apologies can all help you find an amicable resolution, but you should only go down this road when you have all the facts, otherwise you could make matters a lot worse.

Libel, copyright, and other aspects of media law vary across different jurisdictions. If you’re blogging in the U.S., then you might want to check out the State Department’s Media Law Handbook and Media Law Resource Centre’s Media Law FAQs. For any Australian readers, I’d recommend Mark Pearson’s The Journalist’s Guide to Media Law, which has some great plain English examples of the major bear traps.

4. Play to your strengths

Mail Online has great brand loyalty, an excellent understanding of its target market, and a full-scale news operation at its disposal. It’s well set up, therefore, to function as a breaking news service.

While you might want your blog or publication to fulfill this need in your particular niche, the risk with this approach is that you might experience your own “Knox moment” in your rush to be first on the scene with the story. An alternative approach is to make your blog focus more on providing relevant context and insightful analysis on an existing news story rather than on breaking the news yourself.

In most cases, a company blog, an industry newsfeed, or content for your social media will not be your core business but rather a part of your SEO, branding and marketing efforts. With that in mind, useful, relevant  and unique usually beats first to publish. It’s also more in line with what your audience expects from you. If, for example, you’re an IT company and you’re keen to push the benefits of cloud computing, you might produce a blog or regular news articles on your site covering new developments, industry comments or product announcements.

You’d probably struggle to beat the major tech blogs to breaking stories, and visitors to your site probably wouldn’t expect that from you. However, that doesn’t mean you can’t add some real value by producing fresh, relevant, news-driven content. Without the newsroom time pressure, your articles can be a little more considered with reaction quotes, new angles, and additional background. You can also make the link for your readers to show how a particular news event highlights the value of (in the case of this example) cloud computing.

When a potential customer or other stakeholder looks at your social media or visits your website, they’ll see articles that help to identify your brand with relevant themes. Even if you’re not talking about yourself or your products, this association will help build your authority, engage your audience, and grow your digital footprint.

How have you managed content marketing mishaps? Please share your experiences with us in the comments section below.