Content Marketing Strategies That Can Help You Recuperate From Penguin

When asked about recovering from Google penalties, the first thing that comes to mind is removing negative links. Same is considered useful for recuperating from Penguin, which may not be a penalty technically but its effect are no less than one. Now, if you ask an SEO guy like me who has tried to help numerous clients to bounce back from penalties, than link removal does help in the recovery process, but it will not suffice. This is because removal of links can also have an adverse effect of website ranking as well.

So, what should one do? Well by promoting the website with link building techniques that focus on branding and referral traffic you can really augment your website.

Here are some content marketing strategies that can not only help in Penguin recovery, but can also take your business to a new level.

Creation and marketing of linkable assets: This involves creating anything to garner the interest of your audience, like useful, interactive and relatable blogs, whitepapers, slide presentations, infographics, content guides etc.
Link attainment: You should acquire links from significant resources so that it brings referral traffic, makes your outreach emails, encouraging email subscriptions.
Give bonuses, discounts and giveaways: You can attract visitors by interesting giveaways, but make sure to use third party tool like Rafflecopter to avoid being penalized for “link scheme”.
Invite significant people for guest posting: Apart from getting links by guest posting, you can go the other way round and invite influential people who have a different target audience than yours.
Use brand names when linking instead of anchor text: You should use your brand name, or highlight the part that shows your perspective. Anchor text can make you vulnerable to Penguin hits.
Use PRs to promote your business: Using press to propagate your message across your audience is an amazing way to promote your business.

Using these content marketing and SEO strategies, you can ensure that Penguin updates won’t affect you much!

SEO

Accepting SEO Guest Articles on Your Blog, Don’t Lose Your Blog’s Vision

December 12, 2013 brainwork Leave a comment

For any business maintaining overall control of your business and positive online traffic to your site are key functions. Blog post plays very important role in setting up volume of visitors to any website, therefore one need to upload quality blog posts on regular basis to maintain the popularity of the website. There could be many reasons because of which your business goals and vision may change in due course of time; but your business goals and general vision should always go hand in hand so that you will not lose overall control of your business. When you start targeting specific increase in number of visitors over a period of time, you can accept guest blogs that will give different perspective to your blog posts. At the same time you should be vigilant enough about the insight of guest blog. Even though guest blog may present various angles of the host blog; you should not let it go off the track. You need to be more cautious while accepting guest blog posts.

First of all you need to write down basic guidelines to accept the guest blog posts on your site. Prepare document specifying those guidelines and place it somewhere on your website so that they are easily visible to the guest bloggers. Always accept guest post qualifying all your guidelines.
Writers offer guest blogs to increase their own SEO, so when you accept any guest blog for your website you should check the relevance of the blog with your current post, its content, keyword usage, use of internal links etc. That will help both the parties to reap maximum benefits out of the guest blogging.
Do not hesitate to request modifications to guest blogger according to your requirements. You can also request to alter some part of write up if you find it unnecessary.
Maintain good rapport with your In-house bloggers. Discuss and get to know all the basic things related to guest bloggers and expectations from guest blogs.
Always try to upload more In-House guest blogs rather than preferring guest blog posts. This will help your blog to continue moving ahead of other posts.

To conclude, once you have solid framework of your strategy ready with you, allowing guest blogs on your site is a very easy task. Once you have set up your network of quality guest bloggers, you will obviously get quality readers for your blog post. This will help your business accomplish your objectives and thus maintain good SEO for your website.

SEO

Tricks to Build SEO Driven Landing Pages

November 22, 2013 brainwork Leave a comment

In 2013, content marketing has become a very important marketing tool. By now you must have realized how landing pages affect your as well as your clients’ SEO. Landing pages play major part in attracting traffic to your site.

Building strong and competitive landing pages which are solely going to represent your brand image and able to drive more and more traffic to your web is extremely important.

In this presentation we will go through some interesting tactics that will help you in building competitive and strong landing pages:

Captivating content of landing page:

Content on landing pages should be attractive, interesting, concise and informative.
Content should be up-to-date; as the visitor would like to get the latest information.
Reduce ads on landing pages if they are distracting or lacking the essence of content.
Keep a close eye on the metrics of your webpage and comments, feedback of your visitors, they will determine the engagement capacity of content.

Architecture of landing page:

Make user friendly architecture of landing pages.
Make effective use of diagrams, charts, screenshots, pictograms and videos in the content.
Basic structural changes of landing pages should match the content and content layout.

Identical keywords of landing pages:

Arrange the landing pages corresponding to keywords.
For main keyword, landing page should be the home page; but for other keywords position other concerned pages of your website accordingly.
Identical arrangement of landing pages to keywords will help to rank better in search results.

Keep an eye on rank of landing pages:

Use Google analytics to track ranking of your landing pages. You might lose the visitor/s of your site because of inappropriate keywords; so be alert.

Knowledge driven landing pages:

At given point of time you won’t know the knowledge level of your visitor regarding your product and business. Therefore build landing pages keeping in mind the view point of all visitors.
Content should be able to answer almost all the questions of your visitor.

Analysis:

Now after taking all necessary steps analyze the metrics of your landing pages in the form of bounce rate, average time per page, % exit etc.
After analyzing find out if still there are any irrelevant landing pages coming in search results and fix them.

Work along with the above guidelines and capture the SEO market…

SEO

Metadata & You Best Practices, Benefits & Implementation Made Easy

November 1, 2013 brainwork Leave a comment

To put it simply, Metadata is “Data about data”. Traditionally it was used in card catalogs of libraries; but with the increase in use of digital data, it is also being used to describe digital data. Getting exact metadata in your code is extremely important as it will help in brand engagement and SEO. There are different elements of metadata which are beneficial for you.

Titles and Descriptions:

These days’ title and descriptions have gained a lot of importance because of many social media platforms. Keywords, user-targeted copy, humble HTML title tag and Meta description Meta tag are the key factors for SEO.

Twitter Card:

This will help you to improve the looks of your tweets. In Twitter Card with URL, you can specify different types of card for summary, summary with an image, video and slideshow. You can specify how you want your tweet to look like after it is tweeted.

If you want to execute these changes in your twitter profile then just put the tag in HTML. After testing it with the Validator tool, apply the changes on twitter into the program with the help of Twitter Developer. It may take couple of weeks to get these tags accepted.

Open Graph:

Open Graph is Facebook’s brainchild. As it is Facebook’s invention, it was only used by Facebook in the beginning; but gradually many other sites started adopting this protocol. This is used to supply semantic information about the webpages, types of content that can be shared like videos, photographs and other types of content. Recently in Google search they have started showing video play icon with the Open Graph tagged videos.

Similar to the Twitter Card protocol, you can specify the viewing options of your content in advance with Open Graph protocol. This is a good tool which assures you brand engagement.

Schema.org:

It is a protocol that includes almost everything. It is the common structured data protocol of a group of different leading search providers. In local search results, events like concerts and movies, recipes, name and addresses, articles, and embedded videos; Schema.org protocol is used.

Due to its complex nature, it may make sense to check the quality of your code with some tools like Google Structured Data Testing Tool.

Google Specific Metadata:

There are bunch of custom made Meta tags used with Google; however publisher Meta tag and authorship Meta tags are the ones that impact SEO the most. Adding authorship Meta tag in combination with the website to the “Contributor to” section of your Google+ profile will help you in getting rich snippet. It will show your content with your picture.

Publisher Meta tags are created for individuals. This helps you to find which Google+ pages are connected to the web.

Implementing metadata in your CMS is a simple task. WordPress also has multiple plug-ins to establish various metadata protocols. In Joomla and Drupal also you can find few plug-ins to create metadata protocols.

As there are many advantages of adding metadata to your content, many bloggers and brands are adopting it as a lifelong partner in their digital life.

Content Writing, SEO

How to Increase the Profitability of Your Content

October 17, 2013 brainwork Leave a comment

You must have noticed that the current SEO trends indicate that social and more appealing content attracts more customers. Therefore more popular your content is, better will be your position in the SEO. Many website owners have mastered this art and have attained better position in SEO; but still there are many who are struggling to find their way. When we talked to the one of the members of SEO team of Brainwork Technologies, he untied few important knots. He said if you are the owner of a website which is more focused on content rather than product or services; it makes more sense to try increase the popularity and thus increase the profitability. At the same time you cannot afford to lose the value of your content. He suggested few methods to increase popularity of your content pages.

Accessible placement of top content:

Firstly you need to find the content pages that are driving the most conversions and their locations on your site. If the traffic is following the organic search result that means the visitors who visit homepage of your site may not come across these content pages. Therefore for increasing the profit by increasing page hits, you should make accessible placement of these content pages on your site. You can add an extra tab or separate link on the homepage to increase page hits.

Shuffling content to accessible pages:

This is the exact opposite of the method discussed above. Either you can place your content on accessible pages or you can make content pages accessible by any way. Shifting your top content to accessible pages will change the structure of your site in positive sense. Now many more readers can read your top content and that will increase page hits.

Internal liking:

Adding internal links of your top content pages will also help you to increase the conversions. You can add internal links wherever it is relevant, at right content and also at right context. Placing irrelevant internal links may also spoil your efforts of increasing profit.

User Tests:

Some website owners may find this method useful; but some may not. You may need to spend some extra money to test users’ behavior and turning their focus to your desired pages is also a tricky task. There are different applications available for such tests.

Using A/B Tool:

This is the most commonly used way to increase the profitability of your content. Here you can try various structures and layouts that are catching more and more traffic and then you can decide the perfect layout, structure and content getting desired conversions.

He concluded saying, you may start trying these various methods to increase the profitability of your content and may end up having creating your own unique method which could be the blend of various methods; so keep trying to develop your own benchmark. All the very best!!!

SEO

You Don't Have to Nofollow Internal Links

October 10, 2013 brainwork Leave a comment

With the emergence of SEO, webmasters are very much concerned about every little change and update that is made, it could be regarding a new tactic or more importantly reads/hits the website generates. Now those of you who are well-versed with the SEO business might be aware of No Follow links; whereas many who are new to SEO might be wondering what this NoFollow link is all about. Is it just not following a link? Well, to understand its meaning, you must understand the underlying chemistry of the SEO world. The SEO world thrives on the inbound traffic that the external websites generate when using hyperlinks pointing to your page. Google monitors such inbound traffic and ranks your page higher in the search results if your website generates more inbound traffic thinking that your page is a popular page. Thus these Follow links give a boost to your page ranking in the search results.

Let’s understand – what is a No Follow link. A No Follow link is a link that does not count towards the page popularity. It is like telling the search engine not to count it for the Page Ranking.

Now, one must wonder why anyone would want to use No Follow link and reduce the page ranking. The answer lies in the fact that as with other useful things this also lets the spammers/hackers exploit the inherent characteristic of this feature. Spammers/Hackers used these Follow links to such a large scale that they turned around the Page rankings upsetting the real idea behind using inbound traffic for Page Ranking. Hence many webmasters started using No Follow links to only get relevant ranking and avoid any spamming.

Having said that, it does not mean you should always use No Follow link. Remember to strike a balance when using Follow and No Follow links. When you place a No Follow within your internal links, the Page Ranking won’t flow though and thus will not rank the other page. This might be okay when you use it with the external websites; however if it’s a link connecting two webpages of your own site, you would want Page Ranking to flow through, you would want Google to be able to find that another page.

Understandably, there would be some exceptions to this. These could be pages like authentication page, account login page etc. You would usually put a No Follow link for a link pointing to pages like these. This might be a good idea; however even if you put a Follow link and let Google walk though these pages, it is not going to create any harmful effects.

NoFollow links are extremely useful when linking external websites. While linking the authentic links of your site to the external sites by using No follow, you should have trust on that site where you can share this genuine information.

In conclusion, there is no need to use No follow in your internal links, let Search Engines move though your webpages as this will give boost to your webpages ranking.

SEO, Web Development

Penalty for invalid HTML – What’s Google’s stance on it?

October 5, 2013 brainwork Leave a comment

Creating perfect and validated HTML code is an important building block for your SEO. Recently in one video Google’s distinguished engineer Matt Cutts explained its importance.

Creating a perfect HTML code for any website is no child’s play. One needs to be very accurate while building the HTML code. As the phrase goes – “To err is human”, you might have taken utmost care while building your website, there is always a possibility that some or the other mistake might creep in and break the webpage. That’s why you can fall back on Google’s Webmaster Tool which allows you to check and validate your HTML code and rectify any errors.

Now a day, the number of HTML purists is increasing, who will not launch your webpage until all the code is validated. But in reality you will still find many terribly coded HTML that ranks well in search result. What could be the reason? Does Google penalize for invalid HTML? Matt Cutts say: “No, Google does not penalize you if you have invalid HTML; because there would be a huge number of web pages like that”. If Google were to penalize each webpage that has poorly coded HTML, the number will go into hundreds of millions and it will result into poor search result. That is the reason why Google doesn’t penalize those poorly coded web pages.

Having perfectly coded HTML will no doubt yield good search results for your webpage. There are many advantages of it. Some of them are:

Validated code is easy to maintain.
It makes up gradation and editing easier.
It helps making proper indentation.
Validated code helps to keep bugs at low level.
In Google’s algorithm, quicker loading pages rank better in search results. Clean code can help you achieve this.
Clean and validated code helps your site to be free from hacks.
Cleanly coded webpage makes it easier to deploy web content across multiple devices.
Poorly coded HTML tables and forms are less accessible to the surfers.

Despite these advantages, we still encounter broken web pages with invalid HTML; this could be because of the laxity of coders to employ these good coding practices.

Currently Google does not penalize anyone for invalid HTML; however should Google change their mind in future and decide to rank web pages accordingly, poorly coded and pages appearing with invalid HTML will surely get punished. Therefore to keep your web page ranking top in Google’s algorithm it is imperative to have validated code. Start your validation today as “Prevention is always better than cure!!!”

Content Writing, SEO

Why is Content Part of a Smart SEO Strategy?

September 25, 2013 brainwork Leave a comment

“To please Google with your SEO, forget about SEO”, said Andre Weyher (an ex-Google Webspam team member). Does it ring bell in your ears?

Smart SEO professionals capture the essence by reading between the lines. A strategic SEO campaign is about maintaining the right balance between conventional and contemporary strategies. Content is key for the success and failure of any strategy. So, you should pay attention to it.

The Age-old Fight: Quality vs. Quantity

Your site should focus on publishing informative posts which add to the knowledge base of visiting audience members. The focus should be to create one post covering all aspects instead of four different ones talking about the same thing, more or less.

The popularity of infographics and video posts has changed the way people used to read online-based content. The bottom line is to make them participate either by asking them to spend some time on the site or share the content with others. There is nothing to talk about quantity as it does not take the discussion in a progressive direction.

We cannot undermine the importance of creating weekly or monthly posts knowing how important it is to promote relevant keywords and link-building strategy consistently. The biggest revelation made in the SEO sector is that you cannot rely on them to drive traffic to your site entirely. They make a part of it and there are other things to be paid attention to.

Social signals coming from multiple sources, and coming from different sections lends a massive appeal factor. It would be foolish to pitch for the idea that social signals are secondary to links.

Optimize Content to Optimize Keywords

You cannot write a blog post based on certain keywords, unless you’re planning to fail. The best practice is that you should look to write a post which presents something new to learn from or talks about the most neglected aspects of it. A post written with a limited purpose to highlight keywords and create links is doomed to fail, sooner or later.

Your site should serve as a platform where visitors can learn or share something based on the quality of information shared with them.

SEO

Check Protected Tweets in Search Results with Twitter’s New Tweaked Policy

September 20, 2013 brainwork Leave a comment

Tweets from protected Twitter accounts would be shown in the search results now. Twitter has made certain adjustments to how protected accounts were handled earlier”.

The company tweeted about the changes made to the existing policy. Now, you may come across some of the tweets posted by protective account-holders in search results. The followers of a specific account would get the opportunity to check certain tweets in search results.

The guidelines mention that there was no such provision to check the tweets published by protective account holders in search results before. You could have been able to check tweets as a follower however there was no possibility of finding the same tweets in search results.

The announcement is again a series of changes brought by Twitter keeping the tradition of making the service interactive and inventive for the users.

SEO

Why Google Will Reject the Data Feed and Steps to Overcome it?

September 17, 2013 brainwork Leave a comment

Proper communication is key when your data feed is rejected or blocked by Google. Some users may complain that they were never informed or there was no interest shown on the part of Google to resolve the situation immediately. It is often witnessed that Google blocks the account at slightest of the failures to follow the guidelines properly. There are chances that you may not be aware of one of the points mentioned in the list however there is no excuse for it.

Remember There are Different Guidelines for Different Products:

A merchant selling unique products need to follow a different set of guidelines to someone who is selling clothes. As an account holder, you need to be aware about Google’s data feed specifications to avoid any confusion later on. There are different categories listed with product-specific instructions differentiating one from another.

Check the List of Restricted Products:

Google Shopping has a list of restricted products. Banned drugs or banned ingredients can cause serious problems by getting the feed disapproved. It does not stop there. There are certain drugs which you may not find on the list and you can still get penalized due to the controversial nature of the substance.

Check other Data Feed Errors:

Google Merchant account holds crucial information. You should check the account to know whether there are other feed errors or not. It provides in-depth information to get into the details. You need to read it thoroughly to get to the bottom of situation. These errors, if not paid attention to, can get some or all products rejected. There are clear instructions mentioned about the content and format to be followed by everyone.

Suggested Optimizations:

You should check suggested optimizations to fix the issue, once and for all. Google would like the account holder to make the suggested changes mentioned in it. The next step is to inform Google about the changes made to build stronger business ties. The secret is to work as a team with Google customer support to find a concrete solution. You should be extra careful and patient to avoid any such incidents happening again in the foreseeable future.