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Why Google’s Matt Cutts Thinks Moderation Is Key To Guest Blogging

Blogging, Business Tech, Content creation, content marketing, guest blogging, Link Building, Organic SEO, SEO, Small Business Marketing, Social Media Marketing, , , ,

SEO experts, writers, marketers, and business owners have been writing about guest blogging for years now. Guest blogging is something that should help your company improve it’s branding and visibility, SEO, and reader satisfaction, so knowing you need to create a guest blogging strategy is pretty much a no-brainer. However, as Google continues to grow and develop, guest blogging is becoming trickier. It’s hard to know how to be successful when it comes to building links and exposure anymore, so of course it makes sense to go to the man with all the answers: Head of Google Webspam, Matt Cutts.

A Quick Recap: Why Guest Blogging Is Beneficial

For those who are unfamiliar, guest blogging is essentially the act of writing a piece of content, publishing that content on a different (but related and relevant) website on the web, and then earning a link back to your company in an author bio in return. As discussed above, guest blogging is a great way to build up your linking portfolio as well as earn you visibility with a  new audience and really show the world that you know your stuff.

There are a few different strategies used by companies today. In general, how you want to setup your guest blogging has been according to your niche and size, and this isn’t going to change. A few different ways it has worked in the past include:

  • Hire a guest blogging agency. This is usually what very large companies do when they have a lot of guest posting needs. There are many agencies out there that do nothing but guest blog and build links for websites, and if you do your research, you can find plenty that produce great content.
  • Hire a team of in-house writers. This is usually the option for larger companies who don’t like going the freelance route. It gives you more control.
  • Hire freelance writer/writers. This is probably the most popular option. If you just want a little bit extra visibility, hire one or two writers to freelance is an easy way to make it happen. Be careful though and always monitor these writers!
  • Guest blog on your own. This is usually the route for very small companies. If you’re just getting started, and particularly if you work in an odd niche, this should work just fine.

As you can see, some of these strategies produce quite a few guest posts. In the past this was a great way to improve SEO because you earned a lot of authoritative backlinks and all of that visibility, not to mention it allowed you to really work with a variety of blogs (also good for SEO). While this still works, Cutts says that moving forward guest blogging approaches need not be quite as forceful.

Why Cutts Say Moderation Is a Necessity (And How to React)

The biggest thing to understand is that Google is working to put less emphasis on linking and more emphasis on the actual content. While backlinks will still be important, they aren’t as important, and therefore Cutts explained in his latest video that moderation is the key to success moving forward. You can watch the video below:


As you can see, Cutts does make it clear that Google can easily tell the difference between a guest blog and a blog that paid for links, so no worries there.  Still, moderation will allow you to make sure that you are not just spinning articles; you’re actually writing meaningful content, which will be better for your reputation in the long run.

Do you have a guest blogging strategy that doesn’t worry about moderation? What do you think is the best way to use guest blogging to your advantage? Let us know your story and your thoughts in the comments below.

Amanda DiSilvestro gives small business and entrepreneurs SEO advice ranging from keyword density to recovering from Panda and Penguin updates. She writes for HigherVisibility.com, a nationally recognized SEO firm that offers online marketing services to a wide range of companies across the country.

reelWebDesign.com Becomes A Yext® Certified Partner & Adapts to Change

Content creation, content marketing, Google glass, Mobile Marketing, Organic SEO, SEO, Small Business Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Technology, The Importance Of Content Creators, Video marketing, Web Design, , , , ,

google-hummingbirdAs the SEO world has recently been turned on its head by the new Penguin 2.1 and Hummingbird algorithm we at reelWebDesign.com are compelled to focus more on two areas:

  1. Helping small businesses with local SEO (getting you found locally on the web with geographically driven keywords and intentions in mind).
  2. Helping you with social media marketing and content production.

Our focus will be in these two areas more than ever and it will benefit your business and ours in many ways.
How?
Google’s new algorithm is centered around people and helping them find what they are looking for. In essence they have bcome the new ASK.com (even though they’d never admit it), but where ASK had failed to deliver good results Google claims that they will deliver excellent results, and who am I to argue with them as they do own the worlds largest search engine!  So content is what we are going to focus on for our clients. However, many local businesses like pizza parlors and locksmiths don’t need to answer a lot of questions for their consumers and others just don’t have time or money to create fresh content, for these businesses they just need to be found! That’s the second part of Google’s algorithm: where having citations is more important than ever (a citation is basically a listing on any of the major local directories and social networks on the web i.e. Foursquare, Yelp, zagat, 8Coupons, Citysearch etc.).  So we have partnered with Yext to make it inexpensive, consistent and easy to implement.  Note: Consistency is extremely important as the search engines will see the same business as a separate entity if listed with different names, phone numbers or addresses.  This inconsistency will water down your search or ‘Google juice’, thereby lowering your ranking.

In addition to teaming up with Yext® we are offering a free Google plus/places listing optimization as part of our local SEO plan.  Google, as no surprise, values it’s own social networks, Google Plus and Google Places over all others. We believe this focus on providing relevant content, social media management and marketing and local SEO with Yext® as our partner will provide excellent results for all new and current customers.  Please watch the video below about the Yext® service.

responsive_web_designer

Our focus will also be to deliver responsive or mobile ready web design (responsive web design is developing a website that changes or responds to diferent sized screens for a better user experience.  Example: Our website is responsive and will appear differently on your laptop, tablet and phone).  

Why responsive/mobile ready?

mobile-search-dataAnalytics firm BIA/Kelsey has predicted that mobile search queries will overtake desktop queries by 2015. If your website isn’t mobile ready then you’ll be missing out on the larger piece of search.  Compound this with the push in the SEO world to focus more on local search and you’ll understand that mobile search is the area of largest growth and the best bet for acquiring new customers from this point forward.

Social Media

So where does social media fit into the equation? Social media is similar to the old word of mouth marketing… on steroids! It allows for your message to be broadcast to countless people in an extremely fast fashion.  It also helps with search engine rankings.  The more a post is shared the more the search engines see it as valuable. Google+, although an underused social network by most,  is extremely important as Google values it above all other social networks. For this reason we post your message to the main 4 driving forces on the social web: Google+, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.  If you have a blog we’ll also post your article/blog post to various other networks as well including: Delicious, StumbleUpon, Plurk, Newsvine, Scoopit, Diigo, Folk and Hubpages to name a few.  This will not only boost your viewership but also your Alexa rating which influences search engine ranking as well.  It is from the social networks that search engines are able to personalize your user expereince and give you results that are customized for your personal liking’s.  So as you can see social media is an extremely important factor in online marketing and its value to both people and search engines is growing more important every year.

Conclusion

It’s been a tumultuous year in search marketing but I believe I know where it is all headed and I see why Google is doing this great transition. With Google watches, glasses and more voice search integration on the horizon the way we perform and undertake search is going to change dramatically. Search will move more towards speech and visual cues with geographical underpinnings wrapped around your personal likes and dislikes i.e. personalized mobile search.  People will be asking more questions about: ‘what’s in the area’, ‘how to do things’, ‘what do you know about this’ and ‘what’s going on now that I would like’.  From this information, surprisingly, we can see that small businesses do have a future as there will be more of a need to discover and cater to micro-niches.  So as long as we, small businesses, focus on a niche and excel at it we can have a successful life as Google and other social networks will actually be driving people towards us.

The future brings more focus to everything, the question is what will your business focus on, and our job at reelWebDesign.com will be to find you your appropriate crowd through all of our partner networks including our latest, Yext®.

By Peter Marino owner of reelWebDesign.com, a company helping small businesses find their niche.

5 Simple Ways To Speed Up Your WordPress Blog

Blogging, Small Business Marketing, Wordpress, , ,

WordPress pluginsWordPress is a blogging platform which has so many features that will enable its users to customize their blog to meet their needs. There are thousands of plugins, themes, and scripts available for WordPress that can be installed easily to enhance your blog performance. However, using too many features of WordPress for your blog can potentially slow down your blog speed. Here are 5 simple ways to speed up your WordPress blog:

1. Remove Unnecessary Plugins

Plugins can be useful for your blog, but too many plugins will affect your blog load speed. In other words, if you have too many plugins installed on your WordPress blog, your visitors will have more time to wait your blog to load completely. That’s why it is necessary for you to remove plugins that you don’t really use. If you have some unused plugins, you should remove them completely from your WordPress blog. In this way, you can improve your blog performance.

2. Simplify Your Widgets

Sometimes, having too many widgets will also make your blog load slowly. So, don’t clutter your blog with useless widgets that don’t really help your visitors at all. Some widgets are beautiful to put on your blog, but are they really necessary for you? For instance, displaying pictures from Flickr might allow your visitors to see beautiful pictures while they read your blog, but is it necessary for you? Unless you’re having an image-hosting blog, it won’t be necessary for you. So, you should simplify your widgets to boost your blog speed and make your blog as clean as possible.

3. Compress Your Images And Use Wp Super Cache

Compress your images so that your visitors can load your blog images quickly. Be sure to use the WP Super Cache plugin as well. This plugin increases your blog loading time significantly. This plugin will create HTML files for your dynamic blog. So, instead of loading your blog through PHP scripts, the plugin will just load the HTML files, which will make the load time faster.

4. Use A Simple WordPress Theme

Your WordPress theme can also contain lots of files and media that can only slow the speed of your blog. It is better for you to use a simple WordPress theme, which have less images and less media files within it. Make sure that this theme is optimized for SEO as well, so that your blog will have a good performance in the search engine. Changing your WordPress theme can effectively fix your blog speed problem.

5. Use A Web Hosting Service Specialized For WordPress

If you have an extensive blog, with heavy content updates every day, you should consider using a web hosting service that is specialized for WordPress. The difference between using a regular web hosting service and using the service which is specialized for WordPress is that the specialized WordPress hosting is fully optimized for WordPress, which means it has been tweaked to ensure that every WordPress blog can run smoothly and load quickly with it. So, if you want to speed up your WordPress blog significantly, using a specialized WordPress hosting will help you to do it.

Those are some simple ways to speed up your WordPress blog. Follow the tips above to ensure maximum performance of your blog and prevent your visitors from getting frustrated when they try to access your blog.

About Chris

Chris is an SEO Consultant who is an expert in helping websites owners understand ranking effects and how website loading and other aspects affect web rankings. He recently used a new application called www.readycache.com to boost website loading speed.

Learn How To Implement Effective Content Marketing For Global Success

Content creation, content marketing, Small Business Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Video marketing, Viral marketing, YouTube Marketing, , ,

The world of marketing is changing rapidly. In the information age, traditional methods of advertising have begun to lose their luster, forcing companies to raise the bar on how they market their brands and products. Central to this new advertising paradigm is content marketing: attracting customers not by “selling” them a brand, but instead by creating interesting, entertaining, or compelling content that will guide customer behavior without making an explicit sales pitch. Many large brands are now making effective use of content marketing to change the way customers engage with their brand.

Vouchercloud®

When it comes to variety, Vouchercloud® offers instant delivery of money-saving coupons on mobile devices and voucher codes for online shopping. The use of social media and YouTube is to showcase its content marketing and is delivered well. Check out this video below, that silently showcases a family enjoying the benefits of Vouchercloud® as they travel through a fictional restaurant meal, train ride, and movie theater — all without making a traditional sales pitch. Videos such as these showcase the benefits of services that Vouchercloud offer without the need for spokespeople or even explanations of their services, instead focusing on a brief, entertaining video that shows customers what their service is all about and the discounts they can save.

Timex®

For its iconic IRONMAN brand, venerable watch company Timex® knew it had to break out of its traditional advertising practices and focus on a new kind of marketing. They eventually unveiled the “I am a Runner” campaign, choosing to focus not on the products themselves, but on the storytelling opportunities involved in running and the Ironman challenge. Timex® already had a strong connection to the Ironman running challenge, and so capitalized on that connection by creating a Facebook app that collected runners’ stories and photos and allowed real athletes to share their experiences.

Burberry®

Clothing company Burberry®, one of the oldest fashion brands in the industry at 157 years, sought to freshen up their market image and take some new approaches to advertising. Investing heavily in digital advertising, Burberry® launched two projects. The Burberry® Acoustic project, unveiled in 2010, featured a series of videos showcasing up-and-coming British musicians (all wearing Burberry® clothing, of course), and the Burberry® Kisses project involved a website that allowed users to capture their unique “kiss print” on their computer webcams, modify the kisses with virtual “lipstick,” and then share with others. The focus on customer engagement and participation spread awareness of Burberry’s iconic brand.

Red Bull®

One of the most memorable and resonant content marketing campaigns in recent memory has come from Red Bull®. The energy drink company took its slogan (“Red Bull gives you wings”™) to the limit when, as the centerpiece to their “Stratos” campaign, they sent daredevil Felix Baumgartner into space to perform a record-breaking dive from low orbit. The video of the jump, which showed Baumgartner’s successful plummet to earth at Mach 1.25, garnered over eight million simultaneous live streams on YouTube. The photos of Baumgartner’s landing on Facebook gathered over 200,000 “likes” within minutes of its posting. Red Bull created massive awareness for its brand and raised the bar for content marketing everywhere, without turning the Stratos event into a commercial.

The scale and scope of Red Bull’s® marketing efforts have raised the bar for other content marketers worldwide — not every company, obviously, can afford to send a man into space to promote their products. But in the world of content marketing, ingenuity and creativity frequently trump limitless budgets and high production values, and with enough inventiveness, even the most modest content marketing effort can achieve a massive audience.

Author: Hannah is a writer who works alongside the travel, fashion and food brands for vouchercloud.com. We look forward to hearing your thoughts on content marketing for success and any tips you may have.