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All posts by Peter Marino

Driving Blog Traffic – A Beginner’s Guide

Blogging, content marketing, Small Business Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Web Traffic

drive blog traffic“There’s an art to increasing a blog’s traffic” Rand Fishkin, The Moz Blog

I have blogged in the past – travel blogs, interest articles and personal online journals – but I was never truly aware of the power of driven blog traffic.

I have realized, though, that it is all very well churning out high quality, human content on a daily basis, blogging about your passion – writing freely about that which makes you tick – if no one is around the read it.

Unfortunately, unless you know how to maximise traffic to your blog, you might as well be shouting from the top of Everest. No one is going to hear you!

If your blog posts are ever going to have an impact on the online community or generate any revenue, it’s vital that lots of people read it!

So, how do you do it?

The experts have proven that great writing and great content is at the heart of SEO.

SEO, done right, should never interfere with great writing – SEO 101, The Moz Blog

Great writing leads to lots of fans and followers who will then create a buzz through links, tweets and shares. None of this can be achieved without making your site accessible and choosing good keywords, and only all together can you achieve great SEO and a great blog site.

A Hard-Hitting Title

It all starts with a hard-hitting and SEO-rich title. It needs to be clear and instantly recognizable to get people to click on it.

The Right Keywords

Blog content that is well written, but also rich in keywords is very SEO friendly. Do your research as to what people are typing into Google and Bing search boxes and tailor your keyword placement accordingly.

The more you understand the habits and behaviors of searchers, the higher you will rank in search engines, and the more traffic your blog will receive. Google Adwords is a fantastic tool for finding out about people’s search habits.

Encourage Links

Search engines also look at who is talking about you and linking to your blog page. Blogs with other sites linking to it are considered more valuable to search engines than those who don’t. Carefully chosen “anchor text” carries the links in your content, allowing it to blend naturally into the text.

Advice from the experts is to not overdo it with links and keywords to keep your blog content organic.

Use Social Media

It’s time to spread the word! Social media channels like Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn are the best tools you have at your disposal for publicising your blog and its content. Choose one or two that best suit the feel and content of your blog and then go for it. Create an engaged, loyal community and interact with them at every opportunity.

Analytics

You have done all the ‘driving’ you can, and your blog is ‘out there’, but how do you know if it is working? It is important that you run constant analytics on your blog, in order to gauge its reach, which posts attract more traffic and where you are ranking in search engines. Try Google Analytics for a start.

So that concludes our journey to discover the basics of driving targeted traffic to your blog. Learning how to drive traffic is an integral and vital part of the blogging process. Just as important, if not more, than crafting brilliant prose.

Our guest blogger, James Roberts, is an avid blogger and a professional copywriter. He loves travelling and takes his laptop with him wherever he goes. Why not follow him on Twitter?

Eight Tips For Driving Targeted Traffic with Quora

Business Tech, Content creation, content marketing, Quora marketing, Small Business Marketing, Social Media Marketing, , , ,

If you’re after backlinks, you have nothing if not choices. One choice that many people seem to miss however is Quora.com. Often billed as Yahoo Answers on steroids, Quora is a Q&A site/social network that’s grown increasingly popular in recent years.

Quora backlinks might be no follow but that doesn’t stop them being highly reputable. And more importantly, the Q&A nature of the website often makes them an excellent source of highly targeted direct traffic.

If you’d like to increase your website or blogs exposure with Quora, here are eight simple tips for doing just that.

Create a Winning Profile

First off, if you’re new to Quora, you’re going to want to invest some time in your profile. Special care should be taken when choosing both your avatar and tagline. Both will be displayed every time you post something. You should also include a few personal details together with any niche relevant professional experience. The better your profile, the more people will visit your website to learn more about you.

Follow the Right Topics and Users

Quora allows you to select the kind of questions that you’re most interested in by choosing both topics and users to follow. Take the time to choose topics that are relevant to your niche and users who are actively discussing it. Once you’ve done this, you’ll be greeted with relevant questions every time you log in to Quora. This is one of the things that makes Quora so valuable, not only for traffic, but also for new content ideas.

Quality Matters

If you’ve built backlinks on Yahoo Answers, you’re likely to have noticed that the amount of traffic you get is largely dependent on the quality of your answers. On Quora, quality is even more important. The best answers get up voted to the top of the page, the worst answers get down voted to the bottom. If you want results on Quora, taking the time to craft answers that people actually value is therefore crucial.

Learn What Makes a Popular Answer

Get liked on Quora for authority

If you’re not sure what constitutes a good answer on Quora, the easiest way to educate yourself on the matter is to simply spend time browsing the site. You’re likely to find that the best answers are typically:

Written by somebody who’s well qualified to answer

Very detailed, with references where applicable.

Written in easy to understand, non-technical language.

Entertaining and enjoyable to read.

Answer the Right Questions

quality and quantity is important on Quora

Unlike Yahoo Answers, being the first to answer a question on Quora offers no real advantage. When choosing questions to answer, you should instead focus on both the number and type of followers. Are they people who are actually likely to visit your website? You should also look at the existing answers and ask yourself whether or not you’re capable of writing something better.

Ask Your Own Questions

Ask on Quora for authority

If you want to make the most of your time on Quora, don’t limit yourself to other peoples conversations, start your own. Here are a few tips for asking questions that get attention:

Don’t ask questions that have already been asked.

Ask questions that genuinely make people think.

Ask questions that are relevant to your website but don’t be obvious.

Include long tail keywords to get your questions ranked in Google.

Be Tactful

Be tactful on Quora

While there’s certainly nothing wrong with joining Quora solely for promotional purposes, if you want your content to stick, excessive self promotion needs to be avoided.

Don’t link to your blog unless it actually contains relevant information. Don’t talk yourself up, let your answers speak for themselves. Focus on providing a quality answer first, and building a backlink second.

Connect with People

Finally, while there’s no denying the value of Quora for driving traffic, don’t forget that it can also be a powerful tool for connecting with other people in your niche. Quora is, after all, a social network. And if you want to truly harness its power, it’s important to actually be social.

Take the time to engage with the community. Be helpful and don’t be afraid to discuss topics that are not directly associated with your niche. Engage with the Quora community and you’ll be rewarded with more than just traffic.

This post has been contributed by Jake Cornwall, an employee at Vayu Media, an internet marketing firm. He is very passionate about photography and he shares his ideas, as well as suggestions, through blogging.

What in the World is Google Doing with Hummingbird!

Content creation, content marketing, Link Building, SEO, Small Business Marketing, Social Media Marketing

google hummingbird updateGoogle Hummingbird Update As of October 9, 2013

For those of you that have a website that was currently ranking for different keywords you may have noticed a disheartening minor or major drop in ranking. Google has recently launched 2 algorithms. One is Hummingbird and the other is Penguin 2.1. Hummingbird has to do with quality fresh content detection and Penguin 2.1 has to do with spam-filtering.

The general overall pattern seems to suggest Google likes content oriented sites and sites that regularly update their website.  Many of the sites which fell in rankings either lack text-based or video content or did not update the site regularly with unique offers/content.  On-page search engine optimization is not just about having the right meta information any more. It seems Google is actively targeting sites which do not update their on-page content since Hummingbird is designed to look for the content originator.  This means on page schema coding is more important than ever!

Me and my team do differing amounts of link building from different networks and record them just to see the effect it has every time an update gets rolled out. After careful consideration, I decided to discontinue the links from some of our partner networks and invest more on custom built blogs or blogs with high Google authority.

My team and I just made a major change to how the links are distributed during the syndication process. Instead of adding 4 links on some of the article pages with differing anchor tags, we have limited it to 2.  We are making all ‘click here’ anchor tags as no follow links.  Due to this process, you may see some link loss over time. We do strongly believe this process will help everyone in the long run. We’ve also decided to include more co-citations in the articles we create to help with the new algorithm.  What is co-citation? Read here for more.

What I am also seeing is irregular patterns which do not single out any one single factor. Some webpages and sites just seem to have randomly lost rankings while others gained traction from the same domain.

We are fighting an uphill battle since we just never know what Google will do next. There are some reports that Google will de-rank a site if almost no one clicks on the site while it stays on page 1 even though you are doing everything correctly SEO wise. All we can do now is constantly make an educated guess and deal with it. I highly recommend regularly updating your websites and adding a blog to your site and/or post articles on other sites as a guest blogger.  Thus, our focus at reelWebDesign.com will be starting to go deeper into the realm of content marketing as this is where Google is headed.
For current clients I am disappointed just as much as you are as we are at a time of such great change in SEO prompted by Google.  However, if we work together we can prevail, we’ll just need to cooperate with this giant that controls the Internet.  Content marketing seems like the most fool proof way of getting your website ranked and to add consistent traffic for the long term.  For more information and sample content marketing packages click here.

Peter MarinoA direct message from the owner of this blog,  Peter Marino.

Why The Surface Pro 2 Is The Perfect Device For Web Entrepreneurs

Business Tech, Small Business Marketing, Technology, ,

surface 2If you run a website or blog, do SEO for a living or design websites, then you are a ‘web entrepreneur’. That makes you a particular kind of person and we can thus infer a few things about the way you probably live your life. Chances are that you travel a fair amount while you work, you are probably self-employed and you probably have at least some interest in gadgets and technology.

As such, you are probably the kind of person that Microsoft is targeting with their Surface Pro line of products and you should probably be interested in the recent news of Surface Pro 2 which is now just around the corner. Unveiled at the recent ‘Surface Event’, the Pro 2 aims to be everything that a tech entrepreneur could possibly need and it would seem they might just be correct. Read on to find out why…

What is the Surface?

 

The Surface Pro 2 is of course the natural evolution of the Surface Pro. This is a tablet ‘slate’ device that runs full Windows using 4 Gigabytes of RAM and an Intel i5 processor. In short, whereas the iPad is essentially a big smartphone, this is more of a compact PC and can do anything that you would normally use a PC for.

In keeping with this aim, the Surface Pro also came with a kickstand built in and a set of attachable cover accessories with built-in keyboards for inputting text quickly. Combine this with the pressure sensitive Wacom stylus and you have a device that’s highly productive but also convenient to hold in one hand when you just want to read the news, when you want to show a client your web design, or when you’re carrying it to the coffee shop under one arm.

Pros of Pro 2

But the Surface Pro in its original form was not for everyone. Why? Well one big issue was the battery life which was only around four hours – low for an ultrabook and really low for a tablet. Another was the kickstand and cover. While these were great features they were lacking when you came to use the device on your lap on the bus, or when you had to rest it on a table much lower than yourself.

The Pro 2 however should address both these issues. The new Haswell processor that is being used will not only greatly improve performance (by 20% reportedly), but will also give the device 75% more battery life (around 7 hours). Throw in a ‘power cover’ and that goes up to around 14 hours.

Meanwhile the Kickstand has been improved to now support two separate viewing angles. This way you can comfortably rest the tablet on your lap and type or on a low down table. Throw in better performance all around and a more colour-accurate screen with better glare resistance and you have a device that’s ideal for those of us who like to work on the go, and who like the sounds of drawing our designs onto the screen with our device on our laps.

Today’s featured writer, Brady Fisher, works at 7 Strategy, a company that offers comprehensive SEO services. He owns a fantastic toolkit and uses it to do restoration work in his spare time.