Category Archives: SEO

What is Evergreen Content?

Blogging, Copywriting, SEO, Small Business Marketing, Social Media Marketing, ,

What is evergreen content

You know that content is an important factor for SEO.  You might also have read about the importance of producing ‘evergreen content’ in order to give your site lasting SEO value and keep visitors coming back to your pages repeatedly. So what is evergreen content? And how can businesses use it to drive web traffic and SEO results? Let’s take a look.

When it comes to content marketing, evergreen content is perhaps the most important staple that you need to have in your copywriting diet.

However, many people do not understand the definition of evergreen content, nor why it is so important. We looked at some of the key principles behind evergreen content creation, and analyzed how it can make such a difference to your website.

Defining Evergreen Content

Evergreen content is a piece of writing that will retain its relevance long into the future, ideally for months, if not years. This means that a piece of evergreen content will attract visitors to your site, even if something has been written six months ago. If you work in an industry that is reasonably stagnant and slow to evolve, then your content could be valuable for years at a time.

While it is true that Google loves original content, if you search a particular keyword, you’re still going to be shown the best piece of writing for your needs, irrespective of when it was produced.

As a result, a piece of evergreen content will still see an initial spike in visitors when it is first uploaded or indexed by Google, but in the time that follows, there will still be regular traffic to the page, rather than a total drop off in visitor numbers.

How to Write Evergreen Contentwriting

The best approach to take to evergreen content is to look at it as a resource post. By approaching it in this manner, you will be able to build up your reputation for communicating quality information and quickly earn a regular readership for your site.

Write your content in a way that will be easy to update should anything change within the industry. For example, if you are writing resources for local SEO, you will want to be able to easily amend anything should new citation techniques, for example, become available, or Google implement an algorithm that changes how local businesses can rank.

This is in contrast to a regular blog post, where you might talk about a recent event within the industry or speculation regarding something that might occur. While this might be valuable content, it is likely to lose its relevance quickly, and regular posts of this manner will be needed to maintain traffic.

Your Content Marketing Strategy

Please do not take this as an instruction to stop writing blogs and other spontaneous posts. While evergreen content has the potential to be a long-term SEO benefit, you should remember that a variety of writing is the best approach to bringing in traffic and additional business.

Rather than making evergreen content your only strategy, make it a central part of it, and fill your site with a range of resources, from white papers to ‘How To’ guides, and you’ll quickly find your traffic and site popularity on the rise.

Peter Marino is a digital marketing specialist who works with small and medium sized businesses to develop high-quality website content that helps companies rank higher on search engines.

Create Online & Offline Branding Strategies That Support Each Other

Copywriting, Reputation, SEO, Small Business Marketing, Social Media Marketing

Branding both online and offlineTo keep up with their competitors, companies should be cognizant of the power of offline branding. Even online merchants use offline branding, whether it’s in the form of multi-million dollar advertising campaigns or through word-of-mouth from employees. “Branding strategies are more than just a company’s image; it encompasses the experience you want people to have when interacting with your organization,” says Jody Bivens, art director at UPBrand, a firm that helps companies to hone their brand visibility. “It is important to keep your branding consistent so people ‪have the same experience with your company every time. That means the look, feel and tone of your brand’s voice – both digitally and in the physical world – should reflect what you want your company to stand for.” Continue reading for tips on how to build on and manage your company’s brand reputation and align your offline and online advertising.

Types of Offline Brands

Analyze your audience, and determine what offline brand types are most effective for converting new customers, as well as reinforcing relationships with current ones. If your target market is not Internet savvy, consider talk radio ads. Print campaigns, billboards, television commercials, and vehicle wraps may work for businesses with large budgets. Business cards can be modified to fit your brand as well. If your brand prides itself on innovation, you could use plastic cards to convey a unique sensibility. Eco-friendly brands could print business cards on recycled or seed paper.

Other areas of offline branding to show consistency with online branding include stationery, annual reports, brochures, direct mail, and trade show banners. Grassroots advertising and word-of-mouth promotion can also help a company’s brand. Make sure your employees understand your brand’s mission and can effectively convey it to clients and prospects.

Brand Guidelines

Establish your brand’s guidelines and make sure your message is consistent across the board, to ensure continuity in all forms of advertising. Create a brand guideline handbook and send copies to your employees. Dean Marsden, video marketer at Koozai, a digital marketing firm, says this handbook should include the following:

  • A brand overview.
  • A logo visual guide with correct and incorrect logo usage example.
  • Brand colors for all forms of advertising.
  • A copywriting guide with tone of voice and correct brand name format.
  • A glossary of terms related to your brand.

If you use an outside ad agency, keep them updated with any changes in this handbook, so they will consistently know what the goal of your brand is. That way advertisements will reflect well on your brand and target the right consumers. Perfecting your brand’s tone of voice in its communication is vital and can only come with consistency.

Think about what makes your company stand out from the competition, and try describing your brand as a consumer, to glean insights, writes MailChimp content strategist Kate Kiefer Lee. She also suggests teams brainstorm, and use emotional responses to guide a brand’s tone.

By Peter Marino, owner of reelWebDesign.com, a complete digital marketing company in NYC.

Using People In Your Web Design – Make It Look Professional Rather Than Awkward

HTML5, SEO, Small Business Marketing, Web Design,

SEO Expert Peter MarinoFor a business there are many requirements that a website has to fulfill  but one of the most important is that it should look professional. You want your website to reflect your organization in only the best light and make it look like you are capable, resourceful and skilled in everything that you involve yourself with. If you have a website that looks sub-par, or that doesn’t have a professional edge to it, then people will instead think that you either lacked the skills and resources, or that you aren’t bothered about doing jobs to the best of your ability. If your website looks like a child made it, then who is going to want to entrust you to handle their finances, or sell them computer parts? What’s to say they won’t be just as shoddy?

 

With this in mind, using images of real people in your web design is a risky move and one that can go either way. While having people on your site can inspire confidence if it looks professionally done (the assumption would be that you hired professional models and photographers), it can also end up being unintentionally funny if they end up looking awkward or it’s obvious you took the pictures yourself. So how can you ensure that you get the human element right and make your site look corporate and impressive rather than like a fun day out with your friends?

 

Use the Right Services

The first thing to do is to outsource. You may be tempted to try and do this yourself, but unless you are professionally trained in taking and editing great photos and you have a model friend it won’t look right. Your web design company should be able to handle it for you, but if they can’t make sure you find someone who can.

 

The Models

You also need to make sure that you find the right models to demo your products or services for you. This means finding people who are attractive because this will make your company look more desirable and successful, and it means dressing them in a ‘power dressing’ kind of way. Look for diversity in your models too and you will make your business appeal to a wider audience.

 

Additionally you also need to ensure that your models are good actors – if they are even a little bit self conscious it will come across, so ensure they have experience behind a camera before pointing one at them.

 

Setting

The setting of your photos is equally important. If you have a professional looking work environment that says what you want to say about your business then it’s fine to use that as long as you have the right lighting. Otherwise, see if you can rent somewhere else or speak with your designers.

 

Editing

The way you edit your pictures can also have a big impact on how effective they are. This is again something best left to the pros, who will be able to enhance the lighting and contrast to give the images that glossy magazine-style feel, and who can use airbrushing to remove any blemishes or mistakes.

 

Author: Vadim Kirichenko is the brains behind today’s guest post. He likes sharing his views on online marketing and SEO. He says a good advertisement is the one which sells the product without drawing attention to itself. He also says that a good web design is nothing more than creative way of attracting people to your website.

The Easy and Search Friendly Way to
Setup 301 Redirects

HTML5, SEO, Small Business Marketing, Technology, Web Design

301 Redirect Using HTAccess fileAs many of you know I recently updated my entire website and in the process I had to setup 301 redirects for the new page names. Why should you do this when updating a site? It’s simple, when someone does a search on Google, Bing or Yahoo! it would yield a blank or 404 error page if there is no 301 redirect implemented.  A 301 redirect basically takes the old URL/page name and redirects it to the new page or URL.  Thus the information a prospective client is searching for will still come up seamlessly   This can mean the difference between a new client and a passerby.  But wait, couldn’t I have created the new pages with the old file names, Yes, I could have but I believe the newer page names I made are contextually more appropriate to the current content and making them more SEO friendly.  Also, I didn’t want to lose all of that old “Google juice” I had built up over the last 5 years, hence, I needed a 301 redirect.  There are many ways to setup 301 redirects but the following way is the easiest and most search engine friendly approach.  However, it should be noted that this  HTAccess approach is for Apache servers only.

Open a simple text file and name it .htaccess (you can not use Word or WordPad it must be a simple text editor with no formatting).

Depending on what you’re trying to do, redirect an entire site to a new domain or just redirect a page it would be as shown below.

Redirecting  a single page

Redirect 301 /oldpage.html http://www.yoursite.com/newpage.html
Redirect 301 /oldpage2.html http://www.yoursite.com/folder/

Redirect an entire site

This way does it with links intact. That is, www.oldsite.com/some/link.html will become www.newsite.com/some/link.html. This is extremely helpful when you are just “moving” a site to a new domain.
Place this on the OLD sites HTAccess file:
Redirect 301 / http://newsite.com/

Here is an example of my .htaccess file:
RewriteEngine on

ErrorDocument 404 /404.html

%{HTTP_HOST} ^www.reelwebdesign.com$
^/?$ "http\:\/\/reelWebDesign\.com" [R=301,L]

Redirect /web_SMM_packages_NYC.html http://reelwebdesign.com/social-media-marketing-plans.php
Redirect /web_SEO_packages_NYC.html http://reelwebdesign.com/SEO-packages-NYC.php
Redirect /web_design_ny.html http://reelwebdesign.com/contact.html
Redirect /online_public_relations.html http://reelwebdesign.com/press-release-writing.html
Redirect /pay-per-click-management.html http://reelwebdesign.com/PPC-management.html
Redirect /local_SEO_packages.html http://reelwebdesign.com/local-SEO-packages.php
Redirect /web-design-services.php http://reelwebdesign.com/web-design-services.html

Notice the 404 Error Document is telling the browser to go to my 404.html file. This is another handy feature to implement in your .htaccess file.

Happy redirecting!