5 best ways to improve web content for ranking in Google

When you want the content to be good, you need to learn the best writing techniques on the Internet. By studying how to write for the SEO, you can produce quality content that creates consumer confidence with your audience, which can contribute to brand-new, loyal buyers, and sales.

In this article, we will discuss five ways of writing for the web and cover the fundamentals of online writing that will help your organization produce excellent content that will help you improve your Google ranking.

1. Know more about your audience

It is important that you consider your target before you produce any material for your web. Your audience is reading your post. You want to make sure the material resonates with them. Your main market is targeted towards consumers involved in the goods or services.

You will see who uses your resources to consider the audience’s characteristics or who sells your goods. Knowing the activities, preferences, demographic statistics, problems and more for the market is important. You know how to touch them with your material, because you know your audience. You should realize from your company what your audience needs, and build content that resonates with them.

Understanding your audience is very critical, so that you can use a language and tone that resounds with them. You want to be appropriate for and cater to the viewers. Using their words and speak sound helps you more relevant to the audience. If you choose to implement published best practices for the site, begin by defining your target market. It’ll help lead you through persuasive content development.

2. Optimize your SEO content

Some of the most important aspects of site publishing is preparing your material for SEO. If you want people to find your stuff, you need to customize it to show up on sites like Google, Yahoo, or Bing in search results.

Let’s look through several of the best practices to automate the SEO content:

Keywords:

Keywords cause the page to show up in specific search results. You want to pick long-tail keywords, including three or more phrases, to make the material shown in the search results. If writing on the Internet, you’ll want keywords to be embedded into your sites to help your readers locate your material.

Link building:

External links allow you to hold your website visitors longer, which will increase the rating of your website and enable more users to access your material. Through linking to other related pages on your website, you provide more detail to your audience and help them familiarize themselves with your brand. Use a link maker to produce quality links for your website.

3. Use plagiarism free content

As you build new sites and articles for your web, revising your articles is important. You would like to add error-prone pages on your website. Through editing your material, you’ll have clean copies for your audience.

It is important that you do not instantly edit the content after you have published it. Missing mistakes would be that the knowledge is already new on your head. Waiting for a couple of hours and uploading it, or making someone else check it for you, is safest.

Use a tool like grammar checker to help you identify and correct any spelling or grammatical mistakes if you choose to edit instantly. Although this won’t help you test the truth of your post, it will help you create a clean piece of paper.

While writing for a website, check your content for plagiarism and make sure it is plagiarism-free. Plagiarized content is very bad for your ranking. Use a plagiarism checker to check your content for plagiarism.

4. Write short but comprehensive paragraphs

Keeping the material digestible to your audience is important if you’re writing for the web. By creating a material that is dense, you will easily lose confidence in your audience. You’ll want to switch between short and long sentences while writing website material. In the most part, use simple phrases to get right to the point. This lets you dodge misleading stuff or fluff.

If the sentences are too lengthy, then you risk losing the focus of your audience. We can miss the way the sentence started or the paragraph meaning. The simple phrases are simpler to learn and comprehend. As for your articles, holding them at 2-3 sentences is easiest. If you have 6-8 sentence paragraphs, it will make your page appear daunting. Your viewer does not want to read the material because that’s going to be overwhelming.

You make the material easy to read and follow along by making short paragraphs. Your viewers can interpret the material quickly, or skim it. Formatting the material into short paragraphs provides a smoother experience for your viewers. Use a paraphrasing tool to properly paraphrase your content.

5. Use valuable content first

It is crucial that you first communicate the most valuable details while making content and writing for new sites. Your audience has a limited period of time, so they can leave your site before they read your complete post.

You’ll place the most useful and relevant knowledge first with the inverted pyramid process. Most businesses make the error of carrying their most significant argument right to the top. To hold the users on the page longer, they seek to build up excitement to their most critical level. The reality is that it does the reverse. If you’re not placing the most valuable content first, the viewers won’t be able to remain on your website. The client is less inclined to continue on your website if they are unable to access the details they need.

Let’s assume you write an article about restaurants. Talk about what the audience wants to see from the content before you launch. You want the most important details to be brought in first. In this scenario, a restaurant checklist can be given to your readers in the first part of your post, accompanied by a segment outlining what each restaurant is offering. The final section of your article could concentrate on the various services of restaurants.

When somebody didn’t have time to read the post, they might take a fast peek at the beginning of the document and scroll down to the end and leave. Such users can still return to your article for more detail. Using this approach to render writing effectively for a website is very useful. This approach should ensure that you first offer the most important knowledge to your readers, which will allow them to start reading.

Summary

It is important that you adopt best practices when developing website content for the web to help you thrive. You want to make sure you put quality content out for your audience when you are writing for a website.

Testing video object schema coding on a new page

Google structured data tool, click to enlarge

Google structured data tool, click to enlarge

In the hard slog towards building a true Semantic Web, “rich data” is one of the stops. Marking video, audio, article content, products and many other types of data allows it to be categorized much more easily, and in a much more precise, specific and versatile way than old HTML meta tags.

We have recently created a new furniture liquidators page on the website of our client Universal Hotel Liquidators; we have marked an embedded video on the page with extensive rich data.

In order to validate rich data snippets, you can use the convenient Google structured data validation tool, which allows you to input any URL and see if the meta data is entered correctly. In this post, you can see an example of meta data testing on the new page we added for our client.

While most, if not all, of the fields can be omitted – for example, you can enter the video thumbnail URL but not the video’s duration – the more information you enter, the more capabilities your site will have for organizing and managing your data, and the more likely your data will be to get properly parsed and categorized by search engines. This is why using structured data properly is important for online businesses, if they want to increase the chance of their products showing up in online shopping directories such as Google Shopping.

This is only a small sample of what structured data can do for you and your site; mastering this powerful tool will only become more important as more activity happens online.

Could the Godaddy SEO Tool really work?

We’ve worked on hundreds of websites over the years, and every week we hear from someone we served in the past. This week we received a call requesting information on SEO services for a new domain a client had setup on Godaddy website builder. They were going to first try Godaddy’s SEO service and get back to us after giving that a chance. I thought it was worth providing some insight into what you’re really buying with a service that’s about $3 per month.

The Godaddy seo tool really only offers 3 things

  1. Submission – This is a service that is a free tool from the major search engines, and there is no reason to pay a monthly fee for it, hence the low price.
  2. PayPerClick – If you aren’t familiar with this, we’d be glad to discuss, but for their pricing they cannot have any significant budget at play for you
  3. Analysis – They will give you a report telling you what you need to do, but you will still have to do it. You can generate a similar report with a free tool online.

I would also note that the website builder tool produces a fairly poorly coded website, something that negatively impact search rankings.

While there is nothing wrong with trying out an affordable tool, website owners should not assume that this will serve as a solution for building a website that can earn and maintain top organic rankings in Google. You will need to invest time into expanding the content on your site to lay the groundwork to compete effectively for valuable keywords.

 

Acxiom: Local Search’s Most Influential Data Aggregator

In our last post, Factual: A Key Player in Local Search, we talked about the data aggregator Factual and its impact on local search marketing. In this post, we will discuss Acxiom, a more established and prominent data aggregator.

About The Company

Acxiom is a publicly-traded company that was founded in 1969. The company is headquartered in Little Rock, Arkansas. According to Wikipedia, “Acxiom offers marketing and information management services…Acxiom collects, analyzes, and parses customer and business information for clients, helping them to target advertising campaigns, score leads, and more”. According to Forrester Research, Acxiom is one of the leading database marketing services and technology companies in the world.

As A Data Aggregator

Acxiom has a major influence on the local search ecosystem. According to Moz Local, Acxiom is the primary or secondary feed to several important directories, especially Superpages, YP.com, and Google My Business (formerly Google+ Local):

Courtesy of Moz Local

Courtesy of Moz Local

Acxiom says their information goes to the following places:

  • Directly to over 80 companies in the Internet Yellow Page and Local Search marketplace
  • Directly to the largest search engines
  • 250+ distribution partners through online private labeled solutions
  • Directly to the top directory print publishers

Because of Acxiom’s powerful influence on the local search ecosystem, it is important that you take control of your listing in their database. We’ve seen instances where a company’s Google listing has their current address while Acxiom has their older address. This seemingly minor inconsistency led to the Google listing being suspended.

Claiming Your Listing 

The good news is that, unlike Factual, it’s relatively easy to claim and modify an Acxiom listing. The first step is to create an account in Acxiom’s My Business Listing Manager. Once logged in, you need to search for your business to see if it’s already there. If not, you must create a listing. Listing verification can be done via telephone or through submitting official documents that contain the business’s name and address.

For the most part, creating and claiming an Acxiom listing is pretty straightforward, but complications can arise. At 3PRIME LLC, Acxiom is an essential part of our Local SEO package. We believe having Acxiom under control, a lot of common problems in local search marketing can be avoided.

To receive a proposal for our annual program to optimize local search rankings and use online business listings for effective marketing, contact us today!

Image Credits:

  1. http://d1avok0lzls2w.cloudfront.net/uploads/blog/522f825795c145.51334569.jpg

Factual: A Key Player in Local Search

Local search directories (such as Google My Business, Yahoo Local, and Bing Places) get their information on business from several key sources:

  • The primary source is the companies themselves.
  • The second source is users who submit information (such as photos) about business.
  • The third source is other local search directories.
  • The fourth (and often most overlooked source) is from data aggregators.

What Is a Data Aggregator?

Data aggregators are vast databases that local search directories regularly verify their listing information against. Some of the more well-known data aggregators include Infogroup, Axciom, and Localeze. Local search directories often get their information using a combination of the sources listed above. However there are some directories that get all the information from a single data aggregator and no other source. All of this results in a very complicated local search ecosystem.

Courtesy of Moz Local

Courtesy of Moz Local

Overall, data aggregators are the most trusted source for business information and essentially serve as the backbone of local search.

Who Is Factual?

Factual is one of the newest (but least known) data aggregators. It was established in 2007 and is headquartered in Los Angeles, with offices in San Francisco and Shanghai. According to their website, Factual has data for “over 65 million local businesses and points of interest in 50 countries”. Factual strives to clean up and standardize data, while preventing duplicate and erroneous listings. Even though Factual doesn’t have the same name recognition as the other 3 data aggregators, its influence is not to be underestimated. As you can see below, Factual is the primary feed to Apple Maps and Yelp, and a secondary feed to Bing and Trip Advisor. Factual also has some influence over Google My Business (formerly Google + Local).

Courtesy of Moz Local

Courtesy of Moz Local

The above map on Factual was created in 2013 so it is safe to assume that Factual’s influence on local search has grown since then.

Fixing Your Business Information on Factual

Unlike the other data aggregators (Infogroup, Axciom, and Localeze), Factual doesn’t allow users to update business information directly on their website. Instead, you must go through a “Trusted Data Contributor (TDC)”. Some well known TDCs include GoDaddy, Moz, and Yext. In order to fix your business information, you must sign up for a paid membership for one of these TDCs. Costs vary depending on the package you purchase.

Image Credits:

1: http://d1avok0lzls2w.cloudfront.net/uploads/blog/522f818cc55bd8.75231791.jpg
2: http://d1avok0lzls2w.cloudfront.net/uploads/blog/522f82670ed1d4.47301709.jpg

Understanding Google Conversions Concepts

Conversion tracking can be very valuable, but requires planning to execute properly. To properly set it up, you need to define specifically what constitutes a “conversion” meaning what action would a website visitor have to have taken that would indicate that they took a concrete step in the buying process.

google analytics goal conversionConsidering a general “brochure” or non-ecommerce website, here are examples of a customer that converts:

Submits a Contact or Quote Request form
Submits an Appointment or Reservation Form
Visits a Specific page
Signs up for Newsletter

What is key is that for each of these “actions” there must be a unique URL, a Thank You page, for each, where we can place “conversion code”, or at least define that URL as only being visited upon a successful conversion. This means that if that code is loaded, that specific conversion just happened, and can be tracked.

There are 2 ways that this can be setup:

  1. Goal Conversion in Google Analytics
    Once we define the steps that would have to happen for the conversion to have taken place, we define each URL that would apply as a “funnel” in Google analytics. As long as the regular analytics code is on all pages of the website, you don’t need extra coding, you just need to be sure that you have unique URLs for each step in the process.
  2. Adwords Conversion
    To set this up, we’d install google conversion code from adwords on each of the “thank you” pages for each action. Then in adwords, we can see which keywords are converting.

The first step is to clear any roadblocks, like making thank you pages, and define specific URLs that constitute a conversion funnel, or path a visitor takes through a website on the way to being a successful conversion.

How do I completely learn SEO?

Am interested in learning SEO completely am an B-tech Graduate, what should be my key skills?
– Arun P. 24 / M / Chennai, India

Learning SEO Completely is a tall order. You’re going to need to learn from experience. Start by picking a goal, a keyword you want to earn a first page ranking in Google. Make it a phrase with 5-6 words so it won’t take 6 months for results. Then, build the best page/result you can make for it. You’ll need useful content and inbounds links to your page to earn a Google ranking.

On a philosophical note, SEO may not be learned completely since what works changes regularly. That said, our long held general approach to SEO has remained the same since 2004

The best answer for the implied question in a given keyword phrase will be preferred by search engines. The best answer is well written, well-optimized and has lots of references to it from other informative website resources.

Good luck with your new project!

Senator Rockefeller Warns Google, Microsoft And Yahoo: Dodgy Movers Are Using SEO To Game Your Systems | TechCrunch

Senator Rockefeller Warns Google, Microsoft And Yahoo: Dodgy Movers Are Using SEO To Game Your Systems | TechCrunch.

John D. Rockefeller, the Chairman of the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, late on Tuesday sent letters to Google, Microsoft and Yahoo alerting them to how their search engines are being gamed through search engine optimization Continue »

aio-seo pack for wordpress and the %post_title% as text

I ran into this issue for someone this week when cleearing out issues from Google webmaster tools. specifically I was trying to remove the problem of duplicate descriptions for web pages from their blog posts. here’s what All-in-One-SEO has for the meta description setting:

normal-description

Here’s what I wanted it to do:

description-with-%post_title%

But what it did was put add this text to the beginning of my meta description tag!

I tried several other combinations, no luck. so I contacted the plugin developer and said:

Referring to this thread:
I have a client using this plugin, the free version, and I cannot get the meta description in posts to display the %post_title%. I was wondering if this bug was fixed in the pro version.

In their second response I gleened the following solution! Put this as your description:

description-with-%wp_title%

And Viola! My post title, pulled in using the variable “%wp_title%” is included in my meta description. Thanks Semper Fi Web Design, great plugin and valueble support responses!