Long tail SEO benefits for website owners

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Long tail SEO has many benefits to offer to website owners. Whether you are running an online shop, a content driven website, a blog or your company’s website, long tail SEO can help you get more organic traffic and more targeted customers.

Beginners to SEO may have troubles understanding what exactly long tail keywords are so it’s better to start by first explaining what we mean by long tail keywords and long tail SEO.

I remember reading about this 6-7 years ago; a lot of experts during that period talked about how you could make money fast by creating lots of posts targeting long tail keywords related to your niche.

Content quality was not at issue at that time, it was more important to keyword stuff your tittle and copy with instances of the long tail keywords and if you could throw a couple of links as well to the pages, you got yourself first ranking positions and the traffic started flowing in.

Despite the irony in my previous comment, the above method did work just fine and many bloggers and even companies made a fortune from it. Demand Media is a good example of a company who was running websites like livestrong that had pages of every keyword you could search for related to health, fitness and weight loss. About.com and ehow.com are a couple of more examples to understand better what I mean.

What are long tail keywords?

I will explain what we mean by long tail keywords by using some of my favourite keywords.

Let’s take for example the keyword “weight loss”. This is a very popular keyword and according to the Google keyword planner (previously the Google keyword tool) it has more than 250,000 exact keyword searches per month. It is also a high competitive keyword both in terms of advertising with Pay Per Click ads and for ranking for this term high in the search results.

If you search for this term on Google.com you will find in the first positions websites like webmd.com, Wikipedia.org and mayoclinic.com which are almost impossible to out rank with a normal website or blog.

So if it is impossible to rank for “weight loss” what is the next step? You go one step further by adding tail or tails to the existing keyword so as to narrow down your competition.

If you add the word ‘tips’ your keyword now becomes “weight loss tips” but it is still very difficult to target. According to keyword planner it is a high competition keyword and the first places in Google are occupied by highly trusted websites.

So what do you do? Add another word and it becomes “weight loss tips for men”. Looking for this term in the keyword planner you will notice that the competition is now ‘medium’ with not so big websites in the first position but it is still not good since what we want is ‘low’ competition keywords which are easier to target for ‘normal’ blogs or websites.

Changing the word ‘men’ with ‘teenagers’ so that our long tail keyword becomes “weight loss tips for teenagers” makes it a low competition keyword possible to target. Certainly the number of people searching for this keyword per month are a lot less compared to “weight loss” and “weight loss tips” but the benefits gained from ranking long tail keywords are much more than the traffic difference.

You also read another example of finding long tail keywords by reading my previous post: how to choose post titles

What is long tail SEO?

If this is not clear by now, long tail SEO is just a term that describes the process of trying to get more organic visits by targeting long tail keywords.

Easier to rank compared to non-long tail keywords – Provided that you are having a high quality web site long tail keywords are easier to rank especially if you choose low competition keywords.

More targeted visits – If you think about it for a second, those users that use long tail keywords to search for something can be considered more targeted because they already made the effort to make their search terms more specific. If we are talking about ‘buying’ or ‘action’ keywords then those are more likely to convert or perform an action.

Consider the following example:

“Cars” <- General search

“used cars for sale” <- looking for used cars

“used cars for sale in florida” <- looking for used cars in florida

“used ford focus for sale in florida” <-looking for used ford focus cards in florida

Help you build website authority and trust – Having a first page placement of any keyword is an indication of website authority and trust. One of the ways to get your website prepared to target more important keywords is to get as many first placements as you can for long tail keywords.

Of course this is not the only factor that will help you build authority but a number of first place placements together with good SEO can work towards that direction.

You will get more traffic than what the keyword planner is suggesting – The keyword planner and other tools have estimates about the traffic you can get if you have a place in one of the top positions but many times their estimates are not correct especially for long tail keywords. This is because the volume for long tail keywords is low and so is their sampling so they under-estimate. I have many examples of long tail keywords that bring in 10 times the traffic shown by the keyword tool so never reject a keyword because the traffic in the tools is low.

Now that you are convinced that long tail keywords are important, let’s see how you can find long tail keywords for your niche.

Google Keyword Planner: The Google keyword planner is your starting point. You can use it to try different keyword ideas and find those low competition keywords to target. One nice feature I have seen in the keyword planner and don’t remember seeing this in the old keyword tool is the option to search keywords by competition. Under keyword filters (on the left) you can select to show only keywords that have low competition.

 

Google search box suggestions: Another great way is to start typing keywords in the google search box and see the ideas suggested by Google. When you find a nice long tail keyword you can check it with the keyword tool and decide if it is worth targeting or not.

Bing / Yahoo suggest: Bing and Yahoo also make suggestions as you are typing a search term. You can use that as well since in almost all cases the suggestions made are different from Google so it’s worth exploiting.

Competition analysis:  There is no niche without competition so it’s not a bad idea to take a look at what your competitors are doing in term of long tail keyword targeting. Register to their newsletter and RSS feed and if you like a keyword they have used, check it with the keyword planner and see if there are any variations or similar keywords you can target.

To avoid any confusion, competition analysis does not mean copying your competitor’s ideas or stealing their work but simply means keeping an eye on what other websites in your niche are doing.

I have said above that long tail keywords are easier to rank but that does not mean that you just throw text on a page and it will get a top position because it is a low competition long tail keyword.

You need to do a lot more than that in you want to rank in Google or any other search engine.

Content still matters: Content not only matters but it’s the most important factor for achieving and maintaining a good ranking in the long term. Make sure that your content rocks both in quantity but most importantly in quality. Use proven content marketing techniques and try to publish content that answers the question in the long tail.

Copywriting tips: When writing content you should follow some simple but yet every effective SEO copywriting tips for making your copy friendlier to search engines and users. Thinks like post titles, content freshness and formatting do matter and once you learn the basics they are very easy to follow.

On-page SEO is a must: Don’t forget the rest of the on-page SEO factors that can help you achieve better rankings. Besides the keywords and content there are other ways to make your website more attractive to search engines.

Promote, Promote, Promote: When you hit the publish button you don’t sit back and relax but you start promoting your content in social media and using other white hat techniques.

For new websites or for not so big websites there is no other way to get traffic and good rankings than working with long tail keywords. The competition for high volume keywords is so huge and it is very difficult to win one of the top positions.

The best way to start building a strong website is to provide top quality content for long tail keywords consistently so as to start gaining rankings and traffic and then gradually move on to more general terms and establish your presence.

Let me help you build a successful blog or business online

Difference between social media marketing and content marketing

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What is the difference between social media marketing and content marketing and why you need both if you want to succeed online?

Many beginners to Internet marketing tend to confuse social media marketing with content marketing and my goal with this post is to help you understand the difference between the two and how you can use them for your benefit.

As you can see in the image below, both social media marketing and content marketing are under the umbrella of Internet Marketing which is one of the most important components of digital marketing.

So, the first difference between the two is that they are not the same thing. They are two distinct tools online marketers can use to promote their brand, products or services online.

 

In its simplest form social media marketing is the marketing process for promoting products or services in the different social networks either in the form of ads or in the form of content. The goals of a social media marketing campaign can be the same as any other marketing campaign i.e. to increase sales or can be more specific to social networks i.e. to increase Facebook followers or to get more tweets etc.

Who needs social media marketing?

Social media marketing is for everyone working either online or offline. By everyone I mean:

Bloggers or webmasters running blogs or websitesSmall businesses owners who run online businessesBusiness owners who run offline businesses

The impact social networks have on our lives is so huge that you just cannot ignore it. In the case that you do ignore it and stay out, your competitors will take advantage of it and the impact on your businesses will be greater.

What are the benefits of social media marketing?

In a nutshell the benefits of social media marketing are:

Increase brand awarenessFind more customersStay in front of the competitionStay in synch with the latest marketing trendsEngage with your customersProvide another way for potential customers to contact youInform your customers of changes to your products or servicesGradually build a tribe of loyal followers

How do you create a social media marketing campaign?

You can read my previous post, social media marketing tips for beginners for a more in-depth analysis but for the purpose of this post, let’s examine the basic components of a social media marketing campaign.

Decide on your goals – what are your goals from running a social media marketing campaign, what do you want to achieve? Hint: If you’re goals are increase in sales make sure that you track leads coming from social media so that you know if they convert or not.

Decide on the duration – A campaign cannot run forever so it’s important to decide the period you will run your campaign. Hint: Run your campaign for at least a week since not all days are the same in terms of traffic and social media usage.

Set your budget – How much money you want to spend on social media advertising? Hint: You don’t always have to pay for advertising but as we will see below you can run your social media campaigns using the content you have created.

Choose your social media networks – There are so many social networks available and if you try to run campaigns on all at the same time you will get lost in the process. It is better to concentrate on one social network at a time and at the end you can evaluate the results and see which networks converts better. Hint: If you don’t know which is the best network for your niche then why not take a look at what your competitors are doing. If they are spending time and money on a particular network maybe they are getting good results.

Evaluate the results – Everything on the web is measurable so at the end of your social media marketing campaign check the results and calculate the ROI. If the return is not what you expected may you should run the campaign on a different social network or assign the task to professionals to optimize your campaign and produce better results.

Make sure that you also avoid these 15 social media mistakes.

Content marketing is the process of creating the right type of content to fit for the particular purpose. Have a look at the examples below to understand how content marketing can be used in different situations:

Service company (lawyers, accounts etc)Text content: (description of the services offered, articles related to the niche)Images: map to the company offices, organizational structureRetail business selling products online or offlineText content (product descriptions)Images (product images)Videos (product videos)Text content: articles, how-to posts etcImagesVideos

Infographics

What is quality content?

In order for content marketing to be successful you first need to have quality content. Many marketers talk about the importance of quality content but a few people understand what this means. In my view quality content has the following characteristics:

It is detail – provides all the info about the particular subjectIt is un-biased – provides for both sides of a story and it’s not one-sidedIt is shareable – people like it and want to share it in their social networksPeople read it / watch it / hear it – statistics show that people spend time with the contentPeople engage with it – they write comments, add to their favorites etc.

What are the benefits from content marketing?

The benefits gained from content marketing are the same with social media marketing. Your ultimate goal with content marketing is to provide top quality content to your users or potential customers so that you increase sales, increase brand awareness, get to know your users better and stay in front of the competition.

Is content marketing the new SEO?

A popular phrase in the SEO industry the last couple of months is whether content marketing is the new SEO. The reason that made many people believe this statement is the fact that with the latest changes Google made to their ranking algorithms they gave more importance to high quality content websites and it was a clear signal that content is once more a very important ranking factor.

I would say that content is not the new SEO but high quality content with social media marketing is the new SEO. As I mentioned above content alone will do any good but high quality content can bring success especially if combined with a well-defined social media marketing campaign.

Anyone should have clear in their minds the difference between social media marketing and content marketing. Social media marketing is about promotion and content marketing is about creation.

The two can work together in harmony and can generate fantastic results in today’s competitive market. Companies or websites who can create top quality content and have a proper social media presence are more likely to succeed and expand than companies who failed in this area.

Some real life examples from different industries:

Web / Content producers: Sparkpeople.com – They create content on a daily basis about healthy living and they promote their content on social media. Visit their Facebook page here: https://www.facebook.com/SparkPeople

Manufacturing / Retailers: Nike.com – They create content to promote their products and they engage with their customers on social media. https://www.facebook.com/nike

Manufacturing / Retailers: Coca-Cola – They use content marketing and social media to promote their ‘change the world’ campaigns. https://www.facebook.com/cocacola

Service / Software: Firefox.com – content marketing and social media for creating a community of users. https://www.facebook.com/Firefox

Blogging: Read our case study on how to build a successful blog with content marketing and social media.

Content marketing is the starting point of all your internet marketing campaigns. Whether you are a small business looking for more customers or a webmaster looking for more visitors to your website you need to start with content marketing.

Your next step is social media marketing. In many areas social media marketing has replaced traditional link building and is the number one way to promote your website or brand online.

If you can do both well, then you just found the secret for marketing online in the 21 century.

Should you hire an SEO Consultant or a Digital Marketing Manager?

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What is the difference between an SEO consultant and a digital marketing expert? When it comes to outsourcing your website to an agency which is the best choice?

When you decide that it’s time to enhance your online presence and gain from the many benefits the Internet has to offer, then the next question you should answer is whether you should hire an SEO consultant or a digital marketing expert.

For many people the difference is unknown but in order to help you take better decisions, let me explain a couple of basic things.

The first thing to understand is that it does not necessarily mean that there is a difference between an SEO and a digital marketing expert. In many cases both will perform the same functions and have the same skills but they may use different titles mainly for marketing purposes. Before getting into why they may do that, let’s see what the theory says.

SEO Consultant

An SEO consultant is someone that has the necessary skills, knowledge and experience to optimize your website for search engines and improve your position in the search results. To do that he/she will use search engine optimization techniques and practices. The ultimate goal of an SEO consultant is to increase the web site traffic.

Digital Marketing Manager

If you take a look at the diagram below you will notice that SEO is a subset of digital marketing and that a true digital marketing manager will have to manage many other areas besides SEO, for example content marketing, social media marketing, email marketing, mobile marketing, banner advertising etc.

 

So by definition the difference between the two is that the SEO guy only cares about getting more organic visits and the digital marketing guy looks at the complete online presence of a company which goes beyond SEO.

Theory VS Practice

In the real World the theory is different from what is actually happening and this is exactly the case with SEO’s and Digital marketing experts. In the majority of cases a good SEO consultant will also take care of all the components of digital marketing. They may use the title SEO consultant because for the majority of people this is more understandable than the more sophisticated term of a digital marketing consultant.

Take for example our case, while we offer a range of digital marketing services we still name our services page SEO Packages because this is what our customers use to find us in Google. They may use this term but what they want in reality is not just seo but a number of other services and this is what we offer them.

If we forget about the different titles for a minute and concentrate on the actual functions, it is clear that in order to succeed online you need to do much more than plain SEO. In the past SEO was enough but with the growing use of social media and mobile phones, if you want to have a proper online presence and get to your customers before your competitors then you need to have a solid digital marketing strategy.

Is SEO dead? By all means NO, SEO is not dead and it will never be. The only difference is that now you need to take care more things and not only SEO. When I refer to SEO I am not talking about buying/building/exchanging links for the purpose of manipulating search engine rankings; this is not SEO but spam techniques made by spammers.

SEO is about building high quality websites that are user friendly but also understood by search engines.

You need to hire someone that is capable of promoting your business online by taking advantage of all available tools the digital World has to offer. It doesn’t matter if that someone is called an SEO consultant, Internet marketing expert or digital marketing manager; what it matters most are the skills and experience they have and of course the results they can produce.

When it’s time to make the decision for hiring a consultant or agency to promote your business online there are a few questions you should ask your prospective business partners.

What is their working experience with SEO and Digital Marketing? – Ask for live examples, case studies or testimonials about their work.  In addition you can ask for how long they have been working online and details about their academic background, qualifications etc.Ask for the techniques they will use to promote your web properties - What SEO techniques they will use, how are they going to utilize all digital marketing components (content marketing, social media, email marketing, mobile marketing) and how will this benefit your company.Ask about pricing – How much you will have to pay for their services? Will they charge you a fixed cost per month or is it an hourly charge. Do they provide detail monthly progress reports so that you know where your money is spend? For more details you can also  read: SEO Services PricingAsk them if they can guarantee you first position on Google – That’s a tricky question to ask but a good consultant will never guarantee that. For example what we guarantee and offer money back is increase in your overall website traffic but we never guarantee you first positions even if at the end we manage to do that.Test the work before going full scale – What we do in order to give a prospective client the opportunity to test our quality of work, communication and overall service is offer them to start our co-operation with our SEO Audit Service. This is basically a service that has a low one-time fee and the end result is a report describing the problems a website has, what needs to change and it is the first step for designing the overall digital marketing strategy customized for the needs of the particular company 

If they don’t offer such a service you can agree with them to do something that will not cost a lot of money (maybe ask them to do a competitor analysis report) but will give you an idea of how committed they are with deadlines and the quality of their work.

If you are living in a perfect World where everybody is knowledgeable about the latest trends in digital marketing then you should hire a Digital Marketing Manager. According to the theory that person or company should be in position to manage and take advantage of all digital marketing opportunities.

In the real World though not everyone is up-to-date about what is happening in the online World so they still use the term SEO to find consultants but what they actually need is a consultant that will do more than SEO i.e. a digital marketing manager.

For the purpose of speaking the language of the users some agencies (like our agency) still use the terms SEO for their digital marketing services.

Regardless of the terminology and titles what is more important at the end of the day is the result and benefit for your company from whoever consultant this is coming.

Let me help you build a successful blog or business online

Alex has more than 12 years of experience in SEO and Internet Marketing. He studied Computing and eCommerce and the last 5 years he is making a living on-line. You can connect with him on Facebook, Twitter and Google+.

Google SEO best practices - how to keep happy Google

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10 Google SEO practices that will keep both your users and Google happy. Find out how what you need to do to gain the respect and love of the World’s biggest search engine.

1 million visits from Google

I think you also agree that the best way to get the attention of readers and convince them that good Google SEO practices can get you a lot of visits from Google, is to show them case studies with traffic details.

As you can see from the image below, between January 1, 2013 and August 31, 2013, one of our websites (caloriesecrets.net) received more than 1 million organic visits from Google alone. For big brand websites this may not be a big deal but for small businesses and bloggers who want to get traffic, make money from adsense or find more customers online, 1 million organic visits in 8 months is a very good figure.

You can read more details in my previous article: how to build a successful blog that gives more information about caloriesecrets.net, how it started and evolved over the months and how the traffic increased from 0 to 1 million organic visits.

 

So, what is the secret formula that can get you 1 million visits from Google and how can you make sure that your website adheres to google SEO best standards and practices?

I don’t know how many times the last 13 years I have read this phrase ‘original and unique content’; I am not sure either how many thousand times I have said it myself. It’s becoming a cliché but if you want to have any chance of getting traffic from Google you need to have high quality, original and unique content published on your website.

If any of the above is not true then instead of wasting your time, prefer to do something else because it just won’t going to happen.

You can also read 10 content marketing tips for more information on how to create content that satisfies the above rules but as a general rule of thumb content creation usually takes most of the time you spend on your website. I would say that 70% of your time is devoted to content and 30% to other tasks.

Publishing original and unique content is the first step but it’s not enough. Your content needs to stand out and the only way to do that is through user engagement. By user engagement we mean on-site comments, Likes, G+’s, tweets etc.

Why is this important?

For starters it is more than clear that social signals (comments are a social signal as well) have started to play a more important role when it comes to ranking in google and second consider the following example.

Two web pages on the same subject, but on different websites, compete for one of the top positions in Google SERPS for a particular keyword.  One of the pages has 30 comments, 100 likes and 42 tweets and the other page has no comments or social media mentions.

Other things being equal, which of the pages deserves a better ranking? I think the answer is more than obvious and the reasoning behind it is that user engagement is a signal that the particular page is important for users.

Since search engines want to include web pages in their results that help users, most likely they will select the page that is proven (through the user engagement) to be more important.

If you want to increase user engagement on your content make sure that you read my social media marketing tips for beginners.

If there is one thing that Google mentions every time when they talk about SEO, is the importance of having good tiles and descriptions. I have more details and examples in my SEO Tips article but the general guidelines are:

Titles should be less than 70 characters in lengthDescriptions should be less than 160 charactersTitles and descriptions should be unique for each and every page in your websiteNo need to keyword stuff titles or descriptionsIf you want to get local customers then optimize both your titles and descriptions for local SEO

This is again related with the quality of the content but if you are an expert about a topic make sure that you show that in your website. Google is looking for trusted sources and if your professional background or experience makes you an ‘expert’ about a topic, you need to demonstrate that in your website.

Also you need to understand that the web is no longer anonymous so you need to show who you are, what you do and why your readers / customers / followers should trust you. If you can convince people to trust you, Google (and other search engines) will trust you as well.

On page SEO is a term that describes everything that needs to be done on the website itself so that it is optimized for search engines. It is not difficult to have an SEO optimized website and it is the first check you need to do when evaluating your overall internet presence.

You can compare your website against my on-page SEO check list to get a better idea on what you need to change for on-page SEO.

I consider on-page SEO to be more important than ever and that’s why I suggested that you need to be 100% compliant. What I always tell my clients as an example is the following: When building a skyscraper you need to make sure that you have good and strong foundations before start building the floors. Correct on-page SEO will make sure that your website’s foundations are in good shape before doing any kind of promotion.

Although Google is trying to give webmasters feedback when their guidelines are violated (through webmaster tools) so that you can take corrective actions, it is better not to violate their guidelines in the first place.

From my experience, violation of webmaster guidelines can happen when you are not familiar with the guidelines so you do something that violates them without knowing it and second you know that you are violating the guidelines but you are doing it believing that this way will get your more traffic and faster results.

To stay away from unwanted troubles you can spend some time reading the google webmaster guidelines and avoid trying shortcuts or ‘too good to be true’ tricks you may read on the Web. Be patient and do things according to their rules and the good results will come.

From all search engines, Google loves fresh content and up-to date websites. Give Google one more reason to differentiate your website from the competition by providing high quality content on a regular basis.

Content freshness is a Google SEO factor and this is not something I assume or predict but it is included as one of the three most important tips in their one-page SEO guide.

How often you should update your website depends on the niche, competition and type of content. If for example you are running a laptop reviews website, you need to have reviews about the latest models as well to show Google that you are in synch with the latest updates in your niche.

Whenever I talk about Google SEO to clients and explain all the factors above, the question that I always get as soon as I make a break is: ‘When do we start link building?’ My answer is always the same: ‘Forget about link building, we are not going to do any link building in our campaign’.

To say it with some simple words, link building is a think of the past and not only it cannot help your website achieve better rankings in Google but it can do more damage than good.

Does that means that Google is not using links as a ranking factor? Absolutely not, Incoming links are still important and play a very important role in Google SEO but what you want is natural links and not artificially created links.

The best way to distinguish between the two is the following: A natural link is placed by a webmaster or blogger to help their readers find out more about a subject or add value to their existing content. An artificially created link is anything else that does not fall in the definition of a natural link.

So, if you guest post on a low quality website for the purpose of getting a link in your author bio, that’s a bad link. If you pay or exchange links with other webmasters that’s also a bad link. Read these 2 articles for more information on the new way to do link building (without violating any guidelines)

What is off page SEO?

How to grow your traffic without building links

Although officially Google does not say at which extend social media networks influence rankings, they have many times suggested that one of the best ways to promote a website is through social media networks. If you follow their google webmaster videos you will notice that the mentions to social media as one of the most appropriate ways to promote a website, are becoming more and more frequent.

Do not forget that social media promotion will also increase user engagement with the content, promotes brand awareness and generally is a great way to let other webmasters know about your content and get more natural links.

One of the ways to take full advantage of Google SEO is to stay in-synch with the latest developments. Their quality team is making more than 500 changes per year in their algorithm and you have to follow their steps to avoid unpleasant surprises.

For example the latest SEO trends this period (September 2013) are attention to mobile friendly websites and mobile SEO, Google authorship and Google + for business.

If you want to make sure that your website is up-to date try our SEO audit service or have a look on how to perform your own SEO audit.

When we talk about organic traffic and SEO we always refer to Google and we forget about Bing or other search engines. The truth is that without Google it’s very difficult to succeed online. If you take the example above, in the same period that the website got 1 million visits from Google, the number of visits from Yahoo and Bing was around 10,000. There is a huge difference but that does not mean that you should not care about Bing.

When it comes to Bing SEO the same rules that apply for Google SEO apply there as well. They even recently updated their guidelines to mention that excessive link building may lead to your website being delisted. Nevertheless websites with lots of backlinks (generated using techniques of the past) can do very well in Bing while at the same time get a penalty by Google.

The conclusion for this post is straightforward: if you want to master Google SEO and keep the search giant happy so that you get visitors from their search results, you have to play by the book.

Forget about easy tricks or non-white hat practices, close your eyes and ears to those who want you to believe that there is a magic way to bypass Google algorithm and start thinking how you can create a website that has something to offer to visitors.

When you manage to create a website that stands out, you can be certain that traffic from Google will start flowing in, with or without SEO.