Topsy:

Topsy is one of my favourite tools to check which tweets, photos, videos, etc. are trending on the net. This could be helpful to identify the most shared and engaging content. You can also check the most influential people who shared that content and use this information to create a similar or more improved version of the same concept. You can then outreach to those same influences, knowing they are interested in your contents theme and may be willing to share it with their networks.
 

Quora:

This is a Q&A site that is quite useful for collecting ideas as you can find any niche specific questions and answers. This helps to gain an insight into the current trends of an industry. The information is reviewed, organised and edited by users which makes it easy to understand the user behaviour.
 

Google News:

This is the most easy and common way to look for current events and news about your industry, products and keywords. An interesting news piece relevant to your keyword can be used to write a quick, creative and even controversial content.
 

Google Consumer Surveys:

Try using Google’s consumer surveys which can help to get those last minute infographic or blog post ideas.
 

 

Content Curation:

Organising content is quite important to brainstorm for new content ideas. Content suration can be done with the help of many tools like:

Pinterest is all about interesting and unique visuals that can be shared and organised under specific categories and topics. There are many regularly updated boards which can be used to generate ideas for your brainstorm session.

Storify is a great platform that helps users to share stories about an event or occasion. You can curate the most interesting and useful images, tweets, videos, blog posts etc. about an event which can also be shared on Twitter, Facebook and Google Plus. There is also an option to export this curated content to WordPress blogs.

Delicious is one of the oldest social bookmarking sites. It is a collective source of information that is shared, bookmarked and tagged in different categories which can be set as private or public.
 

LinkedIn:

LinkedIn is the most popular professional networking platform. Not many content writers think about LinkedIn while looking for ideas. However, LinkedIn has some great content in the form of discussions that can be used if you are looking to write about your industry related blog post. Join specific groups and look for the topics people are talking about. Use the most recent and engaging idea for your next blog post. You can have an edge over your competitors by simply writing and answering those frequently asked questions in a much more interesting way.
 

Attend conferences and events:

Attending an event or conference, specific to your industry, can be a great platform to generate numerous ideas in a day or short period of time. Networking and socialising is definitely one of the best ‘tools’.
 

Check old posts

One of the best ways to gather ideas for a new post is to check your old blog posts and see if anything can be re-used, updated or written in a more interesting way. This method works really well if the content is worth re-using.
 

Create case studies:

You can always select one of your favourite companies or clients and write a case study about their strategy and achievements. This can be a great method to promote your agency at the same time while creating useful content.
 

Google Trends:

Use Google Trends to search for the most popular and trending topics of your industry.
 

Social Bookmarking Sites:

If your job responsibility involves writing content and research, then checking Reddit and Stumbleupon should be a part of your daily routine. Keeping yourself updated with the most shared content is always helpful.
 

Google Reader:

Google Reader can provide good amount of content according to your choice of keywords and categories on a regular basis. This source of information is quite beneficial if you prefer to receive specific content about various categories or keywords.
 

Data Visualisation:

Exploring different infographics and data visualisations is also imperative to your research as it presents data or information in a presentable, creative and a more comprehensive way. Sites like visual.ly and Daily Infographic have a vast collection of visuals to explore. To apply your ideas for creating an infographic, sites like World Bank and data.gov.uk can be very useful sources of official data that can be accessed and requested by anyone.
 

Talk to your Colleagues

Last but not the least, having frequent brainstorming sessions with colleagues can be a very beneficial idea for content generation and as a team building activity. This has been one of my favourites as it creates a friendly environment and as a result, ideas keep flowing.
There are many more ways in which you can brainstorm for fresh content and this list is definitely limited to my choice. Please share your favourite methods and tools in the form of comments below if you think they can be helpful.

by Malika Sharma

The post Top tips and tools to brainstorm for creative content appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

1. Optimise well for local search

Local search can be really beneficial for small businesses and this opportunity should not be wasted. A really high percentage of people use search engines to research or find local companies. The Venice update has changed local organic search completely and this has introduced many new ways to improve your online presence.

You can optimise for local search by using various link building methods. Commenting on local blogs could be one of those tactics. If you know your local keywords well, it is easy to research for blogs that are talking or writing about your niche or industry. Keeping variations of target URL, for example, Google Plus business profile, company website, etc. can help to get more promising local rankings. Another method could be offering and writing guest posts on local and relevant blogs. This would require a good outreach email and useful content. Providing something useful like interesting content, sponsorships, donations, educational support to local and influential organisations, companies, universities, blogs or listings in a high quality local business directory can help to improve your local rankings considerably. If your business has more than 1 location, then having separate landing pages with content about specific locations would be ideal.
 

2. Do keyword research regularly and use many variations of keywords

Focusing on just one list of keywords for a long time isn’t ideal. Even the high traffic generating keywords cannot promise the same results all the time. Risk assessment and keyword research should be carried out regularly to see any change in the search pattern. People use different variations of keywords to search a specific product or service. Expanding your focus on keywords and experimenting with different variations might not be successful instantly but this method would provide an insight into users search patterns and potentially uncover profitable new keywords.
 

3. Make sure that the technical set up of your website is SEO friendly

Use Canonical tags and 301 redirects

One of the common SEO mistakes that website owners make is not realising that their website URLs can be viewed as both ‘www.example.com’ and ‘example.com’. In this case, search engines identify two addresses of your website with same content on them. A 301 redirect should be used to resolve this issue. Search engines also need to know which page or pages are preferred so that other pages with similar content can be ignored to avoid any duplicate content issues. A canonical tag must be used in this case.

Use image alt tags

An “alt” or alternative tag should be used on all images on a site to describe them with the help of a keyword. This is crucial for search engines and others to identify the image.

Don’t use multiple H1 tags

Even though this is quite basic but I’ve noticed more than one H1 tag on some websites lately. All other content can go under H2, H3, etc. but H1 tag should be just one. This basic mistake could damage your on-site SEO.

Don’t write long meta descriptions

A Meta Description tag should not have more than 156 characters to describe the company. The description must be short and to the point as this has limited visibility in the SERPS.

Update sitemaps regularly and minimise page crawling errors

Every website owner should use Google Webmaster Tools regularly to check how Google identifies or crawls their site. There could be many crawl errors that might be keeping your website from ranking within the SERPS. A sitemap helps search engine bots to visit the site and gather information about your website. Sitemaps need to be updated regularly to get pages indexed quickly by the search engine bots.

Avoid keyword stuffing

If your business is specialising in ‘solar panels’ and your website has the word ‘solar panels’ written too many times or in too many different forms, then you could be a potential victim of a Panda penalty.

Complete page titles and keywords

Using keywords in page titles is imperative to your SEO strategy. For example: Using ‘Support’ as page title for your support page would be wrong and ‘Company name | Support’ would be good. Adding your brand name in the page title shows legitimacy and your willingness to stand by what you are selling or trading in.
 

4. Have a better internal linking structure

Internal link structure can provide good value to the website and this aspect is often underestimated by businesses. A website should have a clear linking pattern of old content or posts with new posts to fully utilise all the content on the website. Referencing old and relevant content in new posts can help to provide complete information to a visitor. Make sure you update your sitemaps, add recommendations of relevant products and link to relevant old posts on your website. This strategy won’t just help to improve SEO of your website but also improve the visitors’ on-site experience.
 

5. Get social

Creating a social media strategy and utilising all possible social media platforms to promote your small business should be a definite yes. This is the most important way to engage with your existing and potential customers and this opportunity must be adopted to increase new and repeat visits to your website which will lead to increased profits and customer satisfaction. No niche can be ‘too boring’ to have a successful social media strategy.
 

6. Take the less competitive path

Apart from doing the obvious and common, like having a presence on platforms like Facebook and Twitter, businesses need to tap the less used path by the competitors. Research your industry and your competitors and then analyse which factors about your business can be used to gain a competitive advantage. Various ideas can be used in the form of hub sites, social media campaigns on Pinterest or being on top for data visualisations.
 

7. Focus on regular original content

We all know that having regular and interesting content on a website is a must. This will not only provide useful information to visitors and web surfers but also increase traffic, improve rankings, engage customers and visitors, improve social media profiles, gain powerful and natural links and improve the overall online presence. However, there are some dos and don’ts for content strategies which I mentioned in my last post.

The post Top 7 SEO tips for Small businesses appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

 
I’ve noticed lots of data visualisation posts and infographics being posted on many websites lately. Many of them are displaying too much information on a poorly designed visual post. Is this just another tactic to gain links? Just a few months ago, I heard some SEOs talking about how infographics don’t work for SEO campaigns and now the tables have turned. I’ve noticed a lack of strategic planning in the industry, which is the first and foremost step forFtops any campaign. A well-integrated communication and content strategy must be created that is linked to your company and client goals. A good strategy is really important to define your actions and goals rather than creating panic and unexpected reactions to a new situation in a company or agency. There are some methods that are used by some brands and can be adopted to enhance any content strategy. I have listed some dos and don’ts for improving an SEO content strategy:

Storytelling

Content marketing is not just a tactic to increase traffic and improve ranking in the post panda and penguin world. It has much more to it than just being high quality, unique and relevant. Storytelling is a vital skill for your content strategy. How can it be implemented in SEO content strategy? Well, the answer is simple. We just need to modify the tone of the content. A post should encourage readers to respond and feel involved. For instance, Coca-Cola always use storytelling as a part of their content strategy. Coca-Cola Zero was successfully targeted at young adult males because of well-chosen customised words and stories that men could relate to. A story holds the interest of a reader. Stories work extremely well for small businesses if implemented properly. It can influence and shape perceptions of a brand. The following videos show Coca-Cola’s approach towards content strategy and storytelling:

Watch the second video here.

Make it interesting and diverse, not just relevant

Content generation and content marketing is not really SEO. It requires market and consumer research skills in order to understand consumer expectations in regards to the kind of content they want to read. SEOs need to think beyond blogger outreach and avoid overusing one type of content after every Google algorithm update. A diverse mix of content should be used for every campaign. This might require videos, case studies, articles, eNewsletters, webinars, blog posts, data visualisation posts, competitions or photographs.

Identify your target audience first

After determining your goals, identification of target audience is the most important aspect. This one is really obvious but there are many SEO experts who decide the matter of the content and how it will be created before determining a target audience for it. This shows a clear lack of concern and research regarding what people actually want to see or read.

Ego bait doesn’t always work

Ego bait is another common approach used in SEO agencies for acquiring back links and social shares. This method of outreach can work well at times, depending on your target audience, but it usually makes a campaign less creative and more dull and repetitive. Usage of this tactic clearly shows lack of a good strategy.

Time for research

The SEO industry is always attempting to anticipate changes and trying to develop the way it looks at strategies and goals but this won’t be possible if we, as SEO practitioners, don’t spend time on researching our clients’ niche in depth. As we all know, SEO is an evolving and ever changing industry. Hence, it becomes even more important to keep up with every change and update in the industry. Implementation of an idea would consume less time if proper research and thought process is undertaken as a part of the content strategy. Good ideas cannot be generated if only 10-15% of time is being spent on research.

Create fresh and timely content

Timely content is one of the best SEO content practices. Google loves fresh content. Creating a calendar for the main occasions, trends, events and activities in your niche will give you an edge over your competitors.  Planning a creative content strategy for each event and occasion could be another win for your brand. Timing is really important when publishing any kind of content.

Consistency and regularity

Development of a plan is one of the most significant aspects of content marketing. However, it should be flexible as the SEO industry is always changing. An editorial calendar should be created for the whole team as it helps to organise posts and ensures you are consistent in posting content. People like to see consistent posts which, in turn, makes them visit your website on a regular basis. Content ideas are not just limited to the content or social media team but it is a cross-functional system. Every employee has different kinds of skills in terms of generating ideas and they should be utilised and included in the content strategy.

Use your industry expertise effectively

SEO experts should have in-depth knowledge about their clients industry and products. Having relevant data about how competitors and influencers write content is also imperative to your strategy. This becomes easy with the help of tools like Followerwonk which helps you to identify top influencers in a specific niche. Link analysis tools help to identify and analyse competitors’ most powerful links and also determine the most successful pieces of content based on the links they have naturally generated. Tools like Topsy help to find out the influencers who shared or promoted your competitors’ best content. Identification of the top influencers can be helpful for promotion and ensuring your content reaches the relevant audience.

Link Building is not dead

Due to the hype surrounding content marketing after the Penguin and Panda updates, SEO experts are starting to think of link building as a tactic of the past. We forget that content should have always been of real importance and central to every SEO campaign or strategy. So why is there a panic? Powerful backlinks are still one of the most important performance indicators. SEOs need to understand that content marketing is just one more method by which an SEO campaign can gain links and ultimately outperform its competitors. This intertwining of strategies, where links are built by the promotion of strong content, can help a site acquire a wider variety of links. Links should not be the only goal; don’t lose sight of the fact that a site must succeed in engaging its visitors as well as generating revenue, traffic and rankings. The best way to achieve this is a mix of good content, links and social noise.

The post DOs and DON’Ts for SEO Content Strategy appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

Content, data visualisations and social media are hot topics in the digital marketing industry currently. Brands are focusing on increasing engagement with their fans, customers and users. Facebook is of course the most widely used platform to interact and create social buzz around potential and existing customers.

According to research by Buddy Media, retail brands that write a post in less than 80 characters on Facebook tend to receive 66% higher engagement as compared to longer posts.

To increase engagement on Facebook, brands should not just focus on getting more ‘likes’ and comments on their posts but should place emphasis on being relevant and personalised for the fans.

Here are 6 tips to increase engagement on Facebook:

Use Post Targeting

Facebook’s improved Page Post Targeting feature allows brands to segment and target their fans according to the relevancy of the post. This function is extremely important in driving the right responses that help to analyse customer behaviour. Facebook now allows you to target fans according to gender, relationship status, educational status, age, location, language and interested in – men or women.

Post targeting will also allow brands to check how many fans or users are selected in a specific category. It also makes it easier to analyse how the post was targeted to specific fans. This can be used to make posts more interactive and fun, for instance, asking questions to seek opinions about products or any other activities. This function is very useful for those brands that target specific markets or people.

Visualise Your Posts

Facebook offers 6 types of posts: a text only post, a photo, a link, a question, a platform post and a video. Personally, I am a fan of visualisations. According to many social media experts, research and Facebook, photos tend to create much more engagement than other kinds of posts.

Posting anything with an image increases the chance a post to be noticed and create interest in fans. A message can also be communicated by adding it manually in an image. Some websites like Rottenecards allow creating your own ecard with a message. Memes are also a fun way to engage fans. These can be created with the help of Photoshop.Memegenerator can also be used for some quick wins.

Personalise the Interaction

Personalisation of posts or even products could be a good strategy to make fans feel important. Asking fans for their opinions about a product, logo or new product name works as a good strategy to create engagement. Giving authority to customers can result in improved sales and engagement on social media platforms like Facebook. The Facebook pages of Tesco and Oreo display a perfect example of personalisation and how to give value to their fans’ opinions and contributions.

Frequency and Timing of the post

Timing is extremely significant to improving the response rate on a social media platform. As pointed out in the research by Buddy Media, the best time to post on Facebook is between 8 PM and 7 AM. People don’t tend to notice or share posts at working hours. Research also revealed that posts that are displayed more than 3 times a day, don’t create much engagement as compared to the posts that are shared just one or two times a day.

Diverse Posts and Competitions

Posts should not just be limit to photos and text. Diversity keeps a social campaign’s engagement consistent as fans tend to get bored easily. Different types of posts should be updated regularly which can include questions, fill in the blank and competitions. Questions can help to gather data about user or customer behaviour, market research and most importantly to provide value to fans’ feedback.

Measure the Engagement

Analysing and measuring Facebook data can not only help in understanding customer behaviour but will also help to create more engagement by recognising the strengths and weaknesses of the campaign. Free data provided by Facebook Insights can be used to gain knowledge about how well a campaign or a post did on Facebook. Brands can measure weekly and monthly percentage changes, percentage of active fans in comparison to hidden fans, geographic location of fans and amount of likes, shares and fan posts on the wall.

It is highly important to check how many fans ‘unliked’ or ‘unsubscribed’ to the brand page. This is important because brands should be aware of the posts that don’t work well and the ones that work the best. Also, fans tend to hide content from any brand without ‘unliking’ them. This should be monitored to find out if specific fans are seeing posts quite frequently on their news feed.

All these factors play a key role in creating more engagement with fans or customers and will reap high benefits in the form of increased customer satisfaction and improved profitability.

The post 6 Tips to Make Your Facebook Campaign more Engaging appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

Any rational SEO would think anchor text distribution is crucial in a competitive and controversial niche like ‘payday loans’. I analysed the backlink profiles of the top 20 websites ranking for ‘payday loans’ on Google UK to see any similarities or anomalies in their anchor text profiles. The analysis was done with the help of the CognitiveSEO tool.

All websites should have a balanced mix of backlinks and anchor texts. Regular analysis of anchor text distribution is extremely important to avoid over optimisation of one search term. The filterable anchor text cloud in CognitiveSEO’s backlink report should make this analysis quite easy.

A natural anchor text profile must include different variations of the target URL. This gives quite strong trust signals to Google. ‘Other’ anchor texts, such as ‘this post’ or ‘visit this website’ have become equally as important in the post-penguin period. Also, variations of the brand name (CognitiveSEO) and ‘keyword branded’ (link analysis by CognitiveSEO) form a large part of a healthy and natural anchor text distribution.

Top 10 Websites Ranking for ‘Payday Loans’

The following screenshot shows the top 10 websites that rank for ‘payday loans’ on Google UK. Websites in the first and sixth positions have been detected as suspicious by Google. These rankings were correct on 16^th September, 2012 and are likely to have changed since due to the nature of this extremely competitive niche.

Firstly, let’s have a look at the anchor text mix of the top 3 websites:

1. www.appliancemagazine.com

• The backlinks report shows 84% of exact match anchor texts
• Backlinks profile comprises of 97% text links
• 91% of backlinks are pointing to the home page of the specified website
• Most of the backlinks are from irrelevant and suspicious websites that clearly indicate the implementation of Black Hat SEO
• This website is not going to rank for this term for long due to irrelevance and black-hat SEO.

2. www.payday-loansuk.org.uk

• The anchor text distribution of this website looks natural and has many variations of branded anchor texts
• 12% of backlinks have exact match anchor texts
• Most of the anchor texts are partial and broad match (contain ‘payday’). This is because ‘payday’ is a part of the brand name
• The website is not stuffed with the anchor text
• 55% of backlinks are pointing to the home page and 45% are deep links.

3. www.paydayloan.co.uk

• Only 9% of backlinks have exact match anchor texts, i.e., ‘payday loans’
• The anchor text profile is random and has different variations of brand
• The website is fairly clean with many high quality and powerful backlinks
• The website also has a lot of creative and fun content considering that it is a highly competitive niche. For instance, this post has almost 90 backlinks including www.forbes.com

Websites at position 4, 5 and 6:

• www.rush-my-pay.co.uk (4^th position) is using 71% exact match anchor text. All backlinks are pointing to the home page of the website. 20% of backlinks have “payday loan” as anchor text.
• www.unclebuck.co.uk (5^th position) has a natural looking anchor text distribution with 30% of ‘other’ anchor texts and only 9% exact match anchor text.  There are some flaws on the website in regards to the architecture and on-site content.
• www.hourofthetime.com is in 6^th position for the term ‘payday loans’ and again, is an example of Black Hat SEO. Even though Google has provided an alert on this website, it has still managed to rank on the first page with the help of 75% exact match anchor text and other ‘dodgy’ techniques.

Now, let’s take a look at www.jackrabbitloans.co.uk, (not available anymore) which is ranking at 13^th position. What makes this website rank on the second page? The answer is a no-brainer for many of us; this website does not contain a lot of on-site content. The backlinks are not high quality and, in fact, most of them are taken from low quality article websites and blogs. 72% of backlinks have exact match anchor text. 99% of backlinks are pointing to the home page. Added to this, the website is quite thin.

Conclusion

• Anchor text distribution is one of the most important elements of the Penguin update but there are still many irrelevant and spammed websites ranking on the first page for ‘payday loans’. Example: www.hourofthetime.com. This page will more than likely be moved to a new domain.
• Natural anchor text distribution is extremely important to get recognised as a good quality website. High percentage of exact match anchor text is a big ‘NO’.
• Targeted keywords should be avoided, to an extent. Although, it can be argued that this strategy won’t always work for small brands, but this can be easily achieved via interesting and creative content.
• Up to date on-site content and social shares are equally as important as good technical SEO.  A very obvious example is www.paydayloan.co.uk. Their creative content has attracted a large number of social shares and backlinks on almost every blog post.  Arguably, however, many of these backlinks could have been bought, but the results in terms of ranking and traffic are worth looking into. Paid links cannot always be avoided but they have to be well integrated with interesting content so that the natural links will flow within the text.
• Natural links automatically make your anchor text distribution more diverse, hence the websites ranking at positions 2 and 3 having an edge over the lower ranked websites for the term ‘payday loans’.
• Google’s algorithm updates seem to have had little impact on highly spammed websites in niches like ‘payday loans’ where websites are continuously being ranked to top positions and often moved to a new domain later that day.
• In a difficult niche like ‘payday loans’, it becomes even more important to keep a regular check on your link and anchor text profile. CognitiveSEO provides a comprehensive link and anchor text analysis tool for an in-depth analysis.

The post Anchor Text Distribution in the Payday Loans Niche appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.