1. Headline

The headline is the first and foremost element that pops in your users’ eye. At least it should be. Your headline must be very clear and concise — it has to communicate the message of your product/service.

Tips for a good headline

• Make it short and precise, get to the point without jabber.
• Your headline must be so clear that when a visitor comes to the site, they will immediately know where they are at.
• Use a big, bold text that pops out. Make it catchy with wise use of CSS.

Examples of good headlines

The unforgivable mistakes for headlines:

• However you play with font-size, font-weight and color, make sure it doesn’t talk down the CTA.

2. Navigation

Navigation is a crucial part of any website. It’s like a map that the user is holding in their hands — if they know how to reach a certain page, they’ll probably visit it. If they don’t know where to go, they just hit the Back button and bounce.

Tips for a good navigation

• Make your navigation straightforward and easy to see through.
• Design all list items to look equal, this way you won’t confuse your visitors.
• Do not separate your main navigation into two pieces.
• Consider using a secondary navigation if your website requires. Make it clear which is the main and which is the secondary navigation.
• The footer of your website is a good place to put your subsidiary navigation elements like ‘Privacy Policy’, ‘Terms of Use’, etc.

Good navigation examples

The unforgivable mistakes for navigation:

• Make sure that all commercial pages can be reached within a maximum of 2 clicks from any other commercial page — but go for 1 if possible.

3. Features List

A feature list is an essential part of your product’s or service’s landing page. It is a (mostly) unordered list containing all the features of your product.

Tips for your next features list

• Again, as always, keep in mind that your users have a limited time to spend on your website. Therefore, create your features list short and concise.
• According to the AIDA marketing principle, you may consider displaying the benefits instead of features.
• Tell only the most important and the catchiest features/benefits that will raise your visitors’ interest.

Great examples of features lists

The unforgivable mistakes for feature lists:

• Never have more than 5 features displayed on your landing page.

4. Forms

If you want your visitors to subscribe to your newsletter, or if you want them to register, then a sign-up form is an essential part of your landing page.

Things to consider when building a sign-up form

• Ask only the amount of information that is crucial. try to avoid creating a sign-up form of over 3 fields! I would be annoyed if I had to fill a form having more than 3 fields, and trust me, neither would your visitors.
• Encapsulate your form properly. Make good use of white space.
• Make your input labels clear and easy to read. Let your users know exactly what and how to enter.
• Mark input fields that are required in a way your users will understand. A common practice is to mark required fields with an asterisk (*).
• Another good practice is to inform your users of their privacy. Let them know you won’t give out their email addresses (or any other sensitive data) to third parties.

Examples of good sign-up forms

The grave error of sign-up forms

• Don’t ever think of using a Captcha on your sign-up form! If you’re attacked with spam, consider other solutions to get rid of it.

5. Call to Action [CTA]

Calls to Action are one of the (if not The) most important inbound marketing and design elements that a landing page needs for better conversion. A Call-to-Action (often referred to as CTA) is either a button, a banner or some kind of textual element that persuades users to click on it, thus making them a lead and then a customer.

What makes a good call to action?

• Make it stand out. Use a big bold font with a nice vibrant color, and make it big! Also pay attention to contrast.
• Make it an actual button. Use CSS’s features to give it a border, gradient, shadows, highlights… whatever suits your landing page’s design.
• Make the CTA text compelling. The actual text is everything. Don’t just simply type ‘Go’, or ‘Start’ – that’s boring. Good examples are ‘Take Our Quiz’, ‘Get a Free Consultation’ or ‘Offer Expires At Midnight’.
• Repeat your CTA throughout your landing page. Remember to always use the same styling for your call to actions!

Examples of good calls to action

The unforgivable mistakes for CTA’s:

• Use only one type of CTA. If you have to use more, don’t make them competing!

6. Images

Images can add a personality to your landing page. Imagery is what makes a landing page unique and distinctive, otherwise, the majority of websites would look almost the same.

How to use images properly?

• Use images that are relevant to your product/service or your audience.
• Try to look for (or design) an image that is in harmony with your landing page’s color and design. For example, on a minimalist web design you shouldn’t use a 3D model, nor would you put a silhouette on a skeumorphic website.
• If your niche accepts it, you should also consider using images with people. Human photos have much more impact on the users first impression of trustworthiness.
• However, if you’re trying to sell a product, put images of the product instead of faces. People love to see the product/software they are about to buy in action.
• Don’t use too many images, it may create fuzziness.
• Speaking about images, you may want to include some of your happy clients’ logos on your landing page.

Good uses of images

The unforgivable mistakes for images:

• Never use images to display text directly. If you want to use a special font, consider using a proper font-replacement method.

7. Video

Do you have a video? Even better! Whether it’s a professionally designed explainer video or a simple introductory one made with your home camera, videos are definitely going to sky-rocket your conversion rate.

Tips for a good video

• Make it short. Time is money, and your visitors are the best examples of it. Don’t use a video that takes more than 90 seconds. An ideal length is between 30 and 60 seconds.
• Present the product or service and nothing more. Don’t tell about your company history, no one is interested in that, really.
• An ideal video is able to replace all informational content on a landing page. Create it accordingly.

Great examples of using videos

The unforgivable mistakes for videos:

• Explain your product and no more.

Bonus Design Tips for Conversion

1. Use proper HTML tags for your headings. Search engines love that, and proper semantics is a plus.
2. Always add alt and title tags to your images. Search engines love ‘em, too!
3. Make your body copy easy to read. Use a clear font, preferably a sans-serif for screens.
4. Make up your paragraphs into a maximum of 4 lines. Users won’t read big blocks of text.
5. Use white space wisely. Leave enough room around your coherent elements to separate them from each other.
6. Keep the information flow straight. Design your landing page so it drives your visitors’ eye in a way you want. Keep the F- and Z-patterns in mind, too!
7. Create a mobile version of your landing page, or even better, make it responsive.

Conclusion

That’s it. I hope you liked my first article at Higher Click. Stay tuned for more, and as always – sharing is caring. Thanks!

The post The 7 Design Pillars of a Successful Landing Page appeared first on Higher Click.

It keeps getting worse! The October 2011 Google SSL search privacy update effected the lives of SEO professionals everywhere. It made things a lot more challenging. Google Analytics just became a tad less useful. I still remember Google promising a single digit impact at most. Those days are long gone however. Recent estimates put the current overall impact between 32-37%. So between 32-37% of the search keywords – which people use to get to your site – will be hidden.

There is a whole website dedicated to tracking the percentage of not provided traffic: http://www.notprovidedcount.com/

I’m a lot more pessimistic, however. There are some websites I’ve worked with, which had close to 90% of their keyword data not provided. Currently, if you simply disregard your not provided keyword data, or secretly hope it will decrease then I have bad news for you.

You must deal with it

If you ever see this: https:// , then you are using a secure HTTPS protocol and you too probably don’t pass along data about your search keywords. HTTPS is HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol) plus SSL (Secure Socket Layer) but just look for https:// and you will know. If you look at the biggest sources of withheld keyword data, then you will clearly see, that it will only continue to increase.

• Logged in to your Google account? No keyword data!
• Coming from G+? No keyword data!
• Logged in at YouTube? No keyword data!
• Surfing at the office? Probably no keyword data either but it depends on how your office network is set up.

It’s not hard to see, that this is not likely to decrease.

On the flip side, Facebook graph search finally passes along keyword data. That is one less thing to worry about. I hope they keep it this way. Facebook really wants to attract advertisers. If you can believe internet rumors so do Google (for AdWords) and that’s why we’ve withheld keywords in the first place. I don’t know about that, but it is definitely an interesting theory.

If you have significant traffic from other search engines, then you can rest assured. This is only a Google-specific issue.

Google Analytics won’t help you

There are many misleading tutorials and blog posts out there claiming that through some esoteric trickery (incantations and possible animal sacrifice…) you can somehow extract the missing data. Wrong! Google Analytics won’t help you with this one.

I have even read one, which advised the reader on how to filter (not provided) keyword data out, so you can put it out of your mind. I hope you don’t do that! That’s about the worst thing you can do. There are some applications and techniques, which are able to help you.

Google Webmaster Tools

I personally like to use GWT very much, “GA’s neglected little brother”. Even though it has its flaws (quite a few actually: bucket data, rounding, slow, limited functionality, not frequently updated), it is still useful in many ways. I always connect a client’s GWT (and AdWords too for that matter) to it’s GA, so I won’t miss out on anything. GWT has its uses. Just think about sitemaps or the disavow tool. Now, it has a new functionality, which you can use. You can make an educated GUESS (notice the emphasis on guess) about the missing keywords.

You can find the data you need at Traffic > Search Queries. There are other things like keyword impression, clicks and click-trough rate and average position but I wouldn’t really put too much emphasis on them. Especially not on average position, as in my experience the likelihood of that to be accurate is the same as drinking too many beers and then gentlemanly discuss politics or sports. In short, not very likely.

To our relief all keywords are provided! If you check your Analytics data and compare it to GWT, then you can get a somewhat accurate picture of the missing keywords. However, I wouldn’t put this in a report for my boss or for a client. We need something more.

Google AdWords

I’m in luck. Most of the Analytics accounts I handle have AdWords campaigns set up and running. Some are bigger, some are smaller and some are quite sporadic, but it doesn’t really matter. When it comes to paid search results, there are no withheld keywords. I always connect my AdWords to my GA and you should, too! If you have connected your AdWords, then you can find these keywords at Traffic Sources > Advertising > AdWords > Matched Search Queries.

This won’t be enough. At this point, you can guess the missing keywords for organic search results. And for paid results, we know everything. There is a little trick I use to get an even more accurate picture.

Branded or not branded

Usually, we think in terms of branded and not-branded keywords. Branded keywords (if your on-page is in order) mostly or exclusively point to your home page depending on the website in question.

To tell them apart you just have to look at the keyword landing pages. Here’s how:

Filter for Landing pages

Filter for (not provided)

…or without parenthesis.

Now you have a nice list of individual keywords and their landing pages. You can tell branded keywords from non-branded keywords by simply looking at results that went to the home page (marked with a “/”), which is probably a branded keyword. The others which went to your pages (“/example”) are non-branded keywords. If you repeat the process with the webmaster tools – which we discussed at the beginning – for your non-branded keywords, then you can now give a reliable list of keywords for non-paid, organic, non-branded search keywords and branded search keywords.

The whole process stripped-down to the bare minimum looks like this:

1. GA (identifying percentage of not provided, outlining the problem)
2. GWT (making an educated guess about the missing data based on your knowledge of the website and the available data and GWT search keyword data)
3. Checking AdWords campaigns and paid search keywords
4. Use GA to differentiate between branded and non-branded keywords
5. Check GWT again and AdWords again for brand, non-branded, paid and organic separately using the right filters
6. Create a structure for your data (excel table), compare your findings and make an educated guess

Common misconceptions

I’m a regular at many SEO forums, groups, websites and YouTube channels. I have encountered a thousand and one misconceptions about the missing keywords, the infamous (not provided). I want to set the most often encountered misconceptions straight. If you are an SEO or some other online marketing professional, then some of them probably seem trivial and self-explanatory.

• Google Analytics Premium still won’t provide you with the missing keywords
• Only Google withholds the organic search keywords, other search engines don’t
• Facebook graph search provides keywords
• Expensive custom analytics software still won’t give you the missing keywords

Conclusion

If you have followed the instructions and avoided the common misconceptions then you will get a much more accurate picture about the missing keywords. I would still not put this in a report but at least now you can do your job as an SEO.

“You can’t manage what you can’t measure.” may not be true in every case but it is definitely true for online marketing.

Stay tuned for my next article! One of my colleagues attended the latest Link Love conference and returned with really groundbreaking ideas. I still test them and research them but I will definitely share the results with you.

The post How to Decode (not provided) Search Keywords appeared first on Higher Click.

You’ve probably heard about the metrics behind the Google News algorithm from the stories about the company’s patent filing last year. As usual, Google tried to be as vague as possible about the details and keep as little of the secret sauce from getting out as possible. For anyone working on any kind of news site, this is an absolutely must read for everyone in your company!

The news algorithm offers unprecedented insights into Google news and offers powerful SEO opportunities for news websites. In this blog post, we’ll look at how we can use insights from the patent filing to fully optimize news websites to gain more traction on Google News. This is NSEO: News Search Engine Optimization.

Google news

Google News is Google’s controversial and heavily downplayed success story.  The only snippets of official data from Google are about the traffic. A humongous 65 million unique monthly visitors (not to be confused with visits!), making it the 4th biggest news portal in the world. Needless to say, that being featured on Google News has very tangible benefits. Every major and aspiring news organization should make an effort to optimize their site and to appear more often on Google News.

The secret is out

These are the facts currently known about the Google News algorithm and how it determines which website to include in its news feed:

Speed

• Breaking news score, a.k.a reaction time, the amount of time it takes for you to cover a story (faster the better)
• Number of articles produced during a given time period (the more the better)

Style

• Number of original named entities used (and possibly linked to as well) in the story (the more the better)
• Writing style
• Number of non-duplicate articles (the higher the better, duplicate articles are penalized!)
• Average length of articles (longer the better)

Size

• Circulation/syndication of the story (more the better)
• Size of the staff (bigger the better)
• Number of news bureaus (more the better)
• Importance of coverage from the news organization (not necessarily dependent on size)

I divided it into three categories for better understanding. There is nothing really surprising about speed. The faster you are the better. It is interesting to note in the style category, that Google News considers an article better if it’s longer, which is something I don’t necessarily agree with. Size matters for Google.

Don’t be afraid, if you are a smaller news website, or you have just started. You too can compete for the attention of Google News. We will show you how.

NSEO, News Search Engine Optimization

So how can SEO help my news website? In a lot of ways. I will illustrate the key aspects of the algorithm, where a good and reliable long-term optimization can help, and where it can’t.

Speed

It’s pretty self-explanatory. You have to be faster than everyone else. This isn’t as straightforward as it first seems. Google only sees your published content as soon it was crawled. There are many ways to increase your crawl rate:

• Social activity (the more and the faster the better)
• Page Load Time (lower the better)
• Real Page Rank (due to the inconsistencies of updates and bugs, toolbar PR may not be accurate)
• Internal linking (the more the better)

SEO companies have a known track record of being able to help in these areas. There are indications that there is an exchange of information between the different Google products (Analytics, GWT, Chrome and G+) because even content, which is not linked too, is indexed sometimes. To be on the safe side; it would certainly not hurt to use them.

Style

This is really subjective and SEO can’t really help you in this one. Keep in mind however, that longer content equals better content for Google, and for other search engines as well. Duplicate content should certainly be avoided at all costs, whether it’s intentional or unintentional. A good website infrastructure, a functional, fast CMS is a must for every news website.

Size

You would think that you don’t have a chance to be included in Google News if you are not one of the big boys. You are totally wrong.

An easy way to increase your circulation and syndication is content syndication. Content syndication on quality websites only takes effort and time on your part. You have to submit your content and build relationships with as many content syndication and news portal websites as possible. News aggregators are a great way to increase your syndication as well. There are many ways to do this. Smaller news websites are not excluded.

There are alternative ways to increase the size of your staff(or make it seem so for Google), apart from hiring in-house full time writers. That is obviously the privilege of only the biggest players.

You can use guest posters and set up an author page for them and Google authorship for all of them. Google authorship will definitely help to get your authors recognized in the eyes of Google.  There are many alternative forms to increase your staff size such as: part-time writers, guest writers, blog syndication, internships etc…

There are many good and reliable news bureaus available online. There are even alternative news bureaus, which are more accessible. You should mention them in your article and link to them as well. The more prestigious (and higher Page rank) the better. Edu and .gov and other top level domains are preferred. The more you include in your articles the better.

Specific NSEO factors to consider

These are the news website specific optimization steps you can take:

News sitemap

If you operate a news website, your content changes rapidly. Therefore Google implemented a News Sitemap specifically for news websites. This is just like the standard XML sitemap and you have to submit it the same way. However, it contains new news specific tags. Regularly updating and re-submitting your news sitemap should be part of your optimization strategy.

Google Authorship

The role of authorship and author score can not be overstated. According to the official announcement of Google, authorship and author score will play an increasing role in the future, even in rankings. This is definitely a must for news websites. Having a good many high author score writers (or part-time writers or guest writers) on-board will be crucial for every news website in the times to come. This is such an important and crucial element of NSEO, that the next article I write will focus solely on Google authorship.

Relevancy

Imagine you go to news site for cricket related news. What you say counts even though you are probably small compared to other news websites covering many topics. However, when it comes to cricket you will be the one chosen by Google News.

Choosing the right niche(s) for you to cover is crucial as the more things you cover, the harder it will be to compete. Don’t forget, that the update frequency is still a crucial factor, so if you specialize in just one niche, you need to cover it extensively. The decision of what to cover and how deep to cover it should be given sufficient thought and should not be rushed. You have to find the perfect balance between quality and quantity to reach your optimal performance.

Search does not happen in a vacuum!

Imagine you are gym equipment company ranking very high for “big ass yoga ball”. All is well. However, a recent new economic stimulus package by Obama was nicknamed “big ass yoga ball stimulus package”. You are out of luck! All the news websites will rank for it instead of you and will continue to do so as long it’s “buzzing”.

The first place in this case will be determined between the news agencies based on their degree of optimization. This is an enormous opportunity for any news website and can drive in enormous traffic. In this case it is even possible to outrank local search results!

NSEO opens up powerful new optimization opportunities for news websites. Following these few basic rules you too can compete with the big boys and be featured in Google News!

For similar insightful advice and tips, follow us on Twitter. Don’t forget. You can ask us directly in the comments below. If something’s not clear, or you just want to say “Hi”. We would love to hear from you! Stay tuned for our upcoming in-depth article about Google authorship!

The post NSEO, SEO for News Websites appeared first on Higher Click.

What Exactly is The Digital Renaissance?

Most notable luminaries of the Renaissance include geniuses such as Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Francis Bacon and not to forget Dante and Shakespeare. The renaissance was a beacon of light after the starless night of the dark ages. The renaissance was a period of enlightenment, great discoveries and advancements and produced many world renowned thinkers and artists.

The digital, tech-savvy equivalents of such great minds have already been born in fact you maybe one of them!

In order to get a somewhat accurate picture of the trends, which shape the future of the digital era and will bring about the future genius, rockstar and part-time ninja of the internet, a “Michelangelo 2.0“, you need to understand the digital renaissance, which will produce it. The successor to the digital era in which we currently live. The main attributes of it are accelerating development and change, adaptive, smart and omnipresent technology. It will bring about changes in the production of information and creation of user generated content online. Most notable will be the gradual shift from the tools used to create user generated content, to the content, art itself and the creative thoughts, which led to their creation.

The Digital World

The global internet penetration is constantly rising, currently it somewhat over 32.5% worldwide. (Latest publicly available figures are from 2011 Source: http://www.itu.int/ITU-D/ict/statistics/at_glance/keytelecom.html)

Internet access is still not commonplace globally, only in the developed world. What it means commonplace anyway? From a mathematical point of view according to the Journal of Technological Forecasting and Social Change it’s 68,3% penetration. (Source: http://www.growth-dynamics.com/articles/Normal.pdf) We are still not there. The digital renaissance will be in full swing, when the global internet penetration will be above that. If the growth of internet penetration will continue to accelerate globally, then we will be there by 2025.

The developed world will lead the way into the full bloom of digital renaissance and it is already in it, in places like Tokyo, New York, London, Berlin and other mega-cities of the developed world.  What’s even more important is, that new technological breakthroughs in telecommunication make internet subscription much more affordable to the masses.

The rapid global spread of internet usage globally, among all income levels of society may be the biggest challenge of online marketing and SEO to date! (Read all about it! http://simonsblogpark.com/personal/the-prostitution-of-content-a-k-a-the-fallacies-of-consumer-demand-driven-media/) 

Usability, High-level Programming Languages

One of the most important changes during the digital renaissance will be the further development of high-level programming languages and a general increase in usability.

“A high-level programming language is a programming language with strong abstraction from the details of the computer. In comparison to low-level programming languages, it may use natural language elements, be easier to use, or may automate (or even hide entirely) significant areas of computing systems (e.g. memory management), making the process of developing a program simpler and more understandable relative to a lower-level language” (Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-level_programming_language)

The rate of user generated content increases rapidly (Source: http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1298306.1298309) and content consumption as well. The coming, easy-to-use, powerful tools and constant rise in global internet penetration will surely increase this even further. Basically we will be flooded with quality user generated content from millions of talented individuals and an even bigger, constant flow of garbage. Reminds me a lot of TV…

As content increases and diversifies we will have to come up with newer, faster and better ways to filter out the garbage. There will be an increased focus on search engines, search and filtering techniques and of course SEO.  People and companies will need better ways to optimize their content ,so that others can find it easily.

The Creative Genius

Tools (programming languages) are becoming easier to use and usability will generally increase. Okay. What about gadgets? Will they get any smaller or something new is around the cornet?

They will indeed get even smaller to the point of virtually disappearing. I call this process the “dematerialization” of technology. This brings in mind one of the three famous three laws by Arthur C. Clarke:

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

(Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke’s_three_laws)

We will see the rapid spread of such “magical technology” but let’s focus only on the digital world. Applications will become user friendlier and gadgets will become nearly invisible and omnipresent and interconnected. This will bring about a focus on the created content and most importantly the thoughts, consciousness, genius, inspiration behind it. That’s why we see creativity over-discussed on every possible webpage, forum and image board and that’s why psychology is such a hot topic and such a popular study choice. (Source: http://www.apa.org/monitor/2008/06/undergrad-major.aspx)  The digital renaissance has already begun in the power centers of the developed world. We don’t even notice the various facets of the digital technology all around us as we commute to work, while checking our smart phones for new Facebook messages and browsing e-mails.

The Future of SEO

What does this means for an SEO? How should an SEO company thrive in a future so complex, so global and high-tech? Well the only way for an SEO company to succeed in the coming times is to aim for long-term value creation, only engage in white hat SEO activities and constantly innovate and expand into new areas.  For an SEO it means, that you have to concentrate on the value you are creating for the client, not on the techniques you use, but on the results. Techniques will rapidly come and go in the coming years and each subsequent one’s lifecycle will be shorter. The SEO of tomorrow must constantly educate himself and expand his repertoire to include such things as web design, web development and knowledge of different programming languages and you have to master a myriad of different tools and plugins. There will be less distinction between the individuals, who make a living online and a new breed of polymaths (meaning: master of many trades    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polymath), a new breed of digital renaissance men will arrive. They will be designers, developers and SEO professionals planning, creating, publishing and possibly selling their own creations online. The need for proper SEO will be more than ever but a different kind of SEO, a powerful holistic approach.

Automation and Smart Websites

What is currently only pioneered by the biggest names in the online world, the search engine giants. Personalized results and Google’s knowledge graph (human pattern recognition and problem solving simulation) will revolutionize the internet landscape. Personalization based on the understanding and simulation of human cognitive processes will advance swiftly and will be an available and affordable technology, which will reshape all websites. We will see dynamic websites, which radically change and adapt to the user’s interests and needs. Static content is the past! However, this will be a topic to be discussed in-depth later. This topic is interesting and complex enough to warrant an article on its own.

Psychology, Social Media, Trend Prediction… and Steampunk?

What does social media monitoring, trend prediction, IBM and steampunk has in common? It turns out, a lot! Steampunk just might be the first trend predicted by a machine at IBM (Source: onforb.es/W49lTQ) and don’t forget to check out the fully animated official infographic. This may be the first but definitely not the last trend predicted by computers. The trend was predicted based on social media monitoring and monitoring of user generated content, and search trends, a process very familiar to SEO. This illustrates nicely the direction, where SEO is headed and a need for a holistic approach to SEO.

Don’t miss the next article! It will be about trend prediction , market research, about the proper holistic approach to SEO,  video games and my love for steampunk (Will include cats too !) so stay tuned and follow us on Twitter for cats and SEO! (UPDATE: The next article is about the recently leaked Google news algorithm. You can find it here: http://www.higherclick.com/blog/nseo-seo-for-news-websites/) 

The post The Future of SEO, The Digital Renaissance appeared first on Higher Click.

Guest posting is fast becoming the weapon of choice in link building. More and more people are starting to reach out to bloggers, connect with others in the blogsphere and try their hand at this challenging task. I have decided to write this post to help new guest posts score some quick wins. Be forewarned though, guest posting requires awesome content (or an awesome writer) and most importantly: you must have something to say.

I. Register first:

Some bloggers usually leave a small gap for guest bloggers to try their luck: they let them register to their blog CMS directly as a contributor. The only thing standing in your way is a validation email to the owner, and you are ready to go. Registering on the blog CMS is quick and easy. It’s a sure fire way to ensure your content get reviewed. To find them I usually use some queries like:

“contribute” inurl:”guest-post” “register” OR ”register as a contributor” inurl:”guest”

There is a good recipe here, basically the equation is:

“common lines used for registration” + filtering relevant pages by URL with an operator = Pick you favorite blogs!

The edge:

You already have established a foothold on the  bloggers site, so it will not require much effort to convince the blogger to review your article. You can also bypass any email filters and other barriers which prevent your content getting published. If you gain access as a wordpress or other CMS contributor, all you have to do is upload, edit and you are done! Be sure to keep a close eye to the guest post guidelines, or you can quickly loose your privileged state.

II. Let them find you!

Using popular guest post forums is really great. Also, if they have any kind of guest post service supporting function, it’s even better. We usually check these places to find great possible partners for our guest posting service:

• Myblogguest: The largest community (that we observed), with almost endless ammounts of potential partners.
• Guestr: Fine list with a couple of great filtering options. It’s list is not as extensive as the one on Myblogguest, but it’s growing and the sites there are sure to answer your messages.
• Bloggerlinkup: Bloggerlinkup is one of my favorite services – get a list delivered to your email account with guest post accepting blogs. You can also advertise your well written articles. A really great compensation for your google guest post alerts.
• Triberr: Register with your twitter to find bonfires of different bloggers there. A good place to take a look around if you’d like to establish a connection with some new bloggers.

The edge:

The edge here is also an obstacle: bloggers here are openly accepting guest posts, but they are usually buried under a ton of outreach emails, so you’ll have to work hard to stand out in their mailbox. My usual tactic which works well here is the bait and hook. I’m usually saying I have an article I wrote about “this closely related topic”, but it’s not really for you. The webmasters are a curious bunch, so they often bite for these articles, as if they were the only ones out there. 

III. Browse around:

This is one of my favorite ways to find good blogs . It’s possible to find blogs you wouldn’t ever find any other way, since they are not following the usual patterns, such as: they are not stating clearly that they are open for guest bloggers, they have never published a contributed article and so on.

Where to start? A good place would be alltop.com. Simply search for your top industry blogs, select one, and start to follow the thread of bloggers linking to each other, like a spiders web, one good blog just leads to the other. These blog lists are slightly more useful than the usual “top 10 industry blogs” search results, since they are not constantly bombarded with emails because they are mentioned in damn best of the web list! Find the links to follow under: blogrolls, other blogs, our favorite blogs, blogs we follow and our friends.

The edge:

When you reach out to these bloggers, there is a high chance they are aware of the path you found them by, so take advantage of this and mention this in the reach out email. Saying in the email that you found them through a friend of theirs is a great advantage over your adversaries. Combine that with your awesome outreach message, and your success is almost guaranteed.

IV. Google+

Despite being written off by many, Google+ is here to stay and is actually becoming increasingly popular in the blogging community. Searching for your focus topics could yield great results if you are looking from the right angle. There are of course many good angles to search G+, and my one is trends. When I search for certain topics combined with trends, more often than not I get great results, with people sharing relevant topics around. Check out their profile for links to their blog or website.

The edge:

I wouldn’t call this method an easy one, but you’ll immediately find people who are interested in your ideas and actively building their blog. If you have great ideas for content, you’ll be able to connect with them easily.

V. The List:

Last, but not least, here is a great list compiled by Kim Roach of buzzblogger.com, with more guest posting opportunities you can handle till X-mas!

Find the list here:  http://www.buzzblogger.com/600-places-to-share-your-content/

The edge::

Great quality blogs listed in an organized way. What else would you need? 

I hope you found some interesting ideas from this post. If you’re interested in scaling your guest posting you should check our guest posting service out. Thanks for reading!

The post Having the Edge: 5 Ways To Find Guest Post Partners Fast appeared first on Higher Click.

Guides on all sorts of SEO related methods such as link building, internal linking strategies, how to maximize social shares and outreaching are plentiful but only a small number are on how to generate quality content.

But…. What’s the problem with that?

The problem is as Bill Gates once said “content is king” and this quote applies especially when it comes to SEO.

Why Content Is So Important For SEO

Link Building

Many SEO companies set aside a much bigger budget for link building campaigns compared to content creation campaigns. But the fact is without unique and high quality content there would be no links to build.

Sure without content you could write some short quick fire answers on Yahoo answers or other similar sites, but there is no way this type of content is going to get you the same amount of traffic that an amazing piece of content would get. Think about it, a short answer consisting of a sentence or two isn’t going to be shared, liked or tweeted nearly as many times as an article that offers a greater amount of value to its readers.

Also without content there would be no way you would be able to get the keywords you want to rank for or build the links you need in an ethical way. You could continue to roll out spammy Black Hat SEO content. But it seems much more logical to follow Matt Cutts advice and create good content as the links will come as a result. Cutts is the guy in charge of Google’s algorithm updates so shouldn’t be ignored.

Outreach Attempts

Outreaching attempts can be extremely difficult. We worry about things such as how personal the email should be, what the title of the email should be and so on and so forth. However we all know that the main goal in outreach is to get our content on websites with a high PageRank.

Without great content I am afraid to say that not many high PageRank blogs are going to want your stuff. There is so much content being produced on a daily basis for the internet, that it is the stuff that stands out from the crowd that is going to get picked up more readily and that’s where high quality content comes in.

On-page Optimization

You can optimize your page as much as you like and spend time making a site look as cool as you can but, I have to tell you, if the content on the site is poor then on-page optimization is a waste of time.

Creating content is all part of creating the ‘user experience’. It is just as important as making the site readable and making sure all the tags are positioned correctly. If your site doesn’t offer the information they are looking for then they aren’t going to stick around for long. Looks account for nothing if the content is bad.

It’s Great For The Penguins & The Pandas

Every time a Google algorithm is about to be brought out many SEO companies are left trembling in their boots. Bracing themselves for the onslaught of penalties and setbacks that will be released upon all of their current campaigns.

However both the Panda and the Penguin update placed great emphasis on user experience. What contributes to user experience? You got it – great content. All the algorithms have lead to sites that contain the most relevant content for a specific search query getting rewarded the most. Amit Singhal a senior VP and Google Fellow said “our site quality algorithms are aimed at helping people find ‘high quality’ sites by reducing the ranks of low quality content”.

The only way you are going to provide people with the information they need is through developing unique, high quality content. Everybody in the SEO industry seems to be fearing the latest Penguin update and I am not surprised with Matt Cutts being quoted saying things like “you don’t want the next Penguin update”. However as long as you are creating great content with information that people need there is no need to be scared.

Content For Blogs

How new the content is on a site is considered a ranking factor. If a page hasn’t been updated in years then search engines are less likely to display it anywhere near the first page of results. They sort of mark it down as irrelevant and unnecessary.

Because of this suggesting that clients blog on their website is becoming a more frequent thing. They can supply people will great content and let search engines know that their site is still important and is worth getting ranked high.

Content Plays A Big Part In Social Media

Social media is becoming a bigger and bigger presence in the world that we live in. Facebook and Twitter both boast huge numbers of users, with Facebook hitting the 1 billion mark recently. If you are a user of social media (it is highly unlikely that you aren’t) then you will know that millions of articles get shared every day.

When articles get shared and retweeted etc etc they gain huge exposure. If you create content that gets shared then it can be a huge boost for your SEO campaign. If more people see the article you are going to get more visits for your clients site, more people viewing their product or service and greater revenue will be generated. This is what SEO is based on – getting clients more exposure and benefiting their business, and the way to go about this is to create spectacular content.

Content is also becoming increasingly important in social media as search engines are now moving towards making ‘likes’ and shares a bigger ranking factor. Bing already uses Facebook ‘likes’ as a factor and Google have plans to make Google+ a ranking factor.

So How Do You Create Great Content?

When I first started writing content for the purpose of SEO I asked exactly the same question. It’s all well and good knowing the ins and outs of why content is so important for SEO but how do you actually go about making high quality content?

I was much more tuned into an academic writing style, which for the purpose of SEO just wouldn’t be suitable. So I went out hunting for guides and as mentioned in the intro found that there is a serious lack of guides on how to make great content for the purpose of SEO.

However that it no longer a problem as here is the ultimate guide to SEO content creation.

Look At The Clients Site

Rule number one: the content you make is never going to be the same for each and every one of your clients.

Because of this you should spend some time looking at the clients site. This is because you need to understand what it is the client does or has to offer. As great as it would be you can’t know everything and when it comes to writing content for SEO you will have to write content for a wide range of industries that you may not be familiar with at all.

So take some time and learn what it is they do, you don’t have to become an expert but you do need to know what it is you are talking about. This is purely for the fact that if you are writing content to be published on a site that it is viewed by experts in a particular industry they will easily be able to tell if you are talking rubbish.

Look At The Target Site

This only really applies if you have already targeted a site and have been given permission to submit some guest posts to it. You need to look at their site in order to work out what types of articles they use and what sorts of articles are the most popular. This is not difficult to do at all, it can be as simple as looking at how many shares and tweets other articles have or looking to see how many comments they have.

You also need to check their writer guidelines, which you will be able to find somewhere on their page. These guidelines will specify things such as the wordlength, how many linkers you are allowed and what the content should offer.

Adapt For Both Sites

This is important as it is very easy to fall into the trap of writing an article that neglects either the client or the target site. You need to fully understand what sort of an image your client wants you to display through your content but at the same time you need to make it match the requirements of the target site.

Your client is the most important of the two as you can always find a site that is more suitable for the needs of your client. All you have to do is consult with them to see what it is that they want, this is the perfect time to see what keywords they wish to rank for as well.

Doing all of this may sound much harder than it is but all you really need to determine is how serious your client is and what type of content the target site wants. Get a little creative and doing this becomes a walk in the park.

Keyword Research

Keyword research is something that you should always include in the process of creating quality content for link building. It isn’t tricky to do and can help you decide what keywords you want to rank for, which is a massive help in terms of your wider SEO campaign.

When it comes to keyword research there are two tools that you should use and they are: Google Adwords and Ubersuggest.

Adwords is brilliant for keyword research mainly due to the fact it is made by the search engine king – Google. All that you have to do is type in your desired keyword or phrase and it will return a wealth of information about that keyword or phrase. You can find out how many monthly searches there are and how competitive a keyword is. It also allows you to fine tune your research as it lets you enter what it is you are specifically looking for. For example if you are looking for an exact match of your keyword, all you need to do is tick ‘exact’. The same applies if you are looking for broader terms, the only thing you have to do is tick ‘broad’.

Ubersuggest is another handy tool for keyword research. It’s great because it is a straightforward tool that isn’t hard to get the hang of. You simply type in a keyword and by taking advantage of Google’s suggest function Ubersuggest then returns an extremely detailed list of keyword suggestions. You can instantly see what the top searches are and then you can see a whole host of keyword suggestions in alphabetical order. Ubersuggest also allows you to look more in depth at the keywords people have been searching for.

Once you have your keywords, you are well on your way to creating some super content.

Get People Together And Brainstorm

Not enough SEO companies utilize the opportunity of brainstorming. The fact is, the greater the number of people involved in the process of generating ideas the greater the ideas will be.

Its logical – the more people, the more ideas and the easier it is to bounce ideas off one another. Leaving the ideas for content down to just one person can lead to generic and boring content that is bad for so many reasons it would take too long to explain.

Always Consider Your Audience

There is no need to conduct a major piece of research on the demographics of the people that will read your articles, each time you are assigned an article. But It is important to bear in mind just who is going to be reading your content. This allows you to adopt the perfect writing style that will engage your audience as best as you can. For example If the viewers of your article are going to be people who know the topic you are writing on well, then you will need to adopt certain terms that are well-known in that field.

Think Of Different Angles

A different angle on a particular topic is what is going to make your content popular. It needs to be something fresh and slightly different to what people already know. If there are a million and one other sites that say exactly the same thing you can be assured that the piece of content is bad and of low quality. The other problem with creating content that doesn’t offer a fresh perspective is that it increases your chances massively of getting penalised for duplicate content. Duplicate content is always going to be detrimental to any SEO campaign.

What you need to do is think outside of the box and try and make connections between what you client does and other topic areas. If your client sells gold on their site, you don’t have to just write articles directed at finance and investment type blogs. Instead you should aim for every type of site you can such as cars (there are gold cars), home improvement (there are houses containing gold) etc etc. You should never be afraid of being a little controversial or trying something new as this will help you see what content works and what content doesn’t.

Remember The Article Doesn’t Have To Be Just About The Client

To explain this I will use a hypothetical example. The client you are required to write for specializes in payday loans. Getting content that is just about payday loans will be extremely hard to get taken up by high PageRank websites. This is because not many people look fondly on payday loans and aren’t so keen to be seen condoning them, especially websites to do with personal finance.

If you outreached with some content all about how great payday loans are the chances your content will be accepted are extremely slim. So what do you do? Your client is paying you to get them links but no one is accepting your content?

What you do is put less focus on the client, instead make the article about something else but make sure you can still include a word or two about payday loans such as “you could borrow money from family, banks or consider a payday loan”. This way whoever is going to approve your post is less likely to know that you are representing a payday loan website so you can get the links that you need.

Research Well

Research is one of the most important things to do when it comes to generating fresh, up-to-date content and you don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to be good at it.

Most people tend to just stick to a Google search and use the first page results – but this is not the way to go. There are plenty of sites that you can use to make your research efforts much better and easier.

Get Tooled Up!

There are two great tools that are going to make researching for ideas much easier and faster.

FastestChrome/Firefox

This extension comes with two brilliant features great for searching the web and looking things up. It has an endless page feature that automatically loads the next page, so there is no need to click the next buttons. When you conduct a Google search you can just keep scrolling down through all the pages.

The other ace feature is that if you highlight a word it will give you four options of where to search for the term; Google, Surf Canyon, Wikipedia and DuckDuck Go. It also pops up with the definition of words, just in case you are ever unfamiliar with it.

Link Clump

Link clump gives you the ability to open multiple links in new tabs easily. All you have to do is drag a box around all of the links you need and voila all the stuff you need is already open.

If you are using Firefox there are similar apps  - Snap Links and Multi Links.

Wikipedia

Wikipedia should be one of your first ports of call, even more so if you know little about the topic you have to write on. Yes some things on Wikipedia are incorrect and you should not think that everything you read is going to be the truth but it’s a good place to start. What you should do is look at the sources at the bottom of the page and take a look at them as this is much more likely to benefit you.

Quora

Quora is sort of like Yahoo answers but a lot better. Questions are usually answered by experts in that field and other people vote on answers so you can see which answer is the best one. Most of the time you can guarantee that the answers on this site are legit. It is a good place to get some ideas for content and uncover some angles that you may not have considered.

Alltop

Alltop is a great site to use to see what topics are popular for the niche you are writing for. If you are stuck for ideas then Alltop is the place to visit. It collects the headlines of all of the latest stories and supplies them to you. If you write content that covers a popular topic then the chances of it getting picked up and used is much more likely.

Social Mention

Using Social Mention is good if you are aiming for content that you are hoping to make viral. It allows you to conduct a real time search to see what people are talking about, writing about and what’s trending. After you have conducted a search the dashboard on the left supplies you with some really cool statistics about the keyword(s) that you searched for.

Create A Great Title

The title is going to be the thing that makes people want to click and open your content, and if you are outreaching with a the title, it is going to be what the website owner bases their decision on. So creating a great title is important. You could have the most amazing content ever but if it’s accompanied by a rubbish title all the effort you put in has just gone to waste.

This article from Problogger is brilliant for generating some really great ideas. A little snippet of advice is that ‘top list’ titles are rather effective. Things such as ‘5 things you need…’ or ‘7 must have…’ are definitely worth doing.
Draw People In With The First Few Sentences

This is why it is so important to make sure that the headline and the content match. If the headline gives the wrong impression or is not related to the actual content, when people read the opening line they are likely to leave the page straight away.

You should start with a bold statement or an interesting quote. If you are unsure whether other people are going to want to read it then get other peoples opinions. Ask friends, family or people in your office whether if they read those sentences they would be enticed to carry on reading.
Include Videos And Images

Including videos and pictures makes your content much more appealing to readers. A page that is just filled with text is not going to make people want to read your content. The rule is that you should always try to include at least one picture in each article. You should use stock items that have a creative commons license -websites like Shutterstock and Flickr are good options. If you are using Flickr you should always conduct an advanced search as not all the pictures are licensed for creative commons.

Including videos is also handy as it can explain a point you want to make but in a lot less words. However what you don’t want is the video to take all of the attention away from your content. The video should just be a part of the content maybe a link that says “if you want to find out more watch this video” The video should never explain everything that will be contained within your content.

Include Your Research

If you make a bold statement always make sure that you can back it up. The way to do this is to include links to the research that you have used. You can either do this within the article or at the end of the article. Not everything you say has to be backed up with academic research but you should always back statistics up by supplying them with sources.

Keywords

When writing content for SEO purposes you will probably be supplied with a list of keywords that you have to include within the article.

How to place these keywords is highly important.You may have come across some really spammy SEO content where keywords have been stuffed in everywhere like this:

But this is not the way it should be done. If your article contains numerous keywords like this people are going to see immediately what your purpose is, and what high PageRank websites are going to to accept content with links or keywords dropped everywhere? The answer is – None.

Instead what you need to do is learn how to place them subtly so they don’t interrupt the overall flow of the article. You need to make sure that the keywords make sense within the sentence you put them in and aren’t too obvious. This can be hard for obscure or long tail keywords that often look out of place but if you are innovative then you can fit them in really well.

Be Able To Adapt Like A Chameleon

After you have completed an article and submitted it for publication, changes may still need to be made. Maybe the website that the article is going to be put on wants a slightly different angle or the client wants you to add something else in. You need to be able to do this when required.

Track Your Content

This is a great way to manage your content strategy. Create a spreadsheet containing the titles of articles that have been done, The date that they were published and the URLs where the articles can be found.

Doing this allows you to see what types of titles work, what sites accept what types of articles so you have a clear picture of what can be done or can’t be done again.

To Conclude….

You now know the importance of high quality content for the purposes of SEO. Search engines love it, bloggers love it and your clients will love it when they see the results. Creating quality content isn’t difficult either. As long as you follow the steps in this guide the content you create is going to be effective. Remember when it comes to content never be afraid to be bold and make statements that not many people will agree with. This is because this type of content is interesting and is going to engage the most readers.

If you’re interesting in having Jared and our other talented marketers work on building quality links to your website using these techniques, check out our brand new guest posting service!

The post The Ultimate Guide To Link Building Content Creation appeared first on Higher Click.

1 – Anchor text ratio

Recognised as one of the main factors that triggers the penguin part of the algorithm. In the past, you could get away with repeating your anchor text again and again when you were doing link building. This is not true any more since April 24 of this year. If you want to be safe, make sure brand terms and raw urls are your top anchor texts.

anchor text distribution of the sites penalised by penguin.

Useful tools: Ahrefs, Opensiteexplorer

Read more about the topic: Micrositemasters, penguin analysis

2 – Website growth and content production

You remember the time when you could just hammer your site with links and never ever update it and still progress in rankings? Gone! A site receiving links without content growth seems to be fishy these days (especially if the links are low quality). Moreover, producing fresh content is a great way to capture long tail traffic these days.

Useful tools: Hittail

Read more about the topic: Could longtail keywords really produce up to 80% more organic traffic long-term?

3 – Real life link opportunities

So many times, as a business owner or just a member of the community, you have the occasion to get high quality links to your site simply by asking the people you interact with. More than ever, this is a very viable link building method. Just offer some value to the person in front of you and they’ll give it back to you in the form of a link (very often much cheaper than buying links!).

Tools: Your business card and Twitter account

Read more about this: Real Life Link Building: Three Real Relationships You Can Turn Into Virtual Votes

4 – What’s trending

Back in the day, SEOs mostly referred to the Adwords keyword tool data to produce content making it disconnected from the real time “buzzosphere”. Nowadays, with the boost to fresh content and the fact that editorial content is one of the most viable link building strategies. You should stay up to date with what’s going on in the world.

Understanding trending topics and creating content around them is quite easy with Topsy

Tools : Topsy, The new google trends, Twitter

Read more about this: Create Something Newsworthy

5 – Internal linking and site structure

Who cared about site structure unless the site was hundreds of thousands of pages. Nowadays, with the increased cost and difficulty to acquire inner page links, internal linking and site structure can make or break your SEO strategy. It’s worth spending time on.

Tools: Screamingfrog, Google docs

Read more about this: Intelligent Site Structure for better SEO

6 – Rich snippets

Remember when the Google results were plain and dull? No more, now we’ve got pictures of authors, star ratings and video snippets amongst others. Brainstorming smart ways to use these can drastically improve your CTR, and the beauty of this is that the results actually happen fast for once in SEO!

Tools: Rich snippet testing tool

Read more about this: A Visual Guide to Rich Snippets

7 – (Not provided)

That may be the worst update of all, Google decided not to share the referring keywords with web masters in the name of “user privacy”. However it’s clear that they want to prevent search retargeting providers to compete with them. This prevents marketers from understanding the traffic they receive and adapt their site to both provide a better user experience and improve their conversion rates.

the growth of not provided over the year.

Tools: none

Read more about this: Recovering (Not Provided) Keyword Data

8 – On site duplicate and low content pages

That one is getting old but many people tend to forget that Panda was originally intended to hit the site with too many of these issues. Consider running a copyscape check on your site, noindexing the tag pages and buffing up the content of your product and category pages to panda proof your website.

Tools: Copyscape

Read more about this: Duplicate Content in a Post-Panda World

9 – The PR team

I used to get mad at them when they were getting great unanchored links in the past. Now I’ve become a bit more humble and learn a lot about quality link building from talking to them. They also have the key to develop great relationships in the corporate/non digital world which we can learn a lot about.

Tools: none

Read more about this: When PR met SEO

10 – What the previous SEO did

You remember the time when you were taking over the campaign from someone else and judged the work wasn’t good enough and simply built your campaign on top of it ignoring what he did? Well now with the anchor balance, panda and penguin issues, you have to acknowledge and fix their mistakes or you risk to face the consequences of their mistakes.

Tools: Ahrefs, Opensiteexplorer, Screamingfrog

Read more about this: 12 Questions to Ask Before Taking on SEO Clients

10 – Converting and non converting keywords

As is it much more difficult and expensive to gain traffic these days, the old mentality of “throw everything on the wall and see what sticks” or “shotgun SEO” is slowly disappearing.  SEOs think a lot more like paid search marketers these days and “snipe” the right converting keywords, which is a good thing in essence as this provides a better user experience. This also means SEO’s actually use paid search to figure out what converts before they start a campaign very often.

Tools: Google analytics, Kissmetrics

Read more about this: How To Leverage PPC To Discover High-Converting Keywords For SEO

11 – Google+

Despite being a “ghost town” according to some mainstream medias, Google+ is here to stay and you’d better jump on the boat sooner than later. It’s only a matter of time before G+ becomes somewhat of a traffic generator or ranking factor. It’s already been merged with Local, it will most likely gain in importance in the future. The fact is that search+ can influence a hell lot of people from a single +1 and it’s already an amazing opportunity if you consider that most people are logged in gmail.

G+ took way less time than the other social networks to reach 10 million users and it’s still growing.

Tools: Google+, Findpeopleonplus

Read more about this: Google+ for SEO

12 – Who your buyers are

As content has to be more trending and fresh these days, it’s very important that it also matches the demographics that buy from you and answers the concerns they might have prior to buying from you.

Tools: Facebook advertising plateform, Doubleclick ad planner

Read more about this: Keyword-Level Demographics

13 – Upcoming Google updates

If we were laughing at the Google updates in the past and how they were missing the real SEO shortcut, 2012 has shown they can react and react fast, keeping SEOs on their toes. It is important now not just to achieve results today, but to make sure they are sustainable and will survive tomorrow’s updates.

Tools: Matt Cutt’s Twitter, Your RSS feed

Read more about this: Google Algorithm Change History

14 – #RCS

Wil Reynolds hit hard at this year’s Mozcon with his #RCS, but he hit where it hurts. SEOs felt like they were not really understanding the business goal of the company they were working with in the past talking about “links” and “rankings” and “traffic”. It’s time for us to up our game and use the metrics businesses have used for decades: ROI, Revenue, Market share, share of voice etc. This is the only way to get the budgets we want to run campaigns.

Tools: Your brain, a good business sense

Read more about this: Real company stuff… It’s a struggle

15 – Freshness

I bet you forgot about that one, November 3 2011, very similar to caffeine  that new algorithm layer seems to give an unfair advantage to fresh content in certain newsworthy or ever changing fields. This update is way bigger than it seems as it promotes heavy ongoing content strategies.

Tools: none

Read more about this: Google’s “Freshness” Update – Whiteboard Friday

16 – Copyright infrigments

If you’re working on a website that has been known for breaking copyrights or is susceptible to do so, you better look back at the content you put online. As per August 10th 2012 update, websites being hit repeatedly with DMCA complaints may now suffer ongoing penalties.

Tools: your mailbox for DMCA complaints

Read more about this: The Pirate Update: Google Will Penalize Sites Repeatedly Accused Of Copyright Infringement

17 – Multi channel attribution

2012 is the year where marketing channels blend with each other and deciding who takes the credit for a conversion is more and more of a challenge. Thanks to Google analytics, you can now look at all the mediums a new customer went through before they converted. Different models are still being argued at the moment but everyone has come to a consensus that the last touch is not always the most important.

Tools: Google analytics

Read more about this: Google Analytics Multi-Channel Funnels: How to Use Multi-Channel Tracking & Attribution

18 – The knowledge graph

The knowledge graph is both exciting and scary. It means that we won’t necessarily have to rely on keywords so heavily and that google will have a better understanding of content. However, it also means Google is scraping authority sources and providing information to its users without click through to your site. This is why monitoring the queries where google provides these is important and understanding that the traffic might decrease from them.

Tools: Google

Read more about this: Google’s Knowledge Graph: Less Traffic To More Sites?

19 – Localised results

Nobody really talks about the Venice update anymore but it’s still here. Google now displays more local results depending on your location settings and IP. This means that a local baker in Liverpool might actually rank for the keyword “baker” in Liverpool instead of multi national firms for the lower part of the search results. This is a big empowerment for small businesses and understanding that update can drastically improve the SEO results you may get.

Tools: Google

Read more about this: Understand and Rock the Google Venice Update

20 – Relationship building

More than link building, relationship building is now the way to go for a durable SEO presence. Simply network with non competing websites in your niche or correlated to your niche. Get them to introduce you to their friends, start common projects, promote each other. These will generate signals Google will pick up on (links, social mentions etc) and reward you for.

Tools: Buzzstream, Grouphigh, Twitter

Read more about this: Building Awesome Relationships For Links, Likes, and Love

21 – Getting paid enough

Seriously, with all these changes and all the extra work that comes with SEO, make sure you get the budgets your projects deserve .

The post 21 Things you (should) now care about as an SEO in 2012 appeared first on Higher Click.

For this very reason I published an article titled: 4 Tips for Improving Your Outreach a few months back.  Unfortunately, it now seems 4 tips simply aren’t enough.  Guest Posting is time consuming, it’s difficult, but it is also powerful and proven, and when you do it right you’re not going to piss people off.

The following is a list of tips that are sure to make Guest Posting life a little easier for both you and the bloggers, from targeting all the way to publishing.

Let’s start from the very beginning:  You have a client, and you identify their niche.  The object now is to find sites in that niche that will publish your content and your links on their blog.

So, how do you go about finding these targets?

The most intuitive way to get started is to simply head to Google.  Not surprisingly, queries like ‘Top [NICHE] Blog’ can yield decent results.  But if you really know how to search you can drastically improve your results with advanced queries such as:

[NICHE] intitle:“Submit an article” or [NICHE] intitle:“Submit a guest post”

Advanced queries refine your results by finding targets that are not only within your niche but are known to accept the guest posts you so desperately desire. This technique works but it is slow, cumbersome, and just feels archaic, anyone can type in queries and comb through Google’s SERPs.

Instead, here are two ways I do it:

1. Alltop 

This method is simple and effective.  Alltop is more or less a blog directory, it’s just  a really good one.  Check out their site and you’ll find hundreds of great leads in just about any area you’re looking for.  But the perks don’t end there, Alltop is also great because you can submit listings to their site.  Should you get approved, connect your RSS feed and watch the traffic climb!

2. Serpiq + Open Site Explorer + Link Detective

Step1: Identify your client’s main keywords
Step2: Head over to Serpiq.com and use the Competition Analyzer to identify the heavy hitters for that keyword (ie. your competition)

Step3: Take those competitors to Open Site Explorer

Peruse their backlink profile and download a CSV with all of this valuable information.  Here is what that will look like: http://goo.gl/SPOUy 

Step4: Upload that CSV to Link Detective.

They will break down that information and allow you to filter those results by link type.  In other words, it’ll give you a long list of links that you know come from blogs within your niche – perfect targets! That will end up looking like: http://goo.gl/ot5Ww

Using these tools you’ve collected a solid list of quality targets.  They have a good Domain Authority, a strong audience, and you know for a fact that they’ve linked to sites similar to your client’s site; thus, they should be open to linking to yours.

Once that list is compiled it’s time for outreach.  But before you start sending out emails you need to consider your target’s perspective.  SEO’s have a bad rap on the web (as Darren Rowse recently suggested on G+), we’re pegged as the guys who throw garbage content around and will do almost anything for a link.  Thus, when Samantha at blahblah.com see’s an email in her inbox from a stranger@higherclick.com she’s most likely going to pop over to higherclick.com to check me out, at which point she’ll see that I work for a SEO company, and that alone will drastically lower my outreach return rate.  Fortunately, sidestepping this issue is pretty simple.  Talk to your clients, and ask the for a company email address.  This way, when a blogger uses your email to check you out, they see a member of the niche community and a resource instead of simply a marketer.  With this new email address, set up a G+ account, a twitter, a gravatar, and in 10 minutes you will have created a way to show yourself under another light that will exponentially increase your chances of receiving replies.

Now, we’re ready for outreach.

In my last post, I discussed the benefits of tools like boomerang and rapportive, while they remain great resources they’re attached to a system that I no longer find to be the most efficient for outreach.  That outdated system is Gmail.  Taking a long list of prospects and plugging them into gmail one at a time is time consuming and unnecessary.  Instead there exists a new tool that streamlines this process.

That tool is Buzzstream.

Buzzstream is a web-based software that helps to simplify the whole Guest Posting process.  Their platform offers a multitude of services, but really hits home on two fronts.  The first actually takes us back a step to OSE & Link Detective, once you’ve found a valuable target buzz stream’s ‘Link Buzzmarker’ function allows you to pull that site’s info, including contact emails, and store it in a specific file dedicated within buzzstream to your client.  After buzzing all your targets into that folder you have a clean list of targets and their corresponding emails.  At this point it’s time to shift buzzstream into the next gear and utilize their best feature, outreach.

Buzzstream sets themselves apart from Gmail in a few ways with outreach.  The first being that you can grab your entire list of targets, select a pre existing template you’ve crafted, and send out personalized (buzz stream pulls the bloggers name/email address and places it exactly where you want it automatically) emails with the click of a button.  This allows you to outreach an enormous list of targets within a few minutes.  I don’t, however, recommend this tactic.  As I mentioned in my last post, massive outreach with templates yields a very thin return and pisses off bloggers!

Instead, this is how I do outreach with Buzzstream:

Ok, so i’m against blasting off templates to a large number of targets, it just doesn’t work.   But Buzzstream’s template system does have a trick up its sleeve. They have recently installed a program that keeps track of each template’s response rate.  This way, I can clearly see that template 1 has a return rate of 9% whereas template 2 has a return rate of 16%.  This provides me with invaluable data, allowing me to analyze my return rate and decipher what works and what doesn’t.  I try one thing, track it, and try another.  AB test, repeat, succeed. This labor has yielded some serious fruit.  I now have a much larger idea of what works and what doesn’t, and here’s what i’ve determined:

Templates, no matter how clever or well worded, are impersonal.  

Template 1 and template 2 may bring back decent results but they are nowhere close to what they could be.  Instead, it is template 3 that really rakes in the Guest Posts.  Except, of course, that template 3 isn’t much of a template, instead it looks something like this:

Hey ____!

Let me know if that sparks your interest, like I said, I’d love to contribute!
Cheers,

You see, the key is to utilize the information in front of you.  When you know where the enemy is you don’t carpet bomb an entire city, you take out a single house.  The same is true with outreach, you need to focus your attack specifically for each target.  That means writing something unique each time.  Now, the overall structure of the email can be the same, as you can see above.  But you need to fill in the middle with something catered specifically towards each site.  Whether that be complimenting a recent blog post, referencing a specific tweet, or commenting on a common interest, an outreach email’s return rate skyrockets when you put in that little bit extra.

Along with personalization, AB testing has confirmed three other techniques as effective.  Firstly, keep your emails short and to the point.  Don’t dance around your objective, be clear, forthcoming, and appreciate brevity.  Secondly, include potential headlines within your email.  Bloggers like when you have a clear cut idea and can back it up.  Thirdly, be genuine, be real! But don’t be afraid to be a little over enthusiastic. I’m talking exclamation points, words like magnificent, awesome, phenomenal; tickle that ego and reap the rewards!

Using Buzzstream in these ways, allows you to group your targets, get their contact info, track template success, and outreach many targets in the most effective and time conserving way.  As long as you remember to get personal, keep it short and sweet, and lighten their day with some overthetop adjectives and punctuation.

The End Result
Utilizing these tools and techniques will not only increase your response rate and get you more published guest posts for your client, but will initiate the beginning of a real-ationship.  Lets face it, targeting and outreach are tedious and time consuming, if you want to Guest Post like a Boss you won’t allow the attention to detail in your opening email to die off once a blogger agrees to a post.  Instead you’ll add them on linkedin, follow them on twitter, and comment on their blog.  You’ll keep in touch, and this will allow you to contact them again should you need to publish another article.

Like I said in my last post, the real players in this industry don’t have to deal with cold outreach.  They have compiled a long list of sites they regularly contribute to and can contact at any time.  The real bosses can throw up multiple guest posts in a day instead of waiting a week for responses that may never come.

If you’re interested in getting more guest posts done for your campaign, feel free to check our new Guest posting service.

The post Guest Post Like a Boss appeared first on Higher Click.

I was immediately sucked into the essay after reading one of the opening paragraphs where Paul Graham gives a shout out to my home town – Buffalo, New York.  He writes, “If you could get the right ten thousand people to move from Silicon Valley to Buffalo, Buffalo would become Silicon Valley.”

As a proud former-Buffalonian I laughed-out-loud after reading this but couldn’t deny the accuracy of the statement. Silicon Valley is Silicon Valley not because of anything different about the water they drink or the air they breathe. Silicon Valley is the way it is because of the people.

On October 23rd, 2011 I said goodbye to my former home in Buffalo and boarded a plane bound for Budapest, Hungary – my new home. My relationship with the city since the moment I landed can best be described as a love affair.

Chain bridge and parlement in Budapest.

You could say I came to Budapest for a job but I wouldn’t say that’s what attracted me to the city. It was the exotic nature of Budapest that really hooked me. Very few friends from back home could identify the location of Budapest, let alone the country it is in and they are not alone (watch the video below)!

What this video >>

Perhaps moving to Budapest was my a “hipster rebellion” that came out of my desire to be different in my post-college life. Regardless, what I found there was a bustling, modern city with more to offer than I could have ever imagined. If there is to be a “Silicon Valley” of Europe, Budapest is just the place for it to happen.

The Situation

Dorm Room Coding. Founders of Facebook Depicted in “The Social Network” (2010)

In order to reproduce Silicon Valley, you need to reproduce that magical moment when a company is first “conceived.” You’ve got to reproduce that romantic situation when cofounders come together to create their baby…I mean startup. This romantic situation takes place at the kitchen table, its scribbled on napkins at bars, in garages or during all night hack sessions when the first prototype is created.

Jobs and Wozniak (left to right) Depicted in “Pirates of The Silicon Valley” (1999)

To reproduce these situations you need people and according to Paul Graham you need two specific types of people…rich people and nerds. Nerds are needed to found the startups and rich people are needed to invest in them.

So the question is – how do you attract nerds and rich people?

Graham writes that nerds like is other nerds. He says, “smart people will go wherever other smart people are. And in particular, to great universities.”

Budapest is home to a plethora of great universities. Central European University (CEU) is ranked 24th globally in the Financial Times EMBA Ranking 2009. Corvinus University of Budapest is placed 65th in the FT Ranking of Top 65 European MBA programs 2008. Budapest University of Technology and Economics is rated 235th in the world according to the Webometrics Ranking of World Universities (July 2009). The list goes on.

According to Graham, “creating a new university would not be enough to start a Silicon Valley.” As Graham describes it, the university is just the “seed” that has to be planted in the right “soil.” Age old history, beautiful architecture, a temperate climate, and stunning views along the banks of the danube help make Budapest a fertile planting ground for new startups.

Nerds also like alternative destinations that aren’t too mainstream. Budapest is a city with a personality of its own. The architecture of the cities pre-war buildings is visible at every turn. Local shops, restaurants and cafes line the streets instead of international chains. remain almost entirely intact.

Graham writes that “if you go to see Silicon Valley,  what you’ll see are buildings. But it’s the people that make it Silicon Valley, not the buildings.”

The post Budapest: The Silicon Valley Of Europe? appeared first on Higher Click.

Gael Breton, Higher Click Director,  at Harvard Business School

Hi guys, just a brief introduction to who I am. My name is Scott Webster, and I am currently working at Higherclick on an internship. I am a university student, studying BA(Hons) Business Management at Edinburgh Napier University in my third year now. And until a couple of months ago, I had never heard of SEO. Since starting this internship, I have asked myself “why not?” These days technology is something the youth absolutly love, we can’t live a day without it. Not knowing the way of SEO is a sin in itself, I believe.

So who else has not heard, or even been introduced to SEO at university? Well to my knowledge, pretty much everyone. Should this really be the case for such an important part of online marketing? Higher Click Director, Gael Breton, has had the experience of conducting a lecture on SEO at top universities, such as Oxford and Harvard Business School. The reason why, because these teachers have had no experience or knowledge to conduct such lectures.

So how can we decide if this unique industry should be taught in university?
Well, what I’m going to do is take you through some advantages and disadvantages of introducing the the world of SEO into the education system from my point of view.

Advantages

1. Compulsory Training

Having a course would pretty much create a specific standard level of knowledge to enter the industry. Everyone who is learning SEO will start at the same place, and learn the same things. Obviously courses would be created and taught by previous “SEO experts”, which for me is perfect. I have seen time and time again that my teachers didn’t have the greatest experience in the workplace. They were just taught how to learn business management, yet had no actual experience from the workplace.

2. Certified Training Methods.

Courses would have the best practices included in the programme. What would be the point in teaching something that doesn’t work. A common trend that I have experienced is that universities try to teach you everything about everything within the subject. It goes into great detail, but never gives you the whole story. It may just be me, but I always think it’s common sense what i’m getting learned. SEO would be different. Its completly new knowledge that I would be learning. The lectures would be experienced, which is essential, but they would only be teaching the white hat techniques that make our work contain much more quality.

3. Standardisation of the Industry

A qualification in SEO would be so beneficial for the industry. It would save so much time, money and resources in training up new employees, such as myself, to the standard that the company wishes. They would be able to do their job, building links, and getting results which is what we are paid to do! Don’t get me wrong, I love the first couple of hours or even days of a new job to be pretty relaxed, getting to know what you are doing etc. But it takes time to teach a new employee everything they need to know about their job. And having SEO as a course in university, would make the first couple of weeks much easier, from the companies point of view.

4. No Houdini’s Who Get Away With Black and Grey Hat Techniques!

Don’t you just love it when you’re driving along the motorway, and then all of a sudden an idiot fly’s by in a car at whatever mph. 10 minutes later your still driving and see the idiot getting arrested for speeding. Well thats how this would kind of work. As the standard of the SEO expert increases though university, less people will be taught about the black and grey hat techniques. Although it will always exist, people will be more knowledgeable about it, and clients will be more aware if they are hiring a shady SEO service which will harm their website, and effectively their brand name that they have created. We all hate when we see the black and grey hat techniques being used, but could university be the solution to this problem?

Disadvantages

Did you get all that? Yeah, well let’s move on to the next part, the disadvantages!

1. Lack of Qualified Lecturers (Failed SEO’s)

Ever heard the saying “teachers are just failed professionals in their field” Well that’s something that may just happen. If you think about it, only someone with a passion for teaching will be good at their job, not the so called “experienced professionals” who just happens to give up his or her lifestyle to teach you, will be a good teacher. Put yourself my position. I’m working for an SEO company, learning the tricks of the trade as I go. I’m living in Budapest, the best city I have ever been to, and I’m living in a dream world on a day to day basis. Something new and fun every single day i assure you. I get a phone call, “do you want to be a lecturer at our university?” NO, hell no. I wouldn’t want to leave this place. I’m having the time of my life out here and i’m certainly not wanting to go and work a boring 9 – 5 job, with a wage that probably won’t be that much better.

2. Less Diversity

From my experience, University can only lead you so far. You never know the full picture of an industry unless you are working on a day to day basis within that certain niche. Having SEO at university would take the creative approach away, because you will have been told what the best practices are so it will stifle creativity and innovative techniques. Not all techniques would benefit every client you have, would they?

3. Finance

Luckily for me, I’m Scottish and I got to university in Scotland. This means it’s absolutely free for me, lucky I know. But in today’s times, university and further education is a mass investment financially. The average cost of a university course in the UK is currently £8,678.36, the USA is almost $20,000. Although the number of students rise year in year out, predictions have been made that numbers will fall as expenses rise and incomes fall, regarding the financial recession. So I believe, the numbers will fall, and niches like SEO being taught at university would falter, because not only, not many people know about it in the first place, but the demand will fall, so it would not be considered a wise investment on the academic perspective.

4. Ever Changing Techniques

The time I have worked in SEO has taught me that not everything lasts forever. This industry is ever changing. As we have seen in recent months, google updates their search engines, and all hell can break loose on the internet. Luckily I wasn’t here at the time. But the updates such as panda and penguin majorly changed the way that SEO’s go about their business. And know, only the best practices make a difference. Black and grey hat techniques can no longer be used to the effectiveness that they once were. The question is though, can the universities be changed year in, year out to accommodate this every changing industry, my opinion would be no. I still see some outdated information and techniques getting taught at university. And to be honest. I would rather learn the newest, best possible practices. Its just like when the new xbox or playstation comes out. Every wants to have it. And I don’t think universities can adapt to this change.

So, Should SEO be Taught in University?

Well, we have made it back to the first question, should SEO be taught in university? We have heard both sides of the argument, both of which have some great points. In my opinion, I don’t think it’s viable to have a specific course dedicated to SEO. How important is it to make it a course at a university? Not that important I think. You see today, some great SEO companies, such as Higherclick, that have been created from little knowledge of SEO. And look, Higherclick is still standing and basking professionally in the industry. I’ve asked myself throughout writing this, which would I prefer? Learning SEO at university, or jumping into the deep end, and learning it with first hand experience. Most definitely the later. I’ve learned so much more than I could have imagined, and had a great time doing it. It looks like fully introducing this industry to the education system would hinder the creativity needed to become one of the top experts in the market. At this point, I say no, it shouldn’t be fully taught in university, but I do believe it should be partially integrated to the marketing programmes to give individuals an insight into what SEO is, and how it’s changing the face of the internet.

The post Should SEO Be Taught In University? appeared first on Higher Click.