Hiren Vaghela - Blurbpoint

Beyond Link Building: Time For Link Earning Driven SEO

For all those pertaining to the SEO industry, the term link building has begun to lose its charm. Many online marketers and business owners think alike, as link building is not the same as it was earlier. Before the occurrence of the Panda and Penguin, link building was just that – getting as many links as possible from external websites, which point back to your site. It was quite easy to manipulate with the search engine spiders and the algorithms, in order to rank high regardless of your links and the content on the site, were below par. The whole scenario changed, with Google’s continual algorithm updates meant to recognize and penalize spammy ways of link building. This is why the whole perception of the online marketing industry has changed. SEO’s have eventually understood that link building is slowly and surely losing the lustre, making way for link earning.

Yes, link earning ads up to the credibility and brand reputation of your website. Understanding the value of link earning, let’s now focus on some of the preeminent online and offline link earning techniques, which could be utilized to top in the SERP’s during the rest of the year 2013.

Online:

Undoubtedly, getting more external websites linking to your site is a vital SEO factor, but it is more important to focus on the quality of the websites linking to the content. The quantity of the links does matter only if they are qualitative. One quality link has enough powers to outperform a dozen low-quality links.

In order to get backlinks from a high-quality website, it is inevitable to have high-quality content. The following examples will provide a clear understanding as to how you could push yourself up in the SERP’s by earning high-quality links from external websites.

•Content rules: Your target is to be right there on the top pages of search engines. For this, you need to strive to come up with content that deserves the first spot. It should be worthy of learning links from various high authoritative websites. If the content is generic, something that doesn’t offer fresh insight into a selected topic, it won’t create a spark amongst the audience. It may even cause the audience to repel from your website each time they see it in the results. Create something new, offering some valuable insights into your topic and industry.

The engagement ability of the content should be at an all-time high. This helps in identifying your business as an authority niche.

•Guest Posts: Guest post has already gained respect as one of the most sorted after strategies for link earning. If done on the right kind of authoritative websites relevant to your niche industry, it is indeed a link earned. It is vital to ensure that the guest posts are published on authority websites with high rates of social sharing. It ensures that your content reaches the right kind of audience, and most importantly, those who are related and are interested in your company.

•Social Media: You are already involved in social media if you are into the SEO of your website. Social media is increasingly becoming a source of interaction, not only on the personal levels but also for major and small brands. There are all chances that your prospects are utilizing the services of at least one of the prominent social networking sites, namely Facebook, Twitter, Linked In and Google+. They use these places to interact with people and share information with others. They share what they like and what they dislike, mentioning a particular brand and the products and services that they have used. By creating a presence on these platforms for your business, you could control the way people perceive you, the way you release information and content to the web. Your content and the information that you share would help in getting more likes, shares and comments from the viewers, making it a great and enjoyable link earning process.

Offline:

SEO is not just an online game. There are a number of factors backstage that needs to be done to make the whole SEO campaign a success. These backstage activities are referred to as offline techniques for smart link earning. In order to build the authority of your website, there are a number of ways in which you can earn links offline. I have mentioned the most salient ones, and if you trust me, these offline link earning techniques do work big time if done smartly and effectively.

• Word of the mouth: Believe it or not, this plays a huge role in link earning/building. There are many instances where links have been attained from sources; you wouldn’t even have the least idea about. These links could have been earned as a result of interaction with people outside the web. Based on the impression that they might have created on your products or services, they may link to you under appropriate circumstances.

• Community involvement: With no thought of SEO in their minds, someone from the niche industry community may sponsor several events, just to give something back to the community. These events that get mentioned alongside a company’s name, results in links from the people, competitors or business associates who attended the event. Also, high authoritative news sources would give a real high-quality link to the website.

• Host an event: Hosting an event in your own city is another potential way of earning links through offline smartness. By hosting one and inviting influencers in your niche and media persons, you are earning a lot of valuable links through write-ups or by press coverage. Also if your competitors are impressed, they might give your brand a mention on their feeds.

• Contact Your Alumni Association: They are always eager to boast success stories. So reach out to them and let them know what you’re up to. Give them case studies, which could prove to be a very valuable source of information. Regularly update them about the happenings in your business.

This post doesn’t mean to say that all the link building tactics have gone extinct. There are certainly some wonderful ones that still do exist. But, by and large, the efforts of Google are directed towards renewing the practice of link earning and end the practice of link building. That’s the reason why so many SEO’s, of late, are welcoming content marketing with open arms.

10 Signs To Show Your Content Marketing Strategy Is A Winner

How to know that your content marketing strategy is a winner? How to create that content which brings out awwwww? Well if you follow the given advice to pump up life in your content, you could rest assured of continued success with your content marketing strategy.

Content marketing has now become very prevalent in the online marketing industry. Although it was there for years, it has now received the deserved respect in the industry. Of course, there are a number of key performance indicators (KPI’s), which help you in determining the success ratio of your content. However, you will know that your content is an instant hit if the following major points of content creation are included in your strategy.

Define Your Goals

It is vital to define your goals systematically before starting the task on specific content. The goal could be any. For instance, you are looking for more conversions or more likes and comments on Facebook. Are you looking to develop content for thought leadership? There could be n number of reasons why you are heading to an effective content marketing strategy. Developing content specifically to influence sales may not necessarily work effectively. You could instead decide on those goals which could influence your marketing strategies, such as the betterment of your social presence or acquiring more email addresses for future campaigns.

Collect the relevant data

Effective content is successful in any one of the following:

* Brings attention to a completely new idea, concept, or news story to your audience

* Redefine or repurpose an existing idea into a new concept

Regardless of what you do, you will always need to gather data – the value factor for your target personas. The data should present a unique perspective pertaining to your industry. Data could be collected through various discovery processes such as interviewing customers, measuring the satisfaction ratio, the success rate of a particular initiative, surveys, to name a few. Anything that offers a valuable insight into a particular sector, is valuable data.

No matter if you gather the data from scratch or some existing piece of information; this process is elementary, which will dictate the projection of your campaign.

If you decide to compare your own data, you may use the services of some survey tools like Survey Monkey, which could be helpful in creating and delivering questionnaires, and send them through your e-mail database. The surveys could be placed on a page of your website, and you could introduce some incentives such as discount codes or some takeaways to encourage visitors’ participation.

One more salient way of gathering data is by creating polls for your clients or the visitors of your website. You could also utilize the craze of social media websites to ask questions and make a compilation of data on a particular subject.

Keep a record of performance metrics

Once the goals have been decided, you will need to decide how you will keep track and measure your performance. Make a list of all those metrics which are to be recorded. Google Analytics is a great tool for keeping a record of all the desired metrics. If a particular post is received with a positive response from the visitors, make sure that you are keeping a track of all the results. This data helps in working on the conversion rate, also allowing you to better analyze the success of each of your posts and identify the areas for future improvement. Google Analytics is a great tool for recording goal competitions.

Decide on the type of the content

Once the data is on your hands, you are independent to use the data and create the content in any form that you like. There is no restriction on the form that you could implement, as there is a wide range available as far as the forms of content is concerned. One great example is the compilation of the data into a colorful Infographic, displayed on your website and your social media page. You could write a post along with the Infographic, explaining it in detail and also keep a link to your post on the social media page along with the graphic. The information could also be worked into a press release that could be used to promote the content on your website. Even a guest post could work a great deal.

Develop your Curation Skills

The role of curation has gained an increased significance for quite some time now. Curation is much more than simply reposting content on various parts of the web. A well-executed content isn’t just reiterating already published content. It is a personalized storey re-telling. Of course, curation is the collection of the most useful resources on a particular topic. However, reposting the same content and just mentioning your name below it, is not what curation is all about. There are a number of tools, which could be used to curate content. OpenTopic, Alltop, Scribit, NewsCred are some of the best curation strategy tools that help you in building the content from top publishers.

Start creating the content

For the purpose of the content designing strategy, you need to ensure that every part of the content is professionally built by an expert on the particular content topic that you are working on. Also, an expert in a specific content format is required, as they have all the tactics to create the desired content form. For instance, a graphic designer could only work on Infographic and not on press releases, which should be taken care of by a copywriter.

No matter who is creating the content, you should be dedicating sufficient time to the writing process, as teamwork plays a significant role in the success of the campaign.

Your content should be created keeping in mind the overall online marketing strategy. So, if you are trying to establish thought leadership, your content should fulfil this aim. If you have posted content on some other site, interested people may come to your site seeking more information on the same topic. They could lose interest if the online strategy is not aligned with the off-site activities.

Optimize your content for search

It is very essential to know how to optimize content for search. Search engine optimization (SEO) is a vast science and it is not a child’s play to master the art overnight. Frequent Panda and Penguin updates only add to the worries. These algorithm updates are meant to enhance the quality of the search engine result in pages. They are in fact angels for those websites which have high-quality content. For instance, all those websites with thin content are demoted by Google, giving way to all those with great content.

Distribute through the right channels

One of the biggest challenges encountered in content marketing is that once the content is created, it could stay deserted on the website. Thus, distribution is everything for your piece of content. You should make sure that there is a clear way for those who are looking for what you have in your content.

To do this, you could look at the existing websites, where you have submitted your content. Analyze the weaker areas and work on them. Is it possible to shift to other distribution channels such as social media, press or other sources? Could you ask the authoritative names in your industry to share your content on their own networks?

Once the content is created, almost the same amount of time needs to be dedicated to finding the right kind of distribution channels for your content. For example, after identifying the targeted audience, you will need to find out the places where you could find these audience members.

Partner up with niche-specific websites

The phrase “content partnership” may mean different things to different people, but the basic idea is to get an audience for your content by utilizing someone else’s audience. An increasing number of brands and small businesses are getting into the content marketing race. This opens a content ecosystem for creative partnerships. Content sharing, cross-promotion on social media and e-mails, exchanging of ad space are all examples of potential partnerships helping to expose your content to a wide audience.

Think quality not quantity

Adding and distributing more content to your own and external websites respectively for SEO purposes is a flawed approach. More pages/copy does not get you more traffic, or engagement ratio, or conversions. While creating or adding content pages to your website or external websites ensure that your content delivers value to your consumers, which therefore adds value to your brand.

There is a lot of perseverance, and perspiration that goes into becoming a winner. The same stands true for your content marketing strategy. The list is long and whatever is covered here, are definitely going to be a part, if you are creating a champ of content.

The Sovereigns Of Inbound Marketing Content Strategy To Rule Over Your Prospects

So many online marketers leave a lot to be desired as far as designing an inbound marketing content strategy is concerned. Perhaps they fail to understand how big a role it plays in making a campaign successful. This ineffectiveness causes annoyance, inefficiency in marketing, which also leads to the abandonment of the project as a whole.

Looking to drive targeted prospects to your website with an effective and targeted content strategy. Looking to convert the visitors into quality leads and boost the morale of your sales team with higher conversion rates? Read on…

Begin With Your Personas:

Regardless of what activity you do to boost your business, it should always start with your personas. The campaign’s personas should be at the centre of everything that you do in your inbound marketing strategy including content.

A persona is a comprehensive character profile based on your target prospects who need information, products, or services pertaining to you. They are researched just like you research the profile of a real person, which includes both personal information and business-related information.

In order to get the necessary input, you will need input from various departments of your organization including the sales team. This enables accuracy in the creation of an in-depth persona profile. Your research should include persona problems, general background, objections, challenges faced by them and the business, elevator pitch, marketing messages, etc.

This works in making your content targeted and relevant, which will have a higher impact in driving the readers to your content.

Drive Visitors By Realizing Their Needs:

At the very top of the pyramid, is the goal of driving prospects to your website. There are a number of tactics ranging from e-mail to social media. However, in this post, we will discuss blogging.

At the very top of the inbound marketing funnel, your goal is to drive prospects to your website. There are many different parts to this from social, email, etc., but the one we are interested in for this discussion is blogging.
The blog could serve as fuel for your content. It could be used to stimulate all the other marketing channels including social, e-mail or SEO. Continual development will ensure that it becomes the biggest traffic generator for your website, and prove to be a huge digital asset for you.

The blogs that you create should be concise and engaging. It should strive to solve and answer all the concerns that your personas may have. Tie up your blogs with some bigger content such as a webinar or an e-book, that gives valuable insights into a topic.

Perform Research:

Your leads, at this stage, have already identified that they want some information and are now performing research to check out the solutions. They are looking for exceptional quality, something that is not promotional in nature but informative. It should have a global appeal, successful in answering most of the questions your leads may have.
The types of content which work efficiently here are e-books, research guides, webinars, survey reports, etc. All the content created should not be biased or non-promotional, and should concentrate on providing wonderful content.

Establish Purchasing Criteria:

Now it’s your time to provide something valuable to the prospects to make them come to your desired place – the conversion spots. Your leads have come to your site in search of something valuable. Your aim in this stage should be to educate your leads on what they should be looking for and what is an ideal solution for them. The trick is to keep all the information purely educational with little to no mention of sales messages.

In this stage, there are a few more styles of content that work especially well in bringing across the feeling and messages you want at this stage. These include white papers, webinars, comparison guides, detailed guides, etc.

Evaluating Vendors (Bottom Funnel):

The final stage in the inbound marketing funnel is the decisive stage where the lead has zeroed on you and one or two of your competitors. At this time, almost 60% of the purchasing decisions have been made. Remember, the lead hasn’t spoken with anyone at your company yet.

If you have done your inbound marketing right, the lead would definitely be interested in your solutions. Demos, free consultations, free trials, detailed product information, to name a few, is the content which is expected to work at this level.

The lead will be marked as a marketing qualified lead (MQL), once they convert on the offer on the bottom funnel. The sales team at this stage will take a close look to see if they truly are sales qualified leads (SQL).
In order to ensure better performance and higher quality leads, you need to keep the persona and the lifecycle stage in the centre of your inbound marketing content strategy.

Think about SEO:

Once the inbound marketing content strategy map has been created, you can start thinking about how SEO could be included in it. With the use of keyword research tools and other tools available, you could find the best titles for your content to ensure that it is found online searching for those particular keywords.

The reason why this point has come down in the list is that the main goal of the content is to provide information to the prospects and putting too much effort into SEO early in the stage will suppress the importance of the goal. Don’t ever lose sight of the goal of your content strategy.

Reviews and Updates:

It is vital to consider revisiting both the content strategy map and the personas frequently. With the evolution of new ideas, it will be very important to include all the updates into your content and your personal profile.

Everyone in your organization should participate to help by giving their own feedback and ideas which could be incorporated into your strategy. It is very important that everyone stays updated with all you are doing.

We are just giving an overview of what should be considered, however, this would serve the purpose of creating an intelligent smart inbound marketing strategy.

Win The Game Of Thrones With Linkable Assets

What is a linkable asset? For online marketers, there is only one single aim: build as many number of links as possible. However, the meaning of linkable assets is given in the name itself. Number one – it’s linkable – i.e. it is something people would love to link to. Number two – it is an asset – something that you own and control, and reap the benefits in the future. It is an altogether new generation of link building. The perceived value of a linkable asset is such, that people are compelled to create a link opportunity for you.

However, if your goal is only links, you aren’t exactly leveraging the full potential of your linkable assets and most likely losing on other opportunities. In other words, linkable assets are those which if used rightly, could fetch you high intent traffic, quality links from authoritative sources and qualified leads in addition to a number of other benefits.

Benefits of Linkable assets

They are numerous. First things first, your domains will continuously get links for a long time. It could get cited in all sorts of content, if found valuable. The followers of those who are citing, will see your linkable asset, thus making it a chain reaction.

The online presence of your website will grow dramatically, as a result of the linkable asset being hosted. This helps in gaining trust of the netizens, who will believe that you are the authority and biggest influencer in your industry niche.

What are those exceptional features of a linkable asset?

It’s perpetual: Any article, infographic, video and many such items, that get links even after month and years is what a linkable asset is made of. The content of such kind, should provide information that could last for a long while. They should not be short term and should attract comments and likes and shares for a long time to come. People should come back to your asset, thinking of it as an established guide for learning.

It is Shareable: The information given on your linkable asset should propel the people to share it with their network. Let’s take the example of The Beginner’s Guide To SEO by Moz.com. It is a comprehensive guide for all those who are willing to learn SEO, and till date it is considered as an undisputed guide with all the modules explaining in detail the various aspects of SEO. This guide has earned, and is still earning, increasing likes and shares from people around the globe even after years. Why? For the sheer fact that the content is liked by all, thus making it a linkable asset.

It shows your insight and authority: A linkable asset at once succeeds in establishing you as an authority. As mentioned in the last point, Moz.com is considered an authority, owing to all the wonderful resources that it releases. In addtion to the guide, they also have the search engine ranking factors released frequently, attracting a number of suggestions, likes and shares around the globe.

The most common linkable assets are….

How to’s or guides: Interested audience will always get attracted by a comprehensive guide on their desired subject. Internet has become the most reliable tool for those who want to learn new stuff. From practicing yoga to learning a recipe, and from knowing a manufacturing process to making a cake, people are searching for all the things on the web like never before. Such guides are always searched for and they stay there unaffected for a long time without requiring constant updates.

Infographics: Incorporating all the data into a graphical and colorful representation is likely to stay in the audience’s memory for a long time. They will naturally like the visual media as it is much easy to consume it.

Infographics are like a trojan horse for a link builder. You will be embraced with open arms from the authoritative websites and people from your industry if you are armed with a quality infographic.

Tools and Apps: A software that can help in increasing productivity for your users, can also help in getting a number of links. There are a number of examples in the form of desktop tools, or widgets or other applications that could play the role of a linkable asset. You will be definitely rewarded for all the hardwork required for creating an appealing application for your audience.

It is far more worthy investing your time and other resources on a linkable asset which will give you favourable results for a long, long time. It helps you in your SEO goals with natural links, adds quality to your website, helps the conversion process of visitors into customers and build a positive online reputation for you.

Want to know more on how you could create compelling linkable assets for a better online future. Want to know more on which are the other linkable assets that you could create. We have organized a webinar on linkable assets on the 27th of September. For more details, please click here. This information webinar will share some innovative ways with those who are looking for some informative ways to enhance their online marketing campaigns with linkable assets.

Infographics – Building Links…Colorfully

In a fast-moving era, where people hardly have time to read the daily newspaper, it is difficult to keep them engaged in reading a long article giving out information on your products and services. It is a challenging task to educate the audience, at the same time fulfil our goal to promote our brand in a very epigrammatic manner.

This undeniably makes Infographics one of the most sought after forms of content marketing. One of the most successful ways to convey the message is a hit with the online marketers and audience for one simple fact that the graphical and colourful representation makes for a quick and better understanding of a complex concept.

This is what Monish Vora, Search Marketing Expert and Hiren Vaghela, Sr. SEO Expert have conveyed through this webinar. The 30-minute webinar received a great response worldwide, which shows us how the popularity of infographics has grown and how to create and distribute them for a colourful link building process.

Here are the key points that are covered in this webinar:

*Infographics Overview
* Creation of Infographics
* How to integrate Infographics with SEO?
* Various distribution channels for your Infographics
* Benefits of Infographics
* Question & Answer Session with Hiren and Monish

With massive information available through the web, it is inundating for the audience. That is why you need to stand out from the crowd and give your audience something that is enticing, which in turn will help your conversion rate go uphill. An Infographic’s theme has to be based on the targeted audience.

At Blurbpoint, this webinar was devised to educate our followers on this fantastic and colourful aspect of SEO and see its results for your online marketing task.

Important Elements of SEO which cannot be ignored

You should try to find out more about the advanced SEO techniques if you wish to make a mark in the field of SEO. Advanced SEO cannot take a single definition. As SEO is changing constantly, only a broad understanding of the advanced SEO techniques and tactics can help you to survive in this competitive field.

Advanced SEO involves a thorough understanding of search engines such as Google, its indexation system, the way search engines behave, search verticals, link building and data research and sorting in several ways that are panda & penguin proof.

Search engine optimization elements – a Snapshot

The use of infographics comes under some of the advanced SEO techniques. This method has gained fame in the recent past. The best thing about this tool is that it helps readers to get loads of information in a well designed and simple format. Since visual images are far easier to make an impact visitors are expected to share them in high numbers. You can get good backlinks and huge traffic if it goes viral.

Alt & Title Tags

You can Alt tags to suggest images to search spiders using Alt tags. Using this advanced SEO technique you can not only include more content but ensure that your images become more searchable on Google. By assigning filenames to all images, you can derive the best results from this advanced SEO technique. You can make use of a title tag to establish keyword relevance on the page. The Title tag appears on top of a tab window or browser in external websites and search results pages. Keywords should be employed at the start of the title tag and it should also contain the brand or company name to fetch the best results.

Social Media

The significance of social media tools cannot be exaggerated. Its importance and relevance in the field of SEO are growing day by day. When your content is shared with hundreds of people across social networks it sends a signal that the content is worth reading. You can get high ranks through social signals since this is an indication to readers that you have the authority over the subject.

Canonicalization

Even though the aforesaid concept seems to be a little tricky, but it’s not that difficult to understand. Your website can appear on multiple URL’s in many situations which can cause it to trigger duplicate content or to be indexed improperly.

Robots.txt

A robots.txt file is used to signal search engine robots about your site’s access. The search engine spiders will first and foremost check the robots.txt file to check whether some pages are restricted for access. This file is useful if and only your site index has content that you need search engines to ignore. You may need this file only if your site directory has content that you don’t want search engines to index. This file can be found in the main directory of your site.

Sitemap.xml

You can make use of sitemaps to know more about a website’s structure which in turn can ensure better crawling of your site. The search engine spiders can find out more details about the web pages using the sitemap. You can also use this tool to get data about specific types of content on your sites such as news, images, mobile and video. Sitemap.xml files can be found inside the main directory of the website and can be submitted to Google using Google Webmaster Tools.

No Follow

If you wish to keep search engines away from some places that you do not want them to visit you can use the advanced technique called – nofollow. You can use this option at both page and link levels to enable search engines to know that a specific link or links on a page should not be followed since they are not endorsed by your website. This technique can be useful if you have a site that permits readers to put up links in a forum. This will help prevent a bad reputation for your website.

Conclusion

You can help your site to get a better ranking and develop it rapidly by following any of the aforesaid advanced SEO techniques. You may have customized page elements and used meta- tags and title tags. Your SEO efforts will not get positive results if you have only incorporated page-level changes in your website. Hence, in order to give maximum results, the advanced SEO techniques should be given constant attention E.g.: www. SEO training. me. the UK

SEO has a greater role to play and cannot be restricted to just giving more visibility to a website. It involves balancing various facets namely protecting your website’s reputation, getting more visitors and facilitating visitors and search engines to navigate your website. You can pick and choose the best technique that would work for you so as to improve your websites rank and reputation.

5 Simple Yet Acute Tools to Take Your Blogger Outreach to the Next Level

#1: Link Prospector by Citation Labs

Main aim of tool is – “Finding the prospect for linking opportunities”

If you a blogger then this tool makes your efforts easier for sure. You can pick the various options which includes depth of search, relevant site/blog results, your specific region, various TLDs, advance search filters and many more. You can include all these stuff in your each campaign level.

Here you will be able to select various types of report like review sites, donation sites, links pages, guest blogging sites and many more in just a one click. You can pull the contacts once you have done with the campaign creation.

#2:Followerwonk

Finding the good prospects for your industry niche is very important. This tool will give you the list of authority influencers within your industry.

This will allow you to find various experts to your industry by using the appropriate keywords and youwill be able to compare, track and analyze them.

So many other advance functionalities are there to contact your followers and track them easily. Blogger outreach is based on email but this will take into another level in terms of building social terms.

#3: Topsy

Just plug your URL in this site and see the magic. This will help you to track your competitor’s social activity and if you are doing branding then use Topsy as a weapon.

You can able to influence part in terms of content, links, keywords, profile etc to make easy outreach to those prospects. It will indirectly help you to give you lead for your niche industry.

It is basically a social search engine and helps you find out the useful prospects and outreach people.

#4: Rapportive

You can integrate this tool with Gmail itself by downloading its paid version as a desktop application. Once you incorporated the tool then you will be able to see the info where you entering the email address in the search box. Rapportive will show other associated details of that person in terms of their social media profile at left hand bar.

If you are doing outreach then this tool helps a lot. You find other alternatives to contact them in a quick way.

#5: Google Alerts

This is my favorite and I love to use it for the outreach. Google provided the wonderful application for getting the alerts in terms of data.

You need to simply add the word which you want to track, just add in the text box and it will return the data in terms of emails. You can filter out the data as well, like, news, discussion etc as your needs. If you want to outreach someone and want to track their activity then Google alert is the best option.

End Note: I hope you find the above mentioned tools helpful for all your outreach campaigns.

Do Small Businesses need SEO? Or Local SEO??

Search engine optimization was something very unfamiliar to many small businesses a few years ago. However, with the continuous evolution of the Internet, and the number of users getting connected with businesses online is increasing, you ae inescapable from the trap of SEO.

The big question is that do you need a full fledged SEO service for your local small time business? Well, let’s say that you own a cake shop in an area in LA. Will you be trying to outreach your business to UK or, in that case, some countries of Asia. Why would you do that when your main target is reaching out to the prospects in your local area? So, it is wise to go with the tactics of Local SEO to promote your business and get more prospects from your local area.

You have started a local business. What is the sure shot way to promote it? Of course, you will be giving local daily ads and other stuff, and also you resort highly to word of the mouth publicity. However, the picture is different in the case of having a website and promoting your local business over the same. It requires special tactics. Let’s see how local SEO could be implemented so as to get more exposure for your local business.

Get listed locally: This is one of the best parts of SEO. Simply list your business on Google Places so as to attract more and more customers from your local area for your local business.

Get Reviews: It is now time to encourage your satisfied customers to go to Google Places and enter their reviews on the products or services that you have offered.

Local Business Websites: Find all those websites like Yellow Pages, SuperPages, Craiglist and others which will help in spreading your presence online.

Update website: Whatever be the updates regarding your products or services, make sure that the same is posted online for your visiors. If you are offering a 20% discount, it should be mentioned on your website as well.

Get Social: Make your online presence social as well as social networking websites are a perfect platform for targeting your desired customers who are looking for the products or services that you have to offer.

Final Thoughts:

These very basic SEO techniques may seem very obscure, however they will provide a great start to your local business SEO campaign. Small businessmen, always make sure that you stress on the fact to your SEO expert that you are looking for local business SEO, and not a global exposure. Remember, all the countries have window cleaners. Customers in UK are not going to call you in US to have their windows cleaned.

Instructographic : The Long Lost Sister Of Infographic

Lo and Behold…The branch of our beloved Infographic has arrived and how? As far as content marketing is concerned, I believe that Instructographic is slowly and steadily climbing up the popularity ladder. What with all the how-to guides and e-books being incorporated into one of the most comprehensive mediums which are so colourful and attractive?

Instructographics are becoming one popular method to explain complex data and make the whole consumption process rather easy for the audience. The clue is in the name itself. While Infographics gave out information in a graphical manner, Instructo-graphic is meant to give complex instructions on a particular matter. Let’s say you want to make banana pudding. Rather than going for a long text, wouldn’t it be preferable to see it graphically instructed with all the pics explaining the whole process? Sounds yummy, right!

This is just a simple example. However, creating an Infographic is a rather hard process that involves collecting volumes and volumes of data, statistics, and facts to build a whole narration and at the same time, ensuring that it has the right colours, pics, and other elements to create an appeal amongst your audience. Whew! Marketers have to spend hours researching the data in order to create comprehensive content.

The next part is of the graphic designer. A designer needs to compile all the researched data and information and make it not only attractive but also legible.

Then comes the main part and that is distributing your wonderful creation through the right channels. There are a number of infographic submission sites, in addition to Pinterest. Also, you could add the same to your other social media accounts. There are many blogs and article directories that are now allowing you to post your articles and posts along with the instructographic. So, let’s say that you want to give instructions on how to create an instructographic and you have written a post of around 800 words for the same. Your post will gain more value if it contains some graphical explanation of the same process as well.

Why Instructographic?

Well, looking at the following reasons, I believe that everyone would like to give a shot to Instructographics:

Appealing: Clever infographics are always successful in grabbing eye-balls.

Learning: More than 80% of learning is done visually.

Memorable: Why do we remember TV ads? Firstly because of the message, then the colours, message, shapes, and all those things to create an appeal. The same stands true for instructographics.

Sharable: Go viral with all the fantastic creations that you have made. Provide something that propels the audience to share

Value: It provides true value to the audience, making the whole learning process convenient for them.

Traffic: A relevant content when provided generates interest amongst your audience, bringing in streams of traffic to your website.

Brand Building: Instructographics is a great way to naturally increase brand awareness. It shows your authority and that you are a veteran in your field.

Some Great Infographic Creation Tools (which could be also used to create instructographic):

• Infoactive: Perhaps, the only tool which stands by its promise. Its unique features include interactivity and live data
• Piktochart: It is a paid tool, which lets you drag and drop elements to create an infographic.
• Easel.ly: It is currently in its beta. It is also a theme-based drag and drop infographic creation tool.
• Infogr.am: It’s good because it is free. In addition to that, it is good because as of today it has helped in the creation of 956,002 infographics. It is simple; however, the features are power-packed.

My Favorite Picks

These ones are perhaps, the most comprehensive guide to various aspects of SEO:

The Advanced Guide to SEO from www.quicksprout.com

The Advanced Guide to Link Building from www.quicksprout.com

The Advanced Guide to Content Marketing again from www.quicksprout.com

In addition to these, I found the following instructographic quite interesting for the steps of inbound marketing that it has to show
The Inbound Marketing Process from www.impactbnd.com

For the sheer reason that the information stays in people’s minds, is what makes instructographic a super hit with the marketers. Although a bit time-consuming, instructographics has the potential to offer better ROI in the near future. Many SEO service provider companies are moving towards instructographic inclusion for their clients.

Next time, when you feel to write something and the information and the data for the same is quite appealing, try creating an instructographic. Chances are that you will have a larger audience.

Targeting Local SEO? Some Points to Boost your Campaign!

If you want to target local users for your online business then SEO will be a part of making that happen and by incorporating the following steps, you will be able to get more visibility from your local customers.

Local SEO involves convincing the search engines’ robots that your site contains relevant information and will best suit the needs of your users from a specific location who might be looking for the same products or services that you are offering. Local SEO acts like signposts for the robots to understand you in a better way. It allows your site to get a better ranking for the keywords entered by the users.

On technical terms, your site needs to implement best practices to be found by crawlers. But, you will need to go deep to target local audience.

1. Titles
Title is a mandatory element for any webpage as it defines the particular page. There are some tricks to create the title as well. Consider the following to get more local followers:

* The brand name should appear within the title.
* Include the major keyword into title of the page.
* Mention your location and the area of your operations.

And all of that should be done in 70 characters.

2. Meta Description Tags
It is necessary for all the pages associated with a website to have a meta description. It gives the search engines’ crawlers a more clear idea about the page and also appears in the search results as a snippet to lure the users to take action by clicking on your page. The following steps should be implemented while creating a meta description.

* Include your brand name.
* Include significant information on what the web page contains.
* Insert your targeted keywords.
* Enter the details of your location

Make sure you don’t over-stuff the meta descriptions with keywords, as it may appear spammy. The meta description should not be more than 155 characters so as to fit the search results space.

3. Schema
Major search engines, namely Yahoo, Bing, Google and others, rely on structured data for presenting optimum results. These search engines endorse Schema as a proper markup language for their robots. Search engines sense out your data with the help of Schema. The data will appear the user in the manner as you want it to appear, however it will provide all the important data to the search bot.

4. Content in your Site
Just add the location of your business where it naturally fits instead of stuffing the name of the targeted area in the content of the pages. You should enter the location appropriately to attract local visitors. The location that you enter should be used just as you use the keywords, so that it is not considered ‘stuffing’, but also ensures that the page is relevant to the location.

5. Geographic Targeting
There are some basic things that you could do if you want to target a specific country. For example, you could use the webmasters tools to change the preferred geographic location.

6. Maps on your Website
Embedding your business’ address map Google Maps on your “Contact Us” page is one more way to help the user in tracking you and help your Local SEO campaign! The map will describe the location and will help users find the business address in case they want to pay a visit.

7. Review Sites
A presence on review sites like qype and tipped serves as more for your location relevance through the links and information given in the profile. They also help users in propagating your business if they are satisfied. Positive reviews by existing customers will attract more new customers when they read the reviews online.

These, according to me, are the best elements to be considered for your local SEO campaign. In addition to these, there are many other things which you could incorporate into the same. Please feel free to mention the same in the box below.