Top 21 SEO Tips and Tricks to Follow in 2014

Google says on the record, “Don’t write for Search Engines, Write for your readers/audience/users.” While this may sound ridiculous, there are plenty of reasons to follow the advice. More often, newbie falls in the trap and often gets confused where to start from. Don’t sound to be too harsh, but do not always listen to almighty Google.

We (bloggers & web entrepreneurs) are mere small creatures and we must write for our readers/users while keeping search engine behavior at the corner of our brain! Producing great content that reader’s love is something not everyone’s cup of team. So how would you start your venture in 2014? What are the best SEO practices that you should follow? Without further ado, let me present you top 20 SEO Tips for 2014.

Excellent SEO Tips To Follow in 2014

I have used an adjective here – Special. These tips are special not because they are something that you have never heard of, but they are special as you have not understood these basic ones quite effectively!

Keyword Analysis inclusive of Competition Analysis

1. Determine Strategy for Keywords

This must be your first and foremost step. You should be clear with your goals that what keywords you want to play around with. This depends on what you want to gain by your online presence and venture. The question in the previous sentence can be answered with information regarding your target audience.

It may look like a flow chart or catch 22 for you, don’t worry, you are right and it is so. We have solutions for it. You can use certain keyword tools like http://www.keywordspy.com, http://www.spyfu.com, http://www.ispionage.com and http://www.compete.com. In order to get complete market scenario you must look at your competitor’s website. You can enter that website’s URL to any of the mentioned tools and get an estimation of competition.

2. List The Potential Keywords

You have now, different results from different tools as all of them use different methodology. You can collaborate all the results depending on your common analytical sense and list out 50-100 potential keywords. Create an MS Excel sheet for these Keywords.

3. Check Competition of Keywords

Keyword competition is something most newbies/expert ignores. While sorting out bunch of keywords from Google adword keywords tool is the first step to follow, people often forget that the checking Keyword competition is equally important. There are plenty of tools available out there, but we recommend to try out tools like Traffic travis first.

Later, you can go for the premium tools like SEOMoz keyword difficulty and SERPIQ keyword competition analysis tool. Both the tools delivers the great result and cut down considerable work required in doing competition analysis as well as keyword competition analysis.

On Page SEO Tips

4. HTML

Use a content management service such as WordPress, Blogger or Drupal and optimize your HTML tags with the keywords. Make sure you also maintain text to HTML ratio. Always try to keep the ratio high so that Google can understand your content better.

5. Title

Keep the character count under 70 and preferably under 66. Use various plugins available for various content management platforms for SEO. The WordPress beginners should start with WordPress SEO plugin by Yoast to make on page SEO as much better as they can. There are also many third-party paid options available in the market, but we do not recommend using them.

Also see : How to write a best SEO title tag to get maximum benefit in Search results

6. Meta Tags & Description

Your keyword must be there in your Meta tag and description. Your meta description must be in the vicinity of 157 characters. This is most important as Search Engines read meta description for understanding the post content.

7. URL and/or Permalinks

Your page URL must contain your keyword or keyword phrase. If it is a phrase, words must be separated by hyphens. Use some plugins to remove stop words from the URL/permalinks. It’s always good to minimize the use of STOP word in the permalink

8. First Paragraph

While this is not necessary a big factor in ranking, try to include important keyword in first paragraph, so Google can clearly understand what the topic is about. While there is no hard and fast rule, make sure you include primary keyword within first few words of the article.

9. Content Length

As per Guidelines provide by Google, the length of your content must be more than 300 words. We advise you to write content with word count above 500 words. (It will help to protect you from “Animal Hit”). However, we recommend to go over 600-700 mark whenever possible. Instead of writing a simple post without proper information, you should focus your energy to provide quality content with necessary bullet point and images to back-up what you say.

10. Content Quality

Your content must be unique. Thinly copied contents are also getting Panda Hit nowadays so stay away from copy and plagiarism. Make sure you follow proper internal linking strategy without over optimizing anchor text.

Also see : Google Panda Recovery Tips and Tricks

11. Keyword Density

Keyword density must be between 2-4%. It means your keyword must not be repeated more than twice or thrice in each 100 words block so if your are writing a 500 words post your keyword count must not exceed 10-15 repetitions. If it does, then Google will count it as over optimization.

12. Image Optimization

Optimize Image ALT tag with your keyword. It is always a good idea to save the image name with the keyword and upload them on the server with the same name. Also attach necessary ALT tag to the image, so Google can understand what the image depicts. Remember, Google is blind, and you need to supply information to Google to understand the image. Moreover, try to provide a wrap up text to explain what the image is all about. This will increase the relevancy as well.

Sitemap

13. Sitemap Submission

Submit your site to the major search engines. Create an XML site map and make sure the search engines can find your site map. Use Google’s webmaster’s tools to verify your sitemap is being read correctly: http://www.google.com/webmasters/

14. HTML Sitemap

Creating an HTML sitemap is an essential part of your SEO endeavors. This confirms you that search engine crawlers are crawling the site properly.

Back-End

15. Avoid DHTML and Excessive HTML

Search Engines can’t read DHTML menus quite easily, so avoid them in your menu. Also, try to maintain HTML to text ratio. Having too many HTML makes the ratio high which is often undesired. Make sure you provided meaningful insight in each and every paragraph and/or article by providing more text.

16. Avoid Major Content in PDF or Flash

Publish your content in HTML format instead of Adobe PDF and Flash. Valuable content that is locked in these formats cannot be easily crawled and indexed.

17. Robots.txt

Make sure your robots.txt file is configured correctly to include and exclude the appropriate directories and files on your website. This file instructs search engines that which portion of your site is not accessible to search engines. Often people misunderstands this concepts which results in duplicate content or the description is unavailable due to robots.txt configuration.

Off Page Optimization

18. Use Social Media Effectively

Market your content on various social networks and media. Try various titles and descriptions that can engage users with your online venture. Initially, target twitter, Facebook, Google+, Stumble Upon, LinkedIn and Reddit. Google is now giving more importance to social media signals to rank website. Now is the time to utilize social media platform and turn the tale in your favor.

19. Generate Quality Backlinks

There are various techniques to generate backlinks. Guest post on other high authority site from same niche, Commenting on the posts related to your site content, Forum Posting and many more techniques are there which should be used moderately to gain more trust. Well, backlink is itself a big chapter and can cover tons of pages, but we do not want to go that route for the moment.

Please note that Google introduced an update called Penguin to penalize the overly optimized sites, which means that those sites which are having spam backlinks and using black hat backlink techniques.  I will explain you in detail  how it will identify the spammers, see if there is a site on Diabetes (Health Niche) and the site site owner purchased a bulk of backlinks for the anchor text “diabetes symptoms in children” to rank for that keyword.

This can get a red flag and can get  penalty because if that is a genuine quality site/article then there should be lot of variations in the anchor test linking to that particular page, because it is a common sense that not everybody in the world will link to the exact anchor text right ?  … Yes, that is not at all possible  because they may link to that via various anchor texts like

• diabetes signs and symptoms in children
• diabetes in children
• children and diabetes : signs and symptoms
• what are the symptoms in children with type 2 diabetes
• type 1 diabetes symptoms in children and adults

People (SEOs) even identified alternatives for this as well to spam Google which I am not interested in discussing publicly and if you are interested in knowing them then you can contact me 

Also see : Also see : Google Penguin Recovery Tips and Tricks

Analysis

20. Use Google Analytics

Install Google Analytics on your website.( http://www.google.com/analytics / )If you’ve already done this, use the data from: Traffic Sources > Keywords to find additional keywords you may want to optimize.

21. Keyword tracking

Tracking your major campaign and keywords in the Google will give you a clear information about your efforts. It’s therefore very necessary to keep track of all your keyword ranking. For this purpose, you can use free and paid tools available online. Even, you can manually track the keyword in the Google. We recommend to use “whatsmyserp.com” or similar service to check your keyword ranking.

Hopefully, the above SEO tips will help you to start your venture in 2014. Make sure you follow each and every one of them closely.

Marketing Budgets 2014

ONE EVENT LASTING SEO VALUE

ONE EVENT LASTING SEO VALUE

Planning for the event? Think ahead- make an impression that will last longer than the ice sculpture. By adding new rules for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to your promotional strategy. You’re giving your one-time event’s greater longevity and a lasting return.

There are two types of Event

1.    Off-line:

New product launch

Conference presentation

Fundraising Event

Limited-time free trial

2.    On-line:

Webinar

Google Hangout

Launching of product, tool or resource library

Free trial/ Download

Before Event

1.    Plan:  Developer name and theme of event by considering an SEO role in the mind that Research and identify keywords to use in name and theme.

2.    Plant:  Create SEO Links Bait

 If Off-Line:

Create a valuable tool on a landing page or web page to accompany the event, Such as:

• Promo code
• Itinerary
• Event workbook

If On-Line:

                    Create a Webpage or landing page to host the event online.

SEO Role:

Optimize for keywords and design to pass link authority to other relevant web pages (title. Tags, URL, Content, links, its location in website navigation/ architecture, etc.)

3.    Promote:  Draft promotional material ads, email, PR & Social.

    SEO Role:

• Providing  keywords for marketing material
• Optimize press release
• Optimize blog posts.

    After Event

4.    Plant:

To plant link bait, publish a resource or asset resulting from the event:

• Podcast
• Video
• Whitepaper
• POV

SEO Role:

• Optimize on-site content
• Promote/ distribute Off-site content

5.    Promote:

Distribute link bait content in blogs, press releases, social channels, CRM & Lead list/prospect email, influence outreach, etc.

SEO Role:

To ensure ranking impact in search engines, optimize all messaging and online content including:

• Blogs
• Press Release
• Tweets/ shares

This will create a footprints of keyword relevance surrounding links that point back to your website.

Why Should SEOs Care about Google+?

It’s easy for a lot of Internet users to write off Google+: it’s another social platform for sharing in a world in which we already have plenty of ways to share. We have Facebook for pictures of our dogs; Twitter for news; LinkedIn for networking; Instagram for more pictures of our dogs and Vine, Pinterest, and other platforms making a play to gather more users. 

With over 500 million registered users, why aren’t more people actually actively using Google+? It’s no secret that Google+ consistently falls short in terms of active usage, especially compared to its main competitor Facebook. According to Gigya blogger Victor White, Google+ only accounts to two percent of social sharing when compared to other major sharing platforms.

But, come on, it’s Google. Google makes the rules when it comes to all things Internet, so here’s the real question: should you play by its rules and get active on Google+, or continue to exclude yourself from the game by justifying your meaningful contributions on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn?

Google+, built for SEO

The popular Moz post “Amazing Correlation Between Google +1s and Higher Search Rankings” caused a major controversy with its revelation that, after Page Authority, Google +1s are more highly correlated with search rankings than any other factor. While correlation does not necessitate causation, can Google+ activity actually help increase page rank?

Google Webspam team head Matt Cutts was quick to deny that +1s are used directly in Google’s algorithm. While this may be true, mounting evidence does suggest that Google+ posts surpass other social platforms in terms of SEO benefits. Put simply, if someone who follows you on Google+ sees a post or a link to your website in Google search results, they can +1 that post and your search rankings can go up as a result.

So, if a link on Google+ could potentially be judged equivalent to any other type of editorial link, why aren’t we using it?

There are often rumblings of Google+ chasing our other favored social platforms for user attention. Ryan Holmes, HootSuite CEO says as much in his post “Why Google+ Is Sneaking up on Facebook,” he also admits that of Google+’s 500 million registered users, only 135 million of them are active users. As Google+ attempts to gain precedence as the source for all things content distribution, why aren’t individuals and brands leveraging their accounts?

Convince me to care about Google+

The most obvious reason to use Google+, if you don’t already, is that it’s integrated into every Google service. Just let thank sink in: Google+ is connected to Gmail, YouTube, Google Drive, AdWords, Blogger, and Google Search. If that’s not enough evidence for you, according to BL Ochman of Social Media Today, Google cofounder Larry Page spelled it out for us when he said that “if you ignore Google+, Google Search will ignore you.”

So, how is the leader in user intelligence not the leader in user experience?

This is what continues to stump the Internet world. We chase Google day in and day out, creating content to maximize the most recent Google algorithm updates; yet, Google+ continues to stump us. In January of 2012, Google+ account registration became mandatory for new users to Google services such as Gmail or Blogger. This would account for the huge number of accounts, but the shockingly low amount of engagement. Furthermore, Google+ being compared to Facebook is an underdog competition for Google+.

But, ultimately, Cutts says:

“If you make compelling content, people will link to it, like it, share it on Facebook, +1 it, etc. But that doesn’t mean that Google is using those signals in our ranking. Rather than chasing +1s of content, your time is much better spent making great content.”

There’s no way to know how +1s affect search results; however, +1s are a vote of confidence for online content. Forget about causation or direct impact though. A vote of confidence on Google+ has got to mean something. All signs point to Google+ as beneficial; yet, I personally can’t pinpoint the practical use of it – what need does it feel that isn’t already filled by our other social media platforms and is there a concrete advantage to playing by Google’s rules even on Google+?

For the other side of the Google+ argument, look for Lindsey Paholski’s post next week about applications of Google+ and how to make the most of the platform.

4 Ways to Avoid Getting Hit by Negative SEO or New Unnatural Links

When helping clients with Penguin or manual actions for unnatural links, it’s common for companies to start asking questions about negative SEO. Once clients understand how Penguin works, and how unnatural links could impact a website, they wonder what would stop competitors from launching an all-out attack on their own website. And more importantly, what type of defense strategy could they build to thwart a negative SEO attack?

Beyond negative SEO, unnatural links have an uncanny way of replicating themselves across more spammy sites (without a company actively setting up those new links). So, even if a competitor isn’t launching a negative SEO campaign, situations like “replicating unnatural links” could end up coming back to hurt companies down the line.

For example, my column from October explained how a company first got hit by Penguin 2.0, andthen again by Penguin 2.1. It ends up they put a stake in the ground, and stopped monitoring unnatural links, so they ended up getting hit twice (versus recovering). Not good, to say the least.

This makes it hard for businesses that dug themselves into a hole to fully jump out of that hole. For some companies involved in unnatural link building over the past several years, it’s like being part of an organized crime family. You can’t just pick up one day and leave. There will be a price to pay.

Based on what I explained above about negative SEO and replicating unnatural links, defense measures can play an important part of a company’s SEO efforts.

This post will give you several methods for monitoring, tracking, and analyzing, new unnatural links. After I cover each method, I’ll explain what you can do with your findings (to avoid getting hit). Because when dealing with link problems, analysis is one thing, taking action is another.

Methods for Tracking New Unnatural Inbound Links

1. Google Webmaster Tools Latest Links

Many people don’t realize that Google provides a separate download for a website’s latest links.

If you head over to Google Webmaster Tools and click “Search Traffic” in the left sidebar, and then “Links to Your Site”, you will see an overview of your inbound links.

If you click the “More” link under “Who links the most”, you will see a list of all domains (top 1,000) linking to your site. At the top of that report, there are three buttons. One of those buttons is labeled “Download latest links”.

When you download that report, you can see your latest links by date that Google has picked up. And yes, if you’ve been dealing with an unnatural links situation, the list might shock you.

You may see new spammy links showing up, which could be the result of older unnatural links replicating, or it could be negative SEO. The good news is that you’ll know about the new links, and can take action.

2. Majestic SEO “New” Links

Majestic SEO is my favorite link analysis tool. It holds a boatload of data, provides a ton of functionality, and easily enables you to refine and download your links.

For our purposes today, the main navigation provides a link labeled “New”, which will take you to a cool visualization of new links being discovered for the domain, subdomain, directory, or URL.

First, check out your trending. Does that look natural? Is there a spike over the past 90 days that looks strange? Does the trending match up with your content development, campaigns, etc.?

Majestic enables you to highlight any 14 day period in the chart to view the new links built during that timeframe (below the chart). Then you can easily export those links for further analysis in Excel. Also, Majestic provides “First Indexed”, “Last Seen”, and “Date Lost” fields, which can help determine what’s going on.

Note, Majestic doesn’t know when a link was actually first placed on the web, just when it was first indexed by its crawlers. There are times you will find a “First Indexed” date that’s off. That’s why it’s important to analyze the links versus just taking the data as-is.

3. Open Site Explorer “Just Discovered”

Open Site Explorer also provides a nifty piece of functionality for finding new links. In the main navigation, there’s a link for “Just Discovered” that takes you to a report listing all links the service has recently picked up (and sometimes just minutes after being published).

Using “Just Discovered”, you can filter by the type of link (followed, nofollowed, 301, etc.), and select if you want to see new links to the domain, subdomain, or URL. In the report, you can view the URL linking to your site, the anchor text of the link, domain authority of the site linking to you, and the date the links were first discovered. Then you can easily export those results for further analysis in Excel.

4. Ahrefs – New Backlinks and New Referring Domains

Ahrefs is another excellent link analysis tool, and it provides some of the best functionality available when analyzing new inbound links. After entering a domain in the Site Explorer field, you can click the “New” link under “Backlinks”. That will take you to the new backlinks report, where you have the ability to drill into the data in several ways.

First, you can select pre-determined timeframes (Today, Yesterday, Past 7 Days, Past 30 Days, and Past 60 Days) for analysis. But Ahrefs provides more flexibility than that. You can use the calendar to select any custom timeframe you want (over the past 60 days).

You can also click the “Graph” link to view a graph of all new and lost links over the past 60 days. If you click on a bar in the graph, Ahrefs will display the new or lost backlinks for that specific day.

Once you select a timeframe, you can view the link information in the report below the calendar. You can see the referring link, its title, how many external links that URL contains, how many internal links the URL contains, its status code, the number of social shares, the destination URL being linked to, its title, the anchor text of the link, and when the link was placed. Yes, that’s a lot of data to analyze for sure.

But you can do more. You can further refine your data via the buttons at the top of the report.

For example, you can select all links, dofollow, redirect, governmental, educational, notsitewide, sitewide, and nofollow. The report below automatically updates showing you just the inbound links that fit the criteria you selected.

And of course, you can easily download your links for further analysis in Excel.

What To Do Once You’ve Uncovered New Unnatural Links

Now that you understand how to find the latest links leading to your site, you still need to know what to do with them. If you exported the results to Excel, then you should have multiple spreadsheets to work with (from each data source). Personally, I like combining the data into one spreadsheet, but still have separate worksheets by data source.

Below are some recommendations for analyzing and dealing with unnatural links you find during your research.

Make it a Monthly Process

I highly recommend empowering someone at your organization to check new links on a monthly basis. Don’t check your latest links every few months, only to find out you’ve got a big problem. Or worse, don’t get hit by Penguin or a manual action because you weren’t staying on top of your link profile. If you miss the window of opportunity, you’ll be dealing with months of recovery (or longer).

In a perfect world, this process should not take a lot of time each month. Most companies won’t be dealing with new unnatural links.

Spend one morning each month and go through the process I listed earlier for tracking and analyzing new links. If you find unnatural links, you can immediately deal with the situation, remove the new links, disavow them, etc. And then you can dig in further to find out who is setting up those links, if needed.

Hunting Unnatural Links

Now that you have the latest links by data source, I would start reviewing the links in detail. For example, filter by anchor text, filter by domain name, etc. Then you should start manually checking the links that are suspicious.

If you find new unnatural links that could have been the result of previous link building campaigns, flag them in the spreadsheet. You can simply create a new column where you can flag URLs (Remove, Disavow, Okay, Ignore, etc.)

By creating a new column, you can filter the worksheet by the flags you set up. That will be helpful while compiling a final a list of problematic links.

Manually Remove

One you have a final list of unnatural links, try to remove as many as you can manually. To me, that’s always the best route.

Now, if any of the unnatural links are completely out of your control, then you can simply disavow them by creating or updating your disavow file. That said, if you can find contact information, or a way to remove those links, then I would.

Disavowing URLs and Domains

As mentioned above, if you can’t remove new unnatural links, then you should disavow them.

First, identify if the domain is ultra-spammy or if it’s just the URL that’s problematic. For example, a domain that’s ultra-spammy that looks completely automated would be one you could simply disavow at the domain level. But if you find a domain that is maintained by a company, or a specific webmaster, blogger, etc., and it contains decent content, then you might want to simply disavow the URLs that contain links to your site (versus the entire domain).

If you’re not familiar with the disavow tool, you can either enter a full URL per line or you can use the domain directive (e.g., “domain:example.com” would disavow all links from example.com.

When you have your list of domains and URLs to disavow, then update your disavow file and submit that file via the disavow tool. And don’t be afraid to add domains or URLs to your list down the line. It’s totally OK, and normal, for that list to grow.

Put On Your Detective’s Hat

If you find new unnatural links keep popping up across various websites, try to find out why that’s happening. For example, is someone still building links for you? Has all unnatural link building stopped? If you’re at a large company, or if you’re working with a number of agencies or consultants, has your decision to stop unnatural linkbuilding been thoroughly communicated to all involved?

I’ve mentioned this during a previous post about negative SEO, but most companies that believe they are being attacked are usually wrong. Upon digging in, it’s typically someone tied to the company (an internal employee trying to increase rankings, an SEO agency, PR agency, consultant, etc.) And no, they typically weren’t trying to destroy the company. They simply had bad advice, or took the easier (but dangerous) route to increasing rankings.

That said, if you truly believe it is negative SEO, then try to track unnatural links back to the source. Start asking questions, emailing site owners, finding common sites and companies with links on the same pages, etc. You never know what you are going to find.

I once helped the CEO of a startup with Penguin who was waking people up in the middle of the night asking questions. That was awesome, and yielded answers by the way. Be a bulldog and get to the bottom of the mystery.

Summary – Avoid Penguin and Manual Actions By Staying Vigilant

By using the methods listed above, you can stay on top of new inbound links. And if you notice anything strange, you now have a plan of attack for finding, analyzing, organizing, and dealing with those unnatural links.

Again, I recommend implementing a monthly process for checking your latest links (so you can avoid the nasty bite of Penguin, or the shock of a manual action). The good news is that you can start right away. Like now.

Google’s New Look Search Results: Still An Experiment

More and more searchers, SEOs, webmasters and advertisers are seeing the new Google design test we’ve covered here a couple times where the ads blend in more to the search results and the font size is larger and the underlined links are gone.

Last night, at Search Marketing Expo West, Google’s head of search, Amit Singhal told the audience that “we’re always experimenting” and this design test is just that, one of Google’s experiments.

In our live blog coverage, Matt McGee summarized it as:

We are always testing things. We need to experiment to improve the product. Rest assured there’s a team of PhDs gathering every piece of data we can about our experiments and if it doesn’t benefit users, we don’t do it.

But even so, Google is showing this search result design to more and more people. Twitter, Facebook, the forums and my email are filled with complaints and questions about this new Google design.

Personally, I am able to see both the current design and experimental design when I use different browsers. Here is a side by side, showing the new ad format, larger fonts, and no underlines. Note, you can click on the image to see a full size retina view of the comparison:

For more Google experiments on their design, see our Google user interface category.

How Email Marketers Can Make Birthdays Come More Than Once A Year

As you evaluate your 2013 email programs and work on your 2014 initiatives, be sure to take a hard look at how much of your revenue from email is attributed to triggered programs, as compared with promotional emails.

From my experience, 20% is a good, general target for the amount of overall revenue that should be attributed to triggered programs.

Triggers are key to a successful email program; they have higher engagement metrics because they are based on user behaviors or data and higher ROI because they have minimal ongoing operational costs.

Triggers With Opportunity

Welcome email(s) will typically have the highest volume and revenue, followed by abandoned shopping cart trigger(s). Moving down the list, there is more variance depending on your business and the kinds of triggers you have implemented.

I recommend performing an analysis of send volume and revenue-per-email (RPE) against all of your triggered campaigns, and then honing in on the triggers that have anomalies.

For instance, a trigger with high volume but low revenue-per-email (RPE) would indicate a need to revisit its timing, creative and the overall click-through experience. A trigger with low volume but high RPE might indicate a need to identify and target a larger audience for a similar send.

A great example of the latter instance is the average birthday email. Who doesn’t love a treat on their birthday? And who doesn’t love to treat themselves for their birthday? It’s because of these behaviors that birthday emails are high performers for RPE. But even with this high performance, so many retailers still have incomplete databases that lack birthdays for most subscribers.

And, it’s no surprise. After all, we know the less information we ask upon sign up, the more likely the subscriber is to opt-in, so marketers made a strategic decision to go after a higher opt-in rate with less information (and who can blame them). But, it’s time to make a change – your revenue depends on it.

Acquisition

Following is a successful case study from Lee (disclosure Lee is a client where I work, DEG) that takes a look at how they increased the number of birthdays on file by 340%.

To begin to gather the non-existent information, Lee sent a responsively-designed email to everyone on file without a birth date with the subject line “Happy Birthday! Or is it?”

The link directed the subscriber to a landing page designed solely to capture the birth date associated with the subscriber.

Upon entering the appropriate information, the subscriber is rewarded with a coupon code and offered a link to start shopping as depicted below:

Results

This email’s open rate was 34% higher than the average open rate for Lee’s promotional emails, and the click-through rate was 142% higher than average. Of the subscribers who clicked through, 81% completed the form. As an added bonus, this campaign also generated revenue, which was not a primary goal. This email has been so successful, it is now sent once a quarter, with variations on creative.

Through campaigns like this, Lee has successfully increased the number of birthdays on file by 340% in less than a year. In turn, the email sent on the subscriber’s actual birthday (see below) deploys to a much larger audience, resulting in increased revenue.

Beyond One Birthday Trigger

After increasing the volume of birthday sends, consider how you could extend the life of this program beyond the one email on the subscriber’s birthday. For example, Lee chose to add a half-birthday celebration into the mix. Increasing the sophistication of triggers involves setting up a series of emails and the birthday campaign is no different!

The half-birthday email is a “surprise and delight” campaign because it is an unexpected trigger for the recipient. The following email was sent with the subject line “A (half) birthday gift for you!”

Next, Lee plans to add a pre-birthday trigger about a month in advance of the date, encouraging the subscriber to create a wish list (which can be shared via email as a hint to friends and family). The Tory Burch company has already implemented a pre-birthday wish list email, as you can see here:

Adding a pre-birthday trigger will complete a three-part triggered birthday campaign for Lee, extending the life of the birthday program with relevant triggered messaging that continues to increase the amount of revenue attributed to triggers.

Trigger Optimization

When evaluating your revenue from triggered email, focus on campaigns with high RPE and low volume. Where appropriate, create campaigns to increase the volume of subscribers to qualify for those triggers.

From there, ask how that triggered program could be more sophisticated beyond its current state. It could be as simple as adding a reminder campaign to subscribers that haven’t converted on the first email, to extend the one-time trigger into a multi-email campaign and further drive revenue from your triggered campaigns.

4 Steps To Scaling Enterprise Content Marketing

Back in beginning of the 20th century, the automobile was an item of luxury — it took a long time to build (with workers “crafting” each one), cost well beyond the means of most consumers and was complex to drive.

As most people know today, Henry Ford changed all that with the Model T and his innovations with the assembly line. He made a simpler-to-drive car at a much cheaper cost, making it available to the masses and bringing tremendous value to his customers.

So, what does this have to do with content marketing?

New Marketing Tactic?

If you ask a group of people if the Model T was the first car built, most will nod. Ask a group of SEOs if content marketing is the hottest new tactic for 2014, and most will vigorously agree. Neither group would be truly correct, however.

In truth, smart marketers have been leveraging content marketing to dominate their industries for many years. Just like there were many other models of cars before the Model T (including many made by the Ford Motor Company itself), content marketing has taken many different forms on its path of evolution. Product and service detail pages, category content, blog posts, white papers, case studies, buying guides, reviews…  it’s all content.

So What’s Different?

Why all the hoopla?

It’s simple: content marketing has been a time-consuming and expensive process, much like the way cars were built before the Model T. Sure, companies of all sizes have been blogging (the early precursor to today’s content marketing) for about a decade now, but content marketing “at scale” has been an especially tough challenge to address for enterprises.

The challenges enterprises face with content marketing are significantly different from those of a small or medium-sized business. In fact, in many ways, small and medium-sized businesses have an upper hand compared to their larger competitors when it comes to the ability to quickly write and distribute content. If you offer only a few services or sell only a few products, it’s trivial to get started and grow your content marketing efforts.

If you’re a large, global company selling products under hundreds of categories (think buy.com) or offering a service in multiple languages (think SurveyMonkey), scaling your efforts will be a lot more difficult.

That is, unless you have an “assembly line.”

In the same way that the assembly line revolutionized the production of automobiles and their accessibility to the masses, the content “assembly line” makes content marketing much more scalable and affordable for companies of every size, helping them deliver valuable content available to the masses. A mature content marketing model is just now emerging.

What Is The Mature Content Marketing Model?

Here is a simple and usable content marketing model that we developed a while ago to help guide the technology we build to support our enterprise clients’ efforts — think about it as your content assembly line:

So, how can you put this model to work?

Plan

Every good effort starts with a good plan. A content marketing plan is no different. It requires research into:

1. The identity of your business segments, product lines or service types
2. Who your audience is for each
3. The stages in their buying lifecycle (there is a great piece by McKinsey on The Customer Decision journey that would be helpful in understanding this)
4. The keywords used by your prospective clients
5. The questions asked at different stages of the buying lifecycle that can serve as topics to write about

Once you’ve identified these five, the next step is to create the content.

Create

All content needs to be:

• Engaging
• Share-worthy
• Optimized

Search Engine Optimization folks (SEOs) focus too heavily on the optimization part of the equation. Smart marketers focus on all three.

Forget the idea that content marketing is difficult. Having an army of writers on staff is no longer necessary for producing great content. We see a large number of enterprises outsourcing their content-writing to services such as ezDia and TextBrokers, among others, to help scale their content writing.

Your end results will of course depend on your input — which in turn is based on your planning stage.

Skimp on the planning stage, and the content you get back is going to be a jumbled mess. Put the time and effort into your planning stage to understand your customers and their needs, and you will have stellar content that actually speaks to them.

Distribute

While putting your content on your website is a great first step, scaling the distribution means you have to make it available where it can be “amplified.” Social sites are a fantastic place to amplify the message and expand the distribution in a viral manner.

Yet, there are also many sites that help with reaching different audiences, especially if you can find ways to repurpose your content in different formats — think sites like YouTube and SlideShare, for example.

The more engaging and share-worthy your content is, the easier the time you will have with distributing it.

Analyze

Traditional SEO analysis of content looks at rankings and traffic generated. This is not enough to help you track your content marketing efforts. While traffic is exceedingly important, the real measure of the effectiveness of your content is in engagement metrics. When tracking your content marketing efforts, analyze:

• Time Spent On Page. Even if users bounced, did they spend enough time on the page to indicate they consumed the content? Or did they leave too quickly, indicating the content was not engaging?
• Bounce Rate. Was the content persuasive enough for your reader to venture further into the site?
• Content Conversion Goal. Content conversion goal defines the actions you want the reader to take once they finish consuming the content. Make sure the buyer’s lifecycle stage you are targeting aligns with the action they take. For example, your content conversion goal may social sharing or amplification, newsletter subscription (allowing for future engagement and greater distribution), white paper downloads or page views that move your visitor closer to your conversion goal.

A Word Of Caution

“Assembly line” production tends to sound like “low quality.” The two concepts are not linked. The quality of your output is only as good as your input.

Henry Ford paid top dollar for the best talent and materials to put into the Model T. Put in poor quality resources, and your “assembly line” will turn out poor quality work!

Your Guide to Accepting Guest Posts Responsibly

Matt Cutts’ recent announcement about The Decay and Fall of Guest Blogging for SEO has many site owners understandably panicked. If you’ve been relying on guest posts to generate high quality content for your site, Google’s recent announcement is probably enough to give you pause. Will your site be penalized if you continue with this strategy? What steps do you need to take in order to ensure good rankings?

My advice is simple: it’s not the time to panic, but Cutts’ article offers an important reminder that having good policies in place regarding guest blogging are essential for webmasters and entrepreneurs looking to improve their organic search visibility. Here’s a closer look at what site owners need to think about to manage their reputations and keep their search engine rankings healthy over time.

Putting Your Brand On The Line

For many site owners, Google algorithm updates such as Panda and Penguin (which I covered over at the Huffington Post) reinforced the need for high-quality content. Content is measured on several levels, including quality, relevancy to the audience, uniqueness, and the frequency of updates. It’s often difficult for entrepreneurs to generate the volume of fresh content needed to stay at the top of the search rankings. Looking to colleagues and peers for guest posts has long been a natural way to fill the content gap frequency.

Things got out of hand when marketers began to embrace guest blogging as a replacement for article marketing, which has become ineffective in the last few years. The result was staggering. Site owners that publicly posted writer’s guidelines or contributor invitations were flooded with requests from authors wanting to submit guest posts. The requests were overwhelmingly poorly written, offering content that was, at best, marginally related to the website. All of this was simply an attempt to get a link back to the author’s website.

And so, as Cutts insightfully puts it, “This is why we can’t have anything nice in SEO.”

For site owners, the choice to use guest blog content is often not an easy one. Your site is an important investment, whether it’s a reflection of your business, where you focus your passions, or even if you see it as indicative of your own personal brand. Each time you publish content anywhere, you’re putting your own brand and reputation on the line.

It’s easy to lose sight of this when your focus is on generating and publishing as much content as possible. Cutts’ post underscores the need to stand back and evaluate, and to make sure that each and every article you publish is high-quality. Here are four questions that can help you determine if a guest author or post is the right fit for you.

1. Would you associate with this person in real life business and recommend them to a trusted colleague?

Your email marketing list and your blog readers are some of your businesses’ most important allies. They buy from you, look to you as a resource for great information, and help promote your content and products to a wider audience. As a result, the recommendations you give them are some of the most critical you’ll make. As you consider a potential guest blogger, it’s helpful to ask the following:

• Do you know them personally, and if so, would you recommend them based on their expertise, insights, and integrity?
• Is their brand managed in such a way that it’s professional, appealing, and likely to resonate with your audience?
• If you don’t have personal experience with them, do you know them online or have mutual colleagues that could speak to their value?
• If one of your most valuable contacts took your recommendation and chose to buy from that person, would you feel confident backing up the results?

If you feel any reservations about brand association with this person, that should give you pause when considering a contribution from them.

2. What is their unique contribution to the ecosystem of your blog?

How can they legitimately create value that’s different from what you write about? What will they add that is powerful, unique, and interesting that will resonate with your audience? If the value proposition is instantly clear, that’s a strong argument for proceeding with the post. To help you identify the value proposition behind a specific post, I recommend that you ask every proposed contributor to answer the following questions – whether you know them or not.

• What’s the proposed title of your post?
• Explain the rationale behind your title. Why do you feel this will be persuasive/interesting to readers?
• What’s your hook or angle? What makes this piece different from the 1,000s of other articles or blogs on the same topic?
• Who is your ideal audience for this piece? Describe that reader, and if possible, tie it to my blog.
• What’s the ultimate value to the reader? What insight, tactical approach, or mindset do you want them to walk away with that they wouldn’t have had before?
• Why do you think this piece is appropriate for my blog? What benefit does it bring to you and your readers, and conversely, what value does it bring to them?

It can seem overwhelming to ask people to fill out this form just to guest post on your site. I have two thoughts regarding that. The first is that if they’re unwilling to do so, it’s a pretty good sign that they’re not going to produce the quality or return on investment you’re looking for. Second, there’s nothing on this form that they shouldn’t have evaluated thoroughly before approaching you.

So filling out the form should largely be a routine matter based on motivations that they know well. If they haven’t thought the issue through, doing so will either help them articulate a stronger post idea or self-select out of the process when they realize they’re unprepared. Show people you take quality and forethought seriously, and they will too.

3. Does the quality meet your standards?

Many brands use an excellent tool called a brand guide in their day-to-day operations. In the corporate setting, it gets down into the nitty-gritty about how to use the company’s tagline, where and when it’s okay to use the logo, and even which fonts can be used. While these points are less useful in the context of guest posting, brand guides also contain vital information about quality standards, voice, and more.

Since we’re in the midst of Google’s quality crackdown, now is a good time to evaluate what quality means to you and how you’re going to enforce it. Take the time to articulate that in writing, both as a reminder to yourself and as a resource to any future contributors. Here are some basic quality guidelines to think about:

• Completely original: Except in the case of authorized reposts, you always want to verify that content is original and if possible, 100% exclusive to you. Verify through Copyscape or similar tool.
• Minimum length: Depending on the type of blog you maintain, you may want to consider a minimum (or maximum) length for any content that you accept.
• Quality of writing: What level of writing are you expecting? Is there a specific format that you like to follow? Should pieces be professionally edited or meet some other minimum standard?
• Voice: Do you have a specific voice or approach that you want reflected on your site? For example, should all posts have a touch of humor or are you looking for detailed tutorials?
• Images, visuals, etc.: What kind of images and data would you like your posts to feature? Do claims need to be backed up with major sources? Do writers need to source rights free photographs, or include other supporting materials such as infographics or video?

Develop a rigorous set of standards, and send it to every on who asks about guest posting. The more you do to ensure quality the less likely you will be to run into issues with Google.

4. Would they do it if you didn’t give them a link?

Cutts’ whole point about not guest posting for links brings up a very interesting question: should you consider accepting guest posts, but declining to give authors links? And will the other benefits be enough to keep them interested? As Cutts says:

“There are still many good reasons to do some guest blogging (exposure, branding, increased reach, community, etc.). Those reasons existed way before Google and they’ll continue into the future. And there are absolutely some fantastic, high-quality guest bloggers out there. I changed the title of this post to make it more clear that I’m talking about guest blogging for search engine optimization (SEO) purposes.”

Now’s an important time to assess whether you’re limiting links, doing no follow links, or offering no links at all in connection with guest posts. If a writer is focused on other goals, such as connecting with your audience and really creating value, they’re more likely to be willing to go forward despite the absence of a link.

Conclusion

If you’re a site owner, it’s important that you pay attention to Google’s increasingly tough stance on guest posting as it relates to SEO. You need to learn to discern the context of a good guest post opportunity and the kinds of guest content that can hurt your blog. By asking the questions above, you’ll be better positioned to choose the right path forward for your site.

Search In Pics: Bing Street View Car, Google Toy Helicopter & Special Key

In this week’s Search In Pictures, here are the latest images culled from the web, showing what people eat at the search engine companies, how they play, who they meet, where they speak, what toys they have, and more.

Google Sydney Monorail Car Conference Room Key:

Source: Google+

Google Microfiber Cleaner:

Source: Google+

Google Piggy Bank:

Source: Google+

Google Toy Helicopter:

Source: Google+

Bing Street View Car: