Which is More Important for Business: Organic or Paid Search Results?

Every time you type in keywords on the search tab, Google and the like return two types of results: organic and paid. The first one consists of web listings that are closest to one’s query in terms of relevance, while the second one are advertisements that websites and companies spend on in order for them to appear on the results page whenever their selected keywords are typed in by a user.

But which one is actually more helpful for businesses? First we must recognize the difference between #OrganicSEO and #paidsearch.

While paid ones are separated from natural results in that paid ones are mostly found at the top of the page - giving them visual priority - the latter is nonetheless more essential in the long-term. It’s also helpful to know that the target audience for these two is usually different: Natural SEO is aimed at people who are looking for information, while the other one usually attracts buying customers who already know what they want prior to making a query.

 Image From: http://inntaonlinesolutions.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/Googles-Organic-and-Paid-Search-Results.png

Both are of course important when you’re running a large-scale business. But know that if you’re actually spending lots on PPC advertising without managing proper SEO techniques for organic traffic to your site, you are essentially losing money with every passing minute.

Recent studies show that over 90% of web users prefer to use organic search results, and only 6% of them actually revert to PPC ads on the page. This is because users are keen to recognize that clicking on paid results means that a company will be pitching a sale.

Let us put that into numerical perspective. Say you are in top position for certain keywords which elicit about 100,000 searches a month. With that, your site should obtain around 80,000 visits. If your website has been created with proper SEO strategies from the beginning, then your optimum traffic to lead conversion rate should be 15%. Multiply 80,000 by 15%, and you get 12,000 monthly leads.

In the PPC perspective on the other hand, one would need to spend on the average about $1.06 to get traffic to lead conversion of only 5.3% - way below what you’d get if you use natural SEO. So to obtain 12,000 monthly leads with that conversion, it would require more than 226,000 visits. If we multiply by $1.06, you’d have to spend around $250,000 to acquire 12,000 conversions.

If you are seeking benefits for the long-term, then a well-optimized site is the way to go. Of course PPC also provide instant traffic and helps improve your visibility, but all your efforts to market effectively will go to naught if natural search strategies are not in place to begin with.

How to Avoid Keyword Cannibalism

Have you ever written a fresh, high quality article in hopes of it ranking high up in search engines, only to find out later that another post from your other domains or social media accounts rank higher than the original post? 

    Image From: http://techlunatic.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/Keyword-Cannibalism-In-Google-Search-Results.jpg

This phenomenon, also known as #keyword cannibalism, is a by-product of an #seo campaign gone wrong. It occurs when you overdo SEO-ing your articles and blast your social media accounts with backlinks to your site, thus your key terms “cannibalize” your preferred articles and your other entries like those in your Digg, Stumble Upon profiles and other web portals end up ranking higher than those in your primary website. Naturally, the best way to avoid this ill effect is to observe proper SEO techniques and to stop overdoing things. Ever heard of the saying too much of anything is bad? That goes for SEO too.

●    Create variations in your titles

    Always ensure that each post is unique, and that you employ varying long tail key phrases for ranking instead of just a highly coveted single short tail one. If you have to submit your content to social media portals like Digg, create a new title for each copy you submit so that you don't lose a well-crafted entry on your site to highly trafficked ones that have higher PageRank.

●    Spice up key terminologies

    Make use of synonyms when drafting content to ensure optimum benefits per post, and so that spiders     don't get your posts mixed up due to redundant permalink structure. While it's wise to stick to your     particular niche, it is not any wiser to repeat the same keywords time and again in ALL your articles just     so you'd have desired keywords ranking high up the hierarchy. Spice up your blog with an assortment of     keywords, both short-tail and long-tail. Not only will this prevent keyword cannibalism, it will also keep     readers engaged and interested.

●    Don't overdo optimization

It's easy to fall prey to overdoing SEO efforts to achieve more than what you'd normally expect for a post, but try not to do so. Overly optimizing anchor text links is a surefire way for unintended posts to cannibalize your intended article.

●    Place a no-follow attribute on your site

This may seem counter intuitive to SEO, as a no-follow attribute means you don't want your material indexed by crawlers. And why would you post something that you wouldn't want to be indexed? Well, for the reason that you do not want to dilute search pages or for some posts that are stuffed with keywords to over power one that you wish to rank high.

With more and more blogs cropping up out of nowhere each day, we as SEO marketers wish we could all bag first prize in the keyword competition. Remember though that sometimes less means more. Don't go over optimizing content; you might find that sometimes doing so will reap more benefits for you.

How Social Media Signals Play A Part In Your Rankings

Two years back, #seo expert Danny Sullivan explored how #socialmedia signals affected search engine rankings. Back then, he surmised that while Facebook remains irrelevant to Google, retweets has become an invaluable part of building links. Immediately after, Google mogul Matt Cutts confirmed that organic SEO is indeed influenced by social media signals.

Although many SEO professionals are still evaluating the extent of social signal’s effect on rankings, various research studies prove that they are correlated to an increase in site traffic, rankings, and consequently, revenue.

Image From: http://socialmetricspro.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/connection_ssignals_seo.jpg

 

Social signals affect rankings in two ways: direct and indirect. Direct social media ranking signals include:

·         Facebook likes and shares

·         Twitter followers and retweets

·         Tweets where your brand is indicated or which pertain to a linkback to your site

·         Individuals who included you in their Google+ circles

On the other hand, indirect influence is directed by these factors:

·         Inbound links and mentions

This is the most important role of social media. The more linkbacks and social media mentions you procure, the more brand awareness and online visibility you raise. In fact, inbound links , especially from high quality sites, are far more important as a ranking criteria than social media and Matt Cutts has made this pretty clear.

·         Positive feedback in Google, Yelp and other similar sites

Through social networking channels, businesses are able to create a distinct and presentable image for their brand. More importantly, it allows them to establish genuine customer connection and trust and boost customer loyalty. This is turn, increases the likelihood of more positive reviews on sites like Google Local and Yelp.

Positive reviews mean satisfied customers. The number of positive feedback directly affects local and national search rank. The more satisfied clients you have tweeting about you or promoting you on their Facebook accounts, the better chances you have of attaining a higher ranking.

·         Less bounce rate and longer visitor time on website

Decreased bounce rate means visitors are pleased with your web content, thus compelling them to spend more time on-site. Similarly, if more consumers are aware of your brand through social media, then the higher chances you have of acquiring repeat visits, and the longer time-on-site you have. Google is able to accurately gauge if a website did satisfy customer queries and how many repeat visits there are to the same site, which makes this metric an effective tool for increasing organic search ranks.

There’s also that recent implementation of Google AuthorRank, which is aimed at identifying credible authors so that their content do not just receive higher search engine rankings, but also give more value to their outbound links.

 

While the impact of social signals are still under continuous study, their expanding role in algorithms that pertain to ranking can not be denied. Companies who welcome social media signals with open arms and eyes have been proven to enjoy wonderful benefits in terms of lead conversion, customer loyalty and awareness, word-of-mouth advertising and ultimately, profit.

How to Land Your Dream Design Job

Landing the perfect position amid a sea of graphic design jobs is oftentimes a difficult and frustrating experience. To make matters worse, the global economic crisis has complicated the job-seeking experience especially for beginners who are aiming for large companies.

In some cases however, the reason for such frustration is that applicants are unaware of where they should start, and often think that merely going around online postings and dropping by offices is the first step.

Image From: http://www.elevationnetworks.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/graphic-design-montreal1.jpg

Getting your feet on the right direction from the start makes this experience easier, more enjoyable and more fruitful. Preparation is the key to any personal endeavor we take, and here we equip you with proper prep-up tips for a rewarding design career.

•    Become the best graphic artist there is

It’s all about sufficient education and experience. While a considerable number of designers are self-taught, it would be beneficial for you to take advantage of training curriculums that specialize in the said field. In some parts of the world where on-campus courses are not available, online programs prove to be very helpful.

Enrolling yourself in one ensures that you have an adequate, solid foundation for a long-term career. It will equip you with the basics, and train you on a variety of in-demand skills and technologies including Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator for those aiming for a spot in print media, and HTML, CSS and Dreamweaver for those seeking web-based careers - skills that employers often check whenever an applicant comes knocking in.

Whenever you can, practice these at home. Recruiters would sometimes ask you to demonstrate your capabilities, and it’s wise to be prepared for battle.

•    Create a wicked portfolio

After learning comes the application and necessary flaunting. For employers to notice you, creating a portfolio is essential. It is great for marketing and selling your experience, skills, resume and sample work to potential employers. Contact information maybe embedded on-site too.

This is much easier nowadays with tons of free websites available in the market where you can house your best work. Being a novice should not hold you back from coming up a sleek collection of your work. Practice the art, make hypothetical samples and flaunt them on your site for clients to see.

•    Draft a great resume and cover letter

While a portfolio sells your skills through work samples, a resume summarizes your entire history, background work, experience and personal data in easily digestible words.

Be sure to keep it at around 2-3 pages of MS Word or PDF files, and focus only on your best skills, making sure that everything is clean and organized.

Also, remember to have a creative and succinct cover letter in hand all the time for easy uploading whenever applying for a company. Stay away from cover letters that are too generic- these tend to be neglected by clients.


•    Take advantage of e-mail signatures and social media accounts

An additional promotional move is to list your skills and current position in your e-mail signatures and also integrate them in your Facebook, Google+ and Twitter accounts. This allows recruiters to have a clear, concise idea of what you offer prior to contacting you.


Now that you have everything set up, it’s time to go look for graphic design job!

These days, the Web is brimming with online employment boards where you can scout for the best positions and companies that fit your personal goals and qualifications. Do your research and try to filter your search according to your acquired skills and preferences. This should make searches easier for you rather than just clicking on random non-related employment searches.

Stepping Up the Game with Google Ad Management

Marketing to customers grows more difficult and more costly by the day, with so many companies resorting to commercial advertising. The challenge of being able to discover ways to encourage customers to make contact and avail products and services without spending a fortune plagues marketers on a daily basis.

This is where pay-per-click or PPC advertising comes into play. As one of the most effective advertising methods today, PPC ads direct highly targeted traffic to company websites, and for less than what traditional media modes cost.

One of the most popular forms of #ppc is #googleads, which like its counterparts’ (Yahoo! and MSN) allow companies to create advertisement text, banners and others, and select keywords that they deem appropriate for their ads. Advertisers only pay whenever a visitor clicks on the ads, and they can also set or bid for the amount of their daily or monthly campaigns, thus giving them absolute control of their campaign costs and flow.

Image From: http://d3sdoylwcs36el.cloudfront.net/Google-Ad-Manager-beta.jpg

 

For many marketers, the secret to an effective campaign on Google is proper and effective Google Ads management. But what is #googleadmanagement? What are the benefits of successful ad management?

Through the Google Ad Manager, publishers can manage ads on their respective sites. This is made possible by adding an advertisement code on the ad tool, then embedding that computer-generated code on their websites. Once done, each ad unit can be effectively tracked, primarily page views, CTR and other related statistics. It also allows publishers to geotarget each ad unit.  It is compatible with graphics, texts and videos.

Managing Google ads efficiently is crucial for achieving effective PPC campaigns via AdWords. It takes continuous work and research and the whole process itself can turn out to be stressful, but learning your way into the system does reward your marketing efforts significantly. With the right management strategies, you will be able to create more effective and highly targeted campaigns and optimize your keyword research and strategies, even your workflow, so you stay ahead of the game.

Optimized Google Ad Management provides the following benefits for your business:

•    Greater return of investment (ROI) with more cost-per-click
•    Get higher scores to improve your ad rankings
•    Reach a wider client-base that will later on lead to more conversions
•    Obtain more relevant, targeted traffic and less irrelevant ones 
•    Huge savings on unqualified clicks
•    Get to know your customers better so that you can adjust your ad campaigns according to their needs and desires.

Google Ads may be a lot more complicated than what some marketers perceive, but it’s definitely one of the best ways to garner site traffic and revenue without burning a hole in your wallet. And efficient Google Ad management is your best bet to making that happen.

Use Social Media to Increase Search Ranking

As a webmaster, you must know by now that search engine rankings are extremely important to your business. When you are at least within the top ten search results, this could mean more ads, more customers, more brand awareness, and thus, more revenue. But nowadays when everyone has gone social, merely ensuring that your site is well-optimized isn’t enough. You ought to ride the trend and be active in #socialmedia as well.

While the subject is still under debate, more and more studies reveal that the impact of social media on search ranking results can not be undermined. For instance, a recent survey by #moz showed that when websites started using various social media channels, their search engine rankings rose up to 14.63 points, specifically for those with Google+ business pages. Those who merely have Google+ buttons saw an increase of over 9 points.

Image From: http://a398.idata.over-blog.com/5/53/10/07/Why-Does-Social-Media-Affect-Search-Rankings---4-Most-Likel.png

How exactly does this influence occur? Well, for one, not only are those who have huge followings on social networking channels sharing information through word-of-mouth, their presence also influences search results based on the information they spread. Also, with recent Google developments, securing top ranking for social media influence is now more significant than being on the top spot for keywords.

Lastly, there’s a direct correlation between the size of your social network and YOUR search results. The bigger your network is and the more social media channels you engage in, the better your ranking will be. See, by regularly sharing information on social networks, you’re enjoying free re-advertising by your peers via organic search. Whenever prospective clients search for related keywords, the information you shared with your followers goes all the way up to your prospects.

As a business, how do you leverage on such reality?

•    Create positive connections with your clients and prospective clients

There is no better time than now. Make use of feedback forms on your website, soliciting in the process their Facebook and Twitter IDs.

•    Don’t link to or share your rivals

Remember, things have changed now. While it was considered healthy to engage in a friendly will-follow strategy before so you can spy on your rivals, doing so now will allow them to affect your connections and future clients. If you really wish to do so, mention them only on no-follow websites.

•    Share your key content on social networking platforms

This holds true especially for those entries that you are aiming to aggressively market to customers. Be sure to link them up on your Twitter and Google pages at the very least.

•    Keep content meaningful

Although there’s no hard evidence that a socially shared link containing good content is significant to social ranking, it’s not going to do you any bad either if your provide great content that’s targeted towards content association and follower shares.

Associations and context: How LSI Works

Whenever a user looks for a particular term or phrase online -  for instance, McDonalds' Quarter Pounder - the main objective of search engines, particularly Google, is to identify whether that user is searching for information about burgers, a weight-related concern, or a McDonald's in his area. In essence, this is how the whole process of how a user's environment, locale or any other associated matters influence and provide context to a particular online search.

Bearing that aim in mind, Google has transitioned from placing priority on keyword density to putting context on top of their priority list. Its search engine crawlers determine cues for what web users are actually searching for on the Web whenever they type data. This process of latent semantic indexing plays a key role in enhancing today's search engine technology to better understand user queries as well as offering answers organically.

 Image From: http://spamhunt.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/What-Is-Latent-Semantic-Indexing-636x330.png

Your goal therefore as a website owner or business is to integrate rich and appropriate context into your web pages so that you Google can provide you with the right target audience. Now more than ever, it has become crucial that your ad copies and site texts answer visitor queries holistically, so that you go beyond sufficing their main search needs, and address their desires, associated background and environment as well.

Let's take another example. When someone looks for overseas employment, it's also likely that he would be searching for information on citizenship, visas and other worker-related details. When creating content, try to always integrate this kind of intensive knowledge-seeking and offering of key terms and ideas that are relevant to the topic at hand.

You can test how LSI works by typing a particular phrase on the search tab. You will see that the top result   often contains great and catchy information on the home page. What you could do is copy that specific URL, go to Google's Keyword Tool then select website content. Place that URL into the box and check  Include other pages on my site linked from this URL. Click search and you will see the tool yielding relevant keywords revolving around the same idea.

If you understand it sufficiently, LSI does not only help you achieve better rankings, but it also provide you with a headstart on the direction that you should go with your content. If you're pretty knowledgeable about ideologies and associations related to your niche or topic, developing in-depth and catchy context and copies targeted towards your audience will be simpler and easier.

Reaping Website Benefits through Low Hanging Fruit Strategies

Many SEO professionals are too dead set on attaining the top spot of high ranking keywords that they forget that low hanging fruit strategies are also significant in achieving long-term SEO goals. Not only are they easier to achieve (i.e. they don’t require much effort on the part of SEO professionals), they also yield faster and more efficient outcomes.

                          Image From: http://go.christiansteven.com/Portals/168354/images/low-hanging%20fruit.jpg

What are the low hanging fruit of SEO? How can we attain them to improve sales, site traffic and search engine rank?

•    Keep your title tags well-optimized

One of the most vital aspects of SEO both for users and search engine bots are your pages’ titles tags. Make sure that your tags are excellently written and that they contain targeted keywords in order to achieve greater click-through rates and higher rankings in search results. Don’t stuff them with too many keywords though as that could make it look like spam.

A great suggestion is to keep them relevant, unique and short (preferably within 70 characters). Include your brand name if possible. Remember to also add a few differentiating points like “FREE ___”.  Avoid using too many articles and fillers like the and but.

•    Include optimized meta tags

Just as your title tags are, your meta description tags should be well-optimized as it appears on search results and contributes to site traffic.

For greater online visibility and click-through rates, it’s good to implement the same ideas that you do for title tags. Keep meta descriptions original and relevant; include keywords as well (without overstuffing). Meta descriptions should be approximately 160 characters or less to prevent truncation.

•    Utilize site links

Employing site links allows better site navigation for users in that they let users easily find information in search engines. They also result to greater click-through rates. Assess your site link structure and determine areas for improvement. Apply appropriate and relevant links, and use brief but descriptive anchor text.

•    Take advantage of rich snippets

Installing rich snippets lets users gain instant and concise information about your brand, thereby decreasing your bounce rate while increasing click through rate. They may come in various forms, including videos, author and photo snippets.

•    Use Google Places

9Dotstrategies Google Places Sample

With Google Places, you can mark your business location on a map followed by an online verification process through Google. Through this tool, you can direct more traffic to your site and encourage customers to share, recommend and rate your business. If there are reviews under your tab, you can also create a response to these for better customer interaction.   

•    Install call-to-action links or badges

Many businesses who have websites employ some sort of call-to-action text, button, badge or banner so that users would be encouraged to take further action on the site, thus increasing their conversion rates. These actions may include newsletter sign-up, offers for cart add-ons or product testing, and requests for user information.

These are just some of the most commonly used low hanging fruit strategies, but there are others that you can still explore to help boost your website’s performance without exerting much SEO effort.

Web Design and SEO Go Together

How a website looks and feels from the outside is a vital factor in attracting visitors. But from then on, there has to be that glue that makes consumers stick to a site beyond aesthetics. With the population of web users and websites alike growing exponentially by the day, it has become obvious that that certain thing that makes them stick, is good SEO technique, and it is indispensable.

As of writing there are over 130 million active sites on the Web, and this figure is expected to increase significantly throughout the years to come with more bloggers joining the digital arena. As the space gets more packed – add to that the volume of competitors who provide similar content - raising brand awareness and getting readers' attention are becoming extremely challenging by the minute, even for established websites. 

         Image From: http://www.primolution.com/wordpress27/wp-content/themes/seo/images/seo-web-design.jpg

No matter how eye-candy one's website is, it can be buried underneath a pile of competitors in an instant without search engine optimization. In these revolutionary times, great design just doesn't suffice. Businesses, bloggers, and webmasters all have to incorporate sleek SEO strategies to ensure survival and success on the web.

Over the years, we have seen marketers create a monster out of SEO, employing shabby strategies to get ahead of the game. These people have found a way to trick their way into higher Page Ranking, more backlinks and higher search results status. Thanks to the implementation of Google's Panda/ Farmer Update, quality content is making a glorious comeback as an accurate parameter of online credibility and fame.

The challenge now is for businesses to find that middle ground to succeed. Successful, well-established sites share a common ground: exceptional web design and SEO. These two go hand-in-hand in baiting loyal, “hooked” customers. Design provides that initial physical attraction,  ensuring that the consumer's attention is captured, and SEO, through valuable, one-of-kind content, offers the inner beauty beyond   visual pleasure that will make visitors stay and go back a second, tenth, or hundredth time.

In addition, search engine spiders are text-based; they are unable to understand images which make SEO even more important. If great design is intended to please the human eye, SEO aims to lure search engine bots so that more site traffic is generated.

There is an adage that goes like, “You only have one chance to make a first impression.” Make a good first impression with visually appealing designs, but also make sure you have relevant, well-written material and enough SEO strategies under your belt to turn that good first impression into a lasting one.

Tips on Integrating Proper Usability in Web Content

Web content writing is entirely different from crafting material for print. For one, readers usually use the Web to find information, thus they tend to merely skim through site pages, whereas readers of printed media usually do so for pleasure and entertainment, and tend to focus on the per-word content of each piece better.

  Image From: http://www.celestialcontentservices.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/Website-content-writing-service.jpg

Thus, when creating online content, a few rules must be observed. The following techniques have been  found beneficial:

• Make articles concise and easy to understand

Studies show that reading something via a computer or any similar device tends to put more strain on the eyes, thus web users read a quarter slower than if they were to read a newspaper or magazine. The clearer and simpler your piece is, the better your readers can absorb information.

Whenever possible, avoid complicated structure and jargons. Unless they are widely used and recognized, spell out acronyms. Use short and active terms.

• Focus on one idea per paragraph

Limit paragraphs to a single idea whenever possible. This ensures that readers can easily skim through the lines and get the point you’re driving at. Otherwise, they’d move on to another paragraph and risk missing vital information.

• Consider front-loading articles

By this we mean placing the conclusion at the beginning of the article followed by the basic details (what, when, where, how). Oftentimes we follow the good old beginning-middle-end format, and while this is a standard, doing the former allows your readers to have a good grasp of what the entire article is about and can decide right away if they would read the rest of the page.

• Utilize informative sub-headings

Creating sub-headings lets your visitors understand the details of each paragraph before even reading it. The sub-headings should be descriptive enough to serve as a pre-concluding statement of what a certain paragraph offers.

• Use italics or bold text to emphasize importance

Bold or italicized words indicate importance. Through them, readers can find vital details more quickly.

• Create lists

Lists and bullet-points are better than long paragraphs. They are easier on the eyes in that they present information in a vertical, succinct manner, and look less intimidating.

• Make paragraphs left justified

This is standard format and the reason is quite obvious: it’s easier to scan through than the center or right aligned text – both of which result to slower and more difficult reading.

These are fairly easy guidelines to observe, but website owners tend to overlook them, at the expense of readers. Assess your site or blog and see if you are  missing anything out. You might just save one reader heaps of time and gain another.

Debunking Keyword Density Myth

One of the most common myths in SEO revolves around the correlation of keyword density with ranking. In the olden days, it was believed that the more key terms you place in an article, the higher your search engine rank will be. While key phrases and terms are important ranking, further studies tell us that perhaps too much may not be such a good thing.

Key terms help you pick up your target audience and help in search engine ranking. However, their frequency must come naturally, as placing them excessively within an article makes your website look spammy and could therefore result to penalties.

        Image From: http://www.searchenginepeople.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/02/keyword-density-calcultation.jpg

Incorporating them wisely in the title and content makes your page relevant to search engines like Google and Bing. But here’s the catch: keywords do not influence ranking itself. Research tells us that they do not even pass as a tertiary influence to algorithms for ranking – quite contrary to the keyword density myth.

What actually determines if your site will appear on the first or second page of the search results is the keyword weight, not the frequency. The weight identifies how important your key phrases are in relation to their context and the index content. There are three factors that affect the weight: local weight, or the frequency of the term within the file; global weight; and normalization. These are all very technical terms, and there are lots of SEO Information out there that can help clarify how the whole SEO ranking really works.

In addition, the relevance of each term in your articles and posts add up to your ranking score. How can you be relevant? Reach out to more people. Relevance is identified by the number of people sharing your website or webpages on social media channels as well as how many followers you have and how many individuals link to your site.

The bottomline is, key terms are essential, but you have to know how to make them come out naturally within a page. While the olden SEO myth tells you that density is relevant to your ranking, we have come to know that more than their frequency in a page, what really matters is that you find appropriate techniques so that these terms appear more than once in your document, but remain relevant too to your entire content, not just some random words placed there for the sake of it. 

Cliché as it may sound, the best way to still attain higher and stable search engine ranking is to write high quality, engaging content that users would be interested to link up to. The more readers there are linking to your site and posting meaningful comments in your comments box, the greater your chances are of achieving higher ranking.

Getting More Out of Your Website through SEO Readiness

More than being a place for one’s ideas and thoughts, a website can be a great source of additional income. Websites are an investment like any other, and must be engineered and managed properly from the very start. Otherwise, your efforts and time would simply go to waste.

Nowadays, nothing beats effective and proper SEO tools and strategies when it comes to properly managing websites. An SEO-ready website does not only ensure better user awareness and search engine visibility for your brand, but also more leads for conversion and greater revenue for your company. But to able to achieve this, we must first know, What does SEO ready websites mean?

An SEO ready site is one that has been carried out with meticulous planning in terms of SEO strategies. Be it a personal or business website, an e-commerce portal or a blog, an SEO ready website demonstrates highly optimized content that is most often achieved through their respective webmaster’s keyword research and strategic plans.

         Image From: http://www.entrepreneurweb.com/sites/entrepreneurweb.com/files/seo-ready-website-design.jpg

In addition, an SEO ready website has also been designed and programmed according to the most up-to-date web architectures and SEO techniques, adhering to specific organic – usually white hat - search guidelines.

It follows then that when a site is SEO ready, you get more out of it in every aspect possible. Some of the benefits of an SEO ready websites are:

•    Increased PageRank and improved search engine ranking

When a website employs SEO-friendly techniques, search engines are able to find and index it faster so that it remains within the top ten search results.

•    Better brand exposure and visibility

It has been proven that users rarely go past the first page of search engine results. If your company is one of the first ones they see on the page, you are able to build a name that’s worth remembering.

•    Sales boost from organic traffic

With an effective content and keywording strategy in place, you will be able to drive more traffic to your site, thereby increasing your leads for conversion and more revenue from related tools like banners and ads. Be sure to put in the appropriate keywords that customers are searching for when publishing content.

•    Guaranteed results at no added expense

With the right SEO strategies, you can achieve naturally-acquired results with a lasting impact for no additional expenditure. Quality SEO strategies ensure that you are visible not just in the eyes of web users, but that you accrue long-term growth through stable search engine ranking in premier search engines.

•    Greater return of investment

If your website has been created and coded following proper SEO strategies from the beginning, you would be able to save costs and time and get more income early in the process. Your sales increases when you create fresh leads every so often through targeted organic traffic.

•    Better edge over your rivals

Every minute, thousands of competitors are vying for the same spot that you are. If you already have an SEO ready website from the very start, your chances of succeeding in such a harsh and highly competitive industry are greater. The sooner you get the ball rolling, the sooner you can succeed.

Bagging the Job with Exceptional Content

These days when the online population expands exponentially by the day, we also see a constant uptrend in content writing jobs in the digital sphere. Online writing provides a decent income for freelancers and most come without restrictions for age, education or geographical location. Competition is a lot tougher for beginners though, what with the volume of pros they have to compete with.

             Image From: http://blog.learningcatalyst.in/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/web-content-writing-jobs-in-india.jpg

     

It is therefore imperative for novice writers to provide exceptional content to capture the interest of readers and potential employers. Exceptional material is generally subjective just as good food is, but both seasoned writers and hungry readers agree these features make good content:

•    Relevant, useful information

One of the primary reasons why readers go online is to retrieve information. Your articles must be useful to readers for you to engage them in the first place. If you were the reader, how would you like articles to read? Put yourself in the shoes of the reader, and give them what they need and want. Awareness of evolving reader needs, desires and background is essential to creating pieces that will provide value.

•    Uniqueness

Readers need information that they can not find elsewhere - be it in entertainment, politics, news, relationships or science - otherwise your piece simply becomes a generic one like the others. As a writer, you need to stand out and distinguish yourself among a long list of aspiring writers and pros.

One suggestion is to scan articles on the web and analyze how you can deviate from such and establish your own approach in terms of tone, voice and writing style while still maintaining its relevance and key points. Experiment writing in various genres first and take to mind both uniqueness and relevance.

•    Freshness and Originality

While many writers assimilate originality with uniqueness, they can mean two different things in context. In some articles, you may find quoted lines or excerpts that are unique, thus making them technically not entirely original. That is not bad on its own, but if you’re starting out as a writer, you would also want to craft pieces that are wholly yours – not re-written and without excerpts. This allows the content to have its own voice, not something that was originally someone else’s. Only use quotes if they are truly essential to drive a point, no matter how clever-sounding.


Good writing is best achieved when the content is kept original, that is, not recreated or thought of by other authors in such form. Whether you’re culling an excerpt of somebody else’s piece, re-writing  another article or creating your own entirely from scratch, always make sure they are unique, original and useful to your readers. Only by doing so can you establish credibility as a writer and catch the eye of prospects.