Author Archives: Amrit Hallan

About Amrit Hallan

Amrit Hallan is a professional content writer who helps businesses improve their conversion rate through credible and compelling content writing. His main strength lies in writing search engine optimized content without compromizing quality and meaningfulness.

With no keywords [100% (Not Provided)], is SEO content history?

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Keyword data not provided

First of all, let me make it clear, there is no such thing as “SEO content”. You should always write content that is useful to your visitors, that provides the right information to your prospective customers and clients, and that is easily accessible. Stick to these guidelines and you have got “SEO content” on your website. Nonetheless, when you create content, you keep your primary keywords in mind while preparing the text. This is for obvious reasons. Up till now, the convention has been that if people are using certain words to find you, shouldn’t you be using those words? Suppose people are looking for content writing services, shouldn’t I use these three words as often as possible, while not overdoing it?

Recently Google has started encrypting every search – it means the various analytics programs that told you what keywords people are using in order to come to your website will no longer be able to do that. Here is an interesting take on this latest development:

Why does Google hide this valuable information in this awesome free tool called Google Analytics that they recommend you sign up for? Why do you think? My guess is it’s to encourage paid search engine marketing possibly through their Google AdWords product. I mean why else would you hide this useful information?

Whatever reasons Google has got, it is not going to show you the keywords for which you get traffic, and that’s that. It’s a big company, lots of businesses depend on it, and it can really take decisions that can wipe off smaller businesses just like that. Deal with it.

How do you deal with it? Most of my clients provide me a list of keywords when they want me to prepare content for them. Although more than keywords, what’s important is the message that is delivered through the content, but keywords are a big factor. You can use common sense to prepare content according to your main keywords. But how do you know that you are getting enough traffic for those keywords? If you are trying to optimize your website for multiple keywords, how do you know which keywords are already optimized for and which ones you still need some effort? In the absence of this insight, what sort of content do you create?

Google deciding not to show you keywords doesn’t mean that keywords no longer matter. After all it’s the keywords that people use in order to find the information they need. Although Google is shifting its focus on context rather than the words that you use – you may like to read my previous blog post titled Preparing your website content for Google’s Hummingbird algorithm. Despite that, keywords are going to matter and this is why…

The entire AdWords business depends on keywords because people bid on them. The advertisements on Google’s advertising network appear on the basis of the keywords people use to carry out searches. So do you want to know what keywords drive the most traffic to your website? Sign up for AdWords. Even if you are not interested in PPC advertising, you can use its PPC ad-creation tool to do research on keywords and find out the most relevant and the most widely used keywords in your industry. By spending some money you can also find out for which keywords people click your links the most.

The best thing to do is, stop worrying about keywords and start publishing content people find useful. In fact this can be a blessing in disguise. Almost since the beginning of the Internet businesses all over the world have depended on search engines for traffic. I’m not saying you completely start ignoring the search engines because millions of people use them to find products and services they need, but people are also using other sources like social networking websites, blogs, review websites and informative articles to make up their minds. In fact, trying to find good information on search engines can be like trying to find a needle in a haystack. On the other hand if you ask your peers, friends and followers (whether face-to-face or through your social connections on the Internet) you can find exactly the sort of information and advice you need. Start networking with people. Build your clout and authority. Improve your author rank instead of solely focusing on page rank and keyword density. Let people send traffic your way rather than search engines.

If you are not publishing a newsletter, then perhaps this is the right time to start one. Have a signup box somewhere on your website and encourage people to drop in their email ids so that you can keep in touch with them. In fact, the conversion rate from your emails is much higher compared to the traffic that you get from search engines.

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The Two Why’s of Publishing Content on Your Website

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Why publish content

You are continuously publishing content on your website, right? You have read raving articles and blog posts about the power of content marketing and how it outshines conventional marketing and how it brings inbound traffic to your website without having to spam people. But you know what, content marketing isn’t just about creating and publishing content. You need to have a clear direction. One thing is indisputable: as a business you DO need to publish high-quality and highly valuable content on your website. But what purpose does that content solve? How does it help your business generate more leads and consequently, more business? How does it help your visitors make up their minds, preferably, in your favor?

In order to implement an effective content marketing strategy you need to figure out the two why’s publishing and promoting content:

  1. Why are you publishing content on your website?
  2. Why should your visitors care about your content?

If you are able to figure out these two why’s you have got something really good going on. Let’s go into some detail now if you are not in a great hurry.

Why are you publishing content on your website?

I assume you are savvy enough to know that you need to inform your visitors; you have to lay your cards on the table so that they are convinced you are not holding something up your sleeve. The great thing about having a website is that it is available to everybody 24 x 7 x 365. The bad thing, although it is not a bad thing and it depends on how you organize information, is that people are not able to talk to you. There is a more than 95% possibility that they are visiting your website for the first time. If you are a known brand, you have crossed a major hurdle already, but if you are not, people are not familiar with you. They doubt you. Even if they don’t doubt you, they need some more information about you, about your product, about your service, and about the way you do business. They might be impressed with your website design but when it comes to spending money, people are more cautious. They are interested in words. You need to convince them that you are a genuine business offering a genuine product or a genuine service. How do you do that?

  • Publish content that informs them without manipulating
  • Publish as much information as is needed in order to make a conscious decision
  • Organize your content in such a manner that it can be easily accessed as soon as it is needed
  • Share your knowledge and wisdom so that people trust you

This is one aspect. The above points take care of your business once visitors are already on your website. Your content should also be able to draw more visitors to your website. This can be achieved by creating compelling content that people want to talk about and even share on social media and social networking websites. Your content should also motivate them to sign up for your regular updates so that you can constantly keep in touch with them.

Try to define clear-cut goals for every blog post and article you publish on your website. There should be a well-defined measuring parameter so that you know you are in the right direction. The measuring parameter can be anything. Do people sign up for your newsletter after reading your articles and blog posts? Do you get mentions on Twitter? How many people favorite your article or blog post on Google+, Twitter or Facebook? How many people directly approach you after accessing your content.

These are just my assumptions. Every business has unique requirements so you can draw your measuring parameters according to your own goals and objectives.

Why should your visitors care about your content?

You may care about your content because, well, it is your content and you think it is going to have a positive impact on your business. But what about your visitors? Why should they care about your content? What do they get out of it? Are you offering them something that they cannot get from other websites? Are you creating an experience for them? Are you empowering them? Are you educating them and then letting them decide whether they want to do business with you or not?

Take for instance my website, or this blog. I provide professional content writing and content marketing services. Why should you read my blog posts and my other pages on the website? When I publish content on my website my primary purpose is to share what I know with you. Then after reading, whatever you have learned and absorbed, you can either apply on your website on your own, or you can hire me. I solve two purposes here: display my knowledge and give you a choice whether you want to use that knowledge on your own or you want me to pitch in.

For a successful content marketing strategy it is essential that you are able to define these two why’s before creating 100s of webpages and blog posts and then realizing they mean nothing.

Preparing your website content for Google’s Hummingbird algorithm

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With voice-to-text going mainstream on mobile phones and tablet PCs, more and more people will be using longer search expressions – something like asking questions in natural language – rather than using smaller keywords and search terms. Google’s Hummingbird Algorithm takes care of this rapidly evolving search trend even for its primary web search engine. It’s the biggest algorithm update since 2009. This was the time when they introduced “Caffeine”. The recent update, according to Google, impacts around 90% of the searches.

Google Hummingbird Update

How does it affect your search engine rankings? How should you prepare your website content for this new ranking algorithm?

Isn’t it similar to what we have already been talking about, the longtail search traffic? To an extent, yes, but the Hummingbird algorithm uses the intelligence Google has been able to gather over all these years drawing inferences and conclusions according to the language used by its users. This Search Engine Land example illustrates it better []:

“What’s the closest place to buy the iPhone 5s to my home?” A traditional search engine might focus on finding matches for words — finding a page that says “buy” and “iPhone 5s,” for example.

Hummingbird should better focus on the meaning behind the words. It may better understand the actual location of your home, if you’ve shared that with Google. It might understand that “place” means you want a brick-and-mortar store. It might get that “iPhone 5s” is a particular type of electronic device carried by certain stores. Knowing all these meanings may help Google go beyond just finding pages with matching words.

In particular, Google said that Hummingbird is paying more attention to each word in a query, ensuring that the whole query — the whole sentence or conversation or meaning — is taken into account, rather than particular words. The goal is that pages matching the meaning do better, rather than pages matching just a few words.

Creating your content for Google’s Hummingbird algorithm

The best way of creating content for Google’s Hummingbird algorithm is not to create content for that and just focus on quality and the message that you want to deliver to your visitors. As you can read in the above quoted text, Google will no longer focus on keywords; taking care that it processes the entire meaning of the query or the long search expression that the user has used in a natural language. So if you search for, “Where can I find a content writer for my web design company around my area?” Google will try to find information exactly according to this question rather than simply throwing a page containing “content writer”, “web design company” and “my area”. This is because sometimes people randomly create articles and blog posts to cover different keywords without meaning to convey what actually needs to be conveyed. In order to find such information Google already has data about the user so “my area” is already known to Google and it throws up results accordingly.

To further stress the point – chucking the keyword business out – every search on Google will be secure now so the various analytics tools won’t be able to find out for which keywords you get your traffic.

So if you want to leverage Google’s Hummingbird algorithm prepare meaningful content that provides the right information to your prospective visitors. Don’t just create pages and blog posts for the sake of using your keywords. Here are a few things to focus on:

  • Concentrate on answering particular queries and questions: Provide answers in a human language without overtly worrying about keywords. Keywords are important, after all they are words people are going to use, but they must relate to each other and they must make a sense according to the query being made or the question being asked. Remember that your keywords, your language should satisfy the context. According to the new algorithm, quality really matters along with the context.
  • Be more specific with the title: Titles of your blog posts and webpages are still important. It hasn’t been proven what impact they will have according to the new algorithm, but it’s better to create them according to the expressions you expect people to use in order to find information that you are trying to impart.
  • Develop your authorship influence: This has direct relationship with the quality of content that you publish on your own website, on social networking websites and on other forums. As an authority on your subject people respect you, watch for your content and share your content among their peers. This increases your influence and makes your content more trustworthy.

Again, creating content around probable questions and queries doesn’t mean you resort to creating content that doesn’t really have a meaning but repeats these queries and questions again and again. Focus on meaningfulness and provide real value. Google’s Hummingbird algorithm works on understanding the entire meaning of your page rather than individual keywords and search terms.

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What type of content should you publish for an effective link building campaign?

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Content writing for link building

Content writing for link building

Link building is an important part of improving your SEO because it helps Google gather all the “real” recommendations and validations and then evaluate your website or blog accordingly.

You can call it ranking outsourcing.

What is link building?

Link building explained

Link building explained

Many online marketers and SEO experts confuse link building with getting lots of websites to link to your website.

Although, in theory, this is the exact meaning, actually what it means is, having so much valuable content that people want to link to you as a good source of information, or any other form of valuable derivation.

Google, and also some other search engines, realized that it is very easy to manipulate search engines because after all they are a collection of algorithms, and whenever you have algorithms, you always have people who can beat them.

So they started taking human help.

In order to improve your rankings, it is important that more and more people link to your website in appreciation of the content you have published.

Benefits of link building

Benefits of link building

Benefits of link building

As mentioned above, search engines like Google want some sort of validation. If many people are linking to you, the search engines assume that you must be publishing great content. This is one reason.

The second reason is that link building creates multiple traffic streams for you. Once you have traffic coming from different sources you no longer solely have to depend on search engine traffic.

Finally, it helps you reach out to more people and people begin to recognize you as an authority figure.

Pitfalls of link building

Pitfalls of content marketing

Pitfalls of content marketing

Link building is a double-edged sword – it can work in your favor and as you must have seen after Penguin and Panda updates, it can also bring disaster to you. It all depends on with what intention people link to you.

So while you’re working on your link building campaign, make sure that your links don’t come from spammy websites because this can totally drop your search engine rankings instead of improving them. Another indication that you may be running a less than legitimate link building campaign is suddenly lots of links coming to you within a few hours or a couple of days. This can also adversely impact your search engine rankings.

From where does content come in and why it is important

As I have repeatedly written on this website don’t create content for just link building and SEO. Your content should provide information about your business or organization. It should explain what your products and services stand for and how your customers and clients benefit from them. The compelling and great traits of your website content are:

  • It addresses concerns of your prospective customers and clients
  • It establishes you as an authority
  • It provides information about your business or organization
  • It turns your website or blog into a specialized source of information
  • It gives Google and other search engines more pages and blog posts to crawl, index and rank
  • It helps you create buzz on social media

Quality content leads to legitimate link building

Since the basic purpose of taking backlinks into consideration while ranking your website is to know how valuable your content is, the most natural way of building back links is creating that valuable content.

Suppose you sell Samsung mobile phones from your website. Do you merely list your inventory or do you also regularly publish blogs and articles explaining why people should purchase these mobile phones, what their salient features are, how they fare better compared to other brands and how various problems can be solved once people start using these phones. Explain to them how they can increase the battery life of their mobile phones, how they can upgrade their operating systems, from where they can get useful apps, how they can make various configurations, and such. This way, whenever someone wants to link to a website containing comprehensive information on Samsung mobile phones, he or she will know it’s your website.

Instead of approaching bloggers and webmasters to link back to you just so that you can improve your search engine rankings (it never works), create enough quality content to encourage them to link to you on their own. This is the real way of link building.

But how do they know about your content? In order to link to your content, first of all they have to find it.

This is where blogger outreach and social media interactions can help you. Initially, when you don’t enjoy good search engine rankings (due to various reasons) it will be difficult for people to find your content and then link to it if they appreciate it. Interact with more and more people on social media, on blogs and on online forums. Don’t just wait for things to happen. You will have to create a schedule. You may even have to hire people to increase your level of networking and interaction. Whenever you create a new blog post or a new article on your website, post it on Facebook, Twitter and Google plus. Encourage people to read it. Pitch your links whenever you think it makes sense (again, don’t spam people’s timelines and blog comment sections).

Email marketing with the strength of your content

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Email Marketing and the Quality of Your Content

77% of your prospective customers and clients don’t mind receiving permission-based marketing emails from you, according to a study by ExactTarget. According to the Direct Marketing Association an effective email marketing campaign enjoys an ROI of around 4300% – no, it is not a typo.

Have you been running a consistent email marketing campaign? I must confess, I haven’t been, and I also know that this is an extremely serious oversight, and I plan to rectify it in the very near future.

Email marketing may sound old school, but a big part of the world is still using emails and regularly checks its inbox for the latest updates, no matter how all-pervasive Facebook and Twitter have become. Despite the spam problem, most people, if well-targeted, don’t mind receiving promotional messages from you.

The relationship between compelling content and email marketing

The basic mistake that most email marketers make is that they try to thrust their promotional messages down people’s throats. They fail to realize, or ignore despite knowing that, that a sustained email marketing campaign is not about sending periodic promotional messages, it is about building relationships and establishing trust. According to this infographic, first email was sent in 1971, and by 2012, 297 billion emails were being exchanged daily. These numbers are just to give you an idea what sort of overwhelming competition you face (of course personally you’re not competing against 297 billion emails) while carrying out your email marketing campaign; so when you want people to open your email, go through it, and click the links your message contains, you need to provide them with an overwhelming reason.

The content of your emails must exactly be what your subscribers bargain for when they submitted their email ids. They were looking for information. They wanted their pain points to be solved. If they respect your authority, they wanted to remain in the loop. If you had promised to send opportunities their way, then it’s the opportunities they are looking for. If they are expecting content marketing tips, they don’t want to invariably hear from you about that e-book you want to sell.

Even if you want to sell that e-book, let there be so much value in your email marketing campaign that they come to your website on their own and purchase the e-book eagerly. Don’t spam them with your offers.

How content quality drives the success of your email marketing campaign

When it comes to email marketing your content matters at two places:

  • The subject of your email
  • The textual or visual content of your email

The subject of your email encourages people to open your email and read it – this is one of the biggest challenges your promotional email faces: getting people to open it. Therefore email marketing experts recommend you spend as much time on coming up with the most convincing subject line for your email as you spend creating the main content of the message. Make it highly relevant.

The content, of course, is the soul of every successful email marketing campaign. Please keep in mind that off-the-cuff campaigns rarely work unless you are offering something extraordinary or irresistible. Offer something valuable with every email you send. In fact, people should look forward to hearing from you – this is an idealistic scenario, but there are many email marketing and brand building campaigns enjoying such fan following.

What’s valuable?

This depends on your business and what you promise at the time of asking your visitors their email ids. Even if they subscribe to your email updates just in order to download some free e-book that you gave in lieu of the subscription, they will start paying attention to your updates if you provide real value.

Your email content should be well-written, well-formatted and packed with information people can immediately use to improve their businesses and their lives, one way or another.