Working with keywords has always been important, but now that Twitter and Facebook are being indexed by search engines, it’s even more important to watch what you are saying, and to optimize for the best possible result.
Keywords are the terms and phrases in your posts that are most relevant to your topic. For instance if you are posting in your blog about a healthy food product, then your keywords will of course be the product name. But don’t stop there; keywords will also include the product category, the product ingredients, and can also include the ways you can use the product.
Want to listen?:
[audio:ListPipe_Podcast_25.mp3]
Your ultimate objective with keywords is to make a connection between your content and the terms your customers are searching for. While many customers search for generalized terms, some search for very specific terms. When you stick with the generalized terms on your site, you are competing with a million other sites for those terms. However, when you make your terms more specific, you reduce the number of competitors and open the door for more attention, albeit from a smaller crowd.
The wisdom follows that you would like to get more interest from a smaller, more focused set of customers than from a very small portion of a larger but less focused set. Would you rather be fishing with a big net in the ocean, or a small net in a barrel chock full of exactly the fish you like?
Keyword modifiers can help distinguish your product from a competitor’s, or can help refine your search for a more specific term. For instance you may add the word ‘chewable’ or ‘drink’ to your product name to help distinguish its specific product type. Adding words like ‘healthy’ or ‘natural’ can help refine search results for people looking for specific categories.
Modifiers are intended to make your keywords more specific, and thereby reduce the number of competing terms.
Associative Keywords are keywords that are related to your keywords, but that may not be precisely related to your product. For instance if you are selling a healthy food, you will want to add keywords that relate to proper digestion or good nutrition. These types of words will come naturally in your discussion, but it helps to be aware of them so that you can concentrate on using them in slightly more density than you might otherwise.
As you contemplate your keywords, don’t forget to consider misspellings or alternate spellings. If your keywords are hard to spell, or have a common alternative, intermingle these in your post to help the search engines identify your content with what your type-challenged customers may be entering into the search window.
Finally, remember to use localization terms with your keywords. The search engines are including localization tags in all their search results, meaning that it matters where you are from and where you are selling. Localized search results are relatively new and many users are only just catching on; this is a great way to get ahead of the curve and take advantage of local searches for your product. To add localization to your keywords, simply add the name of your city, state, and zip to your keywords.
Keep your keywords in mind as you write in your blog, on Facebook and Twitter. Optimize everything you write so that as the search engines index content from these sources, they know exactly how to match you up with the customers searching for your products.
Want to listen?:
[audio:ListPipe_Podcast_25.mp3]
Looking for a great way to start a business blog? Check out our new Business Blog Content Service from ListPipe; We’ll get you started with a blog and even write the content for you, every week!
1. Organic Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – ListPipe is all about ‘organic content’, in fact we just released a new feature that allows us to deliver unique articles to a wider range of customers within a specific category. If you are a franchise organization or a corporate group with a large number of sales representatives and distributors, ListPipe can help you achieve an organic profile across your entire organization while delivering individually customized content for each participant.
2. Facebook/Twitter/LinkedIn – Each ListPipe article includes a sharing tag for one-click sharing of your customized content into your social accounts. Most of our users are Facebook and Twitter users, and we have made it easy for them to share content from their blog to a wider group of people through their social networks. We also include with each ListPipe account an informative online training experience that teaches the basics of sharing content into social media networks like Facebook and Twitter.
3. Keyword Research – Our custom content is chock full of keywords that we have researched for you. Keyword research can eat up a lot of valuable time, but we recognize (as does SEO.com) that it is critical for any online marketing strategy. Get yourself a ListPipe account, and we’ll take care of this tedious task for you!
4. Video Marketing – Like SEO.com, we saw this one coming; and for this reason each ListPipe account hosted on our servers includes an easy to use plugin that allows you to add your own video content to your blog. In addition, an increasing number of our posts include video content from your proprietary sources as well as from popular video sites such as YouTube.
5. Online Public Relations – Because we are working with the corporate umbrella for many of our blog networks, we have direct access to news and announcements that we republish into your blog so that you can repost to your social networks with the confidence that any readers will be able to find their way back to you with customized links and contact information designed to lead readers to your door.
6. Link Building – This is one of the primary reasons we invented ListPipe, and remains one of our cornerstone strategies. Every ListPipe post includes a strong linking strategy designed to direct traffic to your main site as well as lend Authority to your site from the keywords and phrases we are linking from.
7. Blogging – Need we say more? ListPipe is a blog content service; we publish content each week into your blog for you so you can focus on the important aspects of selling your business. And for you eager bloggers, we provide full administrative access to your Wordpress blog so that you can add supplemental content and keep your readers informed at a more intimate level.
8. Conversion Web Design – Our articles and the keyword linking strategy we employ is designed to lead visitors to your blog directly to your site for more information. Links, encouraging language, and a ready-built Contact Me page direct your readers back to you every time.
9. Paid Search Marketing – We don’t offer Pay-per-click advertising services; we’re all about the organic content side. If you are interested in adding PPC to your blog marketing effort, we recommendSEO.com, the original publishers of this awesome top ten list.
10. Email Marketing – Communication is what blogging is all about, and for this reason we occasionally publish your email address within a post to help your readers find you. More importantly, we include with your blog a full-featured Contact Form that allows you to collect leads right from your blog. When a visitor contacts you with their email address from your Contact Form, add them to your marketing list and keep them informed!
ListPipe provides professional blogging services for sales and marketing organizations who want to increase their presence in search engine results. Contact ListPipe for more information.
Thanks to SEO.com for providing this great top ten list.
For any marketing website, conversion goals are the single most important feature, so understanding what conversion goals are is the first step in building an effective web marketing campaign.
A conversion goal is basically a step in your sales process. Specifically, it is the ‘next step’ that you want your customers to take when they visit your site or complete a previous step.
As we talk through this, remember that a conversion goal and a sales process is not necessarily tied to the sale of a product; we could easily be talking about supplying a service, generating a membership, or asking for simple participation. In this context, your ’sales process’ is the collection of steps you want your visitors to complete, and a ‘conversion goal’ is a milestone of that process. Bare in mind, too, that a conversion goal can be the completion of a single step such as the visitation of a specific page, or the completion of the entire process such as a sale or a signature.
Rather just listen?:
[audio:ListPipe_Podcast_24.mp3]
In a nutshell, a conversion goal is the specific task you can measure that demonstrates when you have achieved success. The easiest way to come up with your conversion goals is to ask yourself ‘What do I want my visitors to do when they come to my page?’
Examples of conversion goals can include any of the following:
Completing a form
Making a payment
Forwarding information
Subscribing
Leaving a comment
Note that on a website the measurement of a conversion goal is in loading a specific page. For instance if your conversion goal is to complete a form, the measurement of that goal may be the loading of a ‘Thank You’ page that is triggered when the visitor hits the submit button. In this way you are measuring the results of an action that confirm the action.
When it comes to blogging, you’ll want to think through your conversion goals each time you write. Ask yourself how your subject is going to support your conversion goal, and how you can direct your readers to complete it. In this way you can support your conversion goals with links, calls-to-action, and supporting information.
Every post should contain some form of direction toward your conversion goals, and you should be focused on measuring them for success.
Rather just listen?:
[audio:ListPipe_Podcast_24.mp3]
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Social Media Marking is all about marketing your tangible and intangible assets through social networking tools. You do this by engaging and interacting with your fans.
So in this basic definition of Social Media marketing we have defined three basic elements: Assets, Social Networking Tools, and Fans.
Let’s take a look at these, and think about using them all together to encompass the opportunity to engage and interact.
Here’s the Audio:
[audio:ListPipe_Podcast_23.mp3]
First are your assets. Assets in this case include everything you want to market, from the tangible (your website) to the intangible (your personality) and everything in between. As you perform your social media marketing, be aware of your assets, what type of asset they are, and when it is best to market them.
For instance, when you are meeting with someone in person for the first time, you are working at a very emotional level, which is the best time to focus on your personality. Focus on getting to know the person and remember to be genuine. Once you get to know a person, or have time to engage with people online you can focus more on driving traffic to your website to learn more details about your products and services.
Second is your social networking tools. The three I most commonly address are your blog, Facebook, and Twitter. These are of course the most common and most important tools, but don’t forget that your social networking tools including business networks like LinkedIn, and even entertainment networks like YouTube.
Start with your blog by posting original content that is relevant to your cause, and then repost and engage your audience with that content on Facebook and Twitter. Make sure your connections on LinkedIn know what your business is doing, and have some fun creating interactive content on YouTube. Even Facebook allows you to create video now, and it’s a fun way to get your fans involved and to generate interest with creative communications.
And Third is are your fans. Fans are everyone from family and friends to employees, channel partners distributors and customers. Everyone is a potential fan, so watch for opportunities to interact and engage with them. Primarily, look for opportunities to include the people you meet in all your social media networks. Whenever you meet someone in person, ask them for a card or information so you can follow up, and invite them to participate with you in your social networks.
I often get invitations the next day from people I meet at an event. I was a little uncomfortable with this at first because I wanted to maintain a private network of close friends, but I soon learned that I could create a robust network of friends and business associates, and that people in either category could participate with me in the other; in other words; you never know where that next opportunity will come from, so work to capture them all.
As you repost your blog content to your social networks, one of your big concerns should be getting traffic to visit your site. One of the best ways to encourage the people in your social networks to click through or even share your content is to add interest. Spice it up a bit.
This isn’t to say that your original post isn’t interesting on it’s own. But I’ve been doing a few experiments and reading around on this subject lately and there are two distinct ways I have discovered for building interest and gaining clicks.
One I’ll call ‘The Introduction‘, and the other ‘The Tease‘.
Here’s the Audio:
[audio:ListPipe_Podcast_22.mp3]
Think about the last movie trailer you saw on TV or at the cinema while you were waiting for the feature to start. An interesting clip swaths the screen that frames the story and piques your interest, followed by an alluring sequence that stops short of the big payoff. The premise is interesting to you, and you are intrigued by the possible scenarios that might play out from what you just saw; Will they get their man? Is he a good guy or a bad guy? Will she find out the truth? By the time the roll is finished you lean to your date and whisper ‘We’ve gotta see that one!’
What you have just experienced is a well-crafted introduction, and a big fat tease all rolled into one tantalizing taste of what may come. Years of refinement and research have gone into the creation of the common movie trailer to make sure you are interested in the premise, and wanting some answers. If you could buy tickets right now you probably would.
Enter the re-post: Reposting is when you transfer content from your blog to your social network, for instance Facebook or Twitter. Your intention is to share an excerpt from the article and get people to click back to your blog to read the rest of the story.
For the untrained reposter, it is simply enough to restate the title of the post and to include a picture. But you’ll need an edge to get past the onslaught of posts and tweets that face our social associates. Use the movie trailer formula for the best results.
Whenever you blog, repost the content twice to each of your social networks; this will let them know that you are excited about the information.
Make sure the first one introduces the subject of the post. I have found that writing in the form of a question is the best way to get attention and to set up the intro. For instance if you have posted an article about the nutrition of applesauce, you might write a short introduction in the form of a tantalizing question: “Does an Apple A Day Really Keep The Doctor Away?”
Your readers will be compelled to find out, and are more likely to click through when there is something to find out.
In your followup repost, take an excerpt from the article and give your readers a small taste of the story. Make sure it is compelling and that it generates more questions than it answers. For instance you might write “My doctor says that an apple is one of only three fruits he recommends…” In this case you want your readers to be interested in the rest of the story.
Of course the most important thing is to include a link back to your original article.
Practice makes perfect, and don’t be afraid to experiment with the types of questions and excerpts you post. It will take a while to get the hang of it, but as long as you stay with the proven movie trailer formula it is sure to pay off.
Here’s the Audio:
[audio:ListPipe_Podcast_22.mp3]
If you haven’t started a blog yet, check out ListPipe for SEO blogging.
I was at the Utah Social Media Awards last week and had the chance to listen to David Bradford give the keynote address on his experience and expertise in making connections in social media marketplaces.
Here’s the Audio:
[audio:ListPipe_Podcast_21.mp3]
I have have first-hand experience working with David and can attest to his uncanny ability to connect with people; he reached the Facebook maximum limit of 5,000 friends within a few months of starting his account. The amazing thing about David and his many connections is that they are all personal; he can identify each of his friends and in most cases can describe where they work and how they met.
David is a remarkable networker. He is also a very successful businessman, and he credits his success to his connections. In fact, during his keynote he stated emphatically that it’s not ‘What’ you know, but ‘Who’ you know. David says this, too, from a position of authority; he was Sr. VP of General Counsel for Novell for over 15 years and is currently CEO of Fusion-io, an up and coming storage technology company that Wall Street thinks will be bigger than IBM.
So tonight I wanted to share a few tips I’ve learned from David and other successful online networkers.
1. Use Facebook and Twitter: The two most successful online networking environments are Facebook and Twitter by a long shot. There are other tools to use online, and it’s OK to use them, too. But if you are not on Facebook and Twitter, you are missing the boat. They are both free, and if you haven’t gotten on already; get started right now.
2. Be diligent: You’re going to have to work at it, so plan on spending at least 15 minutes a day in your online environment making connections, organizing, and expanding. Successful entrepreneurs I have spoken to spend anywhere from 15 minutes to two hours on social networking. Log in once during the morning hours, and once again later in the afternoon for maximum exposure without spending too much time all at once.
3. Concentrate on connections: Make it a goal to expand your connections. There are a number of ways to do this, but primarily you want to look for people you know and connect to them first, then start making connections with friends of your friends. David makes it a point to collect business cards at every event he attends, and he tries to connect with those people within a day or two. It is not only an impressive tactic, but very effective in creating an ever-expanding circle of valuable connections.
4. Share pertinent content. Let your circle of connections know what you are doing, but be sure to concentrate on what really matters; Let them know of your progress, success, announcements or experiences that are interesting and engaging. Ask your friends for help when it comes to hiring, making plans, or looking for information. Always share your blog posts.
5. Be careful about your opinions: If you are using your connections to build success, remember that when you pick a side you are probably offending about half of your audience at any given time. It’s a good idea to avoid discussions about politics or religion. No matter how neutral you are trying to be, someone will get ruffled.
Building a network of contacts is a rewarding and important facet of your ability to succeed. Some say ‘critical‘. It takes some work and effort, but I couldn’t agree more with David when he says “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know“.
Linking is an important and effective SEO technique that allows you to explicitly associate keywords with a specific page on your site. By creating links you are directing both your readers, and the search engines, to the pages you deem most relevant to your keywords. Linking is the best way to direct your readers to your conversion objective, and a great way to share what SEO experts call ‘authority’.
Here’s the Audio:
[audio:ListPipe_Podcast_20.mp3]
The links in your content are very much like your personal social connections; They are a reflection of your site personality and an indication of how well you are connected. ‘Authority’ works much the same way as a popularity contest; when you hang out with the most popular kid in school, some of that popularity rubs off on you. If you play it cool, you can build on that popularity-by-association to create your own independent popularity.
Because links are so important, it is important to know how to create good links. Here are a few tips:
1. Link Volume: The number of links you create in a given blog post is important. If you maintain a ratio of about one link per hundred words you will be at a maximum recommended density. Any more, and you risk being seen as a spammer. Any fewer and you are not taking full advantage of your linking opportunity.
2. Words to Link: Concentrate your linking on keywords and phrases, but don’t link more than once from the same word or phrase within the same post. Don’t be afraid to link from multiple words, but make sure they are a searchable phrase. You don’t want to link from phrases such as ‘Contact Us’ or ‘Click Here For More Info’ because there is no SEO value in these phrases and you are wasting potential authority.
3. Placement: Provide links from the keywords in the most convenient places to better serve your readers. At the top of your article, in the first sentence is a great place to provide a link because it is convenient, and is most likely to be reproduced in excerpts.
4. Tagging: Tagging your links is the process of providing the content that appears when you hover over a link in a blog. This content is important to the search engines and provides an opportunity to clarify your keyword. Always add tags to your links, and juice them up with keyword modifiers such as your geographic location, your business name, or an additional keyword. For example, if you are linking the word ‘guitar’ you might tag it as ‘Fender guitar in Chicago’.
5. Destinations: To impart authority from your links to a specific page, you will of course want to link to that page as often as you can. However it does make some good sense to mix it up a bit and direct links to various places around your site as are relevant. It is also a good idea to link outward to other relevant sites; don’t just link to yourself, link to other sites that can add to the value of your reader’s experience. Link to research, supporting comments, or additional resources that add value and relevancy to your content.
6. Finally, make sure you test your links after you have posted. Dead links will count against you, both with readers and search engines. Simply visit your live article and check through the links you have created. If you find a problem, fix it right away.
Links are a critical foundation to blogging, and an important aspect of your search engine marketing. Make sure you are adding good quality links to your content for optimal organic growth.
Here’s the Audio:
[audio:ListPipe_Podcast_20.mp3]
If you are a small business, ListPipe can provide SEO marketing tools that take the work out of blog marketing.
Video can help build traffic to your site, as can podcasts. Whenever you add interesting content to a blog posting, you are adding value for your readers and giving them a more compelling reason to share your content. You also give them more reason to stick around and find more things on your site.
Here’s the Audio:
[audio:ListPipe_Podcast_19.mp3]
There are three basic ways to add media content to your site.
One: You can embed content from a video site like YouTube.com. YouTube in particular has made it extremely easy to share a video to your blog by providing embed code right there on the same page with the video. All you have to do is copy the embed code and paste it into your blog. Add a few written comments about the video and you have a sticky post that will capture search engine attention and give your readers something to watch. Pretty easy.
Two: You can create your own videos to post. This, of course, is a little more complicated, but can be worth the effort because you are posting your own unique content that cannot be found anywhere else. This is a great way to share video of an event that you attended or interview that you have conducted. Making your own video will require that you have a few tools, and a little know how. You’ll need a camera and video editing software. Most newer computers come with the basic tools to edit and post a video. Facebook has a video posting option right in their online account options, and YouTube is a great place to post your videos for sharing around.
Three: For those of you who are camera shy, audio podcasting is another great way to add unique content to your site. It’s not as exciting as video, but it doesn’t always have to be; the podcast industry is going strong with audio content that attracts millions of subscribers. One of the best ways to use an audio podcast is for an interview. An advantage of doing an audio podcast is that you don’t even have to be in the same room to complete the interview. I prefer to do my interviews over the phone using Skype and Sound Recorder, which gives me a podcast-ready file as soon as I am finished with the call.
Regardless of the type of media you include with your posts, adding an additional level of interaction for your readers make your content more interesting and provides a greater opportunity for viral sharing.
A few ideas to consider when posting video or audio content to your site:
Keep it short and simple. A long podcast starts to really drag on when you have things to do or get distracted. If you produce your own media, try to keep it to 10 minutes or less.
Keep it clean. We’ve all encountered tasteless jokes or less than upstanding content on the Internet. These kinds of things are dangerous in a business setting and are sure to offend someone. Your best bet is to keep your content family friendly.
Watch for copyrighted material if you are republishing from another source. YouTube and some of the other popular video sharing resources are a safe play. Be careful of sharing private videos or videos that are owned by a corporate entity. Always ask permission when in question, and get a response in writing.
If you are creating your own content, make sure you add your own brand and present a call-to-action at the tail end of your presentation. Direct your visitors to a website where they can followup with you, and keep in mind that others may share your video, so you always want to provide a way home for friends of friends.
Spice up your blog with a video from YouTube to get started; it’s pretty easy. Once you get the hang of it, branch out into creating your own videos or audio podcasts. Your readers will appreciate you for it.
Save the file to your Audio folder in your Wordpress folder on your server.
Create a new post and reference the new file.
It sounds like a lot of steps, but it’s not that hard. I can typically create a podcast from scratch in less than an hour unless there is a lot of research or special circumstances.
I was doing some copywriting research this last week and ran across a site that is making a lot of mistakes with their use of trademark and registered trademark symbols, as well as using special characters in their brand name. They are also missing a great opportunity to take advantage of common search engine mistakes to help bring people to their site.
Here’s the rundown on a couple tips and tricks for any website copy that deals with copyrights or registered trademarks as well as for product or brand names that have special characters or that are hard to spell:
Here’s the Audio:
[audio:ListPipe_Podcast_18.mp3]
Let’s start with the trademark symbol. You have seen this on nearly every product brand, and it is always included in copywriting to ensure that legal ownership of the brand is established. While it is a good idea to include a trademark symbol in your copy, it is a terrible idea, and completely unnecessary to trademark every instance of the term. Over-use of the trademark symbol (™) or registered trademark symbol (®) in your copy will render it cumbersome and your readers will give up sooner than they might otherwise.
The other problem with using these symbols is that practically no one uses them in their search terms. By tacking these symbols to every use of your product name or brand you are limiting the relevancy between your posted content and the actual terms people are using to search for your site.
I recently found a web page containing only three paragraphs of copy with 20 trademark symbols scattered throughout. I found the page very difficult to read and quickly became distracted by all the clutter.
The solution is to trademark only the first instance of any product or brand name on any given page. By doing this you establish the legal ownership of the trademark and leave the successive instances free and clear for easy readability.
Another common problem I see is the use of special characters. You may have an umlaut or circumflex character with a line or dots over the top of a letter, or cedilla in your term with a small tail hanging down like in the word ‘façade’ (with a tail on the ‘c’). In these cases you may be tempted to incorporate the unique character for the sake of your brand, but be aware that almost no one will use it in their search, and the simple addition of a strange character can change the searchability of a word.
Like the solution for trademarks, use the special character in the first incidence of the word, and then use a more common spelling for all subsequent uses of the term.
Next lets quickly explore a brand-relate SEO tip for words that are hard to spell: When writing about a product or brand name, make a point to notice whether it is easy to misspell. Words don’t need to be hard to misspell, for instance some defy common practice by simply re-ordering letters that are more commonly used in a specific order.
Take for instance words that are spelled with ‘ea’ like ‘read’ or ‘instead’. A unique brand that uses the reverse of this (as in ‘AE’) may find that a lot of people are misspelling the term in their Google searches. This is an important consideration.
The solution: You may actually want to incorporate misspellings of your own terms to help capture additional search traffic, or to ensure that people who accidentally get it wrong are still able to find you. I don’t recommend misspelling your primary brands on your home page, but you may do well to miss one or two at the bottom of an occasional blog post.
It is true that in many cases the search engines will recognize a misspelling and direct traffic to the appropriate place, however you also need to consider that competitors may understand this tactic, also, and may be optimizing their copy to take advantage.
To find out if people are searching for misspellings of your brand, go to the Google Keywords Tool and do some research on misspellings. You will certainly be surprised at the number of searches that occur for misspelled words.
Working with keywords has always been important, but now that Twitter and Facebook are being indexed by search engines, it’s even more important to watch what you are saying, and to optimize for the best possible result.
My good friends at 
Social Media Marking is all about marketing your tangible and intangible assets through social networking tools. You do this by engaging and interacting with your fans.
Video can help build traffic to your site, as can podcasts. Whenever you add interesting content to a blog posting, you are adding value for your readers and giving them a more compelling reason to share your content. You also give them more reason to stick around and find more things on your site.
A friend of mine recently asked me how I record podcasts for my blog. Here are the steps:
I was doing some copywriting research this last week and ran across a site that is making a lot of mistakes with their use of trademark and registered trademark symbols, as well as using special characters in their brand name. They are also missing a great opportunity to take advantage of common search engine mistakes to help bring people to their site.