Monthly Archives: July 2015

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SEO Doesn’t Look Like It Did Last Year

A perfect search engine optimization strategy has been the stuff of dreams since, well, the beginning of search engines. Since that time, SEO has gone over so many facelifts and iterations that seemed to completely reinvent what it meant to maintain “best practices” when it came to search engines. As recently as a couple years ago, “link building” was hailed as SEO king, and link building networks found themselves in high demand.

Too often, the trend of providing SEO work became about ‘tricking’ the search engines, particularly Google. Funny, since what search engine companies have always wanted hasn’t really changed in two decades: Google and its competitors simply want to provide the best, most relevant search experience for their users. This is what keeps searchers coming back for more. Over time, they’ve perfected their search algorithms to better achieve this goal by excluding results which try to game the system.

Professional SEO outfits know this, and have for some time. More and more, working in SEO means becoming proficient in a larger number of tasks than ever before in order to guarantee Google’s good graces.

First of all, if you want to be working in SEO in 2015, you’d better know how to write and prepare some great content. More and more now, SEO positions look for someone who can create the actual content that will help to populate, update, and keep their web properties valuable. This means that being able to write blog posts, scripts videos, create images in Photoshop, and more should be in your CV’s skill list. Let’s face it, SEO now is an aggregate of other tasks and companies aren’t looking to pay four different salaries to have them accomplished when one ambitious employee with a bit of know-how can make it happen.

You also need to be a strong team leader. This is truer if you’re working in a brick and mortar company than if you’re doing SEO for your own blog, but it’s still relevant to enterprises of any size. A large part of an SEO expert’s job is educating others. Because content creation, social engagement, and more all tie into SEO these days, it’s important than anyone and everyone on a team have a basic working knowledge of what SEO is and how you seek to achieve it. In a sense, your job is to help instill SEO into workplace culture so that employees are keeping search engine impact in mind when they work on their own projects. Even if you’re a solo marketer working from home, instilling SEO smarts in any freelancers you hire or business partners you might be taking on can be invaluable.

In the old days it seemed to be that everyone was preaching the “building” of links, when what they should have been on about was the “attraction” of them. Now, more people are catching on, and so should you. Create content that is so good it has to be shared, and make good use of social channels. Your goal should be to attract links from other people who want to repost and talk about your content – what was once limited to syndication is now expanded into the entire arena of social media.

And finally, always keep your eyes peeled for the next trend – the most successful SEO’ers don’t chase waves after they crest, they ride them as they form.

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5 Ways to Increase Click-Through Rates with Killer Meta Descriptions

You can increase traffic to your website in one of two ways. The first is to improve your page rankings on the search engine results for your keywords. The second is to improve your click-through-rate (CTR).

Most Internet marketers focus on the first approach. But improving CTR can provide you with huge results, especially since it’s so easy to do.

Over the years, I’ve discovered dozens of effective ways to increase CTR, some of which yield better results than others. Here are the seven that are easy and provide huge results very quickly:

 

1. Copy Off Other People

While this technique may have been frowned upon in high school, it should be standard operating procedure for successful internet marketers.

A lot of online marketers are allergic to the idea of paying for traffic. But that doesn’t mean that you don’t have anything to learn from the people who do buy paid ads.

The truth is that people who pay for traffic spend a lot of time and money testing their ads to make sure they get the optimal results. The result is ads that already are fully optimized.

All you need to do is swoop in and steal their optimized copy and use it as your own.

In fact, because Google Ads are limited to the number of characters they can contain, it’s a safe bet that the keywords paid marketers include are the ones that perform best and get the most conversions.

 

2. Copy from Non-Paying Competitors

As long as you are stealing your competitors’ best ideas, why stop there? You also can take the copy from the most successful competitors who use organic SEO strategies.

Look to see which keywords and phrases they are using. What benefits or features do they highlight? Then take them for your own and use them within your copy.

This isn’t stealing. It’s known as “not reinventing the wheel”.

 

3. Tickle Your Customer’s Curiosity

Curiosity may have killed the cat, but it also caused billions of web users to click through on links because they were dying to find out what happened next.

In fact, this is a strategy you see all the time on social media sites such as Facebook. Marketers will post something like, “A Woman in Texas Stopped to Give a Dollar to a Homeless Man on the Street. You’ll Never Guess What Happened Next … Wow!”

This may be an overused trope, but it’s overused because it works like magic. Try other clickbait phrases in your meta descriptions like this to exploit people natural curiosity. Other phrases include:

– “Find Out How …”

– “What You Do If … “

– “Discover the Amazing Way …”

– “Have You Ever Wondered What Would Happen If …”

 

4. ‘Features Tell, but Benefits Sell …’

This is a phrase that is as old as advertising itself. People aren’t interested in the facts and statistics about what they are buying. What they really want to know is what it can do to make their life better. Explain that and you can sell practically anything to anybody.

Start your ads with benefits. Features like how much something weighs, how big it is, how long it lasts, and so on, should only be included if they drive the story you are trying to tell. If they don’t, leave them out.

In your meta descriptions, include benefits phrases like “Make More Money by …” or “Lose Weight and Feel Great with …”

 

5. People Love Numbers

Getting clicks is easier when you use numbers in your meta descriptions. That’s because people believe something is more factual if you qualify it with real number.

For example, which would you be more likely to click on?:

– Learn How to Improve Your Click-Through Rate

– 5 Ways to Increase Click-Through Rates with Killer Meta Descriptions

Considering you already are reading this, I think you just answered the question!