Six SEO myths that need to be trashed today

  “SEO is just rubbish. It doesn’t work. I have tried it a couple of times and it doesn’t work. It’s just a big industry trying to scam people”. Well, I have heard this from several different people. Some have a reason as to why they have come to this conclusion; the rest are just well-meaning people with the wrong knowledge about SEO. In each of these cases, I have responded by passionately batting for SEO. I openly like to announce to the world that I love SEO. And there is a big reason for that. SEO has single-handedly, well almost, been responsible for doubling our sales volume. We invested in an SEO strategy, created loads of the right content, spent our time in marketing that content and well we tasted success. And that’s the only thing you need to remember about SEO – you need to do SEO the right way. There are scores of companies mushrooming every day in every corner of the world promising you SEO services. Make sure you know what is right and wrong about Search Engine Optimisation so that you can have big wins. So that’s what I am going to do in this blog post – shout out the most common myths or misconceptions about search engine optimization. Here we go-   Myth #1: SEO just does not work   Well, this one really gets my goat. But, unfortunately, I know a lot of business owners across the world being sold really bad SEO deals with promises that really don’t work. If you are paying someone anything lesser than $125, your SEO goals are most likely not going to be met. This is because your service provider will not invest in high-quality content writing services that are really needed to make a difference. Because he will be cutting the corners on content, he will not be able to deliver the results you are looking for. SEO is working the world over but only if you are going to do it right. And that is impossible without a proper strategy that is backed by lots of good content. If you don’t have a blog, get one integrated to your website. Your service provider should have advised you to get your blog up and ready with good content. For genuine traffic to flow in, you need at least two blogs per week or at least four blogs a month (remember long-form content) to be published and shared. Ask your service provider to share with you the kind of content that his team is producing and sharing on third party sites. If this is crappy content stuffed with keywords that don’t really make sense then chances are your SEO won’t really work. Myth #2:  SEO is a one-time thing I did SEO once, so why should I do it again. This is like saying – I invested in updating my blog once and why should I regularly update it. SEO is a continuous process because of these reasons – Your competitors are continuously at it – There are hundreds of thousands of websites who vie for that ranking on the first page of Google. And that is true for any industry. So if you want to retain that first-page ranking, make sure your SEO is not a one-time activity. Search Engines are continuously changing Algorithms – Google’s Pigeon, Panda, Hummingbird Bird, Penguin updates have changed the way search was done. According to Matt Cutts, the former head of Google Spam Team, 90% of all searches were affected by Hummingbird. Hence, its important to stay abreast of these algorithm changes and work towards newer strategies that help you understand what your users are looking for. Regular updates help maintain page rankings – Your page rankings depend on how regularly you conduct your SEO activities. An interesting study, though very small, highlighted by SEO Roundtable, shows that clients who stopped their SEO campaigns experienced a 30% drop in ranking.     Consistency is the word for SEO. You have to regularly optimize pages and images, submit new content, build links, drive traffic, and enhance your website’s structure. So if you lose momentum, your SERPs will be affected. Your top rankings are never guaranteed. The competitors you have beaten will fight back even harder to reclaim their spot.   Myth #3: Link building is dead. Its only content that matters   I wish that was the case. But no matter what anyone says, link building is very much alive and kicking. It still happens to be one of the most authoritative factors that determine the ranking of a page for a particular keyword. The age old way of building links, of course, is dead. Submitting to scores of directories or building empty links without context doesn’t work anymore. What works now is getting quality back links (preferably with the keyword you need) from a mix of high and average authority websites. In that sense, link building has become less tedious but a tad more difficult. You now need to ‘invest’ strategy and time into link building and cannot copy-paste from others. Research the domain authority of the websites you want links from, serenade them with high-quality content and approach them to build links. Along with on-page SEO, link building is something that you’ll have to do every week. You can start with extensive research on your top Google competitors, spy on their back links using the MOZ site explorer or the Cognitive SEO tool. Curating this list and setting up a process for ongoing link building practices every week can give your SEO the push it needs. Remember that external link building will also need a lot of authoritative, good quality content. Your guest posts need to add value to the host site and the user. Your blog comments should make sense and not be spammy. Start by dedicating just two hours a week to make this work – two dedicated hours where you do nothing but work

[Free eBook] The top 5 things you need to know before writing for Google

  Take almost any topic and Google it. You’ll see hundreds and thousands of pages appearing in search results. According to some estimates, there are over 2 million blog posts written every day! Now, you plan to create content on the same topic – the 1001st piece of content –  that you expect to rank on the first page of Google. The question is how? If everything about the topic has already been written about 1000 times over, it’ll take quite a bit of skill and expertise to beat 990 other listings and see your blog rank on the first page for the topic. Here’s where your SEO Copywriting skills come through. As a content marketing agency, we’ve put together several pieces of content for our clients that have helped drive incremental traffic to their website. Incidentally, those pieces of content also rank well for particular high-volume keywords. It was never a chicken-and-egg situation. The key for us was to brainstorm on how the 1001st piece of content on a topic would be fresher and better than all that was already published. We had to put quality above all else to write content. Quality came backed with days of research and time to write original long form content of 3-4000 words on a topic. We weren’t dishing out 5 blogs a week but the one blog that we did do was eventually churning out better rewards.   What we understood from our research Google uses an algorithm to rank you. But ultimately your content is consumed by humans. Good content is a right mix that is liked by both Google and your customers. This isn’t an idea that can be stolen. This is a concept that needs to be shared with everyone. You see, the more people start creating original, useful and relevant content, the better the search and user experience gets. It’s like a cycle of karma – the more awful, copied or boring content you spew into the universe the more you’ll it get back in search results. But if you contribute to adding good quality content, you’ll eventually be rewarded with traffic, engagement and even leads and conversions. The only way to start this cycle is by helping everyone around to write better content. By separating the myth from facts, we’ve put together a quick eBook that you can skim through during your next coffee break. We promise it’ll be a very productive coffee break. Don’t be a part of the ‘everybody writes, so I do too’ brigade of bloggers and blindly believe marketing gurus that if you keep churning out content, you’ll eventually get a windfall of money. If you write but see very little results, in terms of traffic, ranking or conversions, this eBook is for you. It will allow you to understand how to write content first for your readers and then for search engines in a way that you get both engagement and traffic.

Find out if you have the correct skills needed to become a Digital Marketer

  The Internet has made life infinitely easier for us. Well, maybe not all of us. For, there are the marketing guys. Gone are the days when a good marketing and advertising plan was enough. Businesses, for sure, must serve up new, unique content to clients and consumers to remain relevant in stiff competitive market scenarios across verticals. And these days, the commonest and the most popular way to make your product or service known is to have a resounding online presence and make sure that your target audience finds you there easily.  And for that to happen, you need a specialist – who, along with your advertising and marketing strategies, will pull your business’ socks up, digitally.   So, what does a digital marketing specialist need to do?   In short, he or she must work alongside your marketing team to zero in on the market targeted by your business, develop an image that will go side by side with the brand you have created, and then craft and sustain a campaign that will market and advertise your business online – be it for the Internet or for any other digital platform that the marketing of your business will be deemed fit for. Now, there are many areas in which digital marketing professionals specialize in. While some of them can have a general area of expertise regarding everything to do with marketing products or services online, there are others who specialize in one particular aspect within the digital marketing field. This could be anything from the commonest of them all – search engine optimization (SEO), to something a little more technical like Pay Per Click (PPC), or from social media marketing to working the shopping feeds and on to anything that can work as display media.   The Responsibilities   Before we embark upon a few core specialization areas for a digital marketing professional, let us talk in brief about the role’s general responsibilities.   Brand Awareness The aim of a digital marketing specialist is to improve awareness of the company’s brand through encouragement and promotion of the services or products the company sell and to convert interested audiences into paying customers. In these ways, the role is very much akin to that of a marketing professional in the traditional sense. However, the only difference between a conventional marketing specialist and a digital one, lies in the channels the latter uses – technology or digital platforms, as opposed to the more conventional ones that a non-digital marketer uses.   Online Marketing and Promotions One of the most important jobs of specialists working the digital marketing field is to strive to kick-start campaigns on the Internet – the space where they have to work their magic to drive interest, poke curiosity, and finally trigger a sale. A careful weighing in of the requirements of the market of the consumer gives a digital marketing specialist a good idea about the ways in which to and the places where they need to garner more information about demands and trends in the consumer market. So, how does a digital marketing specialist use that knowledge of consumer trends and requirements to drive sales? These professionals create marketing strategies or plans that would be fine-tuned to address the company’s needs and align it with the consumers’ needs online. To get the word out online, these professionals need to conduct research on the best ways to reach out to their potential customers on the Internet and then collate promotional content and emails campaigns and such and place them in the most appropriate of channels.   Basic Skills Needed for the Job So, in a gist, what are the basic skills that a digital marketing specialist might need to perform his or her job well?   Marketing at the Core First, the specialist needs to know the long and short of traditional marketing basics. Only by understanding core marketing issues will the digital marketing specialist be able to use the same tenets and tweak them to get the job done online.   Creating a Buzz  They need to be able to innovate ways in which to create a social buzz about the product or service they are marketing and use effective tools to promote them in a result-driven manner.   Online Strategizing Developing, managing, and executing a strategy online lie at the very heart of their roles. Additionally, a digital marketing specialist needs to have a good grasp on the working of the tools needed to measure performance with, as well.   Keeping up While in-depth knowledge in the fields of SEO, content and email marketing, social media, SEM, and pay per click is considered must-haves, digital marketing specialists have another key function, which they need to lay a lot of stress on. And that is, staying abreast of the recent trends in marketing and digital technology usages in the field. These may be in the form of updates from Google or some important alteration that comes about in the way the search engine algorithms work. So, now let us delve deeper into the skills you need to perform some specific digital marketing functions. Skills for Search Engine Optimization   Search Engine Optimization, commonly known by the acronym SEO, might have started back in the day with the aim of getting your website being found quickly online. But with advances in technology and the usage of associated platforms, SEO today extends its influence much farther than helping websites to be found fast on search engines.   Adapting with Google Today, merely stuffing your page with keywords is not enough these days. Google is known for altering its search algorithm occasionally, making it more mature as times go by. This means companies have to evolve themselves to keep up with Google.   Creating a Niche Currently, SEO is entirely about creating websites that have niche content. Websites have to stand out at two levels – the page and the server. This needs to be done in a