Posts Tagged ‘seo’
How to Write Great Blog Articles People Want to Read
by Rahimah Sultan
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If you publish a blog post or article and no one reads it, it’s still a post. Anyone can write one, although not everyone knows how to write great blog posts/articles people want to read.
Obviously, you first have to choose a topic.
How do you choose a topic?
If you’re familiar with a particular niche, you probably already have plenty of ideas you want to use. If not, then write about things people are searching for. If there are lots of searches, month after month on certain topics, that’s probably what people want to read about.
Here are some free tools for keyword research and SEO content optimization:
Moz.com
Google Keyword Planner
AHREFS
Semrush
Once you’ve chosen a topic, you need an angle or a viewpoint for your post or a direction. Choose an objective for your post/article.
That may be:
Sharing a solution to a tough problem
Refining an overwhelming topic into something understandable
Telling a suspenseful and emotional story that teaches a lesson
Identifying key trends on a topic, and using them to predict the future
Contributing original information about a field through your research and investigation
Now that you have a topic, select your format. Will it be a listicle or a how-to article?
1. A listicle format, also known as a list-post, are articles structured around lists. For example:
15 Blogging Tips For Beginners
10 Best Online Marketing Tools
10 Quick SEO Tips To Increase Organic Traffic
25 Tips For Content Marketing
50 Best Travel Tips: Advice From A Professional Traveler
2. A how-to article is self-explanatory, in that it shows how to perform a certain task. For example:
How To Start A Blog
How To Promote Your Business
How To Grow Your Business
How To Use Social Media To Grow Your Business
How To Write Great Blog Articles
Now that you have a topic and format, how do you write an article or a post that will rank on Google?
To write an article or a blog post that will rank on Google, you need to know about SEO (search engine optimization), the process of optimizing your site and content for search engines such as Google.
If your article or post is well optimized for a search engine, the higher you’ll rank on Google and it will have more visibility within the search results.
If SEO is well done, the ROI on your time and the money you’ve spent can be exceptionally high. When you’ve achieved a high rank for keywords that are directing traffic and sales to your site, you’re essentially getting “free” leads.
Of course, these organic leads are not totally free, since you’ve invested time and probably some money into your SEO efforts. But, unlike paid ads, organic traffic is a free source that keeps on giving.
Of the couple hundred plus Google ranking factors, there are three key areas you’ll need to familiarize yourself with:
On-page ranking factors—which relate to the content on your pages like keywords, title tags, and images that give Google a good understanding of your page.
Off-page ranking factors—that relate to indicators outside of your site like backlinks and social signals.
Technical ranking factors—which relate to your site’s performance such as accessibility, mobile compatibility, load speed, and more.
Now it’s time to write, but it’s really difficult to sit down and write from scratch – staring at a blank sheet of paper or a blank screen on your computer is daunting.
Since you’ve done research for keywords and decided on a topic, create an outline. With an outline, you just fill in the gaps. You don’t have to write an outline from scratch either. Use a template or make your own.
You’ll need to include:
1. The key takeaways for your readers
2. A smart headline
3. Arrange the major themes and section of the blog article outline
4. Insert relevant sources and any additional data and studies
5. Trim and clean up the outline
6. Write your article
Write a first draft using Google Docs or whatever program you prefer. Put down everything you think you’ll use pertaining to the article subject.
Now pick out a few key points as topics to discuss and use those for headings. Know that people like to skim before committing to reading an entire article. This gets you into formatting. Use each major key point as a heading for the different sections in the article. Be sure these headings are clear for easy skimming.
Break up the paragraphs into short paragraphs of no more than four sentences. You should vary the sentence length to make for easier reading.
Use bolding for emphasis, bullets, and numbered lists.
For complex points (or just for fun) you can add images, tables, charts, and infographics.
Be sure your article shows up well on mobile. Otherwise, your content – no matter how incredible – will not rank.
When you start writing you’ll need to come up with a great headline and introduction. So, state the problem you’ll write about, go into the details of solving it, then offer a solution.
Use the following points as a guideline.
1. Make your introduction catchy but authoritative.
2. The length of the article should be about 1,000 words minimum, depending on the subject matter. Content length varies by industry.
3. Sprinkle target keywords and similar ones throughout the article without going overboard and include important keywords early and frequently, of course, without overdoing them.
4. Use appropriate verbiage so as not to alienate your audience. Write in the first person and conversationally.
Links are very important because they keep viewers on your site and they build trust in Google’s eyes.
Some important ones are:
External links to amazing resources such as marketing tools
Internal links on your site – each blog article should include at least 2-3 links to other pages on your blog or main site
Make sure your anchor text actually links to something relevant. Don’t link the phrase “how to build a list” to an article about affiliate marketing.
In summary choosing your topic, angle, and format and putting effort into your content is a recipe for organic success.
Using this information on how to write great blog articles people want to read will enable you to get started writing great blog posts that people want to read.
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Backlinks and How To Build Them
by Rahimah Sultan
Advertising Disclosure: Marketing Success Review may be compensated in exchange for featured placement of certain sponsored products and services, or your clicking on links posted on this website. There is no expense to you.
Although you are probably familiar with SEO and marketing, you may be confused about some other features of online marketing. One of the aspects that can be confusing is backlinks.
In this article, I’ll provide information on backlinks and backlink building for your website.
What are backlinks?
The links from other domains to your domain or webpage are backlinks. They can improve the traffic that comes to your site and they help boost your website’s ranking in search engines like Google and Bing.
Backlinks, which are one of the most popular ways to increase your site’s search engine ranking, can be the deciding factor used to establish how popular your website is among readers.
When another site links to your website, some of its value is passed on to your website. If you have a lot of high-quality backlinks pointing to your site, yours will rank higher in the search engines.
Backlinks help with:
Ranking – Generally speaking, the more quality backlinks your web pages get, the better chance your web pages have of ranking for relevant search engine searches.
Referral Traffic – If a website has links from reputable websites, visitors who click on these links might be interested in your content as well.
Increased Visibility – Since search engines revisit popular pages more frequently than unpopular ones, backlinks from the popular pages may help them discover your site and material more quickly.
How important are backlinks in SEO?
There are so many different types of backlinks and ways to get them and not all of them are good for SEO. Some types of backlinks can actually hurt your rankings.
Backlinks let Google know that your website is worth ranking higher than others that don’t have any.
Google wants to show the best results first, the ones that are most relevant and useful to users, so it uses things like PageRank, keyword usage, and backlink data to establish which websites should be ranked higher than others.
You need high-quality backlinks pointing toward your site from trusted sources if you want your site to rank higher than others with fewer or less valuable backlinks.
Valuable backlinks:
Should come from a trusted and authoritative website
Should include keywords in the link’s anchor text
Should come from sites relevant to your niche
Should be do-follow links
To determine a domain’s trustworthiness, be sure:
It’s registered with a trusted domain registrar
It has a good number of backlinks from high-quality websites
It has been around for a long time and has a lot of content on it
It’s hosted on a reliable web host
What is the difference between a link and a backlink?
Internal links are links between web pages on the same domain to help users navigate the site while external links or outbound links go from one domain to a different domain that establishes a relationship between the two domains.
In other words, an internal link within the same site is considered the link while the links from the other webpage of a different domain may be called the backlink. Search engines understand the relevancy and reward the target URL by driving the traffic or pushing it in the SERPs for the keyword used in anchor text.
Backlinks pointing to your website indicate that your content is valuable. Backlinks are one of the most essential search engine ranking factors. They play a vital role in every website’s success (or failure).
Now, we’ve covered the basics of backlinks. Keyword research, on-page optimization, and backlink building are the three important elements of SEO. Obtaining backlinks is possibly the most important of these.
Links are beneficial in more ways than one, as they help build awareness and increase traffic. Link building should be a key component of everyone’s SEO plan. Now that we’ve covered the basics of backlinks and how to build them, you should be able to use this information for improving your site performance.
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7 SEO Trends to Leverage in Your Online Marketing
by Rahimah Sultan
Advertising Disclosure: Marketing Success Review may be compensated in exchange for featured placement of certain sponsored products and services, or your clicking on links posted on this website. There is no expense to you.
This article was originally posted on 5/10/21.
If you use SEO (search engine optimization) in the right way, it is one of the most effective ways to attract potential customers to your website. If you rank on page one of the SERP (Search Engine Results Pages) you will generate organic traffic.
This is where you need SEO.
In this article…
Continue
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Keywords and Digital Marketing for Your Business
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One of the most effective ways to attract potential customers to your website is using SEO correctly. By ranking on the top page of the SERP (Search Engine Results Pages) you generate organic traffic.
You want to increase your online visibility. If you have a strong internet presence, it helps consumers find and learn about you and ultimately purchase from you. As you search for online marketing tips, you’ll find advice about blogging for SEO, creating landing pages, and more. The bottom line is “there’s one vital part to digital marketing that can make or break these tactics and strategies: keywords.”
Keywords relate heavily to digital marketing because that’s how potential customers do searches like on Google, by typing in a particular word or phrase.
Keywords need to be something users will search for, relevant to your brand, and terms that can be seamlessly integrated into all your online content.
Once you know which keywords to focus on… Continue here
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Use Blog Comments to Benefit Your Online Marketing and SEO
by Rahimah Sultan
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On the web most of the entries in an average comments section are spam. Akismet is a tool that filters out comment spam for you. Comment spam can have a negative impact on your site’s search engine optimization (SEO) efforts.
Do blog comments still matter or help in any way?
You might think that, with so many social media platforms available to discuss pieces of content, blog comments no longer matter. That depends on your goals.
Many businesses with a large following see no need for blog comments as social media allows them to interact with more people.
However, if you’re a small business just getting started online and only now taking steps to grow a social media following, having a comments section on your blog can prove to be beneficial to your business.
Top brands often benefit by commenting on blog topics. You may not realize this because you don’t see influencers’ names in the comment sections of popular industry blogs.
That’s because they outsource the task. They hire virtual assistants and other freelance writers to write useful comments on recent blog posts.
How do you write good comments that people will notice?
Blog comments are still powerful, if you write high-quality, genuinely-good comments worth noting. They can still get you noticed by popular bloggers and influencers.
Writing a good comment requires:
#1 Letting People See the real You
Don’t use an animal or a generic faceless silhouette. Show you and all your pearly whites with a smile.
If your message is flagged as spammy, a gravatar gives you an increased chance the blog owner will approve your new comment.
#2 Using Your Real Name
Don’t use a fake name or a nickname that your friends and family use or any other name. And don’t use a fake or inactive email address. That will break the communication avenue between the commenter and author.
#3 Not Embedding Links in Your Comments
WordPress, Disqus, and other commenting systems view these links as spam. They come across as sales pitches, a cheap attempt to sell something. The blogger will feel no inclination to view it.
#4 Reading the Post Before Commenting
Although it takes time, reading a post thoroughly before commenting is a must. You don’t want your response to be inappropriate or silly.
#5 Not Having a One-Sided Long Conversation
Long-winded blog comments are not better than short ones. They’re just boring.
#6 Not Being a Parrot
Do not repeat what you’ve just read. Your comments need to offer some insight.
More Pointers:
A) Include a friendly greeting using the author’s name, spelled correctly.
B) Offer a compliment about the post, something about why you chose to be on this blog. Be sincere.
C) Do something that makes you appear valuable to the blogger you’re aiming to entice— anything that establishes you as a person worth knowing and helps develop a personal relationship.
D) Let the blogger know you’re interested in a longer-term relationship. Make a promise at the end, like telling the author you’re going to share the post on your favorite social media platform.
Be sure to do what you promise. When you share the post on your favorite social media platform, be sure to tag the blogger — let them know you followed through.
Show some personality. You can craft your comments like you’re writing an email to a friend.
Good comments alone won’t launch you to world domination, although they’re effective and often overlooked, now that so many bloggers think they’re extinct.
Good comments can get influential bloggers’ attention.
So, you can still use blog comments to benefit your online marketing and SEO and get more traffic to your site when utilized properly. However, not every comment will drive traction and credibility for your site and brand.
You cannot use blog commenting to build backlinks.
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Link Building for Your Online Marketing
by Rahimah Sultan
Advertising Disclosure: Marketing Success Review may be compensated in exchange for featured placement of certain sponsored products and services, or your clicking on links posted on this website. There is no expense to you.
What is Link Building?
According to Wikipedia, “Link building is the process of establishing relevant hyperlinks (usually called links) to a website from external sites. Link building can increase the number of high-quality links pointing to a website, in turn increasing the likelihood of the website ranking highly in search engine results.”
How Important are Links?
Link building for your online marketing is very important.
Before, Google search engines ranked their search results 100% based on the content on a webpage. Things changed with Google’s PageRank Algorithm which looked at how many people linked to a page.
Backlinks still remain the best way of determining the quality of a webpage. That’s why they’re still Google’s go-to ranking indicator.
With more updates Google’s focus is not just on quantity but also linkquality.
Page Authority
The authority of the page linking to you matters most. Links from authoritative pages pass more PageRank to your site. Google doesn’t share PageRank information publicly, although it’s the foundation of their algorithm.
Relevancy
When it comes to links page authority matters as well as relevance.
For example, if you operate a website all about photography and you get a link from an authoritative site about sports, that link won’t really count.
Generally speaking, you want to get links from authority sites that are closely related to your site.
Position
Your link’s position on a page is very important. If it’s embedded in a section of content, you get more notice. Don’t place it in a footer or sidebar where it counts for very little.
You want to place your links in the main body of the page. They should be “editorially placed,” where someone clicks it because they think your site is amazing, not in a profile you created on a random site in which you dropped a link.
These unnatural links can be considered a violation of Google’s guidelines.
Anchor Text
The clickable text section of a link is known as the anchor text. Anchor text needs to be relevant to the topic of the page you’re linking to rather than generic.
Don’t use anchor text excessively as that is considered spammy, just as excessive keyword use (keyword stuffing) is spammy.
A spammy anchor text is a link with an anchor text that has no relationship to the page on which it exists or the page it is linking to.
For natural anchor text links to your website, create beneficial content and the links and anchor text should come naturally.
You don’t want to be penalized.
Guest Posts
Be careful of guest posts. They can be spammy if:
Someone is paid to publish the post
The post contains exact match anchor text
The site exists solely to publish guest posts
The site is unrelated to yours
But, if you publish an awesome guest post on an authoritative, relevant site, that link CAN help your rank.
Nofollow vs. Dofollow
Both types help boost your SEO for search engine rankings because you get lots of clicks from many different sources. For instance, social media.
Nofollow links may not build you as much SEO juice as dofollow links, but they still drive traffic and build your SEO.
After all, your end goal is to drive leads, traffic, conversions, and revenue. SEO just happens to be one of the best ways to accomplish these goals.
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7 SEO Trends to Leverage in Your Online Advertising
by Rahimah Sultan
Advertising Disclosure: Marketing Success Review may be compensated in exchange for featured placement of certain sponsored products and services, or your clicking on links posted on this website. There is no expense to you.
If you use SEO (search engine optimization) in the right way, it is one of the most effective ways to attract potential customers to your website. If you rank on page one of the SERP (Search Engine Results Pages) you will generate organic traffic.
This is where you need SEO.
In this article I will cover seven SEO trends to leverage in your online advertising.
1) CORE WEB VITALS
Google is rolling out a new algorithm update which integrates a new set of metrics known as Core Web Vitals into what Google has traditionally referred to as “page experience.” These metrics measure how long it takes a user to get to your page, how easy/difficult it is for the user to initially interact with your page, and how easy/difficult it is for the user to become disoriented due to inconsistencies/shifts in your page design.
2) GOOGLE’S BERT
Google’s BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) algorithm uses machine learning and natural processing to understand what users are actually looking for. With the BERT update Google search engine bots are much more “conversational.” Google’s algorithm can interpret the intent of a searcher. In other words, Google can understand things like the human brain.
To optimize for Google’s BERT be sure your content and the keyword intent match. If people are searching for “seo” as a keyword on Google, they want to know about SEO. On the other hand, they may search “seo services” or “seo expert.”
Always perform a keyword search on Google before writing your content to be sure the keyword you’re trying to rank for matches the searchers’ intent. You can do a search to find free and paid SEO tools.
3) KEYWORD RESEARCH
Keyword research is becoming more important. Use long-tail and targeted keywords, and understand the intent. While SEO tools are important to use you need to analyze the SERP for the keyword before selecting it.
If the intent is right, even a low-volume keyword with only 10-20 searches per month can still generate thousands of dollars.
That’s why you do your keyword research with patience and find keywords that can easily rank and generate income for you.
4) ORIGINAL CONTENT
Google still wants original content. That is, unique content that hasn’t been published elsewhere. It must be authentic, useful, and add value in your own brand voice and language.
5) VOICE SEARCH
A staggering number of the global population are using voice search on their mobile phones. These search queries are long-tail and extremely specific.
6) ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Due to the personalization that AI provides, it is changing the SEO and marketing industry. Google uses AI to provide searchers with the results they’re looking for.
7) VIDEO MARKETING
YouTube, the second most popular search engine (Google being number one), has over a billion users. Now is the time to get started with videos if you aren’t already using them.
To optimize video content for search engines, start by optimizing your video channel name and description. Keywords are important, however, don’t overdo it. Just provide a user-friendly description about your channel.
As you start typing the topic of your video, related suggested keywords will pop up in the search field. You can use these for optimizing your video to reach the right audience.
Remember, to rank higher or just to maintain rankings with Google’s ever-evolving algorithm, you need to keep modifying your SEO strategy.
These are seven SEO trends to leverage in your online advertising. Keep these trends in mind and use them to continue driving relevant traffic to your website.
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SEO Best Practices
by Rahimah Sultan
If you want to rank in the top ten results for your target keywords on Google you have to get the basics right.
You will be laying the groundwork for your site to increase its visibility in search by following SEO (search engine optimization) best practices.
This SEMrush article lays out the 9 SEO best practices that you should follow which include:
Aligning your content with search intent
Optimizing your images
Using internal linking and more
Read the article here
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Affiliate Marketing Success
by Rahimah Sultan
Tom Dupuis, of Online Media Masters, discusses how to make money with affiliate marketing. In his article, so titled, he discusses how affiliate marketing works and the biggest success factors. This in-depth article covers setting up a blog, hosting, finding a niche, types of affiliate programs, affiliate market places, signing up, nofollow affiliate links, SEO, monetization of YouTube videos, and much more.
You can read the article here.
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Using AI in Your Small Business
by Rahimah Sultan
Advertising Disclosure: Marketing Success Review may be compensated in exchange for featured placement of certain sponsored products and services, or your clicking on links on this website. There is no expense to you.
While doing my research, I found that although AI is faster at producing content than humans, it’s not necessarily more accurate or even more efficient than human-generated content. Overall, human content performs better.
Faster doesn’t equal better. Even though human-generated content takes longer to create, it gets more visitors.
So, what is this advantage that humans have over AI chatbots?
It basically comes down to context and emotion.
AI isn’t capable of always understanding the context of content. Although it can write 2,000-word articles on any number of complex topics, it can’t often fit this information into the context of larger concepts. So, AI-generated content can miss out on nuance and important related and relevant insights.
In order to help readers understand and digest the subject matter easily, human content writers are better able to make big-picture connections.
Another area where AI falls short is emotion and empathy. You can ask a chatbot to write a blog article with a certain tone, but the results can be unnatural and ineffective. People are emotional creatures.
Content writers have life experiences they draw upon to write content that inspires sadness, fear, happiness, or anger because they’ve felt these emotions. They can also be subtle with their delivery, another area where AI-generated content frequently fails.
All of this is not to say that you should avoid using AI. You just need to know when to use it strategically and how to effectively leverage it.
Following are a few tips for using AI in your content creation activities:
Data Collection and Analysis
Although you can’t always trust the data and citations provided by AI, you can trust them with the data you provide yourself. Chatbots are great for summarizing and analyzing data so you can provide more insights to your readers.
Use it to brainstorm. ChatGPT, AnswerThePublic, and other chatbots are able to deliver dozens of blog topic ideas in a few minutes. You can be as specific or general with what you want in your request.
Use it to write a first draft. Although you need to spend time humanizing AI content, you can ask chatbots to create articles by using prompts like the one above. This means adding context, removing redundancies and inaccuracies, and adding to your brand’s voice.
Use it to conduct consumer research. For digital ad testing, content testing, and more you can use tools like Poll the People to conduct surveys and then analyze them.
You can and should use AI freely, but don’t become over-reliant on it. You should view it like any other tool in your digital marketing cache.
Is AI good for keyword research?
If you’ve ever spent hours analyzing spreadsheets, digging through search volume numbers, or trying to predict the best-performing keywords, you’re probably looking for a smarter, faster way to handle keyword research.
AI-powered keyword research can be your definitive SEO partner, helping you to predict trends, discover hidden keyword opportunities, and better understand user intent.
AI isn’t about replacing your expertise—it’s about expanding it. AI now becomes your SEO assistant. It’s about making your SEO strategies more effective and efficient.
You can use AI tools to save time and effort, speed up keyword research, provide smart keyword suggestions, and analyze large datasets quickly.
Among other tasks, you can use AI for search engine results page (SERP) analysis, for searching competitor strategies, and for searching sentiment insights.
AI can automate tasks, but, as stated earlier in this article, it can’t replace your expertise. For best results, combine AI data with your knowledge.
Relying too much on AI tools, without oversight, can lead to errors. Plus, AI tools for keyword research can be costly and they require a learning curve.
From Semrush to ChatGPT, select tools that fit your strategy needs—whether that’s creative brainstorming or deep analysis.
AI is transforming keyword research, making it more accurate, faster, and more insightful than ever before. By using AI keyword research tools to help create your SEO strategies, you can uncover hidden opportunities, stay ahead of the competition, and save time. Just remember, the most powerful approach combines AI’s data-crunching abilities with your unique industry expertise and creativity. Leaverage this technology when and where it makes the most sense for you.
The future of SEO is here. Take your online journey to the next level by using AI in your small business. Continue your online journey and start experimenting with AI tools today— Don’t get left behind.
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