Note: This post reviews web-based keyword tools. It doesn’t cover desktop tools or plugins. Keyword research is extremely important when conceiving new content ideas or optimizing existing content for search engines. You likely have a favorite keyword research tool – be it Google Keyword Planner, SEMrush, or Ahrefs. These tools are great for finding high…
Learn the importance of maintaining and building a strong brand persona for social media and guiding principles for developing content with the right tone.
We all know that user experience is a huge factor in successful SEO. A great user experience can set a site apart, while poor user experience can leave your site hidden amongst the spam. Knowing your audience’s wants and needs – and speaking directly to them – is key for their user experience. But what if your audience is divided into multiple audience segments? How can you speak to all of them at once? We’ll walk you through a few options. But first, let’s look at why this is so important.
The Wayback Machine is well known as a useful tool for viewing the way websites looked in the past. It’s always fun to pop in a URL from your favorite websites to see how far they’ve come since the early days of the internet (and maybe make fun of them a little). But the Wayback Machine happens to be a pretty helpful tool for SEO as well. Here are ten ways we’ve found you can use the Wayback Machine to improve your SEO strategy.
If you’re writing blog posts, or any kind of copy, on behalf of a client, you need to know them so well that you can (quite literally) finish their sentences. As an outside writer, it’s a hard but necessary task. Great writers are plentiful, but writing in someone else’s voice – even a company’s voice – is the real challenge. I compare it to a comic doing impressions. (Or maybe that’s just my excuse to classify watching SNL as “research”.) Someone like Dana Carvey carefully studies the quirks and habits of how an entity presents itself. Sure it’s about the words they say, but it’s also about how and why they say them.
I’ve heard the best time to write is very early in the morning when you’re still in sleep mode. It may help with creativity or in developing concepts. It might even help you spend less mental energy (who couldn’t use more battery life?). Not to mention, the only likely distraction are roosters, though only a problem for marketers working on farms. For our SEO clients, I often write my titles after my piece is written, but I never go into a content piece without a purpose. And more than a fluffy idea, but an idea that I can qualify as valuable.
The folks at Mountain View made the conscious decision that keywords alone couldn’t deliver them the results they wanted to see (ahem, “their users wanted to see”). Google tried some different modeling but ultimately came around to semantic search (that is, using semantic technology to refine the query results). Now I said much of the industry has picked up on it. Not all. I still see a lot of pretending Panda, Penguin and Hummingbird never happened. That’s unfortunate for innocent clients around the world. But for most of us probably reading this, we’re students of a new lexicon. With words like “triples” and “entities” and “semiotics” and “topic modeling.”
