There are instances when SEO is not the best solution as a traffic source, the squeeze page is one of them. Here’s a good example of a question I’ve seen in marketing forums a number of times…
Q: “I understand that SEO is content and backlinks and all that mumbo jumbo. Now normally I’d think you’d stick your squeeze page out there and SEO that, but with that there’s no real content so no real SEO. The other issue I have is that I went and wrote some articles a while back and when I really changed to what’s working for me now, none of the directories will except my new squeeze page as its very small and has about zip content (but has been converting the best for me). So do I need to completely reconstruct everything I”m doing to get started with SEO or is there something I’m just not getting about what pages need SEO and what pages can get subscribers?”
It’s interesting how many businesses act like SEO is in a different department than marketing… “oh that’s IT.” This is a real problem for people who implement SEO because the expectation is often: “go do your technical thing to get our site ranking but don’t expect any help from us, that’s your job.”
This kind of thinking might have worked out fine a few years ago but today the search engines treat sites that don’t engage as not so useful – and that impacts search rank. “But it’s just a program, how could it know what’s engaging or not?” Oh my friend, the algorithm is a program, but don’t be naïve, that’s not all search engines have at their disposal to evaluate and rank sites today.
Lots of bloggers and marketers have participated in social voting sites like Digg and then give up because they didn’t see many of their posts get to the front page. What is really possible if they participated in a more effective way with these sites?
An interview with Will Hinton, serial entrepreneur and networker.
Will was a member of the startup team for nationally-distributed magazine, Paste Magazine; he is owner of SiteBrew, a web development company, and the webmaster at Manhattan Associates.
Many businesses have a blog but don’t use it because its time consuming to write a good article that they would want to publish. I’ve heard lots of different excuses about not producing good content for the company blog.
But, here’s the fact: a blog that publishes useful content regularly draws more and more attention even to the point that it generates business development leads, including b2b lead generation.
Last year HubSpot published “101 Marketing Charts and Graphs” from a survey of numerous businesses and in it was a chart entitled “Leads by Indexed Web Pages” which clearly demonstrated the ratio of search engine indexed web pages to leads generated. It climbed from 60 pages indexed to 120 pages to 200 and so on. The most dramatic increase in lead generation came when a site moved from 200 or so pages indexed to over 311 pages indexed. The number of leads jumped by well over 200%! So adding quality content to your site or blog can produce real business development leads if your target audience uses the Internet to find solutions to problems related to your business.
SEOmoz’s 2011 Search Engine Ranking Factors offers some interesting details about Google’s current algorithm as it relates to individual page features and their correlation to search rank based on 10,000+ pages they tested earlier this year.
The correlation chart below outlines how features on a page tend to relate to higher rankings on a scale from 0 to 1. There are also negative correlations which means the more the particular feature showed up on a page, it tends to relate to lower rankings. But, remember these are correlations, not causes and based on a test of 10,000 pages. So, don’t run off and change your site just because you see something here that correlates to higher or lower rank, but do consider it especially in light of the Panda updates.
Whether you are doing SEO in-house, on your own time or with a professional, it still takes time for a site to begin ranking well for a keyword that has never been targeted before, unless you’re involved with a brand with a huge following. Here’s the gist:
Engaging content to the searcher is the foundation so please don’t try to push a web page that’s all about “me and my super awesome company.” You’ve often got to create content that’s not about you if you want conversions.
That new content should have a few good quality links pointing at it from sites that are reputable and/or relevant to the topic to gain good search rank.
I was working on an ecommerce development project when they approached me about helping with their SEO. I began researching SEO and discovered I had a passion for the subject. My first SEO client was an Ecommerce site, and it has been my favorite ever since.
So, how did Digg rise to wild popularity, fall to mediocrity and give birth to numerous social voting sites?
Digg really was “The Great White Hope”, so to speak, but they blew it with Version 4. They made a classic mistake that so many companies make. When they tried to reinvent themselves, they did not play to their strengths. Coca Cola made that same mistake with New Coke.
In my last post I defined what it means to have useful web content for the business, especially from the perspective of Google’s algorithm. If you aren’t sure what I mean by useful content you might want to read: Useful Content Is Part of The Algo
In this post I want to take this concept further by outlining several excellent content development strategies endorsed by other online marketing pros.
If link-building is all about establishing credibility on the Web, and it has to be if you want favor from Google, think for a moment: if my business and website were top of mind and authoritative, where would I expect it to be listed or referenced on the Internet? Where are my competitors referenced?
The most powerful and credible links on the Internet are those that are placed by individuals who have influence over your online target audience. These influencers are often bloggers, editors, industry speakers and have numerous social media followers. Wouldn’t it be good to have an industry influencer who likes you and promotes your stuff by mentioning your business to his vast audience?
If you aren’t familiar with the terms in this video, you can get an explanation of them as well as more indepth info from my article 3 SEO Resources To Evaluate Your Backlinks.
as a traffic source, the squeeze page is one of them. Here’s a good example of a question I’ve seen in marketing forums a number of times…
SEO is in a different department than marketing… “oh that’s IT.” This is a real problem for people who implement SEO because the expectation is often: “go do your technical thing to get our site ranking but don’t expect any help from us, that’s your job.”
want to stay fresh, but others may find it useful as well:
strategy
