Browse » Home » Archives for September 2012

Wednesday, September 19, 2012

Rock Your SEO with Structured Social Sharing - #MozCon Presentation

1 comments
During my MozCon 2012 talk, attendees learned about the Structured Social Sharing Formula (SSSF) - 10 steps to optimize and track social share snippets on Facebook, Google Plus, and Twitter. The formula includes use of microdata and best practices for controlling the snippet that displays on Facebook and Google+ as well as how to automatically tag URLs with campaign variables for analytics.
  • PRO TIP: This structured markup makes a difference for SEO!
'm sharing the process, my MozCon presentation, and a free worksheet with you below. Oh! La! La!

You can also view my Whiteboard Friday on SSSF where I give a bird's-eye view of through the process.

Why are social snippets important?

 You put your heart and soul into creating a piece of great content or a killer blog post. It looks good, reads well, is attractive, and maybe even authoritative. You're hoping for links and social engagement. Then you share it online... OUCH! The wrong image displays, or worse, maybe no image displays. Your share doesn't look as good as you hoped and fizzles.

If you don't optimize your page with the right code, your dreams of going viral may flop. That killer content most likely won't get as many reshares, likes, or retweets as you thought it would.

Example: Great content without structured markup

Rand Fishkin put together an absolutely stellar Whiteboard Friday: 8 Rules for Exceptional Slide Presentations

The video rocked! He included a SlideShare presentation along with transcripts. There were some fantastic images in the presntation and nice visuals in Rand's video.

However, when shared on Facebook and Google+, the share snippet image didn't work in both cases:


Facebook grabbed Rand's avatar for the post image correctly, but Google+ found no image on the page large enough to pull.

Publishers beware: Most CMS are not set up to allow an editor to control the <head> where the structured markup to control a share snippet needs to be placed. (There are a couple references below for WordPress users.) Amazingly, major news publishers such as the Reuters and the LA Times don't even have it right. Often, a sponsor's ad on the page is the default image that displays. OOPS!

Anatomy of a Share Snippet

Let's review the elements of a share snippet before we get to the SSSF and steps. Every share snippet contains, at least, the following elements:


The code on your page controls how the share snippet displays:

  1. Share Blurb - your explanation about the content.
  2. Title - page Title
  3. Description - brief description of the page
  4. Image - a thumbnail image
  5. URL - links the Title to the page

When you don't use microdata to specify what to display for these elements, Facebook and Google+ determine it for you. You can make your social snippets look good and know if your social media engagement is working for you by implementing the steps below!

Formula for Optimized Social Engagement

Here's the all-in-one Structured Social Sharing Formula to optimize your social engagement:


Five of the 10 steps include placing additional <meta> in the <head> of each Web page using Open Graph Protocol (OG).
  • PRO TIP:
  • You don’t have to create two sets of tags - Open Graph and Schema.org. OG works for both Google and Facebook for social sharing! (Save Schema for other microdata markup.)
10 Steps With Microdata & Analytics

Four of the five Open Graph tags are required, marked with an asterisk (*) below. Let's break each step down:

1. OG: Title*
<meta property="og:title" content="Share Snippet Title Goes Here" />
The title becomes anchor text to the page. Follow best practices for writing OG titles the same way you would write captivating and explanatory text for your meta title tag. (OG title overrides meta title tag.)

Size? You're not limited by 60 or 70 characters as with the meta title tag. I've seen up to 134 characters in a Google+ snippet title, but that's just too long. (Personally, long titles are not preferred, and they are not quickly readable.)

2. OG: Description
<meta property="og:description" content="Your descriptive content goes here, probably similar to your meta description." />
This markup acts like a meta description, but you are not so limited by the number of characters as with the equivalent meta. I recommend up to 188 characters for your text to display without the ellipsis. (OG description overrides meta description tag.)

Best practice is to write it like an ad, summarizing the first paragraph of the page copy and/or include benefit statements.

Caveat: I’m still testing character length. I saw 453 characters in a Google+ description. It was pulled from a page without markup, and that page had short one-sentence paragraphs. Google may have been testing how much they display for the description.

3. OG: Image*
<meta property="og:image" content="http://www.domain.com/images/image-file-name.png" />
Enter the URL of the thumbnail image. If you don't have an image, Facebook and Google+ will look for another image on your page, e.g. avatars, images for related posts, and worst of all...sponsored ad graphics.

150x150 square is the best size for both Facebook and Google+. The height must be at least 120px. (If the width is less than 100px, then the aspect ratio must be no greater than 3:1.)

Important: Size overrides code. Images that are too small or not square enough are not included in a Google+ snippet, even if the images are explicitly referenced by schema.org microdata or Open Graph markup.

4. OG: Type*
<meta property="og:type" content="website" />
Specify the type of content (object) being shared. Any non-marked up webpage will be treated as og:type website. Other type values include article, book, profile, video.movie,music.song.

5. OG: URL*
<meta property="og:url" content="http://www.domain.com/file-name" />
Put in your canonical URL. Simple (period).

OK! We're now done with the markup...

6. UTM Variables
Append tracking tags to end of your URL:
?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=conference

URL tagging with UTM campaign variables gives you social referral data!

All you need to do is identify your URL and the three required attributes: the source (social network), the medium (how it is delivered), and the campaign (the category for how you want to track in Google Analytics).

7. Share Content
This is the textual blurb you want to put in the share box.
Enter it in the boxes where it says, “Share what’s new” (Facebook) or “What’s on your mind?” (Google+).

SEO tip: this share text become the title tag <title> of that share snippet when it becomes a SERP. So, if you are targeting Search Plus Your World (SPYW) personalized search, remember that your Google+ share blurb can rank. Think SEO and front load keywords – without being spammy. However, always think more about your message and audience engagement first.

8. Hashtags
Use #hashtags on Google+.
When you type a # in the G+ share box, it auto-completes (auto-suggests) hashtags other people have used.

Tip: Use hashtags to discover trends! Don't use hashtags on Facebook. (Facebook is not Twitter. Forget the hashtags.) Choose one hashtag for Twitter, and don't abuse that precious hash (#) sign!

Tools: Discover hashtags on Twitter for your topic: Tagdef, Hashtags.org, Twubs

9. Twitter/Retweetable
Sharing on Twitter is a different beast, since the OG markup doesn't affect the tweet. Below are some tips to optimize and track your tweets.

Steps:
1. Append your UTM campaign variables to end of each URL.
2. Create a bit.ly or custom (branded) short URL.
3. Choose a single #hashtag, if any.
4. Create a “retweetable” tweet. (See "Format" below.)

Size:
To be retweetable, your tweet needs to be short enough that it doesn't get cut off. Here's the formula for determining the length:
Max Characters = 140 – 5 – (LEN)@YourProfile

Format:
Put the post title first, followed by your short URL, the "by" you or your company's profile name. Add your #hashtag to the end.
Latest Greatest SEO Post Title:
bit.ly.Moz3Xlu by @YourProfile #hashtag

10. Document & Track
Here's the fun part, err, the FREE part...

Yo! Yo! SEO is making this process nearly error-free and easy for you. Download the Structured Social Sharing Worksheet to plan each page's Open Graph tags and social shares.

Bonus: the Excel worksheet contains an automatic URL builder to tag your file names with UTM campaign variables!


The last step after documenting everything in the worksheet is to cut and paste into each social network.

OK, we're almost done...

Analytics - URL Tagging

Let's delve a little into tagging those URLs. As mentioned, you can quickly and automatically create UTM variables to track the effectiveness of each social share, including Twitter. The worksheet does it for you through its automatic URL builder to tag URLs with UTM campaign variables. The required fields and a sample tagged URL are shown below:


Why is tagging important?

You won’t get full social referral data in Google Analytics when you shared a post without campaign variables.
  • Google Analytics will automatically know if someone clicks on a link from Twitter Web to go to your page. Twitter will be shown as a referral.
  • However, referral data is not available when you use third-party clients like TweetDeck and HootSuite to post to social networks via an API.
Tag every URL you share for maximum "data" to know if and how each social media share is sending you traffic.
  • PRO TIP: You can add UTM variables via AddThis and ShareThis. But you cannot vary your campaigns for each post. Do make it easy to share by using these and other sharing plugins, but for your personal/company sharing, tag and share them manually. Your analytics gurus will be happy for the data.
Additional Social Sharing Tips & Resources


Below are a few more tips to enhance your social sharing (and SEO) experience:

1. Enhanced Google Site Search

A worthy by-product of the "Structured Social Sharing Formula" is that it enhances results for Google's Search Appliance for in-site search results. So if your site uses Google's Site Search, you can control and add images to those search results using the same og:image code. The images will be scaled to a smaller size to fit your own personal in-site SERPs.

2. WordPress

There are a couple WordPress plug-ins that have received good ratings for accessing the <head> to enable you to insert OG code. Check out the following:
  • WordPress SEO by Yoast - Lots of <head> control
  • Like - Ads the Facebook Like button along with OG tag control (NOTE: The plugin is outdated.)
3. Structured Social Sharing - Rock Your SEO with Structured Social Sharing from Yo! Yo! SEO


This is the full presentation as given at MozCon 2012.

4. Best Practices for Structured Social Sharing on WebmasterRadio.FM

I joined Ross Dunn and John Carcutt, co-hosts of SEO 101 Podcast, on WebmasterRadio.FM.

While Ross and I were in Seattle for MozCon, we joined John to discuss best practices for optimizing social share snippets and how to track efforts.


Source: http://www.seomoz.org
Read more ►

The True Power of Evergreen Content - A Case Study

0 comments

There is a very good chance anyone reading this is already familiar with the concept of evergreen content; or content that is perpetually relevant. Most of us have experienced at least one piece of content that holds timeless in the usefulness of its information.

Creating content that is just as useful five years down the road as it was the day it was published is not easy, but it’s possible.

Think of content that is more or less the opposite of news, from a pure informational standpoint this content offers value that will not diminish... at least, not much.

What Makes Content Evergreen?

It needs to provide information that is not likely to change in the near future, a reference point if you will. When thinking of examples, immediately I think of some ‘How To’ posts:

  • How To Tie Your Shoes
  • Teach a Child How to Ride a Bike
  • How To Fix a Flat Tire

Certainly these may be very different in 50 years (perhaps even 10 years?), but they offer long term value in terms of information.

These opportunities do not exist within every niche; however, evergreen content doesn’t need to be timeless to be evergreen, at least not in my opinion; it simply needs to stand the tests of time.

I believe if a piece of content is created that is still useful 1+ years later, even if not completely accurate anymore, it can be deemed evergreen – especially if it's related to technology.

Part of building evergreen content is updating it so it stays current and relevant for as long as possible.

Think of:

  • SEOmoz: Algorithm Change History, Search Ranking Factors, Beginner's Guide to SEO
  • What is Celiac Disease | National Foundation for Celiac Awareness
  • Illuminati | Wikipedia

Now think of a pine tree with no sun or water -- the needles turn brown, become brittle, and eventually fall off and the tree dies. Sustainable content is no different; it requires maintenance to stay alive, to remain useful.

Each of the posts above are updated as soon as new relevant information becomes available to allow the content to better serve its purpose.

When the information starts to grow old (or weak) spend the time, put in the research, and update what is outdated... this is not always possible, but in many cases you can repurpose your content to still serve a valid need.

In this post I hope to provide you with a close look at the true impact of creating evergreen content. We will explore an evergreen library from someone who has put creating evergreen content into practice.

Putting Content to Work For You

Jason Acidre continually leverages his library of evergreen content to consistently acquire new traffic to his website. He has been able to continually send new traffic to his posts years after their initial publication through a combination of inbound marketing channels. The information is researched, accurate, and relevant to his target audience.

This is also a two-way street.

In return for providing value to his audience, Jason gets to reap the benefits of continuous traffic and brand authority growth.

Similar to the above examples, here are some of my favorite pieces of evergreen content:

  • Discover The 90 / 10 Principle | Steven Covey
  • Marathon Training for Beginners | Marathon Rookie
  • How I Did 200 Push-Ups | 30GO30
  • Migraine Symptom Map | Migraine.com

If you look at Jason’s posts you will notice a plethora of comments, high social share counts, and a natural profile of inbound links. This is due to the specific set of benefits factors offered from his content:

  1. Life-cycle: Pre-established content so all new visitors after initial publication are greeted with existing authority signals: comments, social shares, and high search engine rankings.
  2. Links build on themselves; evergreen content is a source for continued reference and will continually be linked to.
  3. Larger citation potential from press channels if content is in under-served or under-saturated industry
  4. Reference point for future citation on additional articles on same topic or closely related context
  5. Brand establishment and awareness

To consistently drive traffic to evergreen content depends on:

  • The amount and quality of referring links (particularly linking pages that are also ranking for keywords that have substantial monthly search volume).
  • If the content/page is ranking for keywords that are generally searched by your target audience.
  • The page’s ability to attract new traffic through social shares (which mostly involves the title and the body of the content – if it’s compelling, relevant and up to date – as well as the visibility of the social sharing buttons).

Here's an example of one of Jason's posts from last year about eCommerce SEO strategies (first published on March 15, 2011) which has generated 4,556 unique pageviews in the first year:


The content is still continuously attracting natural links to it even after a year… in large part due to the visibility from readers who have shared the content via social networks and blogs that have linked to it (even a recent link from SEOmoz).

Google has continually sent search traffic to it as its PA has grown over time.

The traffic to this post nearly doubled in the first 18 months (from March 15, 2011 to August 15, 2012) reaching 8,527 unique pageviews; primarily due to the three factors mentioned above...


Whether your traffic is search or referral driven, true evergreen content will continue to organically attract links as it continues to provide value to new readers.

New Traffic to Old Content from Social Shares

Depending on the authority and influence of the people sharing your content, a simple social media share can send large spikes in traffic.

Look at the traffic to this post published a year ago (August 30, 2011) that came six months later when someone shared the link on Pinterest:


In the above case the largest acquisition of traffic came six months after the post was first published, showing that evergreen content can continue to drive massive amounts of new traffic months or years after they are published.

For instance, another one of Jason's older posts, which also ranked well earlier in 2012 for the search phrase "link prospecting," hit the wire with some momentum; generating 1,796 unique pageviews in its first 30 days.


In the following 60 days the post continued to generate impressions at about a 50% reduction, but maintained some momentum, creating another 1,259 unique pageviews:


Continued Ranking Improvements Mean More Traffic

Sometimes when a piece of content adds enough value it will snowball, so as the word spreads, it gains links and popularity and in return increases in search rankings, and traffic continues to build...

In the case below unique pageviews to the post increased by 41.74% in the period from three to six months after publication over the first three months:


Link Momentum & Scrapers

Link velocity depends greatly on exposure, as Jason puts it:

"The initial wave of links usually depends on the impact on different social media networks. I have posts that receive 20+ natural, earned links within their first week of publication, like this, this, and this.
I believe the amplification of natural links depends on the exposure received through different traffic channels like social networks, communities and forums, blog/newsletter mentions, and organic rankings."

Here is a chart (extracted with the help of Ahrefs) that shows the link graph for the eCommerce post mentioned earlier:



One important item to note on this chart is that the link spike in May 2012 was due to content farms scraping a post from SEOmoz that linked to Jason's post from March 2011.

He believes that "the key" to evergreen content "is to make sure you can continue to satisfy visitor's expectations."

What About Comment Velocity

Comments are often used as a measure of audience engagement, so how do evergreen posts fair in continuing to generate comments?

In Jason's case, they do pretty well.

The majority of comments are received within the first 30 days, but his posts tend to continue to attract comments for the life of the post. Here is an example where the ratio of comments from the first 30 days compared to the next six months is 43:22. Still pretty good...

Social Share Velocity

Share velocity depends greatly on the type of post and the channels it is distributed across.

Using the two posts mentioned before as examples, the 'SEO for eCommerce' post out-performed the 'Link Prospecting' post receiving over 200 retweets in the first two months, since this post was able to gain links that sent traffic from a large number of sources (including SEOmoz).

The link prospecting post still did well, receiving over 100 tweets in the first month, but only around 60 in the second month.

*Rough estimates based on data from Topsy

Evergreen Content for Conversion

Evergreen content has not only helped Jason build his traffic and his brand, it has had a direct impact on his SEO consulting business.

For instance, the eCommerce SEO post assisted with the generation of approximately 14 new service leads, converting readers into prospects at a rate of 1.35%


In Conclusion

Evergreen content is powerful for building a brand, building an audience, and building a business.

Looking at the big picture, evergreen content can be used as a foundation for an overall content strategy to create sustainable traffic, brand growth, and increase the authority of your website.

A big thank you to Jason Acidre for being my study subject and sharing so much of his time and data with me.


Source: http://www.seomoz.org
Read more ►

Wednesday, September 5, 2012

The Ultimate Guide to Content Planning

0 comments
A transition is in effect. The web is maturing and like any form of media that has gone before it that can mean only one thing: That content is now at the epicentre of audience creation once again.

The introduction of Penguin, as we know, is forcing every online business to re-examine how it ‘does’ online marketing and begin looking for ways to grow reputation, reach and visibility via content rather than the link building practices of old.

As Google turns up the algo to promote great content and social gives us all access to the social graph and the network effect it offers there has never been a better time to get your content game in shape and pull together a killer strategy for your brand.

I recently wrote a piece for another digital marketing site that goes into a little more detail around why content is coming to the fore and so for extra context it is certainly worth a read.

In addition to the above theory one thing we do know is that all forms of media before the web have followed the same basic evolution. It starts with obsession about the technology and the iteration of it to a place where the platform has mass media reach. The end game, and the thing that gives the platform longevity, is the content shared on it. Think print, TV and radio and this is true of all of them. We don't get excited about where a paper is printed any more. Instead its about the content that's printed on it.

The web is next and in this post I want to delve a little deeper into how to structure your own content planning to take advantage of this change and maximise the reach and impact of this change.

How to Plan

 Stage one of any great content strategy is the plan. Without it you will fail. Without a clear roadmap of the kinds of content you need to produce, when and for whom you’ll quickly become an also-ran.

The question is how do you first understand what you should be creating and how can you structure your plan to cater for the various personas visiting your site?

Firstly you need to understand exactly WHO your audience is. Many people, especially when they start to become more comfortable with content strategies, often overlook this; and it's key to the whole process.

The point is all men and women are not the same. Obvious, right? Well we can all be guilty of treating our audience as the same person with the same ideals, needs and beliefs. Clearly this isn't the case and so it is important to segment your audience in a way that create two, three or four 'types' - all of which get to your product or service in different ways.

To explain this, and the planning process as a whole, I organised a round table catch up (an evening of beers) with some former colleagues of mine from the world of consumer magazines to pick their brains again on the best way to structure and execute your content plan

Their view, and mine, is always to ‘keep your reader as close to you as possible in every decision you make.’

That process must follow the same basic steps:

        1. Understand your Brand

You cannot begin to talk about personas or content ideas before you truly have your brand values down on paper. Many businesses skip this part but you MUST know exactly what you stand for, your tone of voice, political and social allegiances etc.

To do this you must first map the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors. A simple SWOT analysisworks well here as it lets you see easily where you might be able to steal a march and differentiate.


You can then align these strengths and opportunities to your brand values and begin to build a map of what you may want to ‘own’ from a content strategy perspective.

There are lots of tools out there to make this process easier too. SWOT analysis templates are available across the web while Moz's own TAGFEE core values can really help you structure your own mission statement and brand strategy. For those really interested in this area I can whole heartedly recommend spending time reading Michael Porter's work and strategies. His books make for great reading.

With this in place you can then move onto stage two…

       2. Understand your Audience

The plan to understand your reader is twofold; the first part is to create the ‘Typical Reader’. Here you should be specific and a great example may be:

Steve is 24 and drives a 2006 plate Range Rover Sport and he sees this as being the second most important thing in his life, after his fiancée!
He spends his time and money socialising, discussing sport, music and cars. He drinks Budweiser and occasionally a decent whiskey (as he thinks this is cool). He wears Ralph Lauren shirts but can’t afford to stretch his brand tastes further and so goes with generic jeans and shoes. To him brand is as important as the product, and it influences his buying behaviour.

The process of getting to this point is a post in its own right but the key point is to do your research well. Split it down into two specific parts:

1. Quantitative > Surveys via email and social work well for this. Ask general questions about your product or service so you can get a picture of where it sits in their lives and in their buying cycle. This can lead you to stage two, which is...

2. Qualitative > Customer focus groups, either in a pub or working with research companies and utilising controlled environments helps you to add 'colour' to the picture, enabling you to understand tone and emotive pointers etc.

From this you will usually be able to model your 'typical' client or customer, as above. You'll also be able to understand how to break the audience down into personas, each of which have more specific characteristics and ways of getting to, or interacting with what it is you are selling. For a step-by-step of using data to create them I recommend Mike King's excellent Keyword Level Demographics post.

The next step is then to nail your editorial proposition and to do this you must record your key USPs (things like ‘jargon free advice’ and ‘well written by people who understand the culture and fashions of the market’).

This is a relatively straightforward process and should get you to a point where you can easily sum up your editorial/content persona in the form of a famous person.

This is a really useful way of working as by agreeing that as a brand you are ‘John Wayne’, for instance, it becomes much easier to share tone of voice and attitude across a team, either in house or externally.

While this process is really useful to capture your core values we all know that in reality you have many different types of ‘reader’ and so the process of persona mapping is key to really ensuring your content appeals to your chosen audience.

The process of creating personas is a subject all of its own and this post cannot cover the entire process but several pieces here recently including this one and this one can help you segment your audience in a way that will help you when it comes to pulling together your content strategy.

Let’s assume then that you have followed those tips and have three or four tidy personas in place.


At this point you now have a really clear picture of who you are, your tone and editorial stance. You may even have drawn up an editorial guidelines document to steer the entire team in the same direction.

In short you are more prepared than a cub scout but structure is nothing without great ideas….

        3. Brainstorm Ideas

Ideas are the lifeblood of any content strategy. Without creativity your content marketing campaign is dead in the water. The good news though is that there are ways that you can make the whole process a little more structured and easier.

It is at this stage you can let your imagination run wild. If you have a team then a couple of hours in a bar or even just outside can produce a long list of crazy content concepts. Of course you don’t have to worry right now about them being realistic or actionable. The key point is to get them down on paper.

One great technique to use in recording and expanding your idea list is the use of mind maps. Bubbl.us is a great tool to use to help you do this.

Tools can help too and below is our top five for helping us isolate content ideas.

        1. Bottlenose


This is a great new tool to highlight trending articles and social commentary based on specific keywords. It’s a social search engine and can really help you create news or hot topic led content.
     
        2. Spezify


Does a similar thing to Bottlenose but in a less structured but more visually interesting way. Creates a tapestry of related tweets, images, music etc.

        3. UberSuggest



A popular tool for expanding on keyword ideas and the concept works well for helping you think more laterally.

        4. Keyword Expander



A really cool tool by Optimal Social it allows you to find relationships between things that people like. So people that like (insert keyword) also like XXX. This has obvious benefits and can also help with persona creation. Free registration required.

        5. SEOGadget’s Content Ideas Generator


A popular one around these parts and for good reason; it may not be flashy but it does a great job of pulling in content ideas from a number of useful sources into one Google Doc.

Together these and some good old fashion thinking time can produce a great list of ideas, which will then need refining, which brings us onto the next stage.

        4. Segment your content types and flow

The next step is to begin organising the list you have into content types; working out the best way of presenting that concept for maximum reach.

This is where an understanding of content types comes in and the Content Matrix. This simple yet effective infographic by SmartInsight helps you understand the strengths and weaknesses of the different kinds of content you can create, while also giving you a great starting list of ideas.


It is then useful to segment your ideas into a simple table of types such as this:



        5. Create your content plan

I wrote this on the YouMoz blog last year as a introduction to content planning and it contains some useful elements around beginning to structure your editorial calendar, or plan, by using key elements.

The key part of the process though is ensuring you achieve the right flow.

Every great content schedule, whether it’s for TV, radio or any other media has peaks and troughs as you must have the small to appreciate the big stuff.

If you examine the very best musical pieces they are built in the same way and you should think of your content plan in the same way.

Create a planner as you wish. The one we use is shown below and captures the following elements. If you want a copy simply email us at infoatzazzlemedia.co.uk and we’d be glad to send you a copy.



The basics are that you segment as you would with a normal calendar with months and weeks. The key is then how you transplant the ideas you have into it.

Alongside ideas we capture key dates in the calendar. So in our example as a fitness website we might include key exhibition dates, official Get Fit weeks, peak times of the season such as January and so on. This work helps us capture the visitor’s general mood and frame of mind too and this helps you create content as a solution.

The key piece is getting the flow right and this is where the work done on content type is important as it enables you to then fill in the weeks with a view on what kind of content will follow each other well.

Timing too is important. Huge amounts of effort and many 'column inches' have been put into measuring and understanding the timing of social media activity and the same is true of other content. During a stint working for the UK's biggest golf media brand we discovered that sending a newsletter on a Friday full of equipment reviews etc worked amazingly well as the 'reader' believed that they were about to shoot the round of their lives that weekend, and wanted all the kit to do it with. Come Monday though reality had set in and so we would send a newsletter full of tips to help them improve!

Dan Zarella's blog is great for insight around social sharing and I would suggest you spend some time here absorbing that data to help you build your own content plan.

The other secret is then creating both ‘big bang’ and smaller regular content ideas and get them to work in unison, but that’s a post for another day.


Source: http://www.seomoz.org
Read more ►

How To Get More Comments On Your Articles

0 comments

If you've spent any amount of time reading up on content creation, you've most likely seen a post or two with a similar title to this one. In my experience, these articles are typically littered with buzz-phrases such as "have a call to action" or "write compelling content" and consist of 30+ overlapping ways to do either of those things. While asking your readers to comment and creating comment-worthy content are certainly important concepts to understand, I'm going to assume you're already on-board and looking for something a bit more actionable.

Why are comments important?

 The benefits of user generated content are obvious to most. Not only are you generating additional unique, (hopefully) on-topic content for your pages, comments may even contribute to your article's freshness score. While it's debatable whether the number of comments on a page is directly correlated with higher rankings, we all understand the value of having more fresh, relevant content on a page to say nothing of user engagement and community building.

No matter how in-depth your keyword research is, you'll never be able to naturally incorporate every iteration of a key phrase onto your landing page - and you wouldn't want to anyhow. With user generated comments, you're able to get some of those alternate queries (long-tail or otherwise) without having to shoehorn them into your on-page copy. Let me give you an example of this in action:



The highlighted text isn't actual copy from the page itself. It's from one of the comments towards the bottom of the page. Google has determined that this page is relevant to the query in part because of a comment that includes text that the webmaster hadn't even thought to include on the page. Would the page have ranked without the comment? Possibly. But to me, an example like this shows that Google clearly uses comments to help determine page relevance. In a competitive space where most competing pages look startlingly similar, you're going to need any edge you can get.

I'm sure you've all had the experience of landing on an article after searching for something only to "ctrl + F" your way to the comments section to find your answer. Content from users can provide real value, and this article will arm you with tips to help increase your user comments.

Actionables

Okay, so maybe you didn't need much convincing as to the importance of user generated content. You're here because you want to read something you haven't read before about getting users to comment on your posts. Over the last 10 years, I've founded several fan community pages covering such nerd-tastic staples as Magic the Gathering, Nintendo, and Game of Thrones (yes, ladies, I am that cool). While building these communities, I've picked up a few tricks for attracting article comments that I thought I'd share with the Moz community.

1. Make it as easy as possible to leave a comment

Does "website" really need to be a required field? Are your CAPTCHA images harder to solve than a Rubik's cube? Sometimes the effort it would take to comment on your blog outweighs the potential user benefits. Take a look at each field and ask yourself "is this a hoop I'd be willing to jump through to leave a comment on a blog I've never visited before?" Most users are wary about giving out an email address, so assure them that their data won't be used for anything other than unique identification or just let them login using Twitter of Facebook (more on that below). In the end, you should be mostly concerned with their username, email address (to distinguish their comments from others, gravatars etc), and the comment itself. Anything else is a barrier to entry that should be scrutinized and broken down wherever possible.

 2. Comment placement

So many widgets, so little real estate. If I didn't know any better, I'd think that the end of a blog post is the hottest piece of property on the net these days. After you've pumped your full author bio, social buttons, "other articles you might like," opinion disclaimer, and multiple ad units, the comment section often ends up an entire page screen below the actual content. I know, I know, it's tough to demote any of these widgets because of course ad placement is important; of course, "related content" and extra pageviews are important, but if you're truly serious about getting the conversation going on your article, then you should consider giving the comment section a more prominent position on the page.



At the very least, give users an anchor jump at the end of the article that reads "Leave a Comment" or "Join the Conversation" and bumps them down to the appropriate level.

3. Social logins

If for whatever reason you simply must require users register for commenting (a rather large barrier to entry) consider allowing them to log in using the social media accounts they're already using. If you're running Wordpress, this can be done by installing one or two plugins of your choice. Simple Facebook Connect will get the job done and the Twitter version will do the same. If you're looking for a more comprehensive solution (all social networks), try Social Login. Social logins on custom CMS' obviously vary and can be achieved using OAuth and following the developer instructions from Facebook and Twitter. There's also the all inclusive Disqus comment system that you've probably already seen in use on many blogs.

Not only does this offer users a 1-click login option for commenting and other community activities around your site; this option also gives your users an automatic avatar and social identity. Comments coming from a person with a traceable identity are almost surely of higher quality than those coming from completely anonymous users. And hey, once they're logged in with Twitter or Facebook, it stands to reason that the chances of someone sharing your page on one of those networks increases considerably.

4. Profiles, Awards, and Rankings

You've probably used (or been used by) a piece of ego bait in a link building campaign and the same principles of human nature apply to community building. In-depth profiles, award systems, and commenter rankings are great ways to encourage your contributors to keep coming back for more.

A simple database comment count for each individual is all that is required for deployment. Attach fun titles such as "Youngling," "Aspirant," or "Padawan" to these values and you'll not only please current commenters, but you'll also give readers a way to gauge that person's standing within the community.

Grab the Top Contributors plugin for Wordpress and show your top commenters some love. You could also display "X-Year Club" awards on user profiles or a "She's Over 9000aaaand!" badge for your most ambitious contributors. Anything you can do to give your loyal commenters a feeling of community and importance will encourage more comments.

5. Join the conversation

This one's a no-brainer. Respond to comments on your articles. You took the time to write the piece, so get in there and stand by it! Keep the conversation rolling with questions of your own and address things you may have glossed over in your initial publishing.

Try highlighting author comments so that they stand out a bit. This immediately communicates to readers that the author is paying attention and will most likely respond to their comment if they take the time to write one. The reality is that articles with comments get more comments. Articles without comments have trouble getting initial comments. The difference between 0 comments and a handful can mean everything. Who wants to be the first person to comment on a post? Each new user post offers an entry point for new lines of discussion. Help get the chain reaction going by helping the initial conversation to get started.

6. Email notification on reply

With great power comes great responsibility. If a loyal reader has given you their email address and contributes to your site on a regular basis, the last thing you want to do is lose their trust. You've got their email address but no one wants a "quarterly site update" or "Jan 1st Happy Birthday" email from every website they've ever commented on, right? But what most people would probably be okay with is a notification that their thoughtful comment has just received an equally thoughtful reply thus giving them the chance to respond.

Try Comment Reply Notification for Wordpress if you're looking to add this feature to your blog. You can choose to alert everyone on the thread whenever anyone replies or limit it to personal replies. You could also allow users to choose for themselves with a simple checkbox as they reply. Disqus also offers this feature.
7. Tracking your progress

For many blogs it will be obvious when the influx of new commenters come in, but on larger sites it might be more difficult to track your progress. One simple and universal way to track your progress is to set up a Google Analytics goal associated with a new comment. Here are some instructions on how to do this. You can also easily set up GA event tracking any number of ways using the Raven GA config tool.

Have you found other effective methods of attracting commenters? Try some of the above and leave a comment below!

Oh, and don't forget to "create compelling content" and "have a call to action."


Read more ►
Subscribe to: Comments (Atom)
 

Copyright © The Daily SEO Blog Design by O Pregador | Blogger Theme by Blogger Template de luxo | Powered by Blogger