Where and When Your Keywords Really Matter for Content Marketing and SEO

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By DAVID REICH | Published: OCTOBER 10, 2011

In this post-Panda world, shallow content written for keywords rather than people won’t just leave you with a website no one wants to read but could actually cause a decline in your rankings.  You won’t just see a decline for those pages with poor content but for your entire site!

Proper keyword use will always play an important role in content marketing and SEO. Even though you should no longer be writing for search engines, you obviously still want search engines to rank your content on the first page for your most important search terms.

You want to make it clear to search engines what your content is about and what terms your content deserves to rank highly for in search. And that involves proper use of keywords. Keywords can and should be used strategically, but they should never be overused for SEO.

Let’s explore where and when keywords actually matter for search rankings  and where and when they don’t.

1. Title tags

The single most important on-page SEO factor is the title tag. If you want a page to rank for a specific keyword phrase, make sure that phrase is in the title tag.

Also make sure the page you’re targeting is the most relevant page on your site for that keyword phrase. If that’s the case, including your keyword phrase in the title tag is natural. It benefits your audience by letting them know what information they will find on the page, and it clearly indicates to search engines what your page is about.

Content management systems will often enable you to create title tags that are different than the page or blog post title that’s visible to site visitors. This is particularly easy with WordPress. Certain premium themes, like Genesis and Thesis, have this function built in. You can also download one of many SEO plugins that let you easily adjust the meta data, including the title tags, for all of your posts and pages. The value of this is that you can craft a catchy headline that may be more attractive to readers but with a title tag that’s much more clear and direct for search engines.

2. Description meta tags

Despite a very common misconception, description meta tags do not actually impact rankings anymore. Meta descriptions are what search engines typically (but not always) display in your page’s search results snippet under the title tag, which you can see in the screen shot below.  But just because they don’t impact rankings,  it doesn’t mean they’re not important.

Your description meta tag is essentially your 160-character pitch to entice a web searcher to click on your page instead of the results above or below it in a search. Using keywords in your meta description can be a smart move because it can make your page look more attractive to click on in a search. The key is to be completely natural and convey precisely what searchers can expect to find if they click on your page.

3. Page and post URL “slugs”

The value of a keyword-rich domain name vs. a branded domain name when you’re building a new site is a discussion for a different day. But it is definitely a good idea to include keywords in the URL slug of a new page or post you’re creating. Including keywords in a URL slug can help your page stand out in the search engine results pages (SERPs), as you’ll see in the screen shot below, and provide another small signal to searchers and search engines of what the page is about.

You can see in the screen shot that Bing will highlight the snippet text in your title tag, meta description, and URL that correspond with a search query. Proper keyword use in these three places can make your search results pop. This applies to all major search engines, not just Bing.

Notice how "content marketing," "content," and "marketing" are highlighted in the title tag, description, and URL of these search result snippets.

4. Content and keyword density

Integrating your specific target keywords within the content of a page can certainly have an impact on rankings because it’s a very strong signal that tells search engines what that page is about. However, there’s a very fine line between acceptable use and unacceptable overuse of keywords.

So what’s the correct keyword density for a page? I’ve heard experts say all kinds of things: Insert your keyword phrase once every hundred words, once every paragraph or three times on the page.

Answers like these are inherently wrong because they indicate a flawed thought process: Thinking about keyword density means you’re not thinking about your audience.

Never get caught up in how many times you’ve used your exact target phrase. If your keywords are relevant and aligned with that page’s content, as they should be, then they will naturally fall into place.

Google is also sophisticated enough to recognize and connect different variations of phrases as well as synonyms, so there’s really no need to force anything.

5. Keywords meta tag

Since 2009, Google has openly stated that the keywords meta tag does not impact rankings.It’s just too easy to spam. Don’t waste your time thinking about the keywords tag as a ranking factor.

6. Internal links & anchor text

The clickable text of a link is known as “anchor text.” Anchor text can be a very important signal to search engines of what that linked page is about. One of the most crucial ways to use keywords across your website is in the anchor text of internal links from one page on your site to another. By using keyword-rich anchor text in your internal links, you’re telling search engines what those pages are about, and potentially, what terms those pages should rank for.

Be sure to never internally link your target keyword for one page to another page on your own site. This can contribute to what’s known as keyword cannibalization. You want to make it very clear to search engines which page you want to rank for which keyword. You don’t want to have multiple pages on your site competing to rank for the same keywords.

When you produce a lot of content — as with a blog for example — you’re naturally going to repeat your primary keywords across many different pages of your site. That’s OK. Just mind your anchor text and make sure you’re only linking a specific keyword phrase to the page you want to rank for that term.

These aren’t necessarily the only places on a site where keywords matter, but they are the places where I constantly see both missed opportunities holding back rankings and keyword abuses that can hurt rankings.

Have I missed any areas where you strategically integrate keywords? Have you noticed any sites misusing keywords? We’d love to read your comments.

How do You Measure the Performance of Your Marketing Effort?

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by CHRIS BROWN on MONDAY, OCTOBER 10, 2011

Marketing, without measurement, can be just another expense. With measurement however, it can become one of your best investments. 

How do you measure your marketing? Do you use KPIs – Key Performance Indicators - to help you measure results of tactics, strategy and sales?

For example:

• Just publishing a newsletter (tactic) is important. If you don’t execute your marketing, you don’t even get into the funnel.
• But making sure you distribute the newsletter to the exact people you need to influence and include the correct call to action (strategy) is very important.
• And then measuring who actually took the steps you set up to add customers (sales) can help you tweek the content or the list or the offer to help you improve your sales numbers.

Beyond measuring visitor site traffic, you might be measuring a variety of indicators year-over-year, including:
The total number of…

• fans/members
• positive customer mentions
• mentions
• page views
• contributors
• back links

Or  increased…

• Conversion
• Revenue
• Average order value

And decreased…

• Returns
• Call volume
• Postage costs

I find that looking at the KPIs in a flow chart like this one from E commerce KPI’s from Smart Insights can be helpful:

What KPIs do you regularly track?  Do you monitor them quarterly or once a year?

What I Learned From Steve Jobs

October 08, 2011

by: Guy Kawasaki

Many people have explained what one can learn from Steve Jobs. But few, if any, of these people have been inside the tent and experienced first hand what it was like to work with him. I don’t want any lessons to be lost or forgotten, so here is my list of the top twelve lessons that I learned from Steve Jobs.

1. Experts are clueless.
   Experts—journalists, analysts, consultants, bankers, and gurus can’t “do” so they “advise.” They can tell you what is wrong with your product, but they cannot make a great one. They can tell you how to sell something, but they cannot sell it themselves. They can tell you how to create great teams, but they only manage a secretary. For example, the experts told us that the two biggest shortcomings of Macintosh in the mid 1980s was the lack of a daisy-wheel printer driver and Lotus 1-2-3; another advice gem from the experts was to buy Compaq. Hear what experts say, but don’t always listen to them.
2. Customers cannot tell you what they need.
   “Apple market research” is an oxymoron. The Apple focus group was the right hemisphere of Steve’s brain talking to the left one. If you ask customers what they want, they will tell you, “Better, faster, and cheaper”—that is, better sameness, not revolutionary change. They can only describe their desires in terms of what they are already using—around the time of the introduction of Macintosh, all people said they wanted was better, faster, and cheaper MS-DOS machines. The richest vein for tech startups is creating the product that you want to use—that’s what Steve and Woz did.
3. Jump to the next curve.
   Big wins happen when you go beyond better sameness. The best daisy-wheel printer companies were introducing new fonts in more sizes. Apple introduced the next curve: laser printing. Think of ice harvesters, ice factories, and refrigerator companies. Ice 1.0, 2.0, and 3.0. Are you still harvesting ice during the winter from a frozen pond?
4. The biggest challenges beget best work.
   I lived in fear that Steve would tell me that I, or my work, was crap. In public. This fear was a big challenge. Competing with IBM and then Microsoft was a big challenge. Changing the world was a big challenge. I, and Apple employees before me and after me, did their best work because we had to do our best work to meet the big challenges.
5. Design counts.
   Steve drove people nuts with his design demands—some shades of black weren’t black enough. Mere mortals think that black is black, and that a trash can is a trash can. Steve was such a perfectionist—a perfectionist Beyond: Thunderdome—and lo and behold he was right: some people care about design and many people at least sense it. Maybe not everyone, but the important ones.
6. You can’t go wrong with big graphics and big fonts.
   Take a look at Steve’s slides. The font is sixty points. There’s usually one big screenshot or graphic. Look at other tech speaker’s slides—even the ones who have seen Steve in action. The font is eight points, and there are no graphics. So many people say that Steve was the world’s greatest product introduction guy..don’t you wonder why more people don’t copy his style?
7. Changing your mind is a sign of intelligence.
   When Apple first shipped the iPhone there was no such thing as apps. Apps, Steve decreed, were a bad thing because you never know what they could be doing to your phone. Safari web apps were the way to go until six months later when Steve decided, or someone convinced Steve, that apps were the way to go—but of course. Duh! Apple came a long way in a short time from Safari web apps to “there’s an app for that.”
8. “Value” is different from “price.”
   Woe unto you if you decide everything based on price. Even more woe unto you if you compete solely on price. Price is not all that matters—what is important, at least to some people, is value. And value takes into account training, support, and the intrinsic joy of using the best tool that’s made. It’s pretty safe to say that no one buys Apple products because of their low price.
9. A players hire A+ players.
   Actually, Steve believed that A players hire A players—that is people who are as good as they are. I refined this slightly—my theory is that A players hire people even better than themselves. It’s clear, though, that B players hire C players so they can feel superior to them, and C players hire D players. If you start hiring B players, expect what Steve called “the bozo explosion” to happen in your organization.
10. Real CEOs demo.
    Steve Jobs could demo a pod, pad, phone, and Mac two to three times a year with millions of people watching, why is it that many CEOs call upon their vice-president of engineering to do a product demo? Maybe it’s to show that there’s a team effort in play. Maybe. It’s more likely that the CEO doesn’t understand what his/her company is making well enough to explain it. How pathetic is that?
11. Real CEOs ship.
    For all his perfectionism, Steve could ship. Maybe the product wasn’t perfect every time, but it was almost always great enough to go. The lesson is that Steve wasn’t tinkering for the sake of tinkering—he had a goal: shipping and achieving worldwide domination of existing markets or creation of new markets. Apple is an engineering-centric company, not a research-centric one. Which would you rather be: Apple or Xerox PARC?
12. Marketing boils down to providing unique value. Think of a 2 x 2 matrix. The vertical axis measures how your product differs from the competition. The horizontal axis measures the value of your product. Bottom right: valuable but not unique—you’ll have to compete on price. Top left: unique but not valuable—you’ll own a market that doesn’t exist. Bottom left: not unique and not value—you’re a bozo. Top right: unique and valuable—this is where you make margin, money, and history. For example, the iPod was unique and valuable because it was the only way to legally, inexpensively, and easily download music from the six biggest record labels.

Bonus: Some things need to be believed to be seen. When you are jumping curves, defying/ignoring the experts, facing off against big challenges, obsessing about design, and focusing on unique value, you will need to convince people to believe in what you are doing in order to see your efforts come to fruition. People needed to believe in Macintosh to see it become real. Ditto for iPod, iPhone, and iPad. Not everyone will believe—that’s okay. But the starting point of changing the world is changing a few minds. This is the greatest lesson of all that I learned from Steve.

Read more: http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2011/10/what-i-learned-from-steve-jobs.html#ixzz1aOgkpzLv

Hearing voices: CS Forum 2011

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by Melissa Rach on October 6th, 2011

Back in early September, a few members of the Brain Traffic team trekked over to London for CS Forum. A month later, we’re still talking about how much we enjoyed the conference. Geeking out about content strategy in shadows of Big Ben? Yes, please, and thank you.

Photo by Rhiannan Walton

EMERGING VOICES

One of my favorite parts of attending any content strategy conference is hearing from new and emerging voices in the content strategy community. And, CS Forum’s program was jam-packed with `em.

You can check out the entire speaker lineup, but here are a handful people we think you should know about (alphabetically by first name, becausealphabetizing is cool):

Daniel Eizans (@danieleizans): Contextually relevant content strategies

This talk introduced a series of smart, detailed ways of understanding — and meeting — the needs of our users based on the contexts (personal, situational, behavioral, etc.) in which they encounter content. We'll likely see a lot more discussion of user contexts and content strategy in the near future, not to mention a lot more bright ideas from Dan.

Diana Railton (@dianarailton): How content strategy supports communications strategy

Diana's talk created a bridge between the practice of content strategy with the closely related world of communications strategy. She was both pragmatic and frank about the challenges both practices face as more communication goes online. So sharp and so good.

Irene Walker (@1rene): Let’s talk accessibility

By introducing us to several friends with disabilities and their online content challenges, Irene made an extremely compelling case for spending more time on accessibility. Not because we’re legally obligated, but because it’s the right thing to do. (Incidentally, Irene works for August Sun, the company that will host the 2012 CS Forum in Cape Town. Yes, South Africa. Right on.)

Lise Janody (@lisejanody): Balance & compromise (Weaving localization into a content strategy)

Content localization is a big, big topic. Some consider it too big for a short conference session, but not Lise Janody. She tackled it head on. In a mere 40 minutes, Lise provided a valuable introduction to localization, globalization, translation, and internationalization. Phew. All that smarts and she lives in France, too. Not fair.

Richard Ingram (@richardjingram): How did we all get here?

Ok, this is cheating. Many of you already know Richard from his brilliantinfographics about content strategy. But this was his first-ever talk, and it was a winner. He presented the results of his survey on the varied backgrounds of content strategists. And—you guessed it—he made it all into another interesting infographic. Mmmmm… juicy data.

OH, AND WE TALKED, TOO

I suppose, we should also let you know that the Brain Traffic team also did some talking. Kristina Halvorson moderated the closing panel, and two of us did presentations, which you can see here:

Erin Kissane (@Kissane): Making sense of the (new) content landscape

Melissa Rach (@melissarach): CS Methodology: A DIY project

Thanks to conference hosts Jonathan Kahn (@lucidplot), Randall Snare (@randallsnare), and Destry Wion (@wion) for a lovely time.

Did you attend the forum? What were your stand-out moments?

13 Content Options to Support Purchases

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By HEIDI COHEN | Published: OCTOBER 5, 2011

Is your marketing organization on the fence about using content marketing? If so, consider recent research from Cone Inc., which shows that across formats consumers are increasingly going online to find content that will help them make purchase decisions.

While Cone Inc.’s research highlights that consumers continue to turn to ratings and reviews and that blogs have gained customer interest, the reality is content marketing can support every step of the purchase process. If you don’t provide useful content, your competitors, other consumers, and the public will.

To support the purchase process effectively with relevant content, at the very least, you need to:

• Include a relevant call-to-action
• Include a unique promotion code to be able to track results.
• Socialize your content marketing

Below are thirteen online options you should also consider beyond these essentials.

Your Website

Consider content-rich product information, company and executive backgrounds, location (with maps), and customer-driven FAQs.

Photographs

Here’s where your offering can strut its stuff. Remember, consumers want to see your product in action, as well as what they’re getting. Don’t forget to associate relevant text for searchability.

Videos

Increasingly, videos are being integrated into product content offerings to help online shoppers get a 360-degree view. Develop how-to videos to show prospects the basics (and even the not-so-basic ways) of using your product). Don’t overlook video’s storytelling or entertainment value, which companies like  Will It Blend (aka Blendtec), Orabrush, and Mentos versus Coke Experimentdiscovered and leveraged to great success.

Presentations / White papers

Presentations and white papers have long been at the core of B2B content marketing offerings. To increase their allure, include relevant, usable information wrapped in attractive graphic design. This content shouldn’t be one-sided or purely promotional. Otherwise, it won’t break through today’s information overload. Increase your reach by placing these materials on slide sharing sites that have broad visitor traffic.

Ratings and reviews

While Amazon’s the granddaddy of customer reviews, prospects are increasingly checking what others have to say about your offering through dozens of major and niche sites. Further, Cone Inc. found that prospects look for both positive and negative information. Remember, if you decide that you need to edit your comments on your own site, consumers will turn to third-party sites likeTripAdvisor and your competitors to get unbiased reviews.

Testimonials

Direct marketers have used this form of customer reviews for years: “Don’t take our word for it; here’s what your peers say.” The benefit is that these customer comments can be hand-selected to highlight your products’ best features.

Blogs

While blogs should be at the center of your content marketing offerings, make sure you create blog content that can support your products with information that helps consumers use them. The goal is to provide non-promotional information, such as recipes, patterns, and helpful hints.

Discussion boards

Use product forums to answer customer questions before and after they purchase. Furthermore, get help from other consumers and the public who can answer your prospects’ questions based on their experience.

eBooks

Provide useful targeted information for public consumption that’s sexy by compiling it into an eBook. Increase your reach with strong design and social sharing. While widely used by B2B marketers, don’t underestimate their value for B2C and not-for-profit use. You can also consider creating an eBook to supplement your product manuals or to provide public information for not-for-profit (NFP) efforts.

Podcasts (audio content)

Does your product lend itself to the spoken word? If so, why not create a podcast? Increasingly, investor relations professionals are using this content format. Think outside the box, especially for kids who love to hear stories or for visually impaired audiences.

Email newsletters

While email is a core element of many marketers’ plans, you can offer a tailored newsletter that focuses on giving prospects and customers fun and useable content. Basically, you act like a sponsor of your own content and link to relevant products where appropriate. This works for all types of marketers.

Articles on third-party sites

Support your offerings by writing about product-relevant topics and submitting these articles to other media entities. B2B marketers have traditionally submitted content to trade publications; B2C and not-for-profits can also use this tactic effectively by writing about topics that address their prospects’ challenges.

Press releases

The beauty of press releases is that their keyword-rich content can attract broad audiences. To be effective as content, don’t think in terms of the traditional, must-announce-internal-or-regulatory-information releases. Go for intriguing approaches to your product.

Regardless of your target market, consider how you can provide content that your audience wants and is seeking to help them decide to purchase your products. And as I mentioned earlier, make sure you track results from each form of content to determine what’s most effective for your offering.

Is there any other content marketing format that you’d add to this list? If so, please include it in the comment section below.