#because maybe i was too lazy to properly format my sources last time and just copy pasted papers in there

[malpractice-morale]

not my assignment currently looking like a james somerton script

[remade-graystudie]

how i got a 29 the first time i took the act

i just wanted to give you guys some tips! not all of these work for everyone though so keep that in mind. also, i am going to take the test again in april for those interestedin knowing

to preface: i took the test while pretty sick and it was the morning after the opening night for a Christmas dinner i do each year, so i got maybe 6 hours of sleep. not the best conditions

my scores

composite score of 29

english score of 31

mathematics score of 26

reading score of 31

science score of 29

science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) score of 28

understanding complex texts of "above proficient"

progress toward career readiness of "progress toward gold level NCRC"

some general tips

choose a test center close to you. you will not want to wake up for the test. you will not want to drive there. it doesnt matter if youre unfamiliar with the place, people will be there to help you. but bring your own pencils and an eraser, they probably wont help you with those.

try to get as much sleep as possible. i didnt get much so to force myself awake i took a cold shower, but no caffeine because i feared crashing.

my breakfast that day was just some poptarts while i drove to the testing center, but i started to get hungry during the break. for the next test, im going to plan better and eat some cereal or toast.

take advantage of all leftover time. for me this meant going back to the questions i was super unsure of and making sure im satisfied with my answer choice as well as making sure all bubbles on my answer sheet were filled in enough. it also meant taking 5 minute naps where i drooled on the test booklet a little. oops?

use your break wisely. the testing center i was at had vending machines so i borrow a dollar from my friend and ate some m&m's as a pick me up. i also put a bunch of cough drops in my jacket pocket. after i did this in the span of like 3 minutes i went back to my room and took a nap.

take advantage of the fact that everything is multiple choice (except the essay portion, obviously) because it reallycomes in handy.

i didnt really struggle with nerves because i went into the test with the mindset "i get what i get". i had done what i felt was necessary to prepare and i knew this wouldnt be my last time. realistically, my act or sat score could be the thing that keeps me from entering my dream college (a school with a 7% admission rate and average act score of 34) but i am happy with my other choices of colleges. i have done all that i can do (which in this case was like.. 3 days of studying).

my biggest overall tip: know what the test will be like. know the order of the tests, the number of questions, and the time limits. this will leave no surprises. i was really glad i did this because i always knew what was coming.

tips for individual portions

english portion

75 multiple choice questions with four possible answers in 45 minutes.

dont read the entirety of the passage! read the first paragraph and the last paragraph before you read the questions then for each question skim for the info you need to properly answer the question. this allows you to spend more time with each question and to focus only on whats necessary.

brush up on word groups like there/their/they're, it's/its, and two/too/to. a lot of these questions are about following grammatical rules.

math portion

60 multiple choice questions with five possible answers in 60 minutes.

do what you know first. i almost ran out of time because i couldnt remember some things and spent too long on them so when i got to questions i knew at the end i was rushing and panicking and probably got some wrong.

if youre not sure how to do a problem, guess and check to the best of your abilities. guess and check works wonders.

reading portion

40 multiple choice questions with four possible answers in 35 minutes.

tbh i thought this was really similar to the english part so similar tips. but if the passage is on the short side, just read the whole thing.

science portion

40 multiple choice questions with four possible answers in 35 minutes.

real talk, i thought i bombed this portion like i walked out thinkin it was the reason id do so badly.

do NOT treat this like the english and reading portions! read the entirety of everything! redraw, rewrite, and rename things if you need to!

this part really focuses on graph interpretation and they will try to screw you over so hard with names of things. make sure you know how to interpret graphs well.

this was the only section where i rechecked every single answer. i was so used to the sat that i didnt know how to handle a science portion. it freaked me out.

essay portion

1 essay based on a promot in 40 minutes.

i didnt actually take this part because the only college on my list that says anything about it just recommends it and that school happens is my safety college. if youre really confident it will help your composite score, then take it. i chose not to mainly because im lazy and i didnt want to take the risk of it hurting my score even though i thought it could help since i write pretty strong essays, even under time constraints like id experience on the test.

some final tips

the act company sells a book. buy the book. its genuinely super helpful and im so glad i chose to buy it. i know some people use ones from outside sources, but i dont trust those as much. the official book is actually where i got a lot of my tips from.

take the test multiple times. i took the test in december because i knew i was unfamiliar with the formatting and wanted to have a basis for comparing my april score too. if i still am not happy with my april score, i plan on retaking it during the summer.

pay the extra $20 dollars to get your answers sent to you. it is quite literally the easiest and fastest way to see what you need to focus and improve on.

if you know youre taking the test, sign up as soon as possible. at the very least, sign up before youd have to pay the late fee.

dont add your picture until its like almost the last day. im the kind of person who changes uo my appearance often, specifically my hair color. if i uploaded a picture for the april date now, id be blonde in the picture even though ill probably have brown hair when i take the test.

a reminder

dont peace your self worth on this test. could it impact what college you go to? sure. but whether or not you did student council could too. im very proud of my score, but its not my end all be all. im more proud of the way i fold clothes or how organized my closet is than my act score.

good luck on all your tests everyone ❤️💕

[vanesastudies]

Academics

In terms of difficulty, high school is a step up from elementary school, but in my opinion, not that harder. Show up to class, take down notes, and do homework (you don’t necessarily have to finish it) and you should do fine. A lot of people are incredibly lazy in high school. Just put in some effort and you will get good grades.

You won’t always have a well-structured class with a good teacher and resources. Adapt around it using the Internet and other resources given to you.

English Class: You’re going to have to take this all four years, so you should get used to writing essays and analyzing literature. If you’re applying to a university in Canada, you will need grade 12 English and it will always count toward your average. Whether you love it or hate it, do your best in the class, because you can’t get away with being lazy. Here are some links that you may find useful:

Use proper grammar.

Master the five-paragraph essay.

Learn how to analyze literature.

SparkNotes is a lifesaver for literature. Do not rely on it too much since your teacher is likely going to know it exists. It’s very useful, especially with analyzing Shakespeare.

Purdue OWL is an amazing writing resource that you can use all throughout your academic years. It teaches you how to write in different formats, notoriously MLA format.

University of Toronto writing advice explains every writing concept you would need academically.

Science Class: Read your textbook. Draw out diagrams (even if they’re ugly-looking), because a lot of science is visual. And do practice questions from the textbook. If you’re in a good class, your homework will be enough studying, and all you should be doing the day before a test is reviewing concepts. This class is fun so enjoy it.

List of science resources

Math Class: Do. Your. Homework. Your homework should consist of numerous practice questions. Do as much as you can. The key to being good at math is practice. 

MathIsFun explains math concepts.

Master algebra. A good foundation in algebra is necessary to do well in math. 

My rule of thumb: I spend at maximum of 15 - 20 minutes on a math problem. If I don’t get it, I save it as a question for class or my peers. Don’t spend hours on a single math problem.

Geography & History: You will be taking grade 9 geography and grade 10 history. There is a lot of memorization in these classes, so learn how to memorize. 

Religion Class: Grade 9, 10, and 12 religion is easy, but don’t slack off because of it. They can be very easy marks and average-boosters. Grade 11 religion is world religion, and it will require a lot of memorization.

Focus on what the teacher wants. Unlike elementary school, high school tests and assignments are stricter. Check the list of everything required in the assignment and do it well. They will often give you a rubric or outline. Use it as your bible.   

Learn how to research and cite. This will be more relevant as years in high school go by and prepare you for university. You want to know how to recognize a source is reliable, not plagiarize it, and cite it (both in-text and as a list of references). 

How to cite using MLA format

BibMe creates citations for you

How to paraphrase

Never plagiarize. There are no shortcuts to learning. In the short-term, you might not get caught and get high grades, but you won’t know the information properly. It’s better to get an 80 trying your best than a 100 plagiarizing. Don’t ever cheat on tests, either. You may, however, study in groups, look at other peoples’ homework, look at previous years’ work, etc. for help. In the end, you’re being tested on your knowledge, and it will show in your future career. 

Learn how to memorize. A lot of your high school classes are going to entail memorization. You should first and foremost understand the concept/idea, and then you should memorize information that you will regurgitate on tests.

Memory tips and techniques

Advanced memorization techniques

Read. Read something that may not necessarily be related to your classes. Take out books from the library or read things online about things you’re interested in. You will be more well-rounded and sane because of it. Try to build up your vocabulary.

Basically, learn how to study now. Build your study skills here and they will come in handy when it comes to university. 

Exams

Exams are a review of everything you’ve learned in the class. If you make a small review for each unit/section of the class, then all you have to do is put those reviews together and study from that. (You could always study everything at the last minute, but I recommend you try not to do that.)

Your teacher may give you an exam review outline. Create a study guide based off of it. Answer the practice questions, define all of the terms you need to know, etc. and study off of it before the exam.

Get good sleep and eat breakfast before an exam. I cannot emphasize how important it is that you’re well-rested. You want to do your best, so you should be at your best.

You will do fine! If you do consistent work for a class all throughout the school year, studying for an exam should be easy, especially if your teacher gives you a review.

Organization & Time Management

School Supplies:

Have a binder for each class. Put the course outline in the front. Keep stacks of lined paper in each binder. Keep binders in your locker and pull them out for classes.

Consider getting binder dividers for each unit for each binder. Hole punch unit tests and put them at the end of every section for exam review.

Put dates and titles on all your notes. Keep your binder organized chronologically.

Have a separate folder to hold loose papers and put them away appropriately. 

Get a separate graph paper notebook for math class for homework/practice.

Write in pencil so you can erase mistakes.

Highlighters are great to emphasize certain information. Use them wisely.

Get a good scientific calculator. You can use it all throughout high school if you take good care of it.

Use sticky notes in your textbooks and in your class notes. Use it to write down mnemonics, notes to yourself, extra information, highlight important information, bookmark pages, etc.

Get a hole punch and stapler for organization.

Use your agenda! Write down homework at the end of each class and make a habit of looking at it whenever you need to do homework.

You should spend no more than 1 hour per class on homework every day, though maybe some more time is necessary for math. Yes, high school takes up a lot of work. Try to finish your homework in given free time during classes so you have more time after school for clubs, hobbies, etc.

Don’t procrastinate. Don’t put off what could be done now, because doing everything last minute often sucks. 

Figure out why you’re procrastinating. Is the work hard? Or is the work boring? Address the problem appropriately.

If it’s hard, try to get help for it, whether the Internet, a teacher, or a friend.

Is it boring? Find something you find interesting in it, or work on it in chunks (ex. 30 minutes, 15 minutes) and every so often take a break in between so it’s manageable. 

Sometimes you have to shoulder through work. Visualize being finished with it and finish it! This is a highly important high school skill and I suggest you master it quickly. 

Look at the end goal. In the short term, it might be a high grade on the test. In the long term, it might be getting into a good university. Try to stay motivated.

Social Life

High school isn’t like the movies. There are no cliques, no jocks and nerds. Just friend groups. Try to find a group that you can relate to but won’t encourage bad habits (not studying, skipping class, smoking, underage drinking, illicit drugs, etc.) or form your own.

Be nice to everyone. Even if they hate you. It’s really not worth it to make enemies. If someone asks you for help, give it to them. If someone bullies you, ignore them. High school drama is meaningless.

Get involved. This is the most cliche and yet the most important piece of social advice I can give you. You are guaranteed a friend group just by joining a club. And you’ll have something to do. 

Join a club that gives you volunteer hours and get those done as soon as you possibly can. You don’t want to end up in senior year, applying for universities, trying to get good grades, and having to volunteer on top of that. Try to get all 40 hours during 9th grade, and continue to get them because volunteering is fun and gives you something to put on your resume. 

Go to events. They may cost a small fee but it’s worth it. Peoples’ best memories in high school are not the long hours of classes; it’s what they did. Enjoy it here. 

If you don’t like high school, that’s okay. A lot of people don’t. It’s 4 years of your life (5 if you take a “gap year”) and it goes by quickly. Keep the big picture in mind and push through it. 

Health

Sleep! You will be waking up early five days a week so get to bed at a decent time. I suggest no later than midnight or 1 am. Sleep deprivation wrecks havoc on your health. 

Eat well. Try to sneak in breakfast in the mornings (even if it’s just an apple or a granola bar) and pack a good lunch. Some teachers may let you snack in classes so pack food. You do not want to go hungry. It’s hard to concentrate in class when you’re tired and hungry.

High school is one of the most stressful times of your adolescence. You will be pressured by your parents, your teachers, your relatives, and sometimes it will feel like too much. You are still growing and still figuring out who you are. It’s an easy time for mental health issues, such as anxiety and depression, to arise. You will be pushed to your limits sometimes. It’s a good thing, but don’t ever let the stress get to you. Your cousin was sent to the hospital several times because of the stress. It is not worth it. Your health is more important than anything else.

Don’t be afraid to talk to your parents about issues. 

If you really don’t want to, there should be a school child and youth worker, or a guidance counselor, or some sort of trusted adult in your life.

Friends are lifesavers and often a main source of support. Find a good friend or two that you can trust with your secrets. 

[marie85marketing]

The Wise Content Marketer’s Guide to Sensible SEO

Search engine optimization — SEO — is one of those “you love it or you hate it” topics.

Some get a charge out of the challenge of keeping up with those wily engineers at Google.

Others would rather eat a bug than try to figure out what “headless crawling” means and which redirect is the right one to pick in months that end in R.

I have to confess, I’m in the bug-eating camp on this one.

Fortunately, although technical SEO is still important for some sites, there’s a crazy-powerful optimization technique that people like me can get really good at.

Yes, it’s content. (You already knew that, because you’re smart.) Yes, it has to be good content. And yes, I’m going to talk about what, specifically, “good” means.

But first, I’m going to talk about my most important search optimization rule.

The great rule of SEO

My first and primary rule, when thinking about search engines, is never to do anything for the sake of SEO that screws up the experience for the audience.

That cuts out some downright dumb behavior, like overstuffing your content with keywords.

But it also helps you evaluate new advice that comes along. If it makes your site less useable, if it makes your message less effective, or if it alienates or confuses your audience … you should probably skip it.

Here are nine SEO recommendations that also work to make your site experience better for the human beings who read your content, listen to your podcasts, and actually pay for your products and services.

#1: Answer actual audience questions

Want lots and lots of people to visit your site, and stick around once they find you? Answer their pressing questions, and you’ll get your wish.

People fire up a search engine because they have unanswered questions. If you’re smart and knowledgeable about your topic, you can help with that.

Tutorial content is wonderful, but also think about questions like:

Why is [the thing] so hard to get started?

How competitive is [the thing]?

How can I get motivated to do more of [the thing]?

Is there a community of people who want to talk about [the thing]?

Where can I share my own stories about [the thing] and read other people’s?

#2: Use the language they use

Hand in hand with answering real audience questions is using your audience’s language.

That brings us to our friend keyword research. (Check out Beth’s post tomorrow for more on that.)

It’s too bad that some people still think keyword research means looking up a bunch of word salad that makes sense to rooms of computers in Silicon Valley.

Keyword research means figuring out the language that real human beings enter into search engines to find your stuff.

There are great tools out there for finding those turns of phrase. You can also add in some smart social media listening and pay attention to how people talk on the web about your topic. (This is also a good way to find more of those “problems people care about” I talked about in the last point.)

By the way, you don’t have to feel chained to a narrow set of word combinations that you found with your keyword research tool. Use the keyword phrases you find, absolutely, but don’t use them so much that it gets weird. You don’t have to do an in-depth study of latent semantic indexing — just use synonyms.

(Kind of like a real writer does. Golly.)

Use metaphors and analogies. Use a few big or unusual words (if they’re natural to your voice). Flesh out your list of keywords with all of the fascinating and creative things that writers and artists do.

#3: Cover topics comprehensively

Content and SEO experts love to write articles about precisely how long your content should be. Over the years, the recommendations have gone up, and then down, sideways, and any other direction you might think of.

My advice: your content should be as long as necessary to make your point.

Some ideas can be expressed quickly, with punchy, interesting little posts.

Some ideas need more time to develop fully. They deserve a longer format or a content series that gets published over time. You could even dedicate specific months to covering a subject in more depth, like we’re doing this year on Copyblogger. (Have you noticed? Three guesses what March’s topic theme is …)

A strong series can be repurposed into ebooks (or a whole ebook library, once you have a solid archive), podcasts, infographics, SlideShares, videos, and premium products like courses.

Stop falling for the myth of the “goldfish attention span.” Twenty-first-century audiences have plenty of attention for the things they care about, as long as you make the content easy to consume. Which brings us to …

#4: Create a user-friendly experience

It doesn’t matter how brilliant your content is — if it’s published in walls of tiny gray type, without subheads or line breaks, most users will skip it.

It’s actually really simple to take a strong piece of writing and make it much more accessible by formatting it well.

Make sure everything on your site is easy to read, watch, or listen to. Give everything a clear call to action, so people know what to do next. And establish clear paths to the outcomes your users want … using smart content marketing strategy to present useful options at every point along the way.

While we’re on the subject, if your site looks like it was published in 2003, you need a makeover. Immediately. Premium WordPress themes are a massive bargain for the design expertise (and clean back-end code) they give you in a turnkey package.

Also, users and search engines share a hatred of hacked websites. Use secure tools, including reputable themes and quality hosting, and a good monitoring service like Sucuri to make sure nothing funky is going on.

#5: Write about the whole picture

Covering your topic comprehensively matters, but it’s not just about going deep.

There’s also a real benefit to looking around and going wide with your content.

What’s the context for your topic? Who else is publishing about it? What are the trends? What’s changing? How is the larger environment shaping what’s going on? Who do you agree with? Who do you disagree with?

What do people need to know before they dive into your thing? Where do they start? Where do they go next?

If you write about social media marketing, write about people who have given up on it. Write about people who haven’t started yet. Write about how the larger culture and worldview are changing social media … and how social media is changing the world.

Every topic takes place in a larger context. If that context interests your audience, it should be part of your content mix.

#6: Cultivate your community of topic experts

Link-building is one of the most important topics in SEO.

Here’s a secret:

Link-building is community-building.

Even if your competitors aren’t into the whole “co-opetition” idea, there’s a larger community that cares about what you do.

My friend Jim is an orthopedic surgeon who creates YouTube content about surgical procedures. Other surgeons might (but probably won’t) link to him, because he’s a true competitor — you only get your knee operated on once. (We hope.)

But runners would link to him. Skiers would, too. And sites about staying athletic as you age.

Think about the community of web publishers who have the audience you want. Develop relationships with them. Support each other.

This isn’t, of course, about spamming people you don’t know and begging them for links. It’s about making yourself a valued participant in a larger ecosystem.

One terrific way to build amazing connections (and the links that go with them) is to publish guest content on excellent sites. Try it in a lazy, cheap way and it’s spam. Put the effort in to craft genuinely excellent material that serves their audience (and invites them to come check you out), and it’s a winning strategy.

#7: Keep things organized

Good technical SEOs know all about creating a logical site structure that’s easy for search engines to parse.

As I may have mentioned, I in no way resemble a good technical SEO. Instead, I rely on the Genesis framework and common-sense tags and categories to keep my site properly organized on the back end.

But it pays to keep yourself organized on the front end as well. That means making sure your navigation makes sense for what your site looks like today, not two years ago. It means you take your most valuable content and get it somewhere people can easily find it. And it means you link to your best content often, so your audience naturally continues to find and benefit from it.

#8: Quit being so damned boring

You can do everything “right” for SEO and still get no traction.

Why? Because no one links to you, no one visits your site, and no one recommends your content — it’s too similar to a thousand other sites. It’s boring.

If your niche is incredibly narrow and no one else can write about it, maybe you can get away with boring. Even then, it’s risky.

Be interesting.

#9: Don’t rely (solely) on SEO

And the final SEO tip?

Don’t try to make the search engines your only source of traffic.

Relying on one source of customers for your business is unacceptably risky.

Relying on a monolithic megacorporation as your one source of customers is insane.

Google doesn’t care about your business. Not even a tiny bit. Not even if you give them a lot of money every month for ads.

Make sure there are lots of different ways that potential customers can find you. Keep your eyes open for new opportunities. A platform that was a dud for you last year might offer a lot of promise today. And keep growing your email list, so if you do have a traffic hiccup, you still have a way to reach your most loyal audience.

So … let’s talk search engines

While search engine optimization shouldn’t be the only way you get traffic, it can be an important way for great people to find your site. So this month, we’ll be talking about smart ways to optimize your site for search … without messing up what you’re doing well.

Where are you on the SEO spectrum? Do you enjoy it, maybe even geek out about it, or are you in the eat-a-bug category? Let us know in the comments.

Image source: Jill Heyer via Unsplash.

The post The Wise Content Marketer’s Guide to Sensible SEO appeared first on Copyblogger.

[hypertagmaster]

The Wise Content Marketer’s Guide to Sensible SEO

Search engine optimization — SEO — is one of those “you love it or you hate it” topics.

Some get a charge out of the challenge of keeping up with those wily engineers at Google.

Others would rather eat a bug than try to figure out what “headless crawling” means and which redirect is the right one to pick in months that end in R.

I have to confess, I’m in the bug-eating camp on this one.

Fortunately, although technical SEO is still important for some sites, there’s a crazy-powerful optimization technique that people like me can get really good at.

Yes, it’s content. (You already knew that, because you’re smart.) Yes, it has to be good content. And yes, I’m going to talk about what, specifically, “good” means.

But first, I’m going to talk about my most important search optimization rule.

The great rule of SEO

My first and primary rule, when thinking about search engines, is never to do anything for the sake of SEO that screws up the experience for the audience.

That cuts out some downright dumb behavior, like overstuffing your content with keywords.

But it also helps you evaluate new advice that comes along. If it makes your site less useable, if it makes your message less effective, or if it alienates or confuses your audience … you should probably skip it.

Here are nine SEO recommendations that also work to make your site experience better for the human beings who read your content, listen to your podcasts, and actually pay for your products and services.

#1: Answer actual audience questions

Want lots and lots of people to visit your site, and stick around once they find you? Answer their pressing questions, and you’ll get your wish.

People fire up a search engine because they have unanswered questions. If you’re smart and knowledgeable about your topic, you can help with that.

Tutorial content is wonderful, but also think about questions like:

Why is [the thing] so hard to get started?

How competitive is [the thing]?

How can I get motivated to do more of [the thing]?

Is there a community of people who want to talk about [the thing]?

Where can I share my own stories about [the thing] and read other people’s?

#2: Use the language they use

Hand in hand with answering real audience questions is using your audience’s language.

That brings us to our friend keyword research. (Check out Beth’s post tomorrow for more on that.)

It’s too bad that some people still think keyword research means looking up a bunch of word salad that makes sense to rooms of computers in Silicon Valley.

Keyword research means figuring out the language that real human beings enter into search engines to find your stuff.

There are great tools out there for finding those turns of phrase. You can also add in some smart social media listening and pay attention to how people talk on the web about your topic. (This is also a good way to find more of those “problems people care about” I talked about in the last point.)

By the way, you don’t have to feel chained to a narrow set of word combinations that you found with your keyword research tool. Use the keyword phrases you find, absolutely, but don’t use them so much that it gets weird. You don’t have to do an in-depth study of latent semantic indexing — just use synonyms.

(Kind of like a real writer does. Golly.)

Use metaphors and analogies. Use a few big or unusual words (if they’re natural to your voice). Flesh out your list of keywords with all of the fascinating and creative things that writers and artists do.

#3: Cover topics comprehensively

Content and SEO experts love to write articles about precisely how long your content should be. Over the years, the recommendations have gone up, and then down, sideways, and any other direction you might think of.

My advice: your content should be as long as necessary to make your point.

Some ideas can be expressed quickly, with punchy, interesting little posts.

Some ideas need more time to develop fully. They deserve a longer format or a content series that gets published over time. You could even dedicate specific months to covering a subject in more depth, like we’re doing this year on Copyblogger. (Have you noticed? Three guesses what March’s topic theme is …)

A strong series can be repurposed into ebooks (or a whole ebook library, once you have a solid archive), podcasts, infographics, SlideShares, videos, and premium products like courses.

Stop falling for the myth of the “goldfish attention span.” Twenty-first-century audiences have plenty of attention for the things they care about, as long as you make the content easy to consume. Which brings us to …

#4: Create a user-friendly experience

It doesn’t matter how brilliant your content is — if it’s published in walls of tiny gray type, without subheads or line breaks, most users will skip it.

It’s actually really simple to take a strong piece of writing and make it much more accessible by formatting it well.

Make sure everything on your site is easy to read, watch, or listen to. Give everything a clear call to action, so people know what to do next. And establish clear paths to the outcomes your users want … using smart content marketing strategy to present useful options at every point along the way.

While we’re on the subject, if your site looks like it was published in 2003, you need a makeover. Immediately. Premium WordPress themes are a massive bargain for the design expertise (and clean back-end code) they give you in a turnkey package.

Also, users and search engines share a hatred of hacked websites. Use secure tools, including reputable themes and quality hosting, and a good monitoring service like Sucuri to make sure nothing funky is going on.

#5: Write about the whole picture

Covering your topic comprehensively matters, but it’s not just about going deep.

There’s also a real benefit to looking around and going wide with your content.

What’s the context for your topic? Who else is publishing about it? What are the trends? What’s changing? How is the larger environment shaping what’s going on? Who do you agree with? Who do you disagree with?

What do people need to know before they dive into your thing? Where do they start? Where do they go next?

If you write about social media marketing, write about people who have given up on it. Write about people who haven’t started yet. Write about how the larger culture and worldview are changing social media … and how social media is changing the world.

Every topic takes place in a larger context. If that context interests your audience, it should be part of your content mix.

#6: Cultivate your community of topic experts

Link-building is one of the most important topics in SEO.

Here’s a secret:

Link-building is community-building.

Even if your competitors aren’t into the whole “co-opetition” idea, there’s a larger community that cares about what you do.

My friend Jim is an orthopedic surgeon who creates YouTube content about surgical procedures. Other surgeons might (but probably won’t) link to him, because he’s a true competitor — you only get your knee operated on once. (We hope.)

But runners would link to him. Skiers would, too. And sites about staying athletic as you age.

Think about the community of web publishers who have the audience you want. Develop relationships with them. Support each other.

This isn’t, of course, about spamming people you don’t know and begging them for links. It’s about making yourself a valued participant in a larger ecosystem.

One terrific way to build amazing connections (and the links that go with them) is to publish guest content on excellent sites. Try it in a lazy, cheap way and it’s spam. Put the effort in to craft genuinely excellent material that serves their audience (and invites them to come check you out), and it’s a winning strategy.

#7: Keep things organized

Good technical SEOs know all about creating a logical site structure that’s easy for search engines to parse.

As I may have mentioned, I in no way resemble a good technical SEO. Instead, I rely on the Genesis framework and common-sense tags and categories to keep my site properly organized on the back end.

But it pays to keep yourself organized on the front end as well. That means making sure your navigation makes sense for what your site looks like today, not two years ago. It means you take your most valuable content and get it somewhere people can easily find it. And it means you link to your best content often, so your audience naturally continues to find and benefit from it.

#8: Quit being so damned boring

You can do everything “right” for SEO and still get no traction.

Why? Because no one links to you, no one visits your site, and no one recommends your content — it’s too similar to a thousand other sites. It’s boring.

If your niche is incredibly narrow and no one else can write about it, maybe you can get away with boring. Even then, it’s risky.

Be interesting.

#9: Don’t rely (solely) on SEO

And the final SEO tip?

Don’t try to make the search engines your only source of traffic.

Relying on one source of customers for your business is unacceptably risky.

Relying on a monolithic megacorporation as your one source of customers is insane.

Google doesn’t care about your business. Not even a tiny bit. Not even if you give them a lot of money every month for ads.

Make sure there are lots of different ways that potential customers can find you. Keep your eyes open for new opportunities. A platform that was a dud for you last year might offer a lot of promise today. And keep growing your email list, so if you do have a traffic hiccup, you still have a way to reach your most loyal audience.

So … let’s talk search engines

While search engine optimization shouldn’t be the only way you get traffic, it can be an important way for great people to find your site. So this month, we’ll be talking about smart ways to optimize your site for search … without messing up what you’re doing well.

Where are you on the SEO spectrum? Do you enjoy it, maybe even geek out about it, or are you in the eat-a-bug category? Let us know in the comments.

Image source: Jill Heyer via Unsplash.

The post The Wise Content Marketer’s Guide to Sensible SEO appeared first on Copyblogger.

via marketing http://ift.tt/2n5QnzJ

[goldieseoservices]

The Wise Content Marketer’s Guide to Sensible SEO

Search engine optimization — SEO — is one of those “you love it or you hate it” topics.

Some get a charge out of the challenge of keeping up with those wily engineers at Google.

Others would rather eat a bug than try to figure out what “headless crawling” means and which redirect is the right one to pick in months that end in R.

I have to confess, I’m in the bug-eating camp on this one.

Fortunately, although technical SEO is still important for some sites, there’s a crazy-powerful optimization technique that people like me can get really good at.

Yes, it’s content. (You already knew that, because you’re smart.) Yes, it has to be good content. And yes, I’m going to talk about what, specifically, “good” means.

But first, I’m going to talk about my most important search optimization rule.

The great rule of SEO

My first and primary rule, when thinking about search engines, is never to do anything for the sake of SEO that screws up the experience for the audience.

That cuts out some downright dumb behavior, like overstuffing your content with keywords.

But it also helps you evaluate new advice that comes along. If it makes your site less useable, if it makes your message less effective, or if it alienates or confuses your audience … you should probably skip it.

Here are nine SEO recommendations that also work to make your site experience better for the human beings who read your content, listen to your podcasts, and actually pay for your products and services.

#1: Answer actual audience questions

Want lots and lots of people to visit your site, and stick around once they find you? Answer their pressing questions, and you’ll get your wish.

People fire up a search engine because they have unanswered questions. If you’re smart and knowledgeable about your topic, you can help with that.

Tutorial content is wonderful, but also think about questions like:

Why is [the thing] so hard to get started?

How competitive is [the thing]?

How can I get motivated to do more of [the thing]?

Is there a community of people who want to talk about [the thing]?

Where can I share my own stories about [the thing] and read other people’s?

#2: Use the language they use

Hand in hand with answering real audience questions is using your audience’s language.

That brings us to our friend keyword research. (Check out Beth’s post tomorrow for more on that.)

It’s too bad that some people still think keyword research means looking up a bunch of word salad that makes sense to rooms of computers in Silicon Valley.

Keyword research means figuring out the language that real human beings enter into search engines to find your stuff.

There are great tools out there for finding those turns of phrase. You can also add in some smart social media listening and pay attention to how people talk on the web about your topic. (This is also a good way to find more of those “problems people care about” I talked about in the last point.)

By the way, you don’t have to feel chained to a narrow set of word combinations that you found with your keyword research tool. Use the keyword phrases you find, absolutely, but don’t use them so much that it gets weird. You don’t have to do an in-depth study of latent semantic indexing — just use synonyms.

(Kind of like a real writer does. Golly.)

Use metaphors and analogies. Use a few big or unusual words (if they’re natural to your voice). Flesh out your list of keywords with all of the fascinating and creative things that writers and artists do.

#3: Cover topics comprehensively

Content and SEO experts love to write articles about precisely how long your content should be. Over the years, the recommendations have gone up, and then down, sideways, and any other direction you might think of.

My advice: your content should be as long as necessary to make your point.

Some ideas can be expressed quickly, with punchy, interesting little posts.

Some ideas need more time to develop fully. They deserve a longer format or a content series that gets published over time. You could even dedicate specific months to covering a subject in more depth, like we’re doing this year on Copyblogger. (Have you noticed? Three guesses what March’s topic theme is …)

A strong series can be repurposed into ebooks (or a whole ebook library, once you have a solid archive), podcasts, infographics, SlideShares, videos, and premium products like courses.

Stop falling for the myth of the “goldfish attention span.” Twenty-first-century audiences have plenty of attention for the things they care about, as long as you make the content easy to consume. Which brings us to …

#4: Create a user-friendly experience

It doesn’t matter how brilliant your content is — if it’s published in walls of tiny gray type, without subheads or line breaks, most users will skip it.

It’s actually really simple to take a strong piece of writing and make it much more accessible by formatting it well.

Make sure everything on your site is easy to read, watch, or listen to. Give everything a clear call to action, so people know what to do next. And establish clear paths to the outcomes your users want … using smart content marketing strategy to present useful options at every point along the way.

While we’re on the subject, if your site looks like it was published in 2003, you need a makeover. Immediately. Premium WordPress themes are a massive bargain for the design expertise (and clean back-end code) they give you in a turnkey package.

Also, users and search engines share a hatred of hacked websites. Use secure tools, including reputable themes and quality hosting, and a good monitoring service like Sucuri to make sure nothing funky is going on.

#5: Write about the whole picture

Covering your topic comprehensively matters, but it’s not just about going deep.

There’s also a real benefit to looking around and going wide with your content.

What’s the context for your topic? Who else is publishing about it? What are the trends? What’s changing? How is the larger environment shaping what’s going on? Who do you agree with? Who do you disagree with?

What do people need to know before they dive into your thing? Where do they start? Where do they go next?

If you write about social media marketing, write about people who have given up on it. Write about people who haven’t started yet. Write about how the larger culture and worldview are changing social media … and how social media is changing the world.

Every topic takes place in a larger context. If that context interests your audience, it should be part of your content mix.

#6: Cultivate your community of topic experts

Link-building is one of the most important topics in SEO.

Here’s a secret:

Link-building is community-building.

Even if your competitors aren’t into the whole “co-opetition” idea, there’s a larger community that cares about what you do.

My friend Jim is an orthopedic surgeon who creates YouTube content about surgical procedures. Other surgeons might (but probably won’t) link to him, because he’s a true competitor — you only get your knee operated on once. (We hope.)

But runners would link to him. Skiers would, too. And sites about staying athletic as you age.

Think about the community of web publishers who have the audience you want. Develop relationships with them. Support each other.

This isn’t, of course, about spamming people you don’t know and begging them for links. It’s about making yourself a valued participant in a larger ecosystem.

One terrific way to build amazing connections (and the links that go with them) is to publish guest content on excellent sites. Try it in a lazy, cheap way and it’s spam. Put the effort in to craft genuinely excellent material that serves their audience (and invites them to come check you out), and it’s a winning strategy.

#7: Keep things organized

Good technical SEOs know all about creating a logical site structure that’s easy for search engines to parse.

As I may have mentioned, I in no way resemble a good technical SEO. Instead, I rely on the Genesis framework and common-sense tags and categories to keep my site properly organized on the back end.

But it pays to keep yourself organized on the front end as well. That means making sure your navigation makes sense for what your site looks like today, not two years ago. It means you take your most valuable content and get it somewhere people can easily find it. And it means you link to your best content often, so your audience naturally continues to find and benefit from it.

#8: Quit being so damned boring

You can do everything “right” for SEO and still get no traction.

Why? Because no one links to you, no one visits your site, and no one recommends your content — it’s too similar to a thousand other sites. It’s boring.

If your niche is incredibly narrow and no one else can write about it, maybe you can get away with boring. Even then, it’s risky.

Be interesting.

#9: Don’t rely (solely) on SEO

And the final SEO tip?

Don’t try to make the search engines your only source of traffic.

Relying on one source of customers for your business is unacceptably risky.

Relying on a monolithic megacorporation as your one source of customers is insane.

Google doesn’t care about your business. Not even a tiny bit. Not even if you give them a lot of money every month for ads.

Make sure there are lots of different ways that potential customers can find you. Keep your eyes open for new opportunities. A platform that was a dud for you last year might offer a lot of promise today. And keep growing your email list, so if you do have a traffic hiccup, you still have a way to reach your most loyal audience.

So … let’s talk search engines

While search engine optimization shouldn’t be the only way you get traffic, it can be an important way for great people to find your site. So this month, we’ll be talking about smart ways to optimize your site for search … without messing up what you’re doing well.

Where are you on the SEO spectrum? Do you enjoy it, maybe even geek out about it, or are you in the eat-a-bug category? Let us know in the comments.

Image source: Jill Heyer via Unsplash.

The post The Wise Content Marketer’s Guide to Sensible SEO appeared first on Copyblogger.

from DIYS http://ift.tt/2lwbSgM

[seo53703]

The Wise Content Marketer’s Guide to Sensible SEO

Search engine optimization — SEO — is one of those “you love it or you hate it” topics.

Some get a charge out of the challenge of keeping up with those wily engineers at Google.

Others would rather eat a bug than try to figure out what “headless crawling” means and which redirect is the right one to pick in months that end in R.

I have to confess, I’m in the bug-eating camp on this one.

Fortunately, although technical SEO is still important for some sites, there’s a crazy-powerful optimization technique that people like me can get really good at.

Yes, it’s content. (You already knew that, because you’re smart.) Yes, it has to be good content. And yes, I’m going to talk about what, specifically, “good” means.

But first, I’m going to talk about my most important search optimization rule.

The great rule of SEO

My first and primary rule, when thinking about search engines, is never to do anything for the sake of SEO that screws up the experience for the audience.

That cuts out some downright dumb behavior, like overstuffing your content with keywords.

But it also helps you evaluate new advice that comes along. If it makes your site less useable, if it makes your message less effective, or if it alienates or confuses your audience … you should probably skip it.

Here are nine SEO recommendations that also work to make your site experience better for the human beings who read your content, listen to your podcasts, and actually pay for your products and services.

#1: Answer actual audience questions

Want lots and lots of people to visit your site, and stick around once they find you? Answer their pressing questions, and you’ll get your wish.

People fire up a search engine because they have unanswered questions. If you’re smart and knowledgeable about your topic, you can help with that.

Tutorial content is wonderful, but also think about questions like:

Why is [the thing] so hard to get started?

How competitive is [the thing]?

How can I get motivated to do more of [the thing]?

Is there a community of people who want to talk about [the thing]?

Where can I share my own stories about [the thing] and read other people’s?

#2: Use the language they use

Hand in hand with answering real audience questions is using your audience’s language.

That brings us to our friend keyword research. (Check out Beth’s post tomorrow for more on that.)

It’s too bad that some people still think keyword research means looking up a bunch of word salad that makes sense to rooms of computers in Silicon Valley.

Keyword research means figuring out the language that real human beings enter into search engines to find your stuff.

There are great tools out there for finding those turns of phrase. You can also add in some smart social media listening and pay attention to how people talk on the web about your topic. (This is also a good way to find more of those “problems people care about” I talked about in the last point.)

By the way, you don’t have to feel chained to a narrow set of word combinations that you found with your keyword research tool. Use the keyword phrases you find, absolutely, but don’t use them so much that it gets weird. You don’t have to do an in-depth study of latent semantic indexing — just use synonyms.

(Kind of like a real writer does. Golly.)

Use metaphors and analogies. Use a few big or unusual words (if they’re natural to your voice). Flesh out your list of keywords with all of the fascinating and creative things that writers and artists do.

#3: Cover topics comprehensively

Content and SEO experts love to write articles about precisely how long your content should be. Over the years, the recommendations have gone up, and then down, sideways, and any other direction you might think of.

My advice: your content should be as long as necessary to make your point.

Some ideas can be expressed quickly, with punchy, interesting little posts.

Some ideas need more time to develop fully. They deserve a longer format or a content series that gets published over time. You could even dedicate specific months to covering a subject in more depth, like we’re doing this year on Copyblogger. (Have you noticed? Three guesses what March’s topic theme is …)

A strong series can be repurposed into ebooks (or a whole ebook library, once you have a solid archive), podcasts, infographics, SlideShares, videos, and premium products like courses.

Stop falling for the myth of the “goldfish attention span.” Twenty-first-century audiences have plenty of attention for the things they care about, as long as you make the content easy to consume. Which brings us to …

#4: Create a user-friendly experience

It doesn’t matter how brilliant your content is — if it’s published in walls of tiny gray type, without subheads or line breaks, most users will skip it.

It’s actually really simple to take a strong piece of writing and make it much more accessible by formatting it well.

Make sure everything on your site is easy to read, watch, or listen to. Give everything a clear call to action, so people know what to do next. And establish clear paths to the outcomes your users want … using smart content marketing strategy to present useful options at every point along the way.

While we’re on the subject, if your site looks like it was published in 2003, you need a makeover. Immediately. Premium WordPress themes are a massive bargain for the design expertise (and clean back-end code) they give you in a turnkey package.

Also, users and search engines share a hatred of hacked websites. Use secure tools, including reputable themes and quality hosting, and a good monitoring service like Sucuri to make sure nothing funky is going on.

#5: Write about the whole picture

Covering your topic comprehensively matters, but it’s not just about going deep.

There’s also a real benefit to looking around and going wide with your content.

What’s the context for your topic? Who else is publishing about it? What are the trends? What’s changing? How is the larger environment shaping what’s going on? Who do you agree with? Who do you disagree with?

What do people need to know before they dive into your thing? Where do they start? Where do they go next?

If you write about social media marketing, write about people who have given up on it. Write about people who haven’t started yet. Write about how the larger culture and worldview are changing social media … and how social media is changing the world.

Every topic takes place in a larger context. If that context interests your audience, it should be part of your content mix.

#6: Cultivate your community of topic experts

Link-building is one of the most important topics in SEO.

Here’s a secret:

Link-building is community-building.

Even if your competitors aren’t into the whole “co-opetition” idea, there’s a larger community that cares about what you do.

My friend Jim is an orthopedic surgeon who creates YouTube content about surgical procedures. Other surgeons might (but probably won’t) link to him, because he’s a true competitor — you only get your knee operated on once. (We hope.)

But runners would link to him. Skiers would, too. And sites about staying athletic as you age.

Think about the community of web publishers who have the audience you want. Develop relationships with them. Support each other.

This isn’t, of course, about spamming people you don’t know and begging them for links. It’s about making yourself a valued participant in a larger ecosystem.

One terrific way to build amazing connections (and the links that go with them) is to publish guest content on excellent sites. Try it in a lazy, cheap way and it’s spam. Put the effort in to craft genuinely excellent material that serves their audience (and invites them to come check you out), and it’s a winning strategy.

#7: Keep things organized

Good technical SEOs know all about creating a logical site structure that’s easy for search engines to parse.

As I may have mentioned, I in no way resemble a good technical SEO. Instead, I rely on the Genesis framework and common-sense tags and categories to keep my site properly organized on the back end.

But it pays to keep yourself organized on the front end as well. That means making sure your navigation makes sense for what your site looks like today, not two years ago. It means you take your most valuable content and get it somewhere people can easily find it. And it means you link to your best content often, so your audience naturally continues to find and benefit from it.

#8: Quit being so damned boring

You can do everything “right” for SEO and still get no traction.

Why? Because no one links to you, no one visits your site, and no one recommends your content — it’s too similar to a thousand other sites. It’s boring.

If your niche is incredibly narrow and no one else can write about it, maybe you can get away with boring. Even then, it’s risky.

Be interesting.

#9: Don’t rely (solely) on SEO

And the final SEO tip?

Don’t try to make the search engines your only source of traffic.

Relying on one source of customers for your business is unacceptably risky.

Relying on a monolithic megacorporation as your one source of customers is insane.

Google doesn’t care about your business. Not even a tiny bit. Not even if you give them a lot of money every month for ads.

Make sure there are lots of different ways that potential customers can find you. Keep your eyes open for new opportunities. A platform that was a dud for you last year might offer a lot of promise today. And keep growing your email list, so if you do have a traffic hiccup, you still have a way to reach your most loyal audience.

So … let’s talk search engines

While search engine optimization shouldn’t be the only way you get traffic, it can be an important way for great people to find your site. So this month, we’ll be talking about smart ways to optimize your site for search … without messing up what you’re doing well.

Where are you on the SEO spectrum? Do you enjoy it, maybe even geek out about it, or are you in the eat-a-bug category? Let us know in the comments.

Image source: Jill Heyer via Unsplash.

The post The Wise Content Marketer’s Guide to Sensible SEO appeared first on Copyblogger.

from DIYS http://ift.tt/2lwbSgM

[seoprovider2110]

The Wise Content Marketer’s Guide to Sensible SEO

Search engine optimization — SEO — is one of those “you love it or you hate it” topics.

Some get a charge out of the challenge of keeping up with those wily engineers at Google.

Others would rather eat a bug than try to figure out what “headless crawling” means and which redirect is the right one to pick in months that end in R.

I have to confess, I’m in the bug-eating camp on this one.

Fortunately, although technical SEO is still important for some sites, there’s a crazy-powerful optimization technique that people like me can get really good at.

Yes, it’s content. (You already knew that, because you’re smart.) Yes, it has to be good content. And yes, I’m going to talk about what, specifically, “good” means.

But first, I’m going to talk about my most important search optimization rule.

The great rule of SEO

My first and primary rule, when thinking about search engines, is never to do anything for the sake of SEO that screws up the experience for the audience.

That cuts out some downright dumb behavior, like overstuffing your content with keywords.

But it also helps you evaluate new advice that comes along. If it makes your site less useable, if it makes your message less effective, or if it alienates or confuses your audience … you should probably skip it.

Here are nine SEO recommendations that also work to make your site experience better for the human beings who read your content, listen to your podcasts, and actually pay for your products and services.

#1: Answer actual audience questions

Want lots and lots of people to visit your site, and stick around once they find you? Answer their pressing questions, and you’ll get your wish.

People fire up a search engine because they have unanswered questions. If you’re smart and knowledgeable about your topic, you can help with that.

Tutorial content is wonderful, but also think about questions like:

Why is [the thing] so hard to get started?

How competitive is [the thing]?

How can I get motivated to do more of [the thing]?

Is there a community of people who want to talk about [the thing]?

Where can I share my own stories about [the thing] and read other people’s?

#2: Use the language they use

Hand in hand with answering real audience questions is using your audience’s language.

That brings us to our friend keyword research. (Check out Beth’s post tomorrow for more on that.)

It’s too bad that some people still think keyword research means looking up a bunch of word salad that makes sense to rooms of computers in Silicon Valley.

Keyword research means figuring out the language that real human beings enter into search engines to find your stuff.

There are great tools out there for finding those turns of phrase. You can also add in some smart social media listening and pay attention to how people talk on the web about your topic. (This is also a good way to find more of those “problems people care about” I talked about in the last point.)

By the way, you don’t have to feel chained to a narrow set of word combinations that you found with your keyword research tool. Use the keyword phrases you find, absolutely, but don’t use them so much that it gets weird. You don’t have to do an in-depth study of latent semantic indexing — just use synonyms.

(Kind of like a real writer does. Golly.)

Use metaphors and analogies. Use a few big or unusual words (if they’re natural to your voice). Flesh out your list of keywords with all of the fascinating and creative things that writers and artists do.

#3: Cover topics comprehensively

Content and SEO experts love to write articles about precisely how long your content should be. Over the years, the recommendations have gone up, and then down, sideways, and any other direction you might think of.

My advice: your content should be as long as necessary to make your point.

Some ideas can be expressed quickly, with punchy, interesting little posts.

Some ideas need more time to develop fully. They deserve a longer format or a content series that gets published over time. You could even dedicate specific months to covering a subject in more depth, like we’re doing this year on Copyblogger. (Have you noticed? Three guesses what March’s topic theme is …)

A strong series can be repurposed into ebooks (or a whole ebook library, once you have a solid archive), podcasts, infographics, SlideShares, videos, and premium products like courses.

Stop falling for the myth of the “goldfish attention span.” Twenty-first-century audiences have plenty of attention for the things they care about, as long as you make the content easy to consume. Which brings us to …

#4: Create a user-friendly experience

It doesn’t matter how brilliant your content is — if it’s published in walls of tiny gray type, without subheads or line breaks, most users will skip it.

It’s actually really simple to take a strong piece of writing and make it much more accessible by formatting it well.

Make sure everything on your site is easy to read, watch, or listen to. Give everything a clear call to action, so people know what to do next. And establish clear paths to the outcomes your users want … using smart content marketing strategy to present useful options at every point along the way.

While we’re on the subject, if your site looks like it was published in 2003, you need a makeover. Immediately. Premium WordPress themes are a massive bargain for the design expertise (and clean back-end code) they give you in a turnkey package.

Also, users and search engines share a hatred of hacked websites. Use secure tools, including reputable themes and quality hosting, and a good monitoring service like Sucuri to make sure nothing funky is going on.

#5: Write about the whole picture

Covering your topic comprehensively matters, but it’s not just about going deep.

There’s also a real benefit to looking around and going wide with your content.

What’s the context for your topic? Who else is publishing about it? What are the trends? What’s changing? How is the larger environment shaping what’s going on? Who do you agree with? Who do you disagree with?

What do people need to know before they dive into your thing? Where do they start? Where do they go next?

If you write about social media marketing, write about people who have given up on it. Write about people who haven’t started yet. Write about how the larger culture and worldview are changing social media … and how social media is changing the world.

Every topic takes place in a larger context. If that context interests your audience, it should be part of your content mix.

#6: Cultivate your community of topic experts

Link-building is one of the most important topics in SEO.

Here’s a secret:

Link-building is community-building.

Even if your competitors aren’t into the whole “co-opetition” idea, there’s a larger community that cares about what you do.

My friend Jim is an orthopedic surgeon who creates YouTube content about surgical procedures. Other surgeons might (but probably won’t) link to him, because he’s a true competitor — you only get your knee operated on once. (We hope.)

But runners would link to him. Skiers would, too. And sites about staying athletic as you age.

Think about the community of web publishers who have the audience you want. Develop relationships with them. Support each other.

This isn’t, of course, about spamming people you don’t know and begging them for links. It’s about making yourself a valued participant in a larger ecosystem.

One terrific way to build amazing connections (and the links that go with them) is to publish guest content on excellent sites. Try it in a lazy, cheap way and it’s spam. Put the effort in to craft genuinely excellent material that serves their audience (and invites them to come check you out), and it’s a winning strategy.

#7: Keep things organized

Good technical SEOs know all about creating a logical site structure that’s easy for search engines to parse.

As I may have mentioned, I in no way resemble a good technical SEO. Instead, I rely on the Genesis framework and common-sense tags and categories to keep my site properly organized on the back end.

But it pays to keep yourself organized on the front end as well. That means making sure your navigation makes sense for what your site looks like today, not two years ago. It means you take your most valuable content and get it somewhere people can easily find it. And it means you link to your best content often, so your audience naturally continues to find and benefit from it.

#8: Quit being so damned boring

You can do everything “right” for SEO and still get no traction.

Why? Because no one links to you, no one visits your site, and no one recommends your content — it’s too similar to a thousand other sites. It’s boring.

If your niche is incredibly narrow and no one else can write about it, maybe you can get away with boring. Even then, it’s risky.

Be interesting.

#9: Don’t rely (solely) on SEO

And the final SEO tip?

Don’t try to make the search engines your only source of traffic.

Relying on one source of customers for your business is unacceptably risky.

Relying on a monolithic megacorporation as your one source of customers is insane.

Google doesn’t care about your business. Not even a tiny bit. Not even if you give them a lot of money every month for ads.

Make sure there are lots of different ways that potential customers can find you. Keep your eyes open for new opportunities. A platform that was a dud for you last year might offer a lot of promise today. And keep growing your email list, so if you do have a traffic hiccup, you still have a way to reach your most loyal audience.

So … let’s talk search engines

While search engine optimization shouldn’t be the only way you get traffic, it can be an important way for great people to find your site. So this month, we’ll be talking about smart ways to optimize your site for search … without messing up what you’re doing well.

Where are you on the SEO spectrum? Do you enjoy it, maybe even geek out about it, or are you in the eat-a-bug category? Let us know in the comments.

Image source: Jill Heyer via Unsplash.

The post The Wise Content Marketer’s Guide to Sensible SEO appeared first on Copyblogger.

from DIYS http://ift.tt/2lwbSgM

[seo90210]

The Wise Content Marketer’s Guide to Sensible SEO

Search engine optimization — SEO — is one of those “you love it or you hate it” topics.

Some get a charge out of the challenge of keeping up with those wily engineers at Google.

Others would rather eat a bug than try to figure out what “headless crawling” means and which redirect is the right one to pick in months that end in R.

I have to confess, I’m in the bug-eating camp on this one.

Fortunately, although technical SEO is still important for some sites, there’s a crazy-powerful optimization technique that people like me can get really good at.

Yes, it’s content. (You already knew that, because you’re smart.) Yes, it has to be good content. And yes, I’m going to talk about what, specifically, “good” means.

But first, I’m going to talk about my most important search optimization rule.

The great rule of SEO

My first and primary rule, when thinking about search engines, is never to do anything for the sake of SEO that screws up the experience for the audience.

That cuts out some downright dumb behavior, like overstuffing your content with keywords.

But it also helps you evaluate new advice that comes along. If it makes your site less useable, if it makes your message less effective, or if it alienates or confuses your audience … you should probably skip it.

Here are nine SEO recommendations that also work to make your site experience better for the human beings who read your content, listen to your podcasts, and actually pay for your products and services.

#1: Answer actual audience questions

Want lots and lots of people to visit your site, and stick around once they find you? Answer their pressing questions, and you’ll get your wish.

People fire up a search engine because they have unanswered questions. If you’re smart and knowledgeable about your topic, you can help with that.

Tutorial content is wonderful, but also think about questions like:

Why is [the thing] so hard to get started?

How competitive is [the thing]?

How can I get motivated to do more of [the thing]?

Is there a community of people who want to talk about [the thing]?

Where can I share my own stories about [the thing] and read other people’s?

#2: Use the language they use

Hand in hand with answering real audience questions is using your audience’s language.

That brings us to our friend keyword research. (Check out Beth’s post tomorrow for more on that.)

It’s too bad that some people still think keyword research means looking up a bunch of word salad that makes sense to rooms of computers in Silicon Valley.

Keyword research means figuring out the language that real human beings enter into search engines to find your stuff.

There are great tools out there for finding those turns of phrase. You can also add in some smart social media listening and pay attention to how people talk on the web about your topic. (This is also a good way to find more of those “problems people care about” I talked about in the last point.)

By the way, you don’t have to feel chained to a narrow set of word combinations that you found with your keyword research tool. Use the keyword phrases you find, absolutely, but don’t use them so much that it gets weird. You don’t have to do an in-depth study of latent semantic indexing — just use synonyms.

(Kind of like a real writer does. Golly.)

Use metaphors and analogies. Use a few big or unusual words (if they’re natural to your voice). Flesh out your list of keywords with all of the fascinating and creative things that writers and artists do.

#3: Cover topics comprehensively

Content and SEO experts love to write articles about precisely how long your content should be. Over the years, the recommendations have gone up, and then down, sideways, and any other direction you might think of.

My advice: your content should be as long as necessary to make your point.

Some ideas can be expressed quickly, with punchy, interesting little posts.

Some ideas need more time to develop fully. They deserve a longer format or a content series that gets published over time. You could even dedicate specific months to covering a subject in more depth, like we’re doing this year on Copyblogger. (Have you noticed? Three guesses what March’s topic theme is …)

A strong series can be repurposed into ebooks (or a whole ebook library, once you have a solid archive), podcasts, infographics, SlideShares, videos, and premium products like courses.

Stop falling for the myth of the “goldfish attention span.” Twenty-first-century audiences have plenty of attention for the things they care about, as long as you make the content easy to consume. Which brings us to …

#4: Create a user-friendly experience

It doesn’t matter how brilliant your content is — if it’s published in walls of tiny gray type, without subheads or line breaks, most users will skip it.

It’s actually really simple to take a strong piece of writing and make it much more accessible by formatting it well.

Make sure everything on your site is easy to read, watch, or listen to. Give everything a clear call to action, so people know what to do next. And establish clear paths to the outcomes your users want … using smart content marketing strategy to present useful options at every point along the way.

While we’re on the subject, if your site looks like it was published in 2003, you need a makeover. Immediately. Premium WordPress themes are a massive bargain for the design expertise (and clean back-end code) they give you in a turnkey package.

Also, users and search engines share a hatred of hacked websites. Use secure tools, including reputable themes and quality hosting, and a good monitoring service like Sucuri to make sure nothing funky is going on.

#5: Write about the whole picture

Covering your topic comprehensively matters, but it’s not just about going deep.

There’s also a real benefit to looking around and going wide with your content.

What’s the context for your topic? Who else is publishing about it? What are the trends? What’s changing? How is the larger environment shaping what’s going on? Who do you agree with? Who do you disagree with?

What do people need to know before they dive into your thing? Where do they start? Where do they go next?

If you write about social media marketing, write about people who have given up on it. Write about people who haven’t started yet. Write about how the larger culture and worldview are changing social media … and how social media is changing the world.

Every topic takes place in a larger context. If that context interests your audience, it should be part of your content mix.

#6: Cultivate your community of topic experts

Link-building is one of the most important topics in SEO.

Here’s a secret:

Link-building is community-building.

Even if your competitors aren’t into the whole “co-opetition” idea, there’s a larger community that cares about what you do.

My friend Jim is an orthopedic surgeon who creates YouTube content about surgical procedures. Other surgeons might (but probably won’t) link to him, because he’s a true competitor — you only get your knee operated on once. (We hope.)

But runners would link to him. Skiers would, too. And sites about staying athletic as you age.

Think about the community of web publishers who have the audience you want. Develop relationships with them. Support each other.

This isn’t, of course, about spamming people you don’t know and begging them for links. It’s about making yourself a valued participant in a larger ecosystem.

One terrific way to build amazing connections (and the links that go with them) is to publish guest content on excellent sites. Try it in a lazy, cheap way and it’s spam. Put the effort in to craft genuinely excellent material that serves their audience (and invites them to come check you out), and it’s a winning strategy.

#7: Keep things organized

Good technical SEOs know all about creating a logical site structure that’s easy for search engines to parse.

As I may have mentioned, I in no way resemble a good technical SEO. Instead, I rely on the Genesis framework and common-sense tags and categories to keep my site properly organized on the back end.

But it pays to keep yourself organized on the front end as well. That means making sure your navigation makes sense for what your site looks like today, not two years ago. It means you take your most valuable content and get it somewhere people can easily find it. And it means you link to your best content often, so your audience naturally continues to find and benefit from it.

#8: Quit being so damned boring

You can do everything “right” for SEO and still get no traction.

Why? Because no one links to you, no one visits your site, and no one recommends your content — it’s too similar to a thousand other sites. It’s boring.

If your niche is incredibly narrow and no one else can write about it, maybe you can get away with boring. Even then, it’s risky.

Be interesting.

#9: Don’t rely (solely) on SEO

And the final SEO tip?

Don’t try to make the search engines your only source of traffic.

Relying on one source of customers for your business is unacceptably risky.

Relying on a monolithic megacorporation as your one source of customers is insane.

Google doesn’t care about your business. Not even a tiny bit. Not even if you give them a lot of money every month for ads.

Make sure there are lots of different ways that potential customers can find you. Keep your eyes open for new opportunities. A platform that was a dud for you last year might offer a lot of promise today. And keep growing your email list, so if you do have a traffic hiccup, you still have a way to reach your most loyal audience.

So … let’s talk search engines

While search engine optimization shouldn’t be the only way you get traffic, it can be an important way for great people to find your site. So this month, we’ll be talking about smart ways to optimize your site for search … without messing up what you’re doing well.

Where are you on the SEO spectrum? Do you enjoy it, maybe even geek out about it, or are you in the eat-a-bug category? Let us know in the comments.

Image source: Jill Heyer via Unsplash.

The post The Wise Content Marketer’s Guide to Sensible SEO appeared first on Copyblogger.

from DIYS http://ift.tt/2lwbSgM

[seo78580]

The Wise Content Marketer’s Guide to Sensible SEO

Search engine optimization — SEO — is one of those “you love it or you hate it” topics.

Some get a charge out of the challenge of keeping up with those wily engineers at Google.

Others would rather eat a bug than try to figure out what “headless crawling” means and which redirect is the right one to pick in months that end in R.

I have to confess, I’m in the bug-eating camp on this one.

Fortunately, although technical SEO is still important for some sites, there’s a crazy-powerful optimization technique that people like me can get really good at.

Yes, it’s content. (You already knew that, because you’re smart.) Yes, it has to be good content. And yes, I’m going to talk about what, specifically, “good” means.

But first, I’m going to talk about my most important search optimization rule.

The great rule of SEO

My first and primary rule, when thinking about search engines, is never to do anything for the sake of SEO that screws up the experience for the audience.

That cuts out some downright dumb behavior, like overstuffing your content with keywords.

But it also helps you evaluate new advice that comes along. If it makes your site less useable, if it makes your message less effective, or if it alienates or confuses your audience … you should probably skip it.

Here are nine SEO recommendations that also work to make your site experience better for the human beings who read your content, listen to your podcasts, and actually pay for your products and services.

#1: Answer actual audience questions

Want lots and lots of people to visit your site, and stick around once they find you? Answer their pressing questions, and you’ll get your wish.

People fire up a search engine because they have unanswered questions. If you’re smart and knowledgeable about your topic, you can help with that.

Tutorial content is wonderful, but also think about questions like:

Why is [the thing] so hard to get started?

How competitive is [the thing]?

How can I get motivated to do more of [the thing]?

Is there a community of people who want to talk about [the thing]?

Where can I share my own stories about [the thing] and read other people’s?

#2: Use the language they use

Hand in hand with answering real audience questions is using your audience’s language.

That brings us to our friend keyword research. (Check out Beth’s post tomorrow for more on that.)

It’s too bad that some people still think keyword research means looking up a bunch of word salad that makes sense to rooms of computers in Silicon Valley.

Keyword research means figuring out the language that real human beings enter into search engines to find your stuff.

There are great tools out there for finding those turns of phrase. You can also add in some smart social media listening and pay attention to how people talk on the web about your topic. (This is also a good way to find more of those “problems people care about” I talked about in the last point.)

By the way, you don’t have to feel chained to a narrow set of word combinations that you found with your keyword research tool. Use the keyword phrases you find, absolutely, but don’t use them so much that it gets weird. You don’t have to do an in-depth study of latent semantic indexing — just use synonyms.

(Kind of like a real writer does. Golly.)

Use metaphors and analogies. Use a few big or unusual words (if they’re natural to your voice). Flesh out your list of keywords with all of the fascinating and creative things that writers and artists do.

#3: Cover topics comprehensively

Content and SEO experts love to write articles about precisely how long your content should be. Over the years, the recommendations have gone up, and then down, sideways, and any other direction you might think of.

My advice: your content should be as long as necessary to make your point.

Some ideas can be expressed quickly, with punchy, interesting little posts.

Some ideas need more time to develop fully. They deserve a longer format or a content series that gets published over time. You could even dedicate specific months to covering a subject in more depth, like we’re doing this year on Copyblogger. (Have you noticed? Three guesses what March’s topic theme is …)

A strong series can be repurposed into ebooks (or a whole ebook library, once you have a solid archive), podcasts, infographics, SlideShares, videos, and premium products like courses.

Stop falling for the myth of the “goldfish attention span.” Twenty-first-century audiences have plenty of attention for the things they care about, as long as you make the content easy to consume. Which brings us to …

#4: Create a user-friendly experience

It doesn’t matter how brilliant your content is — if it’s published in walls of tiny gray type, without subheads or line breaks, most users will skip it.

It’s actually really simple to take a strong piece of writing and make it much more accessible by formatting it well.

Make sure everything on your site is easy to read, watch, or listen to. Give everything a clear call to action, so people know what to do next. And establish clear paths to the outcomes your users want … using smart content marketing strategy to present useful options at every point along the way.

While we’re on the subject, if your site looks like it was published in 2003, you need a makeover. Immediately. Premium WordPress themes are a massive bargain for the design expertise (and clean back-end code) they give you in a turnkey package.

Also, users and search engines share a hatred of hacked websites. Use secure tools, including reputable themes and quality hosting, and a good monitoring service like Sucuri to make sure nothing funky is going on.

#5: Write about the whole picture

Covering your topic comprehensively matters, but it’s not just about going deep.

There’s also a real benefit to looking around and going wide with your content.

What’s the context for your topic? Who else is publishing about it? What are the trends? What’s changing? How is the larger environment shaping what’s going on? Who do you agree with? Who do you disagree with?

What do people need to know before they dive into your thing? Where do they start? Where do they go next?

If you write about social media marketing, write about people who have given up on it. Write about people who haven’t started yet. Write about how the larger culture and worldview are changing social media … and how social media is changing the world.

Every topic takes place in a larger context. If that context interests your audience, it should be part of your content mix.

#6: Cultivate your community of topic experts

Link-building is one of the most important topics in SEO.

Here’s a secret:

Link-building is community-building.

Even if your competitors aren’t into the whole “co-opetition” idea, there’s a larger community that cares about what you do.

My friend Jim is an orthopedic surgeon who creates YouTube content about surgical procedures. Other surgeons might (but probably won’t) link to him, because he’s a true competitor — you only get your knee operated on once. (We hope.)

But runners would link to him. Skiers would, too. And sites about staying athletic as you age.

Think about the community of web publishers who have the audience you want. Develop relationships with them. Support each other.

This isn’t, of course, about spamming people you don’t know and begging them for links. It’s about making yourself a valued participant in a larger ecosystem.

One terrific way to build amazing connections (and the links that go with them) is to publish guest content on excellent sites. Try it in a lazy, cheap way and it’s spam. Put the effort in to craft genuinely excellent material that serves their audience (and invites them to come check you out), and it’s a winning strategy.

#7: Keep things organized

Good technical SEOs know all about creating a logical site structure that’s easy for search engines to parse.

As I may have mentioned, I in no way resemble a good technical SEO. Instead, I rely on the Genesis framework and common-sense tags and categories to keep my site properly organized on the back end.

But it pays to keep yourself organized on the front end as well. That means making sure your navigation makes sense for what your site looks like today, not two years ago. It means you take your most valuable content and get it somewhere people can easily find it. And it means you link to your best content often, so your audience naturally continues to find and benefit from it.

#8: Quit being so damned boring

You can do everything “right” for SEO and still get no traction.

Why? Because no one links to you, no one visits your site, and no one recommends your content — it’s too similar to a thousand other sites. It’s boring.

If your niche is incredibly narrow and no one else can write about it, maybe you can get away with boring. Even then, it’s risky.

Be interesting.

#9: Don’t rely (solely) on SEO

And the final SEO tip?

Don’t try to make the search engines your only source of traffic.

Relying on one source of customers for your business is unacceptably risky.

Relying on a monolithic megacorporation as your one source of customers is insane.

Google doesn’t care about your business. Not even a tiny bit. Not even if you give them a lot of money every month for ads.

Make sure there are lots of different ways that potential customers can find you. Keep your eyes open for new opportunities. A platform that was a dud for you last year might offer a lot of promise today. And keep growing your email list, so if you do have a traffic hiccup, you still have a way to reach your most loyal audience.

So … let’s talk search engines

While search engine optimization shouldn’t be the only way you get traffic, it can be an important way for great people to find your site. So this month, we’ll be talking about smart ways to optimize your site for search … without messing up what you’re doing well.

Where are you on the SEO spectrum? Do you enjoy it, maybe even geek out about it, or are you in the eat-a-bug category? Let us know in the comments.

Image source: Jill Heyer via Unsplash.

The post The Wise Content Marketer’s Guide to Sensible SEO appeared first on Copyblogger.

from DIYS http://ift.tt/2lwbSgM

[nathandgibsca]

The Wise Content Marketer’s Guide to Sensible SEO

Search engine optimization — SEO — is one of those “you love it or you hate it” topics.

Some get a charge out of the challenge of keeping up with those wily engineers at Google.

Others would rather eat a bug than try to figure out what “headless crawling” means and which redirect is the right one to pick in months that end in R.

I have to confess, I’m in the bug-eating camp on this one.

Fortunately, although technical SEO is still important for some sites, there’s a crazy-powerful optimization technique that people like me can get really good at.

Yes, it’s content. (You already knew that, because you’re smart.) Yes, it has to be good content. And yes, I’m going to talk about what, specifically, “good” means.

But first, I’m going to talk about my most important search optimization rule.

The great rule of SEO

My first and primary rule, when thinking about search engines, is never to do anything for the sake of SEO that screws up the experience for the audience.

That cuts out some downright dumb behavior, like overstuffing your content with keywords.

But it also helps you evaluate new advice that comes along. If it makes your site less useable, if it makes your message less effective, or if it alienates or confuses your audience … you should probably skip it.

Here are nine SEO recommendations that also work to make your site experience better for the human beings who read your content, listen to your podcasts, and actually pay for your products and services.

#1: Answer actual audience questions

Want lots and lots of people to visit your site, and stick around once they find you? Answer their pressing questions, and you’ll get your wish.

People fire up a search engine because they have unanswered questions. If you’re smart and knowledgeable about your topic, you can help with that.

Tutorial content is wonderful, but also think about questions like:

Why is [the thing] so hard to get started?

How competitive is [the thing]?

How can I get motivated to do more of [the thing]?

Is there a community of people who want to talk about [the thing]?

Where can I share my own stories about [the thing] and read other people’s?

#2: Use the language they use

Hand in hand with answering real audience questions is using your audience’s language.

That brings us to our friend keyword research. (Check out Beth’s post tomorrow for more on that.)

It’s too bad that some people still think keyword research means looking up a bunch of word salad that makes sense to rooms of computers in Silicon Valley.

Keyword research means figuring out the language that real human beings enter into search engines to find your stuff.

There are great tools out there for finding those turns of phrase. You can also add in some smart social media listening and pay attention to how people talk on the web about your topic. (This is also a good way to find more of those “problems people care about” I talked about in the last point.)

By the way, you don’t have to feel chained to a narrow set of word combinations that you found with your keyword research tool. Use the keyword phrases you find, absolutely, but don’t use them so much that it gets weird. You don’t have to do an in-depth study of latent semantic indexing — just use synonyms.

(Kind of like a real writer does. Golly.)

Use metaphors and analogies. Use a few big or unusual words (if they’re natural to your voice). Flesh out your list of keywords with all of the fascinating and creative things that writers and artists do.

#3: Cover topics comprehensively

Content and SEO experts love to write articles about precisely how long your content should be. Over the years, the recommendations have gone up, and then down, sideways, and any other direction you might think of.

My advice: your content should be as long as necessary to make your point.

Some ideas can be expressed quickly, with punchy, interesting little posts.

Some ideas need more time to develop fully. They deserve a longer format or a content series that gets published over time. You could even dedicate specific months to covering a subject in more depth, like we’re doing this year on Copyblogger. (Have you noticed? Three guesses what March’s topic theme is …)

A strong series can be repurposed into ebooks (or a whole ebook library, once you have a solid archive), podcasts, infographics, SlideShares, videos, and premium products like courses.

Stop falling for the myth of the “goldfish attention span.” Twenty-first-century audiences have plenty of attention for the things they care about, as long as you make the content easy to consume. Which brings us to …

#4: Create a user-friendly experience

It doesn’t matter how brilliant your content is — if it’s published in walls of tiny gray type, without subheads or line breaks, most users will skip it.

It’s actually really simple to take a strong piece of writing and make it much more accessible by formatting it well.

Make sure everything on your site is easy to read, watch, or listen to. Give everything a clear call to action, so people know what to do next. And establish clear paths to the outcomes your users want … using smart content marketing strategy to present useful options at every point along the way.

While we’re on the subject, if your site looks like it was published in 2003, you need a makeover. Immediately. Premium WordPress themes are a massive bargain for the design expertise (and clean back-end code) they give you in a turnkey package.

Also, users and search engines share a hatred of hacked websites. Use secure tools, including reputable themes and quality hosting, and a good monitoring service like Sucuri to make sure nothing funky is going on.

#5: Write about the whole picture

Covering your topic comprehensively matters, but it’s not just about going deep.

There’s also a real benefit to looking around and going wide with your content.

What’s the context for your topic? Who else is publishing about it? What are the trends? What’s changing? How is the larger environment shaping what’s going on? Who do you agree with? Who do you disagree with?

What do people need to know before they dive into your thing? Where do they start? Where do they go next?

If you write about social media marketing, write about people who have given up on it. Write about people who haven’t started yet. Write about how the larger culture and worldview are changing social media … and how social media is changing the world.

Every topic takes place in a larger context. If that context interests your audience, it should be part of your content mix.

#6: Cultivate your community of topic experts

Link-building is one of the most important topics in SEO.

Here’s a secret:

Link-building is community-building.

Even if your competitors aren’t into the whole “co-opetition” idea, there’s a larger community that cares about what you do.

My friend Jim is an orthopedic surgeon who creates YouTube content about surgical procedures. Other surgeons might (but probably won’t) link to him, because he’s a true competitor — you only get your knee operated on once. (We hope.)

But runners would link to him. Skiers would, too. And sites about staying athletic as you age.

Think about the community of web publishers who have the audience you want. Develop relationships with them. Support each other.

This isn’t, of course, about spamming people you don’t know and begging them for links. It’s about making yourself a valued participant in a larger ecosystem.

One terrific way to build amazing connections (and the links that go with them) is to publish guest content on excellent sites. Try it in a lazy, cheap way and it’s spam. Put the effort in to craft genuinely excellent material that serves their audience (and invites them to come check you out), and it’s a winning strategy.

#7: Keep things organized

Good technical SEOs know all about creating a logical site structure that’s easy for search engines to parse.

As I may have mentioned, I in no way resemble a good technical SEO. Instead, I rely on the Genesis framework and common-sense tags and categories to keep my site properly organized on the back end.

But it pays to keep yourself organized on the front end as well. That means making sure your navigation makes sense for what your site looks like today, not two years ago. It means you take your most valuable content and get it somewhere people can easily find it. And it means you link to your best content often, so your audience naturally continues to find and benefit from it.

#8: Quit being so damned boring

You can do everything “right” for SEO and still get no traction.

Why? Because no one links to you, no one visits your site, and no one recommends your content — it’s too similar to a thousand other sites. It’s boring.

If your niche is incredibly narrow and no one else can write about it, maybe you can get away with boring. Even then, it’s risky.

Be interesting.

#9: Don’t rely (solely) on SEO

And the final SEO tip?

Don’t try to make the search engines your only source of traffic.

Relying on one source of customers for your business is unacceptably risky.

Relying on a monolithic megacorporation as your one source of customers is insane.

Google doesn’t care about your business. Not even a tiny bit. Not even if you give them a lot of money every month for ads.

Make sure there are lots of different ways that potential customers can find you. Keep your eyes open for new opportunities. A platform that was a dud for you last year might offer a lot of promise today. And keep growing your email list, so if you do have a traffic hiccup, you still have a way to reach your most loyal audience.

So … let’s talk search engines

While search engine optimization shouldn’t be the only way you get traffic, it can be an important way for great people to find your site. So this month, we’ll be talking about smart ways to optimize your site for search … without messing up what you’re doing well.

Where are you on the SEO spectrum? Do you enjoy it, maybe even geek out about it, or are you in the eat-a-bug category? Let us know in the comments.

Image source: Jill Heyer via Unsplash.

The post The Wise Content Marketer’s Guide to Sensible SEO appeared first on Copyblogger.

from SEO Tips http://feeds.copyblogger.com/~/277832258/0/copyblogger~The-Wise-Content-Marketers-Guide-to-Sensible-SEO/

[soph28collins]

The Wise Content Marketer’s Guide to Sensible SEO

Search engine optimization — SEO — is one of those “you love it or you hate it” topics.

Some get a charge out of the challenge of keeping up with those wily engineers at Google.

Others would rather eat a bug than try to figure out what “headless crawling” means and which redirect is the right one to pick in months that end in R.

I have to confess, I’m in the bug-eating camp on this one.

Fortunately, although technical SEO is still important for some sites, there’s a crazy-powerful optimization technique that people like me can get really good at.

Yes, it’s content. (You already knew that, because you’re smart.) Yes, it has to be good content. And yes, I’m going to talk about what, specifically, “good” means.

But first, I’m going to talk about my most important search optimization rule.

The great rule of SEO

My first and primary rule, when thinking about search engines, is never to do anything for the sake of SEO that screws up the experience for the audience.

That cuts out some downright dumb behavior, like overstuffing your content with keywords.

But it also helps you evaluate new advice that comes along. If it makes your site less useable, if it makes your message less effective, or if it alienates or confuses your audience … you should probably skip it.

Here are nine SEO recommendations that also work to make your site experience better for the human beings who read your content, listen to your podcasts, and actually pay for your products and services.

#1: Answer actual audience questions

Want lots and lots of people to visit your site, and stick around once they find you? Answer their pressing questions, and you’ll get your wish.

People fire up a search engine because they have unanswered questions. If you’re smart and knowledgeable about your topic, you can help with that.

Tutorial content is wonderful, but also think about questions like:

Why is [the thing] so hard to get started?

How competitive is [the thing]?

How can I get motivated to do more of [the thing]?

Is there a community of people who want to talk about [the thing]?

Where can I share my own stories about [the thing] and read other people’s?

#2: Use the language they use

Hand in hand with answering real audience questions is using your audience’s language.

That brings us to our friend keyword research. (Check out Beth’s post tomorrow for more on that.)

It’s too bad that some people still think keyword research means looking up a bunch of word salad that makes sense to rooms of computers in Silicon Valley.

Keyword research means figuring out the language that real human beings enter into search engines to find your stuff.

There are great tools out there for finding those turns of phrase. You can also add in some smart social media listening and pay attention to how people talk on the web about your topic. (This is also a good way to find more of those “problems people care about” I talked about in the last point.)

By the way, you don’t have to feel chained to a narrow set of word combinations that you found with your keyword research tool. Use the keyword phrases you find, absolutely, but don’t use them so much that it gets weird. You don’t have to do an in-depth study of latent semantic indexing — just use synonyms.

(Kind of like a real writer does. Golly.)

Use metaphors and analogies. Use a few big or unusual words (if they’re natural to your voice). Flesh out your list of keywords with all of the fascinating and creative things that writers and artists do.

#3: Cover topics comprehensively

Content and SEO experts love to write articles about precisely how long your content should be. Over the years, the recommendations have gone up, and then down, sideways, and any other direction you might think of.

My advice: your content should be as long as necessary to make your point.

Some ideas can be expressed quickly, with punchy, interesting little posts.

Some ideas need more time to develop fully. They deserve a longer format or a content series that gets published over time. You could even dedicate specific months to covering a subject in more depth, like we’re doing this year on Copyblogger. (Have you noticed? Three guesses what March’s topic theme is …)

A strong series can be repurposed into ebooks (or a whole ebook library, once you have a solid archive), podcasts, infographics, SlideShares, videos, and premium products like courses.

Stop falling for the myth of the “goldfish attention span.” Twenty-first-century audiences have plenty of attention for the things they care about, as long as you make the content easy to consume. Which brings us to …

#4: Create a user-friendly experience

It doesn’t matter how brilliant your content is — if it’s published in walls of tiny gray type, without subheads or line breaks, most users will skip it.

It’s actually really simple to take a strong piece of writing and make it much more accessible by formatting it well.

Make sure everything on your site is easy to read, watch, or listen to. Give everything a clear call to action, so people know what to do next. And establish clear paths to the outcomes your users want … using smart content marketing strategy to present useful options at every point along the way.

While we’re on the subject, if your site looks like it was published in 2003, you need a makeover. Immediately. Premium WordPress themes are a massive bargain for the design expertise (and clean back-end code) they give you in a turnkey package.

Also, users and search engines share a hatred of hacked websites. Use secure tools, including reputable themes and quality hosting, and a good monitoring service like Sucuri to make sure nothing funky is going on.

#5: Write about the whole picture

Covering your topic comprehensively matters, but it’s not just about going deep.

There’s also a real benefit to looking around and going wide with your content.

What’s the context for your topic? Who else is publishing about it? What are the trends? What’s changing? How is the larger environment shaping what’s going on? Who do you agree with? Who do you disagree with?

What do people need to know before they dive into your thing? Where do they start? Where do they go next?

If you write about social media marketing, write about people who have given up on it. Write about people who haven’t started yet. Write about how the larger culture and worldview are changing social media … and how social media is changing the world.

Every topic takes place in a larger context. If that context interests your audience, it should be part of your content mix.

#6: Cultivate your community of topic experts

Link-building is one of the most important topics in SEO.

Here’s a secret:

Link-building is community-building.

Even if your competitors aren’t into the whole “co-opetition” idea, there’s a larger community that cares about what you do.

My friend Jim is an orthopedic surgeon who creates YouTube content about surgical procedures. Other surgeons might (but probably won’t) link to him, because he’s a true competitor — you only get your knee operated on once. (We hope.)

But runners would link to him. Skiers would, too. And sites about staying athletic as you age.

Think about the community of web publishers who have the audience you want. Develop relationships with them. Support each other.

This isn’t, of course, about spamming people you don’t know and begging them for links. It’s about making yourself a valued participant in a larger ecosystem.

One terrific way to build amazing connections (and the links that go with them) is to publish guest content on excellent sites. Try it in a lazy, cheap way and it’s spam. Put the effort in to craft genuinely excellent material that serves their audience (and invites them to come check you out), and it’s a winning strategy.

#7: Keep things organized

Good technical SEOs know all about creating a logical site structure that’s easy for search engines to parse.

As I may have mentioned, I in no way resemble a good technical SEO. Instead, I rely on the Genesis framework and common-sense tags and categories to keep my site properly organized on the back end.

But it pays to keep yourself organized on the front end as well. That means making sure your navigation makes sense for what your site looks like today, not two years ago. It means you take your most valuable content and get it somewhere people can easily find it. And it means you link to your best content often, so your audience naturally continues to find and benefit from it.

#8: Quit being so damned boring

You can do everything “right” for SEO and still get no traction.

Why? Because no one links to you, no one visits your site, and no one recommends your content — it’s too similar to a thousand other sites. It’s boring.

If your niche is incredibly narrow and no one else can write about it, maybe you can get away with boring. Even then, it’s risky.

Be interesting.

#9: Don’t rely (solely) on SEO

And the final SEO tip?

Don’t try to make the search engines your only source of traffic.

Relying on one source of customers for your business is unacceptably risky.

Relying on a monolithic megacorporation as your one source of customers is insane.

Google doesn’t care about your business. Not even a tiny bit. Not even if you give them a lot of money every month for ads.

Make sure there are lots of different ways that potential customers can find you. Keep your eyes open for new opportunities. A platform that was a dud for you last year might offer a lot of promise today. And keep growing your email list, so if you do have a traffic hiccup, you still have a way to reach your most loyal audience.

So … let’s talk search engines

While search engine optimization shouldn’t be the only way you get traffic, it can be an important way for great people to find your site. So this month, we’ll be talking about smart ways to optimize your site for search … without messing up what you’re doing well.

Where are you on the SEO spectrum? Do you enjoy it, maybe even geek out about it, or are you in the eat-a-bug category? Let us know in the comments.

Image source: Jill Heyer via Unsplash.

The post The Wise Content Marketer’s Guide to Sensible SEO appeared first on Copyblogger.

from Copyblogger http://www.copyblogger.com/sensible-seo/

[annegalliher]

The Wise Content Marketer’s Guide to Sensible SEO

Search engine optimization — SEO — is one of those “you love it or you hate it” topics.

Some get a charge out of the challenge of keeping up with those wily engineers at Google.

Others would rather eat a bug than try to figure out what “headless crawling” means and which redirect is the right one to pick in months that end in R.

I have to confess, I’m in the bug-eating camp on this one.

Fortunately, although technical SEO is still important for some sites, there’s a crazy-powerful optimization technique that people like me can get really good at.

Yes, it’s content. (You already knew that, because you’re smart.) Yes, it has to be good content. And yes, I’m going to talk about what, specifically, “good” means.

But first, I’m going to talk about my most important search optimization rule.

The great rule of SEO

My first and primary rule, when thinking about search engines, is never to do anything for the sake of SEO that screws up the experience for the audience.

That cuts out some downright dumb behavior, like overstuffing your content with keywords.

But it also helps you evaluate new advice that comes along. If it makes your site less useable, if it makes your message less effective, or if it alienates or confuses your audience … you should probably skip it.

Here are nine SEO recommendations that also work to make your site experience better for the human beings who read your content, listen to your podcasts, and actually pay for your products and services.

#1: Answer actual audience questions

Want lots and lots of people to visit your site, and stick around once they find you? Answer their pressing questions, and you’ll get your wish.

People fire up a search engine because they have unanswered questions. If you’re smart and knowledgeable about your topic, you can help with that.

Tutorial content is wonderful, but also think about questions like:

Why is [the thing] so hard to get started?

How competitive is [the thing]?

How can I get motivated to do more of [the thing]?

Is there a community of people who want to talk about [the thing]?

Where can I share my own stories about [the thing] and read other people’s?

#2: Use the language they use

Hand in hand with answering real audience questions is using your audience’s language.

That brings us to our friend keyword research. (Check out Beth’s post tomorrow for more on that.)

It’s too bad that some people still think keyword research means looking up a bunch of word salad that makes sense to rooms of computers in Silicon Valley.

Keyword research means figuring out the language that real human beings enter into search engines to find your stuff.

There are great tools out there for finding those turns of phrase. You can also add in some smart social media listening and pay attention to how people talk on the web about your topic. (This is also a good way to find more of those “problems people care about” I talked about in the last point.)

By the way, you don’t have to feel chained to a narrow set of word combinations that you found with your keyword research tool. Use the keyword phrases you find, absolutely, but don’t use them so much that it gets weird. You don’t have to do an in-depth study of latent semantic indexing — just use synonyms.

(Kind of like a real writer does. Golly.)

Use metaphors and analogies. Use a few big or unusual words (if they’re natural to your voice). Flesh out your list of keywords with all of the fascinating and creative things that writers and artists do.

#3: Cover topics comprehensively

Content and SEO experts love to write articles about precisely how long your content should be. Over the years, the recommendations have gone up, and then down, sideways, and any other direction you might think of.

My advice: your content should be as long as necessary to make your point.

Some ideas can be expressed quickly, with punchy, interesting little posts.

Some ideas need more time to develop fully. They deserve a longer format or a content series that gets published over time. You could even dedicate specific months to covering a subject in more depth, like we’re doing this year on Copyblogger. (Have you noticed? Three guesses what March’s topic theme is …)

A strong series can be repurposed into ebooks (or a whole ebook library, once you have a solid archive), podcasts, infographics, SlideShares, videos, and premium products like courses.

Stop falling for the myth of the “goldfish attention span.” Twenty-first-century audiences have plenty of attention for the things they care about, as long as you make the content easy to consume. Which brings us to …

#4: Create a user-friendly experience

It doesn’t matter how brilliant your content is — if it’s published in walls of tiny gray type, without subheads or line breaks, most users will skip it.

It’s actually really simple to take a strong piece of writing and make it much more accessible by formatting it well.

Make sure everything on your site is easy to read, watch, or listen to. Give everything a clear call to action, so people know what to do next. And establish clear paths to the outcomes your users want … using smart content marketing strategy to present useful options at every point along the way.

While we’re on the subject, if your site looks like it was published in 2003, you need a makeover. Immediately. Premium WordPress themes are a massive bargain for the design expertise (and clean back-end code) they give you in a turnkey package.

Also, users and search engines share a hatred of hacked websites. Use secure tools, including reputable themes and quality hosting, and a good monitoring service like Sucuri to make sure nothing funky is going on.

#5: Write about the whole picture

Covering your topic comprehensively matters, but it’s not just about going deep.

There’s also a real benefit to looking around and going wide with your content.

What’s the context for your topic? Who else is publishing about it? What are the trends? What’s changing? How is the larger environment shaping what’s going on? Who do you agree with? Who do you disagree with?

What do people need to know before they dive into your thing? Where do they start? Where do they go next?

If you write about social media marketing, write about people who have given up on it. Write about people who haven’t started yet. Write about how the larger culture and worldview are changing social media … and how social media is changing the world.

Every topic takes place in a larger context. If that context interests your audience, it should be part of your content mix.

#6: Cultivate your community of topic experts

Link-building is one of the most important topics in SEO.

Here’s a secret:

Link-building is community-building.

Even if your competitors aren’t into the whole “co-opetition” idea, there’s a larger community that cares about what you do.

My friend Jim is an orthopedic surgeon who creates YouTube content about surgical procedures. Other surgeons might (but probably won’t) link to him, because he’s a true competitor — you only get your knee operated on once. (We hope.)

But runners would link to him. Skiers would, too. And sites about staying athletic as you age.

Think about the community of web publishers who have the audience you want. Develop relationships with them. Support each other.

This isn’t, of course, about spamming people you don’t know and begging them for links. It’s about making yourself a valued participant in a larger ecosystem.

One terrific way to build amazing connections (and the links that go with them) is to publish guest content on excellent sites. Try it in a lazy, cheap way and it’s spam. Put the effort in to craft genuinely excellent material that serves their audience (and invites them to come check you out), and it’s a winning strategy.

#7: Keep things organized

Good technical SEOs know all about creating a logical site structure that’s easy for search engines to parse.

As I may have mentioned, I in no way resemble a good technical SEO. Instead, I rely on the Genesis framework and common-sense tags and categories to keep my site properly organized on the back end.

But it pays to keep yourself organized on the front end as well. That means making sure your navigation makes sense for what your site looks like today, not two years ago. It means you take your most valuable content and get it somewhere people can easily find it. And it means you link to your best content often, so your audience naturally continues to find and benefit from it.

#8: Quit being so damned boring

You can do everything “right” for SEO and still get no traction.

Why? Because no one links to you, no one visits your site, and no one recommends your content — it’s too similar to a thousand other sites. It’s boring.

If your niche is incredibly narrow and no one else can write about it, maybe you can get away with boring. Even then, it’s risky.

Be interesting.

#9: Don’t rely (solely) on SEO

And the final SEO tip?

Don’t try to make the search engines your only source of traffic.

Relying on one source of customers for your business is unacceptably risky.

Relying on a monolithic megacorporation as your one source of customers is insane.

Google doesn’t care about your business. Not even a tiny bit. Not even if you give them a lot of money every month for ads.

Make sure there are lots of different ways that potential customers can find you. Keep your eyes open for new opportunities. A platform that was a dud for you last year might offer a lot of promise today. And keep growing your email list, so if you do have a traffic hiccup, you still have a way to reach your most loyal audience.

So … let’s talk search engines

While search engine optimization shouldn’t be the only way you get traffic, it can be an important way for great people to find your site. So this month, we’ll be talking about smart ways to optimize your site for search … without messing up what you’re doing well.

Where are you on the SEO spectrum? Do you enjoy it, maybe even geek out about it, or are you in the eat-a-bug category? Let us know in the comments.

Image source: Jill Heyer via Unsplash.

The post The Wise Content Marketer’s Guide to Sensible SEO appeared first on Copyblogger.