Take 10 min: Six Quick Tips for Writing SEO-Friendly Content

Writing for SEO means more than just stuffing your copy with the right keywords. Anyone can do that—and immediately lose readers in the less than 33 seconds of attention they're willing to give your site. Effective SEO copywriting, by contrast, is the art of creating fresh, engaging copy that just happens to have the right keywords in the best places to attract more visitors to your site.

In just 10 minutes, learn how to write keyword-rich copy that helps visitors find your website in the search engines, but is never boring or forced. You'll also discover how to effectively use those keywords in headers, tags, and links. Plus, if you're an SEO copywriting newbie, you'll get a few tips on how to get started optimizing your website.

Read more: http://www.marketingprofs.com/marketing/online-seminars/450#ixzz2UBbte79Y

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Google+ Comments Can Now Be Linked to Blogger

Google is giving Blogger a boost by enabling users to bring Google+ comments to their blogs.
Once the feature is enabled in the Blogger Dashboard, Google+ comments made about a particular blog post hosted by Blogger will automatically flank that blog, making it easy for the blog owner to keep track of discussions and comments specific posts are stimulating.
“Reading and responding to comments can be one of the most rewarding aspects of blogging,” writes Google+ principal engineer Yonatan Zunger in a blog post. “Not only do they help you connect with your readers, they can also inspire later blog entries. The challenge, oftentimes, is following all the conversations around your content—on Google+, for instance, as well as on your website. So we’re making things a lot simpler.”
Bloggers will also be able to see activity from direct visitors as well as from people talking about their content on Google+ simply by browsing their blog’s comment threads.
If a public Google+ discussion about a specific post is sparked, for example, those comments and replies will also appear on users’ Blogger blogs, effectively allowing them to connect with more of their readers, all in one place.
Readers would also be given the option to comment about a blog post publicly, or privately to their circles on Google+. When browsing blog comments, they will be given the option to view all of them, only the top comments, or only those from people in their circles, depending on their preference.
“In all cases, you and your readers will only see the comments you have permission to see,” Zunger writes. “Giving people these kinds of controls not only encourages more meaningful sharing — it can lead to more blog traffic.”
To enable the Google+ Comments feature, users must visit the Google+ tab of their Blogger Dashboard and check ‘Use Google+ Comments.’
Bloggers can also visit any post on the Official Google Blog or on Blogger Buzz to see the Google+ Comments feature “in action.”

Google image

resource:http://www.sitepronews.com/2013/04/19/google-comments-can-now-be-linked-to-blogger/

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How to Estimate the Break-Even Point of Paid Search

PPC Management 

What is CPC?

A few months ago I wrote about the death of paid search and had to sustain the backlash of the paid search community through 38 comments and multiple “hate tweets.” I actually enjoyed the discussions and learned quite a lot from some of them.
The question that kept bugging me was if there’s a correlation between a price of a product or service and their CPC? Do keywords associated with high-priced products cost more?

Image Credit: Wikipedia

In the core of this question is the theory of economic equilibrium. Simply, in perfect market conditions, the price of products will be set at a level where supply and demand are equal and with no change in supply or demand, the price will stay the same.
The reason why this theory is important for understanding the relationship between product price and CPC is that if information was completely available to all parties in the market (a required assumption in this theory) then knowing the average cost-per-click (CPC) will allow companies to evaluate the effectiveness of paid search. In turn, companies will decide whether they want to invest in paid search, which will shift the demand curve, creating a new equilibrium price.
For example, if average CPC is low enough to allow positive ROI, more companies will participate in paid search campaigns, increasing the demand and consequently driving the average CPC up. When the price reaches a point of negative ROI, companies will stop their campaigns, decreasing demand and lowering the average CPC.
These shifts will occur until CPC will stabilize where both suppliers (Google) and buyers (advertisers) are satisfied with the return on paid search. That price point will be the point of break-even, where the investment in paid search (CPC) will match the return (sales at a certain price).
But why finding the equilibrium price of a channel is important or even interesting? Well, finding that price, and knowing the rest of the conversion rates of your funnel, will help you evaluate the potential effectiveness of a channel before you even spend a dollar on testing it.
Furthermore, knowing the equilibrium price can, theoretically, help you find arbitrages, places where the market is not at equilibrium and the price is lower than what it should (and will) be. Those arbitrages are opportunities to exploit imperfect market conditions to your benefit until supply and demand return to equilibrium and the price stabilizes again.

Researching the Equilibrium Price of Paid Search

In order to find the equilibrium price of paid search, I needed to find the break-even point.
To simplify, I assumed no overhead costs (no contractors, fixed costs, software costs, etc.) in my calculations, just pure CPC compared to revenue. I wanted to find out if it's possible to predict the effectiveness of paid search as a channel based on a company’s price point. The math is simple:

$X * W% * L% * V% ≥ $CPC

• Price of product or service = X
• Close won rate (%) = W
• Conversion rate from lead to opportunity (%) = L
• Conversion rate from visitor to lead (%) = V
• Cost Per Click = CPC

As long as the left side of the formula is equal or bigger than the right side, paid search is favorable. It seemed like I had a good start.
Using this formula, I can tell for any given price point what is the maximum CPC that I can afford before I start losing money on this channel. But putting together the formula is the easy part, finding the values for the variables needed to solve it, is the challenge.
So I embarked on a quick research to find the following variables:

• Close won rate (%) = W
• Conversion rate from lead to opportunity (%) = L
• Conversion rate from visitor to lead (%) = V
• Cost Per Click = CPC

One of the challenges with finding these variables is that they are extremely specific to industries. It’s hard to come up with a real average for these data points since the variation among the industries is so big.
Furthermore, when you look at individual companies, even within the same industry and market, you will find great variation that will prevent you from coming up with real averages (or at least statistically significant ones).
The solution is to look at optimal rates and not averages. Since my task was to find the price point in which paid search breaks even, I assumed that the entire funnel is optimized and the company achieved optimal results (within reason).
(Note: these figures relate to B2B organizations. With B2C, the funnel, conversion rates and overall marketing-sales process are different.)

Close Won Rate

This rate tends to vary the most because it’s based on the organization definition of an opportunity but it’s also extremely dependent on price.
I found several resources I could reference, but the one I liked the most came from CSO insights. In their annual industry benchmark report they asked companies “What percentage of your forecasted opportunities result in the following: No Decision, Loses, Wins.” The average for Wins was 38.8 percent. So I used 40 percent.

Leads to Opportunities

In SiriusDecision’s new Demand Waterfall model there are several stages for leads including Automation Qualified Leads (AQLs), Teleprospecting Leads (TQLs) and Sales Accepted Leads (SAL’s). For simplicity purposes and to make my model easier to calculate, I treat all leads as one bucket; a lead is anyone who submitted a form on a paid search landing page.
In most B2B funnels, this will be considered as an “Inquiry” or a “Known Name” therefore the conversion rate from that initial form submission to an opportunity, even if optimal, will still be relatively low.
I used Marketo’s benchmark numbers from their Marketing Automation ROI Calculator to calculate the optimal conversion rate from Lead to Opportunity and came up with 5 percent. To make paid search even more favorable, I used 10 percent.

Visits to Leads

The conversion rates of visits to leads vary greatly based on the source. Since we’re focusing on paid search, I was looking for data specific to paid search for B2B companies. I found three sources.

• Optify’s B2B Marketing Benchmark Report. This report had paid search at a median of 1.96 percent, but the 75th percentile showed a 3.58 percent conversion rate.
• AdWords Analysis (WordStreem Study) published by Jack Loehner. This study (no longer available on their website due to a change in Google's API terms and conditions), looked at conversion rates for the top 10 industries, showed an average of 5.63 percent across all industries with the best performing industry (Internet & Telecom) at 6.27 percent.
• MarketingSherpa’s 2012 Search Marketing Benchmark Report – PPC Edition. This report showed a median of 3.5 percent and an average (albeit huge variation) of 8.4 percent.

To make paid search favorable, I use the highest of the rates and rounded it up. I used 10 percent.

Results

I found that using these conversion rates, to break even CPC needs to be .4 percent of the price of the product.

CPC = $X * 0.004

WordStream’s study also showed the average CPC per industry for the top 10 industries. I used those averages and the formula above to provide the price point for each industry at which paid search breaks even.

Use these break-even prices to determine if paid search is right for you. Remember though, that these break-even prices were calculated based on optimal B2B conversion rates. If your conversion rates are different (and they probably are), use them to evaluate paid search before jumping into it.

What About the Equilibrium Price?

Since the market conditions are far from being perfect, and at the heart of the imperfect market condition is the unavailability of information, it’s almost impossible to come up with the equilibrium price of paid search. CPC rates continue to fluctuate so keep an eye on your own break-even point and make sure you make the most out of each campaign.
resource:http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2255282/How-to-Estimate-the-Break-Even-Point-of-Paid-Search

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SEO Simplified – What You Need to Know

When you first hear about SEO, taking in all the information can be quite overwhelming, especially when it seems much of the advice you are given is contradictory.
I am going to simplify the SEO process by giving you a rundown from beginning to end – that way, in the future, you will know when you are being given good or bad advice.

To be able to understand how SEO works and how to go about it you need two things.
• Common sense – never do what an SEO expert recommends without asking why they are doing it. Question their actions and come up with your own reasoning.
• Knowledge of what a search engine is and how it works.
Understanding what a search engine is and what it’s primary objective is…
In the beginning, the Internet was rather small – it contained maybe 1,000 or 2,000 websites.
There was no such thing as a search engine, and you would most likely find out about a website through word-of-mouth.
However, as the Internet grew, there was soon a demand for some kind of directory – kind of like a yellow pages for all the websites on the Internet. This would make it easier to find information you were interested in.
If you wanted to find plumbers, you’d go to the plumbers section and hopefully find some plumbers websites.
This was a good solution for a while, but a directory is only as good as the quality and quantity of the websites it has. As the Internet grew even bigger it was very difficult for the people running the directories to continually add and categorize each website.
What was really needed was an automated solution – some kind of robot that could do the job of human editors but a million times faster, it would have to find websites and sort thousands of them into categories everyday.
The search engine was born!
But let’s take a minute or two to think about that. A human can sort websites into categories pretty easily. A human just looks at a websites, reads a few paragraphs and knows instantly what the website is about.
But how about a machine? How can a computer, with no brain, work out what a website is about?
A computer may not be able to use intuition, but what it can do is count.
Let’s take this article you are reading now as an example. Using your intuition, under which category should it be slated:
• Home and Garden
• Kitchens
• SEO

Straight away, you said: “It’s SEO.”
Let’s look at how counting can bring the same conclusion. If you count how many times the word “SEO” appears on this page, you’ll find there are 14 occurrences, quite a lot in relation to all the other words that appear.
So just by counting, a computer can come up with a conclusion similar to that of a human.
All was good in search engine land. You could head over to a search engine; type in “dog” and it would give you a list of all the sites related to dogs.
But there was a problem; the listings weren’t always that useful. You would get a list of all the websites to do with “dog”, but they weren’t in any particular order, so you might have to scroll right to the 1,000th website before you found a website that had the information you needed.

So, how could this problem be solved?
The immediate solution is human intervention – to have a human revaluate the listings and put the better websites near the top of the listings. The trouble was, by this time, there were literally billions of websites and sorting them by hand would be an almost impossible task.
So we really needed the task to be automated, but how? How can a computer possibly work out which websites are better than others? How can a computer even develop an opinion?
This was a major headache until 1996 when Larry Page and Sergey Brin came up with an ingenious method.
They hypothesized that websites that had lots of other websites linking to them were probably the more useful resources.
Think about it, if you made a website would you link to any old website?
It’s not likely. But I bet you would definitely link to a really good website that would be beneficial to your visitors.
So, it becomes a counting game again. A search engine just counts how many websites are linking to another to determine where to rank it.
You now can see what the true purpose of a search engine is. To serve up listings that are helpful to the searcher – this is how Google intended it to be, and very importantly, this is how they want it to remain.
The other thing you should now understand is that a search engine is essentially a machine, it has no intuition – the best it can do is count. It outputs results that are dependent on what it counts.
The near downfall of search engines
Google was the first search engine to count the number of links and it has worked extremely well. The better websites usually appeared at the top.
As such, Google became the most popular search engine.
But Google’s success brought with it another problem. Because, so many people use Google, there is a great desire for website owners to be at the top of the listings. A top listing for an e-commerce store means loads of visitors, loads of sales and loads of money.
Soon SEO firms started popping up offering website owners a chance to get to the top of the search results.
But how could anyone offer this?
It was simple, they took advantage of the fact that search engines count. If you want to get top ranking for the keyword “dog” you would just repeat the word dog all over your website and create lots of false websites linking back to your website.
From Google’s point of view, this was terrible because it worked. It meant that search results could be manipulated and could end up ruining the quality of the listings. It meant that useless websites could be at the top quite easily.
Google had to find a way to stop it, before all search results became useless. It had to make changes to its algorithms so it could detect when results were being manipulated.
What they used were indictors of manipulation. Here’s just a few.
• If a websites suddenly gets a lot of links in a short space of time, this indicates some sort of manipulation, because it’s very difficult to get that many links so quickly.
• If a website gets links from lots of unrelated sites, this could indicate manipulation. Why would a chess website link to a custard website? It looks suspicious.
• Does a website contain a word too many times in proportion to other words? If there is a saturation of one word, this could look like someone has tried to manipulate results.
Google has lots of detection methods and when too many “manipulation flags” are scored, a website is punished with either a -30 in ranks, a -350 in ranks, a -950 in ranks or a permanent delisting.
So what is the job of an SEO expert now?
The same as it always was, to manipulate results for their clients.
A good SEO firm is always up-to-date on which methods work best.
Google obviously doesn’t disclose how they rank sites, otherwise everyone could manipulate results again.
But an SEO performs experiments, analyses results and comes up with conclusions as to how Google works.
So what do you need to know?
Essentially your SEO expert is your guide – he or she can show you how to improve your site so that it is worthy of links. He or she can also use manipulation tactics and try to do it under Google’s radar.
What you need to decide is how much risk you are willing to take. Every technique needs to be questioned. You need to ask if there is a good chance, a technique will pass through Google’s detection system or if it is likely to be detected by Google, which, in turn, will punish your website.
If you want to do things the safe way, you have two options:
Create a website that is very useful, one that is better than those offered by others in your field, then tell people about it and get many natural links from people who are linking to you for your content.
Or, use AdWords and pay Google to list your adverts alongside their regular listing.
Above all, use your common sense. Google is clever. If a technique is easy for a human to detect, then perhaps Google could find a way to detect it too. This does not mean you should disregard most manipulation techniques; they will almost certainly be required to get top ranks. What it does mean is that you must stay informed and always ask why an SEO expert has suggested a method before moving ahead with it, ask him or her if he/she has had any previous experience with a method and what he/she thinks the risk factor is.
Read More:http://www.seo-news.com

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Four Essential SEO Factors to Optimize Your Website for Search Engines

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a vital part of website design and marketing. A properly optimized website will allow web crawlers to properly index your website for search engines (such as Google, Yahoo!, Ask, and Bing) so that your site appears prominently in the search engine results pages, or SERPs. Four of the primary areas of consideration for SEO are:
1. The Appearance and Usability of Your Website for Visitors
Search engines can track how many visitors your site has, how long they stay on your site before clicking elsewhere, and how often they return. All of these play a role in how well your website performs in search results.
Considering this, it is essential that your site be optimized not only for search engine web crawlers but also for human visitors. If your visitors find that your site is easy to navigate, contains useful content, and can provide value on an ongoing basis, that will be reflected positively in the SERPs.
This also means that you must keep your site active. If a search engine discovers that your website is neglected for long periods of time and grows stale – especially in comparison to other sites offering similar content – visitors will stop returning and your site will sink in the SERPs. Regularly updating your site with new content, on the other hand, can enable your site to ascend the rankings.
2. The Quality of the Content Contained on Your Website
More and more, search engines are attempting to direct searchers to websites that contain quality content. Providing good content optimized with the keywords and phrases that searchers might use can boost your site’s performance in the SERPs and draw more visitors. If your site is filled with advertising or riddled with spelling or grammatical errors, however, it will negatively impact your site’s performance.
The uniqueness of your content is also an important factor. This is true now more than ever, and continues to grow in importance with every update to search engine search results ranking algorithms. If your site is found to contain duplicate, near-duplicate, or spun content when compared to other websites, it will lessen your site’s value, at least in the judgment of the dominant search engines. Whether you create your own original content or hire others to do it for you, it is a SEO necessity that your site be unique.
Additionally, considering the problem of content scrapers (which will steal your content to use it on other sites), it is recommended that you regularly post new content. You should also take precautions to limit those who might steal your content. For example, you can limit the amount of content contained in your RSS feed. You can also file a DMCA complaint whenever you discover a content thief.
3. The Traffic Your Website Attracts and Maintains
A well optimized website will entice visitors to revisit your site periodically. This can be a signal to search engines that your site has been deemed useful by its users. If these users add links to your site from their own websites, that will also add weight to your site’s importance.
You can increase your website’s traffic and the number of links to it in a variety of ways:
• First, you can include your URL in any comments you make on blogs. If the blog applies a “no follow” tag to its comments, however, it will not be counted as a link to your site.
• Second, you can submit articles as an “expert” to be posted on another reputable website. Typically, sites will permit you to include a short bio containing a link to your site.
• Third, you can submit your URL for inclusion in relevant online directories.
Beware, however, of unethical link exchanges or purchases, as these will harm your ranking, possibly even resulting in a ban from selected search engines.
4. The Technical Elements of Your Website
In contrast to the early days of SEO, search engines today want to see sites that are designed more for the user than for web crawlers. Thus, the usability and quality of your site are of primary importance. There are, however, some SEO elements that remain a bit more technical. While these elements do contain value for visitors, they are generally intended more for the benefit of web crawlers. These elements include:
• An XML Sitemap and robots.txt file. These can each assist web crawlers as they index your site.
• Page titles containing keywords. These are the titles that are inserted into the HTML code and appear in the bar or tab at the top of your Internet browser.
• Effective text formatting that incorporates heading tags. The formatting you use, which can also enhance your user’s experience, can emphasize your keywords to search engines.
• Alternate descriptions for images and videos. Though many users will never even notice your alternate descriptions contained within your HTML code, they can reap rewards in terms of SEO.
• URLs containing recognizable and relevant words for searchers. Using real words rather than codes or non-descriptive terms will make your URLs more memorable and can also be another way to incorporate keywords.
• A custom 404 “page not found” error page. This will show that you are concerned about your visitors experience with your website. The 404 page should be consistent with the rest of your site and can provide a link to your root page, an HTML Sitemap, and other important sections of your site.
Invest the time and effort to apply SEO to your website. It can make the difference between your site’s success and failure. Though there are no guarantees, an optimized site has the potential to climb the SERPs and achieve a prominent position at or near the top. This greater visibility typically translates into a greater number of visitors, which in turn enables you to market your product, promote your message, and share your opinions more effectively.
resource:http://www.seo-news.com/four-essential-seo-factors-to-optimize-your-website-for-search-engines/

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Linking Policy

SEO Theory links out to other Websites on an occasional basis. We do NOT solicit or accept link requests. The majority of the sites we link to are either well-established SEO blogs, science Websites, or brand-value Websites that illustrate points we make. On some occasions we may link to less well-known sites if we feel they have published useful, informative articles or other content that illustrates the principles we discuss.

Many of the links we include in our content are discovered from a select list of “daily must-read” sites, from news sources, and/or from referral data we see in our analytics. We may also use occasional discovery queries to find new and interesting content to share with our visitors.

We do not link to content that:

• Sell, promote, or discuss illegal products and services.
• Appear to have been created for the purpose of driving traffic to affiliate or advertising links.
• Engage in, promote, or tolerate hateful, spiteful, abusive discussion.
• Promote, advocate, explain, sell, or otherwise publicize inappropriate Web marketing practices.
• Contain, promote, or offer sexually explicit content, products, or services.
• Is a PageRank trap (pages that are orphaned or which cannot be reached from the front page of the Website).
• Solicits, promotes, or advocates participation in link reciprocation, link buying and selling, or other linking schemes.

All links embedded in our comments are given the “rel=’nofollow’” attribute. We may, at our discretion, remove links in either comments or user profiles if we feel they point to inappropriate content. You agree, by leaving a comment on SEO Theory, to accept these limitations.

SEO Theory has a limited guest post program. Only editorially selected guest bloggers may publish articles on our blog. Guest writers are selected by invitation only and all requests to be admitted to the program are ignored.

Guest articles are expected to be related to search engine optimization. They must be informative and they should be well-written and designed to be interesting and helpful.

DISCLAIMER: Links are not endorsements. Unless otherwise noted in the immediately adjacent text or anchor text, any links you find on SEO Theory that point to other Websites do not in and of themselves constitute endorsements or convey in any sense recommendations or approval for goods and/or services provided on other Websites.

resource:http://www.seo-theory.com/linking-policy/

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