SEO as the first step towards online marketing

SEO is the way to rank your website on the search engines and showing it on the top results of search engines. If your website is displayed on top results for any of your products or services then surely you have gained a good position among the competitors. But it might just be the starting step towards your marketing plans, as having a good rank should also guarantee the business. And, this can be assured only if you have also designed proper marketing frame.

Many marketers believe that SEO is dead, but this is not true as there are still numerous ways and tactics that if implemented properly can give a good online presence to your website. There is, in fact an urgent need for starting with the mobile SEO as well for the companies who have not started that. Almost 91% population of the world has mobile phones, and out of that 51% has smart-phones that majorly contribute to the searches. It is crucial to make the website according to the mobile devices in order to keep the track of these users who come from mobile. SEO simply means optimizing a website to be easily tracked by search engines, so SEO can never be dead. It is just the activities and tactics that need to be changed with time.

There are also certain myths associated with SEO that need to be debunked.

• ·         SEO is not one-time activity; it is an investment that can help your website in long-run.
• ·         It takes 2-3 months for results to start showing up.
• ·         It is a slow process, but if done correctly can make the visibility consistent.
• ·         Creating a website according to search engines is equally important as promoting it.

To keep the website in the good book of search engines it should have magnificent designs that extend a great user-friendly experience. Users are directed to your website for a purpose, and if you have made sure that they should come to your website, you should also make sure they stay there. This can only happen if the landing pages of the websites are engaging enough to hold the visitors. So designing a user-friendly platform should be the first step. With time, even Google has become more sophisticated in order to return the results as per the user’s intent instead of only keywords. With the upgrade in different algorithms, it returns more refined and precise results for the user queries. This makes it even more critical for the marketers to focus on proper SEO and design of the website.

All about Google Panda Algorithm

We all know, the Google Panda algorithm basically looks for low-quality content on the website and penalizes a website based on that. According to the recent updates by Google, this algorithm is now the part of main ranking algorithm. So, how does it affect the website? It, in many ways will affect the websites that have bulk of content. It will put an end to the generation of paraphrased content that does not deliver any unique information to the readers. So how should the websites be updated for keeping only the quality content? There are certain things that you should be considering while generating any piece of content.

     1) Recognize the low-quality content:

There are certain parameters that describe the quality factor of the content. If you have content on a website that is:

·         Generated in bulk with the help of different resources.

·         Simply paraphrased form of already available information on Google.

·         Stuffed with keywords sacrificing the quality.

·         Written with the unclear aim of simply increasing the word count.

·         Badly formed sentences and wrong usage of grammar.

If your website if loaded with such content, then it is advisable to remove it as soon as possible. It will be definitely on the hit list of Google Panda. Since the algorithm has now become the part of main ranking algorithm, it may penalize your website and make it disappear from the search results.  Once the website has been penalized it may become very difficult to gain back the rankings in SERP.

2) Use genuine Ad spaces:

It’s the time when you should reconsider the amount of space to be provided for the ads on any of your web pages. It usually does not deliver a good user experience because most of the ads are irrelevant to the queries of the user. It is also visually distracting and increases the page loading speed. So, it is quite necessary to keep the ad ration healthy. It will not only keep the website safe from the penalties, but will also extend a genuine user experience. 

3) Increase unique and authoritative content:

Increasing the content that is unique can lead panda algorithm to rank your site. Before writing any content ask yourself whether you are writing it for traffic or to help your readers to gain the useful insight. If your content has been written with the aim to simply generate traffic, then it has to be analyzed again. Quality content can be a dominating factor while ranking your site on search engines.  It is also advisable to entirely remove the low quality content pages, because if the Panda rolls out it may penalize all the pages irrespective of the content. Even, the pages with the unique content also might get affected.

4) Issues of Duplicate content and word count:

There can also be the issues of duplicate content on the website, which should be resolved in order to avoid the penalties other than Panda. The content that is duplicate or copied from some other works has the highest chances of getting discarded by Google. Even if you have generated a content that has been uploaded on several platforms, it has to be uploaded with the rel=”canonical” tag; Doing this will help search engines locate the original website where it was published. After this has been done, the content can be republished without worrying about the issues of duplicate content. As far as word count is considered, it has not been a big issue because what matters in the content is the quality and not the quantity. A few hundred words content can deliver more information than a thousand word content.

Reasons to spend on ContentMarketing

There are different kinds of marketing strategies that can be used to escalate the growth of the business. The basic aspect of marketing is to understanding the customer base and delivering the customer friendly content. Content Marketing has been rated as the only marketing practice that guarantees the maximum engagement of the customers. It is a great challenge for marketers to generate the content that can convince the masses to serve the intent. It is a major compelling force that can navigate the targeted traffic to your website. Statistics suggest that content has always increased the number of conversions to the website. It has been estimated that nearly 93% of B2B marketers are using content as their main marketing tool.  The main challenge for marketers is not to generate more content, but it is to generate the relevant content.

Availability of bulk content on the Internet has forced Google to increase the penalties for same. So, to make sure that the content is relevant we need to understand the nature of business and importance of content for that. Statistics prove that most of the marketers spend their 42% of the budget on content marketing and that is a whooping number! This has been proved to be a better strategy!

As per the trends of the market, there will be 60% increase in the content creation and its promotion. There is a huge dependency of PPC campaigns and social media campaigns on the quality of the content that is being produced.

There can be a lot of ways in which you can become a better content marketer in order to stay ahead of the marketers.

• -          Start investing the time that you spend on the reading to writing the blogs.
• -          To make the content effective try to gather the statistics that can appeal the customers to read your work.
• -          Spend some budget on promoting the content on social media platforms

Content Sharing Platforms

As per the above graph LinkedIn is the platform where 94% of the content is shared and that has proved to benefit the marketers. This is followed by Twitter and Facebook, indicating the dominance of social media platform in the content marketing.

Content can even be a piece of visual graphic that has the maximum probability to attract the visitors and to take that advantage around 60% of the marketers are working on the creating the visual content.

So, to stay ahead in the competition in the market, creating the content to appeal the targeted traffic is the best strategy. Consistency in generating the content can actually make your analytics soar high.