Creating SEO-friendly content can be a daunting task, but it’s the only way to make your website popular. Search engines rank your websites according to the quality of your content, therefore, it’s important to be relevant.

It works the same way for content marketing – the creation or sharing of content for the purpose of engaging current and potential consumer bases.

If your website has a decent  SEO, not only will search engines love it, but they will give it a higher ranking compared to non-optimized pages. What we try to tell marketers is to keep in mind SEO and content work hand in hand.

With the current social media explotion, it might be the case that some of you may be forgetting the importance of good content. In a social media strategy, good content means content that is engaging, easy to read/digest and incites people to leave comments and share it with friends and colleagues. Add to that rich keywords and phrases that appear naturally within the text and your content will be taking you places you’ve never been before.

Experts talk about a certain density for keywords in order to improve search engine rankings- that is- an average of 3 to 7 keywords for every 100 words. We advise you use Google’s Keyword Tool to help you choose the most relevant words for your website with the highest amount of monthly searches and the lowest amount of competitors.

Here are some of the factors we recommend you keep track of while developing content for your website:

* make it engaging

* frequency of updates on your website

* placing your target key words in positions of prominence

* using your target words in everything that you do that is related to your site

* keywords in meta tags and descriptions

* relevancy and quality of your content

The more relevant and valuable your content is, the easier it will be for those interested in your product or services to find you on the web.

Traditionally, the main ways for brands to get found online are through SEO (search engine optimization) for corporate websites and  PPC (pay per click) by keyword bidding.

However, having good SEO will also depend on a series of fundamental aspects that will guarantee an increase in website traffic: good content, fresh content, good use of keywords and relevant phrases.

This means that if you want someone to find you easily and appear in the organic results, you must provide your website with a good selection of keyword phrases relevant to your business.

In result, you’re creating exposure for your brand and providing both searchers and search engines with what they’re looking for.

How do you fulfill this? Corporate blog. Blogs are rich in content, contain thousands of relevant keywords and get updated continuously with fresh, new content…exactly what search engines need in order to find you.

The more keywords the better the chance of appearing in the search results and the greater the chance you get spotted by a prospect.

Once you get found, your task is to develop a sincere and open dialogue with customers. Adopting a corporate blog could be one of the best ways to build a meaningful and ongoing customer relationship allowing for your readers to participate in conversation and interact freely with their favorite brand.

Is Google polishing up before Bing continues to steal win over more search market share?

The fact is that Google has been working on what people have been referring to as caffeine or a next-generation architecture for its web search, as stated on the official blog. It’s the first step in a process that will let Google push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions, it continued.

As shown on the results for my search on Starbucks coffee (the word caffeine inevitably led me to choose Starbucks as my query term), Caffeine returned 8,970,000 results in 0.13 seconds whereas the standard Google search returned 9,610,000 in 0.20 seconds.

You can already see some differences between the two searches, but how will this affect SEO for example?

One of Google’s aims is to deliver results fast, which means that the more relevant content your website has, the higher the probability of coming up within the very first page results, hence, the higher ranking. In addition, if the loading time of your website is fast, it will result in better user experience and once again contribute to the effectiveness your SEO efforts.

For now, test out some searches of your own and, if needed, provide Google with some feedback by doing a search at http://www2.sandbox.google.com/ and clicking on the page link that says Dissatisfied? Help us improve.

Just out of curiosity, I ran a search on both engines for ‘gender test’ due to all the recent buzz about the female athlete who’s thought to be a man…results weren’t that impressive. Try running the search yourself.

From my SEO standpoint, effective Information Architecture happens when web design grants usability and accessibility to well organized content.

Accessibility is also spiderability, and search engine optimization will make a website easy to crawl for bots, and pleasant to navigate for humans. Both kinds of visitors will come back to the website if relevant content is organized with usability and accessibility in mind.

Information Architecture is also about structuring information on a website. A thorough knowledge of the website’s content and an in-depth understanding of the target audience’s mind are required: How do users conceptualize the website’s topic, and what words do they use to talk about it?

Keyword research and classification for usability: Keyword Mapping

Hierarchical taxonomies, like nested category levels, from macro categories to the single specific item, can inspire intuitive navigation designs that allow easy access to information, if paired with a bottom up method like keyword research.

Don’t underestimate the value of offline keyword research, because it can give insights on what users would expect as a natural way of organizing information around a central topic. However, online keyword research is the pillar on which keyword mapping stands: broad and specific keywords show us what users want, and what kind of content a website page should provide.

Pages focused on unique keyword variations, will help avoiding keyword cannibalization, and point users and the search engine to the most relevant page for the query.

Information Architecture and web design challenges

An ideal Information Architecture will structure content in a natural, user friendly way that reflects target audience’s search queries, but what happens when users show multiple ways to search for the same information?

Some E-commerce websites use faceted classification to provide the best usability to users that look for products that can be classified on three or more dimensions. SEO efforts in this case need to focus on avoiding duplicate content, and designing keyword targeted pages with dedicated quality content and unique internal anchor text consistently used throughout the site.

Web evolution trends show the importance of providing individually relevant content to the user, starting from a correct assessment of user intent in search queries, and offering tools to parse and share information in a convenient way, like RSS feeds or social bookmarking websites.

The challenge of innovating without leaving the paved cowpath of traditional UI design will become less daunting day by day: widgeted dashboard pages can be an example, and in the future we can expect dynamic websites that will more and more recognize our personal web navigation patterns and adapt to them.

Another good reason: there are millions and millions of people surfing the Web (or Google for that matter),who are constantly in search of information, services, and products. And some of these people can represent potential clients who happen to be interested in what you’ve got to offer.

What are some ways in which you can stand out in order to get users to click on you? The two most common ways are paid advertising and natural or organic search. The latter is entirely dependent on what Google thinks about you and whether your content is in any way relevant and interesting.

How does Google calculate page rank? In very simple terms, without getting into the whole algorithmic aspect of it, it estimates a websites’ rank by the number of pages linking to it. So, this means that if a renowned website links to you, say Cnn.com, your page rank will quickly go up due to the fact that Cnn’s PageRank is 8 making a page with lots of credibility compared to one with a PageRank of 3.

Coincidentially, an article from Cnn.com which I was just reading defines PageRank as the currency of the Web. In short, it says that a link from a site with a high page rank counts for way more than a link from a site with low page rank.

Google’s official advice: “The best way to get other sites to create relevant links to yours is to create unique, relevant content that can quickly gain popularity in the Internet community.”

On one hand, it is very important to do link building, however in must be done correctly. But before that happens, you need to make sure your website has the right, relevant content that helps you show up in the search results. As Cnn mentions, the Web is a vast territory and getting attention for a new site, even one with superb content, is a very difficult undertaking.

Once you get the relevant content, you work on your PageRank. How? You try to get as many inbound links as possible from those resources whose page rank is high. How? By spreading the word about your product or service and getting people to talk about you. The more people talk, the more those and others will come to you for information which will in turn make you a very credible and valuable company.

As an attempt to satisfy all tastes Google has come up with a trio of services all targeted to help users ’slice and dice’ their Google search results.

Search Options is feature number one. Basically, it’s a tool that enables users to manipulate information and restrict search results by a certain criteria, ie: time, genre or reviews. One of the tools within the Search Options is the Wonder Wheel which provides users with related query suggestions and see result updates on real-time.

My search query was for ‘glasses’ and Google suggested I could also look into Dior glasses, bar glasses or RayBan glasses, which I clicked on for more refined results.

Google Squared is feature number two and one which is set to launch later this month under Labs. This tool organizes your results into a sort of spreadsheet that can be edited and saved as you would an Excel file.

The example as dicussed by Matt Cutts was for ’small dogs’. Google results displayed the types of breeds that corresponded to small dogs which stretched down the page as seen on image. Any missing data can be added into different rows as well as new columns  in order to retrieve corroborating facts on a given term.

Rich Media Snippets is the third feature presented by Google. Want to get some extra information on your search results? Rich Snippets are said to be a favorite for webmasters since it allows them to add a piece of code to their HTML, which will in theory program Google to reveal more information than the singular search result you’re used to.

These little pieces of text will extract more information and give you a richer view of the preview text. For instance, if you’re looking to try a new restaurant, the rich snippet will include a review of that restaurant or the restaurant’s price range which can both help you choose the right place. Same goes for people.  If you’re looking for someone but the results show more than one person with the same name, snippets will extract the location and profession of a particular person so you can tell if it’s the person you’re looking for.

Clearly, all three features give users a way to refine results at a much rapper pace and manipulate information to their needs. What has been your experience so far? Tell us your story!

Post Highlights

• Increase your brand presence in social media
• Increase your organic ranking on search results by having a search term in the domain name
• Make your brand stand out from the crowd
• Be in the top-of-mind of your current and potential customers, make it easy for them to find you
  

If you are a company or marketer, (early adopter or not), looking to optimize your brand’s presence on the different social media, ie- Facebook, perhaps you’d like to consider setting up your own Facebook vanity URL.

In some cases companies fear that if they don’t register their trademarks under several domains, their brand names could be hijacked, leading to mistrust of their brands and lack of credibility. However, apart from getting your brand name stolen, it could also be the case that random people can manipulate information, images, videos and important brand data that only YOU should be handling.

It is also true that brands, specially big brands, have a massive fan base, from which a given fan may create a brand’s Page on its own initiative as did the two Coca-Cola devotees who were then rewarded by the soft drink giant.

Nevertheless, these cases may not always have a happy ending and some brands prefer to takeover the ‘unofficial’ channel to make it their own, which is not a simple thing to accomplish either, maybe rewarding fans could really be the easy way out.

In any case, whether it’s your fans, friends or Company X, who launch a dedicated brand channel through any given social media (Facebook, YouTube), I’d say it’s quite useful to have your own corporate vanity URL.

For example: www.facebook.com/dimensionedanza or www.facebook.com/energie.  Note: Facebook only disposes of such URLs to media partners who spend over $50,000/yr on Facebook advertising or preferred partners.

Ordinary Facebook URLs are not catchy at all and people tend to forget them or will just not bother to look you up on the search field. On the other hand, without a vanity URL, you’re not really making that extra effort to differentiate your brand from the cluster of brands existent on Facebook or perhaps even from the unofficial Pages or Groups created by other Facebook users.

In terms of SEO, vanity URLs have either a keyword or your company name at the end of the address which is one advantage point. There’s a higher chance your vanity URL and top-level domains will deliver significant clicks and higher CTR rather than a non-descriptive URL.

What are your views on vanity URLs?

While Landing Page Optimization addresses transactional search queries, and search engines strive on displaying results to match users’ intent based on the combination of keywords and intent-indicating terms (“buy” for transactional queries, “review” for informational queries, etc.), a well structured product page can rank high for navigational, informational and transactional search queries.

These are some ways in which SEO can help your landing page be effective and targeted:

• a good folder structure (avoid creating too many folders!) will feature product category and brand keywords, when the latter is not in the domain name itself;
• the page URL should have product model keywords in the filename;
• product page Title too should be optimized with the crawler in mind, without unnecessary words that would dilute keyword density;
• headline 1 instead, could combine keywords along with transactional intent-indicating terms, that should reflect as closely as possible the headline of the ad used in PPC campaigns.

A clear funnel to conversion can coexist with usability. Avoiding leakage points is as important as providing clear navigation and a good user experience, especially when users could become returning customers or decide to shop for more than one product on your website.

SEO copywriting will improve rankings for any kind of search query regarding your product.

A page with good quality informational content will build trust and convert better than short copy pages for users in the early stages of the buying cycle, especially when the transaction fulfills a rational need and involves high levels of anxiety, caused by high perceived risk and personal commitment.

Transactions that don’t involve high cost and commitment, or are based on more impulsive purchase behavior, benefit from short copy, because long copy would just produce friction and have a dampening effect on the initial emotional strength of the impulse.

Blitz, the online news aggregator by Marco Benedetto, ex-president of L’Espresso Group,  is now live.

Marco Benedetto, current vice-president of the aforementioned group, has decided to plunge into the internet world by starting up his very own news aggregator which picks up headlines from many of the world’s online news sources such as The New York Times, The American, The Telegraph and celebrity gossip blogs, The Daily Beast and Star to name a few.

In an interview by Il Sole 24 Ore (see image) Benedetto exclaimed that ‘newspapers will not die’ -in defense to the many question marks he received from people regarding his news portal- and concluded by saying that people will always be in need of information.

It’s only natural people react this way given his editorial background, however, Benedetto is a full supporter of the web and regardless of the threat it represents to traditional offline media, it comes in handy when times get tough and prices rise.

77 has worked very closely with Benedetto in providing strategic and web consultancy for this new project. The 77 team has dedicated time to implementing a SEO strategy as well as optimized the site for better performance in the search rankings. The implementation of the blog tool, Word Press, was also sought after by 77 together with the employment of the right publishing plug-ins required for the site.

In the meantime, we invite everyone to visit Blitz and feel free to let us know your experience.

Read more about Blitz on the news here.

Universal Search is Google’s recipe for mixing different user intents in a Blended SERP.

Whether to face it as a challenge or an opportunity is up to your smooth SEO techniques!

You’ve already optimized your existing site content, you’ve learnt to use smart keyword-dense file names for your images and tagged videos of your products and services on YouTube and MySpace… however, it’s not enough: there’s more to Universal SEO than just this.

Search engines are using data collection to offer a better targeted variety of results: image and video thumbnails, news, local search results, maps, audio clips, Social Networking profile pages, shopping results, books, the list is growing day by day, and you don’t want to see your website pushed down the rankings by all these types of Blended Search results.

• Do you own a restaurant, or a small shop? Local business owners  can easily compete on Local Search with bigger brands by adding a business listing to Google Maps.

• Do need to manage your client’s (or your own) online reputation? Social Networking profile pages are the answer: take advantage of social media options for your business and rank high with your Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn profile pages!

• News: optimize your press releases as you would do for your website pages!

• PDF documents: ever heard of OCR? That’s Optical Character Recognition, a technology that allows Google to index your PDF scanned documents. Next time you upload a scanned document, think about SEO!

Well, I know what you are thinking now: “where is the rest of the 77 SEO Tips you promised me?” Please, relax and enjoy blended SEO. 77Agency would never allow your competitors to access the best  SEO Services we reserved especially for you!