The video below features a few professionals from the Content Marketing Institute discussing website traffic and the hidden messages your readers may be dealing with. I've been following the Content Marketing Institute's blog and podcasts for a few years now and I've learned a lot from the staff. They are always on the cutting edge and the content they produce is always fresh and useful.
This discussion is based on findings from Content Marketing Institute’s new B2C Content Marketing: 2017 Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends—North America report. When it comes to content marketing, an unseen message in your website traffic could open a new approach to content. In this Content Marketing Strategy Session from Content Marketing World 2016, a panel of B2C marketing experts say that looking for ways to reach the audience that you have – even if it’s not the audience you wanted – may provide a path to new insights and activities.
You probably already know that Google uses about 200 ranking factors in their algorithm... But what the heck are they? Well today you're in for a treat because I've put together a complete list. Some are proven. Some are controversial. Others are SEO nerd speculation. But they're all here.
Here are a few of the ranking factors Google uses every day to rank all the web pages on the Internet. You can follow this list to ensure your site is up to par.
1. Domain Age:
In this video, Matt Cutts states that:
“The difference between a domain that’s six months old versus one year old is really not that big at all.”.
In other words, they do use domain age…but it’s not very important.
2. Keyword Appears in Top Level Domain: Doesn’t give the boost that it used to, but having your keyword in the domain still acts as a relevancy signal. After all, they still bold keywords that appear in a domain name.
3. Keyword As First Word in Domain: A domain that starts with their target keyword has an edge over sites that either don’t have the keyword in their domain or have the keyword in the middle or end of their domain.
This is the thing. I created this post to see if I could use two Embed.ly buttons per post. The buttons empower readers to quickly scoop up the content on any page where the button is embedded, then paste that content into any web page.
As you can see from the image on the left, simply including the html code of the Embed.ly button is not enough as the buttons will appear next to the text. I think I can fix this issue with a <br /> tag, or maybe two.
This banner should hold for a day or two. At least the company get's a link to their site! The green banner below was going to be used as a header placeholder. It looks small on this post but it is actually 729x90 which is the size I need to fill header position.
I may not need it. But if I do I can use it a couple ways. I could do an image tag and render the image via a URL or I could simply insert the pic directly since it's already on this blog's media files. And it's not a bad company either.
Writing content for consumption on the Internet today isn't the same as it was a few years ago. In fact, content creation in general has changed drastically in just the past two years and it'll continue to change as far as the Schema organization is concerned.
the web looks a lot different today than it did fivers ago and it’ll look different than today’s style of producing content in a few years from now. The heavy weights driving this change are Google and Bing.
Unless you truly enjoy writing, you do not want to create content that's more than 700 words in length. It's simply too much work!
You want the SEO benefits of content creation which is why you've become a publisher. Unfortunately, publishers can no longer get away with the bare minimum word count on articles published on their blogs. Why?
Long-form content is slowly becoming the accepted publishing norm. It's not new, people have been publishing 1,000 to 2,000 word articles for the past few years.
Remember Squidoo? Publishers on that platform used a TOC to help readers navigate long articles some of which contained videos and, of course, images.
Long-Form Content should Contain 2000+ Words
SEO professionals have been advising clients to publish long-form content for more than a year. And it turns out that that is great advice!
The infographic below details the benefits of publishing articles which are more than 2,000 words. Articles longer than a couple thousand words provide SEO benefits and help the publisher create website authority.
Other benefits include:
Increase in online visiblity
Increase in social shares
Increase in back links
Higher ranking in the SERPs
According to the infographic, which I liberated from the Entreprenuer.com website, the average content length of the top ten results of search queries is more often than not, more than 2,000 words.
There's also a direct correlation between the length of an article and social media shares. All the major search engines now include social signals to rank web pages in response to a user's search query, so it's important to get on top of the action now while it's still easy to rank well on the strength of great content.
Content Marketing Strategy Shifts in 2016
If you're not publishing long-form content, maybe it's time to create a new content marketing strategy that includes articles that are more than 1,000 words long.
How far along is Google from using social media signals as ranking factors? Can Google use engagement and follower metrics from Twitter and Facebook to evaluate the authority of an individual?
To me, the answers to those questions were the buried headlines in a Google Webmaster Help video (embedded below) by Matt Cutts. Even though Matt is currently on an extended hiatus from his job as head of Google’s web spam team, I believe what he had to say in this video remains the case today.
Supporting that, Google’s John Mueller stated categorically in an August 14, 2015, video that Google does not use social signals in its search ranking factors. And John Mueller and Gary Illyes both reiterated this stand in June 6, 2016 tweets.
My purpose in this post is to examine Matt Cutts’ comments in great detail in order to understand why Google does not incorporate social signals as a ranking factor.
https://youtu.be/udqtSM-6QbQ
I used the banner on this page as a quick temporary fix. I needed a header image to guage the robustness of this theme as I'd just purchased the Blogger theme and wanted to test all the areas that interested me enough to purchase!
Although I regularly purchase items online, it is hard for me to insert my credit card number into most websites. If they offer PayPal that may sway me a little bit. I've been using PayPal for more than two decades and trust the site implicitly.
