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.
