Content is undoubtedly, the king of for any digital marketing campaign. It is crucial to have a good knowledge base on what content marketing is all about. Wish to leverage upon content marketing to attain success in terms of SEO rankings in the year 2015? Get to know about how to leverage upon adequate content, through this webinar conducted by Navneet Kaushal, CEO, Pagetraffic.
Webinar Leader’s Profile:
Navneet is the Editor of PageTraffic Buzz and his columns are read by thousands of readers. He is also featured at Web Pro News, Promotion World, Search Newz, Website Notes, DevWebPro, and Web Help Now among many others. You can also read some of his recent quotes at The Seattle Times, Hindustan Times, Livemint, ET Now, PC Quest etc.
Navneet conducts corporate workshops and is a much sought after speaker at prestigious events. A few of his most recent engagements were TFM&A India, Ad tech, New Delhi, Click Asia Summit, Mumbai & SEMPO Bangalore. His other regular conference engagements include SES, SMX, and many industry events in US, Europe and Asia.
Twitter Handle: @navneetkaushal
As transcribed by Digital Vidya:
Q- What are schema? What exactly link building is and what does indexed page really mean?
A- Schema is kind of a rich snippet. So, if you search something in Google, then it might come across where Google shows the reviews or might show small stars, those are the schemas. There are different sort of schemas. Schemas were launched a couple of years back just to make the results more meaningful. So, some of the popular schemas are Google Reviews, Local listing schemas, event schemas. For instance, if you are looking for movie timings then these schemas are going to show the results right there on the Google result. You can implement them easily on your website. Google has updated its schema tool which acts as a good tutorial that you add to your page to make it more rich in terms of when it get showed in Google. There are almost 35 different sort of schemas. based on the kind of website or based on the kind of content that you are doing, you can actually use most of these.
The indexed page basically means number of pages which are listed in Google for your website. You can type in Google search box like site: your website.com, for example, site: pagetraffic.com. It is going to give me a list of pages which Google has crawled and which have been indexed in Google. If one of my page is not indexed in Google, then it is not going to get ranked. So, it is important that most or all of my pages are indexed in Google and ranked. So, for us it is important to have all the pages and the pages which are important and which are not having thin content or pages which you feel are delible to the user should be crawled and once they are crawled they definitely come up in the index.
Link building to your website meant people voting to your website to build the trust for a specific meaning or a specific service. So, lets say of you have a website which talks about selling online gifts or lets you sell online flowers so more and more links gets build to your website. Thus, the more and more links build to your website, the higher the rankings are. Previously, you could get links from any website and you would rank, it means that the link should be from the websites which are theme based, then it goes again and the link has to be from the website, from the content. So, the link building is an important factor. In fact, last year Google did an interesting experiment where internally they had switched off all the links coming to the website and then they see how the Google search becomes, how does the Google search shows. Link building is kind of getting number of positive votes to your website which helps to get your site ranking better.
Q- What is an ideal bounce rate? What kind of content should be put to decrease the bounce rate on the website?
A- Depending upon the website, Google’s ideal bounce rate should be 100 percent. If people are able to find more and more results on the last page for something, it should be as good as 100 percent. According to our website which is a service website or product selling, the ideal bounce rate is below 50, it should be somewhere around 30-35 percent.
You can reduce your bounce rate by producing engaging content. Foremost important thing is when a page load give user the information which they are looking for, most of the time it has been seen that that the website having huge graph on the first score. You do not have to speak much as that is the first score where you should give relevant content and it has to be engaging enough. Also, the content should not end without any action or call-to-action button. So, there should be a call-to-action- button such as ‘Inquire Now’ etc. and you should have more informative content linked internally to the page. So, the content should be a little longer if you wish to reduce the bounce rate, nicely placed-up and talk about FAQ’s with a particular page which people want to know about.
Q- You added blog-post in the guest articles in the content marketing plan, are they still valid?
A- By referring to blog-posts, it was meant the blogs on your website. Blogs on your website have to be engaging as they get good visitors, so Navneet was not talking about article submissions on the websites alone, but he was talking about putting a blog on your own website.
When it comes to the guest posts, if you think you are building guest posts from the SEO point, then that is not a healthy way to think about it. The guest posts are more specifically talking on your industry forum, talking about preparing a content or an article and sharing it on the websites. For instance, Navneet himself writes on all the major search engine publications like Search Engine Watch, Search Engine Journal, ClickZ, on none of these places does he writes content keeping in mind the links and most of these websites give him direct referral traffic and get good conversions from these websites. So, if you are building guest blog posts not keeping in mind the links, then they are good enough. You might have a resource box where they might say that a particular article has been written by a person A who belongs to company B, it is not something on which Google is going to frown upon because most of the bigger publications such as newspapers also have guest columnists, so they are not building links.
The SEO is the residual of whatever we do. If you think primarily for SEO then it is not going to work, so you have to think that they are the residual.
Q- Does directory submission still hold weightage and if it does then what are the top 5 directories one should list? Does paid directory listing work?
A- The directory submission as such is dead, it was dead way back in 2010-2011. Free directory submissions are dead anyhow and Google has especially said that any link which is submitted to a free website where it seems that they do not have an editorial control is a link which they are not going to count.
The top directories are DMOZ (free), Business.com, and Yahoo’s Small Business Directory. The latter helps small businesses looking for specific service. However, in a nut shell, directory submission is actually dead.
Q- How do we get rid of bounce rate caused by spamming websites like buttonshare.com other than taking service from pagetraffic?
A- You just cannot control how anybody links to your website, website is not something which you and me can control. So, the bounce rate from these websites should not matter to us however, you can put them in Google Analytics, you can filter them while actually analyzing your bounce rate.
Q- Does PPT or PDF help to generate quality back-links?
A- The PPT and the PDF is going to help if it is of a high quality. So, lets say if I am just building a PDF or a PPT and putting it on SlideShare for link building, then that is not going to help. However, if I am building a PPT or a PDF lets of this session or lets say if I write about SEO in 2015 then that is going to help me build more links.
Q- Is content curation same as article spinning? If not, how are they different? Is article spinning recommended? Which tool would you recommend for the same?
A- Article spinning is when you pick an article and spin it with a machine, so that is not recommended and that is actually dead. While content curation is lets say if I am looking for people who have talked about top 5 SEO tools on different places, I can pick services or lets say we did an article on 35 tools for content marketing. So, what were these, these were just tools which were put to create a list. So, that is content curation. So, to create a content, you are actually not producing that content. He himself wrote a content on ‘Top 5 paid SEO tools’ and did content curation as he looked for people who had talked about it.
Thus, article spinning is not recommended and is actually dead as the kind of links they are going to produce are going to be of no use.
Q- What could be done if we are not able to produce the original content? Should we put feeds on other sites of other blog sites such as Search Engine Watch?
A- When you take a feed from these websites, they come in a Java Script, which cannot be read. Another thing is if a visitor sees a feed on your website, then he/she will click on it and move away. So, he does not see any value being added. If you are looking for content from other websites, it is no more like the old school way. Now, it is more interesting and more challenging. Even if you rank with the way Navneet is taking about, it is going to be very-very hard for somebody to place you. So, you always have to keep in mind that content marketing is painful and expensive but very-very high paying. So, content creation is not something for which you have a shortcut for.
Q- What are the techniques/tools/approaches for segmenting your target market during planning your SEO efforts?
A- It depends upon the type of product you have. Put yourself in the shoes of your customers. So, if you are selling an industrial product, what kind of product/service are you offering, what kind of a customer are you looking at? A buyer personification needs to be done and you have to look from Google Adwords and various other tools shared in the session to personify.
Q- How to increase engagement on Facebook page even if there is a good content people do not feel engaged and also due to the Facebook policies, there is a lack of reach? How do you increase your content engagement?
A- The only way to reach now which new Facebook algorithm has is you have to have a sponsored content. Of course, you need to share good images for example if you visit www.facebook.com/pagetraffic.in, there are a lot of interesting images which are engaging and we do share a lot of content. So, they need to be sponsored or else they do not even reach to our audience and we have close to 53,000 fans on our Facebook page, which is very hard to reach with Facebook’s policy where they do not want businesses to reach for free to their users.
Q- What is the time-frame to be dedicated to understand the SEO success?
A- It depends what success means to you. To get rankings for SEO, it would take a linger time-frame as it is no longer a 5-6 months game as you have to give at least 12 months to get good ranking result.
Q- For content marketing what should be the content length?
A- It depends upon the kind of formats. So, for infographic there is going to be a different format, for Facebook post there is going to be a different format, for Twitter there is a prescribed character limit etc. so it depends. For an article to share on your blog it should be around 700-800 words long but if you are really up for it then Navneet would recommend somewhere around 1,500+ words.
Q- Are LSI keywords effective?
A- LSI means Latent Semantic Indexing which in a non-technical language basically means when you are building for content for a specific keyword, you are looking for phrases which are related to that as well which in a newer sense is something which is Hummimgbirds. So, you do not look for an LSI when you are building content for mobile phones, you throw in related keywords like mobile phone or CDMA phone, GSM phone, that is not very effective now. Instead, what is more effective is you build a content around one or two keywords a page and then have a content which has answers. So, the page should have FAQ’s, paragraphs, sub-headings etc. so that is something important not keeping LSI in mind as that is dead from almost a couple of years.
Q- Do you recommend any infographic tools to create best infographics?
A- An article by Navneet for ClickZ has all the infographic tools.
Q- What kind of a content should be produced for a blog of an educational game website? I am running out of content for blog.
A- The best way is to go and search on buzz through keywords and you will get lots of ideas there.
Q- I have submitted site map one month ago, out of 52, 27 URLs are indexed but still Google is not showing respective link in CERP.
A- The main reason for title not being showing depends on how you are doing the search. If you are searching through site: your website.com and you have put the title tag properly, then it will definitely show. However, if you are looking for a specific keyword and you are feeling that Google is not showing the title for that URL listed, then Google states that they do dynamically create or show their own title based on the user search query. So, these are two different cases which can be possible.