Posted by Danny Dover

This week on Whiteboard Friday, Rand Fishkin describes the methods he recommends for outsourcing content creation. Content is extremely important for SEO and users alike so these best practices are important for those of us without the luxury of an in-house staff of copywriters.

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Step 1: Requirements Gathering

Decide what you are trying to accomplish. Are you doing this for sales? SEO? Engagement? Traffic? Brand awareness? Be clear and write down what you want to accomplish along with the metrics you will use to measure them.

Step 2: Locating Potential Resources

You have plenty of options for finding potential resources. You can go offshore, in-house or hire web contractors. For web contractors, you can use the traditional services like Craigslist, oDesk, Elance, Guru or tap into the world of writing communities and long tail bloggers. These last two recommendations while not as established can many times provide superior quality writing with lower budgets.

Step 3: Research Writing Quality & Voice Match

In order to do this, we highly recommend you set up a voice document (a written record of how you would like to sound in your company’s written communications and promotions). Give this to the writer before getting a sample and use this as the yardstick after they submit their first sample. This will help you gauge if this person is a good fit for your organization.

Step 4: Scale, Evaluate, Track

Now that you have established a process, you need to put checks into place to make sure the writer is hitting their targets. Look back at the goals you created in the first step and use them to track and improve upon the related metrics.

Remember, from both an SEO and from a human perspective, writing is about quality over quantity. Having one great article that engages readers and earns links far outweighs 100 poorly written articles.

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Read other posts by this Author: Danny Dover

Building links is still a big topic with SEOs and site owners alike and we’re all a bit fed up with trying to get reciprocal links. While it may be more fun, using social media channels to build links take a lot of time and may not suit everyone. So it’s time to get creative and come up with some content you can put on your site that attracts more links to your site.

Here’s my Top 7 Ways to Increase Link Popularity with Content on Your Site:

1. Top 10 Lists (or Top 5, 25, 100 or maybe just 7)

From the FBI’s Most Wanted to Dave Letterman’s Top Ten, people love these lists! They also love to pass the information on to their circle of friends or colleagues.  Pick a topic that will be of interest to your target market and do a bit a research to come up with the definitive list for that topic.

http://www.askmen.com/microsites/top_10_cities/

This Top 10 webpage from 2008 still does well on search engines.  I like the way you see the info without scrolling and the advertising fits in well.

2. Videos

We all know YouTube is hot, a popular search engine in itself, but if you embed good videos on your own site, it will attract visitors and links to the page. If you have an interesting collection of videos others have done, people will be more likely to link to your page, rather than to the source video site.

You can embed other people’s videos on your site, making sure that they are relevant to your topic (and to get permission and provide attribution, etc.) but it’s not so difficult to produce your own videos.  Digital webcams have come down in price and are easy to use, but you could even just create a nice slideshow from images you have that will highlight your products, work you’ve done, etc.

http://g.sports.yahoo.com/soccer/world-cup/blog/dirty-tackle

Yahoo’s Dirty Tackle blog has been very popular during the World Cup, mainly for its regular posts with videos of highlights and funny moments in the sport.

3. Images

Not as dynamic as video, but people do like to look at ‘pretty pictures’. Whether you create them yourself or get permission to use others images, look for those related to your topic and reinforce the points you are trying to make.  Think beyond photographs – relevant diagrams and charts will also be of great interest.

http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/global/led-by-facebook-twitter-global-time-spent-on-social-media-sites-up-82-year-over-year/

Sites like Nielsen use charts and diagrams on a regular basis to provide an easy way for people to take in the stats provided.

4. Interview an Expert or Industry Leader

Don’t we all want to know what the experts think and how they do what they do?  You’d be surprised how willing most industry experts/leaders are to do a quick interview; whether it be in person or over the phone/Skype, etc.

Make sure you are prepared and professional. Agree on topics (try to find something that’s timely and hasn’t been covered a million times) and keep to the time allowed.  It’s a sure thing that the person interviewed will link to your interview, giving your site even more exposure.

http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/9624

Linux Journal’s Interview with pen source advocate Simon Pipps from 2007 still comes high in search results.

5. How To’s / Tutorials

These days the internet is a person’s main way to find out how to do things, whether via an article or a video.  You can easily write step by step tutorials or articles about an area that you are knowledgeable in. Even better, do a quick How To video, even if just a screencast.  Besides showing people that you know your business and providing helpful information for people, it’s very likely that people will then link to your page.

http://www.neckties.com/content/howtotieatie.html

Neckties.com includes an instructional animated video to help their customers, as well as draw prospective buyers to the site.

7. Free Downloads

People can’t resist free stuff!  Have you created (or commissioned) an app or a script that you can provide for free?  Less technical? Then you can you create helpful checklists or other articles as PDFs that people can download.

https://www.mynrma.com.au/cps/rde/xchg/mynrma/hs.xsl/free_used_car_checklist.htm

Australia’s NRMA provides a FREE Used Car Buying Guide Checklist for visitors to download as a PDF.

7. Commission a Study or Report

People love statistics! Do your own market research or commission an agency or university and put together a study or report that’s relevant to your industry.

http://mulley.ie/facebook/

Ireland’s Mulley Communications commissioned a Facebook Study by a division of the National College of Ireland, “made possible” with an “Innovation Voucher” funded by a government agency. (This is also a good example of providing a download and embedding a video!)

When deciding on content make sure you are focused on your target market and what will be of interest to them to ensure that it will also be something that they’d want to share by placing a link on their own sites.  What to consider:

1. Is my market more likely to link to content that’s funny, serious or informative – or a mix?
2. Is the content fresh and original?  Don’t just copy a list or article from someone else’s site, even if you give attribution.  If you don’t have original information on a topic, compile interesting information from a number of relevant sites and put it together in a new way, making it your own.  There may be times when it’s best to include a quote or excerpt from the original site, but be sure to give proper attribution and you may get a [link] friend for life!
3. Do I make it easy for people to link to my content? Are the URLs on your site not only SEO friendly, but people friendly?  Yes, it’s easy to copy and past a URL, but if your URL is particularly long and doesn’t reflect the content of the page it may put someone off from doing the link.
4. Does my overall site merit getting links from others?  Is it overloaded with AdWords?  Is the site user friendly? Does the site look professional?  Even if you have the most interesting article ever, people will be less likely to link to it if the rest of your site doesn’t live up to it.
5. Are you being generous with your link love?   As they say ‘give and ye shall receive’ and the same is true with links.  Just make sure the links you post are relevant for your visits and that the sites are high quality.
6. How do I get people to link to my page in an SEO friendly way? Short of telling people how to put the link, you can influence the link text people use in the link to your page. They are likely to use your keyphrase in your link text if you are using them properly on the page yourself. Some may still just put the URL as the link text, so if you are using keyphrases in your URL, that will help.  Some may use the title of the page, video, image, download, etc., so be sure to use your keyphrases in any of these areas as well.

As you build up the quality content on your site you will find that more people are linking to the homepage of your site, as well as the pages with specific content, as the site itself will be seen as a useful or interesting resource overall.

Rather than obsessing over what’s going to get you the most links; keep focused on providing good, interesting, relevant content for the visitors to your site and the links will follow.

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

Top 7 Ways to Increase Link Popularity with Content on Your Site

Read other posts by this Author: Ann Donnelly

Posted by randfish

Jason Cohen recently authored a post on A/B testing that deserves both broader awareness and a deeper dive. Most of us in the online marketing world are aware of the power A/B tests can bring through improved click-through, sign-up and conversion rates. Getting a higher percentage of visitors to a page to take a desired action is powerful stuff.

The process by which we hypothesize, design, create and run testing, however, is fraught with peril. And, one of the least obvious, but most insiduous potential pitfalls is actually what we choose to test.

Visualizing the “Local Minimum” Issue

It’s definitely interesting and sometimes worthwhile to test individual elements of a landing page, but it’s often not appropriate at the beginning of a landing page or product’s life. As Conversion Rate Experts points out, the “let’s throw stuff at a wall and see what sticks” approach can have a small impact. Researching the questions visitors have and answering them effectively can make a world of difference.

The problem is, it’s so very tempting to be seduced by an easy answer.

The Tantalizing Tease of Testing Minutiae

It’s likely that many of you have read case studies like the ones below:

• Changing Button Color from Red to Green = 72% Improvement from Dan McGrady
• 11% Conversion Rate Increase with a “Commitment Checkbox” from Conversion Voodoo
• How Adding “It’s Free” Increased Conversion by 28% from Soocial
• Human Photos Double Conversion Rate from Carsonified
• The infamous Twitter Following Command Test from Dustin Curtis

In all of these, some simple change accounted for big increases in click-through or conversion rate, leading to widespread praise and sharing. The problem is – they’re the exception, not the rule. In fact, that’s precisely why they’re newsworthy and get so many mentions. That’s not to say you shouldn’t read them or shouldn’t take away value from the examples (you definitely should). It’s just that the mentality of the small change can create a misleading mindset for marketers.

Very few websites have the experience of changing a button color or altering a headline or fiddling with some copy and seeing huge improvements in conversion rate. If you have good reason to believe you’re an outlier, go for it, just be cautious – it’s not just the fact that small scale changes can have less positive of an impact. They also cost time and resources that you can’t afford.

Some Simple, Compelling Math to Keep You Out of the Weeds

Let’s say you’re pretty good at conversion rate optimization – A/B and multivariate tests are relatively easy for you to perform and you’ve got solid instincts around them. And let’s also say that you get reasonably decent traffic to your landing/test pages – in the several thousand range each day.

Even under these ideal conditions, massive problems emerge.

Knowing that each test takes a substantial amount of time to get high confidence of accuracy and that smaller tests (with less needle-moving potential) take MORE time is a pretty convincing reason to start out with the big ideas and big changes first. But, it’s not the only logic behind this. Let’s say you find a page/concept you’re relatively happy with and start testing the little things – optimizing around the local minimum. You might run tests for 4-6 months, eek out a 5% improvement in your overall conversion rate and feel pretty good.

Until…

You run another big, new idea in a test and improve further. Now you know you’ve been wasting your time optimizing and perfecting a page whose overall concept isn’t as good as the new, rough, unoptimized page you’ve just tested for the first time.

It’s easy to see how you can get lost in this process and frustrated, too. That’s why my recommendation (and the advice I get from lots of talented CRO folks) is to start with the big ideas and big projects, nail down the grand plans worth testing, let your audience pick a winner and then try to tweak, tune and improve.

What You Should Be Testing

What do I mean when I say “big ideas” and “overhauls?” Luckily, 37Signals provided a terrific example yesterday with their Basecamp Homepage Redesign:

They recorded a 14% improvement from new vs. old and can now decide whether they want to try another innovative concept or start optimizing the little things on this version. And while the numbers don’t sound as compelling as a few of the bigger ones from the small tests, I’d argue they’re going about things exactly in the right way. Perhaps a “little change” to the old version would have improved things quite substantially, but with this new version, they’ve got a higher base conversion rate and can benefit from every change that much more.

Another great example is the case study Conversion Rate Experts did for SEOmoz itself. That test gave us a 52% improvement in conversion rate from the PRO landing page. As an addendum, in April of this year, we tested an in-house created, shorter, less story-like landing page that we all hoped would beat out the old long-form version. After a few weeks of testing, it lost out. Later this summer, we’ll be trying something completely different in an attempt to beat our current best.

The process to follow for conversion rate optimization and testing was well described in Stephen Pavlovich’s post – The Definitive How-to Guide for CRO. His PDF guide, in particular, made this dead easy:

Step 1 of 4 in the process

Follow those steps, don’t get lost in the minutiae, and you’ll be on your way to exceptional results - no thousand monkeys with typewriters required.

p.s. I’d also suggest checking out this long but worthwhile post on stats for usability (and A/B) tests.

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Read other posts by this Author: randfish

James Warmington-Smith, Andrew Bentinck (Flynet CEO), Danny Smith

The East of England is in the vanguard of a new initiative aimed at bringing the power of business dashboard software to the average SME. Cambridgeshire web applications specialist, Flynet has secured proof of concept funding from the East of England Development Agency (EEDA), allowing the firm to look into the possibility of tailoring software that usually costs several thousands of pounds to the smaller company.

Ordinarily the preserve of big business, dashboards are a graphical representation – in the form of gauges, dials or graphs – of the performance of a company relative to its main priorities or targets.

Danny Smith of Smith and WSmith, the Suffolk-based web marketing company helping to promote the trial, explained the proposition: “The introduction of dashboards has revolutionised the way companies use and access their data; data becomes an attention directing tool to improve current and future performance, rather than just a past reflection to be analysed and agonised over.

“Dashboards condense information down to the minimum statistics a business requires reaching its targets, its ‘key performance indicators (KPIs).’ Small business owners can then access the data required, immediately, to make quick well reasoned decisions without needing to search through, and analyse, mountains of data.”….READ MORE HERE

Are you the kind of website owner that wants to give your website visitors a fantastic experience every time they come to your website? Do you want your customers to take action? Yes.  Then you need to make sure you meet your visitors expectations, firstly, your website design, (the look and feel), needs to be appealing to  keep your visitor.  The second key aspect covers the technical side, (the speed and resilience) and lastly there are certain marketing and sales “must haves”, (to satisfy each and every visitor and keep them coming back).

Heres what you do…

Web Design

• Use standard web conventions, don’t use unique and outrageous formats that noone’s ever seen or understands.
• Update your site content, make it interesting, compulsive and readable! Secondly, keep your content fresh with regular updating, this will not only keep your visitors returning, it will also keep the search engines coming back, ergo, more visits, more money!
• Website navigation,  keep it simple, clean and consistent, avoid javascript as its not visible by search engines. Make it easy for your visitors to find what they are looking for.
• Clear links and buttons, keep them consistent, easily understood, and regulary check they are working!
• Offer a search facility, have a sitemap – again, making it easy for your website visitor to browse and find.
  Tell your visitors how you can help them – don’t just ramble on about yourself, your offices and your staff.
• Grammar, punctuation & fonts, double check your spelling, grammar and fonts, keep them consistent throughout the site and make the fonts big enough to read or let your visitors listen!
• Include good, relevant text on each and every page, make sure you have text as a back up for images, this is called alternative text or “alt text”,  great for visitors and the search engines.

Technical

• Make sure your website loads quickly, on the web people are not patient, more than a couple of seconds and they will hit the back button! So not too many pictures or videos.
• Make it easily see-able on every browser, such as internet explorer, firefox, safari, opera etc.
• Ensure all the functions work, make sure all pages are consistent.
• Check your buttons, links and navigation are all working, there is nothing more frustrating than finding broken links, they really do chip away at your credibility.
• Ensure you have enough bandwidth to cope with the number of visitors you expect.
• Make sure you have some form of validation for your forms,  you don’t want the worlds craziest hackers sending you every nasty virus under the sun.
• Avoid gimmicks such as pop ups, moving boxes, loud music or animations and videos that take an age to load or run.
• Avoid frames, they are “old hat”.

C. Marketing

• Make your website sticky – add interesting content, give them freebies, don’t let them press the back button.
• Have a reason for each and every page to be there, give your visitor a “call for action”.
• Build your brand.
• Include terms and conditions, legal stuff, a sitemap and “about us” page.
• Give your visitors emotion, interest, make them smile, laugh or cry.
• Make it easy and obvious for your website visitor to contact you, include telephone contact, email contact, a real location address, build an email list, use all the tools.
• Convert your customers, measure everything, (Google analytics or web trends), especially your sales and marketing successes.

If you follow these items to the letter and you’ll be well on your way to having a killer website and delighting all who visit.