Blog

1. Guest writing

You’re probably wondering why I didn’t use the term “Guest posting” or “guest blogging”. Guest posting is turning into an ineffective strategy for back links. Google rolls out more updates that writing to other websites within your niche and offering to write for them is an effective way to get quality back links. You can search for sites that have a “Write for us” tab, contact them via their ‘Contact us’ form or simply drop them an email of your offer to create content for them. That way, you get a quality back link to your site in the most effective method.

2. Take part in online forums

Find an online forum specific to your website’s niche and provide answers to questions that people have posted there. Please note that answering questions in online forums does not mean that you should simply give a haphazard answer and placed link to your site, which is considered as spamming and may result to a Google penalty. On the contrary, you need to do it in an effective way that does not seem like you’re spamming the forums. Get a question you need to answer by blogging or a posting it on your site first and answer the question in the forum with a link to the post you made.

3. Link to sites that are relevant to your own website

You probably deem this as a crazy idea. The difference is in how you go about it. If you are going to do a post and use some top relevant websites as a resource, there is no better way to do that by sending them an email of your intent to use their website as a resource on your post. Simply write them an email informing them that their website is such a great resource and would wish to mention them on your post. Don’t expect that all of them, in fact lesser than 5%, will link back to your site. On a positive note, around 85% will at least tweet your post or share it on Facebook which works best in generating traffic to your website. A portion of the visitors you get from the traffic might link back to your site!

4. Create a roundup post on your website

A roundup post is an informative and a ‘killer’ post based on interviews done on industry experts. Roundup posts are the most linked and most popular posts on the internet. It’s an effective way of building back links to your website. So how do you go about it? What you simply need to do is identify a number of experts in your field and send them an email asking them 1 question you need an expert answer for. Just ask one question to increase the probability of getting an answer as these professionals are usually busy. Asking one question increases your chances of getting a response. Provide a deadline on when you need the question answered and once you create the post, send them an email with a link of the post thanking them for their participation as a well as a link to the post you created. When they read the posts and tweet or share, you’ll get traffic some of whom might link to your website without persuasion.

5. Knowledge tools

Offering great knowledge tools on your website is an effective way of generating back links on your website. Tools such as audio books and eBooks can go a long way in attracting readers as well as viewers to your website. You can offer a free audio book or an eBook to your website for free. Those who find them useful will definitely share information and link to your website.

How can social media help in your business?

June 18, 2015 By Team Impossible Leave a Comment

Before the advent of the internet and online marketing, businesses had to content with using traditional methods of advertising such as posters, flyers, radio advertising and using word of mouth all of which were not only cumbersome and taxing but also required a lot of money. This, however, changed when the internet grows and subsequently social media came in as a means of connecting, interacting and spreading awareness. Whether you own a small or a multinational business, I’m certain that you’ve considered using social media marketing to get a word out there about the products and services you offer.

In fact, you are not alone. 73% of businesses over the globe use sites like Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest and LinkedIn to effectively market and grow their business. Business owners that have yet to embrace social media marketing are not only committing a cardinal sin but also immensely reducing the chances of their business competing with others. If you are still on the sidelines, you may be wondering how can social media help in your business. There are indeed many benefits of using social media to create awareness for your businesses as well as improve profits generally.

How can social media help your business to grow?

The use of social media allows you to strengthen relationships and effectively increase engagements with your existing and potential customers. With that in mind, you’re not only reaching a wider audience but also improving customer experience.

Social media is widely popular and millions of people use it every single day. Did I just say millions? Sorry, I must have gotten that wrong. In fact, there are over 1 billion social media users worldwide! Facebook alone has over 1 billion users, Twitter has over 200 million users and LinkedIn has over 200 million users. With these numbers, the world becomes a global village for your business as you can sell virtually to any customer over the world with the touch of a button!

Social media helps in your SEO, and it is completely free! Opening a Facebook or Twitter page for your business is free. All top social media sites do not require any form of payment to open an account with them. You can easily open an account and embark on free advertising. However, you can make small payments on Facebook to boost certain products and services which cost a minimal fee.

With social media, you get an opportunity to reach people of all ages and demographics. There are no age barriers, geographical barriers or time barriers. Irrespective of who your target audience is, social media got you covered anywhere, anytime and any day!

Social media in itself encourages two-way communication. Believe it or not, more than half of Facebook users log into their accounts every day. Over 400 million tweets are posted every day. While customers might not physically visit your store on a daily basis, rest assured that they will have a glimpse of what you post on your social media page. By doing so, it increases engagement and interaction.

In light of the above, there is no reason why you should be standing on the sidelines! Join the bandwagon and start using social media today to help increase exposure for your business and ultimately help it grow. After all, you can’t fight change and the way to achieve a competitive edge is by changing with the times!

Do proper research

Factual information is what gives your website credibility. It keeps people rooted to your website, which without a doubt is good for SEO, which helps in Google ranking. Before creating content, do proper research and ensure that the information that you provide is not only factual but also educative, entertaining and teaches a thing or two. Baseless content will definitely have a bad impact on the reputation of your website and can subsequently affect its ranking or popularity. Proper research means that you get to address all important aspects of a topic that people could be looking for.

Choose a proper title

Is it just me or does a great title pique your interest and trigger your curiosity to find out more about the content? A catchy and creative title can have great results for your website and the page. In online marketing, by doing a proper research but failing to come up with a good title for your blog post is similar as pouring cold water on your burning effort. Most web searchers simply scan through information and a good title should be able to catch their attention and probably make them spend a few minutes on your web page.

Check grammar and spelling-proofread your content again and again

Most people are irked by content that is poorly written, laden with spelling and grammar mistakes. Most people visiting your website wants to read information that adds value to them which is presented in a professional manner. Once you are done with your first draft, read again and identify for any spelling or grammatical errors that might affect the presentation and the ranking of your page. If you feel like you could not identify your own errors, why not have a friend to do the proofreading for you?

Add supporting images, videos, graphics etc

The idea is to give your readers a good experience browsing and reading through your site. Your paragraphs should be short and punctuated with headers, subheadings, and bullet points when necessary. Most importantly, have images and graphics to further support and explain the information you are trying to convey to your audience. This serves to make your content more appealing and shareable.

Link out to related resources

The whole idea of developing great content is to provide value to the reader, entertain and enable it to be shared. The idea is to come up with an authority article or content that will prompt other authority sites to link into your site. This does not only make your site credible but helps to get it ranked in the search engines. By linking out to various resources, your content gains credibility through support information which works well for your website.

What is off-page SEO and how does it work?

June 16, 2015 By Team Impossible Leave a Comment

Whether you are an expert in SEO or a greenhorn seeking to establish your website online, the truth of the matter is that the success, visibility and ranking of your website boils down to 3 very important elements of SEO: Technical, on-page and off-page. While on-page SEO focuses on the internal settings and how you apply them within your website or blog, off-page SEO on the other hand focuses on the external factors and how they affect your website. The main difference between off-page and on-page SEO is that off-page SEO focuses on certain external activities that essentially go beyond the boundaries of a web page.

Off-page SEO basically works by increasing exposure of a site and subsequently its ranking through social bookmarking, social media and link building. But before we look at how these three factors help in exposure and ranking of your website, let’s take a moment to shed light on why off-page SEO is important and its benefit to millions of website owners out there. From an SEO standpoint, off-page SEO helps search engines understand how the world in general perceives your site. To put it bluntly, a website that is highly rated receives an incredible number of links or references from other websites, large number of mentions on social media and it is likely to be shared widely on the web as well.

So what are the best off-page SEO strategies for your online marketing? How can you effectively make use of off-page strategies to increase your website ranking, exposure and page ranking? We take a look at 3 of the most important off-site SEO strategies.

Social media

Virtually everyone is on social media. With over 1 billion users, social media has become an effective springboard through which you can increase exposure of your site by doing social media marketing. While most of the links you get from social media are “no follow” it doesn’t mean that they don’t bring any value to your website. With the increasing number of social media mentions, configuring your website to be social media friendly can aid to boost exposure and rankings.

Link building

The role of link building is improving the website’s visibility and its subsequent ranking. In fact, link building stands as the single most important off-page SEO strategy available to many website owners. It’s akin to accumulate as many votes as possible with the aim of achieving a competitive edge. In the past years, webmasters built links through the use of various strategies to increase ranking. These were:

Comment link
Blog directories
Forum commenting or signatures
Link exchange schemes
Shared content directories
Article directories

In case you were not attentive, please note that I referenced the above methods in past tense. They are no longer workable strategies and as such you should never use them or else you will risk a penalty from Google rather than an increase in ranking.

The one million dollar question is; if the above link building strategies are no longer legal, then what is a good link? Google has purposed to shift away link building from the aspect of quantity to quality or what they refer to as natural links. In other words, it is no longer important how many links are directed to your site but rather how qualitative the links are. Are the sites directing the links to high authority sites?

Are the links natural? Are they “nofollow” links? For example, a link emanating from an ordinary blog does not carry the same weight as a link emanating from Huffington post. In other words, natural link building is the way to go. Another high ranking website has to find your content informative and interesting enough to link it to his website naturally. Such kind of links carry more weight and without a doubt increase your website rankings.

Social bookmarking

As much as social bookmarking does not carry the importance it used to in the past, it can still be a proper means to get traffic. You can still increase your website rankings by finding sites such as scoop.it, reddit.com and many others to promote your website.

To sum it up, the importance of on-page and off-page SEO cannot be given a wide berth. You need both to increase your site rankings, exposure, visibility and credibility!

What is on-page SEO and how it works?

June 15, 2015 By Team Impossible Leave a Comment

The visibility and relevance of a website is something that every website owner takes very seriously. Ensuring that your website apply the correct online marketing strategy and ranks highly in the search engine is something that is dear to your heart. However, for this to be a reality, you need a combination of on-page and off-page SEO strategies. In this particular post, we are going to look at what is on page SEO and how it works or rather the important techniques/strategies that will have a positive impact on the ranking, relevance, visibility and authority of your website. Before we shed light on that, it’s good we start from the beginning by understanding what SEO is.

SEO is an acronym for Search Engine Optimization and basically refers to a set of processes specifically aimed at optimizing a website for the search engines. It basically encompasses everything that you need to take into consideration if you are to improve the ranking of your website on the various search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing. Now that we have an understanding of what SEO is, it’s time we get an understanding of what on-page SEO is and the techniques that make it effective for the well being of your website.

While both off-page and on page SEO are important, focusing all your energy on off page SEO and neglecting on page SEO is an exercise in futility. On page SEO basically refers to how you set your website and how you apply the same settings to optimize your site with the goal of making it more visible, relevant and rank highly on the search engines. On page SEO works by ensuring that each of your web pages rank highly. It’s about ensuring that your website speaks the language of the search engines.

So what are the best on page SEO techniques/strategies that you should utilize for your website? While there are many techniques you can use, am going to focus on 5 and the most relevant.

Create unique original content

Let’s face it. Regurgitated content and content that is poorly written will make your site go down the Google rankings before you can finish saying the words “Oh my God! In fact, a popular adage has it that “good content is read while great content is shared”. In this regard, aspire to publish original content on your site first, publish content that is properly researched and publish content that is valuable!

Page descriptions, page titles and page formatting

If you didn’t know, the first thing that search engines look out for when checking your page is the page title, the formatting of the page as well as the description of the page. Endeavor to ensure that each of your pages have a unique and attractive title. This helps the search engines to be able to understand what the page is all about. The page descriptions on the other hand are instrumental in helping the person searching your content understand what the content is all about. The descriptions should be at least 150 characters. Last but not least, ensure that your pages are formatted correctly with the appropriate HI, H2 tags and that all the important phrases or keywords are bolded.

Structure of the URL

Let’s not kid ourselves. The structure of the page URL plays an important role in on page SEO. Good permanent URL should be less that 255 characters, make use of hyphens for the purpose of separating different parts and lastly show a chronology of information. For instance, a good URL should be something like this: “https//www.example.com/10-ways-to-make-your-site-more-visible-online”. A bad URL on the other hand would be something like this: “https//www.example.com/p?156/”

Internal linkage or linking

Your pages should be properly linked internally as it serves to improve the visibility and ranking of your website. Internal linking is more or less like building your own unique web. Internal linking is essential as it serves to make the search engines become aware of your other important pages and also a great way of increasing the amount of time a searcher spends on your site!

Speed of your site

Who wants to visit a site that takes ages to open? The speed of your website is something that should be very important to you if you are to improve user experience. Google is spending a huge amount of money to make the internet fast. Optimize your website in such a way that it loads faster and provide visitors with a great experience. Users are most likely to visit a site that loads faster as opposed to one that loads slowly. After all, time is money!

With the aforementioned strategies, there is no reason as to why you shouldn’t improve the ranking of your site using on page SEO strategies. Make use of them and see your fortunes changing for the better!