Types of SEO in digital marketing

Before you start optimizing your site, it’s important to understand the various types of SEO available to your business. Understanding these different strategies and techniques will help you create a campaign that drives better organic results for your business.

Here are four main types of SEO techniques you will come across:

• White hat SEO techniques are the best way to improve your SEO ranking over time and optimize it. These are the tactics that Google recommends you use to help your site rank better in the results. They abide by Google’s search engine guidelines and drive positive results for your business.

These techniques include:

• Creating high-quality content
• Optimizing HTML
• Sharing on social media
• Making your site user-friendly

White hat SEO techniques take time to produce results. The results, however, are worth it. You will have lasting growth and continue to help your site perform better in the search results.

• Black hat SEO techniques exploit search algorithms to get higher rankings.

Some businesses use black hat SEO techniques because they drive fast results.

There are numerous tactics that fall under black hat: Link spamming,

Keyword stuffing,Cloaking, Hidden text/links, Using irrelevant, popular keywords, Over optimizing HTML headings, Copying content, Buying links

While these tactics do improve ranking, it does not last. Google catches on to these techniques and if you’re caught, search engines will punish your business and even ban your site from appearing in relevant search results.

• Gray hat SEO is the middle ground between white and black hat SEO. This technique isn’t quite good for your site, but it isn’t listed as bad.

These SEO techniques aren’t banned by Google. Gray hat SEO techniques are risky, but marketed as the “affordable solution.” Companies that offer gray SEO techniques reduce their costs because they are using questionable methods.

• Negative SEO is a unique situation for your business. It isn’t perpetrated by your business, but rather, someone else. You will see negative SEO scenarios between businesses and their competitors.

When you see a business using negative SEO, they are trying to hurt their competitors’ reputations.

There are a few strategies companies will use with negative SEO:

• Building unnatural links to a competitor’s site
• Posting negative reviews
• Hacking websites to modify content.

Social Media Optimization

What Is Social Media Optimization (SMO)?

Social media optimization (SMO) is the use of social media networks to manage and grow an organization’s message and online presence. As a digital marketing strategy, social media optimization can be used to increase awareness of new products and services, connect with customers, and ameliorate potential damaging news.

Understanding Social Media Optimization (SMO)

For many years, search engine optimization (SEO) was the standard for digital marketing efforts. While social media optimization and search engine optimization have similar goals–to generate web traffic and increase awareness for a company’s website–search engine optimization is the process of increasing the quality and quantity of website traffic by increasing the visibility of a website or a web page to users of a web search engine, especially Google.

More recently, social media marketing has come to the fore, at times converging with SEO and in some instances replacing it as the most effective way to strengthen a brand, conduct lead generation, increase a company’s visibility in the online space, and connect to an audience. Various social media platforms can be used for digital marketing, including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, YouTube, and Pinterest.

Social media optimization often directs the public from these social media platforms to the company’s website, where more information can be provided. For example, a campaign to raise awareness about a new automobile on social media may direct the visitor to a company webpage that provides information about where local dealerships are located and how to schedule a test drive.

Strategies for Social Media Optimization

Companies using multiple social media platforms may use Internet-based tools designed to improve the organization and delivery of their content. These tools allow an employee tasked with creating social media content to schedule content across multiple platforms at the same time, as well as respond to any engagements on the posts including comments or messages from the audience. Some popular social media management tools are Loomly, AgoraPulse, Promo Republic, Hootsuite, Buffer, and Sprout Social.

Sharing tools on social media platforms allow users can share content on the Internet almost instantaneously. Because of this, many companies try to create content that users will pass along to their friends and connections. This strategy, called viral marketing, attempts to achieve a broader reach by getting engaged users of social media platforms to share content rather than relying on users to find the content on their own.

5 Steps to Social Media Optimization

In order to optimize your social media channels, you need to come up with a social media optimization plan and then execute on it. If you follow these five steps, you’ll likely be on your way to an optimized social media presence that plays nice with search.

1. Analyze your audience

As mentioned above, you’ll need to choose the right platforms to focus on, and these should be the ones your audience uses most often. In this step, your goal is to find what social media platforms your audience uses and where they want you to be.

It’s also a good idea to check current social media engagement. Which channels currently perform best? Some may see a fair amount of engagement, while others send a lot of traffic directly to your site.

2. Perform competitive analysis

The next step is to perform a competitive analysis. You want to figure out how you stack up against the competition. How much social media engagement do you see vs. them? What types of social content are working (or not working) for your competitors or other industry leaders?

To do this, you can use the Content Exploration Tool inside of your Alexa Advanced Account. Input the websites of competitors into the Content Exploration tool to see which of their articles get the highest engagement.

You can also perform a content gap analysis on your social media sites to see which topics are not getting attention.

3. Build a strategy based on findings

Once you understand your audience, as well as gain some insight into the competition, it’s time to build a clearly defined strategy to help you reach your goals. A strategy is a keystone of social media optimization, but 28% of businesses have said that a lack of strategy is a top barrier from becoming a social business, according to an MIT Sloan Management Review business study.

4. Execute on that strategy

A strategy is nothing without execution. A strategy is executed by a team, and SEO leaders and content marketers need to work closely beside social media and community managers to make the vision a reality. Because social media optimization is so closely aligned with search engine optimization, these teams need to work together towards the same goals, and make sure the message is similar on every channel. When a brand posts on Instagram, they can direct followers to a blog post or an in-depth guide if they want more information.

5. Analyze results and adjust accordingly

Once the strategy has been executed on, results should be analyzed and adjustments should be made. In your initial strategy, outline how often you’ll check in on the results. That way, you won’t find yourself guessing when the right time is to weigh in.

Social Media Optimization Tools

You’ll need the right social media optimization tools to help make this a reality. Thankfully, there are a number of tools out there that can help you on your social media optimization journey. Here are a few that might be able to help.

• Social media scheduling services, like Buffer, MeetEdgar, Sprout Social, and Later
• Search, social media, and audience research tools, like Alexa
• Marketing automation tools, like Marketo, HubSpot, and Salesforce
• Image creation tools, like Canva and PicMonkey

Conversion Rate Optimization

-What is a conversion rate optimization?

A conversion rate is the percentage of visitors who complete a desired action (in other words, convert). For instance, a desired action may be completing a web form, signing up for a service, or purchasing a product.

Conversion rate is calculated by dividing your number of conversions by your number of visitors and multiplying that number by 100 to get the percentage.

Conversion rate optimization, or CRO, is the process of enhancing your website and content to boost conversions. A high conversion rate means your website is well-designed, formatted effectively, and appealing to your target audience.

The process of optimizing for conversions allows you to boost your number of highly-qualified leads, increase revenue, lower acquisition costs, obtain greater value from your current leads and customers, and, simply, grow better.

Conversions can happen all over your website (e.g. homepage, pricing page, blog, landing pages, etc.). As a business, you want your website to be designed in a way that converts website visitors into paying customers. With so much potential throughout these areas of your website, you must optimize each location to allow for conversions.

-The Biggest Benefit of Conversion Rate Optimization

Let’s look at the impact from having a better conversion rate.

For our fictional business, we’ll say that the company is selling just one product worth $300.

In our first calculation, we came up with a conversion rate of just 3 percent. Three thousand people bought the product.That sounds great. But what if we boosted that conversion rate to our second equation, which quantified conversions at 10 percent?

Conversion rate optimization really comes down to one major benefit.

You’ll get more customers from the same amount of traffic.

This has a huge impact on most businesses.

You probably have a monthly marketing budget that you use to maintain your traffic volume. Maybe it’s in paid marketing, maybe it’s in content or social. Either way, traffic costs money.

Conversion optimization, after it’s live, gives you more customers from the same amount of money.

In turn, you’ll see several great changes in your business:

The acquisition cost per customer will come down. When your marketing budget stays the same and you get more customers, each customer costs less to acquire.

Your profit per customer goes up.

With more profit every month, you can invest more to grow your business faster or take more profit out of your business.

Spending a few weeks or months on conversion optimization can unlock the next step in your business.

-Building an Effective Conversion Optimization Strategy:

Let’s look at the list of metrics above. You need to know your starting metrics  a baseline, if you will  so you’ll know whether your CRO methods actually work.

You can get lots of information for free via Google Analytics.

For instance, let’s say you want to start by focusing on bounce rate and time on page. Other metrics that might influence those numbers could include page load time and UX.

Start with a strategy that looks something like this:

• Condense all images to the smallest size possible
• Improve top-level navigation and add breadcrumbs
• Sprinkle internal links through every page to encourage click-throughs
• Use big subheads on pages with lots of content to keep people reading
• Add unique CTAs to every page

This is a good starting strategy. Test every one of them using both A/B testing and multivariate testing to see how you come out, then repeat the process.

Search Engine Optimization

What is SEO?

SEO stands for “search engine optimization.” In simple terms, it means the process of improving your site to increase its visibility for relevant searches. The better visibility your pages have in search results, the more likely you are to garner attention and attract prospective and existing customers to your business.

How does SEO work?

Search engines such as Google and Bing use bots to crawl pages on the web, going from site to site, collecting information about those pages and putting them in an index. Next, algorithms analyze pages in the index, taking into account hundreds of ranking factors or signals, to determine the order pages should appear in the search results for a given query.

Search ranking factors can be considered proxies for aspects of the user experience. Our Periodic Table of SEO Factors organizes the factors into six main categories and weights each based on its overall importance to SEO. For example, content quality and keyword research are key factors of content optimization, and crawlability and mobile-friendliness are important site architecture factors.

The search algorithms are designed to surface relevant, authoritative pages and provide users with an efficient search experience. Optimizing your site and content with these factors in mind can help your pages rank higher in the search results.

Unlike paid search ads, you can’t pay search engines to get higher organic search rankings.

Why is SEO important for marketing?

SEO is a fundamental part of digital marketing because people conduct trillions of searches every year, often with commercial intent to find information about products and services. Search is often the primary source of digital traffic for brands and complements other marketing channels. Greater visibility and ranking higher in search results than your competition can have a material impact on your bottom line.

However, the search results have been evolving over the past few years to give users more direct answers and information that is more likely to keep users on the results page instead of driving them to other websites.

Also note, features like rich results and Knowledge Panels in the search results can increase visibility and provide users more information about your company directly in the results.

On-Page Optimization for SEO:

Let’s look at a few critical, basic on-page elements you’ll want to understand as you think about how to drive search engine traffic to your website:

• Title Tags

While Google is working to better understand the actual meaning of a page and de-emphasizing (and even punishing) aggressive and manipulative use of keywords, including the term (and related terms) that you want to rank for in your pages is still valuable. And the single most impactful place you can put your keyword is your page’s title tag.

The title tag is not your page’s primary headline. The headline you see on the page is typically an H1 (or possibly an H2) HTML element. The title tag is what you can see at the very top of your browser, and is populated by your page’s source code in a meta tag

The length of a title tag that Google will show will vary (it’s based on pixels, not character counts) but in general 55-60 characters is a good rule of thumb here. If possible you want to work in your core keyword, and if you can do it in a natural and compelling way, add some related modifiers around that term as well. Keep in mind though: the title tag will frequently be what a searcher sees in search results for your page. It’s the “headline” in organic search results, so you also want to take how clickable your title tag is into account.

• Meta Descriptions

While the title tag is effectively your search listing’s headline, the meta description (another meta HTML element that can be updated in your site’s code, but isn’t seen on your actual page) is effectively your site’s additional ad copy. Google takes some liberties with what they display in search results, so your meta description may not always show, but if you have a compelling description of your page that would make folks searching likely to click, you can greatly increase traffic.

• Body Content

The actual content of your page itself is, of course, very important. Different types of pages will have different “jobs” – your cornerstone content asset that you want lots of folks to link to needs to be very different than your support content that you want to make sure your users find and get an answer from quickly. That said, Google has been increasingly favoring certain types of content, and as you build out any of the pages on your site

• Alt Attributes

How you mark up your images can impact not only the way that search engines perceive your page, but also how much search traffic from image search your site generates. An alt attribute is an HTML element that allows you to provide alternative information for an image if a user can’t view it. Your images may break over time (files get deleted, users have difficulty connecting to your site, etc.) so having a useful description of the image can be helpful from an overall usability perspective. This also gives you another opportunity – outside of your content – to help search engines understand what your page is about.

You don’t want to “keyword stuff” and cram your core keyword and every possible variation of it into your alt attribute. In fact, if it doesn’t fit naturally into the description, don’t include your target keyword here at all. Just be sure not to skip the alt attribute, and try to give a thorough, accurate description of the image (imagine you’re describing it to someone who can’t see it – that’s what it’s there for!).

By writing naturally about your topic, you’re avoiding “over-optimization” filters (in other words: it doesn’t make it look like you’re trying to trick Google into ranking your page for your target keyword) and you give yourself a better chance to rank for valuable modified “long tail” variations of your core topic.

• URL Structure

Your site’s URL structure can be important both from a tracking perspective (you can more easily segment data in reports using a segmented, logical URL structure), and a shareability standpoint (shorter, descriptive URLs are easier to copy and paste and tend to get mistakenly cut off less frequently). Again: don’t work to cram in as many keywords as possible; create a short, descriptive URL.

Moreover: if you don’t have to, don’t change your URLs. Even if your URLs aren’t “pretty,” if you don’t feel as though they’re negatively impacting users and your business in general, don’t change them to be more keyword focused for “better SEO.” If you do have to change your URL structure, make sure to use the proper (301 permanent) type of redirect. This is a common mistake businesses make when they redesign their websites.

• Schema & Markup

Finally, once you have all of the standard on-page elements taken care of, you can consider going a step further and better helping Google (and other search engines, which also recognize schema) to understand your page.

Schema markup does not make your page show up higher in search results (it’s not a ranking factor, currently). It does give your listing some additional “real estate” in the search results, the way ad extensions do for your AdWords ads.

In some search results, if no one else is using schema, you can get a nice advantage in click-through rate by virtue of the fact that your site is showing things like ratings while others don’t. In other search results, where everyone is using schema, having reviews may be “table stakes” and you might be hurting your CTR by omitting them

asfjajkfsa

afbjakhf