Tag Archive for: The Mightier Pen

Two Tips for Optimized Text on Busy Pages

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Creating quality content is always important, but if your website is poorly optimized it will still struggle to achieve visibility.

One of the biggest issues when trying to optimize pages is having so much “design” on their page that they have very little room for text, or content. With so much physical page structure taking up the viewing area, the page only allows room for a few hundred words of real value.

Justin Arnold from The Mightier Pen has two simple ways to work around this issue however.

  1. Use a ‘Read More’ Feature – This involves a little extra work, because to do this effectively you have to begin writing short ‘teasers’ for every article, which has a ‘read more’ link underneath. However, rather than linking to a different page, a special DIV tag can be used to have the text on the original page, but hidden until the user clicks for more. This ensures the search engines still see all of your text, while users still get a sleek and efficient page.
  2. Use a Scrolling Frame to Include More Text – Frames are often disparaged due to some rumor that Google can’t read content in frames. This is nothing more than a silly rumor, and frames allow you to get all of that text on the page.

These two tips will help you keep the design you began with while offering a better experience for users and better results in the search rankings.

 

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Should You Be Using Longtail SEO?

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Longtail SEO is beginning to become the dominant method for article marketers to be successful in the results pages, as well as strengthening brand visibility and awareness. It is the most effective method for most marketers.

In the past, the problem for many has been deciding whether to invest energy, time and money into marketing a single primary keyword, which might receive a high volume of searches every month, or possibly to focus on a longtail keyphrase. The longtail keyphrase might only get a small amount of search queries every month, but it allows for the business to achieve the top ranking, which receives the most traffic.

Trying to focus on a single keyword puts you at a disadvantage. It may get queried more than your longtail phrase, but it will be such a crowded market, you would be lucky to get on the third page or results. When most traffic goes to the very first result, being on the third page isn’t going to get you many visitors.

Longtail phrases on the other hand put you in a much higher ranking on SERPs for less popular related queries, which will net you more traffic overall. As Justin Arnold, writer for The Mightier Pen, puts it, you have to choose between theoretical popularity, and actual sales traffic.

Choosing a longtail phrase is much too big of a subject to cover here, but the main idea is to think about claiming a corner of the market. People are searching for more specific queries, so marketing a longtail phrase for your specific area of the market puts you in a good place to actually get some sales.

 

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Find Out What Your Audience Wants To Know

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I’ve talked a lot about how important it is to try to think like your customers. It’s always important to find out what people are thinking, what questions they are asking, etc., but I didn’t offer any specific ways to accomplish this. But today I have one method of finding out what questions people are asking about topics important to you.

Justin Arnold from The Mighter Pen suggests using Twitter because it offers real time feedback on what people are talking and thinking about relative to keywords.

Of course, this is pretty common knowledge, but what people don’t realize is Twitter has some key features built into its search engine that really benefit the person looking for questions people are asking.

Finding out what questions people are asking is as simple as adding a space and a question mark after a querie. Suppose you are writing about painting. You can search ‘painting’ but you probably will get a lot of extraneous posts not of interest to you. If you search ‘painting ?’ however, Twitter filters your results to only include tweets with questions.

Now, the problem we are faced with is Twitter is used pretty heavily for promotion. Don’t you wish you could filter out any tweet containing links to avoid all of the ads? Well, you can. Just add ‘-filter:links’ to your searches to do away with all of the promotions. What you have now is a list of questions users are asking about a topic in real time.

This is just one way to try to get into the minds of your audience. Trying to gain some perspective is always important when creating content.

 

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