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Posts Tagged ‘SEO’

More Content = More Cash. Issue 5

Tuesday, July 14th, 2009

Welcome to issue 5 of More Content = More Cash! Time flies when you are blogging! Hope the past five weeks have been useful and your sites are coming on leaps and bounds! This issue follows nicely on from issue 4. Where we looked at setting up various social media channels and how to make best use of them. Today we are going to look into sustaining your viral fire and how to keep it going. How to keep them fresh and active and most importantly how to keep people coming back to your wonderful content filled site! So read on if you want to know more….

Issue 5: Sustaining Online Utopia

Information is Power

In business, the military and in sport we all depend on the information cycle to gain a competitive edge. This cycle of information is processed to provide solid theory determining how we are to respond and is important to any competitive discipline. This cycle involves information gathering, processing or analysing and responding to the conclusions it draws. Success on the web is no different and due to the digital nature of the Internet, stats are available in all sorts of metrics. I covered the basics of getting setup in analytics in issue 1 but in this issue I aim to explain the important metrics and how to use them to your advantage.

Goals

Google Analytics (GA) allows you to set up 4 goals per account. A goal is simply something you define as a measurement that is useful to you. For dating, this goal tends to be a ‘basic sign up’ which is defined as the action of sign up from a registration form through to the success page. In GA, you setup the goals by defining these pages as a goal. Please see GA’s official help documentation to learn more about setting up goals. Once set up, you can use this goal to filter referral statistics to check what campaigns/sites are working best for you so you know where to focus your efforts. Please speak to your account manager should you need any help setting up GA or setting up goals.

Referrers & Segments

The most important metrics you will tend to observe are the ‘Absolute Unique Visitors’ (Those who have visited your site for the first time) from the traffic list. GA splits traffic down into 3 categories; direct, search and referrals. ‘Direct’ traffic comes from the user typing in the address bar or clicking a bookmark link. ‘Search’ traffic comes from a search engine and ‘Referral’ traffic is anyone who arrived at your site by clicking a link to it from another site. Pretty simple stuff but making use of segments will really help filter the referral traffic down further. Since GA doesn’t have a concept of social media sites, it is worth setting up a ’social media’ segment.

Here’s a useful video showing you how segments work:

You can adapt the above example for any groups of sites that are relevant to you and how you wish to track. The idea is that you use the goal to filter the various segments/referral traffic so you can identify which traffic is working for you in order to target your efforts.

Sustaining the Social Media Fire

Now you know what is working in terms of traffic, you can start to analyse the type of content that particular segment is responsive to and produce more of it. There’s no great secret to success here, it’s simply frequent content that you know works well. For the first few weeks/months you’ll likely to experiment with different campaigns, messaging and content but as long as you have the analytics in place, you can easily track what’s successful.

Another very important factor is SEO. Viral campaigns have a 2-pronged attack giving you both referral traffic and increased SEO from high value back-links. Stick to linking rules as discussed in previous issues, using high value keywords in links back to your site from within any picture/video descriptions, blog titles, blog content, tweets and any other mediums where this is possible.

In summary, the key ingredients include:

  • Topical content that captures the target market interest
  • Various multimedia to seed the various social media channels
  • Tracking and analysing traffic from these external sources and how they meet your KPI (basic signup goal in this case)
  • Targeting areas of strength gained from analysis
  • Frequency of new content
  • Back-links containing keywords and phrases you wish to rank highly on

Next week, we’ll be finishing this series with a summary of all 5 issues and links to further reading highlighting some of the topics covered in more detail. Don’t fret, we’ll soon be starting up a new series focusing on getting the best out of PPC (Pay Per Click) and paid advertising, so watch this space!

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More Content = More Cash. Issue 4

Tuesday, June 30th, 2009

Welcome to issue 4 of more content = more cash. Last week we introduced you to the in depth world of multimedia and what you need to create a social media fire. This week its time to look into starting the fire and how to crate your social media accounts and setting them up for your campaign. WLD really hope that these blog posts are coming in handy for you and are helping you to build up your SEO.

Issue 4: Starting Your Social Media Fire

In this issue, we look at setting up the various social media channels to make best use of them. I’ll be referring to a case study that will help you understand the effects in context. This case study recently won an NMA award for ‘best use of social media’ and involves a certain ‘Meerkat‘. If you haven’t guessed it, it’s the ‘Compare the Meerkat‘ campaign run by ‘CompareTheMarket.com’ (CTM.com).

Before I start, I just want to make a point of ‘He Who Dares Wins’. Imagine the faces of some who first heard the idea ‘I know, let’s do a pun with meerkats?’. Ideas can sound very bizarre but it’s the bizarre ideas that capture the public so be brave with them!

Facebook

What’s it good for? Well, apart from allowing you to shame your friends by tagging photos, it is a colossal community of people connected in a number of ways. It is a place to share interests, to talk about what you’re doing, to join groups or notify others of an event. The core of facebook is both the established community and the tools it has for users to generate content. Facebook will help you build a fan base who you can send messages and be a great discussion forum around your campaign. Take a look at Aleksandr Orlov’s page (the name of the meerkat!)

Facebook allows you to create a number of interactive features within the page including discussion boards, photo gallery’s, video clips, fan lists and even custom features via the Facebook API and markup language (FBML). It is generally a great hub for a campaign allow you to send messages and announcements to all the fans you work hard to collect.

Flickr

What’s it good for? Flickr is a great community based around the love for photos, art and generally anything visually appealing. There are a few large image aggregate sites but none with the community and fluidity of Flickr.

CTM.com’s Flickr page is a collection of meerkat imagery which makes sense! A moderator for the page has conducted searches around Flickr and requested for other users to add their photos to the group, thus building its importance. You’ll notice a link back to their site ‘comparethemarket.com’ which not only helps drive direct referral traffic but increases the site’s SEO benefit.

Twitter

Twitter is a micro-blogging phenomenon. Micro-blogging is simply a blog on a tiny scale. A ‘tweet’ is a name given to an update cast via twitter. Twitter is great for building a character or a business profile but like a blog, needs an interesting or amusing topic to become popular. Twitter popularity is based on the amount of ‘followers’ you have who are other users with twitter accounts who have subscribed to listen to your ‘tweets’. Twitter is a great place to build a profile for your campaign and attract a following. You can route this traffic back to your brand and site by posting links within your tweets. If you haven’t already check out twitter. You can even follow WhiteLabelDating.com on there,  ‘wld‘.

CTM.com use twitter really well with a profile of their meerkat ‘Aleksandr’ which has, at last count, 17,718 followers! That’s 17,718 people who are tuned in to whatever he chooses to broadcast. Could be new product offerings or special offerings. You start to get the idea that a good marketing campaign can leave a long lingering tail of free broadcasting.

Content Aggregators

(Digg.com, Delicious.com, Reddit.com, StumbleUpon.com…)

Content aggregate sites like the above mentioned work hard for you if the content is well received. All you need to do is make it easy for your users to add your content to these sites (mentioned in the previous article). A good example of this is on the BBC site (http://www.bbc.co.uk). If you read any article, you’ll see the various options at the bottom to submit the content to a social network site. As you produce your content, make sure you make use of these in the same way.

That’s it for this week, hope you found the tips useful. Next week we’ll be looking at sustaining the viral reaction created by your campaigns and stoking the fire further…

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More Content = More Cash. Issue 3

Wednesday, June 17th, 2009

Well hello again and welcome to issue 3 of More Content = More Cash. This weeks blog is all about the wonderful world of multimedia! The subject is so vast that we can’t possibly fit in all the information we want to tell you into one blog so we are going to introduce you to new topics of multimedia over the space of three weeks. This week, the main focus is to demonstrate the importance of multimedia, the best delivery methods to use and the potential it could bring to your sites.
The next blog will focus on what you need to start your social media fire, we will be giving you some great tips on setting up your social playground.

So dig into issue 3, and fingers crossed it will keep you glued to your screen for next weeks installment!

Issue 3: Creating Fuel for Your Social Media Fire

Importance of multimedia

Multimedia is simply a name given to the collection of text, audio, still imagery, animation and video. This hasn’t changed much in many years but the delivery of this content has been through rapid and radical development. Notably, developments have mainly occurred through digital delivery methods such as the Internet and Digital TV. These delivery methods have transcended into the mobile market bringing content-to-us in a convenient way. Not only does this make it easier to escape into the multimedia you’re interested in but also makes it a lot more accessible. Apple’s iPhone and Amazon’s Kindle are two good examples of this.

Why is this important? Simply entertainment. We are people, we like to be entertained and feel part of something and the only way we know how is for our senses to be triggered through visual or audio means. Of course, touch, taste and smell are our other sense but we’re not quite advanced enough to engage in these digitally (although a lot of research is being conducted in these areas).

Why is this relevant? It is probably a good time to mention social media and the impact it has on the masses. Social media is a means to share multimedia with the community and when I say share, potentially exposure to millions and millions of people. You need good fuel, very good fuel and you also need to be strategic in the way it is created and burned.

Creating your multimedia assets

Before we look at the practical resource issues of creating multimedia, lets go back and recap on our branding. In our first issue, we discussed the messaging behind your brand and the brand values. You’ll need to dig these out as these provide the catalyst to your creative ideas. Lets use some case studies to help understand this:

Mini Cooper (http://aveaword.glueserv.com/)

A great use of filming that adapts depending on user input and upholds the ‘mini adventure’ campaign. A brand value behind the new mini is ‘adventure’.

Honda (http://www.vimeo.com/4281939)

An innovative usage of the video player that begins to take over the whole screen! Again, this upholds the brand value of ‘innovation’.

Compare the Market (http://www.comparethemeerkat.com/)

This is a brilliant campaign to help gain an edge in a competitive marketplace. A brand message here is ‘the ability to compare many’. A clever play on words and the creation of a funny character helped reinforce this in the audiences mind and provided fuel for a hugely successful viral campaign involving a whole site dedicated to comparing meerkats!

StumbleUpon (http://www.stumbleupon.com)

StumbleUpon is a social media site which aggregates sites that have appeal from an entertainment and informative perspective. This should give you a good idea of what other people have done.

So now you have a feel for how this all works and can see the logic behind branding. Not just a logo design but a whole exercise in messaging that is the essence behind all your marketing creativity. In context of the dating market, you should have plenty of scope for some quirky yet fun ideas to run with. We would be interested to hear from you about any campaigns you have run or about to run.

So how do you create this fuel? It certainly helps to understand everything in context and once you’ve been through the process you’ll really start to appreciate the consequences a targeted campaign have on SEO and brand awareness. The point is that you’ll get better and better at creating campaigns as you experience their side effects.

Later on in this blog series, we will look at how to get the best out of freelance work, what is involved in developing a brief and how to manage the projects effectively. For now, I’ll point you in the right direction for finding the skills you need for the job.

  • 99designs.com is an excellent place to get a good logo design from many different graphic designers. You put down how much you’re willing to pay and then designers effectively ‘bid’ with their designs for the prize pot
  • Freelancers.net, Elance.com, Guru.com are all communities of freelancers covering a wide range of flash design and
  • DeviantArt.com is a great place to source artists for illustration, specialist animation and 3D graphics

That’s it for this week, but next week we’ll be looking at setting up your social media playground to best make use of your multimedia assets.

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More Content = More Cash. Issue 2

Wednesday, June 10th, 2009

Welcome to the second installment of More Content = More Cash. We had some great feedback from you on issue one which focused on four quick tips to kick-starting your SEO campaign. Really hope that you found the comments and links helpful, and fingers crossed it wet your appetite for this week’s issue. This week we look into the tools you will need to produce content and talk about publishing frequency, building link popularity and using current affairs as a fuel for the viral fire. Remember we love getting your comments and feedback on the blog, so please keep them coming!
For now, tuck into the full packed content below and well…. just enjoy!

Issue 2: The Four Corner Stones of Blog Publication

Content Tools
There is an out-and-out winner when it comes to blog production and that title belongs to WordPress. Reason? Simply because it’s a widely accepted and supported platform with tremendous SEO benefit and plug-in flexibility. Further benefits include a vast range of templates and themes many of which are free and its ability to syndicate (broadcast) your content to many news recipients. Setting up WordPress is simple if you’re quite technical by nature but somewhat challenging if you’re not so, but many hosting companies offer a package with the latest WordPress already installed. Two examples include JustHost and UK2.

Places to get templates & themes? To name a few: WordPress.org, wp4themes (dating) & NattyWP.com (adult dating)

Setting up and configuring WordPress is outside the scope of this post but all this information can be found on the WordPress website. There is one more task I will add and that is to expand the default list of recipients your content is broadcast to. Within your WordPress admin; under ‘Settings > Writing’ you should see a text area entitled ‘Update Services’. This lists all the services your blog is broadcast to when you hit publish. Below is an extensive list you can use to expand on the default provided:


Topical Blog Writing
‘Blog’ is a coined phrase from the term ‘web log’, so basically a diary written online. They started as more of a personal means to write about individual travels or any other goings-on that require a frequency of updates. This gives you an immediate clue to what you are to write about and that is something that requires frequent updates. I’ve left the next section to discuss frequency so lets focus on topical blog writing.

Topical blog writing is about matching current affairs and hot topics to the nature of your blog or post. Why? Simply because people will be using social media sites and search engines to keep themselves informed of hot topics and trends. If you can successfully ride this trend wave then you have created a hook into this traffic and have more of a chance to use the powerful ’social media machine’ to build links back to your post/article thus increasing the underlying SEO with keyworded back-links. At this point it’s important to reiterate the use of keywords within the post links. Since the blog post title tends to be the main back-link, make time to think about strategically adding keywords to it.

Lets put this into an example; everyone knows about Peter Andre & Jordan splitting up and it was a hot topic at the time. We could reactively write a post titled ‘Jordan seeks dating after splitting with boyfriend Peter Andre’. I’ve managed to capture the hot topic of interest and insert the dating keyword.

Stuck for ideas on titles? A great but simple tip is to check the big social news aggregate sites: digg.com, techorati, delicious.com and look at the headlines of the most popular posts/links as these seem to be working well. No special tricks here, just do what is doing well!

A few points to remember:

  • Ride the wave of hot topics and current trends
  • Use keywords in post titles and text to build SEO
  • Social media targets peoples view points and personalities so adding topics for argument is always a great idea to stimulate the popularity

Publishing Frequency
Frequency of posting not only helps attract repeat visitors but also triggers a synchronicity with search indexing. That means the search engines effectively ‘learn’ when you publish new content and sync their bots to come along more frequently to grab it. An obvious benefit to SEO is the long tail of content you produce over time. The back-links established from all this content really help build a concrete SEO foundation. This is why it’s important to get the keyword research right upfront as SEO is for the long haul. A final point about frequency is to maintain a focus or topic around your continued blog posting. A good example would be the very one you are reading, you expect to see something next time :)

Using Social Media for Link Building
Arguably we have covered this above as social media is based on UGC (User Generated Content), all we need to do is fuel the already mentioned ’social media machine’ and it takes care of itself! Using social media is therefore quite simple as it ‘uses your content’ in the way its users see fit. A bit of a tongue twister but the efforts you put in to producing the ’sticky’ type of content as described above then you’ll be sure to notice the effect. One thing I would suggest is making it easy for users when reading your blogs or posts to be able to submit it to the big social media sites. AddThis has everything you need to plug-in to your WordPress installation or code to paste in adhoc to achieve this.

A lot to digest this week! Next week we’ll look at the power of multimedia, how to create it and how to use it effectively….look forward to seeing you there!

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More Content = More Cash - Issue 1

Monday, June 1st, 2009

Fancy getting some highly targeted free traffic to your site? Want to gain some new full paying members? Well WhiteLabelDating.com is going to let you into a little secret about how easy this is to do. One phrase…Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).

Over the next few months we will be bringing you consistent weekly blog posts with top tips on how to improve your SEO. The impact on your pocket of having lots of content on your site will be huge. By encouraging new material to be posted to your site on a regular basis, this should ramp up your position on Google’s natural search. This can be through the addition of blog posts, forums, news articles, text captions etc which could have your site appearing within the top organic listings on Google. Hassle free advertising for your site, can’t complain at that!

The next few issues of this blog will have step by step actions,helpful tips, and informative web pages for you to help build up your SEO to the highest standard it can be, resulting in huge amounts of free traffic heading towards your sites.

So look out for the next issue of More Content = More Cash coming next week, but for now, dive into issue 1 and get your four quick tips to kick start your SEO campaign.

Issue 1. Four quick tips to kick-starting your SEO campaign

1. Decide on a Concept

The best place to start is the concept of the dating site you wish to launch. Our account management team should be able to give you a few pointers to what are currently the most successful niches, if you’re short on ideas. Once you have your concept (e.g. Countryside Dating), you can take it forward to the next step of the process… keyword research.

2. Keyword Research

Since search engines and humans alike read words, it makes perfect sense to find out what words not only match your concept but are the types of words people search for. Google Keyword Tool is the best place to begin your research. It’s simple to use, just enter a selection of key phrases that you believe people would use to find your site and submit. The results are a whole host of words and phrases that Google believes match your entered keywords. Many of the words won’t be relevant but the words and key phrases that do match your concept AND have large amounts of search traffic are of the most interest. Make sure you record these keywords as they can be of great use in your PPC campaigns too.

Other tools recently released by Goggle include the ‘Search- based Keyword Tool‘ which is aimed to provide more accurate search estimates based on real traffic.
3. Competitor Analysis

After your keyword research, it is important to look at competitors and see what they are doing well and not so well. A simple Google search will return some top results which is the best place to look since they are obviously doing something right. Although the subject of popularity is outside the scope of this issue, it is the relevance that you should be looking out for. The sites listed at the top are relevant to the keywords you used to search for them with. Check the meta tags (View> Source) and note down what words are used in the <title> & <meta> tags. Remember, this is the text that is used in your search engine listing so make sure it is a precise description of what your site does. This will help improve conversion rates as any user who clicks on this link will expect to see what was described to them. A simple concept but powerful and something you should aim to perfect.

4. Brand/Messaging

You’ll achieve the best conversion results if you can match your descriptive keywords to the identity of your brand. A brand is simply a name underpinned with meaningful words. An example would be Disney, the word does not mean anything itself but is underpinned by the words ‘magic’ and ‘adventure’. List a few keywords that encapsulate your brand. The design of the site, content, and any adverts from this point ideally should adhere to the meaning of these words or make use of them in some way. The whole ethos is to make sure that a referred visitor to your site knows exactly what they are about to see before they get there and to not be disappointed as they’ve found what they were expecting.

In the next issue we will look at the tools you will need to produce content and talk about publishing frequency, building link popularity and using current affairs as a fuel for the viral fire. So make sure you tune in next week!

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