E-A-T- How to meet the needs of quality raters and users
Your website content needs to EAT to thrive. Yes you got it right, we’re talking about E-A-T. Google states that E-A-T is among the top 3 considerations for determining Content Quality. E-A-T is a significant factor in determining the “value” of a website. So what is E-A-T? E-A-T stands for “Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness.” Let’s break it more. Expert –…
Customer Journey
The customer journey is the steps taken and decisions made by a prospect in the course of deciding to buy whatever it is that you sell. The main purpose of defining your customer journey is to guide your sales and marketing team in generating and nurturing leads. For both big and small businesses, a great customer…
Snippet Post
Snippet posts are fairly short posts and either answer one question or convey one main idea. They are contrasted with Pillar Posts which are longer, better researched, and convey more information. Snippet posts are generally 200 to 300 words long, and are for SEO purposes are published frequently (preferably multiple times each day). Snippet posts are not…
SERP (Search Engine Result Page)
SERP (Search Engine Result Page) A SERP (Search Engine Result Page) is the page Google (and the other search engines) return to you in response to a search query. Users enters their search query upon which the search engine presents them with a SERP. SERP’s are unique. All search engines customize the experience for their…
Private Blog Network
A Private Blog Network is a privately owned network of servers that has obtained high domain authority via some means (generally via what where called Black Hat SEO techniques) and from which links to other websites were sold. Private Blog Networks were rendered ineffective in 2013 or 2014 via one of the Google algorithm updates, yet…
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is free software provided by Google to help us monitor measure activity on our websites. It has more features than I can list in this short glossary entry, but it becomes easy to know things like: What sources of traffic bring people to your website. What pages on your website people are loading. What…
Outbound Links
Overview Outbound links are links from pages on your website to web pages on other websites. All things being equal (which of course they never really are) pages with an outbound link or two rank higher than pages without outbound links. Studies also show outbound links provide people a greater sense of credibility as other…
Brand Publishing
Brand Publishing Brand publishing describes how businesses (brands) directly publish content for their customers, their prospects, and to the world at large. Brand journalism is simply the strategy of telling out your story in the style of journalism. Primarily this is done through their blog website, and is also done via social media networking sites. This is…
Plugins
WordPress is a web server framework that provides a specific set of functionality. A plugin is a piece of software specifically made to extend the capabilities of WordPress sites. It is like a small program that is self-contained, packaged, and serves one very well defined function. Installing WordPress plugins (or removing them) is really simple…
Internal Link Structure
Internal Link Structure The internal link structure of your website is literally the structure of all the internal links of your website. An “internal link” is nothing more than a link that originates on one page of your website and points to another page on the same website. By page I mean webpage, not WordPress page. In…
Internal Links
What are Internal links? Internal links are links from pages on your website to other pages on the same website. Not only does your website need these internal links, it needs an internal link structure where the pillar posts you publish often link to the snippet posts you publish less often. This internal link structure raises the authority of…
Google Sandbox Effect
Google Sandbox Effect The Google Sandbox Effect describes a phenomenon where new sites rank very poorly until suddenly, one day the levels of visitors who arrive via organic search increases dramatically almost overnight for no apparent reason. The Google Sandbox effect acts as a temporary filter for new sites. It seems new sites are not…
PageRank
PageRank is THE original search signal and is still one of the strongest. Links were so critical to Google in the early days that the search engine was called Backrub before the name was changed to Google. When the Google search engine was brand new, it was based exclusively on every page and every link…
Pillar posts
A pillar post is one that is well researched, well written, longer (than a snippet post) and reads more like a white paper or tutorial than a snippet. A pillar post is a substantive and informative piece of content on a specific topic. While Snippet Posts are generally 200 to 300 words long, pillar posts are generally much longer. At…
Google Plus
Google Plus is the social media networking site from Google. In the same way that Facebook is at facebook.com, Google Plus is at plus.google.com. However it is a mistake to think of Google Plus as “just” another social media networking sites. Google Plus Circles The reason Google Plus is not “just” another social media networking sites is…
SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. In common usage the phrase seems to have different meanings to different people. There are two definitions I accept. They are similar to each other, but not exact. Definition #1 SEO is the technical aspects of making your website easy for the search engines to search and index, and the…
Landing page
A landing page is a page on a website that encourages the website visitor to take a specific action, which either results in them: 1) leaving some contact information, or 2) buying something. Examples of specific actions are: Subscribe to an email newslettter Register for a webinar Download an eBook (in exchange for an email…
Conversion
Conversion is often considered to be when someone completes a purchase. While this is true, conversion is also the smaller steps people take during their buying process. When someone goes through the process of deciding to buy from you, they follow a certain procedure, whether they’re aware of this or not. While that procedure may…
Inbound Marketing
Inbound Marketing is the process of attracting your audience to your website through a structured and methodical system of publishing useful and interesting articles and stories to your website, and sharing the best of those articles with others. The core activity of Inbound Marketing in publishing. Publishing to a website is called blogging. For that…
Marketing Automation
Studies show that (on average, across America) out of every 100 leads your business attracts: 3% are ready to buy now 30% of never going to buy (from you or a competitor) 67% will buy later (from you or a competitor) The process of staying in touch with the 67% is called Lead Nurturing. Lead…
Back links
Back links are links from webpages on sites other than your site, than “link back” to pages on your website. The image above should help illustrate the idea. Back links are critically important to the success of your SEO. In the early days of Google, back links were THE search signal, and while there are now…
Sales Funnel
The Sales Funnel is a concept that relates to how prospects “fall away” as they take steps closer to becoming a customer. That is why it is referred to as a funnel. At the top of the funnel are people who have some form of interest in your product or service. At the bottom are people…