Inbound Marketing University Study Guide: Notes on Getting Found

Peg Mulligan: Inbound Marketing Certified Professional

Inbound Marketing Certification: Study Tips from the Trenches

According to HubSpot’s Inbound Marketing University, the secret to getting found online is three-part:

Create great content.
Optimize your content.
Promote your content.

I. Creating Content

In his exam review for Inbound Marketing University (IMU #11), HubSpot’s Mike Volpe explains the importance of content development in getting found online:

Create content people want to promote, share, and link back to. Content is more important than SEO and social media. Aim to create more, not perfect content, including blog articles, video, and free tools, like Website Grader from HubSpot. Anyone can create content (the CEO or product manager, for example), and have a good relationship with customers, as long as the content is important to your marketing persona, not just to you.

Blog Article:

A blog allows you to quickly and easily create and publish new content. It allows readers to leave feedback on your content, as well as react to feedback from other readers. Components of a blog include the sidebar, header, comments, and post. Blogs are great communications tools in crisis situations.

Blogging Tips:

The blogger and readers often refer to each other by first names.
The sidebar gives readers information and encourages interaction.
The header sets the visual tone for the blog and provides links to information.
The two column layout, with a post column and sidebar, is the most popular.
Pick bloggers who are happy, passionate, and write well.
A group blog is a very popular choice.
Don’t write about your product. Write about how you can solve your users’ problems.

Article Sharing and Web Directories:

Use article and Web directories to share your content throughout the Internet.

However, refer to A Look At Article Directories and Their Influence in Organic Rankings, to learn about dangers to avoid with these directories:

…the danger is having your article, on a domain with more trust, outranking you in the SERPs. Most article directories have fairly aggressively placed advertising, and the likelihood of someone not clicking a competing advertisement and making it to the bottom and using your link are fairly slim. So I would recommend using second tier content that’s not quite good enough for your website. Never duplicate content on your website and an article directory. It forces the search engine to choose who is the original and who is the duplicate. Instead, opt for a complete rewrite.

Another great source: Web Directories…are They Relevant to SEO?

Blog Commenting:

According to Volpe, ”commenting on others blogs helps you develop a reputation as a thought leader, develop a relationship with other bloggers, and those bloggers’ readers. Bear in mind, however, that most blog comments do not pass any SEO authority.”

Creative Commons:

The Creative Commons license gives others the right to republish your content around the web.

eBook:

Don’t require a lot of information for someone to download your eBook. Have a call to action in the ebook, so you can get contact info and leads.

II. Optimizing Content

Inbound Marketing University provides lots of hands-on tips for optimizing your content, as described in the SEO concepts below.

SEO

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is a set of methodologies that make it easier for search engines to find, index, categorize, and rank web content. The fundamentals of SEO include keywords, link building, and a search friendly site.

Alt Text:

“These are HTML tags that provide “alternative” text when images cannot be displayed. Search engines can’t see what an image is, or represents, so they need to look at the ALT tags.” (Source: http://www.earthskater.net/library/seo.asp)

Alt text is considered a key element in creating a usable, high-accessibility Website. Though using Alt text is considered best practice in web design, most SEO specialists agree that none of the major search engines consider ALT text, when determining relevancy.

Anchor Text:

Anchor text is the clickable text in hyperlinks, with keywords, which drive targeted traffic to your sites.

Page Title:

Apply keywords relevant to the target audience. Place the keywords you are targeting the most, to the left of your title. Use a different page title on each page of the site.

Google Crawl:

According to How often does Google crawl the web?, “Google’s spiders regularly crawl the web to rebuild the [Google] index.”

Crawls are based on many factors such as PageRank, links to a page, and crawling constraints, such as the number of parameters in a URL. Any number of factors can affect the crawl frequency of individual sites.

Our crawl process is algorithmic; computer programs determine which sites to crawl, how often, and how many pages to fetch from each site. We don’t accept payment to crawl a site more frequently. For tips on maintaining a crawler-friendly website, please visit our webmaster guidelines.

Tips for a Crawlable Site:

Quantity of quality inbound links to your site
Use of text links in navigation
Use of text links between pages, using keywords
HTML & XML site maps

Reasons for Poor Google Crawlability:

Unnecessarily complex URLs & session ids
Multiple URLs to duplicate content
Temporary redirects
Site navigation with Ajax, Flash, and JavaScript

Organic Search Results:

These are the ranked results from Google’s index of web pages. Approximately 60-70% of visitors will click on these links. Organic search results are called “natural” or “free” listings, because there is no direct payment to Google for them.

Keywords:

Keywords indicate intent and can drive targeted traffic to your site. Here are tips on using keywords on your web site:

Place most important keywords to the left of your titles.
Titles should include 8-10 words, or about 65 characters.
Focus on 1-2 keyword phrases – specificity rules.
Each page on the site should have a unique title tag (and meta description).
Free Keyword Tools: Google Keyword Tool, Insights, Ad Planner, freekeywords.wordtracker.com
Paid Keyword Tools: Wordtracker.com, KeywordDiscovery.com, and SEMRush.com
Use keywords in title tags, headings, paragraph titles, body copy, anchor text in links, the URL, image alt text, and meta description tags.

Inorganic Search:

Trizeon, a provider of inorganic SEO services, describes inorganic search results in this way:

URL submission is a simple and cost- effective process in which the URL is submitted to different search engines and web directories based on the type of the business the company is engaged in.

Inorganic search engine optimization (Inorganic SEO) usually includes paid campaigning such as Pay per Click (PPC), Cost per Click (CPC), Cost per Acquisition (CPA), Banners Ads and Contextual Ads.

Inorganic search engine optimization (Inorganic SEO) yields quick results. Hence, if you are looking for results in a short period, this is a right strategy.

At IMU, I learned that the most prominent position via inorganic search can be achieved via Google AdWords ads. The best performing ads appear on top. Inorganic search is responsible for 25% of search results.

Breadcrumb Navigation:

Breadcrumbs, “also known as the breadcrumb trail, are a navigation technique that use a single line of text to show the current page’s location in the site hierarchy. It is a secondary navigation scheme, which increases websites usability and benefits to user-experience. It’s also great for search engine optimization purposes.” Source: Breadcrumb navigation & SEO.

Canonical Tag:

Google will discount duplicate content, and your authority will become low, if you duplicate content, too much.

The canonical tag is a link element, which cleans up duplicate URLs on sites. According to Google’s Matt Cutts, it “tells the search engines the preferred location of a URL (the “canonical” location, in search engine speak).” For more information, see Google, Yahoo & Microsoft Unite On “Canonical Tag” To Reduce Duplicate Content Clutter.

301 Redirect:

According to the SEOBook, “301 redirects are used to permanently move a site to a new location. Search engines do not apply penalties to 301 redirects the way they apply them to many other types of redirects.”

Inbound Links:

According to the Marketing Terms dictionary, an inbound link is “a link from a site outside of your site.”

Inbound links send visitors to your web site. Generally, this is seen as a good thing. Many sites go to great lengths to achieve as much of this “free” advertising as possible, although a few sites are very particular about where the links are pointing (see deep linking).

For more information, see 101 Ways to Build Link Popularity.

Traffic:

Traffic to your web site is a combination of off-page and on-page SEO.

Off?Page SEO:

Off-page SEO involves the number of links, with good keywords, that are coming into your website.

On?Page SEO:

On-page SEO involves the targeted keywords in the title of each page on your web site , the URL, H1 tags, and content. On-page SEO is responsible for only 25-30 % of why a page will rank.

Hyperlinked Images:

In a post on ALT Tags for Images for SEO, we learn that ”SEO experts concur, stressing that if your image is hyperlinked (i.e., the image is clickable), then the ALT attribute provides value in the same manner as does the “anchor text” in a text link.”

“Low Hanging Fruit” Keywords:

Low hanging fruit refers to keyword phrases that are easy to rank for, “because they are the keywords that others are ignoring.”

For more information on how to pick low hanging fruit in the keyword world, see these resources:

Meta Keywords:

Though meta keywords do not pass much SEO authority, your page descriptions can increase the click-through rate to your site. Using meta keyword tags is still considered a best practice.

For more information, see SEO Best Practices: Page Titles, Meta Description, and Meta Keywords.

III. Promoting Content

In his IMU exam review, Volpe provides this advice on promoting content:

Promote to get others to share with friends and then publish something on their own about it, and then link to it…Build good relationships with other people in social media. Follow as many people as make sense to your goals. Create more personal relationships. Promoting content involves volume and quality. Promote other people’s content, RT because other people will see it. Every single piece of content you produce is not worthy of promoting to your network. Be interesting and make relevant friends by being helpful.

Twitter for Business:

Maintain a personal account as well as an account for your company.

Social Media and Blogging Integration:

For more information, see these resources: How to Combine SEO, Blogging, and Social Media for Marketing Results and How to Integrate Social Media Into Your Marketing.

Facebook Business Page:

For steps on how to build a Facebook business page, see http://www.facebook.com/advertising/?pages.

RSS Feed:

Wikipedia defines RSS, as follows:

RSS (most commonly translated as “Really Simple Syndication” but sometimes “Rich Site Summary”) is a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated works—such as blog entries, news headlines, audio, and video—in a standardized format.[2] An RSS document (which is called a “feed”, “web feed”,[3] or “channel”) includes full or summarized text, plus metadata such as publishing dates and authorship. Web feeds benefit publishers by letting them syndicate content automatically. They benefit readers who want to subscribe to timely updates from favored websites or to aggregate feeds from many sites into one place.

RSS feeds can be read using software called an “RSS reader”, “feed reader”, or “aggregator”, which can be web-based, desktop-based, or mobile-device-based. A standardized XML file format allows the information to be published once and viewed by many different programs.

LinkedIn Groups:

Here, the best strategy is to build a LinkedIn Group. For more information, see HubSpot’s 5 Tips for Creating, Promoting, and Managing a LinkedIn Group.

Building Community:

More advanced, free tools help you build community.

Related Links: