Analyzing online ventures concerning your niche is as necessary as online marketing itself.  To have a strategic SEO implemented, you will need to first track how your competitors are doing online. There could be several aspects for analyzing e-businesses competing with you, and you need to track at least the main ones carefully to evaluate your competitive environment. You can use several free online tools performing several different metrics to check performance of your competitors’ websites.

On-site analysis

• Adopt a bot’s perspective in checking out the on-page factors of your competitors’ websites. If it’s Flash-based or picture-rich, it will be easy to outrank.
   
• Look for the presence of a particular competitive keyword on their page. Check its frequency and the exact places it appears, especially in the titles, heading tags, meta keywords, meta description, strong tags. This will give an idea of their on-page keyword-specific SEO efforts.
   
• Evaluate their navigation structure, placing of the anchor text or hyperlinks to promote keyword phrases or services.
   
• Check their URL structure to analyze if they have mixed a keyword phrase well.
   
• See what’s their page rank. Though by smart on-site SEO, it’s not difficult to beat a high PR site on a targeted keyword. Still if there are too many competitors with high PR sites, it indicates that the industry is highly competitive. Also, a high PR gives a marketing pitch to the site, reducing the necessity of investing high on PPC ads.
   
• Check how much of the web content has been indexed by Google. Type in the search bar “site:competitorname.com” and you will get all the site pages that have been indexed.

Off-site analysis

• Get a sense of the search engine popularity of the competitor’s site by checking the amount of backlinks their site has. Use a free tool such as Backlink Watch.
   
• Check their organic results and PPC marketing.
   
• Use browser add-ons or free e-metrics or web analytics tools of good quality such as Alexa, The Wayback Machine, or Quantcast.com and get the traffic details, keyword report, link reports, and many other performance factors of your competitor’s site.
   
• Go across your competitor’s Facebook and Twitter profiles to analyze their social media reach.

You must keep evaluating your competitors’ web strategies as that will help you lay an effective strategy to outrank them in the online battlefield and raise your sales volume.

Created By Voltier Creative South Florida SEO

Understanding “Link Bait”

Wikipedia defines link bait as “any content or feature, within a website, designed specifically to gain attention or encourage others to link to the website. There’s a good logic behind using a content, particularly blogs, which is interesting enough to catch people’s attention to garner links from other websites. Link baiting (or linkbaiting) can, therefore, serve great to the purpose of website and/or brand marketing of a viral nature.

Why To Use Link Bait?

There is a two-way benefit of generating links to a website or blog:

• By creating interesting content and promoting it in the online community, one can create an active base of advocates for that content that can lead to its viral spread online.

• Successful link bait can generate hundreds or even thousands of editorially-given links to a site or blog. These links, in turn, will improve the site's rankings in the search engines.

Hence, link-based marketing is one of the most effective ways for you to spread a word about your business and simultaneously improve your website’s search engine rankings.

Here is a five-step process to link bait success:

STEP 1: BRAINSTORMING

The primary stage of creating a link bait (or linkbait) involves brainstorming in the context of:

• Content Type
• Topic Realm and Strictness
• Idea Building

Content Type

The content to be developed for the linkbait can be in any of the following forms:

• Articles
• Infographics
• Quizzes
• Widgets
• Cartoons

You must try to analyze which form of the content best suits your purpose to spread it online.

Topic Realm and Strictness

Create a linkbait considering its relevance to the topic of your site. The title or the anchor text of your linkbait will have significant implications as far as bringing improvements to your site rankings is concerned.

Consider the effect of taking your ideas in the “outer sphere” so that your brand is promoted for being perceived at a higher level of seriousness. Think how you can produce something outlandish that will create a positive impression for your brand.

Idea Building

Your aim should be to generate as many ideas as you can. Think of effective ways to generate ideas and also involve others in this brainstorming for ideas. However, you strictly need to stay on-topic with this process and ultimately narrow down your ideas by testing them for “stickiness.”

The following are the criteria you should follow for “stickiness”:
 

• Simplicity: Have a concept that’s simple and easy to understand at a quick glance so that your audience can quickly pick out the benefit your linkbait has for their gain.

• Presenting something unusual or unexpected: The value of your linkbait depends a lot on how unique it appears to your audience. Make it different by presenting something entirely new or something old in a new way.

• Concreteness: Undertake the process of linkbait genesis in such a way that it leaves no scope for ambiguity. Content, particularly blogs, generated with a clear thesis and specifics at length leads to a higher level of interest among the intended readers.

• Credibility: lf your linkbait smells of spam, or your facts don’t add up, you’re sunk.

• Emotions: Only logics don’t work when it comes to sharing with people. At the first place, your idea must have enough value that it is cared about in the sphere you want it to share. Consider who your target audience is going to be and what their primary motivational emotions might be. Develop your linkbait for a right sensory appeal. Empathy might be good when targeting mothers, while irony or sarcasm might be better when targeting teens. Try to bring real world concepts by relating your ideas through examples. This will give your audience a reason to feel connected.

STEP 2: PRODUCTION

Skimping on production may bring down the quality of the linkbait. Give sufficient time to all the stages of production and come up with a content which is above mediocrity and reflects professional-level writing, layout, and design.
 

1. Content Creation
   Whether your self-create your content or get an in-house employee or a third-party freelancer to create it, it’s important that you maintain a control over the quality and consistency of the content considering yourself as its future owner. Keep a careful eye on the content as it goes through production and assess how well it fits the original idea and goals as it is being created.
    
2. Timelines and Edits
   Make sure that you head towards project completion with sufficient time devotion to every creative aspect of the content. You may keep shunting back and forth while dealing with your writer and graphic designers, but in the end, it will pay back as a finished product to feel proud of. If you have appointed a freelancer, probably you will need to plan and manage your timeline according to his schedule.
    
3. Product on Delivery
   In order to get a high-quality finished product, you can’t afford to compromise on the stickiness criteria of credibility. Make sure that your linkbait is not disregarded as being a non-credible publishing work on account of spelling errors, sloppy images or artwork, and lack of sourcing.
    
4. Branding
   A linkbait which is cohesive with your website and/or your brand will only make your branding efforts successful. It’s vital that you make clear the source of production, but don’t do anything that causes you to lose credibility or portray you as a manipulator or spammer (avoid making a sales pitch by plugging your product or service to your linkbait).

STEP 3: PUBLICATION & PROMOTION

If you have consistently met all the guidelines laid out so far, this step comes out as the easiest part of the entire process. Make sure that your content holds the potential for a “viral sharing” as you put it across the internet for online viewing. Following are the strategies for linkbait promotion:

Content Placement

Your linkbait should reach out to the online community in a non-salesy way. If you put it within a commercial section of your site, you are well on your way to create a recipe for failure. Probably the best place where your linkbait should reside is blogs, which are an excellent, easy-to-use tool to enhance sharing, or a static page apart from your main site.

Enable Easy Sharing

Look for the effective tools to help your readers share content they enjoy with others. Looking at the current trend, it seems much beneficial to use common and popular sharing facilitators such as Facebook, Twitter, and social news voting buttons. For infographics, include easily copyable snippets of code for bloggers to use to easily syndicate your content to their blogs.

News Aggregators

Make Reddit.com, Digg.com, Stumbleupon, and other social news and bookmarking sites your first promotion stop. If you have accounts that have a history of participation, you will have a higher likelihood of success on these types of sites.

Blogger Outreach

In a seemingly infinite world of bloggers, it is likely that there are several hundred or even several thousand bloggers with moderate readerships within your niche. If your linkbait content becomes successful in creating an appeal to the audiences of this community of bloggers, it will be easy for you to convince them to post your linkbait. Don’t stop at simply passing along an interesting piece of content, but be sure that you present yourself as a seasoned reader of the site.

Twitter Outreach

Having similar implications as the blogger outreach, Twitter outreach can also help spread your content far and wide. Don’t push yourself to target beyond the top 50-100 most popular Twitter accounts within your niche as the ones with the few followers won’t be able to spread your content very far.

STEP 4: REVIEWING AND ENHANCING

There is still more to link baiting once it is created and subjected to promotional advancements. Here are the ways you can squeeze the most out of your Iinkbait:

Piggybacking

If your recently promoted linkbait is getting you a solid traffic, you must use that traffic to help you launch your next piece. By having at least two pieces of Iinkbait in the pipeline, you will discover to your surprise how easy it is to piggyback one’s success on the back of another.

Getting all the attribution or backlinks you deserve

You can’t be assured that all the people who shared your content online have provided proper attribution or links to you as the creator. This is especially true when creating and promoting infographics. Use sites like Tineye.com to track all those who have used your content but have not linked you back. Email them and get all the links you deserve.

STEP 5: MEASURING RESULTS

Measure your results by recording the following metrics and drawing comparisons over the attempts at successful link baiting:
 
Social sharing

Check how many Reddit votes, Facebook shares, diggs, tweets, and so on did your Iinkbait receive.

Links

Utilize tools such as Yahoo Site Explorer, SEOmoz’s Linkscape, and Webmaster Tools to track your links as they are created. This will determine your performance at building links.

Key sharers

Look through your referral logs and the built links to know if there were any extremely prominent people, such as any celebrities or top bloggers, who shared your content. This provides you an entree to start a relationship with these key influencers.

One can’t dispense with search engine optimization (SEO) if he wants success in building website traffic. The way you apply your knowledge of SEO will greatly determine the amount of traffic diversion to your website. To understand how SEO can affect your website’s success, make yourself think of a number of websites on the internet which you come across accidentally on the web browser in some remote places of the internet. Though they contain commendable information and succeed in impressing you, still they show up nowhere on the first few pages of search results on major search engines when somebody makes a search with words related to their services. This is the result of bad SEO, and it drastically affects a website’s accessibility on the internet.

Coming to the ways of raising website traffic volumes, there is no single fool-proof way but a combination of different techniques work well. Combining a good SEO with SEM (search engine marketing), you can rule in the realm of internet world. Applying the knowledge of most searched keyword phrases relevant to your domain, algorithms link popularity, site structure and page rank, you can create a website that receives high volumes of traffic.

There are ready-made get-quick-traffic schemes that claim high and allure the website owners. However, there’s a great risk if you depend on them as they could possibly be an outright internet scam. Applying genuine and proven methods of attracting traffic to a website is a display of common sense and persevering attitude.

Here are a few tips to help you with your website traffic building:

Professional looks: Make your website design look professional and your domain name sound professional.

Good-quality content: It plays a major role in building and maintaining traffic on the website. A good content makes visitors feel like coming back to the site. It’s important to add fresh content to your site from time to time, and if there is a consistency in quality with content additions, search engines keep a check on it and you automatically get more traffic.

Link building: It helps to boost search engine ranking in the best way. A good way to do it is by emailing websites that are similar to yours and asking them to perform a link exchange in return.

Social bookmarking: There are a plenty of social bookmarking and social networking sites which can be used for building traffic, but you can’t depend upon them alone. Include articles specific to your product or service on your website in order to advertise your brand.

Google's AdWords: It’s a great (paid) advertising tool that gets you guaranteed traffic on your website.

We can classify webmasters into two categories on the basis of their ideologies. According to one ideology, search engine optimization (SEO) is considered to be a lynchpin of success for the website and the services or products it informs about. On the other hand, there are web developers and marketers who are deeply concerned about the sales objectives but without any inclination towards a stringent enforcement of the SEO principles to accomplish it. Let’s discuss both the views.

What makes SEO popular with marketers?

Search engine optimization helps your website to be found on the internet, and this makes good sense to marketers as a person who has found your website would be someone looking specifically for your niche or specialty. This creates an excellent opportunity to convince people for your offerings. Using relevant keywords and links to get to top spots, you bring yourself to a position from where you can provide your visitors the solutions they were exactly looking for.

Doing marketing away from SEO

There are so many marketers who are just pure “marketers” without any HTML or web design knowledge. Things that matter to them are the looks of the page and sales through them. They hardly care what your website’s Google ranking is for certain keywords. To them, it’s all about gaining traffic which might be through paid advertising or through referral or email marketing. You still can make money and have a profitable website because what matters here is where the source of traffic is coming from, so it might not make sense to you to spend money on keyword ranking.

What yields better results?

These two general classes of marketers emerge depending on whether they have a mind that’s more analytical or more creative. An analytical mind would enjoy the science of search engine optimization and the results it is capable of bringing. The person with a more creative mindset may not even know how to build a website, someone like a copywriter, and he would just be focused on the marketing aspect of the website and providing a product with real value that exceeds the amount of money needed as payment. Such a mindset will prompt promoting an offering by an email marketing campaign or even by physical offline promotion (if you have a website more locally visited, your visitors are more likely to arrive by referral, search result ranking would be less effective). Both the approaches can get good results; you just need to check what appeals to you more and suits your business better.

Any website has a crucial element to be taken care of in its build-up phase which is its information architecture. If the data or content of a website is organized in a search engine friendly way, the results will be very positive from an online perspective.

Designing a site’s architecture for high ranking may be the SEO objective, but a bigger objective than that is to make it soundly usable and customer converting. The latter two have much to do with the logics of customers regarding the extent of website use.

Site structure for search:

There is a need to generate “link equity” for your site. For this, there are two types of links: on-site links, notably those in the site’s tool bar or navigation bars, and inbound links pointing at your home page. But, it is important to determine how much to link and when.

A site that is well-structured tends to focus on a single overall major theme, and from that theme branches out different pages that are continually more focused, specific, and relevant to the overarching topic of the site.

What is more, search engine crawlers will primarily tend to crawl links that are at most three or four clicks away from your homepage. Thus, you should strive to keep your most important content within those 3-4 tiers.

SEO-friendly URL structures:

Getting a site layout wherein the location of individual pages is logical and intelligible to both visitors and search engines is often best accomplished by sticking to static URLs. This will have advantages such as reduction or elimination of crawling problems associated with dynamic, parameterized URLs. You need to have a URL that’s more communicable, which means short and memorable. Also, if your most relevant keywords have been incorporated into your URL and directory structure, it will help search engines to know what your page is about, bolded keywords in the SERPs will result in potentially more clicks, and search engine ranking of a page will be benefited as your most important keywords will be included in the link anchor text. Another thing to take care is to prevent the accidental creation of infinite spaces and curb and eliminate duplicate content.

The extensive and interesting field of information architecture spans the internet and SEO to a great extent, and understanding its importance is very important to serve the actual purpose of a website, i.e. marketing and/or sales.