Below is the #Blab video and summary of our five "musts" to creating great SEO content for your website as shared by Chris Celek during our Blab yesterday, October 27, 2015.
Chris Celek, owner of Celek Media Consulting, presented "Five Things to Do Now That You Have a Website" at the October 9, 2015 New Media Dayton monthly meetup. The information shared regarding statistics, tools and "musts" was valuable for new businesses and for anyone managing content on a website.
I also had just learned of Blab.im, a live video streaming and met my new good friend Darla Kirchner as a result of my first Blab visit.
I invited Chris to join me as a co-host for our first Blab to share the information with others and to invite others to engage with us in the live chat as well as in a seat. Below is the summary of our conversation and key take-aways:
5 Must's:
Use a title generator: We can spend hours upon hours trying to figure out new content to post, blog post title ideas and determining what will generate the most relevant traffic to our website. A couple of tools discussed that help generate ideas for new blog posts, content builders and re-purposing content are:
Top 50 Questions/Ideas: a list of questions and ideas to help get the content and topics flowing that you can write about today
Content Idea Generator: one click content idea tool that you type your keyword/s into and it automatically generates topics ideas for you
For example, keywords "digital marketing strategy" results in "Why You Must Have a Digital Marketing Strategy" and "3 Digital Marketing Strategy Principles Your Business Needs in 2016"
Also, for generating keywords:
LongTailPro. This was mentioned in the chat however I'm not familiar with this particular tool. It looks useful, however!
Content related to "How To" will generate the most views. Search Engine Land reported in May 2015 that YouTube searches for "How to" videos are up 70% YoY with over 100M hours of "how to" content watched. Now that's a lot of hours and a captive audience!
Subscribe to resources: To stay on top of algorithm changes Google makes. This will help minimize the "What happened? I was ranked #3 yesterday and now I'm not even on the first page!" A few resources:
Wordpress - through SEO plugins such as Yoast
Form a habit: Plan your content publishing distribution schedule. To start, publish once a month. Then schedule increases until you've formed a habit. Here's a publishing calendar Chris shared at the New Media Dayton presentation:
Two-step editorial calendar template
An additional resource just because options are good :) Six templates to choose from and download.
Keep readers from getting bored: Mix up your media with text and visual content. Your readers may prefer one over the other and if you can make both groups happy, it's worth it! Here are a few resources that are great for creating your own visuals - even if you're not the creative type, i.e. easy to use. Also, the best type of content to get you started, engage your audience or increase traffic is "How To" videos.
your own photos are best - and free!
Dollar Photo Club is great for free and low-cost images
Tag your images: Google, Yahoo and Bing all scan and read text. The search engines, however, do not interpret an image. knowing that you need to associate text with your images. This can be done with the alt text, meta keywords, meta description, URL, title and caption.
Keep in mind that generating content can be easier and a better use of your time if you leverage existing tools and resources. Here's a link Chris included in his presentation and I find value in the quick read so thought you might as well! If you're looking for creative, time saving, valuable ways to re-purpose content across platforms with the same message, check this out!
Have thoughts or comments? Would be great to hear from you!
P.S. This Blab was generated as a result of a New Media Dayton event that Chris presented the topic on October 9, 2015 in which I used Periscope. Since the video replay is only available for 24 hours, that link is not included in the post.