image(Flickr/Peter Rosbjerg)

Traditionally, businesses have been broken into units, each of which has a particular area of expertise and responsibility. Public relations handled interactions with the media, marketing was responsible for getting the word out, and SEO for bringing in traffic by any means. Then there’s customer service, sales, administration, manufacturing, and so on. Each a little dukedom with feudal responsibility to its C-Level royal court.

SEO is changing; its role is blurring and stretching beyond the areas that used to be its core competencies: bringing in traffic by technical optimization of a site and link building. Now more properly referred to as inbound marketing, in an age where a web presence is central to any company’s revenue stream, and Google are cracking down hard on tactics they disapprove of, content has moved center stage. Continue reading →

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As an industry, SEOs have absorbed the message that ‘short is sweet’. We know that the attention span of surfers is limited. They don’t tend to luxuriate in the written word, enjoying writing for writing’s sake. Instead they want short, informative, actionable content without the clutter of unnecessary verbosity. We’ve also fully taken on board the idea that content should be pitched at the lowest possible reading level, so as not to alienate potential readers and customers.

When done well, short, simple content is great. When done badly, it results in either content that is so thin it isn’t worth reading at all, or content that appears to be aimed at an audience who have just put aside their copy of Ten Little Fingers and Ten Little Toes.

It’s become blogger lore that content should be written in this way; however, there are quite a few reasons, both from the perspective of SEO, and from the perspective of content marketing, that adding longer form content written for educated adults into the mix can actually bring some noticeable benefits to corporate blogs and websites. Continue reading →

image(Flickr/ Eric Fischer)

Search engine optimization is a broad field that employs a huge number of different strategies to help sites rank well in the SERPs. From producing awesome content to technical strategies like implementing caching to speed up a site, many web owners are familiar with the basic practices of SEO, but what they don’t consider is the potential benefit of using a specialist SEO host.

An SEO host provides everything that ordinary web hosting companies provides, but they offer an additional service that standard web hosts do not: multiple IP hosting. Multiple IP hosting depends on a company having control of a large block of so-called C-level IPs. Not all companies have control over a sufficiently wide variety of IPs over a sufficiently diverse geographical range to successfully offer the benefits of multiple IP hosting.

SEO hosting companies allow their clients to make use of the large set of IPs they control, and that has a number of significant SEO benefits. Continue reading →

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Content marketing has always been with us. It has been called different things, but the creation of engaging content by brands has been a lynchpin of marketing for decades. In recent years, online marketers in particular have been forced by improvements to search engine algorithms, the ubiquity of social media, and users’ increasing immunity to traditional advertising methods to up their game in the content arena.

Many, however, remain to be convinced, seeing content marketing a passing fad or a distraction from the tried and true marketing and SEO tactics of the past. The naysayers have a variety of arguments that are frequently used to stymie content marketing advocates, and those advocates are faced with some real problems when implementing content marketing campaigns. We’re going to have a look at five of the most serious problems content marketers face and offer possible solutions.

We Can’t Produce Enough Content

I hear this a lot. Producing content in sufficient quantities to keep hungry search engines fed and social media followers engaged seems a daunting task. Continue reading →