Scott is Chief Optimizer for Webdirexion and includes Marketing, Content Strategy, WordPress, CSS, Photoshop, Tai Chi, and Coffee among his passions.
This month, my “TacTech Talk” Column (a new feature bringing a fusion of Tactical and Technical tips for today’s marketers) features an SEO tactic; a WordPress Writing Team Tip; and a look at Blog Marketing results.
First a quick note about our new logo. We’ve found the winner after receiving over 200 “votes” via a five second test, plus a number of you wrote and gave an opinion (thanks — T-Shirts on the way). We wanted a clean, web 2.0 brand that visually reflects what we mean by web direxion (direction). You can see the new logo above. We believe that with the right direxion, you will optimize your online marketing efforts, promote them well, and then connect with new customers and clients. And that’s our core mission.
SEO Tactic: We’ve seen Google ranking tag index pages highly of late and recommend you go after same. What are tags? When you write an article using WordPress, you can check off a category(s) and tags in which to place your post. Think of tags as “topics” from a visiting reader’s perspective. Categories are like chapters in a book. Tags are like the index. Another analogy is that categories are like the recipe for cooking food, and tags would be like the ingredients. WordPress creates automatic indexes of articles by tag and category. Done well, with quality content, Google is ranking certain tag indexes higher than pages themselves. What to do — fuss about your pages? Well you can always make certain page improvements, but if Google is dealing you a winning hand for tags — why not run with it? Place a rich description (all WordPress sites have the ability to craft tag and category descriptions) at the top of high ranking tag index pages and consider including a downloadable white paper there, when relevant.
WordPress Writing Team Tip: When you intend to gather more qualified visitors to your site using corporate journalism as the foundation of a good Content Marketing strategy, the key is forming a cohesive editing team. With our clients, this usually means designating an “Executive Editor” (sets policies, reviews, edits) on the client side, with us providing a “Managing Editor” (writes, edits, works with writers, publishes), and at least one writer. Then you concentrate on smart editing and strong writing. One overlooked WordPress feature that facilitates this is “revisions”, where WordPress stores all the writing revisions for a story. A lot of users know they can retrieve an older draft this way, but few take advantage of the side-by-side version comparisons this tool affords.
Side by side comparison of editing changes can help individual writers perfect ledes, and editing teams review editing policies and techniques.
More posts, more traffic and Content Marketing Results: This tactic goes to the heart of why you should be business blogging in the first place… more traffic. You can see from the chart below that you get pretty significant traffic increases when you write and publish 6-8 articles per month, then again at 15 and up. It can be tough to generate an average of four articles a week, but ROI wise, the effort could pay for itself. One way to track that payoff is to first set goal values in Analytics for contact lead forms, PDF downloads, newsletter signups, etc.; then study each post to see which are channeling visitors to those goals. Then you can adjust your editing strategies, and use tip #2 above to help refocus the writing team.
This chart from HubSpot shows how traffic increases as a direct result of blog and article publishing.
