How to promote your posts

Get the Most Out of Your Posts

Adriel Michaud, Top Draw

Overview

Getting Traffic to your Website

• Writing posts that no one reads sucks

Overview

Overview

Why don’t I write stuff that people are looking for, but

doesn’t exist or isn’t great?

Overview

Website To Do:

1. Keyphrase research and topic ideation

2. Optimizing Your Website

3. Building links and promoting your post

4. Differentiating your site

5. Measured results

6. Hippy crap

Overview

1. Keyphrase Research & Topic Ideation

1. Come in with an idea on what I want to write, but

with an open mind.

2. I use Google Adword’s Keyword tool to compare

what I think will be good and what Google sees

people looking for.

3. Take note of other concepts or spins on the topic I

want to hit.

4. Look for opportunities where there’s lots of the right

people searching and few high quality websites out

there on it.

Keyphrase Research & Topic Ideation

User Intent

Informational queries:• “How to water tomato plants”: 140 searches/month

Symptomatic:• “Brown spots on tomato leaves”: 390

Transactional:• “Buy tomato plants”: 170

B2B• “Enterprise ready tomato processing solution”

Keyphrase Research & Topic Ideation

Google Adwords Keyword Tool

Keyphrase Research

“how to water tomato plants”: 140

“how to water tomato plant”: <10 (non plural)

“watering tomato plants”: 590 (new keyphrase ideas)

“tomato plant watering”: 73 (re-ordering of keywords)

“watering tomato plants in pots”: 91 (niche)

“watering tomatoe plants”: 22 (common misspellings)

Keyphrase Research & Topic Ideation

Keyphrase Hit List

Tomato plants:

-how to

-watering

-outdoors

-in pots/containers

-over watering

-tips

-heirloom tomatoes

Keyphrase Research & Topic Ideation

Google those phrases!

Keyphrase Research & Topic Ideation

Can I compete?Strong competition: Wikipedia, exact match domains.

Medium: exact match titles or categories or pages on strong sites

Weak: forums, directories, etc

Keyphrase Research

Scope out the competitors/partners

Keyphrase Research & Topic Ideation

Keyphrase Research Summary:

1. Throw your ideas into Google’s Keyword tool to

validate and gain perspective.

2. Make a hitlist of keywords that you like from the

keyword tool.

3. Check out the competition.

4. Understand your title, and some of the words you

want to add in for spice.

Keyphrase Research & Topic Ideation

2. Optimizing Your Website: WordPress

Why WordPress?http://trends.builtwith.com/cms

Optimizing Your Website

Setup: Change your permalinks

www.topdraw.com/presentations

Optimizing Your Website

Setup: Permalink Results

Before: http://adrielmichaud.com/?p=4534

After: http://adrielmichaud.com/tips/watering-heirloom-tomatoes

Or install an SEO plugin like Yoast

Optimizing Your Website

Apply keyphrases to:

• Page title

• URL (web address)

• Headings

• Subheadings

• Images

• Video

Optimizing Your Website

On posts:

3. Building Links to your Website

Link Building from:

• Those that link to your competitors

• Vendors/Partners/Distributors

• Geographically relative sources

• Clubs/associations you belong to

• Blogs, news sources focused on your industry

• Press coverage

• Other sites that show up in searches you want

Building Links and Promoting Your Posts

Please, guv’nah. Link to my website.

Building Links and Promoting Your Posts

4. Differentiating Your SiteTaking things up a Notch

Universal Search

Taking Your Site up a Notch

Image Optimization

Great images + proper tagging = image results domination

Taking Your Site up a Notch

Taking your site up a notch

Google+ Authorship

Taking your site up a notch

Basic Application1. Verified email matching the domain you’re applying for.

• adriel@adrielmichaud.com -> http://adrielmichaud.com

2. Reciprocal links (from your G+ page to your site and vice versa)

Taking your site up a notch

More details: https://plus.google.com/authorship

Advanced Google Authorship Tips1. Use a great head shot!

2. Link your G+ profile to your other social media profiles.

3. Start using Google+ more

More info on optimal G+ headshots: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/google-author-photos

Taking Your Site up a Notch

Schema and Special Markup

http://schema.org (reviews, product info, business info, events, etc)

Taking Your Site up a Notch

5. Measured ResultsWhat’s working?

Measuring Results

Measuring Results

Start with my dashboard! http://goo.gl/WEaaU

Measuring Results

Summary

• Find opportunities• Target them with (great) content• Diversify your keywords• Measure, and re-apply generously!

It’s nice when your site drives traffic all on its own.

5. Hippy Crap

Why Unique Searchable Content is so Cool!

Humans regularly innovate or advance understanding in areas but don’t document or share their findings.

When we make those findings searchable via our websites, we advance the collective of the human race which saves time, enhances knowledge, and solves problems.

Why Unique Searchable Content is so Cool!

Took me 7 hours to fixThe other posts on this topic sucked30 minutes to blog (not Shakespeare)

Why Unique Searchable Content is so Cool!That post is now read by 400 unique visitors per month

Assuming only 70% follow my advice, that post helps 280 people per month and assuming I’m an average mechanic, it takes a 7 hour task down to 1 hour for others.

That’s 1680 hours saved each month, and 20,160 hours per year.

Average hours worked per year per person: 1702.

At the average US hourly earnings of $23.58/hr, that post is saving $475,372 per year.

The shortcut page

This presentation: www.topdraw.com/presentations

Google Adwords Keyword Tool: http://goo.gl/ZyfdT

Google Authorship: http://goo.gl/LLAK3

Optimal Google+ Headshots: http://goo.gl/6Rret

My Topical Google Analytics Dashboard: http://goo.gl/WEaaU

Other Schemas to try: http://goo.gl/61Gnn