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5 Tips for Better Content Promotion

By Ed Pudlo Leave a Comment

Check Out These 5 Tips for Better Content Promotion

Yes, it’s done! You created awesome content that will solve a number of the world’s ills with ease. If only they get to read it.

The major obstacle to most content doing the job it was created to do is the lack of eyeballs on it. Creating the content is only half the battle: you need to actively promote that content for all you’re worth to get it to reach as many people as possible. Your content is only as good as how widely it is shared.

So how can you extend your content’s reach? Let’s take a peek at 5 ways you can do just that!

5 Ways to Promote your Content

Use your email list – Sending out an email announcing your new content is a drop-dead easy (and free) way to get more views to your content. Encourage your subscribers to socially share and forward this email to those they know who might be interested.

Post on Social Media – Your social media channels are yet another goldmine for traffic. Make a short post, again encouraging them to share and comment, and drop in a link. Since we don’t always know who has a large following, this can result in quite a few visitors.

Place Ads on Social Media – Social media channels can be a great place to advertise. Often it is very low-cost, and highly targeted. In particular try Facebook and Twitter. A recent wrinkle is the mobile ad platforms, where large amounts of traffic can be had for mere pennies!

Consider Content Amplification Services – A step further is the use of a content amplification service like Outbrain or Taboola. These sites charge you for clicks to your content only, and ads for your content will show up on major media outlets, like CNN, ESPN, Fox News, ABC News and many more. Worth considering if you have strong content that will convert.

Seek out Promotional Sites – There are a number of highly-trafficked sites that are easy to place your links on. Many of these are free or very low-cost. Some of these are sites like Inbound.org, Snip.ly, Scoop.it, Slideshare, BlogEngage, Triberr and AllTop.

Thanks for reading about these “5 Tips for Better Content Promotion”

Let me know how this article was helpful or if you need more information about anything discussed here!

Don’t Have Time to Optimize for Local SEO?

Busy ClockWould you like a free, no-strings consultation including an analysis of your online presence? We will give you an honest assessment of the changes that we could make to improve your position. Complete the Discovery Form or contact us at (847) 450-7446 to learn how we can position your website on page one.

How You Can Get the Most From Your Facebook Business Page

By Ed Pudlo Leave a Comment

How to Get the Most from Your Facebook Business Page

By this time most small businesses have gotten the news that if you want any significant amount of social media traffic coming to your site then you have to have a Facebook business page. Nevertheless it’s simply not good enough to put up a page and quietly wait for the Facebook hordes to descend.

Luckily for us there are several tried and true tips to not only make your Facebook business page more highly-trafficked, but useful in a number of other ways also. Below are 7 great tips to get the most from your Facebook business pages.

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7 Tips for a better Facebook business page results

  1. Check out the new Call to action feature – Facebook now offers you the capability to insert a call to action into your posts. They include “Shop Now,” “Sign Up,” “Book Now,” “Contact Us,” “Use App,” “Play Game” and “Watch Video.”
  2. Schedule posts ahead of time – You have the ability to schedule posts in advance either on the Facebook interface or by using a third party tool like Hootsuite. This can free up some time, and still let you make the occasional random post when you want.
  3. Give the people what they want – Look in the Posts section of your settings and under post types you’ll see the types of posts that your audience is craving. You might be surprised at what it shows there!
  4. Post consistently – If you’re not posting at least once a day in your business, you’re not doing enough. This helps you stay in touch with your audience, and is especially helpful if customer service issues arise there!
  5. Engage socially as your page – Make sure you Like, Share and comment as your page to help build fans, gain authority and possibly find new people to either work with or for.
  6. Share news and views – Whenever your business is given attention, your Facebook page is a perfect place for sharing this.
  7. Drop links to your site and other web properties – Your Facebook business page is an excellent vehicle to use to send visitors to your web pages, videos and sales pages.

Making your Facebook business page work for you isn’t hard, but does involve some effort. The payoff can be so worth it though.

Don’t Have Time to Optimize for Local SEO?

Busy ClockWould you like a free, no-strings consultation including an analysis of your online presence? We will give you an honest assessment of the changes that we could make to improve your position. Complete the Discovery Form or contact us at (847) 450-7446 to learn how we can position your website on page one.

How to Optimize for Local SEO in 2015

By Ed Pudlo Leave a Comment

Latest Google Algorithm Changes Target Local SEO

By Google’s own admission, they make between 500-600 changes to the algorithm every year, so being mindful of all of them and how they affect your site can be a full time job. If you’re frustrated trying to keep up with all the changes that take place within the Google Local search space, then take heart, you’re not the only one! ElginSEOExpert2015

Just in the last year there was the Pigeon update, aimed primarily at local, MobileGeddon, and the demise of Carousel. These major events combined with dozens of minor shifts make it time to look at what we need to do to keep current.

We’ve put together a list of 7 best practices you can use when it comes to optimizing your pages for local SEO. Most won’t require a huge technical effort, but can yield much better results for you if you get them done!

7 Easy to do Local SEO Best Practices

Continue to build links – These days it’s not really the amount of links you have but the quality, and the best way to garner authoritative incoming links is to create awesome content people are dying to share and link to.

GEO-target your content – Google is now on a quest to deliver local results over global whenever possible. You can help this happen by using geo-modifiers on your pages content and meta data.

Citations still matter – These days it’s about getting quality citations, and cleaning them up so as not to have duplicate entries and inconsistent data.

Customer reviews help immensely! – With more than 90% of consumers reading online customer reviews before purchasing, these are more important than ever. A great form of social proof, you need to solicit these from happy customers and reward them if you need to.

Utilize your Google My Business – The latest local business tool offered by Google, this one’s a keeper. You can do many things from this virtual tool suite, including managing your online reviews.

Create and optimize local images – Use unique local images and make sure they are geo-tagged appropriately. This can help you in a number of ways, including Google Images, the 7 pack, Your Google My Business page and more.

Take advantage of social sharing – Make sure you have social media icons present on all your pages and content so as to provide your audience with the opportunity to share your content far and wide!

Don’t Have Time to Optimize for Local SEO?

Busy ClockWould you like a free, no-strings consultation including an analysis of your website? We will give you an honest assessment of the changes that we could make to improve your position. Complete the Discovery Form or contact us at (847) 450-7446 to learn how we can put your website on page one.

Start with 5 Google Analytics Reports

By Ed Pudlo Leave a Comment

Don’t Fear Google Analytics: Get Started with These 5 Reports

Google Analytics is an incredible tool, with a wealth of information available. In fact, there is so much there that when you’re first starting out, it’s easy to get overwhelmed at the scope of it, and not be able to make much use of this magnificent resource.

An illustration of analytics ...

An illustration of analytics (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Everyone has to start somewhere, so in order to keep things simple, we’ve broken it down to 5 reports within analytics you’ll want to watch. This is manageable, and will give you a glimpse into seeing just how powerful this tool can be for you.

5 Google Analytics reports you’ll want to view

Search queries – Analytics used to show more keyword data than it does now, but a very useful way to get some of this intelligence is by viewing the search queries report. You should have your Google Webmaster account linked to your Analytics for this to work properly. After you do that, you are able to see valuable data such as the keywords you are currently ranking for, the amount of impressions they get, and the click-through rate on that page.

Mobile usage – Knowing how well your pages are doing with mobile devices is important data to know when nearly 50% of all traffic is originating from these.

Referral data – This report shows you which sites are sending you referral traffic. This is good to know, and if that traffic slows in the future you may want to look into why it is happening.

Session information – A report showing you data detailing how much time a visitor spends on your site, and on which pages and how long they are there. Since time on site and page is a big element in the search algorithm, this is highly prized information.

Pageviews and exit pages – The raw number of views a page gets is useful in many ways, and also the pages that people usually exit your site from is equally important.

Keeping a watchful eye on these basics will help you stay informed as to how well your pages are doing, and go a long way toward helping you better optimize your business.

Is Page Load Speed Important?

By Ed Pudlo Leave a Comment

Want More People to View your Content? Improve your Page Load Speeds…

Increase the page load speed! Speedometer in Ford Mondeo ST220 (MK3) (highli...

Increase the page load speed! Speedometer in Ford Mondeo ST220 (MK3) (highlighted). (Photo credit: Wikipedia)


If one of your goals is to best optimize your site for search, then you should consider the importance placed on having your pages load quickly. There are a several great reasons why you’ll want to make sure this is so, among them:

  • Google uses this as a ranking factor for your page.
  • Humans now have an attention span of 8 seconds, one second less than a goldfish.
  • The average retail web page can take more than 7 seconds to load. It’s been noted that a delay as small as one second can cost you a whopping 7% hit in your conversion rates.

Given these stark statistics, it’s high time we look into some ways we can improve our page load speeds.

5 Tips for reducing your page load time

Google PageSpeed Insights – A major ranking factor, the speed at which your pages load is actually super easy and free to check out. Google provides a free tool called PageSpeed Insights which grades your page and suggest fixes you can make to make things quicker, and it works on both desktop and mobile.

Limit redirects – Make sure you don’t have more redirects than you actually need, as these are prone to causing pages to load slower due to more http requests. You’ll require some for your responsive mobile version of your site, so don’t eliminate those!

Unplug some plugins – You might have far too many plugins, and some of them could be gumming up the works when it comes to having your pages load quickly. Eliminate any you aren’t using, and test the ones you are using  to determine if they are optimized well. (They are making your pages slow down and increasing your security vulnerability, so reduce!)

Be sure to optimize your images – Images can have a large effect on your page load speeds, and to make the best of this try not to have too many on a single page, use JPEGs whenever possible, and optimize them for the web.

Enable page compression – Enabling compression on your pages, thereby reducing their size and allowing them to be loaded far faster is a really good idea. This is best accomplished with a tool called Gzip, and can result in page loads 70% faster!

Thanks for reading about “Page Load Speed”

Let me know how this article was helpful or if you need more information about anything discussed here!

5 Tips for Responsive Design

By Ed Pudlo Leave a Comment

Need to Implement Responsive Design? Here Are 5 Tips That Will Help

By this time anyone who is in the business of creating web presence on the internet has at least heard the term responsive design. The fact is responsive design in a must these days if you want your site to show up well, particularly for a mobile-friendly site. This is good, as more than half of all Web traffic is now at least originating on a mobile device of some kind, it’s high time to make sure that your pages are rendering well.

While your web designer (if that’s not you) will do most of the heavy lifting, here are 5 tips for making responsive design work well for your site.

Responsive Design, ElginSEOExperts.com

Responsive Design at it’s best!

5 Essential tips for Responsive Design

1. Make a plan – A real no-brainer there, but you’d be surprised at how often no planning takes place, resulting in far more cost and time wasted than need be. You have to be able to communicate your needs to the developer clearly, and doing so will require some work on your part.

2. Write content for mobile – One of the last things people want to do with a small screen is scroll through a mountain of text. Your mobile content should be more to the point, perhaps bulleted, and even possibly lead to the full version on the main website.

3. Visual content – Images and videos should be carefully considered when deploying them in your responsive design. First, having too many causes your pages to load slowly which results in bounces, lost visitors and revenue. Not what we want, right? Be sure you size everything consistently and properly for small devices, and test them once done for distortion and load times.

4. Aim for a clean design – It may seem like common sense but take out anything you absolutely don’t need. Mobile searchers are known for even less patience than the average Web surfer, and if your page is loading slowly because of unnecessary elements, you lose!

5. Test calls to action and button sizes – On smaller screens, the size and visual impact of a call to action and accompanying button come in to play. You don’t want them to miss it, or worse, have the button so small that it’s difficult to actually click (my pet peeve!). Not good. Test religiously. Then test again.

Why Responsive Design?

Most often, sites are designed on a desktop or laptop resulting in content that is targeted for that type of device. That’s just human nature. But more and more, the content is being consumed on mobile devices where the screen size is often much smaller.

Taking responsive design into account when working on your site is more work. But it is definitely becomes more important every day as mobile use overtakes devices with larger screen sizes.

So you do need to keep all form factors in mind when creating content for your responsive site. To do that, be sure to add these five tips to your checklist!

Making one of these 5 SEO Mistakes?

By Ed Pudlo Leave a Comment

SEO Blunders You’ll Want to Avoid!

It is often tough enough getting your pages ranked well in search engines. So, to unintentionally make it harder (or worse – intentionally) by implementing SEO mistakes that keep you from the first page is something to avoid no matter what.

More often than not it IS unintentional, but other times it merely misguided. However it takes place, you can be sure the results are exactly the same: lost rankings, site penalties and ultimately lost revenue.

So, to help you prevent these avoidable and expensive mistakes, let’s take a quick look at 5 common SEO goofs that can cost you big time!

5 SEO Mistakes you don’t want to make!

Lousy on-page SEO work – If your on-page SEO is amiss, Google will have a difficult time ranking you for anything. Be sure that each page is properly optimized, with title tags, descriptions and images all taken care of and also that your pages aren’t loading like molasses, another rank killer.

All the same keywords – The days of keyword manipulation are over, and to intentionally use the same keywords dozens of times is particularly foolish. Keywords are still needed, but try not to hit visitors over the head with them, and be sure to include relevant verbiage throughout the page as well

Duplicate content – It can be very easy to create duplicate content these days. Tag pages, http and https versions of the same page, and several other tripwires make it easy for Google to discount your pages when they see these.

An intentionally bloated link profile – You can’t always control who links to your pages, but if you’re going out and intentionally acquiring thousands of incoming links to your site that are not obtained naturally, you’re asking for it. Buying links is a good way to get a Google penalty that will be tough to come back from.

Your pages aren’t indexable – There are number of technical issues that can stop Google from finding and indexing your pages, which would obviously be bad. These include broken links, bad redirect and flash, among others.

Off to a Good Start with Your SEO

SEO best practices do change over time. So if you have been making any of these mistakes, follow these great tips to keep from making these SEO blunders.