It is the end of the spring season and I have compiled, in my opinion, my monthly roundup of the best articles in the SEO and internet marketing niche for the month of May2016.
“How to Increase Content Conversion by Using Facebook Retargeting” by Tamas Torok on Momentum blog. Conversion is the most important part of internet business. In addition, there are thousands of good posts on how to increase conversions using different techniques. This post talks about Facebook Retargeting for better content conversion.
The post is quite useful because each step is completed with an image. In this way, you can easily implement the technique for your site.
“Which Is The Best Ecommerce Platform For Entrepreneurs?” by Darren DeMatas on Selfstartr blog. “Picking an ecommerce platform is one of the most important steps you will take in your journey as an entrepreneur.” In this research made by Darren, you can find a lot of useful information. For example:
- Slow loading sites can be the reason why people are leaving your site
- Having a mobile friendly site in 2016 is very, very important
Also, they tested 20 ecommerce platforms and, from the table on their site; you can find the scores for each platform.
“Case Study: The correlation between links and traffic” by Roy Hinkis on Similar Web blog. From year to year, I hear that Google is trying to reduce the impact of backlinks on rankings and traffic but, in fact; it is very difficult at the moment. A lot has changed in the last 10 years, but links still remain one of the most important factors for Google.
Russian search engine Yandex removed links as a ranking factor from their algorithm some time ago, but in a few months, they brought it back.
Top Sites – Global Traffic:
“Google Redesigns Structured Data Testing Tool” by Barry Schwartz on SEroundtable. Google Structured Data testing tool can show you if you implemented schema markup correctly or not. Last month this tool was redesigned.
Jon Mueller from Google confirmed this:
“5 Actionable Talks from Conversion Experts” by Christine White on Moz Blog. In the original post by Christine, you can find all 5 talks with videos and description. Following is the first talk:
It is called “Peep Laja – How to Turn Data into Insights & Customers”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TxsXApadBCA
“In this talk from TractionConf, Peep covers:
- 6 steps to thinking of conversion optimization as a process and not a tactic
- Why “best practices” aren’t necessarily the best ways to optimize your own blog posts and landing pages
- Digging into the formula for conversion success (Hint: it starts with the number of tests run, the percentage of winning tests, and impact per successful experiment)
- Getting better data; not more
- Gathering qualitative and quantitative data to find out if your ideas are actually good
- Identifying problems and holes for conversion on your site”
“Twitter Removes Names, URL, Images from 140 Count” by Caitlin Rulien on Search Engine Journal. On May 24th Twitter officially announced that user names will no longer be counted into the 140 character limit.
It means that now you can use 100% of your characters for the message. Now, when you want to publish a tweet with a URL and a picture; you should take away 24 +24=48 characters.
“How to write meta descriptions for SEO (with good and bad examples)” by Christopher Ratcliff on Search Engine Watch. Today meta descriptions are not ranking factors as they were back in the middle of the 2000s. On the other hand, it is very crucial CTR factor. Very often Google grabs a meta description and shows it in a snippet. If you want to get more clicks from organic traffic, you don’t need to abandon this old trick.
In this post by Christopher, you can find good and bad examples of meta descriptions.
“On-Page SEO: Anatomy of a Perfectly Optimized Page (2016 Update)” by Brian Dean on Backlinko. As everyone knows, Brian loves to write long and high quality posts about SEO. This one is not an exception. At the beginning of the post, there is an infographic in order for you to get everything you need from one picture. Following, I will list the 16 On-Page SEO factors that Brian described.
- Use SEO-Friendly URLs
- Start Title With Keyword
- Add Modifiers To Your Title
- Wrap Your Blog Post Title in an H1 Tag
- Dazzle with Multimedia
- Wrap Subheadings in H2 Tags
- Drop Keyword in First 100 Words
- Use Responsive Design
- Use Outbound Links
- Use Internal Links
- Boost Site Speed
- Sprinkle LSI Keywords
- Image Optimization
- Use Social Sharing Buttons
- Post Long Content
- Boost Dwell Time
“50 Best Content Writing Tips from the Experts!” by Saikiran GVR on Report Garden. This post can be very useful for content writers. The author picked 50 fantastic tips from proven writing experts to discuss.
“Pop-ups Aren’t Dead: What We Learned Analyzing 2 Billion Pop-up Examples” by Sean Bestor on Sumome blog. Some people are thinking that pop-ups like email marketing are almost dead. However, the resent research from Sumome refutes this.
They analysed 2 billion pop-up examples and here are the results:
- The top 10% highest-performing pop-ups averaged a 9.28% conversion rate
- Only 3 out of 100 people ever have pop-ups with conversion rates over 11%
- The average conversion rate for all pop-ups is 3.09%
“5 Little Known Strategies to Use Retargeting The Right Way” by Jennifer Wong on Get Clicks blog. Retargeting is widely used on many advertising platforms. In using retargeting the right way, you can get back people who left your site and encourage them to make a conversion.
Probably the biggest advertising platforms who offer retargeting options is Google Adwords and Facebook Ads. In this post, you will find the strategies of using the retargeting along with the step by step Guide.
“Is Magento the right ecommerce platform for you?” by Craig Murphy on altagency blog. A very nice post describing Magento platform.
- Do you want your website to be hosted or self-hosted?
- Will Magento fit well with your business size?
- Are you going to be integrating your ecommerce site with any other software?
- Will you be looking for a lot of support?
- Are you looking to scale-up fast?
- Are you on a limited budget?
- Are you happy about taking the time to learn to use the system?
There you have, in my opinion, the best posts for the month of May 2016! I hope you enjoyed them, too, as well as discovered some helpful information! Please share your comments below or contact me via this form or via my Twitter account.