Good (and even great) content will need an effective SEO strategy. There are simply way too many active sites on the internet today and there is way too much competition out there as well. Not only do you need to create great content, it also needs to be much better than the competition and also promoted in an effective way. This is where many bloggers, brands and content creators go wrong. It’s not about pushing as much content out there as you can, it’s about providing value and then being able to continually market that same piece of content.

A perfect example of how to do this is through the use of “expert roundup” style posts. Best of all, this will only take your time and effort… versus having to put up a lot of money.

Expert roundups are one of the best ways to not only create content and provide value to your audience, it’s also a great way to increase traffic, social shares, and backlinks as well.

One of the most read articles we’ve created on the blog was a roundup that was focused on recommended web hosting solutions. We reached out to more than 100+ site owners, bloggers and influencers to ask them about who is hosting their site, then we made a really great expert roundup based on their responses.

How Expert Roundups Work and What You Need to Know

The way an expert round-up post works is simple. As the site owner or content creator, it’s your job to perform the necessary outreach to several industry experts and compile all of their responses and answers into one big mega post. With this in mind, only ask ONE question when sending emails out to experts, and make sure it’s one that is also going to provide value to your audience.

You can see a few examples of expert roundups across different niche markets through the resources below:

• Expert Roundup Posts: 18 Examples in Different Niche Markets
• 21 Branding Experts Share their Best Infographic Marketing Tips
• How to Start a Successful Blog – 82 Experts Share Their Best Blog Tips
• When Asked About the Future of SEO, here’s what 25 Experts think!
• 90 SEO Experts Talk White Hat Link Building, Outsourcing And Scaling

As you can see from the examples above, expert round up style posts work extremely well in the online marketing and business space — however, they also work in any niche market where audiences are looking for guidance or information. They’ve also been created and published on many gardening, mom, parenting, shopping, and toy review blogs as well.

The value in creating an expert round up for your site is not just in the 5,000+ words of content is can create, but also in the authority and expertise that you can then associate with your blog as well. It’s also a good idea to reach out to all of the experts who have been featured in your article and ask them to share the roundup with their audience as well. Just imagine how may social followers this could collectively be!

If you’d like to learn more about expert roundups and how to create and promote them in the best way possible, also refer to my latest article in Inc. Magazine.

How Expert Roundups Can Increase Site Traffic and Brand Loyalty

The article outlines many of the talking points above, while also covering the many benefits of creating and running your own expert roundups… which include:

• The ability to feature industry experts on your site and associate their names and expertise with your blog.
• Creating a super detailed article with potentially 5,000+ words of content, all from other industry experts.
• Massive social sharing and promotion opportunities, as each expert featured within your article, should be sharing it with their audiences as well.

Before going live with an expert roundup on your site, be sure to consider all the key points above and also to check out what type of questions and experts have performed best in other round up posts.

WordPress is one of the most advanced software solutions the internet has even seen. What’s even more amazing, is that it’s completely free to use, and has generated billions of dollars in new business for companies that have figured out new and exciting ways to make it even better. In short, WordPress makes starting a blog easy!

In addition to WordPress making a ton of money for businesses around the world, it’s also helped fuel a whole new industry of bloggers who have gone on to some pretty amazing things. In short, WordPress is a gift from the gods — even when it’s installed and running right out of the box. However, there are still always going to be some room for improvements to make your site and content run even better, while also providing a higher level of user engagement in the process.

To help with this process, here are some recommended tools, tricks, and resources to make your WordPress site even better!

Improve Your SEO Skills

No matter how long you’ve been active in the world of content creation or blogging, you already know the rules of SEO and ranking in Google are always changing. One of the best ways to stay ahead of the competition and make sure your site is ranking where it should be is to stay on top of the latest WordPress SEO trends.

Such topics and methods to always keep an eye on are making sure your WordPress SEO settings are setup correctly from day one — making sure your URLs are SEO friendly and that your WWW vs. Non-WWW aren’t getting confused with each other. SEO Plugins can also play a huge role in how your site ranks in Google, so always make sure you are using the latest updated versions, along with XML sitemaps and optimization of your individual blog posts. New WordPress SEO best practices are also changing all the time. Make sure you continue to internally link to your best content, no-follow external links when necessary and also optimize the speed and performance of your site.

Feature an Expert Roundup on Your Site

Creating content for your site is one of the best ways to provide value to your audience and increase rankings in the search results, but always coming out with the same type of content can really be a killer on your audience’s interest and engagement factor. This is especially true if you have an informational based website, where it’s mostly made of text or data-rich information.

One way to bring a fresh breath and excitement to your blog is to feature an expert roundup from industry experts in your space. The concept here is quite simple. Find a bunch of authority figures or bloggers that have an expertise in whatever your blog topic is about, and ask them all a single question your audience would find value in. Once you’ve accumulated enough responses, you can then post an expert roundup post on your site. Not only will this help with bringing a whole new type of content to your site, it will also explode your social shares, backlinks, and references, while also featuring some of the top experts within your space right on your site!

Create a Better Contact Form

By default, many WordPress blogs are set up with a contact page that allows site visitors to send emails to the owners of the blog. Popular plugins like Contact Form 7 have also been installed on millions of WordPress sites, but still… the real features and stats that could be there are simply lacking.

A better solution is WPForms, which is an advanced drag and drop WordPress form builder that allows site owners to have complete control over how and where they build forms and collect information on their sites. Not only does WPForms offers the ability to create any type of online forms you can imagine, it’s also setup for accepting online payments, creating subscription-based forms, eliminating spam with captcha features and also offering a wide range of form templates to choose from.

Simple WordPress Optimization Tips

As mentioned earlier, WordPress right out of the box is pretty amazing… but as you continue to add new plugins, content, themes, and comments build up, it can become quite a clunky and messy world in the database and backend area of your site. This is why it’s important to always keep an eye on the performance of your site and continually run optimization tests and methods wherever possible.

ElegantThemes has an excellent checklist of optimization methods that every WordPress users should be performing. Such tasks include using a fast WordPress theme, monitoring your plugins and removing any inactive ones, emptying your trash and removing spam comments, reducing your drafts, spam, pingbacks and trackbacks to your existing posts… and of course, optimizing your web images for peak performance and fast loading.

Run a Google Speed Test

You might think you have a fast website or blog, but it’s probably best to let the experts at Google decide. With Google now putting more weight on the actual speed and loading time of websites and how they rank in the search results, it’s more important than ever to make sure you aren’t hurting your site with a few slow loading images or scripts.

The good news is that this can all be tested within seconds through Google PageSpeed Insights. Simply plug your site URL into the form and click “Analyze” and you’re off to the races. Google will then provide you with a quality score for how your site loads on both mobile and desktop devices. In addition to receiving a score, you will also get a list of key areas that you can improve to further increase your site. Once you’ve made their recommended changes, be sure to run the test again and see where your new score is.

Make Your WordPress Site Screaming Fast in 2017

As you can see, there are plenty of ways to improve upon whatever you might already have in place with your WordPress site. Whether it’s improving your WordPress theme or how you are collecting data through your lead generation forms, it’s all about staying up with the latest trends and implementing such changes on your site. Be sure to run through each of the recommended resources above and don’t forget to check out our resource guide on the top website analyzer tools to continually improve the overall performance of your site.

One of the most integral components of starting a new business is your website. Being that everyone you know is on the internet, it’s not only going to be the face of your company but the platform in which people interact with it. Marketing your website comes with virtually no risk but can be the vehicle that drives word of your business out to the masses. But with the litter of new websites birthed every day on the internet, how do you keep a leg up on your competition? How do you not only draw customers to your door but then keep them there? We’ve compiled a list of tips on how to increase your website’s visibility on the internet.

1 – Create a blog.

Despite what service or product you’re selling, there’s always a use for a blog. Most often when you’re researching what the best tactics are to generating an audience for your website, you’ll be pointed towards content. Not just content, but a steady stream of it. In creating a blog you can produce content tailored towards your respective audience and generate an engaging feed that will garner followers. Those followers will share then go on to share your content. If done effectively, then you’re going to generate traffic not only towards your blog but also to your company.

2 – Social Media.

To be completely honest, this should be a no-brainer. Everyone and their mother is on social media. Even the decimal of a decimal of a percent that doesn’t have a social media presence is still connected to it via their immediate network. Again, it boils down to content. Create an account for every platform. Feature your website and blog. Ask your friends to help you out with a few shares. Research the most effective ways to promote your company on social media. Of course, if the content you’re producing is tasteless and of poor quality, it’s not going to hit its mark. That’s why it’s important to understand your audience and decide on a creative narrative that is equal part demographically-aware, and faithful to your thesis.

3 – Be dynamic.

We can’t just spell out a formula for marketing success. Why? Because one doesn’t exist. But we can encourage you to create a dynamic platform for visitors. When hosting onsite content, vary the lengths to appease to all readers. In addition to the reviews and content found on this site, you will also see that Amazon widgets and recommendations are also placed throughout the site. This will help with both user engagement and keep the content always in motion and change with the latest top sellers and trends in the drone space. Make sure that within the multitude of content you’re sprinkling in keywords that will attract those searching on search engines. 

4 – Incentivize Influencers.

Social media is a goldmine for influencers who have preexisting followers. A great way to spread the word of your company is to leverage them. Don’t be afraid to reach out to certain ‘big names’ on social media and use whatever sort of mechanic (promotional deals, commission, etc.) to garner a few posts from them promoting your product/service. This method of marketing has done wonders for some companies, as those who follow these influencers are often prone to want to mimic their footsteps. MVMT watches incentivized an assortment of Instagram models to promote their watches by offering discount codes and products – this proved to be a huge success for their marketing campaign and generated major traffic to their platform.  Once these models were ‘searched’ for online, they were often linked to MVMT which gave them more traction.

5 – Pay for advertising.

This method of spreading awareness and generating profit can be immediately rewarding, but beware not to sacrifice your long-term audience. What we mean is when paying for advertising (adds on Twitter, Reddit, LinkedIn, Facebook, and so forth) you’re immediately going to gain traction. This process works extremely well if you have a lead generation process in place. Advertising on a social network or even in Google with retargeting advertising is another great way to increase repeat traffic to your site, while also increasing profits at the same time. However, before you start spending a boatload on different paid placement campaigns, make sure you have a method in place to split test and track your conversions. For paid advertising to successfully work, you need to know where your best traffic is coming from.

6 – Use expert round-ups.

We previously covered the point of incentivizing influencers to share and create content for your site to help with rankings, but another great way to accomplish this is through the use of expert round-up posts. The way a round-up post works is simple. All you need to do is come up with a single question to ask a wide range of experts, then post all of their answers within one big blog post. You can see a live example of one we did here. Most of the work is going to take place in the research and outreach process to ask the right experts and compile all of their information together. Once this is in place, you can then let each expert know the post is live, which will likely result is a large amount of traffic, backlinks, and social shares.

7 – Take advantage of podcasting.

Podcasting has been growing at an alarming rate, and if you aren’t currently taking advantage of what the new world of audio has to offer, you are likely missing out big time. Even if you don’t want to start a podcast of your own, you can still attract a whole new audience by doing interviews and appearing on other podcasts within your niche. Take a look at these top business podcasts — many of which allow for people to be interviewed for free, then shared with their massive audience of listeners. Not only will this help with getting you and your expertise in front of a whole new audience, it will also help with people coming to your site, sharing content and also following you on social media — all key factors when trying to rank higher in the search results.

There’s no right way to market your website, but there sure are tons of them. Remember to be dynamic about your content, keep the content streaming, and reach out to anyone and everyone in your network. Study your competitors to note what they’re doing effectively and ineffectively, then throw in your own twist that correlates with what you’re selling. The most important thing for you to remember is that there are currently over a billion active websites on the internet today. If you want to rank higher and eventually surpass them in the search results, you will need better site rankings and backlinks to make it happen.

If you want to have a successful web site or blog, you will need to rank at the top of the search results. One of the best ways to accomplish this is by staying in good terms with Google and also making sure your site follows their guidelines at all times. While most people will say Google ranks sites based off their content, it actually comes down to a number of factors (content, backlinks, site speed and more).

To help with this process (and more), it’s highly recommended that you run a Site Audit for your website or blog. There are many options to choose from when trying to analyze and improve your site, but in this example we are going to use Mondovo.com, which provides an all-in-one solution for everything you need to monitor and management site rankings, social media and improving many different areas of your site.

How to Run a Site Audit with Mondovo

The first thing you are going to need to create a free account with Mondovo. Once inside the members area (seen below) you will be able to add as many web sites as you like. At the same time you will also see the many different features, tools and reports you can run through their site. The first one we are going to focus on, is the SEO Audit Tool.

On the left side area of the dashboard area you will see the navigation menu where you can navigate through the site. For this tutorial, we are going to click on the “Website Audit” option.

After clicking on the “Website Audit” feature, you will then be sent over to a form like the one below where you can start running an in-depth site audit. You will need to provide the following:

• Domain – The site you want to run an audit on.
• Pages to Crawl – How many pages you want the report to analyze.
• Optional Add-ons – Social Metrics, Google Page Speed and Broken Link checks.

If you have a massively large site, I would crawl as many pages as possible (matching how many pages or posts you have live.) I would also recommend you check off these add-ons, as these are great things to know about your site when trying to improve any errors or problems that could be affecting your site.

You will also notice there is a price associated with this as well. Mondovo is awesome with their rates, as you only need to pay for the services or reports you are interested in. As you can see in the image below, this 100+ page report with all of the add-ons, is only going to cost 68 cents. I will go into more detail on this later on.

After filling out the required information, you would then click the “Crawl” button. Depending on the size of your site and how many pages you are crawling, the amount of time it takes to complete a full site audit will vary.

Once completed, you will see a report like the one below. The website audit report is broken down into a number of categories, including meta issues, linking details, content, HTML optimization, internal links, external links and social metrics. Clicking on any of these tabs will provide a detailed report of issues, which need to be fixed and how to fix them.

You can also see an example of the Meta Issues report below. This will give you a quick overview of missing meta tags, descriptions, duplication issues and if your titles are too long — all important issues when considering how Google will rank websites based off their content structure and settings.

Clicking on any of the gray boxes will load all of the results and reasons for why each issue was triggered as one that needs to be fixed.

To see all of the reporting available through a full site audit, be sure to run your site through Mondovo today.

Run a SEO On-Page Analysis Report

In addition to a full site audit, you can also use the On-Page SEO Tool to analyze individual pages on your site. This tool is perfect if you have a site that you want to rank higher in the search result, and want to make sure it’s as clean and optimized as much as possible.

You can see an example below of how this report looks for the end user.

Monodovo will run your site through a number on On-Page SEO tests, then provide you with a report like the one below on what different areas where your site may have passed or failed. You will also see the Page Size, Page Speed, Word Count and an overall Page Score as well.

Taking the time to fix some of your best individual pages can prove very rewarding, as the more you work to improve your own site and content, the more likely you are to move past the competition in the search results. Best of all, all reports will be stored within your account for future reference and to track progress made.

Why Mondovo is a Perfect SEO Tool for Site Owners

Mondovo was created with one simple goal in mind — providing clients with the necessary SEO and social media management tools, while saving time and limiting excess costs. The mission was simple for the company, and the end result is that clients have the opportunity to save up to 80% on their month-to-month SEO and social media management.

At the same time, it’s important to not let Mondovo fall into the mix with other SEO and social media management tools on the internet today. Mondovo is a pay-as-you-go platform, which means you aren’t going to get locked into any longterm payment plans or agreements. Another area where they are clearly different, is in their pricing models.

As you can see in the screenshot below, clients can actually pick and choose how many keywords they want to track on a monthly basis, website audits they want to run, analysis reports and much more. The end result is no wasted money being left on the table month-after-month.

Since there is no monthly billing in place, and the client decides how much they want to pay (based off reports), it’s one of the best ROI tracking solutions out there for it’s dollar investment.

Start Ranking Higher by Analyzing and Improving Your Site Today

When it comes to creating a website or blog, many people will focus solely on the site’s content and backlinks. These are both important, but if you don’t have a fast loading site or Google is having a hard time crawling your site… you simply aren’t going to rank as high as you could.

It’s also important to think about how many sites there are in the world today — which is over a billion! We all know that the majority of them aren’t doing anything to improve how their site looks on the backend. This means it’s a huge opportunity and advantage for a site to move up in the search rankings when these areas are focused on.

Take the time to run a site audit on your site, which also checking for improvement after each change made to your site. If you spend just an hour a day cleaning up your site, it could make the world of a different after just a few days.

Are you a WordPress user or blogger who needs some savvy analyzer tools to help you figure out how you are doing with your SEO and rankings? Your blog is important. You use it as a way to communicate with your loyal customers about your brand, roll out new products, and survey your readers to see what they want.

WordPress users know the value of using WordPress to create great content that appeals to their target audience as well as all of the extras that come with it. You also need to have a way to analyze your blog or site on WordPress.

That’s why tracking tools are so important. You need to have ways of tracking how your site and blog are doing at any given time so that you can make the adjustments needed to maximize your impact.

There are some tools that will help you keep up with your SEO and rankings. Many of these also measure other elements of your web presence, including targeted traffic, keyword success, and popularity among several different platforms.

SEO Analyzer

Neil Patel is one of the most well-known online marketers and entrepreneurs in the world today. Consider all of the success he’s had over the years, it would only make sense for him to have a few handy custom tools of his own. One such tool is his SEO Analyzer. With this tool you can easily track the basic elements of your traffic and site. You’ll be able to enter your WordPress site URL and see how it is doing on the major search engines. It will immediately give you feedback and stats on your blog and where it stands in the rankings, as well as the links and backlinks that point to your blog.

SERanking

SERanking is a powerful keyword tracking tool and SEO analyzers. From within the member’s area, users can create reports and site accounts to track all of their movements in the search results on a trending daily basis.

In addition to the keyword and ranking reports available through the site, SEO audit and competition analyzer tools are also available. The site also offers access to a wide range of additional tools and features, such as backlinks monitoring, keyword suggestion tools, marketing plans, a white label solution and also social media reports.

Link Research Tools

Link Research Tools provides you with very robust tools to get feedback on your WordPress sites. You can use it for any other site as well, including blogs, websites, and other pages. Just sign up for the trial for 30 days and try it out. You’ll have access to all of the features like the premium membership. But if you want to continue it, you’ll just need to sign up for the premium version.

It allows you to build high-quality “Penguin-safe” links that will keep you from getting penalized. You’ll be able to monitor any inbound links and delete those you don’t want to associate with your site. You will even be able to check on how your competition is doing in the rankings and adjust your campaigns to increase your competitive edge.

SEMRush

SEMRush is another great tool you can easily use with your WordPress site. This tool is different than the others in that it goes on search terms and keywords to do the analysis. Just enter your search term or keyword that you want to test to see if your site comes up. This gives you a glimpse into whether you are using the best keywords to render the results you need to direct users to your site.

It also allows you to use URLs if you choose to do it that way. It allows you to get a view of how your WordPress site is doing using a variety of cross-platform tools that will help you get a sense of what is working and what is not.

SerpStat

Serpstat lets you search a domain, keyword or search term that you wish to test. Using the easy-to-use search bar, you’ll be able to see if your domain is getting the traffic and demographics you want. You can type in a major domain or use some of the keywords that you are experimenting with.

To try this out, try using a popular domain such as amazon.com. You’ll be able to see all of the functions this way including the overall traffic, bar graphs of activity, lists of competitors’ hits, and much more.

SEO Analyzer Tools Summary

These five tools should serve to help you analyze your websites made with WordPress easily and keep records of how your sites are doing. You don’t have to pay a fortune to use most of these, and most have a free version. At the same time, don’t forget to read through our simple SEO tips for bloggers and site owners. These are the most basic SEO methods and best practices that are working today to improve site rankings and indexing within the search results.

I recommend using at least two or three different tools and compare them to get a truer picture of what your site is doing from different views and metrics and then decide how you need to change what you are doing to meet the need.

Whatever you do, make sure you have a way to track your page activity so that you can have the information you need to keep improving and collecting better leads and customers.

Way too many content creators and bloggers are focusing too much on their “content creation” and not their “content promotion”. While content is the foundation for your website or blog, it’s not going to work it’s magic on it’s own. With over a billion active sites on the internet and 300+ million of them being WordPress blogs, how is your site supposed to compete? Also, keep in mind that Google only list ten pages on their search results… which makes the concept of “Page 1” rankings seem even more impossible!

With all of this in mind, there are still plenty of ways your sole website or blog can stand out from the competition and rank at the top of Google. That little secret is called “long tail keywords”.

Long Tail SEO is actually one of the hidden gems of internet marketing and ranking in the search results. We’ve all heard of “long tail keywords” but not enough of us are actively using them within our content, linking structures and rank tracking. The common reason for this is that too many site owners are blinded by the flashy numbers of “generic keywords”, however… the likelihood of ranking for them is extremely low.

The Hidden Value of Long Tail SEO

Through the “Hidden Value of Long Tail SEO” infographic below, provided by HitTail, we can take a look at the true value of ranking at the top of the search results with long tail keywords.

To kick things off we should first explain what SEO is and why it’s such an effective method for ranking in the search results. HitTail descrives “Long Tail SEO” as”

A white-hat SEO process that involves targeting less competitive, highly specific search terms (a.k.a. long tail keywords). Since over 70% of all search queries are for long tail terms, there is incredible value in taking control of those keywords.

Here’s a perfect example of how such long tail keywords would prove more effective in content creation, ranking and online marketing.

Let’s say you wanted to create a website or blog in the financial or personal loan space. This is an extremely competitive space and if you were to try and rank for something like “credit cards” or “car title loans“, it would simply be way too competitive. Even if you wanted to pay to rank for these terms, you would be looking at several dollars per click. Instead, a better approach would be to either target a local audience or go with a long tail approach such as “best credit cards for bonus rewards” or “where to find car loan titles in new jersey”. Not only will either scenario help you rank higher in the search results, it will also allow you to know exactly what your audience is looking for as well.

In the infographic screenshot below you can see a typical scenario of what a long tail keyword looks like in reference to search demand and other top ranking keywords. You will also notice that 70% of all search traffic is based on long tail keywords, versus “fat head” and “chunky middle” keywords that many people focus too much attention on.

In the big scheme of themes, more people are now using long tail keywords in their online searches versus using generic one or two-word keywords. The reason for this is that not only are people getting smarter and more precise about what they are looking for, but Google is also getting better on delivering the best content for such search results as well. This also means that ranking potential and conversion rates are much easier to improve when using long tail keywords.

HitTail points this out in the infographic screenshot below when they state “Pages optimized for long-tail keywords move up 11 positions on average, compared to just 5 positions for head (generic) keywords.” and they also report “Conversion rates for long-tail keywords are 2.5 times higher than head (generic) keywords” — which makes perfect sense.

Here’s another example of how we are currently using this method on Blogging.org. While the main focus of our main page site is on “how to start a blog“, that’s a pretty generic topic. For all other phrases and topics around blogging, we have detailed sub-pages and guides that really drill down on each of these topics. A good example of this would be our “make money blogging guide“, which ranks for multiple keywords and phrases around the concept of making money with a blog.

Also with that in mind, articles using long tail keywords in their headlines and titles also tend to get higher click through rates as well. HitTail reports “Clickthrough rates increase as keywords become more specific”. So if someone was searching for “how to make money with a blog”, they would be more likely to click our article titled “Make Money Blogging: From Start to Business” versus a generic title like “Make Money with a Blog”.

You can also see in that chart below a comparison of 3, 4 and 5 word keywords, ranking based on their click through ratios.

Lastly, if you want to make the most out of your content creation and long tail keyword efforts, you need to know how to take action and put all of these key metrics to work. Here are a few recommended tips from HitTail.

• Add New Content on a Consistent Schedule
  – Publish one targeted article of blog post for each underperforming keyword of at least 400 words in length.
• Use a Variety of Long Tail Keywords
  – Search engines love sites that target a diverse set of keywords. Fortunately, there are plenty of long tail keyword to choose from! There are many sources for long tail keywords, but the best are those that you mine from your own content.
• Speak the Word
  – Build a social media presence around your website or blog. Use Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest and YouTube

No matter how you attempt to make long tail keywords work for your website, blog, brand or business — the two most important factors are your content and the type of links and social signals you point back to your site. You can focus on creating the best content in the world, but if you don’t have anyone pointing links back to your site, it will simply never rank or compete against the bigger players in the industry.

Implement all of these tips into your existing content creation and promotion methods, while also taking a look at what HitTail has to offer through their long tail recommendation service.