The 80/20 Value of Titles

Via:Posted by evolvingSEO to Content & Blogging, February 2nd, 2012, at  sseomoz.org

Recently, Rand did one of the best Whiteboard Fridays I’ve seen in a while (I do watch all of them) about increasing the likelihood of your content going viral. He touches briefly upon the importance of your title for click through rate and sharability, but in this post I’d like to take a more in depth look at titles and how they help spread your content. (By the way, this is my first YouMoz - woohoo!)

In my opinion, the elements of writing click worthy titles deserve more attention. In the wonderful marketing book “Made To Stick”, the Heath brothers note that any good news or editorial writer may spend 80% of their time crafting the title (or “lead”) and then whatever time they have left on the body of the content.

For those familiar with 80/20, what this means is, the size of the title compared to the actual content (and time spent crafting it) disproportionately affects the success of that content. It’s one small piece of text with a lot power!

Note: to clarify, I am not necessarily referring to the title tag exclusively. I’m referring to simply the title of a page, post, article… which as you will see below can be the same as your title tag, but doesn’t have to be.

A Quick Analogy: The Internet As a Highway

If your webpage was a store on the side of a busy highway, the title’s job would be to capture attention and get people in the door. As many of the right people as possible. If you’ve ever driven on Route 1 heading into Boston, MA, you know what I mean (see photo).

Lots of people may pass by your links, tweets and shares, but few may actually stop to come in and check things out.

I hope this little analogy illustrates the extreme importance of crafting a clickable title - and that you will join me as I suggest some ideas for making your titles more clickable. Let’s go!!!

7 Ingredients of a Click Worthy Title

Assuming all other factors neutral for the moment, let’s look at what I think are 7 most important ingredientsof your titles;

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Posted by Brian Whalley Mon, Dec 12, 2011 @ hubspot.com

Do you want to optimize your website but have trouble communicating with the technical folks running it? Jargon alone shouldn’t stop you from making your site the powerful marketing tool it can be.

This is a list of the 40 most essential search engine optimization (SEO) terms to help marketers communicate with developers and understand how to optimize their websites.

40 SEO Terms You Must Know!

0-9

301 Redirect – A way to make one web page redirect the visitor to another page. Whenever you change the web address of a page, apply a 301 redirect to make the old address point to the new one. This ensures that people who have linked to or bookmarked the old address will automatically get to the new one, and search engines can update their index.

A

ALT Text/Tag or Attribute - A description of an image in your site’s HTML. Unlike humans, search engines read only the ALT text of images, not the images themselves. Add ALT text to images whenever possible.

Anchor Text - The actual text of a link to a web page. On most websites, this text is usually dark blue and underlined, or purple if you’ve visited the link in the past. Anchor text helps search engines understand what the destination page is about; it describes what you will see if you click through.

B

Blog - A part of your website where you should regularly publish content (e.g. commentary on industry/company topics, descriptions of events, photos, videos, etc.). Each blog post on your website is a new page that a search engine sees, and therefore a new opportunity to get found online. Make sure you keep your blog within your own domain.

Bookmark - A link to a website saved for later reference in your web browser or computer. Social bookmarking sites (example: Delicious.com) let users share websites they like with each other. Having links to your site in social bookmarking sites is a sign to crawlers that your website content is interesting to people.

C

Canonical URL - The canonical URL is the best address on which a user can find a piece of information. Sometimes you might have a situation where the same page content can be accessed at more than one address. Specifying the canonical URL helps search engines understand which address for a piece of content is the best one.

Conversion Form - A form through which you collect information about your site visitor. Conversion forms convert traffic into leads. Collecting contact information helps you follow up with these leads.

CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) - The part of your code that defines how different elements of your site look (examples: headers, links). 

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Posted by Alison Savery Mon, Dec 12, 2011 at hubspot.com

As an inbound marketer, you are probably driven by the number of leads you generate for your company. Usually, a small percentage of these leads convert into customers, so by logic, the more leads you produce, the more deals the sales team closes. In order to drive growth and generate more revenue for your company, you focus on increasing your leads goal month after month. But what happens when you start to saturate your market or it’s just not possible to hit your new goal with your current resources?

Fear not! All you need to do is start focusing on the quality of your leads. The types of leads you feed to your sales team is a powerful yet overlooked lever that can help marketers deliver. Think about it: if you can increase the percentage of leads that convert into customers, then you don’t need to generate as many leads to hit your company’s sales goals, right? The key to increasing the percentage of conversions is by feeding your sales team higher quality, more nutritious ”wheat bread” leads, rather than low-quality, less nourishing “white bread” leads. Below are 4 steps to take to better feed Sales with these more wholesome, multi-grain-type leads to close more deals with fewer leads.

1. Create Middle of the Funnel (MOFU) Content

The first step to turning white bread leads into high quality wheat bread leads is through lead nurturing. Once you’ve initially generated your leads, it’s important to nurture them with content and offers to guide them closer to a purchase. Creating middle of the funnel content will help you achieve just this. Middle of the funnel content is specific and ties in information about your industry to your product. An example of this may be an ebook that discusses how you use your product to overcome an industry-related challenge or even an offer such as a demo that brings your lead closer to a sale.

Often, we inbound marketers forget to produce middle of the funnel content since we are so focused on generating new leads through top of the funnel content that is mainly educational in nature and avoids mentions of our business’ products and services. The key here is to aim for a balanced diet. You need to start by generating white bread leads with top of the funnel offers and then use your middle of the funnel offers to turn them into hearty loaves of wheat bread!

2. Determine Which Events Close the Most Customers

Once you’ve created middle of the funnel content, you can start looking at which offers and events are converting more of your leads into customers. If you have closed-loop marketing in place, you can use your data to actually analyze the close rate of your current customers based on offers and events. Typically, events such as free trials or live demos have higher close rates, as these are leads serious about a sale. It’s important to recognize these events and offers, since they generate awesome, wholesome leads. Once you start gathering insights into which offers are more effective at generating wheat bread leads, you can double down on the offers that works and nix the ones that don’t.

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Posted by Kipp Bodnar Wed, Dec 07, 2011 @ 03:15 PM originally posted at HubSpot Blog

With more than 120 million business professionals registered, LinkedIn is an online marketing must for B2B marketers. While personal and business profiles get most of the attention on LinkedIn, the social network has several other valuable features that can shine for inbound marketers. One of the biggest opportunities for inbound marketers is LinkedIn’s Answers platform.

LinkedIn Answers allows members to ask and answer business-related questions. Sure, marketers can use the tool to answer questions and promote their business’ industry expertise, but the potential awesomeness of Answers goes far behind that obvious use case. With all of this awesome, public data, it’s about time marketers learned how to get the most out of LinkedIn.

7 Unexpected Yet Epic Ways to Use LinkedIn Answers

1. Use Questions to Generate Blog Post Content Ideas: Consisting of countless questions and answers across different topics, LinkedIn Answers is a treasure trove of content ideas. A big part of successful business blogging is starting with a strong idea that resonates with your target audience. LinkedIn Answers gives you just that. Look at the questions posed for your industry, and check out those questions’ answer counts to determine which topics are sparking the hottest conversations. Then use those topics as fodder for your business blog.

2. Develop Clear Marketing Personas Based on Prospect Questions: Marketing will fail without a proper understanding of your target audience. As a marketer, it is critical to have a clear persona (or personas) for your target customers. You need to be able to answer questions such as: “What are my customers’ key business challenges?” This, along with many other questions, can help you develop a clear marketing persona that guides all your marketing strategies and tactics. Use the advanced search feature in LinkedIn Answers to find questions and answers directly from your target customers. Stop guessing now. 

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