What is the hreflang tag?

The hrefLang tag is used to tell Google the language that you are using on a specific page. This helps Google return results to users that are most likely to match their needs, based upon their location. For example, if you wanted to create a French version of your website, then you would include hreflang=”fr”. Google would then know to show this version of the website when displaying results to a customer in a French speaking country.

You can also use the tag to specify regions where the content has been localized for the audience. For example, if you had Spanish content that was localized for Spain, you would include hreflang=”es-es”, while Spanish content for Mexico would be written hreflang=”es-mx”.

How important is hreflang?

With the hreflang tag, you are able to create localized pages for different languages and locations to get the correct information into your customers hands. If you have separate offerings for customers in Spain versus Argentina, you need to have a way to let Google know which site is for which country.

How do I add hreflang?

To generate the tag, you need to carefully watch your language and country codes. For example uk is used to indicate Ukraine and Ukrainian, not United Kingdom. If your content is for England, then you use gb, which is for Great Britain.

There are generators that will help you spit out the code you need, or you can create it yourself by using the language code from the ISO 639-1 format or the country codes from the ISO 3166-1 Alpha 2.

This tag goes in one of three places:

• Your site map
• The HTTP header
• The on-page markup

You only need to include it in one place. It is important to note that Google and Yandex both recognize this tag, but Bing does not.

The Hreflang tag offers website developers considerable control over the localization of their site internationally. If you have a site that will need to serve customers from different counties, this is a valuable tool to use to get started.

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What is digital marketing automation?

Marketing automation is a process that brands can use to effectively target their ideal audience with the right content at exactly the right time. Since the process is automated, brands can make sure that leads are followed up upon immediately, rather than having to worry about a delay before they can be contacted. Remember than an estimated 50 percent of sales go to the vendor that contacts a prospect first, so marketing automation can be a valuable resource in helping brands get in front of the crowd and connect with a new prospect or lead.

The brands that have begun to use automation report successful numbers, with 80 percent reporting an increase in leads and 77 percent saying they see an increase in conversions.

Execute Successful Email Campaigns

What is online marketing automation primarily used for?

Marketing automation involves setting up certain rules that dictate actions that will be completed in response to customers’ behaviors. For example, if a customer visits your pricing page but does not buy, they might receive a certain follow-up email that offers them a free trial or other enticing offer that fits with their activities on the website.

This type of care is also highly personalized since it is dependent upon someone’s individual behavior. Personalization is a central component of building a relationship with customers. It helps to show that you care about their needs. The rising importance of personalization will likely increase the prevalence of automation.

How do I start using marketing automation?

1. Determine the actions that will be triggers with your marketing automation system, such a visiting a pricing page or downloading a free trial.
2. Begin drafting emails that will be for particular people at certain points in their journeys.
3. Get to know the people on your page, including details such as their location, the information they are looking at and the landing pages that convert them.
4. Capture the information the lead offers on landing pages.
5. Send out your triggered emails at the appropriate moments.
6. Measure your results and make adjustments as needed.

Marketing automation can be an efficient way for brands to get the right content in front of people at the right time. Those interested in implementing these stages can see great results for their marketing efforts.

What is SEO for YouTube?

SEO for YouTube is optimizing videos to rank better for your content on search engines and increase your organic traffic. YouTube is a powerful tool for boosting your brand awareness and your thought-leadership. The platform has a user base of an estimated 1 billion people, which provides ample opportunity for reaching an audience of your intended buyer personas.

Videos are also increasingly becoming a preferred means of communication. An estimated 78 percent of people watch at least one video a week and they have been found to help customers feel more confident in their purchases.

How do you get more search on YouTube?

When people visit YouTube, they are generally looking to be entertained or learn something new from their chosen videos. For your videos to be a success, they must acknowledge and address this need. People do not visit YouTube because they want to hear a sales pitch-- save that for videos you post on your own website. Focus on using YouTube as a way to demonstrate why you are an industry leader and start to build that initial relationship of trust that will eventually lead to the customer converting.

The videos you post on YouTube should be designed for a broad audience. You should focus on primarily creating videos that people can understand and appreciate, even if they have no previous exposure to your brand. Great video topics might be:

• helping people understand a complicated topic related to your industry
• how to’s
• news or thought-leadership videos that introduce people to new ideas, and cast you as the leading brand that first explained it to them.

How to create a video for SEO?

1. Analyze your buyer personas and your buyer journey and look at the topics that fall towards the beginning of the cycle - the ideas that fit into the early awareness and consideration stages
2. Develop a video idea based on what you can realistically communicate in less than three minutes
3. Create a video script and determine your cast with the goal of engaging the audience and inviting them into a relationship with you in mind.
4. Shoot the video using professional grade equipment when possible to ensure that the quality of the video will be to the highest standard.

YouTube is a powerful tool for marketers because it helps them reach customers and engage them, typically early on in the buyer's journey. By creating high-quality videos, you increase your chances of expanding your base and achieving your long-term goals.

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When a YouTube video gains a high number of views and strong engagement numbers, it has the potential to tremendously boost the brand. However, given that there is an estimated 300 hours of video unloaded each minute, it can be a struggle to get your video noticed.

Part of this challenge is creating YouTube marketing materials that people will respond to and optimizing YouTube videos correctly. The second part, however, is understanding the technical specifications of the most successful videos to ensure that the images themselves are clear, welcoming and engaging for viewers.

What makes a successful YouTube video?

1. Length: Statistically, the ideal length is just under 3 minutes—2 minutes 54 seconds.
2. Opening: Your video will need to grab the attention of your viewer within 10 seconds. Studies have found that you will lose 33 percent of your visitors by 30 seconds, 45 percent by 1 minute and 60 percent by 2 minutes.
3. Branding: Including branded footage helps your viewers recognize your work.
4. Thumbnail: Find a frame that conveys the content and the emotion that is found in the video. Ideally, you want to find a frame that includes the main speaker looking directly at the viewer, as eye contact can be a powerful motivator and helps to engage users.
5. Format: Have a format that makes your video crisp and clear. Use MPEG-4 and keep your resolution around 1280 x 720 (16:9 HD) and 640 x 480 (4:3 SD) when possible.

Your YouTube video can have a fantastic impact on how you engage your audience and therefore your Share of Voice and brand engagement. Following these guidelines can help make sure that your video obtains the maximum result.

Related materials

• How to succeed with YouTube SEO?
• What is the latest Google update?
• How to create quality content that measurably performs?

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What is a guest post?

A guest post is when you are offered space to write a post on someone else’s blog or website. When you create a post for another site, you are given the opportunity to engage with a new audience and present your ideas, which can be a great chance to promote your brand and provide technical benefits for your own site and content.

Why is guest blogging important?

When you write a guest post, you can cast yourself as a thought leader within your industry. The site you are posting on has their own audience that has come to trust that particular website and their opinions. By inviting you to create a post, they are telling their audience that you are trustworthy as well.

Writing a post for another site provides you with an excellent opportunity to promote your ideas and build your brand as one that this new audience should listen to. If your new readers like what you have to say, you can help expand your brand’s prospects and encourage new people to enter your sales funnel.

Is guest blogging good for SEO?

Guest blogging opportunities can be a great way to boost traffic and encourage backlinks. Depending on the site where you're writing a blog post, you may be able to create backlinks to your guest piece as sources or in your biography.

Keep in mind that your host is not looking to post a sales pitch, so do not overuse links to your site. However, if you have a page with incredible insight into a relevant subject, it can be a good opportunity to link to it. This helps build quality backlinks, which can boost your rankings.

If the host wants to NOFOLLOW any links back to your website, there are still opportunities to promote yourself. You will be encouraging people to check out your background and visit your website, even if it does not count as a backlink. The traffic and engagement rates will also help improve your page’s ranking.

How do you write a guest post?

1. Identify a few websites and blogs that have strong visitation numbers and would be open to having you write a post.
2. Create content for your own site that is strong and offers the level of insight that the host site will want to see.
3. Nurture relationships with the host site by engaging with their material and form relationships with the people at that brand.
4. Ask if they accept posts from guests and have content available to promote. They will want to see sample articles so they can judge the quality of your writing and how well you will fit with their audience.

Writing a guest post can be a great way to build visibility and take advantage of the enormous crowds that follow a variety of sites. If you intend on guest blogging, take the time to find the right blog and develop a high-quality piece to get started.

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What are high-quality backlinks?

Within the context of SEO, backlinks are a form of acknowledging the authority and knowledge of another site. When another site links to yours, they are trusting their visitors and traffic to you. They are telling their valued audience that you are a good source for them if they want to learn more about a particular topic.

High-value backlinks are the links that come from quality websites. Analyzing these backlinks help search engines understand how reputable your site is. 

How do I get quality backlinks?

Here are six steps on how to get backlinks:

1. Create your target buyer personas and map them to their buyer's journey.
2. Create content that offers high value to a specific persona at a particular point in their journey.
3. Distribute your content wisely across social media, newsletters and email to attract as much attention to it as possible.
4. As more people are exposed to your content, they are more likely to link to your website.
5. Use this content to establish yourself as a thought leader in your industry.
6. Look for opportunities to write guest posts on other websites or for industry publications.

High-quality links have a tremendous amount of value to site owners. They help to establish credibility so that Google knows they can trust your website, therefore raising your ranking and possibly helping to gain a Quick Answer box. They can also help draw more traffic to your site when people click through links on other websites to learn more. Cultivating these links takes work, but when you follow these steps, you will be able to make the power of the backlink work for you.

What is the value of high-quality backlinks?

Search engines are always looking for ways to understand how reputable your site is and whether people trust the information you publish. Backlinks are regularly viewed by algorithms as a factor in determining the value of your website.

Google interprets backlinks from quality sites as an indication that this is another quality, trustworthy site. Building a good backlink profile, therefore, can help boost your rankings in the SERPs.

Backlinks can also help you increase your traffic, especially if they are high-quality backlinks. As more people link to your site, you will have visitors that arrive from these other various web properties, interested in learning more about the topic at hand. This will grow your brand awareness and can further boost your rankings through higher traffic and engagement rates.

Is there any danger from bad backlinks?

Just like Google wants to see high-quality backlinks coming from high-quality sites, it also does not want to see links from low-quality, spam sites. Although it is not clear whether or not these links can actually harm a site’s ranking, it is recommended that you disavow any links that you do not want included in your backlink profile. By disavowing the links, you let Google know that you want no part of them.

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An influencer is a person who is regarded as an expert within their particular field that also has a steady following. People trust their opinions, and thus their endorsements carry a considerable amount of weight. There is a growing interest in experts who have a large social influence and presence via social media.

Why is influencer marketing so important?

Trust is an important part of modern marketing. According to Nielsen, customers trust ‘earned media’, such as reviews and recommendations, more than any other type of marketing. Influencer marketing acknowledges that need for trust and recommendations that consumers want to see.

Since people already follow the influencer and regard them as an industry leader, the recommendations that they make about brands are very important.

When you develop a relationship with an influencer, you can tap into that power and grow your own brand. There are a number of ways that influencers can help promote you and your business.

• They can like or share the content you post on social media which will promote a social influence.
• They can offer you space on their website for you to write a blog post.
• They can endorse you on their own platforms.

The more personal the recommendation the influencer makes, the more value it will hold for your efforts. Some studies have found that the average engagement rate for influencer marketing is 16 times higher than it is for other forms of marketing, such as paid advertising. You can find the best influencers for your brand or business through contractors or an influencer agency. Working with an influencer agency may provide you with a more structured relationship.

How can I get started using influencer marketing?

1. Identify influencers who are active in your industry. Make sure to narrow the list down to those who have an audience that mirrors your own.
2. Build a relationship with the influencer. No one likes being asked to do someone else a favor that they just met. Interact with the influencer, such as commenting on their content or engaging with them in conversation on social media.
3. Produce high-value content that actually offers something new to the influencer’s followers.
4. Ask the influencer for a blog post, endorsement or other acknowledgement.

Influencer marketing is a valuable resource for many brands. It helps to make marketing personal and build relationships with large audiences. Evaluate your own industry and see who might be able to help propel your brand forward.

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What is an integrated marketing campaign and why is it important?

An integrated marketing campaign is a cross-channel marketing strategy that involves creating consistent campaigns across different platforms to provide a cohesive experience to the customer. Each brand experience should be consistent whether a customer experiences the brand through social media, direct marketing or another channel.

What is the integrated marketing strategy planning process?

An integrated marketing campaign understands that customers are not confined to a single channel. Consumers today are encountering brands and advertisements everywhere they go, from the bus to their favorite websites to their email. For your brand to stand out to customers, you need to create campaigns that live on the platforms that customers frequent. Simultaneously, the campaigns must share similar features, so they stand out in customers’ minds.

When your campaign is fully integrated, customers will recognize your brand regardless of where they see it. This will help them remember what you had to say, thus beginning your relationship with them.

Download Integrated Marketing Whitepaper

What are the elements of an integrated marketing strategy?

A quality integrated marketing campaign will take on a few features. Visually and textually, they will provide consistent messaging regardless of the platform. The colors, layout and images should all be easily recognizable across the different formats.

Your campaign should also specifically target a variety of platforms that are regularly viewed by your target audience. Break down social media sites, email touch points, PPC keywords and any other features that will be included in the campaign to maximize exposure for this particular buyer persona.

You also want to make sure that the people behind the brand are informed about this campaign. If you have a physical store, make sure employees know how to redeem email coupons for online discounts.

How to build an integrated marketing campaign?

1. Decide exactly who this campaign will target and how success will be determined.
2. Identify where this targeted audience is most likely to interact with your content and make those channels the focus of the campaign.
3. Bring together the marketing and sales teams that will participate in the campaign and have them set common goals.
4. Have the teams outline how they will contribute to achieving the goals.
5. Use your defined metrics to judge the success of your campaign and to understand which platforms are the most effective at bringing in these customers.
6. Use this information to guide future campaigns to be more efficient and more productive.

Integrated marketing campaigns are an important part of reaching modern consumers. This type of campaign acknowledges that consumers do not interact with your brand on just one channel. Instead, they will be using a variety of different platforms, and they want to be able to interact with you regardless of where they are. An integrated campaign helps you effectively meet these people and bring them closer to your brand.

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What is a backlink? A backlink can be either an internal link directing one page of your site to another page of your site or an external link which directs users from your site to an outside source. If another business is linking your site on their website, they trust your site and your content enough to link to it. This is helpful for SEO as Google monitors which sites trust your site and content. 

Reputable sites backlink to other reputable sites while spammy sites likely link to other poor-quality sites. Linking to any site with spam, can result in Google and other search engines penalizing your site. Search engines crawl and reward or penalize site ranks to avoid leading users to any sort of spam. If you link to poor-quality websites, there's a good chance your site will lose ranks.

Why does SEO link building matter?

Link building is a ranking factor for SEO. If other sites are linking to yours, they're indicating to search engines and readers that they see your content as authoritative and trust their visitors to you. 

Your collection of external backlinks is referred to as a backlink profile. In order to maintain a well-built backlink profile, you need to be sure you're creating quality content that informs readers. You also need to regularly maintain your site's health to ensure an error-proof user experience. You can leverage ContentIQ to perform a site audit and locate any errors that need fixing.

Importance of Quality Links

In April 2012 Google launched the Penguin update. This Google update was designed to downgrade sites that had artificially inflated their rankings by purchasing links or obtaining their backlinks through networks that were specifically designed to fool Google’s algorithm. Since then, there have been regular updates made to Penguin to continually check for sites that are abusing the backlink building process. These updates also reward sites that have gotten rid of the poor backlinks and instead focused on building quality links.

In addition to sorting out poor-quality links, Google also does not want to see links that all originate with the same anchor text or pairs of sites that continually link back and forth to each other. Attempts to manipulate the backlink system are all officially frowned upon by Google.

Monitor your success to see where your backlinks stand with Google. You can see how many you are able to cultivate from other quality sites through efforts to obtain backlinks naturally (link to project page about building backlinks) as well as any poor-quality backlinks, such as those from spam sites. With this information, you can properly prepare your strategy to maximize your backlink potential.

How do I monitor backlinks?

There are two main ways to monitor your strong backlink profile.

1. You can use link:”your website” such as link:brightedge.com. This will pull up the list of sites that Google has that link to that specific website.
2. You can also use tools like BrightEdge Backlink Management to better understand the profile of sites that are linking to your page. With BrightEdge, you will also be able to monitor the link profiles of your competitors and gain insights about the links that seem to have the most positive impact on their rankings and ideas that you can use to build your own profile.

Regardless of the method you choose, it is recommended that you disavow any links that come from poor quality sites. Although Google does not indicate these spam sites can hurt you, it is still a good idea to make sure that Google knows you want nothing to do with them.

Monitoring your backlink profile can help you understand where you have room for improvement and what sites need to be disavowed. It will help you improve your rankings and should be a part of any marketing strategy.

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What is paid distribution?

Paid distribution involves hiring platforms to promote your content across a variety of well-known websites. You can have paid distribution on both social media as well as on standard participating websites.

The value of paid distribution lies in its ability to help you find an audience for your content. This system has largely been called upon to replace older, flashy forms of advertising, such as banner ads. The goal is to make the promoted content seem natural on the websites to encourage people to click on the links and get exposed to your brand and what you have to offer. It allows you to engage with people, even when they are on other sites.

What are the types of paid distribution?

There are three main types of paid distribution

Social media

The social media platforms, including Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook, have a means for users to promote sponsored content. The content appears on the selected users’ newsfeeds, with a ‘promoted’ or ‘sponsored’ tag to distinguish it from organic posts.

Native placement

Platforms like Nativo take content and promote it on sites that are supposed to be similar to the style and content of your piece. The sponsored content is designed to look just like the natural content on the page and appears within the list of other available to stories for readers to explore. Once again, these pieces have a ‘promoted’ or ‘sponsored’ tag.

Recommendations

Outbrain and Taboola are two of the most popular recommendations-based platforms. These systems promote content at the bottom of articles on participating websites, offering further reading recommendations.

How do I use paid distribution to grow my audience?

1. Begin by developing content that is worth promoting-- know exactly who the audience is and create content that they will appreciate.
2. Select a paid distribution system based upon that intended audience.
3. Use A/B tests to measure the impact of modifications to your headline, images and other key factors and make adjustments as needed.
4. Track the attributions and ROI from your efforts by looking at results such as bounce rates, click-through rates and the number of leads you get through this system. Find potential areas for improvement, such as the type of content you promote or your selected platform.

Paid distribution can be a valuable means of getting your content in front of fresh eyes and spreading the word about your brand. While it can be helpful, it is important to optimize your use through the careful selection of content and platform.