Digital Marketing Q&A

The page is aimed to give a basic knowledge about terms related to marketing and search engines.
If you’re a starter ,the information will help you to navigate more easily in the world of digital marketing.

• Digital marketing
• What is SEO?
• White hat SEO, Black hat SEO and whats between
• Search Engine
• What is PPC ?
• What is Link Building ?
• I hear many time the words Link Juice, what it is?
• Google PageRank
• What are Best ways to increase traffic for a B2B website?
• Landing Page
• CTA- Call To Action

Digital Marketing

Image Source Mike Ncube

Outbound marketing use more aggressive techniques to push products and services to customers.
This is kind of interruptive marketing where the potential customer getting information whether he asked for this or not.

On the other side, Inbound marketing looks for ways to drive traffic and customers to a website by making information available to them and to make them come by them selfs rather than seek for them. The marketing efforts are more focused on what solving users problems and giving them what they need.
This is a more collaborate way, but you should be visible enough, so customers can find you.

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What Is SEO?

search engine optimization or SEO is a name for techniques, tactics, and methodology that helps to improve listing in search engines like google, bing and yahoo. the higher a website appears in the search engine results, the greater the chance it will get more clicks and visits, therefore will gain more traffic.

seo it handling many factors considered effecting search engine and improve them to get a higher rank.
No one really knows what these factors are that because these are considered secrets of the search engine companies.
however, there is a lot of knowledge that collected from experiments and many websites analysis that can help to identify these major listing factors.
we can crudely divide the SEO action into two groups: on-page and off-page SEO.

some of the on page elements are:

• Page titles
• Meta descriptions
• Meta tags
• URL structure
• Body tags (h1, h2, h3, h4, etc.), keyword density, images,
• Semantic core: Keywords should be target and relevant
• Only one tag per page
• site structure: intuitive and easy to use, primarily designed for users, readable and relevant
• Internal Linking
• No broken links
• Images and videos
• Alt tag and image title

There is also off page seo, which refers to techniques that raise the ranking of a website through promotional means, outside of the actual code or design of the site itself. widely know is link building, but not only.

Here are some off page techniques :

• Link building: having more inbound links pointing to your site
• Social networking
• Blogging
• Forum postings
• Social bookmarking
• Video promotions
• Business reviews
• Local listings also called Business listings (citations)
• Article submission
• Press release

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White hat SEO, Black hat SEO and what’s between

There are few types of SEO that people are talking about

White hat SEO
This would be using clean (white) techniques to rank higher in the search engine listing.
Trying to keep seo efforts legal according to the rules of search engines.
Examples of white hast seo would be:
Writing optimized content with proper keyword selection, on page optimization,
Site speed improvement, fixing HTML errors, correct usage of H tags and bold in text, earning links and not buying them, and more.
The benefit from using white hat techniques is avoiding penalties from search engines and using more robust methods that will
stand over time.

Black hat SEO
These would be using unethical techniques to promote your serp position among search engine.
All are things against the guidelines set by search engines.
If caught , could lead to penalizing, low ranking or even de-indexing at some cases.
Examples for black hat seo :
Buying links, keyword stuffing, faking social signals, faking website clicks on listing, cloaking content, spamming other websites.

Gray hat SEO
Things in this category are somehow between white and black.
This is not totally defined zone- therefore gray.
Examples for gray hat seo :
Buying other domains to get links or traffic from, spin others content, using fake social media accounts, duplicate content.
Some will classify gray as cloaking, directories link buying or even guest posts, but it all depends on the context.
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What is Search Engine?

This is a service that aim to provide the best search result from a huge database of sites.
When you type your keywords and hit search, the search software is looking among thousands and maybe millions of
Websites to find the best answer that matches your query.
The process is done very fast due to use of smart search algorithms and impressive processing power.
Most people know Google, but also Bing, Yandex, and Baidu are popular search engines.

Search engines are improving them selfs all the times and changing the way they rank results.
Because of the importance and potential of ranking high, many people use search engine optimizing (SEO) for the purpose of ranking higher in the search results and to get more traffic.
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What is PPC ?

PPC or pay per click is when you pay to get ad listed in the search engine serp.
These are the results little yellow icon that you see sometimes when running a search query.

The reason for using PPC is to get more traffic to your website and fast.
It’s no secret the top result on the serp are getting most of the clicks.
Because Ads are placed on top of the organic results (or at the side) you improve your chances to
Get clicks and therefore traffic.
You’ll be charged for every time someone clicks on your ad, regardless of the reason he clicked or the result you got.
Don’t get confused with the option to advertise ads on your site and to get paid.
Here you are the one who pays for the advertisement.

PPC advertising is not something that unique to Google, you can find it also on other networks.
Bing offers PPC service and some social networks as Facebook, Twitter, StumbleUpon provide this kind of service.
5 Popular Paid Services To Get Traffic Fast.

But the truth is, making a good PPC campaign is not easy as it seems.
You need to optimize the Ad title and description, to find good but less expansive keywords and to set bids.
These all require some expertize or at least experience to make a successful campaign.

Consider that if your Ad is been on the first page and you’re among the best bidders, you’ll get a lot of clicks.
Most of the times it’s not a problem, but your budget will run fast.
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What is Link Building ?

Link Building is a process to get more links pointing to a website for the purpose of improving a site’s ranking on the SERPs.
Many quality inbound links to a site can improve his position in search engines and therefore to get more traffic.
The process itself is not easy and requires time, efforts and even some money to do it well.
But, the benefits from building strong links can be worth as reward is a flow of traffic coming from search engines.

Not all links share the same quality, so getting many low-quality links is not worth and even harmful.
Having few high authority links is sometimes better than having dozens of other low rating links.

Professional link building is modular and made of few stages.
Briefly talking, link prospecting is to find link opportunities, link qualifying for evaluating the link relevancy, value, risk, etc, reaching out for getting the link and measuring the whole progress.
This is an ongoing process to repeat with every single link you’re trying to get.

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I hear many time the words Link Juice, what it is?

If we look at links as votes to a site, each vote carries some weight or gives a value.
Link juice is a term describing the value passes from links that points to a site.
Let’s say you have a website page, with 3 do-follow links pointing to other sites.
And theoretically, the page has a power of 9 units (page rank).
The link juice coming from each link will be 3 units (33%).

But, this is not all that simple.
On a page there can be do-follow and no-follow links.
The no-follow links, pass no juice to the receiving site and therefore can’t rank a page well.
Also if we have two sites :A and B that have the same domain strength, and site A is getting 3 links while the B gets only 1 link-
who’ll get more power and will be on top of search engines results?

The answer depends on the links.
If the incoming links have the same juice in both sites, than A will rank better.
But, if B link juice is greater than the 3 links that A receives, it will be B.
That explains why one juicy link is better than 10 low juice links.
or why it’s better getting one good link from high authority site compare to many worthless sites.
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Google PageRank

PageRank, also PR, is a score from 0 to 10 that Google used to give for web pages, based on their backlinks count.
It was named after Larry Page, one of Google’s founders.
PageRank weights the links to a pages and scoring it according to incoming links values.
The higher the rank, the more important the site in Google’s eyes and is likely to be higher on search results
Comparing to other weaker sites from the same niche.

Since the end of 2013, Google stopped updating PageRank and actually dropped this indicator.
Of course , inside his algorithms, Google use some kind of formula to rank pages, it just not displaying it anymore.
This is mainly because of people used the rank to buy and get links while trying to manipulate Google.
The best alternatives to PageRank are Ahrefs, Moz and Majestic.
Each use her own algorithm for determining how well a URL ranks.
We think that all are good alternative and using Ahrefs the most.
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What are Best ways to increase traffic for a B2B website?

First lets define what is B2B.
B2B is short for Business-to-business (B2B) is when business exchange products or service with other business.
It’s different than B2C when the exchange is between businesses and customer (therefore the C).
Examples for such exchange are: websites, information and services and softwares.

Ways to increase traffic for a B2B would be

Blog Using Long Tail keywords
One of the best ways to get traffic and conversions to your B2B site.
Work on your content and promote among other industry business.
It’s good for building relation and strength of brand recognition.

Develop connections with other B2B
Connection and communication with others are powerful and can leverage your efforts.
simply use social media, reading other blogs, email, conference meeting, etc for that.

Use LinkedIn
Do you know how much B2B marketers love LinkedIn?
Statistics showing that Nine out of every ten B2B companies are using this network.
Any why this is better traffic for B2B? Because it’s the right kind of traffic.
More specifically, it leads from that traffic.

Feature a real person
One negative point of B2B is not having real genuine human behind what they do (especially in social media).
This makes B2B company to look distant and unreal.
To minimize the bad effect, use real people when possible.

Find out an unboring angle
A lot of B2Bact boring: they think, write and use social media boring
You can be different, find how can you do that in your unique way.
It can be good for you efforts and more pleasurable to you.

Do guest Post
Very powerful thing is posting in other sites. What is called guest posting?
Selecting the right site and doing targeted guest posting can bring you fantastic results.
It’s one of the best ways for link building and to get more recognition.
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Landing Page

Landing Page also lead or lander is a name for a page designed to bring your visitors to.
Many times you want to take visitors to a specific page designed for something which is not necessary on your homepage.
The two most common types of landing pages are: Click Through and Lead Generation.

In click through landing page, you want visitors to click and move to another page.
Many times this page is part of a sales funnel and the landing page aim to warm the visitors before they are moved to the product page.
Adding the land page can get better conversions rates and usually a better idea than coming directly to a shop or register page.

Lead generation landing pages are good for collecting information like: user email, name and other details and used many times to build
A mailing list. After enough users are registered, the list is used to run different marketing campaigns.
These can be sales, product promotion, giving coupons, webinar and events, free trials, blog posts or any other type of thing related to your site.
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CTA- Call To Action

Call To Action (CTA) is some action you except your visitor to take.
Literally, it’s a call to take (make) an action.
It can be simple things like: click on this button, go to another page, vote for an article, sign for your newsletter.
And it can be also more complicated things like blog comment, download an ebook, share my post, buy a product, attend an event, etc.
There can be more than one CTA for page and they can be placed anywhere on it, but usually, it will be just one.
A simple example of how to get leads would be:

In this form, we ask for visitor name and email before they can download the free report.
This is a classic box with Call to action to join an email list (the lead).

How to make a good Call To Action?

1) Make an Eye-Catching Design
It has to look good ,so that people will notice and want to use your CTA.

2) Your content should match
Write a good and persuasive page on why people should cooperate with you.
If this is a book, what value it gives to others?
If you try to sell a product, what problem it solves?

3) Have a dedicated landing page
Creating a specific page tailored for what you want to get, is the best thing to do.
A landing page for your CTA can be highly effective part of your sale funnel.
The design and content can be totally different from the rest of your site to make it most suitable for your call purpose.

4) Be clear about what you say
Let the visitor on your page know exactly for what he is doing there.
Don’t hide the fact that you want someone to join your mailing list in exchange for an ebook download.
If you collect these name+ email fields it’s obvious, but there are cases when people are promising to give you something, but talking you to other place in their site.
Like instead of free download, you find yourself in another product landing page.
This can be confusing and lower leads, be sure to make it clear and simple.
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