5 for Friday — Links, Stories, & Posts for Your Weekend

April 12th, 2013 by Search Influence Alumni

5 days before maya

The Holy Grail Of Internet Marketing: Owning The Whole SERP — Search Engine Land

Search Influence’s very own Will Scott gives a brief how-to on the essential methods of owning your search engine results page. The main points he hits in the post are the importance of branded SERP ownership, branded  AdWords campaigns, branded organic results, Google+ and local optimization. But the “real win” of owning the whole SERP is obviously taking over your non-branded ranking page. One of the more surprising tidbits for PPC naysayers is “It may seem crazy to pay for clicks to your site, especially if your site shows up in the first position organically, but the data shows that having both the first and “zeroth” positions increases clicks by up to 89%.” Now, that’s a big increase!

How to Build a Content Marketing Strategy — SEOmoz

This informative post briefly touches on the importance of content marketing (it’s the future!) before moving on to some examples of companies that are doing it right, with “it” being what the author calls “phenomenal content.” What these examples all have in common is that they are bite-sized and easily sharable examples of content that is pinpointed to the intended audience. Probably the most useful thing in the post is the detailed step-by-step content strategy.

How to Use Pinterest to Build Trust and Loyalty — Social Media Examiner

We’ve already talked about why your business should be on Instagram, and these reasons also apply to Pinterest (and maybe its smaller, more bro-tastic counterparts like Gentlemint, Manteresting, and Dudepins). And now with analytics for business profiles, you can get data about how your followers are interacting with content. But how do you build trust and loyalty among those followers? This post is a great how-to. Main takeaways: tell your company’s story with humor and portray it as fun and friendly; recognize your loyal customers; make your boards a resource for your followers by including useful information; verify pins have valid, working links before sharing them.

After You Read this Article You’ll Forget It (at least the first half) — Copyblogger

This post telling you how to enhance your content marketing is itself great content marketing. What’s not to love? From the click-bait title down to the excerpts from his book, the author has made a great point about the usefulness of illustrations in your content and promoted his own product, making this whole post an example of how to do it.

How to Create and Promote Successful Social Media Giveaways (and build SEO Links) — Search Engine Journal

The title of this post really says it all. This is a fantastic step-by-step guide to setting up and executing a giveaway. Any business can benefit from the added exposure, but as the post mentions, you can also use this as an opportunity for link building. When you add the giveaway to an existing page on your site, the value of that page increases, even after the giveaway is over and you remove the code.