Yes.

But we’ll elaborate. Google Panda is a widely misunderstood yet surprisingly easy to understand algorithm change. Rather than get into complexities, the best way to understand Google Panda is by what occurred when the change took place:

• Poor quality writing was punished for being poor quality.
• Stolen writing was punished for being stolen.
• Spun writing was punished for being spun.

The goal of Google’s algorithm has always been to find the highest quality results for each keyword. Their original algorithm simply looked for “good enough” grammar, a breadth of information, incoming links, and keywords, among other things.

Content farms and websites that outsourced their copywriting to low cost providers took advantage of these lax rules. They created poor quality content, stole content from other websites, and churned out content as quickly as possible. Rather than reward quality websites, the websites that received the greatest rewards were those that simply churned out content like a factory – caring little about quality, readability, or information.

Google Panda, using whatever tools Google uses to turn quality writing into a mathematical formula, added filters that did a better job of locating “bad writing.” It punished websites that clearly lifted most of their content from better websites (either literally, in the sense that the content was stolen, or figuratively, where the content was copied in a manner that, while not word for word, essentially read as an identical article). It also stopped rewarding websites for lower quality writing, and punished websites that keyword stuffed without offering quality information.

How Great Leap Studios is Different

If your website suffered as a result of Google Panda, choosing a higher quality provider can be advantageous. At Great Leap Studios, all of our content is written from scratch. If we need to research the content, at most we’ll use other websites as an informative reference, but never as a writing reference. We already know how to craft quality content, and your website will always perform well.

Google Panda punished a lot of websites. Rather than cut corners to try to refill your web content will low quality work, contact Great Leap Studios and let us show you the difference that quality content writing can make.

Creating a website from scratch can be difficult. Thankfully there’s WordPress, a free, open source software platform loaded with easy to understand, upgradeable parts. With WordPress, you can add nearly any tool, code, or function you want to your website provided you have installed the right plugins.

Installing WordPress is the easiest way to get started. However, WordPress alone is still just the starting platform. For those of you that are just getting started or are struggling to figure out how to generate traffic to your website, here are ten different WordPress plugins that are crucial for modern day business owners.

• SEO Plugin

Before you do anything else, you should install an SEO plugin. There are several valuable plugins that are relatively interchangeable. Look for something simple. We at Great Leap generally prefer the All in One SEO Pack for most of our websites, but occasionally use SEO by Yoast for highly optimized websites that involve a number of keyword-laden pages, since it has a self-check system that calculates and measures effectiveness scores for each individual keyword article.  Many business owners also like the Platinum SEO Pack.

• All in One SEO Pack
• SEO by Yoast
• Platinum SEO Pack

All of them are free.

• Analytics

It’s also important to make sure that your website is successfully integrated with the Google Analytics platform. That’s why you should also install an Analytics plugin for your WordPress. One of the best is also by Yoast, not-so-cleverly titled “Google Analytics for WordPress.” Ultimate Google Analytics is also a useful one, and one that we like to use when we’re looking for a simpler interface. Those on a Multi-site network may need something a bit more complex though, and may have to pay for one of the available plugins.

• Google Analytics for WordPress by Yoast 
• Ultimate Google Analytics

It’s best to do your own search for a multi-site network plugin to find one that suits your needs.

• Link Cloaking 

Link Cloaking isn’t quite as relevant for businesses as it is for other types of websites, but it can be beneficial. The main link cloaking plugins include:

• Hidden Affiliate Links
• Pretty Link
• Simple URLs

Link cloaking is more valuable when you have a lot of very ugly links. Buyers don’t like ugly links. Ugly links are associated with spam, and things like random numbers and letters make buyers feel a little less comfortable with a purchase or a redirect. Link cloaking plugins clean up these links to make them much more professional, such as: http://www.yourwebsite.com/product/name. The “name” link redirects to something that had an ugly link before, but the user is unaware. Hidden Affiliate Links is the simplest, while Pretty Link is one of the most popular because it has click tracking and other advanced features. Simple URLs by Studiopress is another option.

• Social Bookmarking Tools

While not all businesses will benefit from bookmarking, you do want to make it possible for users to Facebook “Like,” Tweet, +1, or otherwise share some of your content. WordPress often struggles with some of the more basic options that come straight through these websites, but there are plugins that can be a big help. These include:

• Artiss Social Bookmarks
• Tweet Like PlusOne
• TweetMeme

Any one of these can potentially work, and will make it possible for you and others to easily share the content on your website.

• Popovers and Popups

As a business, it’s often useful to have a way to “list build.” You can do this by offering free content (written by Great Leap Studios, of course) that you give away to those that give you their email address. The best way to do this is with non-intrusive pop-up or popover. Some of the best plugins include:

• Popup Domination
• WP Subscribers
• OptinBar

These ones are the least likely to detract from your website or increase your bounce rate. But they do cost some money, so they should only be used if you have something to give away. The average cost is between $47 and $97. Free ones exist, but they’re rarely worth using.

• Split Testing

Split testing is an extremely useful way to test multiple forms of content and see which one nets you the best click through rate, most sales, lowest bounce rate, etc. In a way, split testing is a science, and a great tool for businesses in the process of designing their websites. Shrimp Test is far and away the best plugin for this purpose. Read the manual before starting, but once you’ve learned how it works you’ll find that you will see some very real results.

• Membership Software Plugins

B2B companies and any industry that could use regular contact from its customers would benefit from membership software. Running memberships can be a process, but if you’re willing to put in the work there are several plugins available that could be of use. These include:

• Wishlist Member
• Magic Members
• WP-Member

Personally, we like to use Wishlist Member. It’s used by nearly 40,000 websites as of this writing, and a very effective way of managing memberships. The other plugins are popular with other marketers and may be worthwhile to try if you’re not fond of the Wishlist interface.

• WP Touch

Most modern themes already come with a feature that makes WordPress websites smartphone ready. But older themes – especially if you’ve run the site for a while – may not have this feature. WP Touch is the best plugin for this purpose. With so many people browsing the web from their smartphones these days, one might argue that WP-Touch is not even optional. It’s a plugin that should be installed right away.

• AdRotate

Most businesses don’t have advertisements on their website, because their website is an advertisement. But still, you’ll often find that modern companies look for any way they can to increase their revenue. For these businesses, AdRotate is a great option. It rotates ads in a way that doesn’t violate the AdSense terms of service, helps to manage click through rate, and gives you a reading that tells you the most valuable slots for ad space available on your website so that you can better sell ad space in the future. In general, Advertising Manager is the best option.

• Setting Up eCommerce

Almost every business these days – even those with a storefront – can benefit from some kind of eCommerce area on their website to sell products and services to any type of client. The easier you make it for someone to buy something from you, the more likely you’ll be able to get sales. Rather than use some inferior third party option, consider the following:

• Woocommerce
• WP eCommerce
• The CartPress

These plugins allow you to easily develop your own eCommerce section on your WordPress website, so that your customers can make purchases more easily. Regarding cost, most eCommerce plugins are free, but themes that integrate these plugins can be expensive.

Bonus Tip – Use Themes

While there are thousands of free themes that can be downloaded from WordPress, you still want your website to stand out. Free is always good, but in many cases free also means “common” or “not fully equipped for your needs.” Luckily there are businesses that produce higher quality themes. They cost a bit of money (or a membership) but in the end they’re worth it, especially for a website as important as your company’s. Some of the places to get themes include

• Optimize Press – Optimize Press is better for landing pages that may be used by Internet marketers, but they have several themes that integrate well for those that have a great deal of membership content. It’s also a great tool for using with Wishlist Member.
• FlexSqueeze – FlexSqueeze is similar to Optimize Press, in that the themes may not be suitable for all businesses, but they are an effective solution for certain types of marketing strategies, especially opt-in pages and authority content distribution.
• Woo Themes – Businesses will likely find Woo Themes to be the best choice. The themes are aesthetically pleasing, highly customizable, and primed for businesses to make an immediate impact.

Use WordPress for Your Website Development Needs

WordPress is an outstanding website development tool. It’s easy to install, it takes far less HTML or coding knowledge than traditional websites, and it can be customized for nearly any of your business’s needs. Indeed, there’s almost always a plugin for a feature your business needs, and if one doesn’t exist it’s often easy to find someone to develop the program for you.

If you’re in need of a new website, or launching a website for the very first time, give WordPress some serious consideration, utilize the functionality of the above plug-ins, and contact Great Leap Studios to develop your content.

Not long ago we had a post on the idea of marketing a city. Specifically the city of Merced, which has a great deal of promise as a potentially enjoyable city in which to live, but is struggling as a result of its location and the housing crisis. But perhaps Merced’s biggest problem is that it has developed a fairly terrible reputation despite otherwise not being that bad a place to live or work, and that reputation is extremely clear if you search for information about the city online.

Having been to Merced, this reputation is undeserved. Merced is not without a few problems, but the key issues – violence, joblessness, teenage pregnancies – are generally no longer an issue. Merced is a fairly interesting place, and yet its reputation keeps people from having any interest in it.

Your Online Reputation

As a business, city, product, or person, your reputation is the key to your success, and if you’ve developed a bad reputation online, chances are that the reputation affects you.

How We Do This

Each case is different, so it’s best to  contact us, discuss the issues with your reputation, and let us work with you to improve it. However, here are some examples of how we would help Merced build its online reputation, and hopefully you’ll see how the same processes could benefit you:

• Web Content About Merced

First and foremost, we would develop content about Merced  that shows its positive side. We can do this on Merced’s city website, or we can build several websites about Merced, or we can do guest postings to travel blogs. If we were marketing an individual, we could also ghostwrite informative articles in the person’s name, so that they’re seen as an expert in their field. The goal is to highlight the existing positive aspects of Merced instead of the endless negative stories that currently fill the web.

• Unfiltered Review Sites

There are several negative reviews left of Merced on various websites. It’s not possible to leave fake positive reviews on sites like Yelp, where the search filter does a fairly good job of removing fake reviews and there are potential legal issues to consider. But we can solicit actual positive reviews from current and past residents of the city and ensure they are distributed actively to as many sources as possible.

• Blog Commenting

Blog commenting is also a much smaller, but still valid example of online reputation building. Blog commenting allows us to talk about the benefits of Merced on articles that are relevant to things like the housing market, etc. These have a much smaller effect overall, but they’re easy to do and flood search engines with an increasingly large balance of positive content.

Developing a Better Online Reputation

These are just a few of the examples of how we can develop a better online reputation for your city, company, product, or even your name. There are many different ways to build someone’s reputation online, and while we can’t delete information on other people’s sites, we can make it far more difficult for anyone searching for you to find the negative information on these websites, and increase the visibility of positive information.

Copywriting is, in many ways, an art form. The goal is to weave words together in a way that attracts visitors, keeps them on the page, and leads them towards purchasing your products. You need to be a skilled wordsmith that understands how to grab the reader’s attention – one that understands the art of writing and reaching an audience.

But there’s a science to SEO as well. By testing two (or more) distinct pieces of copy, you can see which of them has the highest purchase rate, the lowest bounce rate, the highest click-through rate, and more.

Split Testing Different Types of Copy

Websites often use split testing to ensure their copy or advertisements get results. Often businesses start with a few completely different drafts of copy, and then perform small tweaks on each to see which delivers greater results.

Split testing is an excellent method of collecting data on your website copy. Yet many companies split test incorrectly. While split testing can be a beneficial tool, you need to make sure you’re collecting relevant data, and the only way to do that is to first establish a working, popular website – and only afterward start split testing your website.

Why to Wait to Split Test

• Small Sample Sizes

There are dozens of factors that affect website analytics, and many of them change over time. That’s why it’s important to split test in a very short period of time (about a week or less), when no other factors affecting the marketplace could change your results. If your website is not yet popular, you’ll be dealing with too small a sample size to be relevant.

• Establishing a Marketing Presence

In addition, during the early stages of marketing it’s very likely that you have yet to develop a clear and established source of hits. Unless your website is well developed, you’ll likely be getting visitors from a very random hodgepodge of websites, a couple of hits per keyword, and so on. Each source can also affect the results of your split test. When the sample sizes are larger it’s easier to check against these sources and see if there’s a difference.

• Changing Your Content Later

It’s also not uncommon to change your content focus and how you’re marketing it as your website develops. Split testing is only valuable if you plan on making permanent changes with the data. If not because you plan it all later, the time you spend split testing will be meaningless.

Split testing is an effective way to discover the best possible copywriting and advertising techniques for generating sales. But make sure you’ve taken the time to develop your website and create a search engine presence before you start split testing your content.

There are several different types of content. Keyword articles, for example, are articles that are primarily used in article marketing and placed in directories to boost your immediate and long term SEO. Content articles are generally added to your website. Blog posts are blog posts, etc.

Each and every type of content is designed to improve where you appear in search engines, inform potential customers, and hopefully lead to a purchase. Sometimes they talk about ferrets.

Content may be the most valuable tool for building your website, but it’s also slow, and you need multiple articles in order to even begin drawing interest from search engine spiders. Yet there is one type of content that, while more of a gamble, has the potential to really help your website take off: Authority Articles.

What Are Authority Articles?

Authority articles are articles that are very, very long, and generally written about a single topic. An example of an authority article would be “31 ways to save money on gas” or “101 ingredients that should be in your kitchen.” While most content is roughly 500 words on average, authority articles tend to be more than 3000 at minimum, and many reach as high as 5000 or more before they’re completed.

Authority articles are rarely used, but are highly coveted by Internet marketers. That’s because authority articles get a LOT of unprompted incoming links. Other websites love to link to long content that is informative for their readers, and authority articles provide that. Also, when a search engine decides that an authority article is useful, it’s not uncommon for the article to rank very high in search engines. One of the earliest authority articles we ever wrote (not about ferrets) received over 125,000 hits, and that article was never actively marketed.

Why Don’t More Companies Use Authority Articles?

So, if authority articles are so amazing and provide such incredible results, why aren’t more businesses using them? Here are a few possible reasons:

• Coming Up With a Topic – You can’t have an authority article written without a valid topic. For example “101 Reasons to Buy a Used Geo Metro” is impossible to write. At most you can come up with 3 or 4 reasons, and so an authority article becomes impossible. Of course, you are an expert in your field, so it should be possible to find a topic important to your readers for which you have a wealth of knowledge.
• No Guarantee – If you have the choice between investing in one authority article or 20 regular articles, an authority article is a bigger gamble. Those 20 articles are valuable in their own way and much less risky because they provide reliable, useful information. There’s no way to say with certainty that Google will value your authority article. If it does, the payoff is outstanding.

But despite these issues, authority articles can be immensely valuable. If you have the time to invest in writing one of these long articles, and you’ve accepted the risks associated with them, then you should absolutely add one or two to your website and see how it improves your search engine rank.

Magazines and newspapers are dying, and Adblock has made it possible to avoid pesky click through ads. If you want to reach an audience, traditional advertising methods no longer work.

Your best way to advertise is to create a website and utilize search engine marketing. But it’s not the only way to advertise. Another method that very few companies take advantage of is guest posting.

Intro to Guest Posting

Guest posting is a difficult but valuable SEO technique that involves writing up a quality and unique informational post and getting it placed on someone else’s website. For example, let’s say you’re a pest control company and you find a blog about home care needs. You ask them if you can write a guest post on pest control, they accept, you write a post, and it gets posted.

Ideally this is used for internet marketing. This method creates more incoming links, which in turn increases your search engine rank. Articles should be informational – NOT sales letters. Your only goal is to increase the value of your website with the incoming link, not necessarily to sell to the readers of the blog.

Guest Posting on Hard Copy

You should also consider this marketing technique for hard copy papers as well. Contact your local magazines. Ask them if they’re willing to place an article in lieu of an advertisement for the same amount of money (or maybe a bit less). Most likely these magazines will accept, because the more articles they have and less advertising they have to publish to survive, the better their magazine will be received.

In that article you can provide helpful tips about your industry, written in a style that grabs the attention of the reader, and use that article as a form of makeshift advertising – drastically increasing the number of people that see your “ad” while using a less invasive marketing technique.

It may work, it may not, but it provides you with an additional style of marketing that could open up new avenues of reaching your customers in a world that has generally tuned out most types of paid advertising.

We chose this career because it was something we genuinely enjoyed, and we’re always looking for new projects that involve some type of creative and/or interesting writing. Also we make money that way. But consider that a secondary benefit.

There are so many ways that writing can be used to improve your “marketing.” We’re placing that in quotations because not all marketing is designed to attract customers or improve your business.

Delivering Apartment Newsletters

A great example is an apartment newsletter. Apartment complexes are always looking for ways to create the aura of a community and improve the satisfaction of the tenants. One solution that many have found is an apartment newsletter, where the residents are given a monthly handout with informative articles, news about the complex, information on new businesses in the area and more.

Apartment newsletters are fairly basic – they’re rarely very long, and they often contain only a few articles and bits of information, but these marketing tools (if you want to call them that) do help build a sense of community with the complex and ensure that tenants don’t necessarily feel that the complex isn’t interested in their residency.

Business Newsletters and Community

This idea is not limited to apartment complexes. All types of companies and businesses can use a newsletter to keep their employees, residents, tenants or friends both informed and entertained. With a little bit of advertising, you can even make up for some of the costs of creating this type of newsletter, or write some of the content yourself to save money and fill up space.

Apartment newsletters are just one example of a great way that writing can be useful for other purposes besides creating content for your website. If you’re interested in starting an apartment or business newsletter of your own and want our company to complete the copywriting for you, contact us today.

Pinterest mania is sweeping the nation. One might even call in “Pinsanity” although that would be a lame joke, so don’t. You can call it “Jeremy Pin.” Then it’s a meta joke. By the time you read this it may not even make sense anymore. See, there was this basketball player named Jeremy Lin. He did well when no one expected to and everyone referred to it as “Linsanity” because everyone makes bad jokes and terrible puns…

Anyway, moving on. Pinterest’s popularity is astounding right now, and whenever any social media website achieves success, the first question most companies ask is “how can we take advantage of this website’s popularity for our own personal gain?”

The Likelihood of Pinterest Marketing

Pinterest marketing is certainly possible. Any website that allows you to easily share photos and images at the click of a button is one that has the potential to help you market your website or products. But before you decide to break into the Pinterest world, there are several things you need to know:

• Demographics

Pinterest has very specific demographics: Women that love crafts and/or photos of crafts and/or clothes and/or romantic pictures. Most are between the ages of 18 and 40ish. Pinterest’s popularity may be huge, but at the moment this isn’t the kind of place where the manufacturers of Axe Body Spray will market their goods. The products and companies need to be attractive to women. This may change over time, but for now it’s important you realize your company may not be right for this market.

• Pretty

What you market needs to be visually pretty. Photos are and always will be the most important part of Pinterest, which means you’ll need to take lots and lots of high quality photos, make sure they’re well cropped, edited, etc. Once again, this is going to limit the potential for a lot of companies. Exterminators probably aren’t going to find much success with Pinterest.

• Visually Interesting

Beyond pretty images, the photos have to have a purpose. Pinterest is about pinning and repinning things that interest you. For example, a bracelet you want to make or a wedding dress you want to buy. Sometimes funny images or cute images make the rounds, but in general the products you market or images you use need to be of subjects that draw the curiosity or emotion of the viewer.

Using Pinterest to Market Your Business

Don’t let this discourage you. Pinterest marketing is absolutely possible, and potentially a great tool for branding. Makeup companies can provide makeup tutorials, and use images of women with perfect, interesting makeup to attract pins. Companies that sell Mp3 players can use a professional photographer to capture an intimate and attractive moment between a couple, with a subtly placed Mp3 device somewhere in the room as a way of branding the product.

All of this is possible, but all of this is difficult. Pinterest marketing may evolve as Pinterest evolves, but remember that Pinterest is not for every company, and your ability to achieve success with your Pinterest marketing (especially in terms of cost/benefits) is slim.

Over the past several years there has been a legal crackdown on the way testimonials are used and collected. Some companies wrote testimonials themselves and assigned a fake name in order to sway buyers, while others wrote up comprehensive testimonials using sales language and tried their best to convince one of their buyers to claim it.

Now many of these practices are illegal. Your testimonials must be associated with a real person that can verify they provided the testimonial free of charge. You can try to persuade a customer to say specific things in their testimonial, but you can no longer create a testimonial from thin air and use it to generate sales on your website.

Methods of Generating Testimonials

Here we’ll explore how to generate real testimonials for your website. These types of testimonials are legally acceptable and will provide you with solid content for your marketing needs.

• Ask Customers

Okay, it may not be that complicated after all. If you are close to any of your customers and you’ve developed more than simply a customer/business relationship, give them a call and ask if they’re willing to provide you with a testimonial you can use for your marketing campaign. Depending on the individual, there is a good chance they’ll agree, and suddenly you have a testimonial.

• Bargain a Bit

You cannot pay someone to create a testimonial for you, but you can trade them for a bit of personal marketing. Some people prefer to keep their names offline, and would rather give a testimonial anonymously than share their full name. Others, however, are more than happy to provide their full name as long as it comes with information about their position and where they work, such as “Anthony Chatfield, CEO – Great Leap Studios.” Add a link and suddenly you’ve helped them market their website and themselves, while also receiving the testimonial you need.

• Contact Forms

When customers or users fill out contact forms, you can use any of their praise or comments as part of a testimonial. Customers must be notified (and should be notified, regardless of legal necessity) before their testimonials are used, and you should never post the individual’s full name without their permission, but you can get permission, cut the testimonial from the contact form, claim it’s from a customer named “Anthony” and use the testimonial legally. Just be sure to save the email as proof.

Reviewing the Legal Language

Testimonials are still a useful tool in today’s business world, but your company has a responsibility to obtain these testimonials legally. No longer can you write up a random testimonial and assign it to a user. You must ensure that you’re following the law, finding real people to provide you with these testimonials, and attributing them correctly.

The holidays are a great time for non-B2B sellers. Customers purchase food, clothing, toys, electronics, and countless other products as gifts or for themselves with their holiday bonuses, credit cards, and savings. The holidays are one of the most profitable periods of the year for thousands of companies.

That’s why companies invest thousands of dollars into marketing their businesses in October and November. Their goal is to prepare for the wave of Internet purchases so that by the time the holidays come around their company is one of the first things prospective customers find.

Slow and Steady Wins the Race

Unfortunately, content writing and SEO don’t work that way. Depending on the current status of your website, SEO can be a very slow process – a process that requires constant updating and a wave of content over the course of an entire year before you see noticeable results.

That’s why the best time to invest in SEO marketing is now – nearly a year before the holiday season. During this time, most companies don’t target holiday keywords, nor do they create content that will help them with holiday shoppers. If holiday shopping marks a considerable uptick in your business, you can start preparing your holiday shopping landing pages and content early, using the SEO techniques that are most effective but take the longest to become prominent in Google.

Risk and Rewards with Holiday Strategy

There’s always a risk with holiday marketing strategies. Some companies have a larger budget and have marketed more in the past, and these companies will require less work closer to the holiday season to be competitive. You should never invest in holiday marketing alone, and instead consider it as part of a larger content and SEO plan.

But as with all things related to search engine optimization, the rewards for taking the risk can be extremely valuable, and by investing in the content early, you give your company an advantage over your competition.