Welcome to another edition of Sites Weekly.
In this week’s edition, you will find links to articles about the following:
- Content. How to Get Featured Snippets on Google: A Quick Start Guide
- Design. Transform Your Business Website Using Our Free ‘Design 101’ Ebook
- Technology. 6 Tools for Sharing and Promoting New Content
- Strategy. Why Is Diversity Important?
But first …
Last week on Site Success
I walk you through the next step after defining your ideal audience: putting together your initial content marketing strategy, which helps propel you and your content forward in the direction of specific goals.
Listen: [33] 3Q for Defining Your Content Marketing Strategy
If you have a WordPress website and are looking to grow your audience through content, then this episode will help. Sonia Simone is one of the most accomplished content marketers in the world, and she stops by to discuss smart, winning content strategies with Sean Jackson.
Listen: [34] Amazing Content Strategies for WordPress Sites
And now, on to this week’s links …
Content: How to Get Featured Snippets on Google: A Quick Start Guide
Featured snippets are important for a couple of obvious reasons:
- They pop up right at the top of Google search results pages, and drive much higher click-throughs than the standard results listed below them.
- With voice search gaining in popularity, featured snippets are gaining in stature as well — because the featured snippet is often what is read in response to the voice search.
So, it would be wise to figure out how to get your website featured in more snippets. This guide from our friends at Search Engine Journal provides an excellent primer for getting your site ready to take advantage of the featured snippet opportunities that might be available to you.
Also of importance from SEJ: Google Sets Deadline for HTTPS and Warns Publishers to Upgrade Soon
Design: Transform Your Business Website Using Our Free ‘Design 101’ Ebook
Choosing a WordPress theme can be a little overwhelming at the beginning — especially if you don’t really know what you want your final website to look like.
Before you even start browsing different designs, there are a couple of things you should first consider, because they will help you narrow down your choices.
In this ebook, Rafal Tomal will guide you through making the best design choices for your brand.
Two of the most important decisions you will make about your WordPress website are your theme and your hosting. Wouldn’t it be great if they worked together to make your website more powerful?
Now they can.
Discover why over 213,675 website owners trust StudioPress.
Technology: 6 Tools for Sharing and Promoting New Content
Assuming that you’ve invested time to create high-quality content, your work is not truly “just beginning” once you’ve hit publish on a new piece of content. Though you’ve probably heard that cliché a time or two.
But … your work is definitely not done. You now need to promote your latest content to your target audiences across the different channels you are participating in.
And while manual channel-by-channel posting is one way to do it — and occasionally you should do it that way, to make sure you’re staying engaged socially on social media, and so you stay up-to-date on changes to the platforms — finding automated tools that fit your particular objectives and workflow can be both efficient and effective.
Personally, I use CoSchedule for my social media automation. I love its feature for creating templates for post types that repeat. So I encourage you to check it out. But also take a gander at this post by Sandra Clayton, which provides you with six more options for tools that help you share and promote new content.
Strategy: Why Is Diversity Important?
This quote from Christopher Penn’s article linked below really hit home:
“The importance of diversity is that if our ingredients — the people we hire and the ideas we encourage — are stale and monotonous, our business will be stale and monotonous — and our competitors will crush us.”
Consider the importance of diversity in everything you do with your website: from the sources you use for research, to the tools and strategies you engage for efficiency, to the viewpoints you embrace in your comment section and community.
So …
Which of the ideas in these posts will you put to good use immediately?
I’ll be back with a new edition next week.
Keep building.