This article is part of an SEO series from WooRank. Thank you for supporting the partners who make SitePoint possible.
When starting a new marketing campaign, no matter the channel, you first need to get the lay of the land. Part of that is figuring out what your competition is up to when it comes to content marketing. Conducting competitive research for content marketing takes a serious amount of time and effort, but will provide you with valuable insights into how to position yourself in the market and what opportunities you have to quickly and easily gain an advantage over your competition.
Plus, with content marketing, you don’t need an inside man to learn other businesses’ strategies and priorities. With a careful eye and thorough investigation you can figure it out to your own benefit.
The first step in competitive research for content marketing is to find your competitors’ content. This can be a long process if your competitors have big, complex sites that have lots of content in lots of different places. If this is the case, you’ll need to peek in every nook and cranny.
Start with the site’s navigation. Are there any links that clearly indicate content? Navigate through each option to check for sub-navigations. Check the usual suspects first:
Lastly, check the bottom navigation. There are usually some links here to content that’s harder to find or requires several clicks from the homepage. The bigger the site, the more likely it is that you’ll find important content here.
WooRank allows you to run a website audit for your site, alongside up to three competitors. This provides useful information, including related websites that can help you to discover other sites with similar content.
A second option is to use a tool like DeepCrawl or Screaming Frog to investigate your competitors’ sites. These tools will crawl a site and return a list of all its URLs along with important page information like title tag, meta description, H1 headers and image alt text. This information will be really helpful later on in your research.
If you aren’t using a crawler, create a spreadsheet to manually track your competitors’ pages and content. Take note of the URL, title tag, article title, category or topic, content type (blog post, whitepaper, product feature page, etc.) and date published.
Now that you’ve gone through the long, exhausting process of cataloging all of your competitors’ content, it’s time for the real work to start: the content audit. This is the part that will tell you what your competitors are targeting, how they’re doing it, if they’re doing it well and what gaps exist for you to fill.
Content marketing generally has two objectives: get your site to rank highly in organic search results and convert the people who consume it. Your content’s ability to be effective in achieving these objectives hinges on keywords used and page optimization for those keywords. Figuring out how your competition achieves this is the first step in the content audit.
Once you’ve compiled your list of content available on your competitor sites, take a look at each page. Identify the page’s target keywords by looking at the words and phrases used in:
Content audits are by their very nature a manual process, but you can help automate it a bit here by using a tool like DeepCrawl or Screaming Frog, if you haven’t already. Once you’ve crawled the site, you can export the list of URLs into a spreadsheet that includes some of the important information on page elements, like title tags and H1 tags, mentioned above. You’ll still need to manually evaluate each URL for page content, but this will help save you some time and effort.
You can also use your WooRank Advanced Review Keyword Cloud to find what keywords your competitors are targeting on their pages.
Make a note of the keywords used in each on page element in your spreadsheet. Then, do a quick search using those keywords. How does your competitor rank for that keyword? Do you rank for it as well? If so, are they outranking you?
Once you’ve determined what keywords your rivals are targeting, keep track of the ones you’re competing over with WooRank’s SERP Checker. This is a great tool to evaluate the effectiveness of your content marketing campaign. Monitor your ranking for your keywords over time and compare it against your competitors (maximum of 3).
The second step of the content audit is to take a survey of your competitors’ content. The content survey will give you a comprehensive look at their content strategy and how it compares to yours. There are four things to evaluate while surveying competitor content:
Continue reading %Improving Your Content Marketing with Competitive Research%
With the advent of data science and the increased need to analyze and interpret vast amounts of data, the R language has become ever more popular. However, there's increasingly a need for a smooth interaction between statistical computing platforms and the web, given both 1) the need for a more interactive user interface in analyzing data, and 2) the increased role of the cloud in running such applications.
Statisticians and web developers have thus seemed an unlikely mix till now, but make no mistake that the interactions between these two groups will continue to increase as the need for web-based platforms becomes ever more popular in the world of data science. In this regard, the interaction of the R and Shiny platforms is quickly becoming a cornerstone of interaction between the world of data and the web.
In this tutorial, we'll look primarily at the commands used to build an application in Shiny --- both on the UI (user interface) side and the server side. While familiarity with the R programming language is invariably helpful in creating a Shiny app, expert knowledge is not necessary, and this example will cover the building of a simple statistical graph in Shiny, along with some basic commands illustrating how to customize the web page through HTML.
To start off, we must first install the RStudio platform in order to create and run a Shiny Web App. RStudio can be downloaded from the RStudio website.
Once we've loaded the RStudio platform, we then create our new Shiny web application by selecting the New File option, and then the Shiny Web App… option.
Upon doing that, we're presented with an interface that allows us to name our application (I've named it “OurFirstApp”, but feel free to come up with other creative names!), and we then select Multiple File (ui.R/server.R) as our application type:
While we could select Single File (app.R), this literally just combines the ui.R and server.R scripts into one. I personally prefer to keep the two separate in order to keep the code less cluttered, but this is a matter of personal preference.
As a side note, there's also a web platform available on the Shinyapps site, which allows users to share their Shiny applications online, as well as use the rsconnect package to control such applications remotely from the R console. While the methodology for doing this is outside the scope of this article, I definitely intend on expanding this topic further in subsequent articles given interest.
In any case, once we have named our Shiny Web App and opened up the source code, we're presented with a template app that uses a dataset “Old Faithful Geyser Data” to generate a histogram. For the purposes of this tutorial, we'll be writing our own app and customizing it according to our needs.
Continue reading %Shiny, R and HTML: Merging Data Science and Web Development%
Over recent years, client side web applications have gotten more and more sophisticated. Browsers have consistently been providing better JavaScript performance, and are capable of doing more and more things, with rich JavaScript APIs for things like geolocation, and peer-to-peer communication.
The rise of rich web applications also created a need for good client-side storage mechanisms, and that is where JavaScript databases like PouchDB come in.
PouchDB is an open-source JavaScript database inspired by Apache CouchDB that is designed to run well within the browser.
In very simple terms, a JavaScript database is a JavaScript object that provides methods (or API) to put, get and search data. In fact, a plain old JavaScript object is the simplest kind of JavaScript database. If you are familiar with Meteor, then you might have heard of Minimongo which is another client side JavaScript database that mimics that MongoDB API.
PouchDB is a JavaScript implementation of CouchDB. Its goal is to emulate the CouchDB API with near-perfect fidelity, while running in the browser or in Node.js.
What makes PouchDB different from databases like Minimongo is that, by default, it is not just in-memory, it uses IndexedDB behind the scenes for its storage. IndexedDB is a low-level API for client-side storage of significant amounts of structured data, including files/blobs. What this means is that PouchDB data is stored on disk, and will be available even after page refresh (however, data stored by one browser will not be available to other browsers).
Different adapters let you change the underlying data storage layer.
PouchDB is a JavaScript implementation of CouchDB, and emulates it's API as closely as possible.
In CouchDB, you'd fetch all the documents using this API call
/db/_all_docs?include_docs=true
In PouchDB, it becomes
db.allDocs({include_docs: true})
PouchDB enables applications to store data locally while offline, then synchronize it with CouchDB when the application is back online.
Now, let's see how you can use PouchDB in your applications.
To start using PouchDB you just need to include the PouchDB client library. You can use the standalone build, which makes the PouchDB constructor globally available on the window object
<script src="http://ift.tt/2bUNyk4"></script>
or, if you are using it in http://ift.tt/2bTLOmj environment, you can install it with npm.
$ npm install pouchdb --save
Then in your JavaScript:
var PouchDB = require('pouchdb');
(Fun Fact: npm isntall pouchdb also works!)
Creating a PouchDB database is as simple as calling the PouchDB constructor. Let's create a database called 'Movies'.
var movies = new PouchDB('Movies');
After running that, you can see basic information about your database, by using the info method, which returns a Promise.
movies
.info()
.then(function (info) {
console.log(info);
})
The code above outputs the following:
{"doc_count":0,"update_seq":0,"idb_attachment_format":"binary","db_name":"Movies","auto_compaction":false,"adapter":"idb"}
The adapter field indicates that underneath it's using IndexedDB.
PouchDB is a NoSQL, document-based database, so there is no rigid schema and you can just insert JSON documents directly. Let's see how you can insert, update, retrieve or delete documents.
You can create a new document using the put method
// returns a promise
db.put(doc, [docId], [docRev], [options])
The params in square brackets are optional. Each document has an _id field associated with it, which works as a unique identifier.
Create a new doc in the previously created Movies database by running the following code:
movies
.put({
_id: 'tdkr',
title: 'The Dark Knight Rises',
director: 'Christopher Nolan'
}).then(function (response) {
console.log("Success", response)
}).then(function (err) {
console.log("Error", err)
})
The response, in case of success, will be something like:
Success {ok: true, id: "tdkr", rev: "3-f8afdea539618c3e8dceb20ba1659d2b"}
Continue reading %Getting Started with PouchDB Client-Side JavaScript Database%
Are you including images in your social media content? Looking for easy-to-use tools to help you create images for your content strategy? If the idea of using Photoshop makes your head spin or hiring a graphic designer isn’t an option, there are many easy-to-use, low-cost alternatives available to you to create social media graphics. In [...]
This post 6 Simple Photo Tools for Creating Social Media Visuals first appeared on .
- Your Guide to the Social Media Jungle
This article was sponsored by Elegant Themes. Thank you for supporting the sponsors who make SitePoint possible.
If you’ve ever created a website, you know there’s a fine line between ease and power. Simple website design platforms like Wix, Weebly, or Squarespace allow for simple drag-and-drop editing, but they don’t offer much power or flexibility. They don’t have the massive plugin library of WordPress and you’re forced to work within the rather strict limitations of the platform. WordPress offers maximum flexibility and plugins, but it lacks the simplicity of drag-and-drop editing.
What if there were a way to combine both simplicity and power?
Now there is with the new Divi 3 theme from Elegant Themes.
Divi 3 is a WordPress theme built using React and Flux, which allows it to be customized using a robust visual builder. When you activate the visual builder, you can instantly make changes to your site and see them exactly as they’ll appear live.
No more working in cluttered style sheets or digging through files. The visual builder truly is a WYSIWYG interface which allows you to instantly drag, drop, type in new text, resize, copy, paste, delete and duplicate. It’s as if the page itself is alive.
Additionally, Divi 3 includes 40 modules which can literally be dropped anywhere on a page. These elements include bar counters, blogs, audio, buttons, blurbs, and a rich variety of others. These elements don’t need to be dragged and dropped from a dock because they are always available and easily accessible. You are in complete control of the content and layout of your site and you don’t need to be a web developer to customize the look and feel.
Once you’ve laid out the page, you can change colors, fonts, add margins, add background images, enable parallax elements, and much more. With Divi 3, you can style to your heart’s content.
The Divi 3 visual builder is also one of the fastest website building experiences you’ll find. There are almost no page refreshes or Ajax loading bars. In fact, no traditional loading of any kind is used, and all changes happen almost instantly.
Additionally, thanks to the "Invisible Interface" design of the visual builder, you work in a clean, open space, uncluttered by unnecessary lines, headers, or grids. There are no floating headers or sidebars to obscure your vision or screenspace and some people don’t even realize they’re in the visual builder when they initially load it.
We are committed to the future of the web, which is why we spent time building this theme from the ground up using React and Flux. Being committed to the future means building truly elegant themes that are both powerful and simple to use. We believe we achieved that with the Divi 3 theme.
For more information on Divi 3, click here.
Continue reading %Divi 3.0 from Elegant Themes Is a Marriage of Power and Simplicity%
The Grid Layout specification has brought us a new method for laying out elements that is much more flexible and better suited for modern web design. Specifications evolve in this day and age of the web, as such, a few things have changed in the latest draft of the Grid Layout module.
In this article, I thought I'd look at all those changes briefly to help everyone get up to speed. If you are new to the whole grid layout concept or the details are a bit hazy, I would like to suggest that you go over my introductory grid layout article to refresh your memory.
Before proceeding any further, I would like to tell you something unrelated — but important — that you should be aware of. The margin that you apply to adjacent grid items does not collapse. This happens because grid items are contained within the containing block of their own grid areas independent of other items.
Now, let's discuss how the spec is going to handle percentages in margins and padding. When margins or padding for different grid items are specified as percentages, they could be resolved against either the inline axis of the grid or individual grid item's own axis:
Continue reading %Where Things Are at in the CSS Grid Layout Working Draft%
