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- Your Guide to the Social Media Jungle
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When creating and implementing a digital marketing campaign, you first need to design your keyword strategy. This strategy is more than just finding keywords that will bring you the highest number of visitors. It’s a top-to-bottom concept that will influence how you design your site, select keywords, optimize your pages and measure the success of your campaign.
Before you can start delving into keywords, search intent, search volume and click-through rate, you have to define what it is you’re trying to accomplish with your SEO. After all, how can you be successful if you don’t even know what you want? There are two basic goals when it comes to SEO campaigns:
You aren’t constrained to one or the other though. You can use a hybrid keyword strategy by dedicating the majority of your keywords (around 80-90%) to a longtail approach, while reserving the remaining for keywords that will get your brand and content in front of a lot of eyeballs.
How you define success will impact the keywords you choose and how you evaluate their performance.
Before you begin any marketing campaigns you need to ask yourself, "what does success look like?" Or, what metric will you track to determine if you’re achieving your campaign goal? When talking about an SEO campaign, most people first think of measuring improvements to your site’s ranking, or increasing the number of new visitors. If you’re running a branding campaign, then these are your top metrics to track. However, you should also keep track of important SEO indicators like click through rate (CTR), time spent on site and bounce rate, as these metrics will help you evaluate your landing pages’ relevance to the target keywords and content quality.
If you are measuring your campaign against a conversion goal, determining success by SERP ranking and traffic is overly simple, and can even cause you to waste time and effort optimizing pages for keywords that aren’t achieving your goal. To measure your conversion campaign, use your analytics to evaluate visitor behavior by keyword. Some important metrics to track for conversions:
And, finally, the most important metrics to track for conversion campaigns are conversions and conversion rate. The reason you want to track indicators other than just conversions is because that number alone doesn’t give you much context, and you could otherwise be missing opportunities to target keywords that have higher conversion rates.
Now that you know what endgame you’re optimizing for, you can start to find keywords to target with your SEO. To get the best list possible, start with your product (or service). Ideally, you know this inside and out. Start by brainstorming keywords that come to mind when you think of your business, or how you would answer the question "What is my website about?" or “What does my business do?”
Since Google’s Hummingbird update, it’s more important than ever to base your keyword strategy around the way humans use and interact with search engine results. Target keywords that will help you answer questions that users would ask in order to learn more about your industry, company and products.
One nice in-house resource you have for this is your very own customer service team. Keep a record of the conversations you have with your customers, or if you’re big enough, have your customer success team keep track of their tickets. Take note of:
This exercise will result not only in a better experience for your customers, but a solid list of potential keywords for you as well. If people are contacting you to ask a question or leave a comment, you can bet they’ve already done so online.
If you have a search bar on your site, update the settings in your Google Analytics account to track what your users are searching for. Click on the Admin tab then under View, select View Settings and switch Site search Tracking on. You can then provide the query parameter used in your search URLs to begin tracking. This will help you to understand user intent, as well as highlighting content gaps where no relevant content exists on your site based on the search query used.
Continue reading %Your Guide to Creating a Keyword Strategy%
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Before we dive into the reasons to use JPA, let me quickly explain what it is. The Java Persistence API (JPA) is a specification for object-relational mapping in Java. As for most standards within the Java Community Process, it is implemented by different frameworks. The most popular one is Hibernate.
All JPA implementations support the features defined by the specification and often extend that with custom functionality. This provides 2 main advantages:
OK, enough theory. Let's start with a short introduction to JPA and then have a look at some reasons to use it.
It’s, of course, impossible to explain JPA in all its depth in just one short section. But I want to show you a basic use case to make you familiar with the general concepts.
Lets begin with the persistence.xml file. Its structure is defined by the JPA standard and it provides the configuration to the persistence provider, first and foremost the database driver and connection information. You can see a simple example configuration in the following code snippet.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?>
<persistence xmlns="http://ift.tt/1cKbVbQ" xmlns:xsi="http://ift.tt/ra1lAU" version="2.1" xsi:schemaLocation="http://ift.tt/1cKbVbQ http://ift.tt/1kMb4sd">
<persistence-unit name="my-persistence-unit">
<description>My Persistence Unit</description>
<provider>org.hibernate.jpa.HibernatePersistenceProvider</provider>
<exclude-unlisted-classes>false</exclude-unlisted-classes>
<properties>
<property name="hibernate.dialect" value="org.hibernate.dialect.PostgreSQLDialect" />
<property name="hibernate.generate_statistics" value="true" />
<property name="javax.persistence.jdbc.driver" value="org.postgresql.Driver" />
<property name="javax.persistence.jdbc.url" value="jdbc:postgresql://localhost:5432/test" />
<property name="javax.persistence.jdbc.user" value="postgres" />
<property name="javax.persistence.jdbc.password" value="postgres" />
</properties>
</persistence-unit>
</persistence>
After you have configured your persistence provider, you can define your first entity. The following code snippet shows an example of a simple entity mapping.
@Entity
public class Author {
@Id
@GeneratedValue(strategy = GenerationType.AUTO)
@Column(name = "id", updatable = false, nullable = false)
private Long id;
@Version
@Column(name = "version")
private int version;
@Column
private String firstName;
@Column
private String lastName;
@ManyToMany(mappedBy="authors")
private Set<Book> books = new HashSet<Book>();
// constructors, getters/setters,
// and everything else is as usual
}
The @Entity annotation defines the Author class as an entity. It gets mapped to a table with the same name, in this case the author table.
The id attribute is the primary key of the entity and database table. The JPA implementation automatically generates the primary key value and uses the version attribute for optimistic locking to avoid concurrent updates of the same database record.
The @Column annotation specifies that this attribute is mapped to a database column. Similar to the @Entity annotation, it uses the name of the attribute as the default column name.
The @ManyToMany annotation defines a relationship to another entity. In this example, it defines the relationship to the Book entity which is mapped to another database table.
As you can see, you only need to add a few annotations to map a database table and use other features like optimistic locking and primary key generation.
Continue reading %5 Reasons to Use JPA / Hibernate%
