#link I added as source did not directly inspire this post however | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

a-little-slice-of-fandom · 3 years

Note

I’d love to hear your thoughts on the Irish-ness of Dracula, if you wanna ramble about it!

(Okay I just want to apologise for how long this took to answer because I know it’s been sitting in my inbox for over a month but..depression and work happened and I just didn’t have the time or energy to complete it. I seriously do apologise for this but I hope you enjoy the post anyway!)

So the first thing I need to clear up is this: the concept of a monster or a demon that feeds upon the life force of humans is not limited to one singular culture or folklore. In fact, this core concept is a wider cultural phenomenon and variations of it exist across both countries and continents. And no one country can take sole credit for the this core concept of vampires. Anyone who tries to claim otherwise either doesn’t know much about vampires or is intentionally being disingenuous. There can be cultural variations that are specific to certain folklores (and to just blatantly steal these would be cultural appropriation), but the main idea of vampires exists across a wide range of folklores and no singular person, group of people or culture can take credit for the creation of vampires.

However, arguably it was the work of Bram Stoker that aided in the solidification of the concept of Vampires that we know today. While there were other authors from a wide range of nationalities who wrote about Vampires before Stoker (including John William Polidori who wrote the Vampyre in 1819)...Dracula is the best known. (Now I personally believe that’s because Dracula is an absolutely banging novel, although I do concede that the prevalence of adaptations of Dracula from the 1920’s to today helps keep Dracula in the forefront of audiences minds.) In addition, it’s important to remember that Stoker was inspired by another Irish author Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, who wrote the novel Carmilla. As far as I know, Le Fanu and Stoker actually worked together on a magazine!

Another thing I think that needs clarification is the common belief that Stoker heavily/religiously based Dracula on the historical figure Vlad the Impailer. This is heavily debated by scholars. While there’s an obvious, undeniable similarity between the names of these two...the similarities start to wain after this, with only small similarities between the two and there’s even literal contradictions between the history of Vlad the Impailer and Dracula’s history in the novel. In fact, there’s not much indication that Stoker based the character Dracula off Vlad the Impailer, or even that he had a working knowledge of Vlad the Impailer beyond the name. In all 124 pages of his notes, there’s nothing to indicate that Stoker’s inspiration for Dracula came from Vlad the Impailer.

(Plus Dracula in the novel wasn’t even originally called Dracula...he was called Count Wampyr in the original drafts of the novel and this was only changed, from what I can gather, in the last couple of drafts.)

In fact, I’d personally argue that that connection between Vlad the Impailer and Dracula is actually something that’s been retroactively added by other artists, for example the 1992 film “Bram Stoker’s Dracula” heavily leaned into this idea that Dracula and Vald the Impailer were one in the same, and as time has progressed people assume that these elements were in the original novel when that’s simply untrue! Stoker didn’t write that! It’s a retroactive addition by other artists that’s just assumed by the masses to be canon. This phenomenon is actually super interesting and it’s absolutely not limited to Stoker’s novel Dracula/the modern day perception of Dracula (another example would be Mary Shelley’s version of Frankenstein versus the modern day perception Frankenstein). I’m not sure if there’s a word for what this is, but I like the term “cultural canon”, where something that’s been added in by other artists has become as good as canon within the minds of the masses and as such is ingrained within the cultural perception of something, despite it having no basis within the original piece or even directly contradicting what is in canon.

(Now I’ll absolutely concede that Stoker taking the name of a historical figure and possibly their likeness from another country and making them into a literal monster is something that should be discussed. I don’t know how Vlad the Impailer is viewed within Romania - whether he’s viewed positively or negatively or a mixture - but regardless he was a historical figure and Stoker did eventually use that name for his own creative purposes. Again, Stoker didn’t say that Dracula and Vlad the Impailer were the same person, that’s other artists doing, but there’s still issues with Stoker that needs to be discussed)

Now, I’ve seen people talk about how Stoker took a lot of inspiration from the Baltic folklore surrounding vampires for his novel, but I don’t really know this folklore very well and therefore I don’t feel like I’m qualified to discuss it. If anyone is more well versed in this topic wants to add to this post then they’re more than welcome to! I don’t deny that Stoker too inspiration from places other than Ireland (like the novel is set in Whitby) but I just feel like people over hype the relation between stokers Dracula and Vlad the Impailer.

Now, onto the Irish mythology side!

So the most obvious inspiration for Dracula comes from the story of Abhartach. here is a link to an actual, respectable retelling of the story of Abhartach which I’d highly recommend people read (it’s really not that long) but the key points go as follows:

There was this Irish chieftain called Abhartach, who was really cruel and the townsfolk didn’t really like him. So, the townsfolk and another cheiftain (known as Cathain) banded together to kill Abhartach. They did succeed in killing him (yay), however, Abhartach just sort of...rose from the dead and began another reign of terror (not yay). However, Abhartach needed to be sustained by blood and required a bowlful every day to sustain his energy. Cathain comes back and kills Abhartach once again, but Abhartach rises from the dead once more and now needs more blood. Abhartach is only banished when Cathain uses a word made from yew wood and wounds Abhartach with it. Abhartach is buried upside down with a grant stone over the grave to stop Abhartach rising once again.

Sound familiar? The similarities between Abhartach and Dracula are undeniable! Yes, there’s some differences between the two but the core story here is almost identical. I could totally reword that paragraph, omitting the names, and it would be indistinguishable from a short summary of Dracula! Even the way that the main characters find out about the wooden weapon that can kill the monster is similar, as both Jonathan and Cathain go to wiser and older members of their community to learn more.

(Also please mythology blogs don’t come for me I know my retelling was an incredible oversimplification but I’m writing on my iPad and my thumbs are starting to hurt. People have wrote full papers on the similarities between Dracula and Abhartach and there’s so many more people more qualified than me, I’m just an 18 year old trying to make a fun and interesting tumblr post. Again, if anyone wants add anything like extra sources or more information or even to point out my mistakes then I more than welcome the additions)

Another piece of folklore that’s also said to have inspired Dracula is the Dearg Due. Now there’s multiple different versions of the tale, but the version I have heard goes like this:

There’s a noble woman who wants to marry a penniless peasant boy, but her dad disapproves and wants her to marry another man who is much richer. The rich man and the noble woman were eventually married but the woman didn’t love the rich man. In retaliation, the rich man locked the woman in a windowless castle where she starved to death. The woman was buried by the locals who took pity on her, but because she was buried hungry she came back to life and drank the blood of her father and her husband as revenge. The version I heard says that the dearg due now basically wanders ireland drinking the blood of men who have hurt or wronged women (as one should) but there’s other endings to the story.

(Again is anyone has a reliable source they want to share then please feel free to add!)

So this is another Irish piece of folklore that clearly includes some elements that we now associate with vampires. Now people (including Wikipedia) claim that this story was specifically what Stoker based Dracula on, and while I definitely think that Stoker was aware of this story and took inspiration from it, I personally think that the Dearg Due inspired the concept of Dracula’s wives more than Dracula himself.

However the key point still stands: Stoker was likely aware of these legends and even the most staunchly anti-Irish person would have to concede that there’s similarities between all three stories. And very rarely are these similarities discussed in classes about Dracula...which I feel is a real disservice. I don’t think students should have to have an intense knowledge of Irish mythology (my knowledge is spotty at best) nor do I think it should be an exam question...but even a brief acknowledgment of “hey, Stoker was inspired by these stories and you can clearly see similarities between them” would be nice. Moreover, it further solidifies my original argument that Stoker was, at least to some extent, Irish and that his Irishness inherently influenced his work.

Also...the social context of what was going on in Ireland in this period can’t be ignored! Again, while Stoker did spend time in both England and Romania, he spent a lot of his life in Ireland and therefore would have known what was going on in his own country.

Dracula was published in 1897, which is exactly 50 years after the worst year of the Irish Famine/ The Great Hunger/An Gorta Mór. Now I don’t have time to do a whole history of the Great Hunger but the effects of the famine were greatly exacerbated by the horrific mismanagement of Ireland by the British government and the British system of ruling in Ireland. How many people died during the famine isn’t clear, but we do know that the population of Ireland at the time was 8 million and the population today is 6 million...200 years later and we still haven’t recovered. So while we all like to joke about the fact that Stoker wrote about an unfeeling member of the aristocracy literally feeding off others with no remorse and basically ruining their lives...are we really going to pretend that there isn’t social commentary there? Scholars specifically think that Stoker was commenting on the absentee landlords (basically British aristocrats who owned land in Ireland but didn’t live there and as such didn’t care about the well being of their tenants) who would often have tenants forced off the land when they couldn’t pay rent...despite the fact that their tenenants were already starving and had no money because their only source of food and income failed.

(I’m not being shady by the way, I also love to joke about the social implications of Dracula, but I feel like people forget that the jokes have actual points behind them)

There was also a cholera epidemic in Ireland in 1832 which is generally accepted to be one of Stoker’s biggest inspirations. You can read more about the epidemic here if you wish, but I’ll summarise what I feel are the key points. Not only was Stoker’s mother from county Sligo and lived through this cholera epidemic, but Stoker also asked her to write down her memories of the epidemic and used her accounts to aid in his research of the cholera epidemic. Now the fact that he was actively researching this should indicate that it would influence his work, especially considering the situation in county Sligo was incredibly morbid. There’s accounts of the 20 carpenters in Sligo town being unable to make enough coffins to keep up with the amount of people dying, resulting in hundreds of dead bodies just lying on the street. However, the most horrific account from this epidemic was the stories of terrified nurses placing cholera patients into mass graves while they were still alive. Stoker himself literally stated that Dracula was “inspired by the idea of someone being buried before they were fully dead”. So while at first there seems to be very little relation between the novel and a medical epidemic, it quickly becomes clear that Stoker’s fascination with this historical event influenced his writing.

My overall point is that Stoker’s irishness inherently influenced his writing. Writers don’t write in their own little bubble, divorced from the world around them, their views and work are shaped by their position in society and their upbringing (it’s why I dislike death of the author as a literary theory). So when people try to claim that Dracula is a piece of British literature...it indicates either a lack of understanding of the context in which Stoker was writing in or a wilful ignorance founded on colonialist ideas. His influences are so obvious to me as an Irish woman but they rarely get discussed, and even if they are it’s seen as overreaching! To call Dracula British literature and to ignore the inherent Irishness of the novel does a great disservice to Stoker!

Anyways I really hope you enjoyed this discussion my love! Once again I apologise for how long this took to write. Also I’m sorry if this comes off as argumentative or anything, that absolutely wasn’t my intention, I just have a particular style of writing long posts haha.

#dracula #bram stoker #irish literature #british literature #bram stoker’s dracula #gothic #gothic literature #ask #ask answered #anon ask #anonymous ask #anon #anonymous #being irish is my only personality trait

146 notes · View notes

forte7 · 5 years

Photo

Forte’s Fan Character Flashback Friday - #11

Name: Kaede Hatake Series: Naruto Background: So, this is probably the last Flashback Friday; turns out I'm kinda out of fan characters to really bring back - at least those that I really remember or have images of. But I will be ending this series off with a bang, I guess, cause today we're going to talk about one of my favorite fan characters who has way more development than a fan character really needs, but hey, I enjoy it and it's fun.

Anyway, I've posted stuff for this character before, but have a lot more I can share and have been kind of holding back for this post.

This is Kaede, my long-lived Naruto fan character. As cliche as it is, she supposed to Kakashi's adopted daughter, who of course, also happened to repress her memories of her actual family and birthplace and thanks to the Third Hokage's permission and whatnot, was able to just more or less seamlessly mesh into living in the Hidden Leaf village.

She was created right after I really got into the series, which was back around 2007, which correlates with one of the earlier images I have of her on my dA. You can see that one here, actually: https://www.deviantart.com/forte-girl7/art/Hatake-Kaede-69525304

Fun side note for that, I had done that image all on the free program GIMP and with a mouse and I'm still amazed at my younger self for having the patience to do all the things I used to do with just a mouse. I've been spoiled by my tablet, haha.

Anyway, one reason why I've been so attached to this character is because, like Rey a while ago, I used to RP with this character on a Naruto RP forum. However, this forum was much more active and the person who RPed as Kakashi was super into the idea and we really ran with the different scenarios we could put the two in. I'm actually still friends with that person and we talk about it from time to time and after the forum itself had gone under, still wrote fanfiction things together, just for funsies.

There's another reason why I got attached to the character and it's kind of a weird, personal, psychological reason, but could really be applied to a lot of my fan characters. As you may have noticed over the course of this series, a lot of my fan characters are either a character's daughter or younger sister. I never did the love interest thing; it wasn't and still isn't a thing that I was into. Not sure why, really, but not my thing.

The gravitation to having characters with older brothers or I suppose "idealized" father figures, however, I can totally explain. The brother thing is simple: I've always wanted an older brother, but as the eldest of the family, that was never going to be a thing. So, I guess I tried to find some kind of surrogate relationship with my fan characters. The same can be said with the father thing, too, but I do still have my dad around and while he isn't the worst dad, I guess he could have always been better. I don't want to paint my dad in a bad light, but he's always been a bit overbearing and had a lot of expectations for me that he pushed so much, I'm sure it didn't help with how my mental state's progressed through the years. Really, it's still a thing I deal with to this day and the more I think about it, the more I understand my younger self's need for "better" father figures to attach myself to.

Kaede was definitely one of those characters, and with someone like my old RP friend fanning the flames, it was hard not to get attached to a source of escapism that I really craved and needed at the time. That and having a set up like that and also have a friend who funnily enough cosplayed as Kakashi at one point saying "she should be canon", well, that's how you make a 14/15 year old's day, haha.

Anyway, I do have a lot of older art for this character (plus a lot of newer stuff), that I'll put next. I'll try and put them in chronological order, starting with some of the older stuff I have.

Old Drawing 1

Old Drawing 2

Old Drawing 3

Old Drawing 4

Old Drawing 5

Old Drawing 6

She's had a few different outfits over the years, though I do have a lot more stuff of her in more random outfits not really connected to her "actual" design. You can tell I was going through that "young weeaboo" phase looking at them, cause there are some of her as kitsune, some of her and Kakashi transformed into dogs, lots of them with bad fashion sense, and even here, she used to have a giant, paper fan as a weapon, cause "they have those in anime". And yes, I know, Temari has a giant fan, but her's is actually like.. a bamboo folding one, while the one here is obviously just a silly paper one that again, you would see in anime as a gag item.

Also, a few notes about some of her outfit inspirations: her earliest outfit looked way too much like Sasuke's, which I wanted to stray away from, but was hard considering I insisted on keeping her color palette the blue/tan mix.

One reason for wanting to stray from that is because of Kaede's odd stance when it comes to Sasuke. Personally, he's not my favorite, but Kaede herself is at odds with him, because of Kakashi's focus on training Sasuke in the earlier part of the series, mainly because of their mutual connection that is the Sharingan. Kaede has a slight inferiority complex when it comes to this relationship and is a major source for her lack of self confidence in her abilities.

Also, one of the later designs is an obvious rip-off of Kakashi's outfit from the Gaiden storyline (the bit where he actually gets his Sharingan). I liked elements from it, but again, would go on to tweak it so it wasn't just stealing from another character. Of course, if you look at the designs (and naming conventions) for a lot of the characters that are related... well, sometimes it seems like they didn't try much harder, hahaha.

And as another note, the reason why some of these images have the dA watermark on it was because I got these from my storage on there and they had those enabled. For the next few, which aren't in storage, I'll just link to the actual dA posts. These are still fairly old at this point, cause I haven't posted a lot of the newer stuff on there or anywhere yet, cause I've been... just going crazy on making new stuff and not posting it.

https://www.deviantart.com/forte-girl7/art/Daddy-s-Girl-126086387

https://www.deviantart.com/forte-girl7/art/Naruto-Kaede-326539607

Those two are from 2009 and 2012, while the ones earlier were posted in 2007ish. Also, the age progression there is pretty similar to the current one, though in the most recent, her older outfit reflects the changes to the general Konoha shinobi found in Boruto.

Now, this is just all visual development for the character. When I say a lot, I mean, a lot, cause there's also a written development to go with this. Granted, a lot of it is more recent, but that's because of me being weird.

Some of the posts there on dA do have the startings of a character profile, but they always say "I'll post most later" or "I'm still working on her profile" or whatever and that never came to light. That's mainly because, as I've mentioned before, I'm oddly pick about how plausible my characters may be in the canon universe. Kaede is no exception and may be the one that really sparked how particular I am about it.

I've been meaning for the longest of times to actually write a fanfiction that more or less adds Kaede to the story, though through research/rethinking, I would now add events not directly connected to the manga/anime, which would be needed either way, cause it's not like I was gonna shove her in the background of every actual scene from Naruto's story. However, because Naruto was still ongoing when I got into the series, I decided to bide my time and wait until it ended and how things unfolded.

While now that it's ended, that means I can comb through everything and actually make sure everything's covered, but it was quite an thing to tough through, considering some of the things that happened in the later chapters of the manga. I don't want to spoil anything for anyone really, but the series is pretty old now at this point and into their next series anyway, and some of the stuff that they pull off and hope you accept in the end game of Naruto is a bit much and trust me, you do not want to get me started on THAT topic, hahaha.

Anyway, now I'll be sharing some of the stuff I've been working on the last bit of time to actually maybe see that long-form fanfiction come to fruition. Please note that a lot of them are still a work in progress, but they have come a long ways since those earlier profile/backstory promises. It turns out that sitting down and combing through stuff, even after the fact, is a lot of work and very time consuming, because again, there's a lot of baloney that Naruto really hopes you'd be fine with, when sometimes they themselves don't stay the most consistent, especially when it comes to their actual time line.

I'm trying really hard not to go on a rant here... so let's move on the links and I'll explain them one by one if needed.

Profile Here's Kaede's current overall profile. It includes the general things on a profile sheet, like name, appearance, personality, backstory, and the likes. This also covers the same parameters for Kaede through the year, because I want to be thorough cause I'm weird like that. I also have little skill charts that use the same ranking system found in the Naruto Character Guidebooks, because I guess I like to waste time, hahaha. The backstory part of this is also kind of serving as a rough draft/abridged version for certain story events I'd like to write out, so sorry if they read... weird.

Relationships This document goes into more detail of Kaede's relationships to other characters. Kakashi's isn't full filled out yet, though it should probably be one of the longest ones, but I've been focusing on other characters, mainly her extended family, that I've been adding to bolster her backstory. There are line breaks between certain groups of characters, and the order after Kakashi should be Kaede's actual parents, her extended family (mainly a lot of her mother's relatives), Kaede's teammate and sensei, Naruto and the others of Team 7/Kakashi, and then other characters from the show.

Supporting Profiles Now, because I'm making up a whole gang of extra characters for my silly little OC, that means they also need profiles for a bit more fleshing out of their own, so that's this document, cause I just don't know how to stop myself sometimes. These again follow an order in their appearance, going from her biological parents to extended family, then teammates, followed up by teammates/colleagues of her biological father.

Technique/Skill List Pretty self explanatory. There are technically two versions of this list, where the other is really just a list. This one is the spreadsheet that covers other parameters of the various techniques/skills/jutsu/whatever and where I keep other notes.

Timeline This one is pretty much the biggest pain the neck for me, because again, it's taking time to cross reference the canon timelines that sometimes muddle themselves up anyway and can be annoying, yet amusing to read. This timeline focuses mainly on characters directly involved with Kaede, such as her extended family/what have you, so it's not the same in-depth one that I've been using on the Naruto wiki. Again, I'm trying to put her into the story, but that doesn't mean she's present and/or relevant to everything, cause she wouldn't be, hahaha, though there are some events present that are only there as kind of reminders for what's taking place in the main storyline.

As seen in the supporting profiles doc, all the characters I've come up with have designs, too, or are in the process of getting them and I've posted sketches and finished versions of them on my Patreon, cause those are also still a work in progress. I want to say I'll post them when they're done, but with me, who knows when that'll be, so I'll just some of them here now:

Supporting Character Drawings

Anyway, I think I'm gonna wrap this one up, cause I've blabbed for long enough. I know not a lot was actually covered Kaede-wise here, but that's because a lot of it would just be repeats of the stuff covered in the way-too-many-documents-for-a-fan-character up there.

Also, like I said, this is probably the last Fan Character Flashback Friday, so I want to thank you all for taking this journey with me to the past to revisit some rather fond memories and fun designs.

#forte's art #forte's fan character flashback friday #fan character flashback friday #fan character #oc #original character #naruto #naruto oc #kaede #kaede hatake #kakashi hatake #fanart

9 notes · View notes

samuelpboswell · 3 years

Text

Boosting B2B Marketing Credibility with Social Proof and Influencers: 4 Tips

This is gonna be the greatest blog post EVER. Did you believe me there? You probably didn't. Sure, I might think it’s an awesome piece of content. But I’m not exactly an objective source. Now, if you were to come across a post on social media from someone you know and trust, linking to this blog post and saying it’s the best thing they’ve read all year? That’s a different story. Therein lies the immense value of social proof, which is only growing more impactful as businesses and society evolve into a new era. A survey from Kantar Media last year found that 93% of people trust brand recommendations from family and friends, while only 38% trust information from advertisers. Meanwhile, 84% of people say they trust online reviews as much as their friends. As a marketer, accepting this reality may cause some discomfort: We can’t control what people say! That’s why a great product and customer experience are table stakes. But when those pieces are in place, today’s marketers can take plenty of steps to strategically encourage and elevate social proof and influencer content.

Building Credibility for Your Brand the Right Way: 4 Key Steps

Going above and beyond with transparency, highlighting third-party voices, portraying influencer authenticity, and creating buzzworthy experiences are among the best ways to build credibility in our current business landscape. A closer look at each: #1: Embrace Radical Transparency In business, the term “radical transparency” is usually evoked as an internal management philosophy — keeping employees looped into everything that’s going on, good or bad, to increase engagement and investment. I feel the concept can also be applied externally. Heightened business transparency is largely happening on its own, in a digital environment where customers and communities can keep a closer eye on a company’s activities and positions. Why not lean into this transparency? When you proactively put everything out there for people to see, it fuels a perception that you’re not trying to hide anything. That’s a huge credibility booster. A few examples of transparency that might be considered “radical” but should really start to become the norm:

Openly acknowledge and address negative reviews instead of burying them

Share product/service pricing upfront instead of obscuring these important details

Own the mistakes you make as a company, and share what you learn from them

Recognize the relative strengths of your competitors in marketing materials, rather than playing up only their weaknesses

Be forthright about who your product or service is NOT a fit for

If there’s one thing business buyers don’t like, it’s surprises. Given the stakes, nobody wants to find out down the line that there’s an unexpected cost, or unmentioned implementation complexities, or unspoken functional limitations. Radical transparency helps eliminate surprises and can dramatically increase buyer confidence. #2: Put Third-Party Reviews and Analysis Forward As noted earlier, customers tend to be more interested in hearing what other people say about your solutions than what you say about them. That’s not to say a company can’t toot its own horn, but this should be balanced by objective third-party voices. Think about ways you can incorporate these trusted, unbiased perspectives into your own content. Highlight research from authoritative market analysis firms (e.g. studies from Gartner, Forrester, Nielsen) that helps establish a need for what you offer. Let trends and statistics do the talking. Build out authentic case studies that are more focused on illustrating your solution’s impact in a customer’s organization rather than just heaping lavish praise. And of course: Point prospective customers to user review sites so they can see for themselves how people describe experiences with your brand. A recent article at Forbes shares tips on getting more reviews and leveraging them effectively. [bctt tweet="“Customers tend to be more interested in hearing what other people say about your solutions than what you say about them.” — Nick Nelson @NickNelsonMN" username="toprank"] #3: Aim for Authenticity in Influencer Partnerships Influencer associations can be excellent sources of credibility for your brand … provided they are handled the right way. From our view at TopRank Marketing, that means taking a relationship-based approach more so than a transactional one. Influencers who are recognized, respected, and trusted in a particular industry or niche can be tremendously valuable advocates. But when your association with them is superficial, that value is lost. Customers will see through it. Nobody’s putting a lot of stock into the genuine sentiments behind a glowing social media post that has an #ad hashtag at the end. However, when you’re building long-term relationships with these influencers, to the point where they speak positively about your brand unprompted? When their audiences see them engaging with your people and co-creating impactful content? This is where the true credibility-boosting power of B2B influencer marketing lies. Helping forge these kinds of authentic influencer ecosystems is an area where our agency specializes, so feel free to give us a shout if you want to learn more. [bctt tweet="“Influencers who are recognized, respected, and trusted in a particular industry or niche can be tremendously valuable advocates.” — Nick Nelson @NickNelsonMN" username="toprank"] #4: Give People Something to Talk About Increasingly, this is the primary task of the new-age digital marketer: It’s not so much about coming up with different ways to say great things about your brand — it’s about coming up with different ways to get other people to say great things about your brand. How is this done? There are many ways, including:

Creation of compelling thought leadership that counters conventional wisdom and gets people talking.

Virtual events that bring together like-minded people around shared passions and interests pertinent to your industry.

Delivering notable customer experiences or content experiences that generate buzz on their own.

Providing exceptional employee experiences that compel team members to openly share how much they enjoy the company and culture.

Running polls, conversation-starters, and hashtags on social media that expand your brand’s relevant reach and connect it to key topics on your target audience’s mind.

Meanwhile, the type of radical transparency cited in Tip #1 can itself be a means to generate positive chatter about your brand and its credibility. In an older but still highly pertinent article for WIRED about the see-through CEO, Clive Thompson summarized why this is really the only way to go: “Here's the interesting paradox: The reputation economy creates an incentive to be more open, not less. Since Internet commentary is inescapable, the only way to influence it is to be part of it. Being transparent, opening up, posting interesting material frequently and often is the only way to amass positive links to yourself and thus to directly influence your Googleable reputation. Putting out more evasion or PR puffery won't work, because people will either ignore it and not link to it - or worse, pick the spin apart and enshrine those criticisms high on your Google list of life.” Be part of the commentary. Take the lead in key conversations. Engage with leaders in your space. Act in a way that inspires other people to speak highly of your brand. Credibility isn’t given; it’s earned. That’s a directive to which everyone across an organization must contribute. But marketers play a key role in earning and showcasing credibility for the brand, and I’d argue that it’s increasingly becoming our most critical job duty. Social proof and influencer marketing are vital cornerstones to doing it well. Looking for specific guidance on advancing brand credibility through your marketing strategy? Check out my post from last year featuring six tips for infusing credibility into B2B content.

The post Boosting B2B Marketing Credibility with Social Proof and Influencers: 4 Tips appeared first on B2B Marketing Blog - TopRank®.

from The SEO Advantages https://www.toprankblog.com/2021/10/boosting-b2b-marketing-credibility-with-social-proof-and-influencers/

0 notes

orbemnews · 3 years

Link

How Food Trucks Endured and Succeeded During the Pandemic This article is part of Owning the Future, a series on how small businesses across the country have been effected by the pandemic. The Covid pandemic hit California hard. It has seen well over 3.5 million cases and over 60,000 deaths. Scores of businesses have closed. But for Ana Jimenez the owner of Tacos El Jerry, a small fleet of food trucks in Santa Cruz County, it provided an opportunity to bring her business into the 21st century. Ms. Jimenez’s four trucks began taking orders through an app and a website, delivering directly to customers, and cultivating a customer base through a new social media presence. All of that added up to a significant increase in sales. “Our business grew,” said Ms. Jimenez, 50. “We even added a new truck. Credit goes to my son, Jerry, who is 23. We didn’t have anything on social media. He said, ‘we’re going digital on all of this, Mom.’” Half of her orders are now placed online, she said. Ms. Jimenez’s son created Facebook and Instagram pages for the food trucks, a social media advertising campaign and began accepting credit card purchases. “Each truck is now serving around 300 people per day, which translates to roughly $5,000 in sales daily,” Ms. Jimenez said. Food trucks — kitchens on wheels, essentially — are flexible by design and quickly became a substitute during the pandemic for customers who couldn’t dine indoors and coveted something different than their mainstream carryout options. That, in turn, has delivered a new client base to add on to an existing cadre of loyal followers. In a very real sense, food trucks are vehicles for equality in the post-pandemic world. “While the pandemic has certainly hurt the majority of small businesses, it has also pushed many to be more innovative by looking for new revenue streams and ways to reach customers,” said Kimberly A. Eddleston, a professor of entrepreneurship and innovation at Northeastern University. Like Ms. Jimenez, some businesses have “focused on ways to maintain their customer base by, for example, delivering products directly to customers,” Prof. Eddleston said. “While others have created products and services that attract new customers.” Luke Cypher, 34, for instance, expanded the already eclectic selections at his Blue Sparrow food trucks in Pittsburgh, adding pizza, four-packs of local beer, gift cards and five-ounce bottles of housemade hot sauce. Mr. Cypher’s main fare since he hit the streets in 2016 has been global street food. His menu carries a heavy Asian inspiration. There’s made-from-scratch kimchi on the menu daily. Dishes can include rice bowls, Vietnamese banh mi, falafel burritos, and a burger made with a ramen bun. During the pandemic, Mr. Cypher’s business took a hit when 24 festivals and over a dozen weddings where he was booked were canceled. “I switched gears to keep things as lean as possible,” Mr. Cypher said. He temporarily shut down a second food truck — a retrofitted 35-foot, 1956 Greyhound bus that he used for the big parties — and introduced a website to interact with his customers and an online ordering system for his smaller truck, which he usually parked at a neighborhood brewery. “I switched the menu to focus on soups, noodles, burritos and pressed sandwiches, so that the things that we were handing our customers would make it home and still be a good experience after they opened up the bag and took it out,” he said. Today in Business Updated May 21, 2021, 3:55 p.m. ET And he began to make and sell pizza one day a week at the kitchen where he used to do his prep work for the trucks before the pandemic. (The pizza, too, has an international flair: a banh mi pie, for example, made with pork or tofu, miso garlic sauce, mozzarella, pickled carrots, cucumbers, and cilantro.) Customers can order and pay online or by phone and schedule a time to pick up; they receive a text or an email when their order is ready. The kitchen “was already in place, so we turned around and said, well, what can we offer our customers in this unknown time that would be comforting,” Mr. Cypher said. “We had a wood-fired oven there that we use for bread baking, but basically it wasn’t being utilized.” Before the pandemic, Mr. Cypher was serving roughly 1,500 customers a week from his food truck. A weekly festival on weekends, with 5,000 people stopping by the bus, of course, ramped up that number. “The cool part is I was able to stay afloat because, unlike a restaurant with traditional seating, it was just myself, my sous-chef and his wife, who worked part-time,” he said. “We ended up serving roughly a hundred people a day, four or five days a week. So it wasn’t the numbers that we did before, but our lights were able to stay on because we had reduced a lot of costs that we had involved in running multiple rigs.” Mr. Cypher, however, opted not to use delivery apps like Uber Eats or Grub Hub. “I don’t want to hand my food off to somebody else,” he said. “If we weren’t going to have the one-on-one conversations with our customers, we were at least going to give it to them directly.” And like Tacos El Jerry, social media became a huge part of his marketing platform. “The pictures that we take and post on Instagram and Facebook let people feel like they’re a part of our truck family,” Mr. Cypher said. “Food trucks were well-equipped to withstand pandemic restrictions, as they’re naturally to-go and socially distanced businesses,” said Luz Urrutia, chief executive of Accion Opportunity Fund, a nonprofit organization providing small-business owners with access to capital, networks and coaching. “Many food truck owners stepped forward to seize opportunity during a time of great uncertainty,” she said. As Pittsburgh emerges from the pandemic, Mr. Cypher is adding a twist at his kitchen location. “We have licensing to offer beer on draft from our local breweries, so we’re going to have a small beer garden,” he said. “And that’s a revenue stream that we’re going to kind of lean into that we probably never would have done if not for Covid.” In 2020, Mr. Cypher’s food trucks had $200,000 in gross sales, down about 40 percent from the previous year, he said. “But with the new offerings, more efficiency and only running one rig, we were actually able to net enough to keep the business moving forward,” he said. “This year we’re already up about 30 percent from where we were at last year at this time.” For Ronicca Whaley, the chef behind the St. Petersburg, Fla.-based truck Shiso Crispy, timing was much tricker: she opened her first truck in November 2019, just a few months before the pandemic. And yet Ms. Whaley, 35, who offers handmade gyozas, bao buns and their signature dish, dirty rice, now has two trucks because of a strategy of regularly parking in certain neighborhoods and offering discounted and free meals outside a nearby Ronald McDonald House. (She added the second truck in January.) One challenge: “The internet here is shoddy. And cellphone service in different areas out here just doesn’t work,” she said. “During the height of the pandemic, I was consistently losing two or more transactions at my point of sale every shift.” Luckily, she was offered a special initiative for small business owners by Verizon Business: a year of complimentary connectivity and a 5G iPhone, as well as tools such as the Clover Flex point of sale program for touchless transactions. “It has digitally transformed my business,” Ms. Whaley said. She also signed on to an app, called Best Food Trucks, that allows customers near her to pre-order once they know her location for the day. “The inextricably connected stories of food trucks and Covid are a perfect microcosm of the undeniable reality that women, immigrants and people of color, historically relegated to the edges of the economy, are actually the foundation upon which the next economy must be built,” said Nathalie Molina Niño, author of “Leapfrog: The New Revolution for Women Entrepreneurs.” But the silver lining from the pandemic for some operators is more personal — including bringing families together. “I have a ton of wisdom about how to operate food trucks and cooking,” Ms. Jimenez said. “It’s the coming together of the generations that made the business stronger now and for the future.” Source link Orbem News #Endured #Food #Pandemic #Succeeded #trucks

0 notes

kathydsalters31 · 4 years

Text

12 Scary Dog Costumes for Your Spooky Pooch

Our internet site uses cookies. By continuing to use our website, you consent to our use of cookies. To see what cookies we offer as well as establish your very own preferences, please review our Cookie Policy. Learn More.

Updated September 4, 2020|Adhering with Your Dog This blog post includes associate web links. Find out more right here. Table of Contents Cute canine outfits are very easy to find. That does not like the

concept of a dog impersonated a ladybug, strawberry, or fairy? Several of us,

nonetheless, don’t have a pet dog that does charming. They’re the canine ghouls as well as spirits of Halloween, as well as who are we to stifle their demand to terrify the community? Fortunate for us, there are lots of scary dog costumes around for Halloween. Note: When searching for a Halloween costume for your pet dog, one of the most vital factor to consider is dimension. Since pet outfits are not all produced similarly, your pet could be a medium in one outfit and also an extra-large in another, so make sure to determine your dog and also use your family pet’s dimensions as well as the item dimension graph to guide you to their best fit.< iframe src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Z7kYU-ET4ok"size

=” 560″height =”315″frameborder=”0″allowfullscreen=”allowfullscreen”> 12 Scary Dog Costumes for Halloween Keep reading to get influenced, and also help your pet be the frightening(cuddle)monster you understand they can be.

Inspired by the infamous viral video a couple of years back, dressing your canine up as a scary spider remains a preferred choice. This creepy-crawly choice comes in several sizes, from tiny to big; we tried dimension tool on a variety of workplace pets, including Dosha the Beagle as well as Shirley the Pug.

While neither dog was overly passionate to flaunt the outfit, the costume itself was simple to put on by means of 2 front leg sleeves and a simple velcro waist. The fit was very good; not also tight to constrict motion or remove blood circulation anywhere, and also it remained on both canines firmly. So for beagles, pugs, and various other small-medium pet dog breeds, the costume in medium runs true to dimension. (To coin an oft-used fashion expression, they both used it well!)

The tarantula was likewise among the better-designed options we’ve run into in the world of canine costumes, with a very easy to put on, one-piece layout made from a plush polyester as well as realistic-looking spidery information that weren’t also heavy or overly-complicated. Squeezable luxurious legs with an internal cord can be curved as well as shaped right into the perfect sneaking crawler shape, and further details such as crawler “hair” as well as a hood with fangs aid complete the appearance.

So, even if puppers might really feel warm regarding this outfit, you can feel excellent its uncomplicated style will not injure or extremely stress your pet dog– as well as will certainly no doubt delight your family and also visitors.

Store on Amazon

As long as we’re looking at creepy-crawlies, look into this menacing scorpion outfit

for pets. It’s ideal for desert dwellers as well as

entomologists alike as well as makes sure to make at the very least one person dive when your dog enters into the room. Features: Sectioned luxurious body with pinchers as well as spiked tail for a sensible scorpion appearance Velcro neck and also tummy bands for a protected fit Customers note it runs a bit tiny, so examine measurements before you purchase Shop on Amazon Dress your pet dog up like one of the most frightening slashers in scary movies with this creepily precise Freddy Krueger outfit. The candy striped coat, brown hat, and also dog-safe” razor “(material)cuff will have you screaming in terror … or delight. Attributes: Officially licensed Nightmare on Elm Street costume Sweater is a little bit elastic to accommodate a canine stomach Some

reviewers said their pet really did not such as the cuff, but the costume functions without it Store on Amazon If your partnerships swing much more Voorhies than Krueger, don’t skip this Jason outfit for pet dogs. The outfit comes total with a hockey mask and jacket with Jason’s name on the back. All you need to include is an axe. Functions: Lightweight mesh hockey jacket remains on with Velcro Mask is made from soft foam Option(

per a couple of customers)to tie the mask to the dog’s collar as opposed to use the

flexible strap Shop on Amazon If you’re going terrifying, why not go timeless? This skeletal system hoodie shows off the spooky things on your pet dog’s insides, as well as kicks it up a notch with glow-in-the-dark bones and an ominous smiling head. Best of all, it’s extremely comfy cotton-blend for your pet, and also easy to place on as well as remove. Functions:”Charge”outfit under a light before putting on your dog for added radiant power Soft cotton-blend t-shirt is device cleanable Some reviewers note that the hat does not stay on, yet it doesn’t really matter since the shirt is so cute Store on Amazon Staying in the world of old fashioned scary stuff, this white tee shirt with a supernatural face heeds back to Halloween’s past. The ribbed sleeves, neck, and waistband aid maintain this dog tee shirt in place, while the white product maintains your pet visible in dark light. Features: Shirt can be machine-washed; simply surrender the mild cycle Sized for extra-small type canines Usage fabric pens or paint to add custom-made attributes Store on Amazon

Eek! A monster! Have no concern, this fuzzy blue scary pet dog outfit will have you screaming with pleasure. It includes a furry head collar and 2 matching leg fluffies. Your canine will need to give their own ferocious holler. Some reviewers keep in mind the fur sheds. Features

: Velcro assists pieces stay on Best for canines with even more narrow heads Store on Amazon

A simple costume for a pet

that doesn’t feel like using a lot more than a harness, this bat costume

states”terror of the evening” while still fitting. Examine the seller’s sizing notes to make sure an excellent fit for your canine or pet cat. Attributes: Black really felt product is lightweight Fastens with Velcro at the neck as well as upper body Spruce up your pet dog’s wings with radiance paint or blood-red lines for additional scary! Store on Amazon We can not include a Halloween bat without a Dracula! Transform your bat pet dog right into a very fearsome vampire with this black as well as red cloak. It’s a one-piece terrifying canine costume that will not drag your pet dog down as they mysteriously re-emerge and also go away on Halloween evening. The extensive collar can stand up directly for an authentic Dracula appearance or fold up down for comfort. Features:

Easy to put on and take off Integrated unclear fastener band keeps the cape in position Can be found in canine as well as cat dimensions Locate on Chewy Add some creepiness to your

dog’s Halloween look with this funny, frightening

headpiece. The light-weight material building makes it comfortable for your pet. It’s a fantastic costume for pups that will not put on clothing however will happily prance around with a hat on. Features: Designed with elastic straps and also flexible toggle Quick and also easy to hop on your pet dog Comes in 3 sizes to better fit a range of pet breeds Find on Chewy

Come on. Clowns are frightening. This horrible costume comes with a vibrant shaken up collar and spooky, pointed hat that remains on with elastic(some customers note that the hat really did not remain on their dog long ). Gigantic clown footwear and also distressing laugh not included.

Features:

Collar slides on and also off quickly One size fits most dogs We all concur clowns are terrifying, appropriate?

OK, currently this clown I believe we can all agree is very, really terrifying. It’s Pennywise from Steven King’s It, as well as it’s a truly distressing Halloween search for your pet. This terrifying pet costume covers the front fifty percent of your pet’s body as well as makes them appear like a tall-walking, sadistic clown. Yikes.

Attributes:

Attached arms, a plush red balloon and wig cap consisted of

Officially licensed Warner Bros. . It movie product

Step-in t-shirt is simple to put on as well as off your dog

Seriously however. Clowns. Shudder.

Locate on Chewy

And also If All Else Fails …

Scary dog outfits don’t always need to be deliberately frightening– as you can see. You can constantly clothe your pet dog up as something adorable and also let their creepy side come out by itself.

A Lot More Dog Halloween Fun

sidebar

The Dog People E-newsletter

source http://www.luckydogsolutions.com/12-scary-dog-costumes-for-your-spooky-pooch/ from Lucky Dog Solutions https://luckydogsolutions.blogspot.com/2020/09/12-scary-dog-costumes-for-your-spooky.html

0 notes

kadobeclothing · 4 years

Text

What is Local Advertising and How Does it Work? [+ Examples]

A couple of years ago, I ran to every grocery store and convenience store in my area, looking for one specific thing.

I wasn’t going to rest until I found it, and it took months upon months of searching high and low, almost every week, until finally, my eyes settled on the slender, enticing beauty in front of me, right there in my local grocery store. A bottle of Coke with my name on it. Finally, I could indulge in a drink I don’t even prefer, just because my name was on it. This is the effect of the Share A Coke campaign: a global company taking steps to localize their efforts.

The great thing about this type of marketing, called local marketing, is that it favors small businesses. You don’t have to be the Coca-Cola Corporation to start a local marketing campaign and have it be effective. Here, let’s explore what local marketing is, and how you can use it to maximize your own marketing efforts in 2020. What is local marketing? Local marketing is the strategy of targeting audiences close to the location of a business with messages reflecting the local market. A business wanting to use local slang or influencers to attract customers living nearby would benefit from local marketing. The messages using this method relies on proximity. Local marketing materials engage with the communities to build a presence. Tactics like local influencers, advertisements, or hosting public events are all examples of local marketing. Check out this Instagram post from beauty brand Frank Body. Frank is using local marketing by connecting their products to a cause specific to their home region, in Australia:

A post like this shows how local marketing can start small and then expand to the masses, by having the sale apply globally. This sale builds Frank’s reputation as a brand that cares about the local population. Small businesses can benefit exponentially from local marketing, especially in building a loyal customer base by using local assets. However, without an understanding of local audiences, you lose that foundation for how you can connect with a crucial part of your market. For instance, let’s say you lead marketing efforts for a tech company, and after conducting market research, you’ve found that a common perception about your brand is that your laptops are of lower-quality than competitors. To switch that perception, you might invite students, young professionals, and business owners in your area to perform important job functions on your laptops in-store, documenting opinions. After, the participants share high praise on social media to their followers, tagging your brand. Using those posts, you have now created a user-generated marketing campaign. This is how local marketing shows that focusing on locality and market research can resonate with a wide audience as a result. Let’s look at some more ideas to crack into the world of local marketing. Local Marketing Ideas These ideas can be scaled to your business and its needs. Remember, you don’t always need millions of dollars to be effective, you just have to focus in the right areas. Use these examples as inspiration when shaping your campaign. 1. Support a cause. Does your brand want to lead a cause marketing campaign? This can be woven into local marketing. Conduct market research on social issues important to your target audience, like Smirnoff did with inclusivity. Through research, Smirnoff found that 12% of millennials identified as transgender or gender non-conforming. To show their support, the company created a campaign called, “We’re Open.” This London-based campaign took action to help marginalized groups safely at night by enlisting the help of volunteers with the help of Westminster Council. By taking action in a specific location with a specific community, Smirnoff solidified their stance on a global issue and took action to support it. 2. Personalize your efforts. One of the key aspects of local marketing is how personalized it can be. Like the “Share a Coke” campaign, personalized messages can make consumers feel special. Coca-Cola isn’t the only global brand making local strides. Have you ever seen the location-based mugs in Starbucks? The colorful mugs usually come with the city you’re nearest to printed on them, or with popular landmarks that define the area. It’s a fun way to be proud of where you’re from or collect a souvenir on vacation. This interactive “Mug Map” on Starbucks’s website shows how the massive coffee company uses their global resources to keep local marketing a prominent feature of their brand. You don’t have to look far to feel included. Personalized marketing doesn’t have to be super expensive, though, either. If you’re a B2B company, think about how customers in Perth, Australia can benefit from an Australia Day promotion. 3. Get focused on demographics. Let’s say you want to tap into a certain group within your total audience. Activia wanted to do the same, and started conversations about the well-being of women after recognizing that typically, women are their own worst critic. They jumpstarted this campaign with a video that showed interviews with American women talking about their connection to well-being, and specifically targeted women in the U.S. between the ages of 25 and 55. By doing this, Activia started a conversation in a demographic that makes up a large portion of its target audience. They also improved the perception of their brand in this demographic globally by focusing on experiences to which other women can relate. 4. Host local events. Similar to the tech company example (above), grocery store Lidl found, after market research, that the public perception of their brand was centered around low-quality food. In order to change that, they invited food specialists based in London to a private farmers market in a popular area. The result of this was high praise on social media about the high-quality of Lidl food at competitive prices. The brand used some of the praise on social media on banners in their store, sparking a domino effect of praise and brand awareness in the London area. By holding community-specific events, you can ignite the interest of customers in a certain area and invite them to explore your brand. A public demo of products would be a great way for a small B2B company to build a positive reputation. So now that you have a couple of ideas of how local marketing can look, you’re probably wondering how much this is all going to cost you. Let’s explore that next. How much does local advertising cost? It probably doesn’t come as a surprise that the cost of ads fluctuates depending on your goal. Even so, there are handy benchmarks to point to when considering online ad costs. Here are a few of them for the most popular ad platforms, based in CPM (cost per impressions), unless otherwise noted. Google Ads: $2.32 per click Facebook: $1.72 LinkedIn: $2 Instagram: $5 Snapchat: $2.95 Microsoft Ads: $1.54 per click Online advertising can cost thousands per month for small businesses, so make sure your decisions are informed when you make them. Ad costs can also change based on location, and that’s where location targeting comes in. Location targeting allows you to pick and choose certain geographic locations to advertise in. This can tie in directly with local marketing. If you only want ads to appear in a certain city, region, state, country, or continent, you can. What’s helpful about location targeting is that you can set up ads that are most beneficial to certain audiences to make sure you’ll have a more impactful ROI. Most ad platforms have the option for location targeting, so be sure to look for that when considering ad space. Additionally, when you buy ad space, track your analytics so you can measure performance. When it comes to ad tracking, HubSpot has an ad tracking platform within the CRM. It does the heavy lifting of data collection for you and measures the ROI of your campaigns, allowing you to sync real-time results with the rest of the campaign. Advertising online can be a tricky business, and if you’re just starting out with the possibility, we have a complete guide available with everything you need to know about it. Next time I share a Coke with someone, I’ll think about the market research Coca-Cola most likely conducted to figure out how many bottles of certain names to send to specific regions. How will you use local marketing to impact your business?

Source link

source https://www.kadobeclothing.store/what-is-local-advertising-and-how-does-it-work-examples/

0 notes

wjwilliams29 · 5 years

Text

How to Write SEO Friendly Title Tags | Guide & Best Practices

Titles are among the most important things in SEO. But, although it is very basic to have your keywords inside the title, it isn’t always easy to write SEO friendly title tags. That’s why we’ve prepared this guide and set of best practices you need to follow in order to have well optimized titles on all of your website’s pages.

If there’s one thing I’ve noticed during many years of practicing SEO, it’s that people heavily neglect titles. Countless times have I been told – “I’ve worked with an SEO agency before, but with no results” – just to see that the “agency” hasn’t even optimized something as basic as the title tag.

What Are Page Title Tags?

Why Are Title Tags Important for SEO?

What’s the Difference Between H1 Tags and Title Tags?

SEO Title Tags Tips & Best Practices

Write the title for humans first

Keep your titles short and to the point

Try adding the main keyword closer to the beginning

If possible, try optimizing the title for multiple keywords

Try to avoid keyword cannibalization with other articles

Make your title catchy to improve CTR

Fill short titles with calls to action

Make your article & title look fresh

Back up your title tag with relevant content

Use different titles for SEO & Social Media

How to Craft an SEO Friendly Title Tag

Step 1: Choose your keywords wisely

Step 2: Draft your title tag

Step 3: Optimize the title tag

How To Write Bulk (Auto-generated) Title Tags for eCommerce Websites

Why Is Google Showing a Different/Wrong Title Tag?

What Are Page Title Tags?

You might think that the title tag is the phrase you write in WordPress or whatever platform you use and which represents the title of your page/article. However…

The title tag is actually an HTML element which serves a number of key roles in browsers, search engines and on the web, in general.

Like any other HTML tag, the title meta tag is surrounded by angle brackets and it has a start tag <title> and an end tag </title>. The actual title is found between those tags.

The title of this particular article you’re reading right now is written as follows:

<title>How to Write SEO Friendly Title Tags | Guide & Best Practices</title>

If you hit CTRL + U on your Windows machine (I don’t know the combination for Mac OS Safari) or right click anywhere on the article and hit View Source, you will be able to spot the title tag in its true form.

If you can’t see it, use CTRL + F to search for the start tag <title>.

The title tag’s contents are also displayed inside the browser tabs. You can hover over them to view the full title of a web page.

However, titles aren’t there just to look pretty. They serve a purpose, especially for search engines and SEO.

Why Are Title Tags Important for SEO?

The title tags are considered to be an important SEO ranking factor. There are multiple reasons why titles are important for SEO. The first one would be that it’s the main thing users see when they search something on Google or any other search engine.

Unless specified otherwise, the title meta tag will also be used on most social media platforms when sharing a link.

You might notice a slight difference between the Google title and the Facebook title. Truth is that the original title is actually the one in the Facebook post.

Our homepage’s title tag is actually “SEO Tools to Increase Your Traffic – cognitiveSEO” but on Google it’s “cognitiveSEO: SEO Tools to Increase Your Traffic”.

Why is it different in the Google search results? Well, it’s because sometimes, Google tends to rewrite titles. It’s not something we did on purpose. Google chose to do it.

The ‘brand first’ rewrite is one of the most common title rewrites. It usually happens only with the homepage. As you can see, the pricing page has the branding at the end of the title.

We’ll talk more about title rewrites towards the end of the article, so keep reading.

What’s the Difference Between H1 Tags and Title Tags?

Although they seem very similar and do share some similarities, there is a pretty big difference between the title tag and the H1 tag.

They are completely different HTML tags (<title></title> vs <h1></h1>) and serve different purposes.

The big main difference between the Title Tag and the H1 Tag is that the Title Tag does not show on the web page itself.

The Title Tag’s main purpose is to show on search engines and external websites that make a reference to your web page’s title.

On the other side, the H1 shows on the webpage or within the website itself.

This isn’t always the case and it depends on the CMS you’re using. However, most Content Management Systems out there tend to use the H1 tag as the on-page title.

Most of the time, the Title Tag and the H1 Tag are identical. For example, in WordPress, when you create a new blog post and write the title, you’re actually writing the H1 Tag. WordPress then pulls that information and also adds it to the Title Tag.

However, if you use an SEO plugin such as Yoast SEO, you can specify a custom SEO Title Tag which will be different from the H1.

This means you can show something on your website but something different in the search engines. This is useful as you can add multiple keywords into your H1 tag when the Title Tag is too long and doesn’t fit.

Here’s one example of a longer H1 tag:

And the shorter Title Tag accompanying it, that fits the SERPs:

Another big difference is that there can be multiple H1s on a web page, although we recommend using H2 and H3 tags for multiple subtitles and sticking with a single H1 tag.

For example, on the blog page, WordPress automatically converts all the blog posts H1s to H2s, as the H1 of the blog page is “The SEO Blog from cognitiveSEO”.

On the other side, it’s crucial that your website have only one title tag per page. Multiple title tags can negatively impact your rankings, so make sure you don’t do that.

SEO Title Tags Tips & Best Practices

Before we talk about actually crafting your SEO titles, we have to make sure you’re following the best practices.

Here’s a list of things that you should try to constantly keep in mind when you’re writing your titles. Once you know these, writing an SEO friendly title meta tag should be pretty easy!

Write the title for humans first

I’m writing this first because it’s very important. Sure, the titles are read by robots and algorithms and they’re the ones that rank your site.

However, when they finally make it to the top, titles are read by humans, who eventually dictate if they will click on it or not! If they don’t click on it, the algorithms will know your title isn’t a great one.

Try to avoid keyword stuffing and instead focus on being relevant.

User intent is also an important factor. What are your customers looking for? Are you writing your title for a commercial keyword or for an informational one?

Try to think what your target audience and customers would click on. You can always take a look at what your competition is doing. Don’t copy, but get inspired. The top positions are clearly doing at least something right.

Keep your titles short and to the point

When writing your title tag for SEO purposes, one of the first things you have to keep in mind is that the title has to be short.

Why?

If your title tags are too long, Google will make them shorter and will add […] at the end. This process is called truncation and it looks just like this:

This won’t directly impact your SEO but it can affect your CTR, which will eventually impact positions. Generally, you want to keep your title short enough to fit the Google search results.

How long can your title be? Generally, it’s a good idea to keep the title tag lengths between 60 to 70 characters. However, Google actually has a limit of 600 pixels in which it displays the title and, because different characters have different widths, the limit number might be different.

That’s why it’s a better idea to use tools such as the Yoast SEO plugin to make sure your title fits properly.

If you don’t use WordPress or another CMS and cannot install an SEO plugin on your web host, you can always use a tool such as MetaTags.io to quickly check if your title, URL and meta description are displaying properly in the search engine result pages.

You can then manually add your titles and meta tags for SEO on your website, regardless of your platform or web host.

Keep in mind that it’s also a bad idea to keep your title too short. Too short titles might not grab the user’s attention either.

Quick tip: You can use | instead of – as a separator in your title sections. | has less pixels than – and in some situations it can help you get a fully displayed title, without having to remove any words.

Try adding the main keyword closer to the beginning

Google puts more weight on the keywords that are closer to the beginning. This also boosts the click through rate, as users click more on the results which contain the keywords they have just searched for.

Sometimes, you won’t be able to add the focus keyword with the most search volume right at the beginning.

For example, the primary keyword with the most search volume for this article is “title tags SEO”. However, that’s pretty hard to get inside a title and still make it sound good and natural.

Google is smart enough to figure out what an article is about, but you have to give it some good hints. If you give the right hints, it will figure it out easier and will reward you for it with better rankings.

So, writing “SEO Title Tags” instead of “Title Tags SEO” won’t be a big problem.

Quick Tip: If you also do Google Adwords, it’s a good idea to follow the best practices offered there. Google spends a lot of time perfecting CTR, so they definitely know what users want to click.

If possible, try optimizing the title for multiple keywords

Try to keep them in order. For example, this article is optimized for the following keywords:

“how to write seo friendly title tags”

“seo friendly title tags”

“seo title tags guide”

“seo title tags best practices”

If you look at the title of this article, you’ll see that you can find all these phrases in order, from left to right, although there might be some other words in-between.

The keywords must also align with what you have to say in the article. You shouldn’t include keywords just because they have a high search volume.

Optimizing one article for too many keywords is a bad idea. You might try to kill two birds with a stone. For example, if you write an article entitled “SEO Guide”, don’t expect it to rank for “keyword research”, “onpage optimization”, “link building”, etc.

Take advantage of the H1 Tag as well. If you can’t fit all the keywords you find relevant into the title, you can squeeze a couple more in the H1. Make sure you keep the focus keyword in the H1 as well.

Also, don’t forget the meta descriptions. You should add your keywords there as well, as Google tends to ignore your meta description if it doesn’t contain the keywords the user is searching for.

Try to avoid keyword cannibalization with other articles

You should take care of this before you even start writing your article. Check if your site doesn’t already have a page optimized for very similar keywords.

In other words, you need to have unique titles for your articles, each targeting a specific topic and set of keywords.

However, writing separate articles for each and every keyword is also a bad idea! You’ll end up with an issue called keyword cannibalization, when too many articles are competing for the same keywords.

For example, if I had two separate articles for “how to write seo title tags” and “seo title tags best practices” they would both compete for the keyword “seo title tags”.

Sure, you could still optimize them separately and they might even rank the way you want. However, if you start having more and more articles that target the same keywords, it might become harder and harder to rank with them.

So, since both of these keywords cover similar topics (regarding writing title tags for SEO) I’ve decided to try and optimize the article for both keywords.

However, for a completely different topic such as “Do Title Tags Affect SEO?” I would definitely write a completely separate article.

Cannibalization can also happen often when you publish a lot of content. When you’re writing 3 pieces a month for 2 years straight, you sometimes simply forget you’ve written about a topic before. I’ve done this mistake before.

That’s why we’re trying to cover as much of a topic as possible in a single article. Chances are that we won’t be writing something specifically for writing title tags again. We will only improve this article when the time comes.

However, that doesn’t mean you can’t add something about titles in another article. For example, you can have an H2 section about titles and how to write them in an SEO Optimization Guide. You can then use this content to improve your internal linking strategy.

Make your title catchy to improve CTR

The first thing potential readers see about your article when they search for a keyword on Google is your title tag. If that title tag doesn’t convince them to click, Google will observe that and consider it as a negative signal.

On the other hand, if more users click on your title, Google will see that as a positive signal and reward your website with better positions.

So, if your article is currently ranking #3 and out of 1,000 impressions, 18% of the clicks go to your article, 12% to the #2 spot and 25% to the #1 spot, you have a high change of switching seats with the #2 spot, to your benefit.

That’s why you have to make your title catchy. You can do this by adding emotion to your title or words that increase CTR such as “free”, “example” or even numbers (7, 21, 77 etc).

Here are a couple of examples:

5 Keyword Research Tips That Will Blow Your Mind

Best Free SEO Tools to Help You Improve Your Rankings in 2019

However, keywords have a higher priority, at least until you get your article to the top. Until you get to page 1, almost nobody except the search engines will see your article anyway.

Don’t bother testing the CTR by changing the title until you’re at least on page #1 of Google. Also, keep in mind that any modifications can impact your rankings negatively as well.

For example, if a no. 1 position increase on the main keyword resulted in 100 more visitors per month but the trade off in modifying your title would be to remove a set of keywords that could bring 200 visitors per month, then it’s not a good trade-off.

If your article is already ranking #1, you should’t make any changes until your competitors rank better than you.

Quick tip: You can use ▷ in front of your title to make it stand out from the crowd. You can also try adding emojis to your titles. where it makes sense. However, don’t turn your title into a clown (no offense intended to any clown SEO readers). Keep it civil.

Fill short titles with calls to action

If your main keyword is very short and you don’t have any secondary keywords that are relevant or make sense to add into your title, add a call to action or try to make it catchy.

For example, if your title is simply “Ski Rental Prices” and there are no other keywords that have search volume or make sense targeting, then you can add “50% Discount for 1st Time Clients” or “Best Prices in the Entire Resort”.

This way, you are taking advantage of the real estate instead of wasting it.

Make your article & title look fresh

Convince your potential readers that the article is relevant by adding the current year inside your article’s title. If you have a topic that keeps changing or evolving, it’s always a good idea to keep updating your articles.

However, once you update it, make sure you let your users know about this. Here are some examples from our blog:

Are Web Directories Still Relevant for SEO in 2019?

(This article was written a long time ago and updated this year).

21 Effective Low Effort & High Return SEO Techniques for 2019

(This article was written as new this year).

You can also add these keywords in the meta description if they don’t fit inside the title, although it’s better if they are in the title as well.

When you update articles, make sure you don’t also modify the URL. The URL should never be changed, if possible.

Back up your title tag with relevant content

The title is a very important ranking factor. However, there is a ranking factor more important than the title: the content itself!

That’s why it’s always a good idea to back up your title with relevant content. You can do this by adding relevant keywords in your content.

You can find these keywords easily by using the cognitiveSEO Keyword Tool & Content Assistant.

Also, make sure you avoid what SEOs call keyword stuffing. This occurs when a particular keyword or set of keywords is found too often inside an article.

Use different titles for SEO & Social Media

If you use social media to promote your content (and you should) you can always use different titles for different platforms.

By default, social media platforms take their titles from the title meta tag. However, you can use protocols such as Open Graph or Twitter Cards to set custom titles for your social media posts.

This can help boost your traffic and engagement, as you can stick with using keywords on your SEO title, while using something catchy and rich on emotion on your social media posts.

If you use WordPress, you can quickly do this via the Yoast SEO plugin. You can even specify a different description excerpt and image. This comes in handy in case the thumbnail image sizes on your website don’t match the ones on Facebook.

On a custom platform you can manually add the meta tags into the HTML:

OG example for title: <meta property=”og:title” content=” “/>. The title goes between the apostrophes under the content attribute. This title will show on Facebook instead of the title tag itself.

How to Craft an SEO Friendly Title Tag

Once you have the best practices in mind, you can start actually creating your title. However, step one doesn’t involve any writing!

Step 1: Choose your keywords wisely

Everything in SEO starts with keyword research. Without it, you’re venturing into the dark. You don’t know if the keywords have any search volume, you don’t know your competition and you don’t even know if your content is relevant.

Make sure you pick a primary keyword to target for your article. You can then pick a set of secondary & long tail keywords if they fit.

For example, in an article in Romanian which I worked on for a client, we decided to write about the primary keyword “weight loss exercises”.

However, you can always have secondary keywords, especially if you’ve decided to target more long tail phrases, with less traffic and competition.

The final title ended up begin “Best & Most Efficient Weight Loss Exercises You Can Do At Home”.

This title targets multiple keywords: “weight loss exercises”, “best weight loss exercises”, “efficient weight loss exercises”, “weight loss exercises at home”, “best weight loss exercises at home”, “efficient weight loss exercises at home”.

While this article is primarily optimized for “weight loss exercises”, it will gain traction a lot slower for this keyword as it is more competitive. Meanwhile, the other long tail phrases will bring traffic as the competition is lower and they will rank high easier.

Step 2: Draft your title tag

If you’re on WordPress, there is a dedicated field for the Title. By default, what you fill there will act as both the Title and the H1 tags.

You can use the Yoast SEO plugin as mentioned above to differentiate these two.

If you have a custom made website, ask your developer where the <title> meta tag is generated from and insert your title there.

Often times, new webmasters ask themselves if they should write the title before or after they write the article.

Well… Yes. You should write the title before the article, as well as improve it later on after the article has been written.

Writing the title first will help you outline the general idea of the article. However, the title ultimately represents the article, so until the article has been written the final title remains uncertain.

Step 3: Optimize the title tag

As you write your article/webpage, you might notice that there are new ideas that pop up in your head and new subtopics that you want to cover. Some of them might even be relevant enough to be included in the title as well.

That’s why you often have to rewrite your title tag to better fit your content. If the title tag is not relevant, it won’t be as effective.

Optimizing title tags isn’t always an easy task. If you want to include multiple keywords while still keeping the focus on the main one, things can get tricky.

Count in the best practice of making it catchy and you really don’t have enough space to write everything you want!

That’s why it’s a good idea to keep the SEO Title for SEO and take advantage of Open Graph and Twitter Cards to optimize your titles for social media as well.

However, one rule to keep in mind here is to try and keep things simple. Overly complicated titles might do more harm than good.

After you publish the article, you have to keep an eye on how the title is performing. We all know that SEO takes time. At first, it won’t be ranking very high.

Monitor your article with Google Analytics and the Google Search Console to see how it performs. Once it gets to page #1 or the search results, take a look at the click through rate.

If the article starts stagnating on the 5th or 4th spot, you can try to play with the titles & meta descriptions to improve your CTR. This will result in higher rankings if you do things well.

Keep in mind that this can also negatively impact your rankings. For example, in an attempt to gain more clicks, you remove a long tail keyword from your title which will most probably result in a drop in rankings for that query.

However, it might be a good trade-off if your CTR for the primary keyword increases and brings in more visitors than the other long tail keyword would have brought.

How to Write Bulk (Auto-generated) Title Tags for eCommerce Websites

So now you know how to write an SEO friendly title tag for each and every page or article on your website.

But Adrian, what if I have thousands and thousands of pages and can’t afford to write titles for each and every one of them?

That’s a good question! Often times, you can’t afford to write a title for each and every post on your website. It simply takes too much time and it isn’t practical.

In this case, you have to dynamically set up your titles. This is usually done using the CMS. If you’re on WordPress, the Yoast SEO plugin can definitely help you. Just go to the Search Appearance Settings and you can set up templates for content types:

You can also have a template for your meta description and even set up custom variables to make the titles exactly the way you want. Maybe you want to add size or weight into your titles automatically because that’s what your users seek on your products.

Other platforms might have similar plugins. Just search the web for them. Magento, for example, already does this out of the box, as it is a platform specifically designed for eCommerce and hosting a ton of products and categories.

If you’re on a custom platform, then the variables must probably be set up into the database and called in the title tag dynamically using PHP. If you don’t know how to do that, then you should get in touch with your developer.

Here are some examples of good title structures for eCommerce sites or websites where manually writing each title isn’t an option:

Product Name | Your Brand

Product Name | Category | Your Brand

Product Name | Call to Action | Your Brand

Service | Location | Your Brand

This way you can generate some templates that will automatically write titles for your products and category pages.

However, for those important pages you should spend some extra time doing the proper keyword research, analyzing the competition and crafting unique titles and descriptions.

If you really want to see results, the best shot is to seek out those pages with good results and traffic and to properly optimize them. This includes writing unique titles for them.

You can find those pages in your Search Console or in Google Analytics. You can also determine those pages from keyword research.

Why Is Google Showing A Different/Wrong Title Tag For My Site?

The one true answer here is because it can. However, there are multiple reasons why Google might choose a different title for your site.

The first one is obviously that your titles are simply bad. If the title of your Homepage is Homepage, then you’d probably be grateful rather than concerned anyway.

Google wants to show the most relevant title possible for the user. Here’s a quick example of how Google does that.

If I search for “do meta descriptions affect seo” this is the title we get from the SERPs:

If we also add the brand to the query, “do meta descriptions affect seo cognitiveseo”, Google modifies the title tag.

This is Google trying to prove to the user that the results it is showing are the most relevant ones. They include the brand the user was searching for.

Another example was mentioned before, where the brand name inside a title was moved from the end of the title to the front for a branded search.

In these cases the keyword was in the title already. However, Google might get the required keywords from the content itself, be it from general paragraphs or headings.

This “rewriting” also happens with the meta descriptions. In fact, the very article I’ve mentioned above has a different meta description.

The original meta description is “This description might influence whether you visit our site or not. So, do meta description tags affect SEO? If you haven’t figured it out yet, click here.”

However, Google chose to show the direct answer to the question. Unfortunately, this isn’t in our best interest, as answering that question directly might result in users not clicking through to reach our website!

It is however in Google’s best interest, as the more time users spend on Google, the more ads they see and the more money Google makes.

Secondly, your titles might be taken from anchor texts of both internal and external links pointing to your pages.

This usually happens when your pages are blocked from being crawled and indexed.

Not being able to reach your page and read its title, if Google finds a URL pointing to your page on another website, it can still index it. If that URL is under an anchor text, that anchor text can be considered as a title for the page.

This case is extreme and if you’re blocking pages from being indexed, you have greater concerns than title rewrites.

Last but not least, it is possible that the Google Cache is simply outdated. If you have recently changed your title, it might take some time until Google recrawls your page and sees the modification.

You can try to rush this action from the Google Search Console by searching for the URL and hitting the Request Indexing button:

Can you stop Google from rewriting your titles?

Well… yes. By rewriting them the way it wants. However, as long as you follow the best practices and include the right keywords in your titles, you shouldn’t worry about it. It’s not such a big deal if Google partially rewrites your titles in some cases, especially if you’re ranking high!

Conclusion

Title tags are one of the most important SEO ranking factors out there. In order to have great SEO results you must make sure your titles are properly optimized. They have to target the right keywords and also intrigue the reader enough to click your result.

Writing them isn’t difficult if you follow a set of best practices, and the results they bring can be significant!

How do you write your SEO titles? Do you use any tools? How do you deal with bulk titles and descriptions? Let us know in the comments section below!

The post How to Write SEO Friendly Title Tags | Guide & Best Practices appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

0 notes

philipfloyd · 5 years