Google is now extremely advanced and answers around 15 percent of its search queries with the help of artificial intelligence (AI). This AI is called “Rankbrain” and consists of machine learning algorithms. The fact that search engines are getting smarter has very practical consequences for SEO. Professional search marketers don’t submit the URL to the major search engines, but it’s possible to do so. Learning search engine optimization can be overwhelming at first. There is a lot to wrap your mind around. But becoming proficient in SEO is definitely an achievable undertaking. Links are integral for connecting each piece of content, ultimately leading to a potential sale. All other metrics being equal, would you rather have a high-authority link with lower relevance or a highly relevant link with low authority?
While doing a backlink audit, analyzing toxic backlinks and removing them can be a lengthy and tedious process, it is worth doing if you really want to see your website perform well in the search results. How SEO works for a big brand with an established reputation and a massive marketing team, PR agency and all of that stuff is very different to how SEO works for some local tradesmen with a low-end budget that has to catch up with the big boys. Yes, contextual link building is important, because they boost results on search engines. But, the number of links on a particular content page also matters to Google. You should use large header tags and take advantage of CSS to alter these to fit into the style and colour scheme of your page. If you are using software such as Microsoft SharePoint Designer/FrontPage or Adobe Dreamweaver for example, these CSS details are created automatically for you. A solution which is also perhaps advisable is to make your CSS an external file; this way there is no need to repeat all of your CSS statements on each page, but simply just one. Link Building adds a level of credibility to your website which just isn’t present without those links to reliable information sources backing up whatever claims you’re making back on your own website. Everyone knows not to trust everything they read on the Internet, but finding other sites saying the same things sure doesn’t hurt.
Quality content rules the digital landscape, yes — but what’s often forgotten is that even the best and most authoritative content needs to be built with the modern Internet in mind. Internal SEO isn’t just about keywords anymore; it’s about creating an authentic and engaging user experience. The key is to consistently deliver value so that people come to your site for answers. And this is also ironically what will get other good sites to link to your site. This is the perfect example of ‘emergent SEO’. Keyword research can be done using free tools.In simple words, International SEO is the effort of localisation of your content and website in order to attract relevant local visitors in the countries you are entering. Google has made it apparent that site speed matter in search rankings, and today, with a bigger emphasis on the user experience than ever before, site speed will continue to be a critical ranking factor.
Gaz Hall, a Freelance SEO Consultant from SEO Hull, commented: "Good quality takes time to create. It takes time to implement. And it takes time for Google to acknowledge that quality." Competitor Analysis can help you to identify links, ads and other tools which are working well on other websites. Then, if similar stuff will have equally positive results on your own website, you don’t have to go very far to find inspiration and create your own content. It won’t always work for you if it works for them, but it just might. SEO is a long-term strategy,so it sometimes takes months before you start seeing results. A good link profile is not just backlinks. Stated another way, backlinks are just one component of the link profile. There is a deeper complexity to the backlink discussion. It’s not just the content, but also its structure, that helps search engines decide on the results they’ll display first. Thus, a clear structure with headings and paragraphs that facilitate reading are preferred both from a user perspective and also from a search perspective.
How do your competitors rank? Pick out a keyword for which you want to optimize your site. Check out the top 20 search results: Are your competitors somewhere in there? What is your ranking for this keyword? This information should help you to find a good niche for you and your keywords, where your competitors are not operating. It may also be that you find keywords for which it is worth joining the competition. An effective link building strategy that simply makes a lot of sense is fixing broken links on your site and on sites that you’d like a link from. Your first step is to look for broken links on pages that interest you. After finding the links that go to pages that no longer exist, you reach out to the website owner and point out the link and suggest a new page that could provide value to their audience. Links pointing to your site help Google discover new pages on your site. It also, traditionally, is regarded as a signal of popularity. The site linking to your content is essentially telling Google they trust your content. Backlinks are links from other websites to yours, and are incredibly important in the SEO strategy. In fact, these backlinks are seen by many as THE most important aspect of a comprehensive SEO plan. Today, semantic search has evolved even more, and search engines are better than ever at understanding query context and the relationships between words.
Write unique descriptions for every page of your website. In case you don’t know, each single page of your site stands on its own merits. Your website as a whole does not get ranked on Google. A website redesign presents the perfect opportunity for you to analyze your backlinks and remove the shady ones. If you use Google Webmaster Tools, you’ll see a “manual penalty” appear if Google detects one of these low-quality links. You’ll then have the option to make such links “no follows” so Google stops paying attention to them. It is better to create a content that is user-friendly than exhaustive. Content should be easy and simple to read. Producing quality video content is the first step, but without a solid marketing campaign in place, you’ll find it harder to get ranked on SERPs. As companies are recognizing the power of this form of media, using these techniques yourself will help you increase and maintain your SEO rankings in the long run. Find out which channels are driving traffic to your competition .
Link building is still an important part of your company’s SEO strategy. Instead of trying to get as many links as possible, proper link building now focuses on relationship building and by providing valuable information. An HTML sitemap (as opposed to an XML sitemap) is often mentioned as being useful for SEO. They certainly are if you use them wisely (and especially Bing seems to like them at times), but I like them even more for the fact that users like them a lot. Search engines like unique content and content that is updated on a regular basis. That’s one reason blogs tend to get indexed more quickly: they’re being frequently updated (which is also a good reason to build your business site on a blog platform). You shouldrefrain from writing articles that are too sensitive or controversial such as adult oriented articles and vulgarity. Keep it simple, keep it direct and informative. That is the best type of article to deliver. According to research by Google, smartphone users have a higher buyer intent than desktop users. They’re focused and ready to buy. It’s your job to be there when they are looking for your products.
The mobile version of your website is equally important, if not more important than the desktop version. Mobile-first, they say. Fact is, that your website probably has as many mobile visitors as it has desktop visitors, of course depending on the type of site you have Most webmasters believe Google crawls their website in one go and will continue until everything’s crawled. Modern SEO is about so much more than keywords and meta tags. Within the space of 3 years, it has become significantly easier to find businesses, stores or items nearby, creating a shift in user’s intent and search behavior. Users no longer have to include their location in search queries, such as inputting “coffee shops in Queens” into Google. When youmaintain a blog or a regularly updated website, is there an optimal amount of time you should wait before updating your articles, or should you post them all at once?
Keyword research is one of the most valuable things you can do to obtain and maintain high search engine rankings and promising SEO results. For most small businesses, a keyword combination contains usually three or more targeted words that describe what you do. If you’re not blessed with excellent writing skills, outsource this job to somebody who is. With 75 percent of companies currently increasing their content marketing budget, it’s apparent that content can no longer be treated as a part-time job. Outsourcing content creation to dedicated writers allows for consistent, high quality publishing, fresh perspectives, insight into best practices and better leveraging of resources. Mobile SEO is – just like regular SEO – all about making sure your site is crawlable and findable. Also, you need stellar performance, great content and a flawless UX. How to fix Google penalties. Like all things when itcomes to building an effective SEO strategy research is key! Don’t be afraid to check out your competitor’s sites and other similar websites to see what long tail keywords they’re using. This can give you a great springboard to base new ideas off and don’t be afraid of using the same long tail keywords either. Beware, excessive linking, either internal or external can lead to the exact opposite results. Make sure that every link serves its own purpose in your content.
Gaz Hall, a Freelance SEO Consultant, commented: "If you’ve set yourself up with Google Search Console or Bing Webmaster Tools, you can now get some free keyword ideas." Keyword stuffing is simply the process of repeating the same keyword or key phrases over and over in a page. It’s counterproductive. It’s is a signpost of a very low-quality spam site and is something Google clearly recommends you avoid. On regular pages and posts, Google will most probably grab a piece of related content, including the keyword used in the search query. That makes a lot of sense for news sites, for example. Still, I recommend adding a meta description to all your important pages. If search users commonly misspell a keyword, you should identify and use it. If you uncover duplicate content, check the organic traffic for each of your product page variations in Google Analytics.
In the earlier days of SEO, sending out press releases with keyword optimized anchor texts would get you a dozens of backlinks. In some fortunate cases, this would even make your site crawl to the top positions on SERPs. So, eventually Press releases became a tactic to build links and rank high. Whether we like it or not, SEO isn’t simply “plug n’ play”, and it won’t automatically look after itself. You’d be surprised, however, at the ROI you can achieve with a few hours of focused outreach every month. Whatever shows up in the search results box has been searched for before meaning these long tail keywords could be very valuable. But remember these just give you a starting point to work off, people have Googled some quirky things so don’t think just because something shows up that it will make a good long tail keyword. Google suggestions give you a great place to work from but shouldn’t always be taken at face value. When your schedule is manic and you just haven’t got the time to create new material, re-purposing existing content is the ultimate time-saving strategy. And although it may seem like the lazy option, it’s actually a really effective aspect of content marketing. Website owners all want their content to be placed at the top of page one of search results. This is because very few website searches ever go beyond page one of results.
From an SEO perspective, I never treat a piece of content as ‘complete’. There is always room for improvement with updates, additional information, and various other things that can make it more useful to visitors. A search result with a high CTR can often be given a boost by Google because it’s seen as attractive and relevant. You can increase your CTR by giving your page a custom meta description. This can be done from the page’s HTML or if you’re using WordPress, you could use a plugin like Yoast SEO to do this. A general rule to followwhen creating your new URLs: use dashes (-) between words instead of underscores (_). Google treats dashes as separators, which means it can return results when you search for a single word that appears in a URL and when you search for a group of words that appears in a URL. In contrast, Google treats underscores as connectors, which means it will only return results when you search for a group of connected words that appears in a URL. The bottom line: using dashes creates more opportunities for your pages to be discovered. When it comes to SEO, less is not necessarily more. The main body of your piece shouldn’t be under 300 words and if you manage 1,000 words or more on the subject then your page is in a healthy shape. When choosing keywords, be specific without being obscure. Never try to optimize for a single word: instead, think of a string of words that accurately describe what you do. You can use various free online tools to get ideas.
The days of self-serving, scammy, and spammy SEO are long-gone. And that’s a good thing. The ‘secret’ to success with SEO is no secret at all. Just focus on serving your audience’s needs and answering their questions in a thorough and empathetic way. SEO marketing can be a very powerful tool for generating massive passive traffic. But if you use it incorrectly, you’ll end up doing more harm than benefit. “Dwell time” is the amount of time visitors spend on your website and it can affect SEO ranking. When you provide useful content, visitors tend to stay longer on your website to consume the information and therefore increase the dwell time. SEO is very simple, and unless you’re a very large company it’s probably not worth hiring somebody else to do. Unfortunately, there is only so much Search Engine Optimization you can do on your own website. After you’ve come up with compelling copy, studied keywords, looked around to see what competitors are doing and gone through all the other steps, one of the only remaining ways to boost your rankings is by Utilizing Social Media.
SEO isn’t just for large companies. As a small business or local business, there is actually a lot you can do to achieve local goals yourself. Many of these things relate to focus. Getting your content out there and shared generously should be your goal. Make sure the content is better than what already is ranking for your keywords; provide unique value and a fresh perspective on the topic. Consider your exposure options for your content, and get your content out to as many options as possible. Putting your individuality and personality across throughout the off-site SEO process (outreach emails, guest posts, social shares, etc.) makes others more likely to engage with you. Craft your unique selling proposition (USP) based on your own personality and the way you can best solve your customers’ problems. Keyword Research and Implementation is important for making any piece of copy shine, especially in the eyes of search engines. Search engines don’t like familiar or generic content.
. Search engine optimization applied correctly will create better visibility online, but it's just one part of your overall marketing strategy. For Search Engines, backlinks help to determine the page’s importance and value (i.e. authority). Historically, the quantity of backlinks was an indicator of a page’s popularity. Your website’s health will not only impact your SEO results but will also have a hand in how well you’re able to convert your traffic. SEO in Withernsea is here. Building a strong site architecture and providing clear navigation will help search engines index your site quickly and easily. This will also, more importantly, provide visitors with a good experience of using your site and encourage repeat visits. Contrary to popular belief, social media doesn't have a direct relationship with your search rankings. However, it can have an indirect bearing on the success of your SEO campaign.
Gaz Hall, a Freelance SEO Consultant from SEO Hull, commented: "SEO isn’t magic or voodoo. I know some SEO consultants will make you believe they possess magical powers and only they can optimize your website, but don’t listen to them. " Once you understand what a user might be looking for when searching for a certain term, the next step is to tailor your content and on-page optimizations to fit the needs of the searcher. While SEOs aren’t generally user experience experts, we do have a set of SEO techniques and tools that let us build a fantastic, user-targeted website. Specifically, we structure web content based on user demand. Creating content that consistently drives traffic to your site is a win; however, not all traffic is created equal. The challenge is finding a balance of content that is interesting, sustainable, and relevant to your business interests. ou can optimize the entire technical side of your site and still find it lost on page two or more in Google. SEO isn’t a trick. It isn’t something your web developer can do for you.
On average, the higher up page 1 the result is, the greater the number of linking domains that the webpage has. The traffic information from different search engines helps you make timely changes in the semantic core, and allocate budget and efforts to promote the significant keywords only. It's not actually that difficult to get on page 1 of Google in a search (but that depends on the search!) You need to know your market and you need to have a good understanding of SEO and how to use keywords. You also need some time, I'm not selling magic online marketing wands - if you know someone who is, please hook me up! The freelance world might disagree with me but frankly I do not think there is not an SEO in the world who can lay claim to having the expertise and experience to deliver, hands-on, every single facet of what makes up contemporary SEO. A lot of SEOs will tell you to fix the foundation of your website, meaning the template. I think content is the foundation of the website and your template(s) should serve that content.
Technical SEO can seem daunting. However, understanding the principles is important. There may be parts you can try, or work on with your developer. If your web developer tells you that the website is accessible from a mobile device, don’t just trust him/her. Go over your mobile website yourself and check if you, as a visitor, can do all you want and need to do there. Sound SEO strategies aren’t susceptible to the whims of Google and the other search engines and depend far less on them than might be assumed. The cleaner the code onyour website, the faster your pages will load and the actual html text on the page will be given greater emphasis. In other words, if you say “vacation rentals” five times in 100 lines of code, those phrases will stand out much more than if you use 10,000 lines of code. As you use more programming code, you dilute the value of the actual verbiage on the page. Your online competitors may not be who you think! By taking a broad look at your sector from an online perspective will help uncover potential opportunities that you are missing out on.
Digital marketing professionals understand the importance of SEO and the need to implement a proper strategy. However, only defining what those keywords are isn’t enough to improve your website’s search engine ranking. Your content needs to come together in such a way that it shows a search engine that you are an authority on a given topic. More importantly, it has to quickly answer the questions your customers likely have about you and your products. Remember how people say, "it's not about what you know, it's about who you know"? The same goes for the Web. Those relationships will turn into links, both in the short-term & the long-term. Imagine for a moment, a yacht. The on-page elements represent the sails and the ropes above water. Now imagine the technical elements of SEO are everything below the water line: the hull and the cabin. So you could have your sails blowing, and your knots tied correctly, but if there’s a hole in the bottom of your boat you’re not going to get very far. Giving your personal opinion and opening up a little bit goes a long way towards creating rapport with your audience. Like many things, of course, don’t overdo it!
If your web developer tells you that the website is accessible from a mobile device, don’t just trust him/her. Go over your mobile website yourself and check if you, as a visitor, can do all you want and need to do there. There’s strong evidence that click-through rates will influence your website’s Google search ranking, though this is difficult to confirm given the company’s secrecy surrounding their algorithms. Google is far more capable of deciphering user intent and generating results that meet a user’s needs, rather than relying on one-to-one keyword matching. Mobile SEO is – just like regular SEO – all about making sure your site is crawlable and findable. Also, you need stellar performance, great content and a flawless UX. If you can’t meet a visitor’s need on that page, direct them to a page (or even another site) that can. The user will greatly appreciate it and your webpage’s authority will be boosted.
TD-IDF means that content should include different phrases and that some of those phrases should appear more frequently than others. There are literally hundreds of factors that contribute to your final rankings. On top of that, it can be hard to determine what kinds of trends Google may associate with your chosen keywords. As you’ve probably identified at this point, SEO is incredibly detailed. But, it doesn’t need to be complicated. As search engines like Google continually improve and try to show the best results they can to users, their focus is to provide quality and relevant results. Most SEO consults cover a local area. Just like you should interview others, seize opportunities to be interviewed, no matter how small the audience is. The 5-600 words that take you 15-20 minutes can turn into a few highly authoritative contextual links. DA/PA and CT/TF are all third party metrics meant to somehow replace the void left by the famous Google PR (Page Rank). Obviously none of them could replicate PR real values of nowadays (as those values are being kept secret for quite a while now).
Gaz Hall, a Freelance SEO Consultant from SEO Hull, commented: "By following this advice, you will save a lot of hard work and time creating high quality content for poor quality sites." Google estimates that around 56% of mobile searches have local intent, and 50% of consumers who conduct local search on their phone visit a store on the same day. With local SEO you can showcase your business information directly to consumers who are actively looking for businesses like yours, and achieve an incredible reach throughout your local area. The meta description is not a ranking factor, but it does play an important part in optimizing your Click Through Rate (CTR). When you link to a webpage, you’re proclaiming that you trust that content as a resource – so your brand is on the line. Since Google only wants to deliver the best possible results to its users, it will push sites with strong engagement up in the search engine results pages (SERPs).
Google does not expect you to meet all of their standards, but they do expect you to at least try your very best. The days of blackhat and grey hat SEO strategies are over. Remember, real SEO takes time. Companies that claim they are able to get you results in a few weeks are likely engaging in unethical practices like buying links, linking to low quality or irrelevant websites, or spamming comments. These shady business practices can result in a slight boost for a short period of time, but sooner or later, search engines are likely to catch on. Not only could Google remove your site entirely, these types of tactics can ultimately destroy your online reputation. Over-optimization is proof that there can sometimes be too much of a good thing. Improving your ranking for certain online keywords is ideal, but mutilating your content by stuffing keywords into everything you write, or building way too many links with the same anchor text will not only look unnatural but also hurt your SEO strategy. Guest posting as a tactic has a dual benefit. First, it helps you reach the target audience of blogs who have similar audiences as yours. Second, it helps you get backlinks to your site so you can drive up your search engine rankings. Many website owners neglect to spend the time analyzing how their page structure actually looks and works for the visitor.
It helps the search engines quickly determine what the page is about. A social media following shows that the website has an audience who want to hear more. The website you are targeting would want to share their new posts to their audience on social media, promoting your website at the same time. What’s more is that if you’re in the same niche as the website, their audience are more likely to enjoy your content and start following you too. Besides looking for established companies and Internet presences to learn from, you can also pick up some good tips and quick information from up and coming companies that are suddenly doing well in the rankings. Sitelinks have the benefit of distributing organic search traffic that would normally be concentrated on your homepage across other areas of your site. On-site optimization is all about publishing awesome stuff in the first place.
Search engines scan tags and categories to identify what products, blog posts, or gallery images are about. Adding tags and categories that accurately describe the item could help it appear in search results. Poor spelling has always had the potential to be a negative ranking factor in Google if the word that is incorrect on the page is unique on the page and of critical importance to the search query. If your site is littered with lengthy, indecipherable URLs that don’t align well with the actual content of your site pages, restructuring your URLs should definitely be a priority during your next website redesign. Wondering where SEO comes into play here? While just like the searchers themselves, search engines prefer URLs that make it easy to understand what your page content is all about. If you want to link to somebody but you don’t want it to count as a vote (you don’t want to pass link-juice), or you support user-generated content and want to deter spammers, you can use a nofollow link. Google says it discounts the value of those links. I’m not convinced they discount them heavily, but other SEOs are so they seem to deter spammers if nothing else. While we all enjoy seeing the keywords rank well in the search engines, this doesn’t necessarily mean your SEO campaign is successful.
SEO is a long-term strategy, so it sometimes takes months before you start seeing results. You’ve seen what links you and your competitors have. Now it is time to start building up your profile. As with any strategy, you need to set goals, and make sure it aligns with your overall marketing focus. To ensure consistently high quality, business owners and digital marketers need to adopt a long-term content strategy that boosts a website’s search engine ranking and keeps it there. Good content plays a crucial role here. If you only do a little SEO once in a while, then you need to adjust your expectations on how much organic traffic you can expect from search engines. Websites that are constantly improving their code, publishing valuable content, and earning backlinks and social share activity are building a larger arsenal than sites that are not engaging in SEO. Gut, brain, intuition, emotional intelligence,whatever you want to call it, humans can’t be beat for determining relevance.
Your competitors may be investing more in their own SEO campaigns, outperforming you in the process. Troubleshooting technical errors and ensuring that your website is always accessible is one of the biggest hurdles to manage when thinking about good SEO practices over time. On page SEO of course refers to all the strategies that you can use within your pages to get Google interested in your site. This begins with content – and it begins with having a stronger understanding of the subtle changes Google has gone through in recent times. What is SEO? Links found within the main body text of a webpage is more valuable than links found in separate plugins or widgets found elsewhere on the page. There was a time when “keyword density” meant something for SEO content.
Gaz Hall, a Freelance SEO Consultant from SEO Hull, commented: "Besides voice search and Google’s focus on that, more is changing in and for Google. Specifically: a few new technologies and a profound new way of looking at the web." After the emergence of major updates, like Panda and Penguin, search optimizers have thrown around the term “penalty” to scare SEO novices into thinking that one simple mistake could instantly tank their site’s rankings. Overfed with countless advice making things look simple and obvious, webmasters often rely on their intuition, common sense, or gut feelings when it comes to SEO… and they often fail. Links pointing to your site help Google discover new pages on your site. It also, traditionally, is regarded as a signal of popularity. The site linking to your content is essentially telling Google they trust your content. Researching, tracking, and competitive reviews all of these are part of Search engine optimization package. SEO is not just limited to advertising tools, although it includes all elements of advertising.
Link signals tend to decay over time. Sites that were once popular often go stale, and eventually fail to earn new links. If you tried to optimize an article for a certain keyword, but it’s getting more traffic for a different variation of that keyword, then go back in and re-optimize it for the new keyword. With all the signals in the Google algorithm – and there are hundreds of them – why would links still be so valuable as a signal? The only thing you can do off site to incraese your rankings is build up more links. More links will generally lead to better Google PageRank and better search engine rankings. As recommendations from peers become more prominent online, the influence they levy will weigh more heavily into activity on search and social sites combined. For this reason, it’s wise to start thinking of your company or organization’s fans as extensions of your inbound marketing team.
Higher volumes of backlinks are great, but combining that with high diversity is what’s really going to move the needle. It is better to create a content that is user-friendly than exhaustive. Content should be easy and simple to read. Make sure your site is up to par. Speed is critical; the user experience is part of how Google interprets our sites. People give up on pages that are slow to load, and this includes e-commerce pages with shopping carts! What is it about Google algorithm updates that send all of our thoughtfully crafted, tried-and-true, SEO strategies out the window? You wouldn’t build a house without foundations, and that is exactly what Technical SEO is to your website.