SEO Information

This site has lots of information about SEO and Search Engine optimisation in general

SEO Information

This site has lots of information about SEO and Search Engine optimisation in general

Learn more about Page speed and SEO

Writing is hard enough when you have to write 500 word blog posts. Now imagine writing in-depth articles and guides that stretch to 5,000+ words on a consistent basis. Google alreadygives ranking boosts to sites on a secure protocol (https vs. http) and this emphasis on security will only grow as time passes. Use keywords relevant to your products and services that your customers are searching for, especially in your Title Tags and internal links. Rankings in SEO refers to a website’s position in the search engine results page. Using bucketbrigades is one great SEO strategy to increase user experience, according to Backlinko. These are simply words and phrases that keep people engaged.

An instant SEO diagnosis using Google Analytics

How does a new website start ranking? Does it just magically appear in Google after you’ve launched it? What things do you have to do to start ranking in Google and get traffic from the search engines? Type in your keyphrases. At least look at the first page (the top 10) and see what everyone else has in their description tags. Does it look like they’re being pulled from the copy on their pages? Keywords are usually broken up and grouped based on the number of words within the query phrases. The more words in a keyword phrase usually the easier it is to rank for the term, since usually there is less relative competition. A search engine results page (abbreviated to SERP) is the listing of results returned by a search engine in response to a query for a keyword or phrase. Search engines, like Google and Bing, will return many pages of content results for a given search term. The longer and more specificthe keywords are, the higher your chances of ranking for this keyword. Of course, this also means that the search volume for this keyword decreases, but you can compensate for this by optimizing a lot of pages on your site for different long tail keywords.

Have a Unique Domain Name To Create a Brand

The modern user has a very short attention span. If a website takes more than a few seconds to load, she/he is likely to leave. Therefore, it’s really important to make sure that site speed/load time is optimized as much as possible. SEO is the process that brings traffic to a website, but if you can’t convert that traffic into a sale, email subscriber, etc., there is no point in having it in the first place. It may not be a good idea to link to the website from footers or sidebars. Are you looking for SEO Advice? Relevance is a measure of how appropriate a given page is for a given query. In the early days of SEO, this ultimately boiled down to what keywords were used in a query, compared to what keywords were found on an indexed page. What if I was to tell you Google has a powerful collection of tools that tell you exactly how often they crawl your site, what they think it’s about, and even suggestions on things they have trouble with? And that you can have it? For free? You’d want it, wouldn’t you?

Tracking what works versus what doesn’t requires a least a few months’ worth of results

According to SEO Consultant, Gaz Hall: "Think of the last time you wanted to purchase a product but knew next to nothing about it. What did you do? You likely used a search engine to look for online reviews or articles about the product. If the most helpful article was on a site that also sold the product, odds are that you purchased at that site." How do you write aclickable title that will draw people to your site and keep them on there without sounding salesy or cheesy? The length of your posts is also an important consideration. Back in the days of spammy-SEO, almost every post was 500 words long. Today, you’ll have the most success by writing posts that are longer and more in-depth. Imagine that your reader is going to sit down with a cup of tea and really dive deep into the subject – that’s the kind of experience that you should be delivering! Standard SEO advice is to keep the site architecture as flat as possible, to minimize clicks from the home page to important content. Do not go off the deep end, though; too many links on a page are not good for search engines either. Search engines scour the Internet to find keywords and clues to match search results, but if your website isn’t giving them the right clues, your SEO efforts will take a dive. Ultimately understanding your audience, competition and keyword options will play a major role in your website’s SEO potential.

The value of Google authorship

One of the most common problems that I hear from people looking to learn more about SEO is that they don't know what information to trust. Prioritise content marketing. That's publishing valuable content on your website. These can be articles, blogs, white papers, videos, infographics or other interesting information that can be shared with your network via an e-newsletter or social media. Doing this will create backlinks naturally. The focus on the right audience and the right content brings an understanding of the content that they’re more likely to consume. Keep in mind that you don’t need to think of Google as your audience. You write for your visitors and not for Google. If it’s been just a day or two since you made your website and are not appearing on the SERPs, then you might consider submitting your URL to Google (If you haven’t already done). If you still don’t appear on the SERPs, relax! Google takes some time to crawl and index your website.

Learn more about Page speed and SEO

Paid link-building is considered black hat SEO and is likely to incur a penalty. Check forums, online communities and Q&A sites to find the questions people in your niche are asking. Providing clear answers with actionable points is a sure-fire way of creating content your target audience will love. It’s better to have a custom 404 error code page than to have an empty page — it doesn’t send a good message to search engines or site visitors. The activity generated by social media suggests that your website is trustworthy, worth sharing, currently important to people, and is being referenced as a valuable resource. People buy from businesses they trust, not businesses that publish low quality, untrustworthy content.

Headings and SEO

When we’re creating content, if we don’t understand what the purpose is, then that’s when we really get confused about what is good and what is just good enough. Social signals may not play a direct role in ranking your site. But social shares generate more eyeballs on your content. And the more eyeballs you get, the more likely someone is to link to you. Spam links often go both ways. A website that links to spam is likely spam itself, and in turn often has many spam sites linking back to it. Increase visibility to new content you create by sharing it on social networks and building links to your content (both internally and from external sites). Software programs cannot adequately interpret each of the various types of data that humans can—videos and images, for example, are to a certain extent less readable by a search engine

What the Keyword Data Tells You

Long-form content is a magnet for long tail searches. The more searchers and visitors you attract, the more you can ‘satisfy’ and the better chance you can rank higher in the long run. Much of the time, it makes sense for the search engines to deliver results from older sources that have stood the test of time. However, sometimes the response should be from newer sources of information. Your content can target any audience, but if it doesn’t sufficiently deliver the information that audience is seeking, you’re out of luck. SEO is a many-headed beast. From off-page elements to on-page elements, covering all aspects of SEO can easily become a Herculean task, especially when dealing with large websites. A big part of effectively writing for Internet users and search engines alike is to understand the human user's psyche while also feeding the search engines the relevancy they need to consider ranking the page for a given topic.

Finding Backlink Opportunities

The more fresh, engaging and authoritative content on your website the better regarded it will be by search engines. Even with more and more consumers using their mobile devices to search and browse the web, there are some companies that still focus all their marketing and SEO efforts to desktops and choose to ignore their mobile customers (or just don’t realize how mobile their customers really are). Use keywords relevant to your products and services that your customers are searching for, especially in your Title Tags and internal links. SEO in Goole is here. Each webpage should have a single focus keyword and be included 1-3 times naturally in the page content. Make sure it’s also included in your page title, meta description, and H1 text assuming it fits within the parameters. If it doesn’t fit well, work towards a more general keyword. Over the past couple of years, SEO has significantly changed as search engines get smarter. There is a huge difference between what SEO was five or two years ago and what it is today.

Link to Influencers Within Your Content

According to SEO Consultant, Gaz Hall: "All sites have a home or "root" page, which is usually the most frequented page on the site and the starting place of navigation for many visitors. Unless your site has only a handful of pages, you should think about how visitors will go from a general page (your root page) to a page containing more specific content." The methods vary from technical practices you can achieve behind the scenes on your website (we tend to refer to this as ‘on-page SEO’) to all the promotional ’off-page’ approaches you can use to raise your site’s visibility (link-building, social media marketing). When you add a link to your website, you are inviting users to leave your site. There are ways to do a bulk search on a list of URLs to check if any of the pages contain a link to yours, but if you're checking this on a daily basis, it's probably just as fast to do a quick manual check. Creating descriptive categories and filenames for the documents on your website can not only help you keep your site better organized, but it could also lead to better crawling of your documents by search engines. Also, it can create easier, "friendlier" URLs for those that want to link to your content.

Rank Content in Google's Featured Snippet

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. Google and other search engines keep the inner workings of their algorithms a secret. All we can do is speculate and test. The problem with speculation is that if an idea seems believable, it becomes eagerly accepted as truth without the data to back up the speculation. You’re ultimately looking to rank for keywords that will bring value to your business (i.e., those bringing traffic that will convert into leads and customers). You, therefore, have to target keywords with relevant intent. Setting up Google My Business is a must for your SEO gameplan. It is this that dictates whether your business will claim the space on the right hand side of the SERPs (the Knowledge Panel) when someone searches for your business by name. With SERP space at a premium, owning this piece of real estate when someone searches for your brand is a must. Analytics tools such as Google Analytics, Google Search Console, Ryte and HubSpot enable you to examine many important details about your website and its usage. For example, the HubSpot tool can identify which organic keywords are already driving traffic to your website. The same is true of Google Search Console, which is free. These keywords create a good base of core keywords and give you a list of keywords that you can use to measure the performance of your future SEO efforts.

Headings and SEO

We use search engine optimization to monitor the queries that drive traffic to a page, to improve the quality of the content on the page to better match those queries, and to modify or expand content (where appropriate) to match overlooked queries. Long tail keywords may offer more chances to show up higher in the search results, while you can also perform manual searches on your own to test the first pages of the keywords you want to target. Another factor in determining the value of a link is the way the link is implemented and where it is placed. For example, the text used in the link itself (i.e., the actual text that a user clicks on to go to your web page) is also a strong signal to the search engines. Site speed, from the front end to the back end, is an often overlooked area of web development that also has SEO implications. Based on some online surveys, SEO is one of the most significant marketing activity for modern marketers and companies are hugely investing in SEO.

Set Up Backlink Alerts for SEO

Gone are the days of keyword stuffing. Sentences actually need to make sense now. Optimise your website by ensuring that any published content is easy to read and digest. Natural keyword inclusion is acceptable, but make the readers your first priority, not the keywords. Good content is important, but it also needs to rank high on SERPs if you want to reach a wider audience with it. A URL is more important than you may think it is. Your website’s URL structure is like a math formula — when followed properly it will give you the right answer. You want people to subscribe to your blog by providing you an email address. You can then market to them with your newer blog posts, content offers or sales. Just make sure not to spam them; no one wants to receive an email every day pushing a purchase. Links increase the authority and trustworthiness of a page to search engines, which increases the overall authority of that website.

Determining Relevance in Link Building

The secret to building a blog that gets crazy backlinks, ranks for awesome keywords and makes you money on autopilot? Duplicate content is your website’s worst enemy. Google is very serious about penalizing websites with duplicate content, descriptions or titles. If your site has a blog with public commenting turned on, links within those comments could pass your reputation to pages that you may not be comfortable vouching for. Domain authority is a score (on a 100-point scale) developed by Moz that predicts how well a website will rank on search engines. Links and content are certainly at the top of your SEO strategy. However, Google identified CTR and user experience as major ranking factors. Increasing one will certainly increase the other as well.

Link acquisition is an ongoing investment

Building backlinks is not enough. You also have to monitor every link your website is earning. Not knowing who links to you or when links are being removed can cost you a lot of traffic. Google is getting better every day at recognizing—and rewarding—high-quality content. As defined by Google and humans, valuable content is useful, informative, better than other content on the same topic, credible, original, and engaging. Link building is definitely one of the most important aspects of SEO strategy. But, finding good sites to comment on might be a daunting task. You can read an offsite SEO beginners guide here. The ultimate goal of any marketer is to create a diverse range of high quality backlinks from various credible sources. But not all marketers tend to achieve this pinnacle. It takes time and patience and a lot of strategizing and in the end it is never that straight forward and many marketers in the process tend to compromise on the quality of such links and end up deterring their own websites with toxic links. Websites that receive many inbound links can be more likely to rank higher in search engines. Basically, inbound links tell site crawlers that your website is an authority on a certain subject -- so the more inbound links you have from high quality, high authority sites, the better your website can rank in search engine results pages (SERPs).

Collaborate and filter

Gaz Hall, a Freelance SEO Consultant from SEO Hull, commented: "People buy from businesses they trust, not businesses that publish low quality, untrustworthy content." Google views your site as authoritative when other sites link back to it. It doesn’t want to see a site that is spammy linking back to your site. If you try and manipulate the system, you can get hit with a Google penalty and your site won't rank at all. What factors do you need to bear in mind? Does keyword usage still apply? Search engines won't notice changes to your site instantaneously. Google and Bing offer search tools to help you manage your site's search presence. The source of a link matters a great deal to how much weight it carries in Google’s algorithm.

Follow a consistent content cadence

Arguably, one of the most crucial aspects of on-page SEO is tags. Whether it’s title tags, header tags, meta tags or blog post tags, they have been demonstrated to increase traffic and boost engagement. The content on your site should be organized in a logical way. This is not only good for SEO, it also helps visitors on your site find other related content easily. Write locally oriented content: It’s one of the best things you can do to improve local rankings. A great way to boost your site’s search visibility is to have a blog. Search engines are constantly scanning for content that is well-written, original, relevant and up-to-date and a blog post can tick all these boxes. While it's true that keyword-stuffing will be harshly penalised by Google, intelligent use of on-page tags that help potential customers to find your site remains vital; the margin between the best SEO company and the also-rans frequently lies here. Make sure the site's meta descriptions and titles include both primary and secondary keywords and are unique for each page. All images' alt text need to be keyword optimised and descriptive, without forgetting to optimise video content as well with relevant meta data.

Set Up Backlink Alerts

Crafting quality titles for product pages, articles, blog posts, lists and all other written content is what gets that content noticed by search engines. It might not make sense at first, but long and ugly titles containing lots of descriptive information are actually the best types of titles around. Evergreen topics have long lasting value, so when looking at the trend, it should be pretty consistent throughout the year. Traditionally, these tend to be slightly more competitive, but have a much longer lifespan for being relevant. People love to browse through a clearance section for bargains. You could include overstocked items or products nearing the end of their buying season. A dollar section for low priced merchandise can generate a lot of sales, especially if your website offers pop up suggestions for related items from your store. The customers will feel like they are getting a great deal and you will get more sales. When Google demotes your page for duplicate content practices, and there’s nothing left in the way of unique content to continue ranking you for – your web pages will mostly be ignored by Google. Prevent duplicate content. Don’t confuse Google with almost similar pages. Those serve no one.

Reduce Redirects: Beneficial to SEO

Paid links are like paying someone to be your wingman to impress a girl rather than having a genuine friend by your side who can vouch for how great you really are! Posting regularcontent is key to building trust with search engines and your customers alike. A posting schedule is easier to stick to when you’re writing regular content. The newest result isn’t alwaysbest – for less newsworthy topics, an in-depth and authoritative result that’s been around longer may outrank newer, thinner content. Cloaking is when you present different content or URLs to your visitors than you do to the search engines. Along those lines, a “sneaky” redirect is when site owners “embed a link in JavaScript that redirects the user to a different page with the intent to show the user a different page than the search engine sees… Ensure that your site loads quickly, not just where you're located, but from around the world.

Pay attention to on-page ranking factors

Analyzing content alone is not real SEO. Making a deliverable look pretty for a client is not SEO. Optimizing performance, however, is a continuous process. Your site will never be fast enough because there’s always more to improve. There’s a good chance you have some fantastic resources your audience would love. If you don’t, get thinking. What can you build that would really interest your market? That others would share with their readers? Making use of the assets your business has will be a hook for getting attention – building links is much easier when you have content worth linking to. Learn to write good website copy and your Search Engine Optimization (SEO)—think of it as digital catnip for Google—will improve, as will your site ranking. Paid links are another no-no, whether another site linking to yours, or on your site linking to another site (except for banner ads and ad networks like AdSense).

Web 2.0 indexing is great for backlinks

Using bucket brigades is one great SEO strategy to increase user experience, according to Backlinko. These are simply words and phrases that keep people engaged. If you have a blog, you can submit it to various blog directories. Like all other directories, some pass value, while others are crap. Domain authority is more insightful than PageRank because it’s measured on a scale of 0-100, but it’s not perfect. So, how does Google determine site quality? Think about SEO from the perspective of the minds behind Google. Through deep learning, the goals of the developers behind Google is to generate search results that genuinely benefit the user. 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.

Determining Relevance in Link Building

Gaz Hall, a Freelance SEO Consultant from SEO Hull, commented: "Think of outreach as a brand awareness campaign for your most authoritative audience." Creating evergreencontent is as simple as staying away from topics that no one will care about in the foreseeable future, and focusing on keyword research. Never start writing an article without performing a keyword research. The best tool to use is the free Google Keyword Tool. Sites that aren’t optimized for user intent and mobile SEO will fail. The factors that search enginesuse to rank results include social media engagement, off-site optimization, topical authority, latent semantics, mobile friendless, local optimization, domain authority, and much more. That's where search engine optimization (SEO) comes in.

Focus on ‘Things’, Not ‘Strings’

The header text, or H1 text, is usually the title of an article or some larger bold text at the top of your page. Google and the smaller search engines can see this and they put extra importance on the words in the H1 text. Make sure your target keyword or phrase is there. Using structured data, you can serve Google your address details in the most convenient way. Google’s featured snippets, also known as “position zero” on the SERP, can be a great opportunity to get one over your competitors in search results. User experience is critical toSEO, so it may be a good idea to test how it affects the traffic to your site. You need to see things from your customers’ point of view and, more importantly, you need to write the things that appeal to their viewpoint.

Reduce Redirects: Beneficial to SEO

All too often, when we’re brought in for SEO work on a redesign, it’s often late in the process, such as when the site is being coded or even totally complete. “Hey, we should probably have the SEO guy take a look at this before we launch,” but by then, it’s too late. Without considering a search engine user's intent, you will attract too much unqualified traffic. The introof the article should be short, focused, and to the point. This will help the reader prepare for what they are going to learn from reading the article. Major search engines, including Google, provide free tools for webmasters. Google's Webmaster Tools help webmasters better control how Google interacts with their websites and get useful information from Google about their site. Anyone who is commenting on the blog will leave a backlink, which means, backlinking is a mode to drive traffic. Make sure, you are not commenting a random one, as it will serve you no good. The comments should be relevant and in that context only.

Toxic links and their cure

In the early days of SEO, you could get a site to rank fairly easily by buying a bunch of low-quality backlinks, keyword stuffing (including the same keyword on a page a bunch of times), or by buying a domain address (website name) that exactly matched the keyword you wanted to rank for. The “title tags”, or the title of a blog post, is one of the crucial aspects when it comes to getting a better ranking on search engine result pages. The title tags not only tell search engines what your web page is all about, but also leave the first impression on the people who see your post title in the search results. Your website is one of your most important pieces of digital equity, and one of the fundamental components of a successful local marketing stack. Vertical search is the term people sometimes use for specialty or niche search engines that focus on a limited data set. Examples of vertical search solutions provided by the major search engines are image, video, news, and blog searches. The more webpages use the same keyword to point to a subpage, the more signals the search engine will receive indicating that this landing page must be very relevant for this keyword. This in turn means that the page will be ranked better for this and other similar keywords.

Group keywords by conversion funnel stages

You can speed up the process of getting useful links by connecting with content curators. Another tip is to make sure you do your research and examine which terms to target before you set out. Search engines are invested in providing users a great mobile experience. 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. According to Google, natural links leading back to your site are definitely something to strive for.

Optimize from tail to head

Organizations should take many factors into account when pursuing an SEO strategy. If you uncover duplicate content, check the organic traffic for each of your product page variations in Google Analytics. Sometimes knowing why you’re doing something can make all the difference. SEO in Market Weighton is here. In the early days of SEO, it was the quantity, not quality of links that mattered. “Link building” consisted of mass spamming and buying of links, online directory submissions, building bad links, mass commenting on sites and blogs and using automated link bait. Certain words present an ongoing challenge for the search engines. One of the greatest challenges comes in the form of disambiguation.

Search Console shows your average position for each keyword

Gaz Hall, a Freelance SEO Consultant from SEO Hull, commented: "Users searching for your site on Google might not necessarily want to land on your homepage. Sitelinks on the SERP provide them with a direct link to other parts of your site which might be more relevant to them." Sometimes the best way to get links is not to ask for them. That doesn't mean you should sit back, do nothing and wait for links to appear. Spend time creating content and making your site as attractive and easy to link to as possible. Lets go a little deeper as to the relevance of authority. As everybody knows, Search Engines are the moderators of the Internet. The search engine spider crawls the Internet finding billions of new pages, indexes them and then matches each web page to the relevant search query Search engines also assess, in great detail, the technical aspects of your website. For example, how quickly the site loads plays a major role in your website ranking. Search engines also take into account how accessible your server is. Because, ultimately, Google and other search engines want to provide the best possible search results. So, the aim is to guide visitors to sites which work well, and which can always be accessed and used. Always remember that the success of link building, along with advanced strategies such as the Skyscraper technique, depends on an effective outreach strategy.

Audit Your Site To Improve It’s Performance

For me internal linking is one of the most undervalued aspects of SEO, with many sites having inefficient menus and/or poor site structures. One of the best ways to get links when you’re first starting out is to ask people you know to link to your site from their site using a target keyword as the anchor text -- the text being used as the link to your site. Use your network of customers, partners, vendors, and even friends/family around the world to link to your site, and ask them to link to the right locale site. A focus on the formatting of your page can facilitate the crawling for search engines, while it also enhances the readability for your readers. 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. Search drives an incredible amount of both online and offline economic activity.

Toxic links and their cure

Analytics tools such as Google Analytics, Google Search Console, Ryte and HubSpot enable you to examine many important details about your website and its usage. For example, the HubSpot tool can identify which organic keywords are already driving traffic to your website. The same is true of Google Search Console, which is free. These keywords create a good base of core keywords and give you a list of keywords that you can use to measure the performance of your future SEO efforts. Optimizing a blog is very similar to optimizing a website, and optimizing a blog post similar to optimizing a web page. But depending on the blogging service or software you use, the results may look somewhat different. Having asitemap for your website plays a crucial role in SEO. It helps Google easily crawl your pages and index your website. Research other business websites and encourage them to link to your site. Joint ventures are a good way to exchange links and benefit each other’s business as well. Since Google is the number one search engine in the world, it is the leader in determining which websites are the most relevant for search words and terms.