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

Understanding Your Competitive Landscape

There have been many minor changes to the layout of Search Engine Results Pages. Local and more location-specific searches have become more commonplace — especially on mobile devices. Cramming popular search terms into your blog isn’t enough anymore, businesses need to spend time creating meaningful copy. Structured data, sometimes referred toas schema markup, are codes which are added to websites to provide search engines with in-depth information about your products, your business offering, prices of your products, location-based offerings and much more. Like most SEO professionals, nothing wrecks my digestive system more than an organic traffic drop with no apparent reason. The naturalgrowth of a Website’s backlink profile is a strong indication of the true competitive quality of the site’s content. Most Websites never earn very many links. Search engines understand this and award those sites with appropriate traffic based on other signals used by their algorithms.

The Cleanup process

Search engine optimization, while a very technical practice, is a marketing function—and it needs to be treated like one. A great way to incorporate all those valuable local keywords into your website is to create valuable content. Fresh, unique content has great SEO benefits, but it will also help to establish you as a reputable, reliable and knowledgeable business. Plus, you can use it for link-building efforts and share it on social media to widen your reach there, too. Many moons have passed since search engines interpreted information solely on simple information like keyword density, but keyword stuffing is still prevalent on many sites. Internal linking is one of the few methods we can use to tell Google (and visitors) that a particular page of content is important. So how should you go about linking internally to other pages of your website?2 Content marketing is about creating content that will help Google to find your site and posts and to ensure you rank highly in the search engine results pages. While this is a powerful and useful effect though, it's actually only one part of what content marketing is about.

What exactly are Search Engines?

Always remember that the success of link building, along with advanced strategies such as the Skyscraper technique, depends on an effective outreach strategy. An infinite number of niches are waiting for someone to claim them. I’d ask yourself where you want to be, and see if you can find a path from a tiny specific niche to a slightly bigger niche and so on, all the way to your desired goal. Sometimes it’s easier to take a series of smaller steps instead of jumping to your final goal in one leap. When optimizing for conversion, it is critical to gain some perspective into the psychographics of your target audience, and also understand the most common segments of search intent. Why do you need a Freelance SEO Consultant At the heart of your local SEO campaign will be building the number of listings you have. In other words, the amount of places you can add your business, and get a citation. Often it is assumed that only business directories count, but actually there are number of ways to expand your portfolio. Social networks are an important source of traffic. Good content significantly raises the probability of the posts being frequently shared organically on social networks which helps you expand your reach. At the same time, you can also generate additional traffic through social channels. Social interactions are also registered by Google and can help the search engine review the relevance and quality of your content.

Does Blog commenting play a vital role in SEO?

According to SEO Consultant, Gaz Hall: "Today, virtually every business has its own space over the internet and it does not matter whatever the size the business is. Most of these business owners who use SEO strategies are successful in getting customer attention through marketing over the internet." If you are putting content on your own site, try to keep things fairly uniform. This can help you start building your own following and establish your own voice. Of course, that shouldn’t stop you from doing something that has more of a “shock factor.” Something a little more controversial can draw in big crowds, which translates to a lot of clicks and comments. An SEO campaign can deliver all the traffic in the world, but if none of the visitors ever becomes a customer then the campaign has not succeeded. Make sure at least one image file name includes your target keyword and that your target keyword is part of your image Alt Text. So one of the best long-term marketing tactics is regularly publishing content on your site. Develop an editorial calendar and create a plan to consistently publish new evergreen content if you want to create long-term value for your website.

Linking to related posts

On page optimization is very essential to gain visibility in the search results as without optimizing your on page factors, you won’t be found in the Search Engines. Post regularly and build the trust of your users with content marketing. 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. A great and fast way to convey your goal is by using headlines and taglines. It appears that when attempting to improve search engine ranking for a web-site, a position in the top six of the search engine results page has never been more important. Even web pages that currently have a top search engine ranking cannot afford to be complacent.

Understanding Your Competitive Landscape

Contextual link building -- links that are surrounded by text in the body of content -- have a higher SEO value than links that appear in the footer or sidebar. It’s not enough these days to create a website then sit back and wait for your customers to find it. As 80% of UK customers use Google to search on the internet, it’s vital that your site is optimised to meet Google’s search engine criteria. This is known as Search Engine Optimisation or SEO. The world of search is a big one; even if you serve a niche industry, there are hundreds -- or even thousands -- of keywords and topics to choose from, and your choices could make or break your strategy. I think it's good to have lots of content on the website given the 'long tail' nature of searchers' keyword queries. If you’re an SEO-newbie you’ll probably hear lots of new and complicated terms.

Featuring an adequate number of high-quality links

It does not matter if you are running an e-commerce store or a business blog, content marketing remains an important part of modern-day SEO processes. You need a clear strategy on your most profitable keywords. You also need to determine whether you need a strong focus on your local market or if you should be targeting keywords nationally. Local SEO is, inarguably, the best bet for local businesses to grow big. 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. Stop words are the small words in your SEO phrase, such as up, with, is, a, etc. While it’s widely accepted as a best practice to remove these from your SEO phrase, sometimes removing them can actually hurt your SEO. For example, “What is a graco taco?” makes a lot more sense than “what graco taco.” So while many SEO plugins and search experts will advise you to remove stop words, sometimes it’s best to leave them in if they drastically impact the meaning of the phrase. Be your own judge.

How Can I Create Engaging, Trustworthy Content?

You should refrain 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. By regularly auditing your  or your client’s – sites, you can get a good feel for what you still need to do to improve SEO. SEO today is increasingly driven by natural language search, that is, people doing searches that are more like normal questions than two or three keywords. 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). The Google Search Console is an important basis for website monitoring. Not only is the sitemap.xml uploaded to the Search Console, you also obtain important data about the most common keywords used to find the website on Google. In addition, the Search Console also informs you about hacked websites and warnings to unnatural links.

Optimize Your Site With WP SEO Plugin

It’s totally understandable that Google takes user behavior into account in their assessment of which result to rank highest. 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. Google pays attention to third-party expert testimonials from independent sources – reviews, references, news articles. Recommendations from professional societies, are strong evidence of very positive reputation. SEO in York is here. Make sure your visitors know where to find what they need, and of course, make it simple for them to get back where they started. Link building is still an effective way to up your website’s SEO and improve is search ranking. As opposed to the unethical link building efforts that could get you into trouble, effective link building tactics can help improve your brand’s online presence, get more website visitors, and start increasing sales.

Pay attention to the content’s structure

Gaz Hall, a Freelance SEO Consultant from SEO Hull, commented: "Cornerstone content (in short: assigning one main page per content and linking that from related pages) shows how internal linkscontribute to your site structure." Now, as you might expect from Google, the definition of what constitutes a good landing page experience is a little vague and can vary widely from one page to another. It’s hard to imagine that just 10 years ago, SEO was a discipline governed by blackhat marketers whose sole objective was to increase rankings and drive traffic. Long story short—it wasn’t pretty, and Google didn’t like it. Compelling and unique images have always been at the forefront of link building strategies. Search engines, website owners, and their audiences find these types of assets helpful to the overall online experience. Canonicalizing URLs is a very important aspect of Search Engine Optimization but also of Social Media Marketing.

Business Factors That Affect the SEO Plan

Data analysis should be the cornerstone of your SEO efforts. Assess how customers access your site, what they do when they get there, and where the primary exit points are. Keyword research can help you discover new content opportunities, while it can also improve your existing content. Until Google get their act together, unethical and spammy SEO techniques (black hat SEO) will always exist. A great way to get your site more visible is to begin posting blogs on your site. Blogs increase the size of your site and give you a way to connect with your visitors. This, in turn, increases your search engine visibility, which will give you many more visitors. Google is also now looking at things like bounce rates – how long someone spends on your website. And it is looking at how your site renders on mobile and how quickly it loads. You can now get penalized for typos and mistakes.

Featuring an adequate number of high-quality links

Customized information will make sure your brand is memorable and distinct from all your ho-hum competitors. A good trick is to dig into your Google Analytics to see the top visited pages on your site. Content strategy and execution is a discipline in its own right. If you are looking to build a genuinely compelling brand experience shortcuts cannot be taken. Remember any additional traffic is typically good for your website ranking, so getting people to visit is the most important thing. Blogger outreach is a process of putting your product or content in front of relevant bloggers and journalists in your industry by sending them personalized emails. The primary objective of blogger outreach is to make website owners and people with a large audience talk about you and link to your website.

The issue of full posts on archive pages

Without on page optimization of your content which talks about your website, there will be less chances of your website getting authority leading to, you missing out on traffic. If you lack on-page optimization, there are less chances of you getting notice, which will again lead to low conversion rate. . If your site has thousands or even millions of pages, hand-crafting description meta tags probably isn't feasible. In this case, you could automatically generate description meta tags based on each page's content. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) isanother important strategy that helps grow your website traffic. The number of backlinks you have on your website plays a crucial role when it comes to ranking your blog on Google. If possible, secure your site’s connections with HTTPS. Encrypting interactions between the user and your website is a good practice for communication on the web. 80% of traffic to awebsite begins with a search query and 60% of clicks (to a site) are generated by the top 3 search results (on the search engine result page).

Can I Just Write Naturally and Rank High in Google?

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. Search engines (and users) look to the site architecture for clues as to what pages are most important. A key factor is how many clicks from the home page it takes to reach a page SEO – an acronym that can strike fear into website owners! Why? Because having an attractive website is just a first step. Beauty is, as they say, in the eye of the beholder and your visitors will be looking for an attractive and informative web site. Search Engines, however look for different things. We’ve all been frustrated by sites that load slowly, or won’t load at all, on slower data connections. Sites that load quickly help build positive digital engagement with your business, and there’s some evidence to suggest that both load time and engagement with your content improve your rankings. Link Building is arguably one of the easiest steps to Search Engine Optimization, since links don’t really need to be written or phrased in a certain way.

Google values the languages consumers use.

Keep in mind that you don’t need to think of Google as your audience. You write for your visitors and not for Google. With for instance the rise of voice search, longer keyphrases become more and more common. Using a long keyphrase five times in your 300-word-article will look so unnatural, that it’s not a good practice at all, where using a certain keyword five times might fit there. If your content is consistently very short and not original the Google algorithm is likely to consider the site low-quality. Local search success can be achieved by SEO. LSI keywords are synonyms that Google uses to determine a page’s relevancy (and possibly quality). Sprinkle them into every post. The best way to get backlinks from other blogs and from social media sites is to write posts that are engaging and worth sharing.

Make a good use of your competitors’ keywords

Gaz Hall, a Freelance SEO Consultant from SEO Hull, commented: "Determining the unique content on a page is an important part of what the search engine does. It is this understanding of the unique content on a page that the search engine uses to determine the types of search queries for which the web page might be relevant." With your website already cleaned up and shining with outstanding quality content and internal SEO methods (keywords, meta tags, etc), you should have a strategy to get your website noticed by others. The only way unethical SEO techniques are ever going to be eradicated is when Google themselves get clever enough to work out how to tweak their algorithm to ensure these tactics no longer work. Don’t get me wrong. Google have come a long way during the past few years in stamping out unethical SEO spam but they are far from ensuring none of it works. When it comes to getting visitors to your site, you want to grow your audience and also keep them coming back. Google will follow your links, the post and pages that have the most internal links will be most likely to rank high in the search engines.

Need to Branch Out

Today, many sites use secondary menus to accommodate for additional content. Loads of site-owners can’t help but state that they “can’t squeeze all they have to say in just a few pages.” Basically a search engine searches the web using automated programs called web crawlers. The crawlers follow links from page to page, they then send a copy of each page back to the search engine, which then builds an index of the words on each page. Evergreen content. Content you write once, and have it ranking for years and years. Content that constantly brings in traffic and compounds in value. Keyword research represents the very foundation of your SEO campaign and when done properly, keywords can drive traffic and rankings for your web pages. Keywords represent terms and phrases people type as search queries to find local businesses. User-generated content (UGC) sites and communities are two of my favourite places to find untapped keywords.

The issue of full posts on archive pages

Google recognizes that a site might have two versions on the same page (web version and printer friendly version), and this duplicate content is actually meant to make for a better user-experience, and not trick the search engines. A new shift in SEO strategy, and a redefinition of its goals, will ultimately result in a stronger campaign that can withstand the changes in search algorithms. Internal backlinks connect different assets — including content, product pages, or other information — together. Naturally, external backlinks will lead to increased brand exposure and sales. Ranking potential is an assessment of where you can realistically hope to get your rankings to; if the top 5 websites have a DA of 90+ and your website is at 20, it is not realistic to think that you will be able to grab one of the top 5 spots in no time. Again this is not always the case, but tends to generally be a safe standard of procedure. Repeatedly building over-optimized, spammy backlinks overtime will lead to a penalty.

Optimize for people not search engines

Cross linking is a great technique to get a better user experience. This can be an added advantage to you, if you have sites related to it. The more inbound links you have, the better it is. Cross links also helps in improving your rank in search engines . Knowing where to find good keywords and the proper way to work them into a website’s copy is important, but it’s only a small part of Search Engine Optimization process. There is an old adage used by webmasters which sum up most successful websites, “content is king”. It’s important to keep this in the forefront of your mind before adding or removing the copy from your site. Web users surf the net in search of answers, information, products, and entertainment. They will leave a site very quickly if it doesn’t give them what they want. You can stop improving certain pages, but the site as a whole can always be improved. Brands are generally most interested in gaining follow links as opposed to no-follow links because they help to increase ranking positions. But there’s a problem that has come from this. For some time now, brands have been incentivising bloggers to add unmarked paid for follow links – which is against Google and ASA guidelines.

Focus more on Brand building

Google doesn’t only consider on-page SEO score when ranking an article. It also takes into account many other factors like social media signals (shares, likes, tweets, follows, etc.), backlinks, domain authority, and many other off-page metrics. SEO allows you to capture demand when a searcher may not even be familiar with your brand name. At a bare minimum, include social sharing buttons on your content. Monitor the keywords, the site’s stats, the levels of engagement on each topic and find what users really expect from your page. If youwant to achieve a higher ranking on Google and other search engines, you’ll need to get serious about search engine optimization.

Think about Long Tail Keywords

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. 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. There’s a difference between desktop SEO and mobile SEO, but the goals are often comparable. You want to reach your audience and turn them into customers. In some ways, desktop SEO tactics also work for mobile SEO, but in a slightly different form. SEO in York is here. You need to produce quality content that provides valuable insight. Google has enhanced its algorithms to weed out low-quality pages from its index. Therefore, if you are not part of Google’s directory, search engines will not include you in their results. And you can imagine what that can mean for your website! A general rule of thumb: If you have links in a menu at the top of the page, avoid duplicating those same links on the bottom of every page. Linking to the same page in the footer creates a hole for the link juice to seep out.

Keywords are used by search engines as an indication as to what a page is offering

Gaz Hall, a Freelance SEO Consultant from SEO Hull, commented: "Meta descriptions don’t carry as much value as they used to, but they still have an important role for SEO. Each of your posts should have a unique title and meta description. Make sure all are unique and you don’t have any duplicate ones." It’s worth noting that there are SEOs who prefer using TF (Trust Flow) and CF (Citation Flow) from Majestic when checking their competitors authority and trust levels. Fundamental search engine optimization never changes. You only have three things to work with: content, links, and measurement. An SEO campaign can deliver all the traffic in the world, but if none of the visitors ever becomes a customer then the campaign has not succeeded. As you spend time identifying your target audience and conducting keyword research, you’ll begin to uncover long tail keywords that will help you identify the best options for naming and describing your product or service.

Keep your title tag under 55 characters

Scan through your website and make a list of all the relatable keywords.Then, make a list of all the potential keywords keeping your niche in mind. If you are already clear with your business/product/service offerings, then keyword selection is all the more easy. Once you’ve identified opportunities you’ll want to decide on whether to create a new page from scratch or to make changes and improvements to one of your current web pages. Google is looking for answers to the user’s query that provides the answer to the question in a succinct manner. Formatting your HTML and providing content that clearly answers the question will help you rank well. Getting your business included in local resource lists is an indicator to Google about your authority. All you have to do is locate authoritative websites within your industry/community that also host a couple of local resources. If you have already worked to establish your business as an effective local authority, all you need to do is reach out. In the earlier days of SEO, the organic search engine optimization discipline was more of a technical skill, of making sites crawlable. Then the focus switched to creating quality content where keywords were used in a natural way. Do the main pages of the site have enough content? Do these pages all make use of header tags? A subtler variation of this is making sure the number of pages on the site with little content is not too high compared to the total number of pages on the site.

Optimize for people

Good quality takes time to create. It takes time to implement. And it takes time for Google to acknowledge that quality. As opposed to general web directories, niche specific directories only accept sites that meet a certain topic criteria. For example, one directory might only accept sites about arts & crafts. Some of these directories are free, while others are paid. Your competitors may be investing more in their own SEO campaigns, outperforming you in the process. Look at how your landing pages have performed since the launch of RankBrain to see if there are any correlations between user engagement metrics (such as time on page, bounce rate, and so on) and your SEO rankings. Backlinks from older websites may be worth more than links from newer sites.

Set-up Search Console (Webmaster Tools) Account

Important elements of a website redesign oftentimes get pushed to the side when timeframes are constrained. One of the most important components of a new design project is to take time at the beginning to analyze current traffic to ensure current visitors are not lost. Although the top-level domain isn’t necessarily considered a factor, some people believe obtaining a link from .edu or .gov domains can carry more weight than others. This may be because these sorts of websites have high authority anyway. Provide high quality photographs ofproducts, and include an easy to use magnification system so customers can get a good idea of the details. Be sure that colors are accurate and that no parts are obscured by reflections. Try photographing the items from several angles and either choose the most attractive result or allow customers to view each version in turn. 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 Search volume refers to how many times a particular phrase is searched for. It’s a handy way to gauge how much traffic you’ll receive from a specific query, though you should know that volume tends to fluctuate over time.

Cut Back Costs with SEO

Use an online tool to help you come up with more keyword and topic ideas, based on some of your preliminary ideas. If you're trying to get links from colleges, create content targeted at them that you can use during outreach. Trust me, there's usually something you know that you could write an entire tutorial on that would interest college webmasters. In the past, standard SEO advice was to get as many links as possible to your site, regardless of the source, and use the same anchor text each time. These days, doing that will get you knocked out of Google in no time. Another one of the best SEO tactics creates even more links to your site to improve your SEO. Local SEO practices and building profiles on business directories can build online authority for your brand and make a bigger digital footprint for your website. A blog is one of the easiest ways to create a regular stream of SEO content. In general, blog posts are more engaging and more likely to attract links than product pages, so they can be a great way to build some authority for your site.

Keyword research is the basis of all search marketing

When it comes to search engine optimization, creating a mobile site should be at the core of any solid SEO plan. s. Cloaking refers to an attempt to boost search result rankings by serving different content to Googlebot than to regular users. This causes problems such as less relevant results (pages appear in search results even though their content is actually unrelated to what users see/want), so Google takes cloaking very seriously. Data analysis should be the cornerstone of your SEO efforts. Assess how customers access your site, what they do when they get there, and where the primary exit points are. SEO in Howden is here. Google prefers fresh content. An older page that’s regularly updated may outperform a newer page. There are literally hundreds of factors that could influence your rankings in search engines, and even more considerations to bear in mind when you factor in content marketing and conversion optimization.

Get Keyword Suggestions

Gaz Hall, a Freelance SEO Consultant from SEO Hull, commented: "Build a unique contact page for each location that you operate and mark up your location information in Schema.org." Build links as if Google didn’t even exist – links that will bring you customers in addition to rankings. A popular practice, and thought to be best for SEO, is to include your target keyword as close to the start of the page title as reasonably possible (so that it still makes sense). Currently more than half of searches account for mobile devices. Building linkpopularity of a website is far more crucial than any other factors for SEO and positioning for top search engine ranking. But pay attention to who your link partners are.

Too much of content

When it comes to SEO, monitoring for keywords and changes in your website’s backlink profile is one of the most tedious tasks. It’s no coincidence that the highest-volume keywords also tend to have the highest amount of competition, and of course, the higher the competition, the harder it’s going to be to rank for that keyword. At the heart of it, keyword clustering is what it sounds like: you are taking relevant keywords and clustering them together into groups. With the many different resources available for finding keywords people are actually using in their searches, it shouldn’t be too difficult to get through this stage of Search Engine Optimization successfully. When it comes to marketing strategies for your small business, local SEO is the first avenue on that road.

Set-up Search Console (Webmaster Tools) Account

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. Writing blog content is one of the best ways to generate traffic and inbound links to your site. Marketers who blog consistently see up to 97% more organic links generated for their site. Guest blogging greatly contributes to that number if you’ve made that part of your content marketing strategy. In today’s SEO world, search engines often evaluate content to determine the search rankings of a website. It is a common misconception that content marketing doesn’t work as well for e-commerce websites. SEO changes quickly. Information that was true six months ago, may not be true today. If your current website isn’t using HTTPS then you should start scoping out a migration.