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. Over the years, SEOs have become really good at understanding keyword intent and segmenting the marketing strategy to match intent. 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. Focus on keywords that have higher search volume but don’t neglect long tail keywords. If optimized right, you can get more traffic from keywords with less search volume. Links from and to an article help boost its ranking. When you submit, check the ways you can enrich your article; linking to different websites and databases is always a good idea.
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. When you’re spending good money on SEO, it’s common to obsess over your keyword rankings. There was a time when “keyword density” meant something for SEO content. For many content marketers, organictraffic earned through SEO is like a holiday bonus: It’s cool if it happens, but no one is planning their monthly budget around it. 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.
Keep your descriptions under 150 characters to avoid a trail off (…). This shows visitors that you have intentionally put up an informative and helpful description, opposed to the randomly generated one that Google pulls for non-optimised pages. Add structured data markup in your website's code to include vital business information for Google to find and showcase. Instead of willy-nilly linking to pages from site-wide elements, like the top navigation or the footer, consider the value of the pages that you intend to throw in the navigation. Try to limit your sitewide links to only the 20 percent of your pages that are the most valuable, and pages required for a good user experience. SEO in Hull is here. SEO-friendly contentwriting is not just about pandering to your audience with content that is splattered with keywords. Your website loading speed is one of the most important rankings factors in Google. No one likes slow websites, and neither does Google.
Gaz Hall, a Freelance SEO Consultant from SEO Hull, commented: "The search engines are able to analyze the reading level of the document. One popular formula for doing this is the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level Readability Formula, which considers things like the average word length and the number of words in a sentence to determine the level of education needed to be able to understand the sentence." Do your maths - its one of the primary resources for this sort of thing. Its as simple as KS2 Maths. Really! Quality means not something rammed with keywords which isn’t actually very useful or easy to read. Good quality content is something useful, or interesting to the readers. You want it to be well written, broken up with subheadings and images to make it easier to read. Every SEO strategy focusing on making the best website possible, will make a website more usable and user-friendly. Repeatedly building over-optimized, spammy backlinks overtime will lead to a penalty. Do you have enough pages around a specific topic area that it would make sense to create a page describing these related pages (e.g. root page -> related topic listing -> specific topic)? Do you have hundreds of different products that need to be classified under multiple category and subcategory pages?
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. Don’t try to act smart. There are some plugins which allows you to add no follow in external links. If you have applied no follow on the link of your blog, it will be given the priority. You cannot use do follow and no follow simultaneously. This won’t be helpful. 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. If you’ve been producing content in a haphazard manner, hoping and praying that some of it eventually ranks, it’s time to buckle down and commit to a more methodical SEO content strategy for the web. Google alone uses over 200 different signals in order to rank web pages and these signals change based on the type of content, industry, user intent, and other factors. There is not a one size fits all approach to SEO and what works for one business may not work for another, even if they’re in the same industry.
Your bounce rate is determined by the amount of people that click on the link to your website in the search engine result pages (SERPs) and consequently click back again to Google. A high bounce rate indicates that people did not find what they were looking for on your website. How bad hosting can lead to losing SEO rankings Downtime of your website can lead to vastly decreased performance in organic search. Title tags and meta descriptions are on-site HTML elements which reflect the content of your page, and are shown in SERPs and browser tabs as text. To truly understand whether your SEO campaign is working, you need to learn which measurements deserve your attention. 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.
In the search marketing field, the pages the engines return to fulfill a query are referred to as search engine results pages (SERPs). 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? Over time, you’ll gather data that helps you determine which of your keywords are most successful, and which ones need more work -- but how do you pick the right initial set of keywords? “SEO” refers to search engine optimization, or the process of optimizing a website so that people can easily find it via search engines like Google. There are some legitimate concerns about SEO for newcomers; it isn’t a strategy you can master quickly, nor is it guaranteed to pay off.
To truly understand whether your SEO campaign is working, you need to learn which measurements deserve your attention. Don't deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users, a practice commonly referred to as cloaking. Understanding what your customers and users want to learn and know is exactly how you should be developing your SEO strategy. The problem is, not all backlinks are the same. A large and authoritative site in your niche may be more powerful than many general blogs with little or spammy backlinks. It’s important not to waste your time creating content for sites that won’t help you rank, but how do you determine if a site is worth getting a link from? To ensure the best web browsing experience possible, the software engineers at Google created a search ranking algorithm that thinks like Internet users.
Link building, as a strategy, began in the late 1990s, coinciding with the advent of Google. In the early years of SEO, link building was at the forefront, and generally considered the most important tactic to get one’s website picked up by the search engine. The practice of link building soon went awry as there were no regulations and the algorithms had not yet developed to the point where they would punish link-building offenders. There are two main factors that Google considers when ranking results for a given query -- relevance and authority. The relevance of an entry is how appropriately it meets the needs of the given search query, while the authority is how trustworthy or respectable the source is. Authority is determined, in large part, by the inbound link profile of the page (and its domain) in question. To ridiculously oversimplify things, the more, higher-authority links you have pointing to you, the higher you’re going to rank. Internal links help Google establish site architecture and relative intra-site importance of webpages. For this reason, you should have internal links both on a site-wide & on-page, in-content basis. The actual number of internal links per page will vary & depend on the utility offered to users (once again). SEO in Hull is here. Every business needs a marketing strategy and so does a website. The best strategy to market any website is through SEO management. If you have covered the technical issues of a new website, you’ll have properly prepared your site for all the great content you’ll be adding.
Gaz Hall, a Freelance SEO Consultant from SEO Hull, commented: "Setting up, planning and executing an SEO campaign might well seem like an insurmountable obstacle." Do your maths - its one of the primary resources for this sort of thing. Its as simple as KS2 Maths. Really! Numerous studies have documented that page one rankings are often in the 2,000+ word length and higher. Getting more traffic is top of mind for any business owner, so the thought of mastering ecommerce SEO has probably crossed your mind once or twice. Although lead generation via the Web is less direct than an ecommerce transaction, it is arguably just as valuable and important for building customers, revenue, and long-term value. It is important to note that, despite popular belief, having keywords in the domain name does not help your SEO and it won’t help your website reach a global audience.
As long as you don't do reciprocal linking excessively and these reciprocal links are on topic and "make sense from a user standpoint”, link exchange is not something bad. Study yourniche (a.k.a. know your target audience!) and write specifically for the purpose of helping them. Duplicate content isn’t necessarily a bad or wrong thing, apart from in the above example where it’s just straight up theft. Links need to actually be of interest to the reader. They must be relevant to the reader’s concerns and answer a question, provide advice, show images or do something else that is beneficial to the reader. This might sound tough, but it’s really not. Search engines have been running on two wheels, On page and Off page factors. Even if one disbalances, it will lead to failure in proper SEO.
If you have any experience with local SEO you probably already know this, but If you are just starting out, here is something you should know. A good way to do local SEO niche research is by typing in your keyword + the geo modifier you are looking to target into Google. Google’s mission is to organize the worlds’ information and make it universally accessible and useful. Therefore, Google wants to show a user the best result possible, the result that best fits their search query. Search engines constantly tweak their algorithms to try to balance relevancy algorithms based on topical authority and overall authority across the entire web. Sites may be considered topical authorities or general authorities. 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. A common way to judge the reputation of a website is to check its Domain Authority (DA). DA is a score (on a 100-point scale) developed by Moz that predicts how well a website will rank on search engines. A site’s DA can grow over time, like a lifelong reputation. A backlink from a high DA website to your own is a strong indicator of your own authority on a topic. For instance, bbc.co.uk, a news site which is trusted the world over has a very high DA of 95. A backlink from a site like this would be powerful for your backlink profile.
Google Analytics allows you to specifically analyze the user behavior on your website. The analysis options range from very simple to very complex functions. Using tools like Google Analytics is essential to evaluating the success of your SEO measures. Google Analytics tracks the users on your website. In order to activate the tracking, you must add the respective Google Analytics code snippet on every page. Off page SEO is a long term and time consuming process.It includes acquiring backlinks to your webpage from the authority sites, Social media and Social bookmarking. Off page factors work in the background to improve the search rankings. When dealing with search engines, the term ‘relevance‘ describes the extent to which the content of a website corresponds to the search term used. Location search is growing every year and we are using our mobile phones daily to search for answers and solutions locally to us. Websites can occupy a so-called Bad Neighborhood. This refers to all websites that have been severely downgraded by search engines.
The addition of internal links – links from your own domain – to your content can be very effective for SEO. It’s a strategic way to inform search engines about the topics you want to serve as an authority, Your website loading speed is one of the most important rankings factors in Google. No one likes slow websites, and neither does Google. White Hat SEO – These are SEO techniques that conform to Google search engine guidelines and will not result in your website being de-ranked during a future Google update or if they perform a manual review of your website. Internal page linking is an important part of on page SEO. These can be interpreted as binding your website together. The main difference between goodand bad backlinks lies in the quality of the website that they link to. After all, no business should want references from untrustworthy sources. A good backlink is a link obtained from a genuine website, with a good reputation, that has your website listed as a Dofollow.
If possible, choose a domain name which includes your local area, and structure URLs to include relevant geographical terms where possible. Create content which talks about your local area, but be sure to make it engaging and relevant to provide a good user experience. Include your business NAP (name, address and phone number) on every page of your website – not just your home page or contact page. You want your page title to accurately describe what your page is about but you also want it to be “clickable”. Meaning, you want it to draw a searcher’s attention in a search result and entice them to click on it. On top of that, your page title should include your target keyword. Always use no follow if you have linked your site with another site which is not of your niche. Google will be very careful and can take a step of getting you deindexed if he feels anything fishy. Google does not wants its search results to suffer and hence takes this kind of steps. How do you add content to Google? Leveraging exceptional content is the right way to engage your audience. SEO combines art with science, and content is the way to get maximum results. It can help you create your brand, draw backlinks from relevant quality sites, build relationships, and position yourself in your industry. Keep in mind that quality and consistency are crucial. Google’s algorithms are always changing and updating, and increasingly there is more and more focus on the user — with the search engines favouring quality content over poorly written, keyword-stuffed pages.
Gaz Hall, a Freelance SEO Consultant from SEO Hull, commented: "Every business needs a marketing strategy and so does a website. The best strategy to market any website is through SEO management." Do your maths - its one of the primary resources for this sort of thing. Its as simple as KS2 Maths. Really! 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. People really love to check their search rankings. Many companies want to use this as a measurement of SEO progress over time, but it is a bit problematic, for a variety of reasons. Get people talking about your brand, and mentioning it on their website, or any website for that matte Ranking high on search engines relies on a variety of different factors, including the quality of the content you write. As you use content to deliver keywords and reach audiences, you’ll rank higher in search engines and increase authority with your site visitors.
Google regularly refreshes its search engine algorithms. These are called “Google updates.” These updates improve search results by gradually optimizing the specifications for website quality and relevance. At the same time, they counter web spam. The type of traffic we want to build is the type that will compound and will never go away. We want to create traffic today that will still give us a little trickle in five years. Combining hundreds (or thousands) of little trickles, our site that converts, and a great product we will create a giant river. If you need search engine optimisation help for your small business website, consider working with an SEO agency or hiring an SEO freelancer. This can be a complex area, and it pays to get it right. To increase your CTR, create a custom description that describes what your page is about and what the reader can expect to get out of visiting your page. You also want to include your target keyword. Think about the searcher’s intent when crafting this description. Optimizing your website will invariably lead to more organic traffic later on in the life of that website, so there’s no reason you shouldn’t do it.
Link outreach is a bit “old school” but can still be quite powerful. For larger websites, especially those within e-commerce leanings, there are huge SEO wins to be had with snippet optimization. Search engines want to show the best content based on context relevance, authority of the site, trustworthiness based on how other sites and people engage with the site, and other factors. Let’s not forget the speed of your site, not just because we all browse the web a lot more on our mobile devices, over not-so-broadband networks, but also because a fast site makes Google and in most cases your conversion rate happier. Understanding your audience and the entire consumer journey so you can be visible at the moments when it matters most is mission critical now.
We use keyword research to identify potentially useful queries for which a site is not receiving traffic. Keyword research is often abused by aggressive Web marketers who pursue an endless keyword strategy. Endless Keyword marketing continually adds keyword targets to a Website’s list of desired queries. This leads to an overabundance of content production and production standards suffer. More and more we are seeing the use of keyword clustering from sites that are making it beyond the scope of mediocre search results and traffic margins. Ensure that your site loads quickly, not just where you're located, but from around the world. Did you notice Google is offering fewer options for your search results to shine? It seems like Google regularly adds a new box to the search result pages that answers searchers’ questions immediately, without them having to click on anything. Site speed, from the front end to the back end, is an often overlooked area of web development that also has SEO implications.
Social signals like those from Twitter and Facebook are increasingly valuable, despite being no follow. The key is to build your brand – don’t think of what links are good for SEO, but instead think what links are good for your business, your brand, and what links can help establish you as an industry authority. Remember that links, no follow or not, build trust. Much ofdigital marketing has revolved around getting found by search engines and coming up within the first page of the SERPs When website copy contains a wider variety of terms and keywords all relative to the same topic, it appears more natural, resulting in higher rankings. The content flows naturally, more like a conversation you might have with someone. I strongly believe that relevant links have a bigger impact on the algorithm. If you want people to hang around your site, or make the purchases, your site should load in lightning speed, otherwise the users will not even give a second thought in jumping on to your competitor’s website.
Evaluating keywords for relative opportunities is still very tough. So most people don’t have the time to get up to speed on all of the shifting trends, the technical aspects, and make sure their website is running perfectly for SEO like a finely tuned machine. Don't fill your page with lists of keywords, attempt to "cloak" pages, or put up "crawler only" pages. If your site contains pages, links, or text that you don't intend visitors to see, Google considers those links and pages deceptive and may ignore your site. You can read an offsite SEO beginners guide here. It may seem counter-intuitive, but Google is tightening its organic results for 3rdparty websites and trying to respond to the good amount of searches by itself. Focus onkeywords that have higher search volume but don’t neglect long tail keywords. If optimized right, you can get more traffic from keywords with less search volume.
Gaz Hall, a Freelance SEO Consultant from SEO Hull, commented: "The technology used on your website can sometimes prevent Google from being able to find your content. Rich media (Flash, JavaScript, etc.) can lead to Google not being able to crawl through navigation, or not see content embedded in a webpage." Do your maths - its one of the primary resources for this sort of thing. Its as simple as KS2 Maths. Really! 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. If you execute your keyword research properly, you’ll end up with a long list of search terms you want to be found for. Make sure to search for those terms in Google yourself. What results are there already? Who will be your online competitors for these search terms? What can you do to stand out from these results? 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. The quality and quantity of links you have pointing to your domain determines your overall authority, which in turn determines where you rank for various search queries.
Search Engine Optimization is all about making your website more visible to people who are using search engines to look for your product, brand, or services. Focus on publishing compelling, quality content that is uniquely different and more valuable than anything else out there. That usually means it’s long-form content. Google already gives ranking boosts to sites on a secure protocol (https vs. http) and this emphasis on security will only grow as time passes. For those of you wondering, “index” is another name for the database used by a search engine. So “to index” a page is to have it added to that database. In other words, Google has discovered your page. To be successful in SEO, you need to know a site's mission, brand, target audience, and operations--and know those factors intimately. The only way to do that is to have agencies and clients work closely together throughout the process.
You want to be attracting users who are going to convert and remain loyal to your site and this can be done by delivering on your promise of quality content. To facilitate this, you need to offer clarity in your website headlines so as not to confuse or mislead anyone. It is recommended to take a holistic approach to SEO and consider all factors. The days of being able to manipulate one or two isolated metrics are gone. Look for pages that have excessive links. Google advises 100 per page as a maximum, although it is OK to increase that on more important and heavily linked-to pages. Search engine optimization (SEO) is the work involved to improve a website and promote it to increase visibility on search engines, which usually translates into an increase in organic visitor traffic relevant to your website. Additionally, it’s the application of using each search engine’s best practices to optimize a site and in doing so, keeping user experience first. If nobody has heard of your brand or company name (and it’s not part of the important keyword phrases) put it at the end of the title tag.
The overall goal is to increase the level of traffic to a website by using keywords and keyword topics to improve the user experience and meet search engine guidelines. The morepages you have give you more of a chance to rank well for a more diverse set of keyword phrases: this should technically lead to more traffic from Google, Yahoo and Bing. Google hasgiven significant backing to its Accelerated Mobile Pages initiative too, and the evidence so far suggests it is paying off. A 301 redirect means that the move is permanent. If you need to change the URL of a page as it is shown in search engine results, then you should use a server-side 301 redirect. SEO-friendly content doesn’t have to be difficult or time-consuming, provided that you understand how on-page SEO can work alongside your content.
Keyword selection requires its due consideration. You do not want to select a common, albeit popular, keyword featured in various other contents as it dilutes your visibility. Conversely, you do not want to choose a keyword that is so vague that your content becomes almost non-existent for the users. If a blog or web site doesn’t use the NoFollow tag, the search engines acknowledge the link; if a site does use the NoFollow tag, the search engines do not acknowledge the link. Repeatedly building over-optimized, spammy backlinks overtime will lead to a penalty. All the content you produce should be tailored to your target customer / audience. If you submit posts with very little content and a load of popular search terms, you’re likely to be found out. 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.
Even if the social search playing field hasn’t been completely defined yet, one of the key takeaways from the early actions of Google, Bing, and Facebook is that as marketers, we need to start seeing our search engine optimization strategy and our social media strategy as utterly intertwined. Instead of focusing on what you do or what you sell or why you’re awesome, instead focus on why your customers should care. Building links is hard. Google scrutinizes website backlink profiles more closely than ever, and it’s extremely important to operate within their guidelines lest your site gets penalized and you lose all of your traffic. There are many reasons why SEO is an important part of your marketing strategy. Search enginesoptimize their results pages — especially their mobile search results pages — to display businesses that are located near the searcher. This is a good thing for local businesses because local online searches lead to visitors and purchases. Google defines duplicate content as large blocks of text used across multiple pages, or even other websites, that are exactly the same or very similar. Simply put, you don’t want to use large blocks of the same text on more than one page of your website.
Gaz Hall, a Freelance SEO Consultant from SEO Hull, commented: "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." Do your maths - its one of the primary resources for this sort of thing. Its as simple as KS2 Maths. Really! 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. It’s important to keep in mind that if search engine traffic is your only goal, your results will probably suffer. Sometimes, your blog simply doesn’t get the attention and the traffic you want it to get. If neither your ranking nor your SEO has changed, you probably just need to put in a little bit of effort It’s all about website analytics — a powerful tool that gives you a full-picture analysis of how your website is doing online, and insight into areas that can use improvement. Services like Google Analytics give you a full-picture view of your site’s success with detailed statistics about a website’s traffic, visitors, conversions and sales.
Visual content is more important than ever. It manages to supplement text in the best possible way (or even to replace it) and it certainly can affect SEO. A great way to put people off your page is to tell them one thing with the title tag, and then not match their expectation with your main heading. Don’t keep repeating keywords through your sub-headings – use variations and natural language to describe your content. An SEO writer must take the time to understand who your audience is, what is important to them, and what content would be useful and meaningful to them. Be informative. Above all else, ensure you have informative content. The most entertaining writing doesn’t make you an authority on much more than entertainment. Noindex is a meta tag implementation that is sometimes used on search pages. Since some implementations of filters use the same technology as search pages, you may inadvertently be hiding some of your most valuable pages from search engines.
There are many theories, some backed by data, that show Google uses user metrics such as bounce rate, click through rate, time on site, etc. when determining the relevancy of a piece of content to the searcher’s query. Cramming popular search terms into your blog isn’t enough anymore, businesses need to spend time creating meaningful copy. Always remember, “Content is King”. Thereby, the content should be fresh, unique and relevant to what your website is about, and there should be no duplicate content. You need to get allsorts of links - not just comments, or profiles, or blog posts. A typical site will get links from all over the place and with all different anchors. You need to follow that strategy too (especially true after the Penguin and Panda updates). Another way to find places you can build links is by using a link intersection tool. These find sites that link to “competitor a” and “competitor b” but not to you. Theoretically, if they link to both of your competitors, they should be willing to link to you. Moz, Ahrefs, LunaMetrics and others have link intersection tools that work quite well.