Building links is certainly an essential SEO practice, but Google is still dealing with the manipulation of SERPs via economically minded marketers. However, your link building strategy needs to encompass relevancy. In addition to storing the content of each page, Google also stores how its crawlers arrived on the page. In other words, it remembers the pages and websites that were linking to it. A link from one site to another is like a vote or endorsement for the credibility of the second website. Google AdWords have a brilliant – and completely free – keyword planner which allows you to search for new keyword ideas while checking out real search volumes. If you’ve got a specific idea for a blog post in mind, use the tool well before you start writing to find a few popular and relevant keywords to include. If you’re an existing business, you can learn a lot from your current customer base. If you have a shop you probably have a good idea of your target audience because you and your customer service team will be meeting and talking to them everyday. Otherwise, you could learn more about your customers by asking them to fill out a survey. As our internet ecosystem has evolved, we have shared increasing amounts of personal data with services we use every day, from social networks to search engines. They then use this data to tailor the content they provide us with to what they think will be most appealing, engaging or relevant.
The clear majority of websites gear their SEO strategy toward traditional search engine keyword searches carried out by typing. Good SEO involves creating valuable content, but they are not synonyms. Many companies that have an amazing content strategy don't have always have the technical and linking aspects of SEO taken care of as well. While you can’t always control who links to you, successful SEO often includes promotion and outreach. This includes reaching out to other sites, influencers, and bloggers in your industry to check out your content and hopefully share or link to it. A proximity search uses the order of the search phrase to find related documents. Each listing on the SERP has three core components, which include the page title, page description, and page URL.
When you're ready to scale your strategy, consider hiring a professional SEO agency or a highly skilled independent contractor. Search engine optimization (SEO) plays a crucial role in bringing in more traffic to every site. Keyword cramming is old news and will probably result in a penalty anyway So, don’t do it! Instead, focus on creating real, interesting and valuable content. No matter what niche your website is in, when you start writing an article, always provide helpful and actionable guidance. If you are giving the users the information they want, your content can be as long as you need. Search has penetrated the very fabric of global society. The way people work, play, shop, research, and interact has changed forever. Organizations of all kinds (businesses and charities), as well as individuals, need to have a presence on the Web—and they need the search engines to bring them traffic.
Gaz Hall, a Freelance SEO Consultant from SEO Hull, commented: "Links increase the authority and trustworthiness of a page to search engines, which increases the overall authority of that website." Do your maths - its one of the primary resources for this sort of thing.Google has no problem telling you what you need to do to compete for their top ranking spots, just read their guide and do your best to follow through with their recommendations. There are various ranking factors that influence whether a website appears higher on the SERP based on the content relevance to the search term, or the quality of backlinks pointing to the page. In organic search, you don’t have to continually pay to be seen, and once you’ve reached the first page of Google (and you have quality content and a trustworthy site), you’ll often stick there for a long period of time (depending on the amount of competition). 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.
It makes sense to use the same keywords in titles and headlines, simply because a single page should always define it's topic as exactly as possible. This means there will always be only two or three main keywords any given page will need to be optimized for. If you sign up to become a member for a site, you'll get a link in your profile. Well, not every site. Some sites will allow quality links in your profile, while others won't. Some are in the middle, such as Twitter, which gives nofollow links (links that don't pass link juice). If you’re a business, it may be a good idea to start a blog on your website. Not only will this keep your site up-to-date with fresh content and encourage repeat visits (and increase the frequency of search engine crawlers), but also show that you’re a relevant, trustworthy business. The Internet is all about trends — what works phenomenally well to improve SEO one year, might fall flat the next. SEO isn’t a one-and-done type deal. It requires constant updating, tweaking, experimenting and testing. And with SEO being one of the highest returning investments you’ll make for your website, you’ll want to constantly measure its success to maintain powerful results. Creating Local resources offers a plethora of link building opportunities. It is also an easy option for those businesses that don’t have a strong local presence or haven’t interacted much locally. Creating these resources is relatively easy but extreme care should be taken that only well-researched content goes into them.
The most important user signals are the bounce rate and the click-through rate (CTR). These are important for your SEO, as Google takes these seriously. If you haven’t already Ihighly recommend you sign up for both Google Analytics and Google Webmaster tools. Both of them are free, and provide a wealth of information about your website, who visits it and what keywords they are using which really helps when planning/assessing your SEO campaign. Ensure that you site is free of spam, malware among other problems for reputable and fast site. With algorithms getting savvier, focus on purchasing quality links and try to earn good inbound links. 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. Generally speaking you don’t want orphan pages (those that aren’t linked to by other pages), nor do you want an overly-messy link structure.
The recent statistics show that there are over 1.2 billion websites hosted on the internet today. And, there are also numerous websites that are competing for specific keywords on popular search engines. A small dip in search traffic is no immediate cause for concern (it may just be a temporary drop in consumer interest); but if that dip lasts for more than a few weeks or turns into a more significant drop, you’ll need to troubleshoot the problem to see what’s going on. When approaching other webmasters to link to your site; it's really important to “suggest” suitable text for them to use; i.e link code that will have the most suitable link text for your site. 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. Whereas a page's title may be a few words or a phrase, a page's description meta tag might be a sentence or two or a short paragraph.
The glitz, the glam, the glorious design elements that make your website look like a million bucks … When contemplating a website redesign, it’s easy to focus only on those features that are appealing to the eye. But to ensure your new site will truly resonate with your target audience (and to save yourself from some major headaches down the road) you need SEO to be ingrained in your redesign strategy from the very beginning. Internal SEO isn’t just about keywords anymore; it’s about creating an authentic and engaging user experience. Low-quality links can lead to a higher bounce rate and click-through rates, which can eventually degrade the ranking of your site on search engines. The basic thing you need to remember when doing SEO is that you want to get as many links from as many high quality websites as possible. This can be a difficult thing since getting your links approved can take a lot of time. SEO is important for every website that wants to attract traffic. SEO for non-profits, in that regard, isn’t that different from SEO for other businesses.
Despite all the changes, the fundamentals of search engines remain the same. Search Engine has become more smarter New Rules of SEO have been implemented or will soon be implemented—-It means old rules are of less use or outdated. It is necessary to understand and learn these new rules to maximize return on Investment on the biggest platform of the Universe—Google. The three main pillars of Search Engine Optimization; content, links and site architecture will remain for years to come. How to fix Google penalties. The key is to use SEO and content marketing together. Yes, SEO requires a lot of content, but that doesn’t mean you should pin all your hopes on that single aspect of online marketing. We want to come at this from all angles. 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.
Gaz Hall, a Freelance SEO Consultant from SEO Hull, commented: "It has long been understood that Google’s ranking algorithm is complex (by design)." Do your maths - its one of the primary resources for this sort of thing.Relevance versus authority can be particularly challenging for beginner link builders as they begin the arduous process of securing links User experience improves with original content, quick page loading, pages that fulfill their promise and easy site navigation. Authority enhances a site’s longevity, and the quality of its backlinks plays a major role in this. If you are linking to good sites, and they are linking to you, then you gain authority. Authority sites also get indexed quicker and deeper. Keywords are still a factor in content, but with the Hummingbird update in 2013, the way they are used, viewed, and searched has changed dramatically. Ensure that you site is free of spam, malware among other problems for reputable and fast site. With algorithms getting savvier, focus on purchasing quality links and try to earn good inbound links.
The search engine optimization (SEO) world has undergone some big changes in the last few years—the biggest being coming in the form of Google’s heightened push towards strong user experiences. Organizing your website into various sections, each with their own unique focus, will help visitors to find the content they’re seeking, as well as similar content they might also enjoy perusing. Video content is a great way to drive engagement from your visitors. Facebook users are now watching over 100 million hours of video per day on the social network alone, and video is becoming an increasingly cost effective format for advertisers. From an organic search point of view, video has a few issues, especially if you're not hosting your video content through YouTube. The biggest problem is that search engines can't understand the content within video (yet). 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. Successful sites load fast. Even a small delay can have an impact on visitor numbers, ad views and conversions.
What used to be a handful of on-page, off-page, and architecture factors has evolved into hundreds of signaling attributes fed through a complex algorithm that is constantly being refined and learning from your behavior. 99% of people don’t need any fancy tools or tactics. They just need to write the best content online for the topic they want to go after. Each yearmore than 2.8 trillion search queries are made on Google alone. This means that Google answers more than 88,700 searches worldwide per second.i In other words: Every second that your website is not indexed on Google, you miss out on hundreds, if not thousands, of opportunities in which someone might have accessed your website, viewed your content, and bought your product or services. If your page title is too long (currently 400 to 600 pixels), it will get cut off in Google. You don’t want potential visitors to be unable to read the full title in the SERPs. Be Yourself. Write about what you know and make it a conversation with your readers. Keep it natural. People will find your content because they speak the same language and seek your advice.
Search engines scan tags and categories to identify what products, blog posts, or gallery images are about. Adding tags and categories that accurately describe the item could help it appear in search results. People don’t read on the web; they scan. To make scanning easier, use plenty of clear and informative sub-headers to guide readers down a page. You don'tnecessarily need a large social media presence, just an active one. The more you engage with the local community by responding to comments and questions, the more your Facebook, Google+, Twitter and other social profiles are likely to appear in local searches. Editorial links can be some of the most powerful for SEO because they come from other publications in your niche mentioning your company. They can also come from thought leadership guest posts that you write and get published on third-party sites. Research proves the importance of gaining a presence on the first three pages returned by the search engines. Being on the first page of the search engine results page (SERPS) should always be the target.
The macro approach to keyword research is necessary for content heavy websites (and optimizing for traffic), but not ideal when doing intent-focused keyword research, as would be the case for Ecommerce, software, or other scenarios where some keyword phrases are going to carry significantly more qualification. Ranking high in Google can bring you some serious traffic too. When looking at a Google results page (often referred to as Search Engine Results Page, or SERP for short), the number one result alone brings in 31% of search traffic on average. Meaning, when people search for a keyword, 31% of those searches will click the first result. Once you create your blog, stick to the same domain for as long as you continue to publish. You could end up losing a lot of your organic traffic, your readers and all your search engine listings if you decide to move or change your domain and URLs. Does the website that is linking back to your website relate to your business? Make sure there is a strong relevance when acquiring backlinks. If everybody is linking people from their sites to yours, your site must thus offer top quality information worthy of a link. Therefore, Google and search engines alike bump these backlink-wealthy sites nearer the top of their pages in order to ensure people are finding the best sites for the information they require.
Search engines have a limited ability to recognize images, animation, video and audio. Back in 2011, you could use blog commenting to get 200 backlinks and quickly skyrocket your rankings on search engines. But, in today’s algorithm for search engines, the focus is on quality over quantity. Create great content. Google’s reputation depends on it leading users to high quality sites, so the better and more original your content is, the more Google will like you. Long tail SEO can attract traffic. Long tail keywords are essentially longer more specific keywords that tie in directly to your content. For example, if you are selling woman’s shoes on your eCommerce website. The main keywords would likely be: “ladies shoes”, “woman’s shoes”, “girls shoes” and other similar words. Review your h1 tags across your site, using a crawler to find them all if required. Do they all describe the page accurately? Do they use the keyword target? And do they match the title tag in what they say the page is about?
We asked an SEO Specialist, Gaz Hall, for his thoughts on the matter: "Search engines were nothing new; the first one was Archie created back in 1990, and there had been more than a few created between then & when Google launched (most notably Yahoo!)" .The concept of searcher’s intent is no new. We have seen the focus shifting from SEO to understanding searcher’s intent to provide better user experience. After the release of Google Panda and Google Penguin update, SEOs have started focussing on user experience rather solely on Search Engines. Most people look at SEO the wrong way. They look at ways to do the least amount of work for the greatest initial return, when in fact, it's quite the opposite. Using social media for your business has numerous benefits, but it’s never been more important for SEO than today. Search engines are measuring social signals such as likes, favorites, shares, retweets and +1s to determine valuable, search-worthy results. According to experts, we should expect high-quality social media posts to rise higher and higher in search results. To avoid spreading yourself too thin, consider focusing a majority of your social efforts on two platforms, or hiring a part-time social media expert. In social search, content thathas a social connection to you in some way is prioritized. A social connection could mean someone you are linked to via Facebook, Twitter, or any other major social network.
Google collects user data on your site and makes further ranking decisions to determine where your content pages should be ranked in the organic results of search engines. when writing for the internet, break up your paragraphs as often as possible. Lots of white space makes reading text on mobile phones a heck of a lot easier (more than half of most websites’ traffic comes from mobile), and clearly formatted articles are used as a Google ranking signal. In link analysis, search engines measure who is linking to a site or page and what they are saying about that site/page. Principally, technical SEO is concerned with how a website works, and how search engines are able to crawl and index our pages. Think of technical SEO as the foundations of your site – without it, whatever beautiful building you create won’t be as sturdy as you’d like. Nofollow does not mean that the search engine bot will not follow the link at all but, it only means that the search engine bot will not pass value / link juice which normally would have passed for the given link.
Search engines use the notion of citation index to evaluate the number and quality of inbound links to a site. Citation index is a numeric estimate of the popularity of a resource expressed as an absolute value representing page importance. Each search engine uses its own algorithms to estimate a page citation index. As a rule, these values are not published. The best key phrases would automatically fall into place naturally, as you write the article. And that’s what Google is looking for. There is no one-size-fits-all solution for a search engine optimization strategy. Every company, whether large or small, needs to first set some specific business goals and objectives. From there, it’s possible to find your marketing opportunities and set a strategy that matches your current size and goals for growth. Building a strong site architecture and providing clear navigation will help search engines index your site quickly and easily. This will also, more importantly, provide visitors with a good experience of using your site and encourage repeat visits. We know consumers want personalinteractions with brands, but they also want them in real time
PageSpeed Insights is a powerful tool to analyze the performance of your mobile site. It’s easy to use and gives you loads of insights into the loading speed of your site. Put in your URL and Insights will give you two scores: one for mobile and one for the desktop. There’s no point in creating new content if it’s not authentic enough to stand out. Even if you come up with an idea from a different source, it’s still up to you to offer your unique perspective that will add value to the particular topic. Did you migrate from HTTP to HTTPS or are planning to do so? If so, it’s best to monitor after so you can gauge the impact on rankings and traffic. The search engines tend to give pages with longer, more in-depth content a higher placement on SERPs. Google places importance on the amount your content is shared socially, they see this as a sign that you site has quality content. By sharing it on their social media people are effectively endorsing your content.
Create profiles for your business (and include a link to your website) on major directory sites such as Google My Business, Yelp, Angie’s List, Yellow Pages, and other listing resources associated with your industry. Dramatic growth in the interaction between offline and online marketing necessitates investment by organizations of all kinds in a successful search strategy. At the heart of it, keyword clustering is what it sounds like: you are taking relevant keywords and clustering them together into groups. 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. The navigation should help theuser browse the pages without problems. From the menu structure to the link structure and the page’s design, even a slight detail may impact the user experience.
Editorial links can be some of the most powerful for SEO because they come from other publications in your niche mentioning your company. They can also come from thought leadership guest posts that you write and get published on third-party sites. Build a unique contact page for each location that you operate and mark up your location information in Schema.org. 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. Anchor text diversification is all about not having the text links. Keyword research can prove to be one of the most high return activities, not only in SEO, but in search marketing as a whole. Selecting the right keywords and strategically placing them in key areas of your pages isn't rocket science, but it does take a little time and dedication. Good quality takes time to create. It takes time to implement. And it takes time for Google to acknowledge that quality.
Gaz Hall, from SEO Hull, had the following to say: "Do not even expect to be on the first page of the Google if you believe in the theory that link building is an outdated concept." Google has guidelines that regulate the use of keywords and regularly updates its algorithms to regulate the industry. 9 out of 10 people users make use of Search Engines to find an answer to their query. When these users type in their keywords/query, the Search Engine’s bots and spiders run their complex algorithms, scan through the giant database that has been crawled and indexed by them. They, then come up with results (websites) whose keywords matches with that of the query. Real SEO is all about helping Google understand the content of your website. It’s about steering, guiding and assisting Google. Not manipulating it. Many marketers talk about the specifics of algorithms, content updates, spider-bots etc, but there’s no need for many business owners to worry too much about this. All you need to do to focus is assume that search engines want to get the most relevant articles, posts and products in front of an audience.
Off page SEO refers to the strategies performed outside of your website that can be used to improve your search engine rankings. When someone mentions off page SEO, they are generally referring to link-building or techniques that provide your website with some kind of coverage or exposure. If you’re struggling to rank #1 for your brand name among other websites with a similar or the same name, a rebrand to a more unique name or URL might give you a better chance of getting to the top. Metadata has become less important in SEO but is crucial to video indexing. Like images, Google can’t read media in the same way it can plain text, so your metadata should describe the video so that it can be read by search engine crawlers. Creating incredible content that people will want to share is still the best way to earn links. You can use your blog as an informal platform for giving insights into your thought process as it relates to your business. You can review products, offer personal opinions (be careful, of course, to avoid serious controversy) and answer questions. Even if your blog readers aren’t ready to purchase your products or services, they’ll be more likely to turn to you when they are.
Generally speaking you don’t want orphan pages (those that aren’t linked to by other pages), nor do you want an overly-messy link structure. Google’s shifts and tweaks on ranking algorithms are happening more often. What you’ve learn from an SEO competitor analysis may no longer be true after a couple of months. Competitor analysis in SEO is great for getting valuable insights, but it won’t give you a remarkable boost unless you also provide unique value to your visitors. So keep an eye on your competitors, while constantly working on ways to improve UX on your site. There are plenty of business owners whose websites haven’t been updated in years who are being left behind by major shifts in digital marketing. You don’t want to be one of those people. In the long run, not changing with the times hurts your business. Keyword cramming is old news and will probably result in a penalty anyway So, don’t do it! Instead, focus on creating real, interesting and valuable content. I strongly believe that relevant links have a bigger impact on the algorithm.
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. Take a look at which sites are currently winning the front page for the phrase you are hoping to win. Then, go ahead and link to a few of them within your own content. It can be within the body of the text, or you can include a few links at the bottom with a “More on This Subject” type of call to action (CTA). It may seem like this could lead eyes to a direct competitor, but don’t be afraid to break the mold and link to them anyway. As search engine algorithms adjust to accommodate the change in content, likely towards video, it will be important for marketers to optimize their content accordingly in order to best increase overall organic traffic. Some of the first things you probably think of with regards to SEO are links. Links are good. We need lots of links to our site, and to our pages, to be successful. This is part of Authority, that sneaky third aspect of SEO. To add to your understanding of links, internal links (or links from your own website) are also incredibly important. They’re how we pass our website’s authority around. And those super nav links? They create links from every single page on the site, to every single other page on the site. An SEO specialist should know how long content needs to be and to avoid keyword stuffing.
Is your website available in different languages or country versions? Awesome! Don’t forget to notify search engines of this. The search engines will then display the content of your website in the respective country and language versions for users. This improves usability since users are immediately redirected to the desired version in the SERPs. RankBrain andother machine learning systems examine user behavior to deliver the “best” search results possible. Unfortunately, what’s deemed best for one query might not be the best for another, which makes machine learning very difficult to optimize for. When you think about keywords what are they really? It’s an interesting thing to think about isn’t it, for one thing, keywords are usually short and common. Because people won’t often type in long sentences into search engines. Keep a list of keywords that bring traffic from organic search queries to your site. Study the organic search traffic in detail once a month, and analyze which keywords were responsible for the traffic. Your brand keywords will normally be responsible for most of it. Try, if possible, to distinguish between brand keywords and other keywords. The bad news about SEO is that it’s not as simple as flicking a couple of switches. Nor is it a one-time deal; SEO has to be a consistent part of your ongoing marketing. There is also an overwhelming amount of information available online – how do you know where to begin?
Don’t try to improve your website’s reputation by buying links or deliberately sharing links. Google has become very good at detecting these types of manipulative measures. It means that you risk falling heavily down in the rankings and it can destroy much of what you have spent time and money on creating. By continuing to create quality content that provides immense value to the searcher and satisfies their original search (whether that’s answering a question, listing ideas, educating the reader, etc.), you’ll be well on your way to creating content that search engines want to see and provide to searchers. Understanding what your customers and users want to learn and know is exactly how you should be developing your SEO strategy. Don’t just stuff your keywords in willy-nilly and then tack on your city and state (or region or county) at the end. Remember that in addition to conveying to Google the terms for which you want your business to be relevant, these are the phrases that your prospective customers will see when they’re searching. At the end of the day, Google makes decisions based on the number of links pointing to your pages and the circumstances surrounding such links.
According to Gaz Hall, a UK SEO Consultant : "You shouldn't feel comfortable using robots.txt to block sensitive or confidential material. One reason is that search engines could still reference the URLs you block (showing just the URL, no title or snippet) if there happen to be links to those URLs somewhere on the Internet (like referrer logs). " The closer to the startof the title tag any given keyword is, the more likely it will be to rank for that keyword based query. Whenever a high authority blog links to your website, Google considers it as a positive signal toward your blog. Your blog becomes more important and it gives your site a boost in search rankings. The more backlinks you have, the higher you rank on Google Search. Your title tag needs to be written for humans – as in it needs to make logical sense, rather than a keyword stuffed mess. The title tag will appear in a variety of places, from SERPs, to a social share, to the browser tab, so make sure it’s relevant and readable. Despite previous assumptions, a link from a 301 redirected page shouldn’t lose any PageRank compared to a link from a non-301 redirected page.
A silly issue that causes huge problems -- and happens more often than you would think -- is that sometimes people forget to unblock robots from crawling and indexing the website after the website goes live. Keyword research helps you identify keywords that appeal to a target audience and expand the reach of your content. When you use keyword research tools, it helps you identitfy what kinds of content users are looking for on any given topic. Always make sure to prioritize time for keyword research. Use bullet points: Using a bulleted list is the easiest way to ensure that your content doesn’t strain your visitors’ eye to read through it. Since bulleted lists stand out from the rest of your page, they make the entire piece easier to skim through. Your website won’t be found if people have to search too hard for it. “Ranking” for specific keywords relating to your industry and services is the first step in this process. When customers see their searched-for terms in your title and meta description, they will be more likely to click it. Learn which industry ranking factors are important to your business and how to improve your online rankings.
Start as you mean to go on: titles are the best places to get started with SEO. Regardless of what the search engines think, a snappy, relevant title will help attract readers on any platform. Including your target keyword within your page title positively correlated with higher search rankings. When you delete one or more posts or pages from your site, there’s often collateral damage. User experience is important to search engines and one way they determine this is based on how easy it is to get around the site or the navigation. Use 3-4 internal links on each page, but make sure they are incorporated naturally within the body of the text. Don’t put lots of links in the footer or at the end of your content. Google will penalize you for this. 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.