One of the most frequently asked questions by fellow SEO consultants probably is: “What online marketing tools do you use?” Great content marketing isn’t self-promotional. It’s useful and meaningful to the target audience. If you want to earn high rankings in Google search results, you first need to understand how Google ranks its search results. Rather thantargeting a broad audience, local SEO is about chiseling down and honing in your reach to target a specific group of people living in a certain area. It’s all about making the most of the existing relationships, communities, and consumer ties. The biggest challenge with SEO is that it’s ambiguous territory—but you shouldn’t let the uncertainty get the best of you. Understand that almost every marketer is exactly where you are now. Everyone’s trying to figure out SEO’s ‘hidden secrets’ with little direction.
Avoid thin, insubstantial content, duplicate content and of course spammy-looking keyword stuffing techniques. If you have redirect chains, the conventional wisdom is that the loss in link equity is compounded. If there are two redirects in place, that becomes 85% of 85%, or roughly 72%. The more redirects there are, the worse it gets. Search engines simply want todeliver the most relevant results to their users based on search queries. There is no optimal number of words on a page for placement in Google. 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.
Don't use any shady tactics that will get you into hot water like sneaky redirects, content cloaking, and so on. Using hot keywords and search phrases is crucial to catching people using search engines, but crafted content shouldn’t look mechanical or read like a lecture. 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. The user’s keywords are typically shown in boldface when they appear in the search results (sometimes close synonyms are shown in boldface as well). 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.
Gaz Hall, a Freelance SEO Consultant from SEO Hull, commented: "A backlink from a more important page that is high in popularity itself will count more toward a higher ranking for your website." Do your maths - its one of the primary resources for this sort of thing. Its as simple as KS2 Maths. Really! The notion of UX (user experience) has evolved to become the guiding framework for search engines. Relevance versus authority can be particularly challenging for beginner link builders as they begin the arduous process of securing links Did youmigrate 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. Another “old school” method of building up your backlinks is to make use of Forum Posting. It is a quick, easy and sometimes even fun way to get your links out and maybe even have someone directly click on them which is always a good thing.
There are several ways of creating backlinks, some of them are categorized good ones others are the bad ones that you would want to ignore in order to not get penalized by the search engines. Make it easier for search engines to index your website. When a brand fails to work on good customer service, the implications can be so dire to the extent of bringing down a company. Ranking in Google is getting more and more complex every day. The algorithm is this huge monstrosity and it is impossible to get anywhere even using all of the top SEO ranking factors. With search engines becoming smarter and more sophisticated with each passing day, it has become crucial for businesses seeking the benefits of organic search engine optimization to comprehend the undertaking required to rank highly in competitive search verticals.
Most SEO consultants have said goodbye to spammy, shady optimization techniques because Google actively penalized you for it since 2011. If you're not adding value, then the customer simply won't ascend and you won't grow your business (fast or slow). That's what it takes. earch engines don’t read images, they read the ALT text instead. You should use an ALT attribute to help engine crawlers better understand the meaning of an image and what it represents. Once you are done with cleaning up all the toxic backlinks pointing to your site, you need to file a reconsideration request with Google. This has to be polite and detailed, stating that you admit the mistakes you have committed, explaining the steps that you took to correct the same and promising to use nothing, but best practices for link building and SEO. Well, ours is an imperfect world, and, as you might have heard, some self-proclaimed SEO “experts” scheme to trick search engines and inflate their rankings using black-hat, unethical methods, and in the times before the nofollow attribute, link-building was an easy way to artificially boost page rankings.
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. With responsive design, the only thing that changes across devices is the styling (which is controlled by CSS). This configuration makes it easier for Google to crawl your pages and retrieve your content. To quote Google, “This improvement in crawling efficiency can indirectly help Google index more of the site’s contents and keep it appropriately fresh. A fantastic and free way to get new ideas for keywords in your niche is by using the data Google gives for each search. After you do any search in Google, you’ll find Searches related to it at the bottom. Can you use any to improve your content? One question that often arises in regards to HTML tags and linking is whether or not internal links should be “nofollowed.” “Rel=’nofollow’” instructs Google to not allow PageRank to flow through the link. A title tag describes what your domain is all about. This is one short sentence in which you describe your online space. It will appear in several places, such as: the SERPs, social media, external pages, and in browsers.
If your website or webpage suddenly or gradually changes focus over time (say from a carpentry guide to a best practice SEO guide – sounds unlikely, but you never know), then anchor text pointing to you will likely change in line with the different topic. Google may then decide that your page has changed so much that the old anchor text is no longer fresh and devalue those older links. There are increasing opportunities to use schema markups, depending on your niche. There are numerous schema opportunities for news, recipes, and even fitness video. As time goes on, there will increasingly be more and more opportunities to use schema to enhance your website, tell Google more about your website and make how your website shows up in search results better. But the blogging holy grail is just this: A quality blog improves your Google ranking, which will draw leads to your website and encourage them to make purchases. Looking at statistics behind applicable keywords will reveal traffic rates and competition levels, helping you better understand the terms and topics that most interest your prospects. External, or outbound, links indicate that you are well aware of the topics you’re writing about, to the extent that you’re ready to use further sources to support your content. It’s more useful to link to reputable sources, as these links have bigger credibility.
Backlinks from relevant sites in your niche will be worth significantly more than ones from irrelevant sites or webpages. Some people believe that links from competitors for the same search position as you are worth more than others too. SEO and SEM tactics are not disappearing any time soon, so why not use them to your advantage? There are a lot of people using search engines to look for what you have to offer, and in the area you are offering them in. The well-publicised Panda and Penguin updates have had a significant (and in my view, positive) impact on the discipline of SEO. Most SEO consults cover a local area. According to research by Google, smartphone users have a higher buyer intent than desktop users. They’re focused and ready to buy. It’s your job to be there when they are looking for your products. It really comes down to just using common sense. Just sit down and think, "What would other people search to find this? What would I search for to find this?"
Gaz Hall, a Freelance SEO Consultant from SEO Hull, commented: "Imagine for a moment, a yacht. The on-page elements represent the sails and the ropes above water. Now imagine the technical elements of SEO are everything below the water line: the hull and the cabin. So you could have your sails blowing, and your knots tied correctly, but if there’s a hole in the bottom of your boat you’re not going to get very far." Do your maths - its one of the primary resources for this sort of thing. Its as simple as KS2 Maths. Really! If the link to your website can be found on a page with good content, chances are that people will trust that link. It's pointless to get a link from a website that people do not trust. Meta descriptions don’t carry asmuch 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 a common misconception that the internet is the ultimate learning environment. Yes, you can find everything you need, for free, but the information you end up with is not always trustworthy. It’s scattered, often outdated and sometimes contradictory. Now, even if search engines change their algorithm and give no advantage to exact match domains (not likely in my opinion), I’m here to say that exact match domains have another benefit: They attract amazing anchor text associated with inbound links!
Record any results that appear to be effective, and re-test them on other domains or with other terms. If several tests consistently return the same results, chances are you’ve discovered a pattern that is used by the search engines. 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? Your website URL should generally be related to/contain your keywords. The domain name keywords are a very important ranking signal for Google, so take advantage of it if you can. *Note that this ranking factor has been made less powerful over the past couple of years, specifically for EMDs (exact match domains where only exact keywords are in the domain name). The importance of keyword research is still quite prolific in SEO, although we have been switching to a topic-based search world for years now. Stop using keywords in yourURLs. Why? Because if you don’t know how to optimize a page without slamming keywords into the URLs, you don’t know how to optimize a Web page.
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. Links from a diverse range of websites are good, as too many links from the same domain can be seen as spammy. Do not use paid links because this is against some search engines' policy and could even result in penalties and in extreme cases get your website banned from that search engine altogether. The exception to this rule of course is through a search engine's paid keyword advertising called Pay Per Click, the search engine's primary source of income. Google will bring people to your website, but engagement can help return visitors and for instance sales promotions. Building backlinks for a particular keyword through different off page techniques like blog posting, forum posting, article submissions etc.. You can give hyper links to those keywords to get more backlinks while you submissions done.
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. Use simple and obvious terms that are easy to understand. Use descriptive captions and avoid generic captions such as 'Products' or 'Services'. You can and should use keywords that are related to your business in the captions as long as they make sense. Social Networking is bigger than ever these days! Sometimes known as “Online Reputation Management”, getting involved with social media sites is the fundamental step with which you begin to advertise, market and build your online reputation within your niche. Don’t overlook websites that don’t have a “write for us” page. Not every website has one of these. Links within long-form, evergreen content are also more valuable than links in short, news-based posts.
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. What is the first thing that you do when you want to learn more about a product? What do you do when you're trying to find the solution to a problem? The vast majority of people carries out a search on Google or another search engine. 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. 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. Whenever I speak to people about SEO, the number one question that I get asked is, “What’s the most important factor to rank number one in Google?”
It has become a trend by SEOs to remove older content, especially older content on a news sites, where sites remove content rather than simply archiving it. Add internal links to thetaxonomies the post belongs to 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. SEO in Snaith is here. Link building is working to acquire backlinks that lead to your site. Wondering why you need backlinks? Having high-quality backlinks is one of Google’s most important ranking factors for sites to show high up in search results. These links show authority. It’s almost as if the other site’s link is a vote for you that tells Google your site is trustworthy, credible, and valuable. While developing your mobile site, you’ll have three options: responsive design, dynamic serving and a separate site on a subdomain. Google prefers responsive design. This way, you have one site that adapts to the device it’s used on.
Gaz Hall, a Freelance SEO Consultant from SEO Hull, commented: "All Javascript and CSS files on your site must be unblocked. That means Google must be able to access those files so that it can see the site as a normal visitor does." Do your maths - its one of the primary resources for this sort of thing. Its as simple as KS2 Maths. Really! You may not have theresources to create locale sites for each country or language you want to target. In that case, add Google Translate to your site to ensure that your website visitors can see your content in their language (even if it’s not a perfect translation). In the vast sea of websites--from e-commerce, media and informational websites to blogs and wikis--most site owners use a basic approach to search engine optimization. They submit their site to more than 200 search engines and blast these with some domains and keywords that may be related to the site. If youwant to populate on the first page of Google organically and improve your SEO, patience is what differentiates the pretenders from the contenders. One good way to know what’s coming in the world of SEO is to keep your eyes peeled to industry news sites and specifically Google’s own blog.
Users don’t like to wait, and we are becoming more and more accustomed to the fast load times, which means your site will be left in the dust when a user must wait. Although SEOmarketing tactics take a long time to show impact and ranking against high-power competitors isn’t an easy task, SEO should be a critical part of any small business’ long-term growth marketing plan. It isn't just about the number of links that are going to a domain, but about the quality of those links. Unfortunately, this isn't something you can do quickly overnight. Analyzing content alone is not real SEO. Making a deliverable look pretty for a client is not SEO. You should use descriptive anchor text for all your text links. It plays a significant role and is seen by most of the search engines.
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. The key is to find the keywords in our niches which have low competition and create content for those specific searches to take advantage of the void in the niche we are working in. When you or your SEO Company creates links – make them hefty and serious. They should actually be almost a pain to get, whether through outreach, guest posting, or by deliberating with someone in your network to include a link back to your site. These things, when worth something for real will either take… money, time, or effort. If they don’t, they aren’t worth it. You might get caught up in creating different versions of content for your locale sites. But remember, creating remarkable and unique content should be your highest priority, above any other off-page seo tips. Create interesting and valuable content that other people will want to link to, no matter where they live. 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.
Just because long form content is meant to be educational and informative, doesn’t mean it has to be dry. Incorporating humor and writing in a conversational tone are strategies for making long form content more readable and interesting. Local SEO refers to making a company's website more visible on maps and in local-oriented searches, often for people seeking a brick and mortar store or a services based business that serves their area. Keywords are usually broken up and grouped based on the number of words within the query phrases. The more words in a keyword phrase usually the easier it is to rank for the term, since usually there is less relative competition. As a digital marketer, one of the most frequent questions I get asked is “how do I get traffic to my website?” Users searching for your site on Google might not necessarily want to land on your homepage.
Search engines drive dramatic quantities of focused traffic, comprising people intent on accomplishing their research and purchasing goals. If your blog lists your individual posts in order of the date that they were published, like most blogs do, then the older your blog post gets, the lower down the website architecture it goes. Ensure that your site loads quickly, not just where you're located, but from around the world. SEO helps your content gain enhanced visibility, which is why it is essential to the success of your marketing efforts. Most companies outsource SEO services for their business since it is convenient and more efficient to let an expert deal with the creation of SEO content. Yes, "content is king" – but that's only half the story. Imagine if Wikipedia, one of the world's most popular sites, offered no more than huge blocks of text, or if Google cluttered its search interface with distracting graphics. It's unlikely that either site would have become as successful as they are today. When content and design work in harmony, users will find your site more easily and stay there longer.
I’m sure you already have some assumptions regarding your target audience’s needs and problems. You also have some tips on who they are and what demographic they fall into. You can hire good writers, but that is often an expensive proposition. You may be under the impression that it will take an extensive amount of time to create enough content to make a difference or to start appearing in the search results. Just breathe. Even the creation of one blog post a week will reap you 52 posts over the period of a year. Google estimates that around 56% of mobile searches have local intent, and 50% of consumers who conduct local search on their phone visit a store on the same day. With local SEO you can showcase your business information directly to consumers who are actively looking for businesses like yours, and achieve an incredible reach throughout your local area. Are you looking for SEO Advice? Ideally, if you’re running your own small business, doing your own writing establishes you as the authority. Everyone likes to deal with the owner, and this provides a way to establish many relationships with customers simply through generating your own content. Develop SEO-enabled content from creation that is ready to deliver across all devices.
We asked an SEO Specialist, Gaz Hall, for his thoughts on the matter: "Social platform optimization - Your linkeraiti and my linkeraiti are two entirely separate groups that find content on two entirely different platforms. Whether it's Twitter, LinkedIn, or a niche news site (ex. Inbound.org), you need to find the right place that gets your content in front of the right people." 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. What would you type into a search engine to find your business website or page? Is yourarticle hiding among millions of others, difficult to find and not being read as a result? If it is, you’re not alone; great research can go relatively unnoticed if it’s not highlighted and indexed in the right way. The overall objective of SEO is to optimise a website for search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo.
Google’s Penguin 4.0 is now included in the core algorithm and is updated in real-time as of September 2016. Before this rollout, website owners waited years to recover rankings lost because of questionable SEO practices related to manipulating links. A link should only be considered quality if it’s relevant to your website and the particular page that the link is pointing to. The three main pillars of Search Engine Optimization; content, links and site architecture will remain for years to come. Quality content, in other words lots of original, error-free text organized well on a modern-looking website, is what matters most in terms of SEO that you can control. Your goal should be to create links to individual posts/pages along with those leading to your homepage.
SEO is a long-term strategy for your business and when done correctly (with the proper amount of time and resources allocated to it), it will produce consistent long-term value in the form of higher rankings and increased traffic. 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. There’s a debate as to whether or not this really matters. The days of self-serving, scammy, and spammy SEO are long-gone. And that’s a good thing. The ‘secret’ to success with SEO is no secret at all. Just focus on serving your audience’s needs and answering their questions in a thorough and empathetic way. 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.
Your links should be short, concise, and easily readable. Shorter URLs with fewer folders (“/” in the URL) tend to rank better. Needless to say, Google is going to make meta descriptions and meta titles short for mobile sites. So it is advisable that you should not write long Meta descriptions and titles. Else, they will be truncated by Google. All search engines deliver results based on relevancy and popularity, but how they determine what’s relevant is what differentiates them from each other. All search engines crawl and index the web, but each have their own algorithms (super complex systematical equations) for ordering the information. For small businesses, the best approach to identifying target keywords requires diligent research and the proper mindset. On-site optimization is all about publishing awesome stuff in the first place.
You don't need to write at a doctorate level to rank at the top of Google. You simply need to write at a higher reading level than normal. Understanding what your customers and users want to learn and know is exactly how you should be developing your SEO strategy. If you have two domain versions of your website, i.ewww.example.comand example.com and both www and non-www URLs are serving the same content (i.e the same homepage), then you might face problems regarding the duplicity of data. To avoid such situations, you must first choose the preferred domain (canonical), which is to be seen and then 301 redirects all the other non-canonical to the preferred domain. The Google algorithm incorporates hundreds, if not thousands, of signals when determining where pages rank for a search. Knowing which factors carry the most weight and optimizing accordingly can be the difference between success and failure. One of the things that can cause a lot of panic to SEO consultant is ranking fluctuations. Many questions such as what did I do wrong come crossing the mind.
Prove that you are trustworthy by connecting as closely as possible to high authority sites. Use structured data to further explain your topics. These days, directory links are unlikely to generate a torrent of traffic but they're a good way to build external links to your site. Additionally, links from specialized directories in your niche will bring in a steady stream of targeted visitors and help reinforce the topic of your site with Google. 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. You can read an onsite SEO beginners guide here. 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. A title tag tells both users and search engines what the topic of a particular page is. The title tag should be placed within the head tag of the HTML document. Ideally, you should create a unique title for each page on your site.
Gaz Hall, a Freelance SEO Consultant from SEO Hull, commented: "Constant changes to Google’s search rankings to hinder exploitative techniques and an algorithm that’s as hard to crack as KFC’s herbs and spices recipe mean a lot of what we know about search engine optimisation is largely conjecture." Do your maths - its one of the primary resources for this sort of thing. Its as simple as KS2 Maths. Really! Simply put, higher volume is better. The more people that search for your keyword, the more of them that might find your page. Quite simply, the better your SEO, the higher the chance your article will appear in a relevant search. This means people will find what they’re looking for more easily, and you’ll get more readers. Backlinks drive traffic to your site, but that is less than half the equation because once traffic has arrived at any given page (most likely a blog post), you want to move it to a landing page to convert it. Mobile SEO is the process of designing a mobile friendly website, which is responsive. Mobile SEO lets your site get viewed on mobile devices of different screen sizes and having low bandwidth.
If you are getting links from a site that has high PageRank with many other links pointing to it then those links will boost your site's popularity. Keywords as the first word in a domain name will boost your traffic a little. Using a country TLD (top level domain) will boost your rankings locally but hurt you internationally so use that with caution. Don't use any shady tactics that will get you into hot water like sneaky redirects, content cloaking, and so on. Googlebot and other web crawlers follow the links that they find on web pages. If Googlebot finds new links on a page, they will be added to the list of pages that will be visited next. If a link does not work anymore, or if there is new content on a web page, Google will update the index. You need to build content promotion into your content. This is the foundation of every successful content promotion campaign, and it starts with writing an irresistible headline.
In Google search, a headline with a relatively high click-through rate will receive a ranking boost since it indicates that the post is more relevant for that search query. In a Searchmetrics 2016 study into ranking factors, there was an “extremely high” correlation between social signals and Google rankings. However, this couldn’t be accredited to the algorithm, but rather to the “overlap between brand websites performing strongly in social networks and being allocated top positions by Google.” What we need to understand is that search engine optimization begins with the simplest of foundations: Create a Website that is easy to crawl, index, and match to queries people use. From that foundation we build greater complexity into our optimization methods and practices. Try to get backlinks to various pages on your site, not just your Homepage, but also Galleries, Blog Articles, etc. Your Homepage already has more hits than any other page. 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.