by Karl Hudson | Jan 14, 2014 | Search Engine Optimisation
The year 2014 has come, which means a new year of opportunity has opened for online business owners. If 2013 was not so great for you, it is time you make changes and look into effective off page SEO strategies that you can use this year.
Beating your competition and keeping your rightful space online is a must if you want to survive the bloody world of online business. It is a must that you stay on top of your game and keep up with the changes made online. Here are some effective off page strategies you can try to achieve your desired traffic this year:
Quality Link Building: This technique is nothing new to veterans in the off page SEO strategies, but this continues to be an effective tool in generating valuable leads to your website. Get as many recommendations or backlinks from reputable sources and relevant sources as possible. You should keep in mind that your sources should be related to the products and services that you offer. It is highly irrelevant that you ask a baby product website to link to you, if you offer dating services. Google and other search engines do not only check your incoming links, but will also check the quality of your backlinks. If you have a friend that is operating in a related niche, you can always ask him or her to link you up.
Use Anchor Text: Search Engine Optimization, as you know, is all about using the right keywords and key phrases. It is always your goal that you use enough keywords and key phrases to achieve a good ranking in the search engine results pages (SERPs). With this, it is possible avoid creating content that is stuffed with keywords and key phrases, please note search engines do not like it when you keyword stuff, so just don’t do it. You can instead use anchor texts like “Click Here” or “Visit Here” to lead valuable traffic to your site.
Content Quality: Again, this is an old off page SEO technique that is still useful for this year’s SEO campaigns. Google and other search engines value quality website content. They will continue to prefer websites, which can offer valuable quality information to end-user’s. Make sure that your content remains fresh and relevant to your market today. Maintain and update your site content regularly.
Social Networking: This off page SEO strategy will continue to be a fad as long as the Internet is alive and kicking. Social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Multiply, and others are very helpful in bringing awareness to the public that your company exists. This will most definitely increase your visibility online. Remember, Google is not the only way for you to achieve online visibility and drive important and relevant traffic to your website.
If you haven’t done this in the previous years, then you should re-strategize and apply these techniques this year. This will keep you from being penalized and being banned in Google and other search engines. Most importantly, this will help drive valuable leads to your website.
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by Karl Hudson | Jan 12, 2014 | Search Engine Optimisation
WHAT IS SEO?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation. It is the process of optimising a website or webpage using specific methods which can help boost its page position.
The term “SEO” was created/mentioned in an article published by Bruce Clay. Which Danny Sullivan then promoted, as he published an article on his ezine titled “Congratulations! You’re a Search Engine Marketer!” Source: searchenginejounal.com.
So the concept has been around since 2001. Major developments in search engine technology and algorithms has made SEO a core piece of any company’s marketing strategy. Businesses are now beginning to understand the value of SEO and what it can do to help their business succeed online.
WHAT DOES “ON PAGE SEO” MEAN?
On page SEO used to be as simple as stuffing your page with the keywords you wanted to rank for.
This is no longer the case. In fact, it has become very important to do on page SEO, as search engine algorithms are becoming more advanced.
Back in the day, search engine algorithms used to just read your content, find your keywords and then try to rank you for those keywords based on your back links and other metrics.
Now, search engines take a look at your site as a whole, as well as the individual pages and can work out what niche your site belongs to. As well as fully analysing all of your on page SEO factors.
THREE FUNDAMENTAL FACTORS OF ON PAGE SEO
1. SEO Friendly Permalinks
You may find many websites out there have horrible URLs. To show this I will use IMDB.
So one way to help with this is to ensure that all URLs on your site describe and mention the keywords you want to rank for. As you can see, IMDB pulls no punches with their unreadable URL’s. The problem with this is crawlers – the robots that work for the search engines and have the job of checking out pages and introducing them into the SERPs (search engine results pages) – can’t understand what the page is about from just looking at the URL, which means they have to dig deeper and find correlations within their data.
Matt Cutts even mentioned in an interview that the first 3-5 words of the URL are given more weight. You can check out that interview here. So it’s quite an important feature that needs to be incorporated into your site.
2. The title of your page has to start with your keyword.
Your title tag is still the most important factor of your entire on page optimisation strategy. A recent Moz.com study shows the correlation between pages that had the keyword as the title of their page and the different weight it carried.
The closer the keyword is to the beginning of the title, the more weight/value it will have.
3. Keyword Density
Keyword density still plays a major part in any company’s optimisation process. Many people try to stuff huge amounts of keywords into one little 500-word article. Now the problem with this strategy is algorithms penalise your website for having high keyword density. Basically, if you’re inserting keywords randomly, then you’re doing it wrong.
The best practice for ensuring keyword density is kept low is to just write the article naturally. The whole algorithm is designed to stop people from unnaturally stuffing their keywords into an article.
What I like to do is start with the keyword in mind. So for instance if I were to write an article on “cat walking”, I would brainstorm the ideas for the article and create titles that are associated with the topic. It’s a great way of ensuring your producing quality content and keeping it all looking natural.
WHAT ARE THE ACTUAL BENEFITS OF EFFECTIVE OPTIMISATION?
Effective optimisation can help your website rank organically without the need of much link building. Algorithms are starting to reward people for writing quality content and contributing to their niche.
If you start to optimise your website you should start to see an increase in the amount of visitors as well as the amount of crawlers visiting your site. It can also help you reduce bounce rates. Bounce rates are where a user clicks on to your site, skims through, and decides to click the back button on their browser.
Effectively optimising your site can help reduce this as you can give them answers to the questions they have.
Over the next few months, we will be publishing monthly tips on how to improve your website and how to align it with an effective SEO strategy.
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by Karl Hudson | Jan 6, 2014 | Search Engine Optimisation
Anyone involved with internet marketing or web site design and development must be aware of the necessity of keyword research. A keyword is the word or phrase that an individual types into the search bar in order to find the most relevant web pages. It is possible to have to allocate an hour or more for keyword research, depending upon the depth of keyword research the marketer, designer or developer wants to achieve. It can prove to be a time-consuming and harrowing experience, indeed.
There seems to be no exactly correct way to perform keyword research. Recommendations on how to do keyword research vary immensely, depending upon which “expert” you choose to consult. The primary consideration is what the marketer, designer or developer wants to accomplish with the keyword. Usually, it is for the purpose of search engine optimization (SEO). But again, the best way to achieve keyword SEO is different from so-called pro to so-called pro.
Numerous tools are available that can assist with the keyword research aspect of an internet project. Some of these tools are free of charge, others can cost up to a couple of hundred dollars. Most authorities will admit profuse use of the Google keyword research tool, a free tool available to everyone. The major drawback is that the statistics reflected with the Google tool relate to ad placement and are not necessarily useful to a marketer or site designer. The tool will, however, give the user sufficient information on the number of searches performed for a specific keyword in order that keyword research begins SOMEWHERE.
The Google keyword tool is easy for even a novice to use. The researcher need only type in the niche of his project, a keyword idea or the URL of a specific website. The tool will search Google’s database and provide the results. A good practice is to write down the top ten long-tail keywords that appear, ignoring the competition column. A long-tail keyword is a keyword that consists of 3 or more words (more like a keyword phrase). Then write down the top ten LSI (latent search indexing) keywords. The LSI keywords are the top 10 keywords that appear from the search, regardless of length, in order of relevance. It is a good practice to not only use ONE primary keyword to a density of at least 2%, but to utilize LSI keywords in the content to avoid keyword spamming while accomplishing improved results.
The next step in keyword research is to determine the amount of competition for each of the 10 long-tail keywords that were selected. To accomplish this, the researcher must individually type the keywords into the Google search bar and perform a search of the relevant web pages himself. He should write down the number of competing pages (the total number of results returned from the search) and also make note of the sites that appear on the first page. Since the objective of keyword research is usually to rank on Google’s first page, the page rank of the sites that already appear on page one must be taken into consideration.
The software tools that can be purchased can cut research time dramatically. Most are equipped with complex algorithms that will not only find the most relevant keywords, but also weigh the competition to determine what will be the most profitable keywords – all in a matter of minutes. Though some of these tools may be expensive, the money that can be saved because of the cost of time-spent may make the investment worthwhile, if the marketer, designer or developer has the intention of performing keyword research on a regular basis.
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by Karl Hudson | Dec 28, 2013 | Search Engine Optimisation
In today’s world, internet and online marketing have become increasingly important for growing businesses, both big and small. The key to online marketing is your website and the key to gaining traffic and potential customers to your website is search engine optimization. Many people are not familiar with search engine optimization and know next to nothing about white hat, grey hat, and black hat SEO. This article will give readers a broad overview of search engine optimization as well as explaining the difference between white hat, gray hat, and black hat SEO.
To begin, search engine optimization affects how well your site ranks on Google and other prominent search engines such as Yahoo and Bing.
The first type of SEO is white hat SEO. White Hat SEO is basically a process where users try to increase their search engine optimization through honest techniques and by following search engines’ guidelines. This means creating an error free website that has a ton of quality and unique content that offers a valuable experience to visitors. Examples of White Hat SEO include writing articles for other sites in order to gain backlinks, guest posting on blogs in order to gain targeted traffic, and posting on relevant forums in order to receive backlinks. White hat SEO is a very time consuming process because of the quality, time consuming work that must be done manually by humans.
Secondly, and in complete contrast to white hat SEO is black hat search engine optimization. Black Hat SEO seeks to improve search engine optimization through techniques that are frowned on by search engines, or even considered illegal. Black Hat SEO wants to rank websites as quickly as possible. There are many different black hat techniques. One is keyword stuffing, which happens when a certain website includes a huge amount of keywords in an article in order to rank highly for that keyword. Another black hat technique is creating thousands of low quality or spam backlinks that link to your site in order to try and gain backlinks. Other methods include cloaking and hidden text.
Black HAT SEO is found attractive by many website owners because it is extremely cheap and if done right, can still work. The costs of black hat SEO are a mere fraction of the cost of white hat SEO. However, black hat SEO is risky and can get you demoted or even outright banned from search engines such as Google.
As you might have figured out, grey hat SEO is a mixture of black hat and white SEO. Grey hat SEO avoids or bends the guidelines that search engines have. Many website owners choose to engage in grey hat SEO because it offers a balance. You can quickly rank your website without being too risky.
I hope you enjoyed this article about white hat, grey hat, and black hat SEO.
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by Karl Hudson | Dec 24, 2013 | Search Engine Optimisation
Google launched this update claiming that its search was going to be more designed to provide users with a more direct answer to their questions. Google actually started using this update in the end of August, but they only announced the change on September 26th.
WHAT DO WE DO NOW?
As you may have probably guessed by now, Google’s algorithms continue to be a complete mix of factors that weight the relevancy of a page or site to the search query typed in. This definitely has not changed and continues to progress in the same pattern.
Keywords are still a vital part of SEO. Google is trying to encourage SEOers to move away from just basing their strategies around keywords. They are now looking for people to actively engage users and to start answering questions.
Provided you’ve been keeping up to date with the latest SEO strategies, you should have no cause for worry. Many SEOers believe that their entire strategy needs to be revamped, but there is nothing to worry about.
Based on what we know about Google and how it’s improving their search results, we know there is a list of things that will continue to matter;
·Structured Data Mark up: If you scratch their back they’ll scratch yours. Making the search engine spider’s job easier will help them navigate through your site and do a much better job. Structured data can also help you improve your click through rates when your data is displayed in rich snippets.
·Google+: Google loves its own stuff. Its social network is essential in helping identify your online brand. Connecting it with concepts and serving your content in its search engine results pages.
·Keyword Optimisation & Content Creation: Keywords are not dead. You do not stop focusing on them; instead you have to learn how to refine them. Meaning focusing on quality content is becoming a vital part of the whole program and not over optimising keywords.
·Mobile SEO: Mobile SEO is becoming huge because everyone nowadays uses their mobile phones to access and search for things online, although there is still debate on whether or not people buy things online.
·Backlinks: Are still very important and a vital part to SEO and online marketing. You have to remember that even though Google is cutting back on their PR updates, they are still looking at backlinks, a valuable aspect of their ranking algorithm.
HUMMINGBIRD UPDATE IMPROVING UPON THE FUTURE OF SEO:
Hummingbird is a fantastic step forward in connecting relevant search result pages to the questions people are asking.
It could also be a great way for users to focus on gaining visibility, especially if they change their whole marketing approach to target the user first, answer the questions they are asking, then follow up with some fantastically written content.
Today, instead of focusing on questions like “How do I rank for this keyword?”, you would ask, “What are the best questions that I have about this keyword?”.
Google can help you identify these questions by simply typing in the search keyword and it will produce results of related search questions.
So now you know how to do this. You have to take a step forward and look to actually put this plan into action.
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by Karl Hudson | Dec 24, 2013 | Search Engine Optimisation
For those of you that have not heard of Exact Match Domains, these are domains that contain the keyword in which you want to rank for. For example, if you were a dentist based in Newcastle upon Tyne, an exact match domain would be:http://www.dentistnewcastleupontyne.co.ukNow, the benefits of having a domain like this have decreased recently as Google has been focusing on reducing the amount of trust and link juice these types of sites can pass.
How can you ensure an EMD retains its power?
It’s simple. Google has been targeting poor quality content and poor quality anchor text structures on sites.
So one of the best strategies moving forward with any domain you have is to ensure that every piece of content you write is unique.
Then, any linking strategies you make have to target brand and generic anchor text.
Then, adopting the “less is more” principle you can look to build very high quality links into these sites.
As soon as you get the high quality links setup, it will help you increase the quality of your website.
CMSwire recently produced an article on Content Quality vs. Quantity. With this they tried to distinguish a clear winner. The article was published in September so it’s a little dated now.
“There is one question weighing on almost every marketer’s mind, or at least should be: what is better, quality of content or the quantity produced? The debate is ongoing and seems to be picking up momentum, but is there a clear and definitive answer to this question?
No. The answer is that simple.”
This piece is from http://www.cmswire.com/cms/customer-experience/content-quality-vs-quantity-is-there-a-clear-winner-022575.php
Google has launched their recent update which is targeting quality content. Humming bird is the name of this update.
It is focusing on content that answer’s questions.
Answering questions is a great way to show off good quality content. The focus on semantic research is even more powerful thanks to this update.
What do I mean by semantically related content?
Semantically related content is content that is similar to other related keywords.
Google is becoming highly focused on this type of content, content that relates to other things.
You can see it from this example.
Now with this example, you can see a lot of searches relating to “keyword research”. This gives us a rough idea of different keywords that should be used in the articles.
These keywords can help us devise a good content plan and structure based on these related terms.
It also means that you will be answering a lot of the questions that Google is asking. This could hopefully assist you in creating great quality content.
Following on from the idea of using EMD’s and linking them to your site, this would give you the highest level of control on the links coming into your money sites.
It also means you can use grey hat techniques to help you achieve online success without having to worry about Google.
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