I go over some of the essentials here, but I wrote a more comprehensive article on the subject in Search Engine Land, for if you’re into the geekier parts of the matter. Check that out here.

The Free Tools

Screaming Frog

There’s just a massive amount of data collectible with Screaming Frog‘s spider tool. It should be considered the right hand for the technical SEO. Screaming Frog allows you to do a complete technical audit of the site with one tool and collect info like duplicate content, client and server errors, and a custom source code search. There is the option to purchase a “license” that ups your crawl limit and allows you to access all available metrics, but the license fee is the cheapest across the board of all the tools, at around $150 for a full year.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is some of the most useful data that you are going to get about your customers. And it’s free. Analytics allows you to track the way the audience uses your site – what pages they enter into, which they exit on, and traffic sources. You can use this data to analyze your click funnel, to track conversion, and learn more about the type of buyer you have.  Many of these tools have the ability to link to your analytics to be able to become a one-stop shop for both conversion information as well as ranking tracking or competitive tracking or whatever it may be.

Google Search Console

Google Search Console (formerly known as Google Webmaster Tools) allows you to diagnose the problems of your site and report those problems right to Google so there is a clearer understanding between you. It allows you to see your site just as Google sees, and see potential problems that you may not be aware of. You can see what Google is indexing of your site, and check out the impressions and clicks your site gets from its Google keywords.

The Paid Tools

Particularly if you’re in a more competitive market, paid tools will give you edge over competitors and depending on how you are using the information, can be an incredibly sound investment. These come at more of your own personal preference and what your business is specifically looking for. However, I do recommend them because they do offer personalization to fit your needs in a way that free tools often don’t.

Competitive Analysis

SEMRush has you covered with competitive analysis. It’s platform is incredibly easy to use and great for the person who doesn’t even necessarily know what the competitive landscape is like. Plus, it’s pretty cheap, at $80-$150 monthly. SEMrush is particularly useful for finding ideas for marketing content and marketing plans – you can search keyword rankings,trends, competitor marketing practices, and even dollars spent by competitors.

TrackingROI

Open Site Explorer also has a great platform for this that won’t dip into your bank account too deep. The $99/mo option allows you to research a great amount of competitor links and backlinks; it’s excellent for scoping out hubs and as well as analyzing your own backlinks. Moz Analytics, a feature of a subscription, is great for tracking data over the long term such as interaction with content, links, brand mentions, and search ranking.

Link Analysis 

If you’re looking to scrub through your own backlinks or perhaps do some expansion and link building, there’s no better link analysis platform out there than LinkResearchTools. It’s got a huge range of functionality and 93 individual SEO metrics that it measures, and is easily able to cater to a wide range of site issues. Link Detox is incredibly important in a webscape floating with spammers and bad site links. If you think your website might be getting penalties for toxic links, LinkResearchTools link detox is one of the most thorough in the game.

There are hundreds of paid and free tools to help you with your search engine optimization. Until you get deep into SEO as a specialty or into very complex sites and campaigns the tools above should handle the vast majority of your needs. Now you just need to go and start using them!

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How Nofollowed Links Can Help

To get more links

Often, a virality explosion will actually start out with a nofollow link. If you can get some buzz around a specific post on Facebook, that substantially increases the likelihood that a journalist or influential blogger will get their eyes on the post. There is where the good follow links come in. From there, you may get other blogger mentions. Matt Cutts mentioned that Google isn’t going to be using social signals at least in the immediate future, however, that doesn’t mean they aren’t possibly going to find a way.Time to look at nofollows as free publicity!

To get impressions, clicks, and leads

Although the nofollow link doesn’t pass link authority, it doesn’t lose its status as a link. People can still click through it to bring traffic to your site page. As well, especially if the page is linking to some high quality content of yours, that link could turn into leads. If you know that a certain page or piece of content has a significant amount of nofollow links, you can get the most out of those

An alternative to advertising that is often less in-your-face

According to Google’s rules, sponsored posts do need to contain only nofollow links to the sponsor. However, that doesn’t diminish the value of the sponsored post. As well, the guidelines of the post differ by blogger or site owner. Some bloggers don’t even require you to signal that the post has been sponsored. Instead, you get what essentially is an advertisement, but more subtle, more organically fit into the site, and sometimes less complicated in connecting with the blog’s audience.  These may not make changes to your link profile, but that’s ignoring the potential for clicks and for a large benefit from positive PR. Instead of thinking of the immediate short term benefits of a great link,think about the value of the link in its totality and over time.

How They Can Harm

There are certain parts of Google’s philosophy that seem a bit contradictory, since nofollow links, if bad, can still harm you, even if great, nofollow links can get you positive link authority. Matt Cutts has said that this is only in cases of very flagrant nofollow spam problems. Matt also mentioned that if you are spreading no-follow links like wildfire on other pages, you could also be sought out and penalized.

There are actually a number of studies that show that Google does indeed follow these links; but, they don’t index the site. However, none of these really have any solid footing to make any concrete theories. This means it is relatively easy to keep nofollows from harming you simply by keeping spam in check on your forums and comment threads. However, that takes effort.You can also factor in those nofollows in a link detox audit (I recommend LinkResearchTools) and involve those badly rated links in a link detox campaign.

Instead, we might just have to try harder for follow links, and maybe that is a good thing.

That way, links are earned. You are sharing your link authority coming from a great site with a bunch of affiliate links or links that are posted through illegitimate means. Links develop a sort of purity that makes linkbuilding much harder, but also gives a sort of genuineness to the web.I believe that was Google’s intention with the switch.

The post Why You Can’t Avoid NoFollow Links appeared first on Art Of Seo.

The setbacks

Directories

Directories benefitted in a hugeway with the unrolling of the Pigeon algorithm in August. Yelp got a huge boost in rankings, but other directories got a boost too, such as TripAdvisor, Expedia, and Kayak. You may see directories even surpassing your social media accounts in searches for your location.That means if you have bad reviews, they are going to be front and center of your business’s online reputation. However, if you’ve got stellar reviews, then this update is your moment to shine.

The 7-pack

The 7-pack is the grouping of traditionally 7 local listings for a local search term on the SERP. Blumenthal’s found that the search radius for this listing of locations was reduced greatly after Pigeon, such as only shops in a specific neighborhood of a larger city.That means you may have to market your shop as more of a niche than it was. As well, in many searches, the 7-pack is reduced to a 3-pack, such as this search for “cafe madison”.If you check out Moz’s eye tracking study from 2014, these “packs” take up a large portion of where searchers are looking, so this reduced pack is a hit for site visibility. Those 3 spots are going to become more competitive real estate on the local level.

How to improve

Geographic markup on schema

This is a few lines of code that a site-owner implements right into the HTML of the site. This markup lets the searcher know the physical location that complements a site, and is visible on the SERP page beneath the listing header. Google claims it isn’t being used as a ranking signal, but SEOs know that it increases your visibility, and that can be crucial in the post-Pigeon landscape that puts location information front and center and integrates them with maps.

Create a Google My Business Listing

Formerly known as Google Places, a Google My Business Listing also incredibly useful in the map search, since plenty of users search on the app when searching the closest physical stores for a given need, like “computer repair”. Your markup will put you in the running with those local competitors.It also shows reviews and a star rating, which doesn’t affect your search results placement directly, but does make viewers take notice when you have a huge group of results. The best ratings are going to shine.

Write Content for a Location

Putting your locations on your pages is helpful, but in a larger metropolitan area, it just isn’t going to cut it. Instead, adjust your content marketing strategy to include location-specific content. For example, if you’re a law office in the Chicago area, you can post a blog article about local law resources, your firm’s work with the local library to provide support for low-income families, and perhaps posts related to local crime.

Link to relevant local partners

Google still uses links to create a digital landscape of relevance. Link to sites that are your partners in the local scene, however, don’t over do it. Google will notice, and may hand you a penalty.

Promote participation in directories

Link your Yelp reviews directly to your site. Promote to users on your site to leave a review, as well as leaving a reminder for your customers at your physical location.The prominence of the new importance of these listings means that you will need to establish yourself in a larger network.As well, this will help establish your prominence in a certain niche.

Enacting these tips put you in a position to become not just a local shop, but a local presence. Use Google’s interest in furthering user intent to recognize what users want when they are doing local searches for your industry, and how you can fill the niche that they create. With these changes, Google gives the small store a chance at grabbing the searcher’s attention perhaps even more than the chain store or large company.

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1. Crawl your site first

Before generating a sitemap, make sure there isn’t any duplicate content that the sitemap generator might throw into the sitemap. This will confuse Google, and could prevent Google from getting the best reading of your content. This is available at Google Search Console under “Crawl”, and then select “Crawl Errors”. Are there any pages that are showing up that have errors?

2. Then, generate.

Unless you have a very small site, you’ll probably want to use a sitemap generator to get at all the nooks and crannies of your site. Usually the backsite style generators get a more comprehensive scour of the urls, since it can more thoroughly get through gateways made on the site.  Make sure you give it a good look-through when you are done.

3. When Google says update infrequently, what they mean is:

If you’re a smaller site, expect to update your xml sitemap daily if you update your site frequently. If you’re a larger site, only feel the need to update the part that is new.

Sidenote: You should be trying to maximize the ability of your sitemaps, don’t put just a few dozen links in one. If you’re doing a lot of small sitemaps, there’s a higher chance that Google will miss one.

4. Lastmod Time

This tells the Google bots exactly when a page has last been modified. It also tells Google that you want the date of the change you reported visible to the search engines.This also minimizes the chance that Google is going to have trouble indexing your newest content – you’ve laid it all out for them already.

5. Check up on Google’s indexation of your site

If you think you might have some indexation problems going on in a portion of your site, an easy way to diagnose is to segment up your sitemap categorically, by depth, or by content freshness. There’s a great in-depth article on using site maps to check in on indexation problems here.

If done right, your sitemap can be your key to make sure all the pages on your site are continually getting indexed, which is the first step in making sure they get seen and turn into traffic and conversion. However, you still should be checking in on Google Search Console to guarantee these pages are getting indexed. Sitemaps are not difficult, but also easy to get wrong. Following these steps is a great way to improve the visibility of your site incredibly fast.

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