Digital Marketing : Seo & PPC Tips

Google Speed Update: Google Algorithm Designed To Downgrade Slow Mobile Pages

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 23 Jan 2018 06:43:00 +0000

Google announced yesterday a new ranking algorithm designed specifically to downgrade the search rankings of really slow mobile pages. Google said "starting in July 2018, page speed will be a ranking factor for mobile searches."

In the blog post, Google said this update "will only affect pages that deliver the slowest experience to users" they also added it "will only affect a small percentage of queries." How small that percentage is, is unclear. But Google has said for a long time only really slow pages have to worry about a downgrade in their rankings for speed. To be clear, there is no ranking boost for being fast, just a downgrade for being really slow.

In April 2010, Google did announce a page speed ranking factor but that only worked on desktop and as we said, Google's mobile search rankings uses desktop speed - which made no sense. We thought, even Google thought, that when the mobile first index goes live that they would not have a page speed factor but we did know they were working on that issue. Well, they were kind of right, because it did start to go live and this mobile speed thing won't be live until July.

Google says you can measure your page speed multiple ways and they are not sharing a specific single metric to know if your site was hit by this algorithm update or not. In fact, Google told me in my big FAQ on the speed update at Search Engine Land that there won't even be a notification in the Google Search Console if you do get hit by this update, that is because this is an algorithmic thing, not a manual action.

Google points webmasters to look at the new PageInsights report over here, also check the Chrome user experience report and use the Lighthouse tool. But again, if you see an unavailable message in the PageInsights report, you will have to use these other metrics.

In any event, when Google announced this, I had several questions, which I published in this FAQ - the biggest question was around AMP.

If a page has an AMP URL but the canonical page, i.e. the mobile URL, is really super slow but the AMP URL is super fast, will Google use the AMP or mobile URL for measuring speed? Logic can say it goes either way, because we know that for indexing and most signals Google will use the mobile page over the AMP URL and heck, even the desktop URL over the AMP URL. So in that case we would assume that the slow canonical mobile page would result in a downgrade. But NO! That is not true, Google told us since the AMP URL is what is being served, even if the mobile URL is super slow, as long as the AMP URL is fast, there is no downgrade. This question alone caused huge confusion and I am glad we got an answer quickly, although I do wish Google would have addressed that question in the original post.

Overall, this update really is not that big of a deal. I doubt most sites will even notice when it goes live. A page has to be super slow for it to be impacted by this. Heck, even a super fast page won't see any ranking boost. It just hurts pages that are really unbearably slow. How slow exactly? Only Google knows but they won't say.

Anyway, the answer is AMP for speed will be what Google uses for this algorithm, not your canonical URL because that is what is being served. But for other signals, like content, links, etc, Google will use the canonical mobile URL. Confused? Yea, thought so.

by Barry Schwartz

Google Search Ranking Algorithm Update: The Maccabees Update

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 09 Jan 2018 11:29:00 +0000

Google Maccabees Update

There is currently both a lot of chatter in the SEO forums and many of the tools are lighting up around major changes in the Google search results. It is rare for there to be this must chatter this late in December in any of the forums, so when the WebmasterWorld thread started to get busy late December 13th through December 14th, it was something that caught my attention.

It seems like the update touched down on Tuesday, December 12, 2017.

In addition, many, but not all, of the tools are showing big swings in the Google search results. When you have both signals, SEO chatter and tools, start lighting up, it is a good sign something major changed in the core ranking algorithm with Google search.

Here are some of the comments from the thread:

My non seasonal site that never fluctuates unless its an actual holiday dropped 30% of it's traffic yesterday Dec 12.

My Site also dropped approx. 25% on 12 December. No seasonal content.

Massive drop from Tuesday onwards. SERPS for our keywords are all over the place with multiple duplicates. Likewise seen a steady decline since September. We're essentially back to traffic levels in June 2016. Hope Google stops messing around soon!

Like others, I had a major drop in Google organic traffic on Tuesday. A page that has ranked #1 for years went down to #9. It was replaced by outdated articles on major sites that had far less relevance. Other highly ranked pages dropped as well.

We've been down noticeably (though not drastically) since December 12, too, with no obviously discernible pattern: Some of our most popular pages are doing better than ever, but others have slipped.

35% drop on my main site starting December 11 (same day my mother passed away). Many pages that ranked top three for years.dropped five to ten positions. Some pages no rank drop.

We've also experienced a noticeable drop across our sites on or around December 12th. Like some of you sites which have held the top spot for keywords for several years have dropped 5 or 6 places in the rankings and have been replaced with low quality sites.

On one search result where I went from #2 to #9. The top three spots are now from the same site.The funny thing is (or not so funny) they have a featured snippet in #1 spot and the image in the snippet is taken from my site. So if you click on the image, then click visit site it takes you to my article.

So check your analytics, see if your Google traffic changed significantly around December 12th or 13th. Check your Google Search Analytics in Google Search Console, it should have data through the 13th. And check your keywords to see if anything changed there.

There does seem to be a big Google ranking update - let's call it the Google Maccabees update since it happened during the holiday of Chanukah? For more on the the Maccabees, check out Wikipedia, it makes for a good name for a Google update. :)

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Update: If you were hit by this update, please take our survey over here.

Update at 2pm EST 12/20: Google has confirmed with Search Engine Land that there were some updates aroujnd this time. The statment Google sent was "we released several minor improvements during this timeframe, part of our regular and routine efforts to improve relevancy."

Quick & Actionable SEO Tips 3/3

noreply@blogger.com (Akhi) — Thu, 09 Nov 2017 12:06:00 +0000

Cont..Quick & Actionable SEO Tips Part 2

63. If you’re hiding divs in your CSS, stop and clean it up.

64. Fresh content can give your rankings a little boost. This content doesn’t have to be new content on the homepage. It can come from your blog content as well.

65. Adding breadcrumbs to your site will enhance not only your SEO but also your user experience.

66. Avoid long redirect chains to help search engines crawl your site faster.

67. When using images, try to get the vector format image file. These types of files scale better, giving you better image quality on multiple devices.

68. Consider getting a content delivery network (CDN) to host your images. A CDN helps speed up your website.

69. If you haven’t switched to HTTPS and you’re running AMP pages, you will need to change soon. Maile Ohye from Google shared at the SEJ Summit that HTTPS will be required for AMP, but John Mueller recently stated it is not yet an AMP requirement.

70. If you have products with very close descriptions and names, use the canonical tag instead of redirecting it.

71. Nofollow links were first created to identify paid links. Today, most sites use them for external links in case you link to a low-quality site.

72. Always nofollow links listed in forums or comments. The same goes for sponsorships, advertising, and press releases.

73. With the launch of Google Allo, you’re going to want to increase your quality reviews for your local business. The businesses in the closest vicinity with the most reviews get top priority.

74. Check to make sure your NAP across local citations is the same across all channels.

75. Google increased the character limit of title tags to 70 characters. Make sure you’re optimizing for all characters. However, be sure to check if characters are cut off on mobile.

76. Google also extended the length of meta descriptions to 200 characters on desktop and 172 on mobile.

77. While having a privately hosted domain won’t affect your search rankings, having shared hosting may cause your site to get indexed less. Search engines index based on IP address and when they are multiple IP addresses, search engines can get too many signals.

78. If you want to get seen on the first page of search results, launch a paid campaign for your non-branded and branded keyword terms that you want to appear in search. Test and experiment with these to determine what keyword terms are working for you then integrate into your organic efforts.

79. You do not need to use exact match keyword terms. Google can associate your topical keyword search terms thanks to semantic search.

80. If you’re trying to structure your keyword buckets based on density, stop. Keyword density hasn’t been a thing for many moons.

81. When you’re hyperlinking internally, you do not need to link with your keyword terms internally. But it does help if the content surrounding the link is related to your main keywords.

82. While Google AMP pages may seem bare bones, you can add forms to capture leads.

83. Personalize your call-to-actions based on a referral. You can also do this based on location and keyword search query.

84. On your Google AMP pages, you can implement Scroll Tracking with Google Tag Manager.

85. When you’re working with influencers or getting your content posted to another site, do a quick search to see when their pages were last cached by searching “cache: URL”. If it’s more than a month old, save your content for somewhere else.

86. Voice search queries for locations will continue to grow. Think about incorporating phrases like “near me” in your content and ad strategy.

87. Develop content in a conversational tone to rank for voice search queries.

88. Social bookmarks do still matter, but they are growing into communities. How you engage on your social networks is how you should engage on your social bookmarks. Social bookmarks are not a one-time submit-your-link-and-that’s-it. You need to have a conversation, leave a few comments, or upvote other content not related to your content.

89. Retailers and e-commerce brands should integrate visual search into their marketing strategy. Pinterest is leading the way for visual search. Pinterest gives you the option to highlight a section of an image then create a search for that part you highlighted. Google Lens and other applications are also stepping up their game.

90. Thanks to artificial intelligence, we see a rise of chatbots. Chatbots allow brands to interact with consumers in a more human-like way. H&M is a good example of a brand utilizing chatbots.

91. When choosing a domain name, stick to 15 characters or less. Short domain names are easier for people to remember.

92. If you’re an e-commerce site, do not use the manufacturer’s description when writing your product descriptions. Take the time to rewrite engaging product descriptions for the user and search engines.

93. If you have a sudden drop in traffic, it could be due to a penalty. Check your email and Google Search Console to see if they sent you a manual penalty notification.

94. The sudden drop in traffic could also be due to keyword loss. Check to see if your competitors have started ranking for similar keyword terms with new content they are producing.

95. Start testing with Progressive Web Apps, or PWAs, with the new mobile-first index. PWAs will deliver a mobile site if a user comes to your site from their smartphone tablet. Major brands like The Weather Channel and Lyft are already testing this, and you don’t want to get left behind. PWAs are beneficial to brands that drive revenue through ads. They are an excellent alternative to AMP.

96. If you’re a new business starting out, invest in high-quality content. Also consider switching up your metadata to reflect seasons to potentially rank for long-tail, local keywords.

97. Guest posting is not a relevant way to build links, but it is an awesome way to create content.

98. If you have multiple pages competing for similar keyword search terms, consider combining the content into one giant piece of long-form content.

99. Curious why your competitor is beating you in the SERPs for the same piece of content? Go back and fill in the blanks of your content. Conduct an analysis of the keyword terms related to your article and find out if there are any missing pieces you can add to beef up your content.

100. When you’re searching your site in the search engines ‘site:example.com’ make sure to find all the variations of your site. For example, search the following:

http://example.com

http://www.example.com

https://example.com

https://www.example.com

101. We’ve talked a lot about Google’s mobile-first index. Bing and other search engines will likely follow. But it’s still important to focus and optimize the desktop version of your website.

In the best-case scenario, you already know everything on this list. You’re stats deep into a technical audit, and you’re never at a loss for words during a client meeting.

This Post First Published By SEJ on 21.10.2017 .

Quick & Actionable SEO Tips Part 2

noreply@blogger.com (Akhi) — Tue, 24 Oct 2017 09:49:00 +0000

Cont..Quick & Actionable SEO Tips Part 1

Other tactics get a lot of attention. But sometimes it turns out that those new and cool trendy tactics don’t actually work for you anyway.

Many SEO tactics just don’t work anymore. If you’re using outdated tactics, it’s time to rethink your approach to SEO.

31. If you’re a local business and on Facebook, geotarget your Facebook Live posts to include or exclude specific locations.

32. You can have customers browse your local store within Google if you’re using Google’s Local Inventory Ad program.

33. Indexed age of your domain has always been an important factor in ranking. If you’re a newcomer, it’s going to be hard to compete against a website that’s been around for 10 years.

34. Maintain a healthy link profile because the search engines connect this to the authority and quality of your overall website and brand.

35. Get rid of thin content or rewrite it. It’s doing nothing for your site but bringing down the quality. Long-form content has proven to get higher search results.

36. Clean up duplicate content that’s hosted internally or externally. By cleaning up duplicate content, you’re removing any scraped content or duplicate on your site. If you have duplicate content on other sites, email the webmaster to have it removed or add it to your disavow file.

37. Customer citations are continuing to grow. Put together a plan to ask customers for product reviews or comments on products. Search engines use these to attribute value and result in higher conversions.

38. Track what pages users are leaving your site by analyzing the exit pages. Why are users leaving? Consider revising these exit pages to increase time on site.

39. If you see low click-through rate in Google Search Console Search Analytics report, consider rewriting meta descriptions.

40. Sometimes old content is still driving traffic. If this is the case, consider creating a new post with similar content to drive new, fresh, more relevant content.

41. Double check to make sure your money pages are indexed with ‘site: domain’. Also, check to see if you’re double-indexed. Double-indexing can lead to duplicate content.

42. One page should have one H1 tag. Don’t use multiple H1 tags on a single page.

43. FAQ pages are growing in importance; I’d suggest you spend time combing through your FAQ pages. To gain more exposure for long-tail keyword terms, rewrite these FAQ pages to incorporate more of these search terms.

44. You can no longer match your SEO efforts with PageRank now that Google has removed it. When comparing your site to other brands or competitors, use SEO tools like Moz’s Domain Authority or Ahrefs’ URL Rating. These are not a replacement for Google’s PageRank because they aren’t 100 percent accurate, but it’s a good starting point.

45. When redesigning your website, bring in an SEO marketer before you invest more time and resources in your site. Many new trendy website designs like parallax scrolling need to tailor to SEO best practices such as pagination.

46. Don’t forget to add image ALT attributes before posting. Also, try to include relevant keyword phrases.

47. You can have more than one sitemap. If you want Google to focus its crawl attention to specific sections of your site, create a separate sitemap. These are for images, videos, profiles, and blog posts.

48. Make sure all your pages have the rel=canonical tag directing search engines to the main page. Rel=canonical tags reduce confusion when another site scrapes your content, ultimately creating duplicate content.

49. If your URLs are dynamic URLs (meaning you see something like this: www.donutsaregoodforyou.com/?mode=1-list=1), you’ll want to adjust your parameters in Google Search Console to how you want Google to crawl your content. Again, this helps with reducing duplicate content.

50. When someone else is syndicating your content, make sure they place the rel=canonical tag to direct back to your original page.

51. Are you setting up Google Search Console for the first time? Remember to add both versions of your site. You should submit both www and non-www versions of your site. Once it’s finished, set the preferred site.

52. Similar to above, if you have multiple subdomains, you’ll want to submit them to Google Search Console as a new property to gain all the data.

53. Before you migrate from HTTP to HTTPS, change your internal links to HTTPS.

54. As it’s quality over quantity for content, the same goes for link building. Link building is not what it was five years ago. Link building and PR efforts are now merging to create a more authentic linking experience.

55. When creating a piece of content, think about how that content can be repurposed into a video, Facebook Live, Slideshare, etc.

56. Don’t forget to add your IP address to Google Analytics.

57. Remove pop-ups on mobile and interstitials from mobile. Ever since Google announced in January 2017 they were going to implement a penalty on sites still using intrusive pop-ups and interstitials, webmasters have been opting for alternatives to pop-ups.

58. When you’re writing content, be sure to check your spelling and grammar. Errors won’t affect your rankings, but it makes for a poor user experience.

59. Create a system to schedule in manual outreach for link building and PR. Yes, links can build themselves, but what’s wrong with a little nudge? SEO is not a one-time fix-and-leave-it job.

60. When you’re working with an influencer, always have a contract in place. You want to be clear about what the influencer expects from you and vice versa.

61. If a client comes to you and says they want to rank for the “magical page 1 keyword”, run.

62. When figuring out what type of content to write, use tools like BuzzSumo to reverse engineer your competitor’s top performing content.

Contd..

Quick & Actionable SEO Tips Part 1

noreply@blogger.com (Akhi) — Sun, 08 Oct 2017 09:38:00 +0000

Many SEO tactics just don’t work anymore. If you’re using outdated tactics, it’s time to rethink your approach to SEO.

1. Do not use “#” in URLs. Googlebot does not support index URLs with “#” listed.

2. With the new mobile-first index, use Google Search Console’s Fetch and Render tool to test how Google’s mobile search agent views your mobile pages vs. your desktop pages.

3. Do not use AJAX-Crawling scheme on new websites. Migrate any sites that are currently using AJAX-Crawling. Remember: remove “meta fragment.”

4. If you’re donating to charities and nonprofits for a backlink, this is against Google’s webmaster guidelines.

5. While your sitemaps are limited to 50,000 URLs per Sitemap, you now have the ability to have a compressed version of 50MB, compared to the previous 10 MB.

6. Google will show emojis in search results. Emojis can play a big role in local search. Just check out how you can search for a pizza place nearby using an emoji.

7. Content is king, backlinks are queen, and video may be the spawn of the two. Google integrates video into Google Maps listings. So, if you don’t have a video strategy, start developing one soon.

8. If you’re a brick-and-mortar store, utilize Google AdWords distance and store visit reports to optimize what geographic regions and user locations are driving the most in-store purchases.

9. When conducting keyword research, incorporate queries that are more relevant to voice search. Now that Google voice search is available in 30 new languages, it is available to more than 1 billion people worldwide. Voice search will continue to become more important with Google Answers and the mobile-first index.

10. Ever since Penguin is now real-time, it’s important to monitor your backlinks in Google Search Console (Search Traffic > Links to Your Site) and disavow them once a month.

11. To help prep for the mobile-first index, increase mobile search traffic, launch Google AMP or Progressive Web Apps (PWAs). Google will serve up your AMP pages or PWAs in the mobile-first index if you don’t have a mobile site, so you’ll want to make sure your primary content and links list on the AMP pages or PWAs.

12. Keep your link building white hat. If Google detects mass manipulation, it will devalue all of your links, not just the bad.

13. Many SEO marketers feel unlinked citations offer no value. However, Gary Illyes hinted in an interview that there might be a future in unlinked citations. So, any mention is a good mention.

14. Stop building a mass amount of links on directories. Stick with directories that are of higher quality (Yelp, Yellow Pages, Google+, etc.) and add relevance to your brand.

15. Stop using widget links as a link building tactic. If you’re going to use widgets, use them as a brand awareness strategy and UX experience.

16. Make sure you have a clear linking structure within your website. For example, if you’re counting on your footer links to drive your internal linking strategy, think again. Footer and header links do not hold a lot of weight. Therefore, internally linking within your body copy will allow Google to navigate your website better.

17. When migrating your site from HTTP to HTTPS, do not make any other changes to your website. Google is assuming that nothing else has changed on your website. If you change more than one thing, Google may have a hard time acknowledging all the changes.

18. Canonical tags do not save crawl budget. Search engines must also crawl the duplicates to determine they are, in fact, duplicates.

19. Keep site speed to 2-3 seconds for the user. You can use tools like WebPageTest to find your site speed.

20. Swap out your Twitter URL for Twitter Cards.

21. Same goes for Facebook; you want to add Open Graph markup to optimize how your posts are viewed on Facebook.

22. If you’re an e-commerce brand and you’re not using Instagram, now is the time to start. Based on Instagram’s early success with shopping features, they are starting to roll out to thousands of businesses that sell apparel, jewelry, or beauty products.

23. With Google Home, Amazon Echo, and more digital assistants rising, facts and local guides will become extremely beneficial for brands looking to land in the first result.

24. Google launched a trip planning feature in their Knowledge Graph so if you’re a local business or travel company, creating travel guides might work to your advantage.

25. Invest in customer service on Facebook. You can sell and purchase through Facebook Messenger. Everlane is an excellent example of a brand doing this well.

26. Test and experiment with LinkedIn ads. LinkedIn allows you to track conversions for how many users from your sponsored content and ads are converting.

27. Create “Shop the look” ads in Google AdWords to convert more mobile searchers.

28. Try creating a 360-degree video for Facebook. Now, you can live stream 360-video on Facebook.

29. Get featured in Google’s Search Live carousel results by having AMP pages, structured data markup, and an Atom XML feed. Then, complete this form.

30. Reddit is the ninth largest website in the U.S. This is somewhere you want your brand to be, and you can start by testing with their sponsored content ads.

How To Optimize Your SEO Results Through Content Creation

noreply@blogger.com (Akhi) — Sat, 02 Sep 2017 05:16:00 +0000

It’s now become pretty common knowledge that one of the best ways to increase brand exposure is through content marketing. However, the best content in the world won’t help you generate leads unless the public is able to discover it in the first place.

This is where search engine optimization (SEO) comes in. By optimizing your content for search, you can ensure that more people will find – and potentially engage with – your organization.

1. Use Keywords Effectively

75% of Internet users never scroll past the first page of search results, which means you’ll need to get on that first page to capture people’s attention. One of the best ways to do this is by coming up with strong keywords that people looking for information about your niche would use when searching.

Chances are you’re already naturally including keywords in your content, since you’re providing information about a topic. However, there are often keywords you haven’t considered that can help you get higher in search rankings.

Try brainstorming what kinds of language potential customers might use to ask questions or describe problems associated with your product or service. Think about relevant topics to your industry, and then create a list of potential keywords for each topic. You can also use keyword research tools like the Google Adwords Keyword Tool to come up with your keyword lists. At that point, you can optimize your content for relevant keywords.

A good rule of thumb is to keep your focus on just one or two keywords per piece of content. This will help you keep the focus of your content narrow enough to make it easier to place keywords in strategic locations – like the first 65 characters of your headline – and avoid keyword stuffing.

2. Optimize Multiple Features

Along with the beginning of your headline, there are a few other strategic locations to place your keywords in order to help you best increase the SEO value of your content.

For instance, one of the easiest – but often overlooked – areas to optimize your content is in the URL. Having a clear, simple URL with a keyword or two will help search engines easily figure out what’s on the page, making it more likely that your content will appear higher up in search results.

You should also take into account your post length when putting up written content. Although Google tends to prioritize long articles over shorter ones, which means that you should have at least 300 words or so, overly long posts can turn off potential readers. This means articles should be somewhere around 700 words, and you should try to put keywords in about 1 – 2% of your text.

Finally, images are a great way to not only make your content aesthetically pleasing, but also boost your content’s SEO value. When you upload a photo, include keywords in the file name and fill out the alt text field with a brief description that includes a lot of those same keywords. Alt text is how search engines understand what an image is about, so filling it with keywords will help your content sit higher in the search rankings. Since 93% of online experiences begin with a search engine, this is extremely valuable to getting more eyes on your website.

3. Use Links To Reference Others

Out of the top results on a Google search page, about 99% of the websites have at least one external link. It’s important to place internal and external links in your content to increase its SEO value.

Internal links are helpful because they help search engines index your site, pick up on your main keywords, and overall improve the pagerank of the pages that you link. Basically, it brings other relevant content you’ve produced to the attention of search engines, giving you more bang for your buck than keeping everything separate.

External links lead to pages outside your website, which have a couple of uses. For one, they help search engines identify important keywords. More importantly, they help you gather incoming links from other websites as those content creators see you link to them. It’s generally good etiquette to provide someone with a link who links to them, especially if the content is related.

Although in an ideal world great content would be all you need to reach a wide audience, the reality is that you’ll need strong SEO strategies to expose your website to viewers in the first place. By paying attention to certain SEO techniques, you will be on your way to boosting your content and boosting your marketing ROI.

What are some other useful ways you’ve been able to boost your content’s SEO value?

Author AJ Agrawal is the founder and CEO of Verma Media

Check Your Mobile Site Has Alt Text Tags on Images

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 17 Aug 2017 07:03:00 +0000

Most site owners are pretty good about ensuring their images have alt tags, especially ones that might also be used as links, as Google will use that alt text for SEO purposes. But John Mueller had an interesting side note about the use of images when they are on a mobile site, which could have a pretty big impact for the upcoming mobile first index.

Specifically around images in general, so not specific to image links, but images in general, especially on mobile, make sure that your images on mobile also have an alt text.

This does make me wonder if this might be an issue Google is seeing as they are crawling and comparing desktop versions of a webpage with a mobile version, in preparation for mobile first index, where Google will be swapping over their search index from the desktop version of a page to the mobile version. We do know that links in general is one issue with mobile first, so it is likely that it is something they are seeing with links as images as well on mobile.

Bottom line, when auditing your website in preparation for mobile first, checking that your images have appropriate alt tags should be on your list. And don’t forget it isn’t strictly for SEO purposes, it is for usability purposes too, for those who can’t load images due to internet connection speed and for web accessibility reasons.

By : Jennifer Slegg

Google: Position & Weight of Internal Links for SEO Value

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 14 Jul 2017 06:58:00 +0000

An interesting question came up in the last Google webmaster office hours, with Google’s John Mueller being asked about internal links, and how Google weights those links for SEO purpose.

While one use for internal links is for users to enable them to easily find their way around a site, there is also a great deal of value in those links for SEO as well, especially for signalling to Google and other search engines which of your internal pages are more important than others.

For example, would a footer link be weighted as high as one in the navigation? Or would there be more SEO value in an internal link placed higher on the page or HTML?

So position on a page for internal links is pretty much irrelevant from our point of view. We crawl, we use these mostly for crawling within a website, for understanding the context of individual pages within a website. So if it is in the header or the footer or within the primary content, it’s totally more up to you than anything SEO wise that I would worry about.

So looks like all those internal massive footer links we see on some sites might not be that bad for SEO, even if it does look pretty awful for users.

That said, there definitely are sites that aren’t using the full value of their internal linking structure to ensure Google weights internal pages properly. While this isn’t as much of an issue on smaller sites, sites with a massive number of pages should consider their internal links for SEO purposes, including showing Google the importance of specific pages and for crawl budget purposes, regardless of where they end up getting placed on those pages.

By : Jennifer Slegg

Basic Tips For The SEO Beginner

noreply@blogger.com (Akhi) — Mon, 19 Jun 2017 09:59:00 +0000

SEO is a complex topic that sounds simple, so let’s clarify what it means before we get into the meat of the issue. SEO stands for search engine optimization. Search engine optimization refers to how search engines determine which links are shown first to users.

This determination centers around certain factors in the case of the results stemming from an organic search (non-paid). That’s not all. The benefits and profitability of SEO are even increasing with respect to mobile platforms. SEO refers to the set of factors that determine the search ranking of your landing page and other links in relation to many factors.

Framing the issue is important before getting into the question of why SEO is so important in the first place. Most people intuitively understand that the higher their site’s landing page shows at the top of a search engine’s results page, the more traffic they will receive. In reality, the influence that search engines have over the results you see and the frequency at which search engines are used may surprise you.

The fact of the matter is that search engines generally dictate what gets shown and what doesn’t get shown. Nowadays, search engines appear to have taken on a referencing role based on website relevance in addition to a simple search function. Interestingly, search sites like Google act as both gateways and gatekeepers to the rest of the Internet.

Google controls seven out of every ten searches. Because of this, Google is a gateway that most people use to find other sites that they need. On the other hand, Google is also a gatekeeper based on how it organizes and ranks the links of various websites.

This article will go over five ranking factors used by Google to shed insight into the details of that ranking process. In other words, by reviewing the features of the gatekeeping process, we can implement more robust and effective SEO measures.

1. Provide Useful Content

The more accurate, helpful, and reputable your content is, the better SEO results you’ll get. Simple, right? In theory, good content leads to higher rankings. The problem here is that machines are sorting through and making judgments on what’s good or bad. So you’re really trying to hit a number of things that mimic or approximate good content in your SEO quest. Making small, impactful, and targeted changes is key to creating the type of content attractive to search engines.

2. Write Suitable and Attractive Anchor Text

What’s anchor text? It’s basically the blue underlined stuff that you click on when you browse the Internet that takes you to another related site. Essentially, the HTML code specifies a section of text and associates it with a link to create the hyperlink that we are all familiar with.

So how do you add a bit of flair to your anchor text beyond its depressingly default color of blue? Moz gives a number of suggestions, but in general you just want to want your anchor texts to be pithy, unique, simple, and relevant to the linked page.

3. Backlinks

Backlines are exactly what they sound like, but like all important SEO features on your site there are both good and excellent ways to use backlinks. The concept behind a backlink is incredibly simple. It refers to the sites that link to your site, or any other site. Let’s say the Wall Street Journal made a link to your website. That’s a backlink.

There’s a number of key things to do when considering backlink quality. These tips relate to making your backlinks more useful to site visitors. You can accomplish this by evaluating a site’s link relevancy through a number of factors like content and online tools. Focusing on real websites, or websites that experience a lot of traffic along with using authority sites will also boost your rankings.

4. Make Your Site Easier to Navigate

This one’s pretty easy to grasp too. Just don’t fill your site up with a much of unnecessary clutter. Clean simplicity is one of the reasons that Google was so successful as a search engine in its earlier stages. You want your site to get to the point. You want to capture your users and have them understand the purpose of your site within seconds. Finally, you’ll need to arrange buttons and widgets around a theme or style that appeals to the visitors for maximum ranking results.

Even Google itself thinks organization and navigation clarity are important in its SEO guide. It emphasizes things like the relationship between clean navigation and search engines and makes suggestions like planning your site around your homepage in order to make visitor browsing more convenient.

5.Consider RankBrain’s Algorithms

The significance of technology appears to have subtly increased to a great degree over the years. Google’s RankBrain is an example of an algorithm has been making waves on the issue of search traffic and rankings.

So how does Google do it? The larger category of technology is called artificial intelligence, coding computer to perform tasks that only humans normally handle. But with the arrival of a type of artificial learning called machine learning, RankBrain has certain elements that are capable of rewriting their own software to get better at ranking the most relevant sites.

The real impact of RankBrain manifests in its ability to interpret human meaning (in searches) to an extent: “RankBrain is designed to better understand the meaning behind the words a person uses and types into his or her search engine because 15 percent of queries per day had never been seen by Google” (Broadbent, 2017).

With the powerful machine learning technologies guiding SEO and the calculations behind the rankings of site relevance, focusing and studying up on the latest SEO trends across popular platforms has never been more important.

Author : AJ Agrawal , Contributor (Forbes).This article was first published on forbes.com .

The Periodic Table of SEO Success Factors by SEL

noreply@blogger.com (Akhi) — Tue, 13 Jun 2017 07:50:00 +0000

What the SEO table covers

There are two major classes of factors:

On-the-page SEO: These are factors largely within the control of publishers.
Off-the-page SEO: These are factors influenced by others or not directly tied to a publisher’s site.

Within these two classes are seven categories of factors, which are:

Content — Factors relating to the content and quality of your material
Architecture — Factors about your overall site functionality
HTML — Factors specific to web pages
Trust — Factors related to how trustworthy and authoritative a site seems to be
Links — Factors related to how links impact rankings
Personal — Factors about how personalization influences rankings
Social — Factors on how social sharing impacts rankings

Overall, there are 35 individual factors, which range from making use of descriptive HTML title tags to whether a site has success with visitor engagement. Here’s a close-up of the table, focusing on just the factors:

How to understand the table

Each factor has a two letter symbol. The first letter represents the category a factor is part of, such as “A” for Architecture. The second letter represents the element itself, such as “m” for Mobile, giving “Am” its symbol.
Each factor also has a weight. This is a relative guide to how important it is to focus on a particular factor versus others and overall. Those with a +3 are most important, with +2 and +1 indicating factors of lesser importance.
It’s also important to understand that the factors work together. No single factor guarantees success. But several factors working together, even if they are minor ones, can increase the odds in your favor.

Violations are negative factors, spam activities that can harm your visibility. Don’t do these! Violations, unlike the other elements, all begin with “V” regardless of what category they are in, so that they can more easily be identified as violations. Factors marked -3 are considered worse than -2 and -1.

Factors with weight increases: Mobile, speed & direct answers

Am: Mobile — Google continues to push for content to be mobile-friendly, no surprise given that more than 50 percent of Google searches are done on mobile devices. In addition, by the end of this year or in 2018, Google will use a mobile-first index, even for desktop users.
All of this made us feel the mobile factor should increase to +3, a rise over the +2 it had in 2015 and the +1 when it was first added to the table in 2013. Those surveyed agreed, giving it a 2.8 average weight.
As: Speed — Google has continued to emphasize the importance of speed as a ranking factor, including widely implementing the AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) format that it backs. AMP didn’t even exist when our SEO table was last updated in 2015.
With so much attention on speed, it made sense to increase this factor’s weight from +1 to +2. Those surveyed gave it an average weight of 2.6, but we decided to be conservative with our increase.
Ca: Direct Answers — Both Google and Bing are increasingly showing direct answers that are culled from web pages above regular listings, something Google calls featured snippets.
Some publishers worry these are harmful, because if an actual answer is shown, why would people bother clicking to the source page? However, many others compete to be an answer, finding they do indeed drive traffic. Google’s featured snippets also serve as the single spoken answer that’s often given by the Google Assistant on mobile devices or in Google Home.
This factor was added in 2015 with a conservative +1 weight. Given the increasing prominence of direct answers, it made sense to raise the weight to +2. That also matches up with survey respondents, who gave it a 2.1 average weight.

Factors with weight decreases: Site and personal search history

Th: History — Google seems to have downplayed, in public statements or a lack of them, the importance of a site’s age or history versus years past. Given this, we felt dropping this factor from +2 to +1 made sense.
The factor was raised to +2 for the first time in 2015, when we agreed with the average survey response of 2.0. This year’s survey saw that drop to 1.8, giving us further reason to feel a decreased weight was in order.
Ph: History — Someone’s personal search history also felt to us like a factor that has decreased in importance. That’s why we’ve dropped it from +3 to +2. Survey respondents put it at 1.7, further reassuring us that the decrease was justified.

Factors that were dropped: Site identity and personal social sharing

Ti: Identity — We heavily debated dropping site identity as a factor when doing the 2015 edition, because Google had ended support for Google Authorship, which was the primary way identity seemed to be having an impact. However, those surveyed then gave it a 1.6 average score. Google also suggested that authorship was still being determined in other ways.
Since then, Google has backed away from authorship entirely. This year’s survey also saw it drop slightly to a 1.5 average. To us, there seemed little reason to continue listing this factor at all. We decided to drop it.
Ps: Social — Google+ was the primary way Google was using personal social sharing to influence someone’s search results. Google+ might continue in name, but its impact on Google’s search results seems all but gone — along with the users and brands that were active on the service. Because of this, we decided this factor deserved to be dropped. Survey respondents gave it an average weight of 1.6.

Factors considered but not added: App indexing and AMP

We wondered if we should add new elements for app indexing and AMP pages. People were asked to rate these on the survey. The average for app indexing was 1.7; for AMP, it was 1.8. We ultimately felt those were better considered as part of the existing mobile factor (Am) and decided not to add them as new elements.

Not changed but notable

As shown above, we don’t always go with what our survey suggests for a factor’s weight. Ultimately, we try to be a bit more cautious than what the survey suggests, plus we take into account things we’ve seen the search engines say or do.

Here are some notable diversions from the survey, where factors did not have their existing weights changed.

Au: URLs — The survey had keywords in URLs at 2.1, but we felt keeping it at +1 was fair.

Ah: HTTPS — The survey had the impact of running a secure site at 2.0, but we felt it was
appropriate with its existing lower weight of +1. However, this could change in the future — and there are good reasons beyond SEO to make a site secure.

Ah: Titles — The survey gave keywords in title tags a 2.3 average weight. We kept it at +3, viewing it as an easy and still important area of focus.

Ah: Headers — The survey gave the use of header tags (H1, H2, etc) a 2.2 average weight. We felt that was too much and kept it at +1.

Ta: Authority — The survey gave the idea that a site or page has authority that helps with ranking a 2.4 weight. Google has certainly downplayed the idea of site or domain authority, as we covered recently. But it has given even further emphasis to the idea of page authority. We felt keeping this factor at +3 made sense.

Ln: Number of links — Those surveyed gave an average weight of 1.9 to the idea that sheer number of links is an important ranking factor. We remain conservative on this, keeping it at +1.

Pc: Country — Survey respondents gave a 2.1 average weight to the importance of someone’s country on the impact of the search results they receive. It’s easily demonstrated that country location has one of the most important influences on search results. Just ask anyone in a country different from the one you’re in to do the same search. They’ll usually have widely different results. We kept this at the highest +3 weight.

Pl: Locality — The survey gave a 2.3 average weight to the importance of someone’s city or locality on the impact of search results. As with country, we know — and anyone can easily test — that a city or regional location can have a huge impact. We kept this factor at +3 weight.

Ss: Social shares — The survey gave a 1.6 average weight to the idea that the sheer number of social shares can have an impact on search rankings. Social is generally an indirect benefit, in terms of Google. It has repeatedly said that it doesn’t try to measure social signals from Twitter or Facebook to rank results. But social sharing might lead people to link to and engage with sites, which are direct factors. Overall, we felt remaining conservative here with a +1 score made sense.

Vd: Piracy — The survey put the impact of having pirated or copyright-infringing content at -2.6. Sites with pirated content can indeed be hit hard by Google, but most sites don’t do this and so don’t need to worry about it. Hence, our lower weight of -1.

Va: Heavy ads — The survey put the impact of having sites heavy with ads or intrusive interstitials at -2.4. We agree that Google certainly seems to be looking harder (and penalizing) for this. Still, we decided to remain conservative and keep it at -1. However, there’s an excellent chance this could change in the future.

Vp: Paid links — The survey average for buying links was -2.1. We think that underestimates the negative impact on a site that’s caught doing this. We kept this at -3.

Factors not mentioned & the importance of quality

Above, we’ve only covered factors that had changes from the last edition or where we deviated from how survey respondents felt. There are many more factors than these, however — so please do review them all.

More than anything else, Cq: Content Quality, remains the bedrock of success. It’s the first factor on the chart and heavily weighted for a reason. If you have great content, all things good SEO-wise flow from that. Survey respondents agree, giving it a 2.8 average.

Original Published By Danny Sullivan on June 12, 2017 at 1:00 pm on Searchengineland.com

SEO Tips to Optimize Your Mobile Marketing

noreply@blogger.com (Akhi) — Wed, 07 Jun 2017 10:10:00 +0000

Websites without a mobile version or with a poorly optimized mobile website will slip even further in search engine results pages (SERPs) as the rollout encompasses more sites. The good news is that some mobile SEO tasks are very easy to do yourself.

If your content performs inconsistently across mediums, you’re missing an audience engagement opportunity. Mobile SEO, much like traditional SEO, is about creating and tagging content in a way that makes it stand out online. Use this list of DIY mobile SEO tips to protect your brand from search engine penalties and maintain online visibility:

1. Create a Google My Business listing.

One of the most important listings businesses owners can create, Google My Business accounts are free and simple to set up. Fill out the information to the best of your ability, and include as many images of your business as possible. When people enter a search for your business online or via a Google app, they will likely see this information first. Make it count.

2. Frequently review all directory listings.

Beyond the Google My Business account, mobile users may use other websites and applications to find your brand. Frequently review and update all listings for your business online. Update listings on Yelp, local websites, TripAdvisor, Facebook, Angie’s List, the Better Business Bureau and other popular business directories. These listings will ensure searchers reach the right information when they search for your name.

3. Get social.

On mobile devices, social media sites drive a significant amount of traffic. Around 80% of social media users spend their social media time on mobile devices. If you want to maintain visibility with mobile users, prioritize your social media marketing strategy. Use platform-specific advertising, engage with users, and/or post prolifically to ensure your brand stands out.

4. Take advantage of plugins.

If your business uses WordPress or another platform, take advantage of the plugins designed to make your mobile site more user friendly. WordPress offers plugins to improve site speed, optimize images, and take care of other important mobile SEO tasks. WPtouch is a somewhat ubiquitous WordPress plugin that will create a Google-approved mobile-friendly version of your website. If you’re not currently using a professional to update and optimize your website, look into how plugins can help you maintain visibility online.

5. Use keywords for content visibility.

Mobile users search differently than desktop users. Optimize for mobile keyword searches to keep your content in front of the right people. While you can purchase tools to find the right keywords for your content, you can find keyword comparisons by device in Google’s Search Analytics.

6. Optimize images.

To improve page loading times on mobile devices, optimize images for mobile users. If you don’t use a plugin to help with images, identify the ones that present a problem using a page speed tool and then compress or change the dimensions for faster loading times.

7. Prepare your content for mobile.

In addition to searching differently on a mobile device, many people digest content differently. Readable and scan-friendly content tends to work better on mobile devices, but testing is the only way to know for sure. Consider using a basic A/B test format to determine which types of mobile content perform better.

8. Optimize for local searches.

You may not want to dive into detailed code optimizations that can boost search rankings, but you may want to consider a few basic activities. To optimize for local searches, include both the city and state in title tags, the URL, the H1 heading, and Meta description.
Mobile SEO will soon trump desktop SEO. Consider working with a professional or attempting a DIY head start today to ensure your site maintains visibility in mobile and desktop searches. A few simple tweaks can boost your digital presence and bring local customers to your door.

Author:John Boitnott

The 7 Most Common Negative SEO Attacks

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 07 Jun 2017 09:40:00 +0000

Here’s what you need to know to spot the 7 most common attacks, fix them and protect yourself in the future.

1. Auto-complete SEO attack

The principle is simple, but this negative SEO attack is very difficult to defeat. Practitioners simply search your brand name numerous times with words like ’scam’ included in the search. Do this enough times, and users who type in your brand name will get an auto-suggestion including the negative term. This might seem petty – and it is – but it can have a big impact on your brand perception.

You can spot this attack by keeping a close eye on your search queries. If unusual terms start to appear, you’ve probably been a victim of this negative SEO technique. You can’t do much to stop this happening, but a smart content marketing strategy can help you rank positive content for those negative terms.

2. Link removal attack

Backlinks constitute an important SEO ranking factor, so it’s little surprise to see these targeted by SEO saboteurs. This technique sees attackers emailing the webmasters behind your best links and requesting that they’re taken down – usually masquerading as you. The sheer number of legitimate link removal emails means that these imposters can escape without proper scrutiny and you lose your best links in the process.

Diagnose this attack using link-monitoring tools such as Majestic or Monitor Backlinks. If a link is unexpectedly taken down, you can investigate immediately and resolve the problem before your rank is badly affected.

3. Hack attack

Unlike some of these other attacks, SEO hackers aren’t normally looking to damage your ranking. Rather, they’re jockeying off your authority to build their own. Aside from being unfair, the unfortunate by-product of this attack is often penalisation for your site. This technique is when a hacker-attacker hacks into your site and buries spammy links in your content to build their own backlink profile. They might even create a series of new pages that drive traffic back to their own site.

This attack is noticeable if you start to recognise strange anchors for keywords you’ve never tried to rank for. If you suspect you have been hacked, you should investigate promptly to discover how the hackers got in so you can shut them out the next time they try. You can help prevent hacking before it happens by installing plug-in updates as soon as they’re available and using double authentication for your back-end users.

4. 404 Error attack

If Google detects that many of your pages are getting a 404 error message, they’ll generally drop your site like a hotcake, before you can deliver a terrible user experience. Unfortunately, negative SEO practitioners know this and can manipulate that knowledge to attack their competitors. They simply create thousands of links back to pages on your site that don’t exist, so when Google tries to follow those links, a 404 error is generated:few things can adversely affect your ranking so quickly.

You can spot this attack by closely monitoring your ‘Crawl Errors’ through Google Webmaster. If you see a sudden leap, that’s a good sign that you’re being targeted.

Luckily, you’ll generally find that a pattern emerges so you can easily spot which URLs are involved in the attack. Then you can request that your site delivers a 410 ‘Gone Forever’ message instead, to cut down the number of 404 messages being issued.

5. Redirect attack

As you may or may not know, redirects allow link equity to be passed to a new domain. Negative SEO attackers use this knowledge to redirect negative link equity to your domain, so you’re penalised for their bad links. In its most basic form, this is simply pointing a penalised domain link back to your site so you get the penalty. In its more complex form, a committed negative SEO attacker might copy your entire website, add canonical tags and then bury spam links in the content. The spam links will be penalised and the canonical tags ensure that penalty is transferred to your original site.

You can spot this attack in several ways. Firstly, keep a close eye on your link-monitoring tool. Majestic reports redirected links in the same way as normal links, for instance, so you can quickly spot any issues and disavow. You can also search Google for copied versions of your content and check manually whether the canonical tag has been used.

6. Spam links attack

This is one of the most common negative SEO attacks, as it’s one of the easiest to implement. An attacker simply creates an unnaturally large number of links pointing to your site, which triggers Google’s Penguin tripwire. Google assumes that you’re engaging in black-hat SEO yourself by creating unnatural links in order to improve your rating and it penalises you accordingly.

This attack is all about volume, so it should be pretty obvious if you’re a victim. If your intelligence platform tells you that you’ve suddenly received an unusually high number of links, often on the same day, it’s probably SEO attackers at work.

Often all links will point to the same page on your site – to allow the attackers to quickly create links. They’ll often come from very similar sources, with a similar authority ranking. If you’re using Majestic, you get a Trust Flow report telling you how trustworthy the linking site is. Often this ranking will be very similar.

You might also notice that links are using the same anchor text, making Google think that you’re playing the system. In the Google universe, over-optimising your focus keywords is a punishable offence and negative SEO attackers use that to their advantage.

To combat the link spamming attack, add those links you’ve identified to your disavow list, so their link equity doesn’t count towards your ranking. You might also register a spam report with Google which identifies which domains are involved in the link spamming.

7. Fake parameter attack

This is an insidiously effective attack that targets your URLs. Basically, an attacker creates multiple links that point back to legitimate URLs on your site, but using fake parameters. (www.mysite.com/legitimate-url?spam-fake-parameter.)

These links then create duplicates of your legitimate pages, which can flag a Panda penalty. The keywords used can also indicate that your site isn’t relevant, which is one of the fastest ways to incur Google’s wrath. Say you run a property firm, for example, then a URL littered with keywords like ‘viagra’, ‘gambling’, or ‘discounted storage solutions’ is a pretty sure sign of irrelevance.

These URLs will often achieve a 200 OK response, so they are treated as normal, genuine pages. As such, this can be particularly difficult to spot and you’ll find it more productive to stop this attack before it happens. The best way to do that is to use the canonical tag, to identify which pages should be ranked. This makes sure that no other pages using that URL can rank and cuts the SEO attacker off in their tracks. You could also configure your server to recognise and ‘noindex’ any unknown parameters.

Retrospect is a wonderful thing though, so if you’ve already been a victim of this attack then you can manually exclude those fake parameters through Google Webmaster.

This article was published on receptional.com in march 2017.

Google sent 9M web spam messages in 2016,Just double than 2015

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 20 Apr 2017 10:16:00 +0000

Google said they received less than half the 2015 number of user-generated spam reports in 2016.

Image Courtesy - Google

Google has sent out over 9 million messages related to web spam in 2016; that number was more than double the 4.3 million messages in the 2015 report.

The other metric that stood out was that hacked sites continue to rise, this time by 32% from 2015 to 2016,but it was a 180 percent increase from 2014 to 2015 in the previous report.

Major web spam activity 2016

Website security continues to be a major source of concern.Last year we saw more hacked sites than ever 32% high compared to 2015.
Over 9 million messages sent to webmasters to notify them of web spam issues on their sites.
Structured data manual actions taken on more than 10,000 sites.
Over 180,000 user-submitted spam reports from around the world, down from 400,000
Of those 180,000 spam reports, 52 percent of those reported sites considered to be spam.
More than 170 Google online office hours and live events around the world to audiences totaling over 150,000 website owners, webmasters and digital marketers.
More than 67,000 questions in the Google support forums.

Ref: https://webmasters.googleblog.com/

Not set Vs not Provided Keyword - Google Analytics

noreply@blogger.com (Akhi) — Wed, 01 Mar 2017 08:44:00 +0000

(Not Provided) = Organic visits from a keyword search

In 2011 Google switched to a secure server (https) which encrypts search results. Meaning anytime you’re logged into Google (i.e. Gmail, Calendar or YouTube) your searches become protected – Leaving all keyword data as (not provided) in Google Analytics.

We’re noticing most accounts have more than 50% of all keyword information replaced with (not provided).

(Not Set) = A direct visit or a referral from another site

This is a little more complicated, but basically refers to a catch-all for information Google Analytics wasn’t able to identify.

For example, if you see landing page = (not set), it probably means that session didn’t have a page or screen view. The session could have been triggered an Event or an E-commerce hit type.

Conclusion

Google’s ‘not provided’ data is a controversial topic, and there’s no failsafe way to access the data. However, if you’re losing a significant amount of statistical data to ‘not provided’, it’s certainly worth investing some time to overcome the problem. Implementing one or more workarounds may help you to improve your understanding of organic keywords and get a better insight into your missing statistics.

Basics of Mobile SEO

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 07 Feb 2017 10:10:00 +0000

Mobile optimization is the process of ensuring that visitors who access your site from mobile devices have an experience optimized for the device.

Every year people spend more and more time on their mobile devices and tablets, but many websites still aren't designed to account for different screen sizes and load times. Mobile optimization takes a look at site design, site structure, page speed, and more to make sure you're not inadvertently turning mobile visitors away.

Best Practices

If your site is already well optimized for search engines, there are only a few additional things that you need to think about when optimizing for mobile.

Page speed

Because of hardware and connectivity issues, page speed is even more important for mobile users than desktop users. Beyond optimizing images, you'll want to minify code, leverage browser caching, and reduce redirects. More information on page speed can be found on our SEO Best Practices for Page Speed page.

Don't block CSS, JavaScript, or images

In the old days, some mobile devices couldn't support all of these elements, so webmasters of mobile sites blocked one or all three. But for the most part that's no longer true, and the Smartphone GoogleBot wants to be able to see and categorize the same content that users do. So don't hide it. These elements are also critical to helping Google understand if you have a responsive site or a different mobile solution.

Site design for mobile

Mobile devices are simplifying and revolutionizing the ways sites are designed. "Above the fold" has no longer meaning in a world where we scroll endlessly.

Don't use Flash

The plugin may not be available on your user's phone, which means they'll miss out on all the fun. If you want to create special effects, use HTML5 instead.

Don't use pop-ups either

It can be difficult and frustrating to try and close these on a mobile device. This might lead to a high bounce rate.

Design for the fat finger

Touch screen navigation can lead to accidental clicks if your buttons are too big, too small, or in the path of a finger that's trying to get the page to scroll.

Optimize titles and meta descriptions

Remember that you're working with less screen space when a user searches using a mobile device. To show off your best work in SERPS, be as concise as possible (without sacrificing the quality of the information) when creating titles, URLs, and meta descriptions.

Use Schema.org structured data

Because of the limited screen space, a search result with rich snippets is even more likely to stand out than on a desktop. Read more about Schema.org structured data.

Optimize for local search

If your business has a local element, remember to optimize your mobile content for local search. This includes standardizing your name, address, and phone number and including your city and state name in your site's metadata.

Mobile site configuration

Probably the most important decision you'll make when setting up a site is deciding whether you want to use a responsive, dynamic serving, or separate site configuration. Each has its advantages and disadvantages. Google prefers responsive design but supports all three options as long as you have set them up properly.

Responsive web design

Responsively designed sites use CSS3 media queries to serve the same content to mobile and desktop users using a fluid grid and a flexible design to automatically adapt to the size of a user's screen.

Responsive designs use media queries to target the layout based on screen width, orientation, and resolution. For example, you could use the following CSS to instruct browsers how to display content for a screen that's 420 or fewer pixels wide:

Dynamic serving

If you don't have the resources for a complete site redesign or want to display different content for mobile visitors than you do for desktop ones, one solution is to use one URL to display different sets of HTML and CSS depending on what type of device your visitor is using (also called detecting user agents). This can be useful, for example, if you're a restaurant who wants a mobile visitor (who might be wandering your neighborhood) to see a sampling of reviews and a map to your location, instead of your full website.

Displaying different content based on the user agent is called dynamic serving and it's done using the Vary HTTP header, which looks like this:

Vary HTTP Header

GET /page-1 HTTP/1.1
Host: www.example.com
(...rest of HTTP request headers...)
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Type: text/html
Vary: User-Agent
Content-Length: 5710
(... rest of HTTP response headers...)

Example from the Google Developers Blog.

Simply put, this means that the content displayed will vary based on the user agent requesting the page.
Dynamic serving is not the perfect compromise that it might seem to be. For one, it relies on having an updated list of user agents, which means that every time a new mobile device comes to market that list needs to be updated. And it's not uncommon for desktops and mobile devices to be wrongly served with the HTML for the other device.

Separate mobile URL

Another option is to create a second, parallel site for mobile users. This allows you to create completely custom content for mobile visitors. To avoid URL confusion, most parallel mobile sites use an "m" subdomain.

Parallel mobile sites can be as imperfect as dynamic serving sites at sending visitors to the right version, so be sure to make it easy for visitors who end up in the wrong place to click over to their preferred experience.

You'll also want to make sure that your site redirects are all in place and as lean as possible to decrease page speed. And to avoid duplicate content issues, you'll need to set up rel="canonical".

Post credit : SeoMoz.

Build relationships, not links - Content to Pace up Indian Digital Marketing Space

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 27 Dec 2016 07:20:00 +0000

“Build relationships, not links,” says Scott Wyden Kivowitz who wants to be known as the community and blog wrangler, a father and an educator than just an ace photographer – his principle vocation. Kivowitz believes that his abilities are heterogeneous hence appropriate for a cross-channel consumption through an ideal digital marketing method. Perhaps there is a robust lesson for Indian digital marketers here; if you have a great digital content, reach out to as many potential customers as possible through the centimane of cross-channel marketing.

The country is on the cusp of an exponential growth in the digital space, fueled by the rising Internet usage via smartphones and other mediums of access. According to Internet Live Stats, as of now, India has over 46 crore Internet users, the second biggest base in the world after China. However, given the major digital push by the Government, this is likely to touch over 730 million in 2020 with much of the spike coming from rural areas, says a report by Nasscom and Akamai Technologies. Rural consumers are consuming data in local languages thus allaying fears that some of the marketing campaigns would not make sense in India’s remote areas since these are in English.

Then comes the channelizing of disposable incomes; India is expected to have mobile wallet market size of Rs 30,000 crore by 2022 as against Rs 154 crore this fiscal. As the banking customer base grows, the growth of credit and debit cards would go up significantly (from 2.70 crore credit cards and 7.6 crore debit cards in November 2016). India now boasts of the second largest internet population at 462 million users and is now the largest smartphone market in the world.

With the Govt giving an aggressive push to projects like Digital India, more and more are moving online to conduct key activities from reading news to banking and shopping using credit cards. As per Google data, 90% of the online users switch between devices to complete a single task, using at least three devices per day. While such an uneven behavior makes tracking and attribution difficult, it also hands out a huge opportunity to launch cost effective marketing brainwaves, using inviting content and advantageous channels.

Indian Campaigns Hit Cross-Channel Favor

There are several positive examples of cross-channel utilization of digital marketing by corporates in India; Amazon India’s `Aur Dikhao’ digital campaign was rolled across a plethora of channels even as it was complimented by a TV campaign during IPL 8. The much-lauded creative content rightly played on the Indian sensibility to `see more and more before buying’, but it was ideally leveraged across cross-channel. For example, on YouTube, it gained over 1.2 million views in few days as the buzz built around the hashtag #AurDikhao started showing conversions.

Land Rover did something more dramatic world-wide, picking up valuable inputs from social media where car buyers were actively seeking inputs. The company reached out to these potential shoppers on all their devices at every point in the purchasing funnel through several optimal ways – from a homepage masthead takeover on YouTube to a masthead in Lightbox ads across the Google Display Network. It added every tool to exploit the visibility on mobile phones. The result – 100 million impressions in no time and 15% of total sales from online leads.

There are several brilliant case studies to vindicate cross-channel exploitation hence Indian corporations, regardless of size, scale or budget, now prioritise cross-channel integration of marketing activities, followed by the selection of channel mix. To build an effective digital marketing campaign, here are few guidelines:

Narrative of Digital Marketing Expands

Digital marketing broadly describes marketing of products or services using digital technologies, mainly on the Internet though mobile phones, display advertising and all emerging digital media which can be clubbed under this definition. As the power of new media grows to disperse personal, valid and timely messages, digital platforms – from SEOs and SEMs on the Net to call back and on-hold ring tones on mobiles - are being incorporated into marketing plans.

Given such huge diversity, to succeed, optimal digital marketing strategies today need greater involvement and innovation at the cross-channel marketing level. Marketers are under pressure to constantly and swiftly grasp what channels, what type of content and what delivery format could thrive. Thanks to the much-evolved cross-channel marketing, using data and learning gathered from a sphere of consumer interfaces, today marketers can implement digital marketing efforts to logical conclusion. Let us examine the pre-requisites for the execution:

Build Content to be Fully Exploited by the Digital Strategy

One oft-repeated limitation of the traditional marketing route is that it `talks at people’ whereas digital content marketing `talks with them’. Consultancy firm, McKinesy envisages that digital advertising will be the fastest-growing global advertising segment over the next five years at 15% till 2018 as against 5% for electronic media. The beauty of digital marketing lies in its simplicity of publishing a variety of content formats though the quality of the content and its presentation would decide its universal appeal.

Content is king if it’s digital: As successful corporates would vouch, the challenge in building an integrated digital marketing plan lies in creation, repurposing, amplification and syndication of the content which that will work across all your digital channels. And those who have made it big in the digital space have done it by pushing a resounding message through the following maze:

Organic search
Search engine marketing (SEM)
Email marketing
Display advertising
Social media
Videos
Events
Speaking engagements
Websites
Blogs
e-books
White papers

A successful campaign is also the one that has harmoniously integrated online and offline campaigns to maximize the reach and impact across PR, TV, radio and print as well. Combining digital and traditional advertising strategies is an even bigger task but with tremendous rewards.

Channel Optimization, Data Treatment to Influence Results

By definition, cross channel marketing is the practice of using multiple channels to reach customers and making it easy for them to use (and convert) whatever medium they are most comfortable with. Despite good content, many great campaigns fail to pass the muster when marketers do not run a well-integrated campaign, often due to poor understanding of optimal channels to do so or the failure to appreciate the requisite business impact. Thus, campaigns across multi-channels can produce better results - if the data thus generated - gets monitored diligently.

Understand the power of each channel to convert: It is said that if the content is king, then conversion is the queen; thus, it is critical to understand which channels would spearhead the strategy, leading to greater business impact. One should strive for a perfect balance between chosen technology and its cross-channel attribution modelling to identify where, how and when different channels would impact each other. Simultaneously, a smart marketer must comprehend micro nuances of the target audience, using diverse sets of primary as well as tertiary data. The data digestion – using both historical and real-time data – would not only identify the right channels but the right type of digital content as well.

Tools to Measure Progress and Success

Technology, analytical integrations and greatly refined data points today assist and guide marketers in gauging actual results of digital marketing efforts while content performance parameters help them sharpen or refashion the content. In fact, many CMOs seek accurate measurements from multiple customer touch points to generate a progressive cross channel marketing strategy. Gauging the efficacy of campaigns can be done through few predefined set of tools/perspectives that would build on from a customer’s initial interface with a brand to his final purchase, giving valuable insights on customer expectations from a brand.

Align Digital to Collective Marketing Ethos

Often we hear CMOs blaming the `silo approach’ in an organisation for the failure of campaigns. When departments within an organization work in isolation or do not share useful and actionable data with others, multi-channel promotions can suffer unless these are duly integrated with the overall marketing. It is imperative to structure and optimise internal departments and digital talent to work towards a common goal. Managements must set up task centres to check and correct the effectiveness of multi-channel marketing efforts by compiling and sharing data from multiple channels and other numerous touch points for future marketing efforts.

Credit:The article is written by Kunal Tomar

How to get rid of referral spam

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 22 Nov 2016 12:39:00 +0000

Unfortunately, there’s no way to get information OUT of Google Analytics once it’s in there. However, there are ways to keep this kind of spam out in the future, and to remove it from the reports on existing data.

How to block referral spam in Google Analytics

As the name suggests, we usually see this kind of spam in the referral-section of Google Analytics. If Analytics isn’t properly set up (that’s by far in most of the cases), you can see suspicious referrals (under Acquisition > Referrals), such as:

secret.google.com
1-free-share-buttons.com
100dollars-seo.com
copyrightclaims.org
darodar.com
Etc.

In the case of the Vote for Trump referral spam, the information is located in the language-tag (under Audience > Geo > Language).

To effectively block referral spam, do the following in Google Analytics:

Go to ADMIN > All Filters
Click on “ADD FILTER”
Give the filter a name (e.g. “include host only”)
Click on Filter Type “Custom”
Click “Include”
Click “Select Field” and select “Hostname”
Under “Filter Pattern”, add the domain name of your website (e.g. “searchify.ca”)
Apply the filter to any of your profiles.

This will ensure that only Analytics requests from your own domain will be counted in Google Analytics. Automated , external requests from other domains will not be included in the data.

How to remove referral spam from Analytics reports

In order to remove referral spam from reports, add a similar filter to the reports. In the case of the Donald Trump referral spam, do the following to filter the referrer spam out of any Analytics report or Data View:

Create a new Report or Segment
Click on “Traffic Sources”
Under “Source”, type the domain of the spammer you’d like to exclude (e.g. “webmonetizer.net”
If you have multiple spammers, choose “matches RegEx” and add a list of spammer domains, separated by a pipe sign and with a backslash before the dot (e.g. “webmonetizer\.net|wmasterlead\.com”. Feel free to omit the top domain levels (e.g. “.com” or “.ru”) altogether.
Save your report or segment.

Contd.

Google Released Penguin 4.0 - Filter Updates in Real time

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 03 Oct 2016 06:40:00 +0000

So it happened. Google finally released Penguin 4.0 — the last Penguin update of its kind, as it now processes in real time as a part of Google’s core ranking algorithm.

After a few weeks of turbulence in the SERPs, the announcement that many had predicted was finally made.

The Penguin 4.0 announcement had two key points:

Penguin is now running in real time. This is really good news. There are lots of folks out there who have paid the price for low-quality SEO yet are still not seeing a recovery after removing or disavowing all of their spammy backlinks. Certainly, a house built on dodgy links will not spring back to a position of strength simply by removing those links; however, there are many businesses out there that seem to have been carrying algorithmic boulders around their digital ankles. Hopefully, these folks can now move on, their debt to a punitive algorithm update paid in full.
Penguin is now more granular. This element is a little more curious, in that Penguin 2.0 seemed to add page-level and keyword-level penalties, making it more granular than the 1.0 release. However, we can only imagine that things have got much more advanced, and possibly individual links are considered rather than the seemingly aggregate approach that was taken historically. Only time will tell the degree to which this granular approach will impact sites, but I suspect it will be a good thing for those looking to play by the rules.

It will also be interesting to see how this fits in with the other 200 or so factors or “clues” that Google uses to rank websites. We now we have both Panda and Penguin integrated into Google’s core ranking algorithm (though Panda does not run in real time), so it’s possible that the weight of the various known ranking factors may have changed as a result.

One other interesting nugget is that there will be no more notifications for Penguin updates. Penguin now constantly updates as Google crawls the web, so tweaks to the finer points of this system will no longer be announced.

This post is first appeared in SEL.

Myths About Link Building - Rand Fishkin

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 10 Sep 2016 07:07:00 +0000

Video Transcription of Rand fishkin's Whiteboard Friday edition

1. Never get links from sites with a lower domain authority than your own

What? No, that is a terrible idea. Domain authority, just to be totally clear, it's a machine learning system that we built here at Moz. It takes and looks at all the metrics. It builds the best correlation it can against Google's rankings across a broad set of keywords, similar to the MozCast 10K. Then it's trying to represent, all other things being equal and just based on raw link authority, how well would this site perform against other sites in Google's rankings for a random keyword? That does not in any way suggest whether it is a quality website that gives good editorial links, that Google is likely to count, that are going to give you great ranking ability, that are going to send good traffic to you. None of those things are taken into account with domain authority.

So when you're doing link building, I think DA can be a decent sorting function, just like Spam Score can. But those two metrics don't mean that something is necessarily a terrible place or a great place to get a link from. Yes, it tends to be the case that links from 80- or 90-plus DA sites tend to be very good, because those sites tend to give a lot of authority. It tends to be the case that links from sub-10 or 20 tend to not add that much value and maybe fail to have a high Spam Score. You might want to look more closely at them before deciding whether you should get a link.

But new websites that have just popped up or sites that have very few links or local links, that is just fine. If they are high-quality sites that give out links editorially and they link to other good places, you shouldn't fret or worry that just because their DA is low, they're going to provide no value or low value or hurt you. None of those things are the case.

2. Never get links from any directories

I know where this one comes from. We have talked a bunch about how low-quality directories, SEO-focused directories, paid link directories tend to be very bad places to get links from. Google has penalized not just a lot of those directories, but many of the sites whose link profiles come heavily from those types of domains.

However, lots and lots of resource lists, link lists, and directories are also of great quality. For example, I searched for a list of Portland bars — Portland, Oregon, of course known for their amazing watering holes. I found PDX Monthly's list of Portland's best bars and taverns. What do you know? It's a directory. It's a total directory of bars and taverns in Portland. Would you not want to be on there if you were a bar in Portland? Of course, you would want to be on there. You definitely want those. There's no question. Give me that link, man. That is a great freaking link. I totally want it.

This is really about using your good judgment and about saying there's a difference between SEO and paid link directories and a directory that lists good, authentic sites because it's a resource. You should definitely get links from the latter, not so much from the former.

3. Don't get links too fast or you'll get penalized

Let's try and think about this. Like Google has some sort of penalty line where they look at, "Oh, well, look at that. We see in August, Rand got 17 links. He was under at 15 in July, but then he got 17 links in August. That is too fast. We're going to penalize him."

No, this is definitely not the case. I think what is the case, and Google has filed some patent applications around this in the past with spam, is that a pattern of low-quality links or spammy-looking links that are coming at a certain pace may trigger Google to take a more close look at a site's link profile or at their link practices and could trigger a penalty.

Yes. If you are doing sketchy, grey hat/black hat link building with your private networks, your link buys, and your swapping schemes, and all these kinds of things, yeah, it's probably the case that if you get them too fast, you'll trip over some sort of filter that Google has got. But if you're doing the kind of link building that we generally recommend here on Whiteboard Friday and at Moz more broadly, you don't have risk here. I would not stress about this at all. So long as your links are coming from good places, don't worry about the pace of them. There's no such thing as too fast.

4. Don't link out to other sites, or you'll leak link equity, or link juice, or PageRank

...or whatever it is. I really like this illustration of the guys who are like, "My link juice. No!" This is just crap.

All right, again, it's a myth rooted in some fact. Historically, a long time ago, PageRank used to flow in a certain way, and it was the case that if a page had lots of links pointing out from it, that if I had four links, that a quarter each of the PageRank that this page could pass would go to each of them. So if I added one more, oh, now that's one-fifth, then that becomes one-fifth, and that becomes one-fifth. This is old, old, old-school SEO. This is not the way things are anymore.

PageRank is not the only piece of ranking algorithmic goodness that Google is using in their systems. You should not be afraid of linking out. You should not be afraid of linking out without a "nofollow" link. You, in fact, should link out. Linking out is not only correlated with higher rankings. There have also been a bunch of studies and research suggesting that there's something causal going on, because when followed links were added to pages, those pages actually outranked their non-link-carrying brethren in a bunch of tests. I'll try and link to that test in the Whiteboard Friday. But regardless to say, don't stress about this.

5. Variations in anchor text should be kept to precise proportions

So this idea that essentially there's some magic formula for how many of your keyword anchor text, anchor phrases should be branded, partially branded, keyword match links that are carrying anchor text that's specifically for the keywords you're trying to rank for, and random assorted anchor texts and that you need some numbers like these, also a crazy idea.

Again, rooted in some fact, the fact being if you are doing sketchy forms of link building of any kind, it's probably the case that Google will take a look at the anchor text. If they see that lots of things are kind of keyword-matchy and very few things contain your brand, that might be a trigger for them to look more closely. Or it might be a trigger for them to say, "Hey, there's some kind of problem. We need to do a manual review on this site."

So yes, if you are in the grey/black hat world of link acquisition, sure, maybe you should pay some attention to how the anchor text looks. But again, if you're following the advice that you get here on Whiteboard Friday and at Moz, this is not a concern.

6. Never ask for a link directly or you risk penalties

This one I understand, because there have been a bunch of cases where folks or organizations have sent out emails, for example, to their customers saying, "Hey, if you link to us from your website, we'll give you a discount," or, "Hey, we'd like you to link to this resource, and in exchange this thing will happen," something or other. I get that those penalties and that press around those types of activities has made certain people sketched out. I also get that a lot of folks use it as kind of blackmail against someone. That sucks.

Google may take action against people who engage in manipulative link practices. But for example, let's say the press writes about you, but they don't link to you. Is asking for a link from that piece a bad practice? Absolutely not. Let's say there's a directory like the PDX Monthly, and they have a list of bars and you've just opened a new one. Is asking them for a link directly against the rules? No, certainly not. So there are a lot of good ways that you can directly ask for links and it is just fine. When it's appropriate and when you think there's a match, and when there's no sort of bribery or paid involvement, you're good. You're fine. Don't stress about it.

7. More than one link from the same website is useless

This one is rooted in the idea that, essentially, diversity of linking domains is an important metric. It tends to be the case that sites that have more unique domains linking to them tend to outrank their peers who have only a few sites linking to them, even if lots of pages on those individual sites are providing those links.

But again, I'm delighted with my animation here of the guys like, "No, don't link to me a second time. Oh, my god, Smashing Magazine." If Smashing Magazine is going to link to you from 10 pages or 50 pages or 100 pages, you should be thrilled about that. Moz has several links from Smashing Magazine, because folks have written nice articles there and pointed to our tools and resources. That is great. I love it, and I also want more of those.

You should definitely not be saying "no." You shouldn't be stopping your link efforts around a site, especially if it's providing great traffic and high-quality visits from those links pointing to you. It's not just the case that links are there for SEO. They're also there for the direct traffic that they pass, and so you should definitely be investing in those.

8. Links from non-relevant sites or sites or pages or content that's outside your niche won't help you rank better

This one, I think, is rooted in that idea that Google is essentially looking and saying like, "Hey, we want to see that there's relevance and a real reason for Site A to link to Site B." But if a link is editorial, if it's coming from a high-quality place, if there's a reason for it to exist beyond just, "Hey, this looks like some sort of sketchy SEO ploy to boost rankings," Googlebot is probably going to count that link and count it well.

So with that in mind, if you have other link ideas, link myths, or link facts that you think you've heard and you want to verify them, please, I invite you to leave them in the comments below. I'll jump in there, a bunch of our associates will jump in there, folks from the community will jump in, and we'll try and sort out what's myth versus reality in the link building world.

Questions You Must Ask a Prospective SEO Analyst

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 30 Aug 2016 09:33:00 +0000

Are you in the dilemma whether to hire an in-house SEO analyst or hire a consulting agency? If you’re looking to hire an in-house SEO analyst, I want to help you to find the right one. That’s because our most successful SEO consulting happens when there’s a competent SEO manager working in-house. Choosing a right in-house SEO person is a daunting task since SEO person should be a good communicator as the right in-house SEO person communicates well with both the CMO and the consultant. He or she follows through on our recommendations and fulfills the plans we’ve jointly made. And a good in-house SEO analyst or manager makes the client-consultant relationship a real partnership - so the client wins.

I am sharing a list of 30 questions that you would pose to the aspiring SEO analyst for your firm. Find the right analyst by asking questions that will allow candidates to not only talk about their SEO experience but also reveal their digital marketing knowledge and strategy.

30 SEO Interview Questions

What makes a website search engine-friendly?
How do you define success when it comes to SEO?
How do you stay updated on industry news and algorithm changes?
What programming languages do you have experience with?
Regarding your previous SEO job, what did an average day look like?
How do you adapt to the needs of different clients?
How often do you communicate with clients?
How did you learn SEO?
How do you approach keyword research?
What is the relationship between SEO, SEM and social media marketing?
What SEO tools do you regularly use?
How do you stay organized when working on an SEO project?
Who are Gary Illyes and John Mueller?
What is your favorite website and why?
What is your opinion on proper link building?
How have you dealt with link penalties?
What’s the ideal speed for a site to load a web page?
What method do you use to redirect a page?
What are your thoughts on accelerated mobile pages (AMP)?
What is your process for helping a local business become more visible in search results?
Are you aware of the latest changes to Google and the latest updates to Panda and Penguin?
How has Hummingbird changed the landscape of search?
What is Google’s preferred method of configuring a mobile site?
What do you know about content building and content marketing?
What has been your experience getting content featured in answer boxes?
How have you utilized structured data to earn featured snippets?
What are the three possible configurations for a mobile site? Which do you prefer and why?
What’s your greatest digital marketing success story?
How do you stay up-to-date on the near-constant search algorithm changes?
What metrics do you use to measure SEO success?

Facebook's media arms race

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 23 Aug 2016 09:46:00 +0000

Is the social platform protecting its rights or taking away others' in the new battle on ad blockers?

Image Courtesy : Al Jazeera

Facebook has declared war against ad blockers and says that protecting revenues for media outlets was a key motivating factor.

Recently, millions of Facebook users who have applied ad blocker systems have found their feeds littered with advertisements they had already opted out of seeing.

Facebook was behind this action, blocking the ad blockers in order for these ads to appear once again on user feeds.

With $6.4bn in revenue in the first quarter of 2016, it is clear to see why Facebook is invested in this cat-and-mouse game with the ad blockers and the open-source community that supports them.

Facebook released a statement regarding the ad blocker situation, claiming "user experience" and not much else as a reponse to why blockers have been overruled.

However, some might argue that the lack of transparency regarding the platform's social media streams may have been echoed by the ad blockers themselves.

With ad blockers using "white listing", that is a payment by publishers to keep ads unblocked, is this media battle truly a matter of moral fabric or simply a series of business decisions?

We take a look at what the Facebook vs the ad blocker battle really means for users, publishers and for Facebook's own business model.

Talking us through the story are: Ben Williams, PR manager, Adblock Plus; Justin Schlosberg, lecturer in journalism and media at Birkbeck University; Lara O'Reilly, senior editor at Business Insider; and Raghav Bahl, founder of Quintillion Media.

Source: Al Jazeera

Black Hat SEO Tactics to avoid

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 02 Aug 2016 13:02:00 +0000

In search engine optimization (SEO) terminology, black hat SEO refers to the use of aggressive SEO strategies, techniques and tactics that focus only on search engines and not a human audience, and usually does not obey search engines guidelines.

Image Courtesy : positionly.com

These practices are against the search engine's terms of service and can result in the site being banned from the search engine and affiliate sites. A list of tactics and strategies employed by black hat SEO practitioners have been openly denounced on Google's Webmaster Guidelines and Bing's Webmaster Guidelines.

"Is the work that I'm doing adding value to the user or am I just doing this for search engines to see?" is a litmus test on whether an SEO tactic would go against a search engine's webmaster guideline. If no value is added to the user, but rankings are likely to increase, then your decisions are highly likely to be black hat. The same test can be applied to to paid search practices to determine whether an activity is considered black hat ppc.

Black Hat SEO Tactics

The following SEO tricks are considered as black hat and should not be exercised at all if you want to stay in SERP with Google and other search engines.

Content Automation
Doorway Pages
Hidden Text or Links
Keyword Stuffing
Reporting a Competitor (or Negative SEO)
Sneaky Redirects
Cloaking
Link Schemes
Guest Posting Networks
Link Manipulation (including buying links)
Article Spinning
Link Farms, Link Wheels or Link Networks
Rich Snippet Markup Spam
Automated Queries to Google
Creating pages, subdomains, or domains with duplicate content
Pages with malicious behavior, such as phishing, viruses, trojans, and other malware

Avoid Black Hat SEO Tactics

Black Hat SEO tactics can get your website banned from Google and other search engines.

Though there may be some short-term success through increased traffic to your site, Google penalties are getting more and more sophisticated and can have devastating effects on your rankings and traffic. With hundreds of millions of users searching on Google per day, can you really afford to be de-indexed?

Expanded text ads - Google AdWords

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 29 Jul 2016 10:53:00 +0000

Expanded text ads are the next generation of text ads, designed for a mobile-first world with both users and advertisers in mind. Expanded text ads give advertisers additional control over their messaging, and provide users with more information before they click your ad. Like text ads, expanded text ads are available on both the Google Search Network and the Google Display Network, and are supported by all the AdWords tools that currently support text ads. Ad extensions (both automatic and manual) are fully compatible with expanded text ads too.

This guide explains what expanded text ads are and how they differ from standard text ads. It also recommends ways to create new text ads in the expanded text ads format.

Image Courtesy : Google.com

Your new Display URL

Two headline fields (up to 30 characters each)
A single, expanded description field (up to 80 characters)
A Display URL that uses your Final URL's domain
Two optional ”Path” fields, used in the ad’s Display URL (up to 15 characters each)

Luxury River Cruise Holidays – Book Your Getaway Today
www.example.com/Cruises

Explore the world along rivers. Selected locations on sale!

With expanded text ads, you no longer need to enter a Display URL that matches your Final URL domain. Instead, AdWords will take the domain from your Final URL and show it as your ad’s Display URL. For example, if your Final URL is www.example.com/outdoor/hiking/shoes, your ad’s Display URL will show as www.example.com.

Expanded text ads also introduces two optional “Path” fields, which can hold up to 15 characters. They are part of your Display URL, and are placed after your website’s domain. So if your final URL is www.example.com/outdoor/hiking/shoes, you might want your path text to be Hiking and Shoes so your ad’s display URL is www.example.com/Hiking/Shoes.

We recommend using path text to give people reading your ads a better sense of where they'll land on your website. The text that you put in the path fields doesn’t necessarily have to be part of your website’s URL, but it should be related to the content on your landing page. Find out more

Transitioning to expanded text ads

Right now, AdWords supports the creation of both expanded text ads and standard text ads in both the new and previous versions of AdWords. When you create a new ad, you will be defaulted to expanded text ads. To switch back to standard text ads, click the Switch back to standard text ad link above the “Final URL” field.

Starting 26 October 2016, AdWords will no longer support the creation or editing of standard text ads. New text ads generated after that date should use the expanded text ad format. Existing standard text ads will continue to serve past 26 October 2016.

After this date, you will only be able to create and edit expanded text ads. However, existing standard text ads will continue to serve alongside expanded text ads.

AdWords tools that support experimenting with different ad text, like campaign drafts and experiments, are fully compatible with expanded text ads. We recommend trying out different variations on your expanded text ads to see which perform best for your business. When you create a new expanded text ad, we also recommend waiting for the ad to be approved before pausing your standard text ad. Create expanded text ads

Using bulk editing

Making bulk changes to expanded text ads is very similar to making bulk changes to standard text ads. You can multi-select ads and pause, enable, or remove them via the Edit menu. You can also use “Change ads” in the “Edit” menu to edit multiple text edits at once.

Bulk upload also supports expanded text ads, though with additional column headers that aren’t available for standard text ads. You can make changes to both standard and expanded text ads within the same Bulk upload spreadsheet. Get Started

Using AdWords Editor

You can also create and edit expanded text ads in bulk using AdWords Editor. AdWords Editor supports expanded text ads in Version 11.5. Find out more

Make the most of expanded text ads

Expanded text ads share a number of the best practices that you’re already familiar with for standard text ads. But with almost 50% more ad text available and an additional headline, expanded text ads provide more opportunity for you to connect with users and drive more, qualified clicks to your website.

Rethink the messaging of your ad. It can be tempting, but don’t simply add a second headline to your existing ads. Consider the entire message that you want to present, taking into account all parts of your new ad.
Take advantage of your character limits. Expanded headline fields increase the clickable space of your ads, and allow you to communicate more with someone who’s searching before they decide whether to click through to your website.
Focus on optimising your headlines. People are most likely to read the headline of your ad. When viewed on the search results page, your ad’s headline fields are combined using a hyphen, “-”. On mobile, the headline may wrap beyond the first line. Consider the different ways in which your headline may display when writing your ad to make sure that your ad is compelling and easy to read on different devices.
Use ad extensions. Including information below your ad, such as additional deep links into your website or your business location, has been shown to increase your ad’s performance. Get Started

Six SEO Tips & Rules for 2016

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 29 Jul 2016 10:02:00 +0000

The rules for effective SEO have shifted seismically over the past few years. Experts offer tips on the current state of SEO and how you can use it to maximize your investment in content in 2016.

Marketers are beefing up their investments in content, but to leverage those investments, they’ll also have to put some time and effort into learning the new rules for SEO. The days of driving traffic to your site by packing headlines with keywords are long gone, experts say, and the new SEO strategy revolves around another big-money marketing focus: experience.

“Historically, the recommendations around SEO have been … to focus on keywords,” says Martin Laetsch, director of online marketing , Ore.-based marketing automation company . “The reality is search engines are getting much smarter. The content creator is having a lot less control over how their pages are showing up and what words they’re showing up for.”

According to an August 2015 study on the future of SEO by Moz Inc.,a Seattle-based SEO consulting company, the most important factors for SEO impact next year will be mobile-friendliness, which will increase in impact by 88%; analysis of a page’s perceived value (up 81%); usage data such as dwell time (up 67%); and readability and design (up 67%). SEO factors that the study reported will decrease in impact are the effectiveness of paid links (down 55%) and the influence of anchor text (down 49%).

Here, experts offer six tips on how to use SEO to maximize your content marketing investments.

Intention is everything

You no longer need an exact keyword to offer a relevant search result, says Cyrus Shepard, director of audience development at Moz. “In the old days, it was about getting the click. Now search engines are seeing how people are interacting with your website: Are they going back and clicking on results, or are they finding the answers they’re looking for when they’re on your site? Today it’s about the post-click activity. Not only do you have to get the clicks, but you have to satisfy user intent.”

Keywords aren’t the be-all and end-all

Including keywords in headlines is becoming less important, Shepard says. “Google has gotten better about interpreting meaning. It used to be that if you wanted to rank for ‘best restaurants,’ you had to say ‘best restaurants’ three or four times. It’s still helpful to mention ‘best restaurants,’ but the semantic meaning is becoming much more important. Now you can just talk about great dining experiences, and the search engines will pick up on it.”

Adds Laetsch: “Historically, we wanted to get a keyword in the body copy or in the meta description. Now that’s all gone out the window. As the search engines get smarter, they start to think about other words that you expect to be in that article, what will signal that this is an authoritative article on the topic. If you were writing an article about the Apple Watch, you might have the words ‘Apple,’ ‘iPhone,’ ‘Watch,’ ‘apps’ and ‘time.’ If those are in the body copy, it sends signals to the search engines that this is a pretty good article.”

Seventy-five percent of search queries are between three and five words long, so you should write headlines accordingly, he adds. “The search engines are figuring out that if people search for the word ‘marketing,’ or any one- or two-word query, they don’t get the results they want. To get quality results that are most likely to answer their question, they have to go to three-, four- or five-word queries. As content creators, when you’re thinking about optimization, you have to think about that.”

Focus on the user experience

Thus, original content is becoming more important than ever, “The more original content that you can produce - whether it’s an image or a video, or long-form content, anything you can put together that’s going to justify someone wanting to read it or share it—the better.”

While articles with a “top five” list format often are clickable, Create an editorial calendar to appeal to your customers’ interests, Your content has to be original and targeted to your audience. If you curate content, take a paragraph from another article or site, and give them full credit and add an attribution, but add a paragraph or two in your own voice: ‘Here’s why I think it’s relevant.’ You’re adding a journalistic voice and making it your own.”

Size matters

Longer articles, between 1,200 to 1,500 words, perform better in search, on average, Laetsch says. “It’s significantly different than it was two or three years ago, when 300 words was a pretty long page. Longer articles are getting more traffic, and they’re ranking higher in SEO, especially for competitive terms. The changes that Google is making, and the reason they’re making these changes, is to make sure they’re sending traffic to pages that delight humans.” He suggests breaking up long-form content with subheads, bullet points and images throughout the copy to make it easy for readers to more quickly scan and digest it.

Longer articles perform better in search results because there are more words and images to rank on the page, Shepard says. “People are sharing longer articles on social media more, and linking to them and citing them more. Shorter articles do well sometimes, but on average, longer articles tend to perform better.”

Optimize for mobile

More people are reading news on their smartphones, so it’s important to ensure that your content is searchable there, says Derek Edmond, managing partner and director of SEO and social media strategies at KoMarketing Associates, a Boston-based B-to-B SEO and social media marketing consultancy. “Making sure Google can understand the content that’s found within a mobile app, and leveraging the marketing of the app with respect to SEO, is an opportunity on the consumer and B-to-B marketing side.”

Use unique images

While images aren’t as big of a referral source in Google as they used to be, having unique images on your site is valuable, Shepard says. “The same image can show up in hundreds of places around the Web, but having unique content around those images is what makes it stand out. I’m not opposed to using stock images to illustrate a point, but any time you can create something that’s custom or use unique photography, that will pay off more in the long run.”

The most important SEO tip for 2016 is to focus on your audience, Shepard says. “In the past, it was about marketers trying to promote what they wanted people to see. Today it’s about delivering what people actually want to see that will give you an SEO ranking boost.”

Adds Laetsch: “The reason we’re doing optimization and want to show up in Google, Bing or Yahoo is not because we make money because we show up No. 1 or No. 2. The reason we want to rank well in the search engine is so that our audience, the people we’re trying to reach, have a great experience. It doesn’t matter how high you rank if your target audience goes to your site and they’re not happy.”

This article was originally published in the November 2015 issue of Marketing News.

White hat SEO

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 15 Jul 2016 07:28:00 +0000

White Hat SEO refers to the usage of optimization strategies, techniques and tactics that focus on a human audience.To be more precise - a website that is optimized for search engines, yet focuses on relevancy and organic ranking is considered to be optimized using White Hat SEO practices. White Hat SEO / Ethical SEO. is more frequently used by those who intend to make a long-term investment on their website. Some examples of White Hat SEO techniques include using keywords and keyword analysis, backlinking, link building to improve link popularity, and writing content for human readers.

These tactics stay within the bounds as defined by Google. Examples include:

Offering quality content and services
Using descriptive, keyword-rich meta tags
Making your site easy to navigate

Implement White Hat SEO Methods

Implementing White Hat SEO practices is the best way to create an ethical, sustainably successful website and business.

keywords

Keywords still hold value but must be used correctly. Many SEO professionals don’t bother putting keywords in the Meta information as Google doesn’t look at them anymore. See the video below for Google’s Matt Cutt’s reasoning on why keywords in meta information are more or less ignored by the search engine now:

Keyword ‘stuffing’ used to be a very common practice and was a black hat method intended to ensure that the word associated with a company was picked up. We’ve all seen those articles which are barely legible as every other word is a keyword. Many good SEO content writers now refuse to write content where a client may ask them for a keyword density of 7%, as it lessens the quality of the piece considerably.

However, keywords do still have their place for use with site content, including blogs, images and video and PPC/Adwords. These days, it’s better practice to use similar words throughout a piece of writing as well as the main keyword. Key phrases are also good practice and should be used. It’s also important that these are used in Titles and sub-headers as well as throughout the text.

Content – ascended from King

Have you heard the phrase ‘content is king’? This is no longer true, content is everything (well, pretty much). It’s no longer enough to stick a poorly written blog up once a month – or worse, use text spinners to rejig old content.

Content must be:

Original and not infringe on the intellectual property rights of others
Highly relevant and useful to your industry and audience
Very well written with good grammar and spelling
For image and video should include a title, ALT tag and description and if appropriate, give credit to original artist (if using creative commons licensed images for example)
Point to the source of research and quotes where applicable

Adding value to your audience

The best possible way you can perform best in the search is by giving value to your audience and preferably, your industry too.