Category: Category I

Search Engine Optimization is a scalable method for you to take control over the inflow of visitors. In other words, it gives you the possibility to do something in order to attract visitors to your site. Not knowing or not having someone to help you with SEO is one of the surest ways to build an unsuccessful site.

SEO gives you the assurance that you will attract visitors to your site which in turn will increase your sales. It’s a vital skill on the internet and not only that it can, it will surely bring you quite an income if you’re good at it.

What Is SEO / Search Engine Optimization?

 

What Is SEO?

SEO stands for “search engine optimization.” It is the process of getting traffic from the “free,” “organic,” “editorial” or “natural” search results on search engines.

All major search engines such as Google, Bing and Yahoo have primary search results, where web pages and other content such as videos or local listings are shown and ranked based on what the search engine considers most relevant to users. Payment isn’t involved, as it is with paid search ads.

VIDEO: SEO Explained

New to SEO? Start with this quick and easy to understand video about search engine optimization. It’ll quickly cover the basics:

It’s fascinating, especially when you start applying and you start getting visitors, which in turn start interacting by leaving comments and sending messages, it brings your site to life and it’s simply wonderful. As I said not doing SEO it’s a sure way to fail.

You may have great content and a good looking website but it would be a waste if no one visits to admire it and if you don’t receive traffic you may lose interest if you have an eCommerce and you’re not making sales the same will happen. So buckle up and start learning or hire someone to do it for you.

I think we all know that when you buy an aged domain the first thing you do is toss it in Majestic and see what protocol it used so that you can install it in the same to save the old backlinks and after that, we go to the pages tab in order to recreate the old pages.

What if I told you that you can redirect 404 pages that belong to other sites? I know, I know it sounds like stealing but it isn’t, take a look at this:

How to Build Backlinks Using Your Competitors’ Broken Pages

 

We all know building backlinks is one of the most important aspects of any successful SEO and digital marketing campaign. However, I believe there is an untapped resource out there for link building: finding your competitors’ broken pages that have been linked to by external sources.

Allow me to elaborate.

Finding the perfect backlink often takes hours, and it can can take days, weeks, or even longer to acquire. That’s where the link building method I’ve outlined below comes in. I use it on a regular basis to build relevant backlinks from competitors’ 404 pages.

Please note: In this post, I will be using Search Engine Land as an example to make my points.

Ready to dive in? Great, because I’m going to walk you through the entire link building process now. Read more…

Now that’s groundbreaking, this is the first time I ever heard of this method and I really wanted to share this. Being equipped with dozens of techniques like this and a spreadsheet ready to be filled will teleport your website from the second page on the first page top result.

I always use a spreadsheet to save my progress, you can’t rely too much on tools. For example regarding Majestic, there was an update that halved it’s recorded backlinks in half, the reason beeing was that they were flagged as un-organic PBN backlinks so that came as an overnight surprise for those who didn’t have a spreadsheet.

How to Properly Track and Manage Your Backlinks

 

I am absolutely O.C.D. when it comes to tracking, measuring, and recording data.  One of the best skills you can have in SEO is to be able to stay efficiently organized.  Only by keeping track of what actions you’ve taken, will you be effectively able to make correct decisions about what to do next.

Famous management consultant Peter Drucker once said: “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.”   I couldn’t agree more.

Unfortunately, not everyone has the same nerdy obsession I have over collecting data.  Every week, I perform SEO consultations for various clients.  When someone doesn’t show up with a list of the links pointing to their site, I simply can’t help diagnose their offsite SEO problems.  There’s simply nothing to talk about.

I decided to make this post to help make your (and my) life easier by explaining how to properly track and manage your backlinks. Read more…

Now that’s a high-value well-written article. I liked how he started with a quote from Peter Drucker “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.” and he have’s a point. Tools are a great way to see live what backlinks we have but also having a spreadsheet can be only a benefit.

Having a High Authority site and rank #1 for some big keywords is all great and profitable but there are some limits to that. For example, a big site would tap into a 30.000 visits keyword put it would draw away from the 80.000 that they are already ranking for so the would win nothing. In this case, a smaller business has the high ground.

There are many reasons for why a small site could be more profitable on an individual level. What I mean by that is that big sites always have teams behind them so one member of that team could win somewhere around $3000-$4000 per month, you on the other hand by having patience, keeping an eye on the big guys and doing your homework you could easily earn $5000 and here’s why:

How Can Small Businesses/Websites Compete with Big Players in SEO? – Whiteboard Friday

 

It may seem like an impossible uphill battle to compete with big sites in the SERPs, but there are benefits to running a smaller site that can make a tremendous difference to your SEO. In today’s Whiteboard Friday, Rand explains how small businesses and websites can target opportunities the big sites can’t, in spite of their natural advantages.

Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we’re going to chat about how you, as a small site, could compete against big sites.

Big site advantages

Now look, big sites in SEO have some big advantages. Those include things like:

• Domain authority
• Quantity and diversity of the links that are coming to them, which bias engines to generally rank their content higher than they ordinarily might if it were on a brand-new site or a smaller site that they didn’t recognize.
• Trustworthiness. They’ve built brand associations in the space through advertising and through their size and scale and their reputation over time and over years that means that people have these biases towards trusting that brand, liking that brand, buying from that brand.
• Financial resources that likely you are not going to have as a small website. If we’re talking about Expedia here versus randstravels.com, they have tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars that they can put towards their web marketing efforts and their SEO efforts, and I have, well, my bad self. Read more…

That’s plentiful of information to make you understand why having a small site is a blessing in disguise, depending on how you look at, you might even start thinking that it’s better to have a smaller site than a big one. If you watch the following video you’ll discover that it’s possible to rank for ANY generic keywords even for CAMERAS that’s taken by Amazon, the only difference between you and them is that you are a single person making 20 backlinks a day and they are 1.000 people making 20.000 backlinks a day. (this is just an example, the numbers might be 0% true)

I would keep an eye on some of those keywords that the big companies would rank for, look for the big sites that are related somehow to your niche and analyze what keywords they are ranking for, see what they have but they don’t invest time and work in.

You can estimate how much work it would be needed for those keywords and go for them. This is a really powerful method that you can tap into.

I like how the next article I’m about to show you tells about the importance of content. It says that every one of us wants more traffic and they focus too much on the conversion process without considering very much the visitors and the niche’s relevance.

This is how you build a low-quality websites with low revenue. “Yeah just make sure that those affiliate links are there and let’s create some content with backlinks and spread it on the web to get some traffic.” NO! This is why Google updates its algorithms! This is why Google hates those sites and penalizes them!

Successful SEO programs require content that supports the entire buy cycle

 

Every SEO has heard these four words: “I need more traffic!”

It seems that websites are becoming less focused on top-of-funnel content (general informational and educational materials) and more focused on bottom-of-funnel lead generation offers. In my opinion, this is a short-sighted strategy, and one that will not drive a high volume of qualified traffic. Successful SEO programs require website content designed to reach prospects across the entire buy cycle.

Excuses, excuses

When bringing up the idea of having more informational content on a website to better support the SEO program, I often hear:

• We won’t be able to rank for these general topics and high-volume keywords.
• This traffic won’t convert.

It seems the fear of “not ranking” trumps the “let’s give it a shot” mentality. This way of thinking can crush SEOs’ creativity and limit your results. By developing top-of-funnel content and providing helpful, educational information, you will be able to…Read more…

Let me give you an example. There is a reason why PBN’s are considered “Gray-Hat” and not “Black-Hat” because as long as you offer great content, I mean, It doesn’t have to be great! It just have’s to be useful, to give a hint, an idea something from your mind but as long as you’re offering value to the visitor there’s no problem with it.

When Google does a manual review the first things that they ask are “Does this site offer value? It was built poorly?” if they look at it and see a nice looking site with nice ordered content that ha’s a point they see no problem. If it’s a NO! Then they start looking for footprints and trust me they will find them.

You can always pick a book from your library and get to know that niche a bit, 1 book, that’s all it takes to know more than 80% of your visitors in order to offer them something they don’t know, in other words, value! Don’t just use an article spinner to steal some article that was already stolen from somebody else who stole it.

We all remember that at first our mentors told us “Choose something that you are passionate about or you would like to learn”. There’s a reason for that, by following this and combining today’s principle we can build a niche site that earns $5000, have a great community that we have a bond with and enjoys working and improving our site.

It’s a lot better and easier! Then having 10 niche sites with a cumulated sum of $5000

How To Find Your Target Audience And Create The Best Content That Connects

Content marketing success starts with knowing how to find your target audience.

After all, how can you begin creating content before you know who your audience is?

Good content marketing takes time. A lot of it. You can’t afford to waste that time with content that isn’t perfectly focused on your target market. You need to find who your people are. But how?

That’s exactly what this post will cover.

 

By the time you’re done reading, you’ll understand:

• How to define your target audience and understand your target market to create a clear picture of exactly who you are (and aren’t) writing for.
• Pick up tips, tactics, and strategies for gathering audience data.
• Use your improved knowledge of your audience to create content that connects with their needs and interests.

As you can see, number 3 says, “Increase conversions”, but the article doesn’t tell you how to increase your conversion, it only tells you how to create content that “connects”, conversions will come naturally as a byproduct! offering value to your audience. This is very important and they know that.

So What I’m suggesting is to draw your attention towards your content and away from your balance for a while and ask yourself how can I increase its content value? get rid of that feeling on your site that says “I want to make a sale” and direct it towards “I have something interesting to share”, get knowledgeable about your niche or outsource the content from somebody else that’s interested in it.

Image source

Indexing, it refers to showing your site in the Google results. So if a website doesn’t show up in the results that means it wasn’t indexed. How does a website get indexed? It gets visited by a crawler. Short and simple said, crawlers are bots that visit every site on the web and every link on that website.

It gathers information on the keywords, pages, links and tries to determine it’s topic by the relevancy of links it received. After it finishes it send the information back to Google so that the next time you type something from your website in the search bar it will get listed in the results.

This is the easiest, fastest, shortest explanation that I can give in regards to Google crawlers. It gives a simple picture. It’s enough but there’s more that you can learn about how this full process works so that you can use it in order to index your website or store properly.

What is Google Crawling and Indexing?

 

SEO is a very big, deep sea. To fully understand SEO, we should know some basic SEO terms.

Crawling and indexing are two such terms.

If you have been in the web world for a while, you’ve at least heard the words: 

• Google Crawling and Indexing.

These are the two terms upon which the entire web world depends.

Let’s define, understand, and get some in-depth information about crawling and indexing.

Crawling:

• When Google visits your website for tracking purposes. This process is done by Google’s Spider crawler.

Indexing:

• After crawling has been done, the results get put onto Google’s index (i.e. web search).

Submit URLs to Google with Fetch as Googlebot

Webmaster Level: All

The Fetch as Googlebot feature in Webmaster Tools now provides a way to submit new and updated URLs to Google for indexing. After you fetch a URL as Googlebot, if the fetch is successful, you’ll now see the option to submit that URL to our index. When you submit a URL in this way Googlebot will crawl the URL, usually within a day. We’ll then consider it for inclusion in our index. Note that we don’t guarantee that every URL submitted in this way will be indexed; we’ll still use our regular processes—the same ones we use on URLs discovered in any other way—to evaluate whether a URL belongs in our index.

After the initial crawl, the bot will revisit from time to time to see if there are any changes in content, keywords, relevancy, outbound links and so on. The initial indexing is more important in case the bot doesn’t know where to find you but once it visited it will know where to come back.

This is one of the first things you must do once you have your site ready for visitors. Before you bring customers in, you must bring bots first. Quite ironical.

Search Engine Optimization appeared the same time as Google and it’s algorithms. Webmasters soon discovered how Google gives relevance to a website and what conditions have to be meet for it to be shown on the front page as a top result.

They started investing time and energy on those conditions so that Google will like them more and by doing so rank them higher in order to attract more visitors.

The only problem was that some users started abusing those requirements and the result was that too many websites appeared at the top in an unnatural way, it wouldn’t be a problem if the website was offering good content and value but the top results weren’t relevant to the keywords that users were typing. So I order to avoid a fall Google started changing the rules and come up with updates from time to time.

SEO Basics, introduction to Search Engine Optimisation

 

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the on-going process of making sure that your web site performs as well as possible on specific search engine searches.

This article aims to explain the SEO basics that every SEO expert, website designer, developer, or owner should know.

Why optimise your web site?

Success is biased at being top of the rankings. The top-ranked site for a search does better than #2, and the top few get many times more visits than the results at the bottom of the first page, which in turn get many times more clicks than results on page 2 etc. etc.

The skew is so great that the benefits of getting higher up the rankings far outweighs the costs. You should be optimising your web sites to get high rankings.

Aim to get in the top 5 or 10 results for one or more specific search terms. Read more…

Why Search Engine Marketing Is Necessary

 

An important aspect of SEO is making your website easy for both users and search engine robots to understand. Although search engines have become increasingly sophisticated, they still can’t see and understand a web page the same way a human can. SEO helps the engines figure out what each page is about, and how it may be useful for users.

A Common Argument Against SEO

We frequently hear statements like this:

“No smart engineer would ever build a search engine that requires websites to follow certain rules or principles in order to be ranked or indexed. Anyone with half a brain would want a system that can crawl through any architecture, parse any amount of complex or imperfect code, and still find a way to return the most relevant results, not the ones that have been ‘optimized’ by unlicensed search marketing experts.”

But Wait …

Imagine you posted online a picture of your family dog. A human might describe it as “a black, medium-sized dog, looks like a Lab, playing fetch in the park.” On the other hand, the best search engine in the world would struggle to understand the photo at anywhere near that level of sophistication. How do you make a search engine understand a photograph? Fortunately, SEO allows webmasters to…Read more…

So that’s why we optimize our website, not only that but as a general rule, we should always strive to better our business in order to increase sales and grow. There is no stagnation, you can’t simply build something and suppose that it will never fall, you always have to stay updated and improve on it or else it’s going to be left behind.

Who knows how the next Google update will affect the market if your business is quite ahead a disadvantageous update will only bring it back a bit instead of completely ruin it if you’re on the line between costs and profit.

Why do we use tools you may ask. Well, if you’re trying to lose or gain weight why do you get up on a scale? You see, tools are a wonderful way to monitor and keep track of your progress when it comes to Search Engine Optimization. One of the first things that you should ask when you talk to another expert is “What tools do you use?” and “Why do you like them?”

There are a dozens of tools out there and some of them may do the same thing as other tools do, the only difference being the user interface. Others may offer many graphs and specs that are nice to look at but won’t help you in the sense that you can’t use that information to better your tactics.

Aside from that tools should be simplistic and straight to the point. You will need a few basic important tools to start. Some of them are free and for some of them you’ll have to pay but this also depends on how much you need to use them. Here is an article about the basic tools you’ll need.

The most important SEO tools at a glance

If you want to be successful online, you won’t get far without the magic phrase: SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Without adequate tools, it is difficult to predict which SEO strategies are the most successful and which increase your website’s ranking in Google’s search results. It’s equally hard to know which weaknesses are standing in the way of a good search engine ranking. SEO tools are therefore an important instrument for every webmaster since they help you understand your website better.

SEO tools: the most important features

Without concrete data, SEO and marketing specialists can only rely on their gut feeling, which is not always so reliable. SEO tools offer essential and reliable information for search engine optimization that covers many different areas. Read more…

We now know what tools we need in order to proceed and start working. You can also take a look at what tools experts use. You might take a liking and use them instead. If experts are using them it doesn’t mean that they are complicated and you can’t.

As I said tools should be easy to use and straight forward, we use the same tools for small businesses that we use for big businesses, the only difference is the volume.

10 Great Marketing Tools for SMBs

 

Digital marketers are more enabled than ever to do pretty much anything on the web in their pursuit of getting more eyes, leads, and eventual customers. Countless tools exist that are intended to make a marketer’s life easier and more efficient, but no two products are exactly the same. How does a marketer differentiate between one and the other?

Demos, blog posts, and product features are intended to show off the best aspects of a tool, but they all sound the same or too hard to believe. What’s worse, marketers are being berated with “the next best thing” on a daily basis, which makes committing to one tool near impossible. Let’s make this all much easier, clear up the confusion, and dive into the best performing tools, no fluff. Read more…

You can always experiment with other tools, find which one is easier and most efficient. Just remember that the tools won’t do the work for you. After we cleared this topic and we have the necessary instruments we can move on to the next thing.

It seems that the recent Possum update from Google had a major impact on the businesses that were doing local SEO. This update can only foretell major changes on how experts are going to deal with this situation. New techniques and tricks are going to show up on major blogs and websites.

We better stay updated and keep an eye on what’s next. Create new spreadsheets, give new tasks to our VA’s and be prepared to spend some extra hours to get back on track. How major this update is and in which way it affected local SEO? Let’s find out.

Study shows Google’s Possum update changed 64% of local SERPs

How significantly did the Possum update impact local search results in Google? Columnist Joy Hawkins shares data and insights from a study she did with BrightLocal, which compared local results before and after the update.

In the local SEO community, Google’s recent Possum update was a very big deal.

To those of us who regularly track the search results for local businesses, it was obvious there were massive changes on September 1. The SEO community as a whole has been relatively quiet about this huge update, and I believe this is because this update primarily impacted the Local/Maps search results and not organic.

SERP trackers like MozCast and Algoroo do a fabulous job of tracking changes in the search results, but this algorithm update didn’t seem to…Read more…

As we can see the situation is pretty obvious, at least for businesses that are targeting local markets. This one was a hard one but not much is lost and we can easily get back on track. Let’s see what more we can learn.

Everything you need to know about Google’s ‘Possum’ algorithm update

Wondering what’s up with local search rankings lately? Columnist Joy Hawkins has the scoop on a recent local algorithm update that local SEO experts are calling ‘Possum.’

For those of you wondering what “Possum” is, it’s the name we in the local search community decided to give the massive Local algorithm update that happened September 1, 2016.

Phil Rozek suggested the name, pointing out that it is fitting since many business owners think their Google My Business listings are gone, when in fact they are not. They have just been filtered — they’re playing possum.

What was the update?

All the evidence seems to indicate this particular update only impacted ranking in the 3-pack and Local Finder (AKA the local results or Google Maps results). There is talk of another update that happened…Read more…

All this being said we know have an idea about what’s happening. There isn’t anything that we can’t do to better our situation so the next steps will be to gather more information and rethink our next plan of action. And of course, act on it.

If we act now and do what have’s to be done we may not even feel this update more than just a scratch on the arm. “Entrepreneurs, draw your keyboards, victory lies ahead”

You might consider doing things in a different way. It’s all nice and good if you’re doing something and it works but doing the same over and over again won’t bring you different results. It have’s no logic, what’s worse, your method might get outdated with the next update and you might loose that as well.

So you better stay sharp and informed and always have your main project running nice and sweet while at the same time experimenting with new methods.

There are literary dozens and dozens and dozens of things that you can do to increase your page rank in Google. You don’t have to be original and come up with something revolutionary. All you have to do is hear out what the Big Shots are doing. They are all awesome! And share a lot of information for free.

Well not all of them for free but they do share and a percentage of your money can actually return with more money if you direct it in the right direction. Here is an article with a few examples that you can do in order to maximize your ranking:

Four SEO Tips to Apply to Your E-Commerce Website Today

The success of an e-commerce store can be determined by whether it generates enough quality traffic that ultimately turns into sales. SEO can effectively drive traffic for all websites; e-commerce, however, presents unique challenges.

Avoid the most common pitfalls of SEO for e-commerce by learning what those pitfalls are and how to prevent costly mistakes in the future. Our favorite tactic is to turn these weak spots into strengths.

This article will discuss how to identify a few of those issues, along with our best tips on how to make them work to your advantage.

Tip 1: Avoid keyword cannibalism

Though it aptly sounds like the subject of a TV horror show, keyword cannibalism is much more insidious than your average ghost haunting. Read more…

As you can see all that it takes is some interest, willingness to learn and caring for your current business. You do care about your business, don’t you?

There are many blogs out there and forums that you can subscribe to and take your daily intake of marketing when you wake up. If you’re an entrepreneur than learning about your market should be as important as eating. Don’t limit your learning material to online sources. There are also many great books out there teaching about finances and principles that are just as important as the next Google update or money making idea.

Know that every action have’s a reaction and the worst thing that can happen is that you might loose a few dollars but gained a valuable lesson in exchange. When investing be sure that you’re ready to lose the money that you put on the table.