SEO Link Building: Quality vs. Quantity

If you chase quality and quantity in SEO submission, both will lack.

Hi Friends,

I don’t how many of you maintaining both quality and quantity in off-page SEO work day-to-day, but I know that most executive fails to chase both at the same time.

Especially if you are still following the year 2010’s SEO submission methods.

Please rectify your off-page SEO paradigm.

One of my managers in an organization where I worked as a professional SEO years ago, was always stressed on maintaining quality in work. But when it comes to reporting, he screamed a lot since the off-page SEO submission numbers were low. It was not enough how many quality backlinks I gained, to him at that point, the quantity was the issue.

Another of my previous manager has a lot of link-building ideas, he wants to keep us abreast of the new backlink generation trend, and he wants to try everything out at once without compromising quality.

But trying to do everything with maintaining quality and quantity both leaves him burnt out and struggling to relax.

Which taught me this –

If you need to run your SEO campaign successfully, it isn’t enough to “build back-links anymore”. You need to get the right ones.

And do it in the quickest way possible. That way you do not have to look at neither the quality and nor the quantity anymore.

This means focusing on the right link opportunities and on the right ways to win a backlink – the ones that will have the most impact on your SEO work.

Unfortunately, most of the managers are still verbally encouraging their teams to maintain the quality however when it comes to reviewing, they focus more on numbers in your quota.

In fact, many have lost their career direction in and as SEO because of the dilemma between qualities vs. quantity.

Here are my suggestions to those managers which will help you how to implement a comfortable system for everyone matching the latest SEO trends:

• Pinpoint the right prospects for backlinks
• Approach them in a creative way,
• And track to identify how your backlink generation system work for your SEO goals over and over again

This is not a fight between quality and quantity. There is no strategy discussion needed or any secret SEO link-building formulas exist.

All we need to be focused on our responsibilities and meeting SEO project goals with our own dignified SEO techniques.

Do not chase quality and quantity both at the same time – chase realistic results instead to make a super easy et enjoyable SEO submission process.

Best,
Partha

Two Words: Forget SEO!

No matter if it is building relevant backlinks from reputed sites or creating high-quality content that targets certain keywords - we are ALL in a constant race to optimize for rankings organically.

Of course, optimization is important to get you top rankings on Google, but instead of continuing to be trap in this maze of constant optimization, why not try something else - an effective yet not so popular ranking technique that you can consider.

As to what it is, here’s a clue. Go and check results against your targeted keywords on Google. It can be anything - keywords your business is targeting or something random like how to clean a bicycle.

What do you see? I’ll bet you in most if not all cases - VIDEOS.

Video results always appear on the First Page and it’s no fluke.

Search engines like Google generally prefer to display appropriate video results if there are any and guess what - they rank even new videos that don't have any backlinks.

Most professional webmasters and SEOs don’t realize this, but YouTube takes up a huge amount of space in Google’s search engine result pages. And this is on top of YouTube's own search engine which you can aim for to bring traffic and conversions.

If there's anything you can do, now is the time to take advantage of this trend and start creating your own videos - but wait a moment, it's not just videos you have to create.

Good SEOs may already have discovered this amazing way to rank on Google. Anyways -

Freshness, dwell time, likes/dislikes - these are all important factors that can help boost your SEO, and they're all-natural qualities Google picks up in a video.

The method is simply so easy that you can forget all about SEO link-building at least temporarily.

There's not as much tweaking and optimizing, all you need are targeted keywords, their LSI and you're good to rank your videos and enjoy organic traffic from Google and YouTube.

This is no joke. Just take a look around.

The amazing part is you can hold your position at the top for long.

Really, with publishing amazing videos, ranking on the first page of Google and YouTube has never been easier.

But you also need to keep some points in your mind, like -

• You need to know how good SEOs are using Google to get targeted traffic to their landing pages and how to convert those as leads
• You need to have a blueprint to optimize your video content
• You need to do keyword analysis to find untapped long-tail keywords that you can rank for using within the video title and/or description

Just imagine, all these top and permanent rankings, traffic, conversions, etc. are for your taking again, so quick try out now!

SEO Is Always The Lowest Priority, Until It Is Not

In today’s post, I will talk about my 5 reasons why I believe SEO is not anymore a smart marketing investment.

I think SEO is neither compulsory for businesses, nor it is anymore one of the obligatory investments that a business owner can make.

On the contrary, many still think of SEO as a needed investment for their business - its stock that will increase value over time and remain in your account.

Unfortunately, those days are gone when by investing in SEO you build long-term value for your website that will continue to accumulate over time.

Here are 5 reasons why we should stop investing in SEO now.

1. SEO does not work.

This is a straightforward reason, but it is true. As of today, Google processes nearly 4 billion searches per day. With that number of search volume, there is no debating that, ranking in Google’s search results with PPC ads offers much better and realistic opportunities to get more targeted traffic for websites.

This is very important because more targeted traffic typically brings more leads and leads turn into sales that is ROI.

By investing in SEO if you want to raise your rankings in Google and expect more traffic to your website that can produce more leads and sales for your business is a myth now.

If not, then why almost everywhere I am seeing text/display ads now?

2. For mobile, SEO is becoming even more meaningless to all.

Yesterday, people had to wait until they got a computer to review something online. With mobile searches now surpassed desktop, today more people are comfortable doing research on the move. Tomorrow is even shiner for businesses because people will make a purchase through IoT devices.

With the growing usage of “near me” search queries, even the small local shop owners now see the opportunity to rank in their area. As a result, big businesses start showing their financial power by launching huge paid PR campaigns.

That means people not only can find more attractive ads online but also find any business info on their mobile screens in real-time.

Therefore, your noble thought about investing in Local SEO for your small business to grab the attention of people who are your ideal customers and are ready to make a purchasing decision quickly is vaporing even more quickly.

If not, then why paid ads are always above all?

3. Higher search engine rankings don’t prove your business credibility.

What do you do when you’re considering making a purchase online or offline? For most people, the answer is research - means checking all available buying options to get the best deal possible.

Most internet users - as high as 80% in some studies - look past paid ads and focus solely on organic search results. That means that when someone is doing web research for a product or service, they are much more likely to do business if you rank highly in Google’s organic search results. In order to rank higher, your website should have a high level of expertise, authority, and trustworthiness, which will help to drive sales once someone clicks through to your site.

However, having a high ranking doesn’t always mean that Google and other searchers have found your website to be relevant. A high rank on Google SERP also doesn’t signify trust and authority for your business always. If giving consumers a positive feeling towards your business before they even start searching around your site is important, then how most of the businesses are allowed to run paid ads (and they are making a profit too from it!) without at least considering Google’s search quality rater guidelines?

If not, then why the paid PR sites are rank higher in the news searches? Or sometimes, how they appear above the organic listings?

4. Rankings can change fast, and but your competitors don’t know it.

As per popular thesis, SEO is an ongoing process and the more you invest in it, the greater it will be. This is a good feeling at many levels.

If your website is already ranking moderately higher in search results that’s great - but it means you need to continue to invest in SEO in order to stay there - this is not true anymore.

With everyone competing for those top spots on SERP, your competitors are going to invest in paid ads and digital PR campaigns, and if they do and you don’t, they can start to outrank you - simple.

If you’re not currently ranking high in search result pages, you still have an opportunity to rise up. By investing in a sound paid digital advertising strategy including smart yet paid social media marketing tactics, you may be able to start outranking your competition and driving more traffic to your website.

Though that’s doesn’t guarantee the actual conversions from that traffic.

Ranking #1 is a constant race to the finish line, and whoever invests the most in paid ads and runs the diversified media buying campaigns will get there first.

If not, then why business owners are more and more investing in programmatic advertising?

5. SEO is an easily replaceable art.

Customers used to learn about products or services through advertisements on the radio, television, and print ads. People are still, also use to make buying decisions in stores and look for service providers in the phone books or local business directories.

While some people may still reluctant, many (and the numbers are increasing at a significant pace) are relying on social media for making purchasing decisions nowadays, and the tendency is it’s going to stay.

Online shopping and searching are not only here to stay, it’s going to keep growing and evolving and with that means optimization work for social media will continue to change as well. It’s important to start investing now on social media so you set your business up for success in the future and most importantly consumers are on social media.

If not, then why so many businesses are operating on social media without having a website at least?

Final thoughts

Traditional marketing is one-way i.e. brand to customer, which is not engaging. But marketing through SEO is multi-ways - brand to customer, customer to brand, customer to customer. SEO is the marketing practice that allows you to engage and interact with your consumers virtually.

So, SEO will remain here and will grow.

To make SEO work for you, do learn which sources are generating the most traffic, find your competitors' best conversion tactics, and view metrics, including conversion rates and top-selling products at first.

Need Help with SEO?

Click here to request a quote for SEO services.

How Does Voice Search Affect SEO?

We’ve come a long way from the days of rotary dial phones. With our smartphones, we can text and call anyone from anywhere, but even more revolutionary is the facility to search for real-time business information. You can find store hours, if a new book is in, and even order food with the press of a button. Now, we’re entering a new age of mobile-connected and search engine optimized world-wide-web thanks to voice search.

Small businesses especially everywhere are starting to integrate voice search optimization in local SEO practices to prepare themselves for the near future where 50 percent of all searches on Google will be voice-based.

People are using voice search functionality more every year as leading mobile devices increasingly develop exclusive voice assistants like Apple’s Siri and Google Assistant on Androids phones. The opportunity voice search optimization provides in overall SEO is incredible for driving traffic to brick-and-mortar stores. Now you know why Amazon is opening physical stores - from booksellers to grocery pickup locations to cashier-less convenience stores.

Voice search optimization is your best bet as a small business owner to take on giants like Amazon by leveraging mobile voice search feature to create the most convenient and intuitive local SEO strategy that drives traffic to your store.

Voice search optimization facts:

• According to a tech firm, there were more than 30 million voice-first devices in circulation
• Another report said that one-fifth of the queries on Google are voice searches
• Teenagers are savvy users of voice search, but a survey found that people in all age groups use mobile personal assistants
• The shipping trend of voice-first devices year-on-year is on rising
• “near me” searches have grown significantly YoY as per a study
• Recent data from the research shows that more than 15% of Americans now own a smart speaker
• More than 70 percent of smart speaker owners perform searches for local businesses on a weekly basis, and more than 50 percent say they perform these searches every day, according to data

What is voice search?

“Hey Google, what’s the best Bengali restaurant near me?”

Voice search lets you be conversational with your search engines and contextual with the information your small business has included on its Google My Business listing. Location, store details, and business hours are just some of the information Google will quickly crawl and index to provide the most relevant answer to a user’s search query. The algorithm will also take into account reputation in terms of Google reviews your business listing has received. This is done by analyzing star ratings and comments posts in order to provide credibility for voice search optimizations that include keywords like “best”.

Voice search utilizes the power of artificial intelligence (AI). Algorithms like Google’s RankBrain can decipher the nuances in your speech-based command in addition to the user’s search history and device location to find the most relevant answer. Since its AI, it also becomes smarter and intelligent with every conversation.

You might optimize your pages to rank for keywords like “hardware store Kolkata” or “cheap clothes for sale Pune” but with voice search, you need to optimize the content appropriately to sound conversational. That is the fundamental difference between typed searches and voice search - usually five words or more (a very long tail keyword), which plays a decisive role in user intent.

To create the optimal online presence, here is what the ideal local business should:

• Have good and growing review ratings
• Regularly get online mentions linking to their websites
• Get talked about on social media platforms
• Have listings in local directories

How to mix voice search optimization in local SEO?

Voice search optimization, in the beginning, was about including answers to frequently asked questions by users about your business. The effectiveness of your voice search depends on how easily Google and other reputed search engines can crawl and index your content so optimized rich snippets can appear in ”position zero” on SERP. That way, it’s come to providing the obvious answer for voice search both on mobile devices and on at-home devices like Google Home and Amazon’s Alexa.

1. Structured Data Markup

By applying the correct schema markup, search engines can better understand your site and its content. Use Schema.org to find and use the crucial markups for your site, because beyond keyword-optimized content, you need to provide search engines context too.

2. Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Your FAQs section within the site can be used for more than a reference for people on your site. Use FAQs to drive voice and type-based organic search traffic by providing better solutions to solve users’ queries. Tools like answerthepublic.com are great for compiling exact keyword match questions that you can markup with the schema to answer for voice search queries. Be sure your answer to each question is precise and clear. You may also need to create several FAQs in order for Google search algorithms crawling for voice search queries to better pull information from your site.

3. Rich Snippets

In order to create a powerful impact like being cited in the answer for a voice search query or get featured in the “People also ask” section on Google SERPs, you must add structured data that put your page in position zero (also known as rich snippets or rich results) on SERP. Optimize for long tail queries to include keywords like “store hours”, “near me”, and “price” so that you can take advantage of a mobile user’s GPS to drive traffic in form of in-store visits.

Remember that, using structured data doesn’t guarantee appearance in and as a rich snippet on Google SERPs all the time.

Mobile Optimization

Most digital marketers aware that mobile searches have surpassed desktop searches which is why it’s more important than ever to be optimized for handheld devices. This means creating super-fast pages with fine user interface (UI) design that provide a seamless mobile user experience (UX). If a page is too slow to load, a user will bounce and adversely affect your keyword rankings and may lose your rich snippet in position zero.

You should also keep in mind Google’s E-A-T (stands for expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness) from search quality rater guidelines. Grossly, it means the credibility of your site is based both on the credentials of the content. Factors that influence your rankings include reviews and ratings, the accuracy of NAP (business name, address, and phone number) information, and a naturally growing backlink profile. All of which can influence your success in voice search in an SEO program.

If you would like to learn more about what cutting-edge SEO and CRO can do for your small business, then call Tenet today at +91 9748776969 or contact us here.

What Is A Black Hat SEO Technique?

It is well known to all SEOs that Google, the search engine has rules, and it demands that SEOs follow them. And, it’s pretty much guaranteed that you’ll regret going against Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.

When it comes to SEO, it’s wise to avoid black hat tactics.

What is black hat SEO?

Black hat SEO is an umbrella term for all practices that can improve your performance in the organic search results in ways that search engines like Google condemn.

Engaging in black hat SEO schemes can get your site punished on the search engine results pages (SERPs) and, in some cases, banned from search engines completely. So, it’s best to stay with Google’s policies as much as possible.

A rule of thumb you can follow to determine if a tactic falls under the black hat SEO practice is to ask yourself: “Am I doing this to offer value to my site visitors, or am I doing this ONLY to do better in the search results?” If the answer is the latter one, it’s safe to stay away from or think twice whatever method you’re considering.

A brief history of black hat SEO

Long ago, in the early 2000s, to be successful on all the major search engines we now take for granted was fooling around in terms of -

• Stuff keywords
• Build a network of sites that existed for the sole purpose of linking to each other and pushing themselves up the rankings
• Cloaking your content so it shows one thing to search engines and something completely different to users

But, once the search engines are getting smarter, especially when Google has become the leader, it started cracking down on spamdexing. Update after update of the search algorithm sought to improve crawling and indexing by penalizing over-optimizers, keyword stuffers, and spam link builders.

Google over the past decade or so, messaged clearly to the worldwide SEO community: webmasters and content creators are to prioritize user experience (UX) over search engine optimization. Relevant, high-quality information from fast-loading, easily browsing websites became (and remains) the number one priority.

Which tactics are considered black hat SEO?

Now, let’s talk about some risky black hat SEO techniques.

• Gateway (doorway) pages: web pages aimed to rank highly for particular search queries and that exist solely to direct visitors to another page on the same site.
• Content automation: using a tool or program to automatically generate and publish content.
• Hidden text and links: making certain text or links invisible to visitors with the intent of augmenting purely for search engines.
• Keyword stuffing: excessively adjusting a piece of content for a given keyword by overusing it in the content body and headings, image names and ALT, Meta tags, and so on.
• Link farming: forming a network of sites for no reason other than to link to each other and get higher rankings.
• Buying links: paying other websites to link to yours in order to manage Domain Authority.
• Cloaking: presenting one piece of content to search engine bots and another piece of content to visitors.
• Spam comments: building links to your site in the comment sections of other websites in order to achieve Domain Authority.
• Footer spam: packing footers with links for the only purpose of ranking.
• Article spinning: using software to mechanically regenerate existing content in a rephrased way.
• Using irrelevant keywords: including irrelevant keywords into an old piece of content for the only purpose of ranking for those keywords.
• Click baiting: building links to a high-quality piece of content, only to replace that content with something more profit-making or money-making.
• Scraping: stealing another site’s content and using it to drive traffic to your site.
• Low-quality guest posting: writing a guest post on another site only for the sake of linking to your own.
• Tradeoff products for links: offer free product in exchange for receiving reviews of it and linking to your site.
• Negative SEO: do a negative SEO campaign for a competitor website in hopes that their fall will boost your rankings.
• False headlines: baiting clicks with an enticing yet false headline and directing visitors to an unrelated page or piece of content.

This list is not at all exhaustive - there are many other tactics that can get you a penalty. Since; organic search is in constant flux, so this list may also evolve in the future. But, for the time being, these 17s should give you a pretty good idea of what are black hat techniques.

What is the difference between white hat and black hat SEO?

White hat SEO refers to - the set of Google-recommended webmaster guidelines that will improve your organic search rankings.

Undoubtedly, the best thing you can do to rank higher is created informative, high-quality, easy-to-understand content that answers visitors’ questions and solves their problems. This requires a strong understanding of search intent and a willingness to do robust keyword research. You can’t develop useful content unless you know what your visitors are seeking and how you want to present it so they find it helpful.

Generally, good content earns links from reputed sites. Although there’s nothing wrong with guest blogging and outreach (I encourage these things in fact), getting an authoritative inbound link without asking for it is always desirable.

On top of that, your website needs to be fast, secure, and easy to browse.

As of now, Google is officially penalizing sites that take too long to load, particularly on mobile devices. Not to mention the fact that users with 4G and 5G networks simply aren’t going to tolerate slowness.

Making the switch from HTTP to HTTPS is a no-brainer considering the importance of keeping web security intact to its fullest, and as it’s been a ranking factor for nearly half a decade.

Ease of use is significant for a couple reasons. One: making it easy for users to navigate around and find what they need to find is a surefire way to decrease bounce rate. Two: making it easy for crawlers to consume content ensures that more of your pages will be indexed properly and featured on the SERPs. Keep your internal links organized and make sure it takes no more than two clicks to get to important sections of the site.

On-page SEO is all about making your page as contextually relevant to the search query as possible.

For a given page, the title tag is the hyperlinked text that search engine users are typically going to see on the SERP.

Including your primary keyword in the title tag makes the page more relevant to the search query and increases the likelihood that searchers will click through. Make sure the title’s length is optimized enough to avoid truncation and to keep users engaged by presenting it logically.

The Meta description is the snippet of text that appears below the title tag on the SERP.

It’s your opportunity to 1) further demonstrate the relevance of the page by including the semantic variations of the primary keyword and 2) tell the users what the page’s content is about. Keeping the Meta description succinct ensures that it will appear meaningfully on both mobile devices and desktops.

Make sure to include your targeted keyword and its close variants thoughtfully throughout the page, too: in your heading tags (H1, H2, etc.), throughout the body copy, and in the URL. This shows visitors (and search engines too) that the content is tightly relevant and that they should remain engaged. Further, using the keyword in your image names and in the images’ ALT texts will give web spiders an even better indication of what the page is about.

The middle hat: Grey hat SEO

Certainly, the heading of this section is slightly ambiguous.

It’s not entirely incorrect to think of grey hat SEO as the "no man's land" between black hat and white hat SEO practices. However, it’s more precise to consider it as a practice that is neither straightforward black hat nor white hat.

Google hasn’t passed the verdict on all credible SEO tactics till now. Though Google has shared its stance on some things so far. So, if it’s unclear whether Google’s evolving search algorithm has issues with a particular practice - and if SEOs can have arguments both for and against the issue - then it’s likely that you have a grey hat situation on your hands.

Why is it essential to be aware that a new idea of yours is the grey hat? Because experimenting with any untested idea is basically to take a risk with the hope of gaining something positive from it. This is absolutely true especially in the field of SEO where a lot of principles are yet to be well-defined. Sure, it could boost your ranking and help grow your business. Or, it could go all wrong. All you can do is educate yourself as much as possible and do some cost-benefit analysis.

Is the prospect of a new idea worth the risk of lost conversion?

Final thoughts

SEOs will debate about best and worst practices forever. What we know is, we don’t know which factors are behind Google’s algorithm or how these factors are weighted. Plus, the rules are changing many times in a single year. This all sums up to a lot of room for speculation and disagreement.

What’s not unclear is that doing shady stuff gets you in the danger. When your organic traffic volume stagnant or drops, it is tempting to become reckless. That’s pretty much common as it is impacting ROI. But forget not that, there’s always something (or a bunch of things) that can be tweaked, improved, repaired, or removed. It’s just a matter of staying on top of it - means that you are fully in control of the situation and can react rationally if something changes.

22 SEO Tactics To Optimize Your Blog In 2022

The Coronavirus crisis has had an upsetting effect on thousands of lives and businesses worldwide. We don't know how many more will be impacted, but the global stock market is shaky, which implies that everyone will be affected in some way sooner or later.

Is there any way to keep your business-related digital activities active during such challenging times?

Yes! One of the ways to do this is to capitalize on your website and blog content to make sure that you continue communicating with existing and potential customers and followers.

Even if your local business is closed now due to the quarantine, the search engine traffic hasn't been closed for you - you can still share your ideas, collect feedback, plan future campaigns, etc. Why lose these opportunities?

In this post, I want to focus on the basics of SEO and online marketing for businesses that are pretty new to blogging. I want to illustrate how you can build a solid foundation for your business blog, make it optimized for users and search engines, without spending a dime on costly software and services.

A crisis comes and goes, but your content stays and will keep working for your business in the years coming, so let's see how you can get the most of it.

1. Fix technical SEO issues and improve load time

If you could only do one thing to your website, it should be onsite optimization. If your blog cannot be crawled, if it takes too long to load or it can't be legible on mobile devices, your awesome content won't stand a single chance to catch the reader's attention.

To check how "healthy" your blog/website is from the technical point of view, you can do an SEO audit with any free tool of your choice.

Even if you are not tech- and SEO- savvy, try to find some time to leverage any online tool and analyze the reported issues - the issues found on your website and fix the critical ones. That is important. Without it, none of the rest of this thing even matters.

I'd recommend starting the audit with these issues:

1.1. Check the content restricted from indexing

If some URLs on your blog are blocked from indexing, people won't be able to see them in search results. So, make sure that important URLs are always available for indexing.

1.2. Fix broken links and unnecessary redirects

A few broken links are not huge SEO trouble for your blog, but if a site has hundreds of them, it is logical to conclude that the content has not been updated for quite a while. Search engines do not favor outdated and abandoned pages.

Also, check the list of redirected pages and fix long redirect chains (pages with 2 and more redirects) - these can badly impact the indexing of your blog pages.

1.3. Optimize your blog to improve its loading time

Site speed is known to be a search engine ranking factor and for a reason - it greatly influences user experience, something Google's serious about. So, why risk your rankings and ignore the site's performance?

Since page speed plays a role in ranking rise and fall, so it's a good idea to follow Google's advice and optimize your blog load speed by:

• Avoiding landing page redirects
• Enabling compression
• Improving server response time
• Leveraging browser caching
• Minifying resources
• Optimizing images
• Optimizing CSS delivery
• Prioritizing visible content
• Removing render-blocking JavaScript code

And as your competitors will optimize the performance of their websites as well, you'll need to monitor and fine-tune your blog periodically.

1.4. Review structure-related issues on your blog

Now take a quick look at the structure of your blog, check the internal links, and analyze click depth.

During one of the Google Webmaster Central hangouts sessions, John Mueller revealed that the number of slashes in a URL does not matter. What does matter is how many clicks it takes to get to a page from the home page? So, make sure that your most important blog pages/posts are not more than two clicks away from the blog's homepage.

This idea will also help you plan your blog structure using the self-styled topic clusters. The topic cluster model ideally consists of a central 'pillar' page linking to multiple pages of cluster content that all link back in turn to the main pillar page.

If you decide to use this model, you'll need to choose the specific topic, your pillar content page (a.k.a. important landing pages), and surround it with relevant posts (cluster content). Pillar and cluster content get connected via hyperlinks. And it'll be great if you manage to create cluster content using different formats, such as how-to guides, infographics, podcasts, webinars, video series, downloadable content, email newsletter, etc.

1.5. Make your blog mobile-friendly

Finally, make sure that your blog is responsive to different devices and screen sizes. Again, this impacts hugely on user experience in addition to your search rankings and traffic.

There's much more to technical SEO undeniably, but if you manage to address these 5 factors, it's going to be a very sound foundation for further optimization.

And if you want to dig deeper into the techie stuff of SEO, subscribe to this blog.

2. Content ideation, set goals, and research keywords

Now that we know our blog content is necessarily crawlable and can be accessed by users and search engines, we can safely turn our focus to another part of your blog optimization - content planning and keyword research.

First things first - how do you come up with catchy ideas? If you write on a regular basis, I am sure you've already hit the point of writer’s block. The good thing is that inspiration may come from anywhere for your posts but just keep it relevant to your niche.

Here are the steps I'd strongly recommend you to follow before you start writing:

2.1. Define the goal and the audience of your new post

Do you want to attract a new audience? Do you need to convince your existing customers about anything? Or are you planning to share some big news that will hopefully create a social media buzz? Whatever your goals are, get certain about them before you start writing. This way, you'll be able to determine the related metrics (sign-ups, social signals, sales, etc.) and later on quantify them.

For example, your goals may look likes this:

• Get in the top 3 search results in Google for the "targeted" keyword
• Achieve at least 50 sign-ups
• Get 10x more unique page visitors per month
• Increase social media following by 5%

Well, you get the idea! You can write down your goals somewhere to remind you of what you're aiming to achieve.

2.2. Find primary and secondary keywords

There are a few keyword research tools on the internet that offers excellent service for free. Most of them focus on the 3 main steps:

• Insert a seed list of starting terms
• Extend this list using keyword research tools
• Refine your list using competitive research

Sounds clear?

Nowadays search engines tend to emphasize more and more semantic search - analyze search intent and match contextually search results with query. Point to remember that, user's search behavior is changing simultaneously.

For example, five years ago, a user could search for "buy used computers in edge city", while today's searcher may use voice-activated search assistants and say, "find me local PC stores with the biggest discounts".

So how do we group semantically related key phrases?

Say, you're writing a blog on "how to choose an SEO company" in Google AdWords Keyword Planner (you may choose other tools later to expand the list) and type in your keyword.

After Google’s keyword tool finishes collecting keyword ideas, you'll see them neatly organized in groups.

Just by looking at these groups of phrases, I can plan out the structure of my future post (or posts, if it's going to be a series):

• Best SEO company
• SEO companies near me
• Best SEO companies for small business
• Best SEO companies in the USA

Not enough ideas? Then take a keyword idea that has a high KEI (keyword effectiveness index) for your topic and analyze it further. You can do a Google search to see a list of the sites already ranking for your selected keywords for research.

You can select the most relevant keywords and if you need even more phrases for your posts, check out the other popular keyword research methods in Google - autocomplete search feature, related searches, competitor domain research, related questions, and combinations of keywords.

All set? Let's move on to the next step.

2.3. Check your keywords for traffic and competition

You should have ideate a wide-ranging list of key phrases by now, but how do you choose the 2-3 keywords for the post from the list? You'll need to take a closer look at keyword metrics and select the queries with the highest KEI.

Generally, you should look at:

• Search volume
• Competition
• Keyword difficulty

Typically, keywords with high search volume and low to moderate competition are the best, but sometimes you may find that all have high competition. In this case, you need to do further research and discover how difficult it really is to rank for this key phrase.

You'll need to sort keywords by calculating KEI for each keyword – the higher the score, the profitable it'll be to consider.

2.4. Analyze search intent when selecting keywords

One more thing, when you select your primary and secondary keywords, figure out as accurately as possible the searcher's intent behind all of these search terms and phrases so that the content can match the context.

There are three core categories of search intent – navigational, informational, and transactional (or commercial).

To target informational search queries ("SEO checklist for new websites"), you create how-to guides, videos, very detailed instructions, infographics, etc. People need solutions and you provide them with the necessary information.

When you target transactional search queries ("which is the best SEO company in India?"), your content should sell a certain product/service. For instance, it can be a detailed review of digital marketing agencies that help handle your SEO requirements most efficiently and effectively.

3. Create and optimize your post

Now that you know whom you're targeting and which questions you're going to answer through your content, it's time to get creative and start writing the post.

3.1. Identify the problems and solutions for your readers

If you're still undecided about the topic of your post, keep in mind that the top 3 popular categories of blog posts are:

• Answer a question,
• Provide a numbered list (checklist), and
• Provide a guide or a how-to tutorial

It might be a good idea to look at your direct competitors' content and see how you can provide additional value that's different from what other people have created. For instance, you can share some unique views on the topic, or provide new stats you've collected, or present case studies with interesting outcomes.

If you feel unsure about any topic ideas, here are some more ways to discover them:

• Analyze the comment section (eligible for your and your competitors' blogs). Spotted the questions that pop up more often? Jot them down and think of covering good detailed answers to these questions.
• If you're super active on social media (and you should be as a digital marketer at least!), ask your followers what they'd like to learn from your next post.
• Take a look at the related forum discussions – which topics are popular or get more comments and answers?

Finally, do some SERP exploration to see what Google/Bing finds relevant for your topic/keywords and see if there are any content gaps that you can fill up. If you find those potholes and manage to fill them with your uniquely developed content, you have a very good chance of taking over the top-ranking positions.

3.2. Discover competitors' top performing posts

When you've completely run out of new content ideas, you can take a look at the top-performing posts of the market leaders.

By diagnosing their posts, you'll find out the estimated traffic each page gets, as well as the hint of keywords this page is ranking for.

3.3. Plan to cover different types of content

Now you should also think about the types of content you'll construct. To make your content more user-friendly, consider presenting an idea in form of images, videos, graphs, GIFs, infographics, memes, newsletters, news releases (PR), and flowcharts.

For example, “how-to guides and step-by-step instructional content” may require less effort than “conference presentation and event materials”, but can prove much more effective in your industry. Or, publishing “original research and compelling statistics” will be a better choice because are more demanding than “industry news, information, and analysis”.

One more thing, don't forget to add links to useful sources – readers won't exit from your website, instead, they'll explore your blog as a credible and informative resource they can rely on (and mention too!).

3.4. Make your post smart for both humans and search engines

Finally, when you're done with the draft, take a look at what you've created. Does it look simple to read, and more important – is it smart enough? If you can't like the post you've written yourself, there's little chance other people will. Here's what you can do to improve this:

• Break up your content with subheads
• Add bulleted lists
• Create meaningful captions for supporting images and graphs
• Highlight the most important parts and calls-to-action

Surely you may ask, how is this related to SEO? It is. If visitors coming to read your post bounce immediately, that may negatively affect on site's rankings. Many SEOs believe user behavior signals are becoming more and more significant for search engines, and you shouldn't overlook them in your blogging.

3.5. Optimize on-page elements

Let's revisit the list of keywords you've selected for the post. Make sure the most important keyword (i.e., the primary keyword) goes in the page's Meta title, headline, and possibly URL.

After that, you can use all the secondary key phrases in:

• Content (pay special attention to the first two paragraphs),
• Meta description
• Images' file name and ALT attribute
• Heading and sub-headings
• Link anchors

There's no absolute formula on how many keywords and how many times each keyword you should use in the post, but be careful not to over-optimize your posts. Otherwise, your blog can be hit by Google's Panda penalty.

So how to determine the number of keywords to use? The safest way is to analyze the search results and see how the competing sites are using the terms you target. Doing it manually – by clicking on each result on SERP, visiting the landing page, and searching for the keywords on to the page – is one of the best ways.

You must conduct periodic research on your top-ranking competitors to find out where your website lags behind or, on the contrary, goes overboard with keyword usage.

By doing competitor research, you can optimize content logically and improve the stats in Google Analytics. Another tool – Google Search Console will help you if you need to fine-tune your website’s SEO.

The tool will also provide you with a big list of recommended adjustments – suggestions collected crawling your website to improve the site’s health.

3.6. Use rich snippets and Schema markup

Some blog posts in search results are more noticeable – draw attention and get clicks unsurprisingly, right?

If you have some visuals, recipes, or a good featured snippet opportunity (list posts, how-to instructions, etc.), you should definitely add markups to your content through editing the HTML code. Check out the guides on structured data available for free on the web for beginners to learn which type to choose and how to implement it correctly on your webpage including the blog.

3.7. Proofread the post

Well, this one's evident. Nobody (read both the readers and search engine spiders) will consider your blog/ content as a genuine source of information if you often mix up "weather" and "whether," or "affect" and "effect." If you can be watchful with your words and grammar, building trust for you with the visitors to your blog will become easier.

When proofreading your post, make sure you check the 3 main aspects:

• Spelling
• Grammar and
• Consistency

You can also use tools such as Hemingway App and Grammarly, or hire a freelance proofreader to get this task done faster and also skillfully.

4. Plan outreach and link building

Typically, another process begins right after you hit "publish". It's time for your targeted audience to learn about your blog post through share it across social media networks or email newsletters. As you may know, it won't happen automatically, so let's talk about how you can ensure your post gets the attention and backlinks optimally.

4.1. Make it easy to share your post

Obviously, you should place the social media icons on your blog page and don't be hesitant – ask your followers and/or subscribers to share the post and express their opinion in the comments (if available). Now the question here is where exactly you should place social sharing buttons on your blog page?

As a general rule of thumb, I recommend you to:

• Pick a prominent position
• Place the buttons in close proximity to the content being shared
• Watch out for UX and UI issues

Also, keep in mind that "near-zero" sharing buttons may provide negative social proof. As a consequence, social media buttons can hurt the conversion rate. Since there are very few social sharing stats (for instance, likes and retweets, etc.) displayed right on the pages, visitors may feel unsure about the depth of the content.

So if you're afraid your numbers will look too low, consider adding the buttons without a counter.

4.2. Share your post on social media sites

Use the power of social media automation tools to let the world in Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn, etc. know your new post's out. Create multiple content snippets for your social media posts, so you'll be able to share them regularly across a variety of networks in a customized way.

If appropriate, share a customized piece of content (an extract of the original blog post) in form of an Instagram story or a short video on Facebook telling people about your new blog post and how it can help them solve their problems.

In addition to the popular social media networks, you may also submit your post to the many leading social bookmarking sites and online communities/forums.

If possible, find other niche-specific sites, and share content there too.

4.3. Place links from older posts

If you have relevant posts that you've already published, links to them from the new content and vice versa. That's a win-win case – people reading older posts will be able to discover this new piece, while the search engines will index the new content, follow the links to the old posts faster.

4.4. Reach out to influencers

First of all, if you've mentioned a brand (a person or a company) in your post, let them know about it. You can do that the following way:

• Send a notification email if you've already communicated with this influencer
• @Mention them in your tweet
• Mention them in Facebook/Instagram/LinkedIn posts

The chances are quite high that the brand will recognize your effort and amplify the post’s outreach on social media platforms.

Secondly, you'll need to use a social media monitoring tool, to see who's talking about a topic similar to your blog content. Reach out to them politely ask them for their review of your content since your post can be useful to the person's followers and subscribers.

4.5. Re-optimize and repurpose old content

You don't have to write new content all the time – instead check your Google Analytics account to find the posts that bring a consistent level of traffic to the blog.

It's possible the content is not up-to-date on those pages so they are losing rank on SERP slowly – you can update content on these pages and start getting an increased amount of traffic by crawling back again top of the SERP.

Here's what you can do:

• Link to some new findings and studies
• Add answers to the "People Also Ask" questions
• Add Schema markup to those posts
• Enhance the formatting or layout
• Target some new keywords
• Add videos or images
• Rewrite title and Meta description
• Re-promote your updated blog post on social media

It could be a good idea to schedule those content checks and update your posts periodically, based on Google Analytics and/or Google Search Console performance data.

4.6. Focus on the process, not on the outcome

Now, be patient a bit more - do not expect to get instant results after you follow the above steps – as you'll need to repeat the routine for possibly dozens of posts to see what's exactly working for you. It may happen that you'll need about 90 minutes for keyword research, selection, and on-page optimization, and a week to promote the post on social media sites, bookmarking sites, forums, and online communities.

The important thing is to set up and continue the process, do experiments and analyze the result. And eventually, you'll just see that most of your posts keep getting new traffic, backlinks, and higher rankings.

Endnote:

How do you usually manage the optimization process for your blog? I'll be happy to see your questions and tips in the comments below!

3 SEO Copywriting Ideas To Boost Website Traffic

Ranking well on the search engine result page (SERP) without ignoring your readers’ interest is the key. Aim for search engine optimization (SEO) copywriting to build trust and credibility.

This article centers on and around how to rank well on SERPs through search engine optimization, while also retaining the quality of your SEO copywriting.

If you’ve ever done SEO for your website, you definitely know that search engines (SE) play a major role in web traffic. SE optimized copywriting can maximize the number of visitors you receive, just because visitors are using the key phrases of your content to search for information.

However, ranking well on SERPs does not mean to satisfy only search engines, you can’t ignore your readers either. You do need to provide quality content in your optimized web copy to build trust, credibility and entice your readers to come back for more.

What is SEO copywriting?

Having optimized web content for both visitors and search bots is essential to increase your rankings on major search engines, like Google. By following SEO-focused web content writing tactics, you can help search engines to better categorize your webpages and ultimately serve better the users.

As your SEO-rich articles climb higher and higher in rankings, the exposure of content increases, and more visitors will see your articles. The more traffic you receive, the more popularity you gain and build a readers base.

Many professional search engine optimizers, however, focus more on search crawlers, which can be a mistake if their readers are ignored. The purpose of this blog post is to demonstrate you how to maximize your traffic from search engines, while also satisfying your readers by providing super quality content.

1. Finding keywords for your web copy

For any optimized content you write, you’ll need to research and find potential keywords to include in each article meaningfully.

Many writers use Google’s keyword tool to search for lucrative keyword ideas. When using this search tool, typically you’ll want to find keywords with a decent amount of search popularity to receive a considerable amount of traffic if you rank well for the key-phrase.

You’ll also want to make sure that the key-phrases you use have moderate or low competition in your industry. To do this, determine the Keyword Effectiveness Index (KEI) of your chosen keywords.

About KEI -

The KEI or Keyword Effectiveness Index is actually a formula that gives a comparison between the number of searches for the keyword and the number of competitive pages for the same. This Index helps to point out which keywords have the higher searches with the lowest competition level which can be the most effective for your SEO-focused content.

The procedure -

To start with, find the KEI of a certain keyword by first doing a search for the keyword in Google’s tool you want to use in your content. Then, search for the keyword on a search engine, preferably Google, for its global dominance as of now. Finally, divide the number of visitors by the number of websites in the search results.

A KEI greater than 1 is a good number, since fewer competitors are trying to rank for the keyword phrase, and you have a good chance of ranking well for the search term. Any keyword phrases with a KEI of less than 1 will be harder to rank well with, and you should find another keyword phrase to use in your SEO article.

Let’s take, for example, a hypothetical number of 300 searches a month for your targeted keyword. Google shows 225,400 results against that same search query. To get the KEI, just take the 300 and divide it by 225,400. The result is 0.0013, such a low KEI implies that a specific keyword is, most likely, NOT a good one for you to go for unless you are super authoritative.

If you’re having trouble finding a keyword with lesser competition, try adding a popular suffix or prefix into it. For example, instead of targeting the keyword “dog food”, try using “healthy inexpensive dog foods” or “nutritional dog food recipe”.

2. Retaining quality in SEO web copy

As mentioned earlier, you need to write quality articles for humans to be successful in terms of ranking, traffic, and conversion performance. After all, why should readers prefer to read what you say over others if you’re simply writing for search engines? Put your readers before search engines and make sure that your SEO web copy is uniquely informational.

A good way to do this is to keep your keyword density to less than 2.5 - 3 percent. To determine the keyword density, just divide the number of times the target keyword used in the SEO web copy by the number of total words in the entire article. Then, multiply the resulting number by 100 to get the percentage.

According to many renowned SEO masters:

One way to tell if your usage of keywords is spammy is to measure that occurrence against the overall length of the content. A keyword density roughly less than 2.5% and greater than 3% could make your content dull and your page could be abandoned by readers. You don’t need to carelessly repeat keywords within the content for SEO, else, it will be considered as keyword stuffing by search engines. In fact, if you do keyword stuffing, you’re likely to achieve the opposite result. Your focus should be on inserting keywords naturally within the flow of content.

3. Backlinking SEO web copy

Major search engines like Google also look at how many backlinks are pointing to your content, both internally and externally. So it’s a good idea to link back your SEO web copy to increase its authority to search engines to influence the ranking. To do this, here are some “suggestions” for linking based on generally accepted SEO best practices:

• Link back from relevant web pages of your site or other sites (the more reputable the more beneficial)
• Choose anchor texts that work for a long-term SEO perspective, though keep it natural
• Find the right opportunities to place links as high as possible in the content’s body
• Link back to relevant web pages from within the content

You might also receive backlinks logically if your SEO web copy provides top-quality content. These types of backlinks are better than backlinks you create intentionally since people who are genuinely benefitted from your content will want to become an advocate of it and share it with others.

These SEO tactics are obviously not the only ones to help increase your conversions but they are certainly among the well-known to significantly influence the ranking by major search engines and help drive more traffic to your website. Therefore, by considering them, you will have the best chance of considerably optimizing the ranking position of your website and shape your traffic flow to impact conversions positively.

Wishing you a happy year ahead!

Which Meta Tags Are Important For SEO?

Good SEO can position you in front of the potential customers who are searching for your products or services on the web, and great SEO can help those visitors become long-term customers and even brand advocates.

SEO is a practice that involves many on-page and off-page factors, and it’s critical to know how to incorporate Meta tags into each one of your web pages. Meta tags help search engines correctly crawl and index your pages, which may result in higher rankings and more exposure to the audience you're trying to reach.

Now, you might be thinking, “Wait … what's a Meta tag?”

What Are Meta Tags?

Here, I’m going to define Meta tags, pinpoint some of the most important Meta tags you need to care about, and provide directions so that you can begin incorporating Meta tags into your HTML today for SEO benefit.

SEO & Meta Tags

A Meta tag is a snippet of code you'll include in the HTML of a web page but it doesn't appear on the page itself. Meta tags help search engine crawlers understand what your page content is about and index your page, which is critical when you want to rank on SERPs for the right keywords.

Meta tags are useful from an SEO angle since they let search engines more easily crawl and index your web page's content. There are many types of Meta tags and their attributes are available to use, but how you apply them on a page will depend on your SEO strategy.

Meta Tags Example

Examples of basic yet notable Meta tags include canonical tags, meta content type, robot Meta tags, Meta descriptions, and title tags. You might use a canonical tag to communicate with search engines which page is the "original" one. Alternatively, you might use robot meta tags to confirm search engines don't index a section of the site you don't want on the SERPs, like search results pages on your site.

Let's explore some of these now.

1. Canonical Tags

If you have a single page but can be accessible with multiple formations of URLs, or different pages with similar content (such as a page with separate versions for mobile and desktop devices), search engines see these pages as duplicate versions of the same page.

For example, as a human, you know typing "www.google.com" and "google.com" will bring you to the same page - if you search for either, you'll land on Google's homepage.

But Google sees "www" and "non-www" as duplicate versions of the same page just like "HTTP" and "HTTPS". If you don't specify which page you want to be the official one, Google will choose one version as original and crawl the other versions less often.

This could mean that Google may devalue your desktop version of the homepage over its mobile counterpart by consistently crawling your mobile version of your homepage and rarely checking your desktop version or vice versa.

For this reason, it's often important to include a canonical tag, which simply tells Google, "Hey, if you find this same content elsewhere - please disregard. This is the source I want you to consider, and this is the version with which I want to appear on the SERPs".

This is particularly important for pages like your homepage - the most important page among all. To insert a canonical tag, simply put this code in your HTML:

<link rel="canonical" href="https://example.com/tenet/meta-tags" />

2. Meta Content-Type

The Meta content type allows you to specify the media type (e.g. "text/HTML") and character set for each web page - you'll want to include this on all of your web pages. Different browsers extract information differently, and different programming languages have different character sets. Using Meta content type tags ensures your pages are rendered in all browsers.

Here's an example of the code you'd use for Meta content type:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />

3. Robots Meta Tags

By default, search engine bots crawl your entire site and follow internal and external hyperlinks. However, this may not align with your SEO strategy if you are looking to control how some pages appear on SERPs. In addition, a high number of outbound links may negatively affect the value (a.k.a. "link juice") passed through your links.

If you don't specify a robots meta tag, search engines will obey the default “index,follow” directive. Robots Meta tags can affect the behavior of the search engine crawling and indexing, resulting in more strategic control of how your site pages get indexed and what "link juice" a page retains.

Here are a few common robot Meta tags:

• noindex - Excludes the page from being indexed
• nofollow - Blocks Google bot from following links from this page
• nosnippet - Prevents showing any textual snippet for a page in the search results
• noarchive - Prevents Google bot from showing the Cached link of a page
• unavailable_after:[date] - Let's you specify the date you want to stop crawling and indexing a page

There are many reasons you might use a robots Meta tag. You might convey the "nofollow" command, for example, if your web page has a section for posting comments from visitors. Since you can't be sure which links are posted by readers in the comments section (which could be spam), it might be smart to tell search engine bots not to follow those links.

On the other hand, "noindex" is a popular tag for a few reasons. Let's say you're planning to relaunch a website, but you want to test the redesign on a development server that resides in a subdomain on your live website. You'll want to use the "noindex" tag to ensure Google won't show the site in search before it's ready.

You might also use "noindex" if you have a gated discount offer you don't want users to be able to find on search engines - since you want them to fill out a form to avail it.

Lastly, you might use "noindex" if your website creates imitation web pages whenever someone does a site search. Search engines might think those value-less pages are part of your website, which will hurt your SEO. It's best if you incorporate "noindex" to ensure URLs containing site search results aren't displayed on the SERPs.

To incorporate a robots Meta command, insert this code into your HTML:

<meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow">

4. Title Tags

Title tags help searchers initially understand what your content is about, and they are also a major factor in helping search engines understand your content's topic. Additionally, a title tag can ensure dependability, since the title tag will showcase your web page’s subject matter, on the web browser, and in social networks.

Even if you include a <title> tag, Google, sometimes, will create a custom one for the SERPs for searchers - which can hurt your ranking. So, better if you create a compelling, click-worthy title that will intrigue readers while accurately portraying what your page is about.

Include a title tag on each of your web pages by inserting this code into your HTML:

<head>
    <title>Example Meta Title</title>
</head>

It's important to note, ALT text is technically not a tag - it's an attribute. However, you've likely heard the term "alt tag", which is why you might think ALT text is part of the Meta tag family.

Regardless of its nomenclature, ALT text is incredibly important for your overall SEO strategy, particularly since Google gives equal value to visual search. When a search engine spider crawls your page, it's going to look for the ALT text of an image as an identifier for what your web page is about - so it's critical you correctly insert text in and as an ALT attribute.

Here's a code example for ALT attribute to include in your HTML:

<img src="meta-tag.png" alt="Meta tag image">

5. Meta Keywords

Meta keywords are an element of the "meta" tag family that get added if you want to use keywords to define what a page is about. These keywords would not visible on the page but rather in the page's code, and search engines used to apply them as a ranking factor.

Note: While it doesn't hurt to use them nowadays, Meta keywords are no longer relevant for any SEO strategies. In 2009, Google announced that it no longer consider Meta keywords as a ranking factor due to massive spam with this tag by SEOs worldwide.

6. Meta Descriptions

A meta description is another integral member of the Meta tag family - simply put, a Meta description is a snippet of text a user can view on a search engine results page. A Meta description tells the searchers what they'll find if they click on an organic listing displaying on the SERPs - which, if done correctly, can significantly increase click-through rate (CTR).

The tag doesn't impact on ranking directly, but it's nonetheless an important element of SEO strategy - a good Meta description can encourage viewers to explore your content, and if the Meta description accurately portrays your page content in addition to supporting the title tag, the searcher is more likely to visit and stay on the page. Click-through rates do influence search engine ranking, so optimizing Meta description is essential for SEO.

Here's an example of the code you'd use to insert as a Meta description into your web page's HTML:

<head>
    <meta name="description" content="This is an example sentence of my meta description.">
</head>

Meta Description vs. Meta Tag

These two often get mixed since they both contain the word "meta". Note that the Meta description tag is just one example of Meta tags, it’s a subcategory of Meta tags. Meta tags are used to help primarily search engines figure out the content of your site, but Meta descriptions are used to invite a user to interact with your content. On the contrary, sometimes it is okay to not include Meta descriptions for selective pages since search engines like Google won't all the time use your Meta description as Google’s algorithm doesn't think the existing Meta description matches a searcher’s query and creates a custom snippet from the target page that better matches a query.

How To Write Meta Tags For SEO?

I think of exactly what to include in this topic because we often hear about spamming through Meta tags in SEO. Note that, to work with Meta tags, you should have knowledge at least about HTML. Nowadays, most of the sites are built on CMS (content management system), and they all have an easy user interface to DIY Meta tags optimization as per your need. So, let’s learn how to write Meta tags.

1. Understand that not all Meta tags are handwritten. Some are just codes.

After reading this post so far, you've learned that there are several categories of Meta tags are available to use. Some Meta tags require human intervention at the page level in terms of customization and creative while others just code snippets that you can simply copy and paste throughout the site.

2. Create and save a file to use for copy/pasting those codes.

For the cases in which you don't need to write or customize any Meta tags, it's useful to have the preset coding in easy reach anytime you're creating a new page.


3. Use the canonical tag properly.

If the page has duplicate content or if there are multiple versions of a page on your site, you'll need to use canonical tags to specify the original source for that content. For any duplicate content, you can refer to your canonical code structure from your saved file to use it as such.

4. Use the robots noindex tag properly.

If you don't want the page to show up in SERPs, due to any reason, the noindex tag will signal to search engines not to index that particular page.

Like canonical tag, refer to your robots meta tag code in your saved file and then, paste it into your HTML header of the page in need.

5. Use the robots nofollow tag properly.

If you don't want web spiders to follow links on a page, you can do this with the nofollow tag. The nofollow tag is also useful for distributing "link juice" in a strategic way throughout the site. If you don't want search bots to follow any links on a page, pull this code from your saved file insert it in the HTML header.

6. Create a short catchy headline to use in your title tag.

At least some portion of your title tag should be unique for each page you create because it essentially defines the page. The title tag appears in the SERPs, in the browser, and on social media. For that reason, it should be written for your target audience, not for search engines predominantly. Some things to keep in mind as you write:

• What benefit are you providing to them?
• What solution do they find if they visit the page?
• What values you are adding compared to others?
• How can you present the most valuable information while enticing them to click?

A rule of thumb is to include your page's primary keyword as close to the beginning of the headline as possible.

7. Write a compelling Meta description that supports your title tag and further entices readers.

Since the Meta description also is visible on SERPs, this is an additional opportunity that essentially advertises your offer. The goal here is to expand on the title/headline with enough elaboration while also keeping it short and concise for enticing them to click. Here are some points to consider:

• Use your secondary keywords in the Meta description to make it more relevant to a searcher’s query, catching their eyes
• Briefly talk about the benefits and features, giving the reader ideas about what you'll be delivering
• Add CTA (call-to-action) to make them want to explore more.

8. Add ALT text that is keyword-optimized and descriptive to any embedded multimedia content on the page.

ALT text describes the relevancy of multimedia elements for search engine crawlers and screen readers. With that in mind, you should:

• Don’t spam and include information about the image or context of the image in terms of the surrounded text of that image as concisely as possible
• Include a targeted keyword to make the image more relevant from an SEO perspective

Meta Tags That Google Recognizes

Google recognizes the following Meta tags (a comprehensive list):

• <meta name="description" content="A description of the page" />
• <meta name="robots" content="..., ..." />
• <meta name="keywords" content="..., ..." />
• <meta name="revisit-after" content="..." />
• <meta name="generator" content="...." />
• <meta name="googlebot" content="..." />
• <meta name="mssmarttagspreventparsing" content="..." />
• <meta name="no-cache" content="..." />
• <meta name="google" content="notranslate" />
• <meta name="google-site-verification" content="..." />
• <meta name="verify-v1" content="..." />
• <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="...; charset=..." />
• <meta http-equiv="refresh" content="...;url=..." />

Note that, all the Meta tags reside within the header section of the HTML document. Google specifically can read both HTML and XHTML-style Meta tags, regardless of the programming language used to write code on the page.

With the exception of "google-site-verification", letter case sensitivity is commonly not significant in writing the Meta tags. As said, this is a comprehensive list of usable Meta tags, and you should feel free to use other Meta tags if they are essential to your site’s SEO. Just make sure, you have included Meta tags correctly and remember that Google may ignore some Meta tags that its algorithm doesn't recognize.

How To Use Meta Tags in CMS?

Every CMS has a unique means of editing its HTML, CSS, and Meta information. Let’s review the steps for the top three most popular CMSs in the market right now.

How to use Meta tags with HubSpot?

• Go to your website pages or landing pages under the marketing tab
• From the list of your pages, select to edit the one you're looking to add tags to
• At the top of the page editor, click the Settings menu and find "Additional code snippets" under the "Additional Options"
• Enter your desired Meta tags into the header HTML box
• Save and exit

How to use Meta tags with Wix?

• In your website dashboard screen, click on the "Edit Site" button
• In the hovering menu on the left panel, find the Menus & Pages menu
• Hover over the page you want to work on, press the Show More icon, and select Settings from the menu
• Scroll through the tabs to the Advanced SEO button to get to your SEO features
• Enter your Meta tags into the Custom Meta Tags field

How to use Meta tags with WordPress?

WordPress is a little tricky than the above two, some may think but with the inception of the plugin, it becomes easier. Plugins are useful tools especially for those who do not have a web development background.

Each plugin is a bit different, so it's important to do your research and find one that suits your website best.

These are the top three SEO plugins to use for your website:

Yoast SEO

Yoast SEO is widely used and considered one of the best SEO plugins available right now. It provides space to add Metadata inside the CMS at the bottom of every page and blog post.

The SEO Framework

A little less feature-heavy than Yoast SEO, but this plugin prioritizes Meta tag information above all else. Its interface is pretty simple, making it easy to use for those who aren't professional developers.

All In One SEO Pack

This plugin generates Meta tags automatically and you can edit them however and whenever you like, which is a helpful feature for those who might forget to check their Meta before going live.

Most of their default settings are set to enhance on-page SEO performance by the moment the plugin is installed and activated, but you can customize them however you wish.

Conclusion

Meta tags have such an impact on your site's SEO, so make sure your web pages are well-aligned with your SEO strategy by keeping up-to-date on Meta tag best practices and how they work with search engine bots.

Now that you know what Meta tags are and how to implement them on your website, you can start an SEO audit. Your pages will now be much more easily crawled and accurately indexed by all the ethical search engines like Google. Keep in mind, however, that Meta tags are only one part of the optimizing process for organic search. There are many other SEO factors that could affect your performance in terms of ranking, traffic, and ROI (return on investment).

The Ground Rules Of Link Building

Are you building links the right way? Or are you still following out-of-date practices? Let’s explore which link-building tactics matter most today and which are not anymore.

It's no secret that backlinks (read relevant backlinks from quality sources) are one of the top three ranking factors in Google and can greatly influence your website’s traffic. But there is mass confusion around what's okay to do as far as building links and what's not. I believe this handy guide will be useful for you all.

The good practices

So what are the compulsories? Let’s start with -

I. Regulate the value of a link by determining its relevancy, authority and the benefit it will bring to your site.

II. Complete the incomplete/inaccurate local listings as these types of citations broadcast to Google that this business has consistent NAP info across the web. Which in return gives you extra mileage over others.

III. Search for unlinked brand mentions. One of the best ways you can get a link is by figuring out who is citing you but not linking to it. Then the job is to reach out to the source and look for contacts to get a link from unlinked brand mention.

IV. Retrieving broken links is also a great way to recover some of your non-functional links easily. Definitely, a great thing to do if any of those broken links are now pointing towards a 404 page on your site and you can stop wasting the value of the links by placing a 301 redirection on such pages.

The best practices

Some of the futuristic approaches not many are considering seriously -

V. HARO (Help a Reporter Out). This is kind of a sophisticated way of building links. Reporters will connect with you about any questions or information they're seeking for a news article via this service. It's like digital public relations. It’s a great way to get a citation in their write-ups.

VI. Sponsor or participate in events. Find your local space and grab opportunities that could enter you as a sponsor or as a participant. This gives you an opportunity to get a link from those event sites in addition to mass outreach.

VII. Guest blogging. There's nothing wrong with outreach, especially when done well. I know that by finding out the right sources and pitching emails for guest posting in general, the response rate is painfully low. But you can get the real benefit if you're a little bit more strategic about it or if you outreach to the right people with the right offer at the right time. There's a ton of opportunities available to tap in, so definitely try this out. You mustn't do guest posts always just for a link. I think there is a ton of value in guest posting. So use it sparingly.

VIII. Linkbait. This is another tried and tested way when it comes to link building. Create great content and people will naturally attract you. It's an awesome way to earn links. Common types of linkbait content include debatable content, data, guides, and newsworthy pieces.

The bad practices

All right. So what to avoid? The bad practices in today's time are -

I. Don't spam on anchor text. Asking for specific anchor text is good but they should fit in properly. That's going to look more natural. All the ethical search engines are going to consider it to be more organic, and it will help your site in the long run. Anything other than these is definitely big no-no's.

II. Don't buy or sell links. You can buy or sell links through a link exchange program. Any reciprocal links which are non-thematically associated with each other and built upon unfair trade is another big no-no. Link schemes, private link networks, and private blog networks are some classic examples. It looks so, so spammy, and you need to avoid this.

III. Hidden links. Surprisingly, many still think that invisible links are useful, keeping background and text’s color similar to make links invisible to humans. They are totally hidden, but crawlers would still recognize them. Don't do that. That's a useless tactic nowadays. Give proper recognition to the intelligence of today’s smart web spiders.

IV. Low-quality directory links. Simply better you check DA and PA before even considering any directory for your submission.

V. Footer links to spam. Site-wide worthless footer links or top-level navigation links, looks really, really spammy. Avoid doing this.

VI. Spam through blog commenting. Again, it's just like any of these others. It looks spammy. It's not going to achieve anything. So, avoid this too. However, real blog commenting is still worthy to continue in terms of user-generated content.

VII. Link exchange. This tactic does not work anymore, but there are some opportunities that still exist to gain links naturally and more authoritatively if you can build it organically and thematically. But, personally, I do not think, creating and maintaining a link resource page in any modern website is any more feasible.

VIII. Focusing on quantity over quality. When it comes to building backlinks, quality is far more important than quantity. Rather than focusing on how many links you can collect, you should focus your strategy on collecting the right types of backlinks and maintaining a high-quality and updated backlinks profile.

So hopefully, this helps you define your own link-building guideline. One last thing I would like to mention here is: To disavow or to not disavow? I have read so many discussions for and against this. Does the disavow file work? Does it not? What are your experiences? Please let me know through the comments.

Thank you so much for your time. I will see you all soon. Bye for now!

7 Common SEO Myths Debunked Once & For All

There’s always a lot of advice are available on the web about SEO.

Some of it is very helpful, some of it not.

The difficulty is then in selection.

It can be hard to identify what information is based on facts and what is just a misinterpretation of Google statements.

The challenge is the internet is available to everyone but knowledge of SEO is not. So myths automatically are prospering.

Some real-life scenarios:

A client will tell you about with confidence of running Google ads to influence keywords’ rank organically.

Your boss will question you for not keeping the page’s Meta titles to 580 pixels.

Your developer will prohibit you to implement GTM on site for the sake of site speed issue

Your designer will convince you that if it looks good on your computer, everything is fine

Your content editor will calm you by saying typos are some minor errors and is not hampering the brand’s goodwill

How SEO myths form?

The issue is, no one knows exactly how the search engines work.

Due to this, a lot of SEO work starts as a test, experiment, and educated guesswork.

When you are learning about SEO it can be difficult to try out all of the claims you are hearing.

That’s when the SEO myths begin to spread out.

Why SEO myths form?

The reasons are -

• Start considering Google search engine as almighty
• Relying on untested theories
• Giving too much importance to minor adjustments
• Following the out of date advice
• Misinterpreting advice from a Google representative
• Creating myths on your own to cheat from the fear of failure

There could be other factors at play.

How to avoid SEO myths and misinformation online?

Spotting SEO myths and act accordingly can save you from experiencing lost revenue and a whole lot of time.

So -

Do the test: Measure whether making a change across many pages will be worth the time and resource before you commit to doing so.

Be confident: Someone may not have had success with a method when they have tried due to any reason but it doesn’t mean it won’t help you since the context of applying the same method is different and can bring a different result.

And remember: Google often tested new features before a mass rollout. So before you jump for the latest SEO advice that is being spread around as a result of a change by Google, wait to see if it is going to last.

7 Common SEO Myths

Let’s talk about the reality behind some of the myths now.

1. The Google Sandbox

The Sandbox effect is a name given to a thought of the way Google ranks web pages in its index. It is the subject of much argument—its actuality has been written about since 2004 but not established, with several disagreements to the contrary.

2. Duplicate Content Penalty

Google tried to put an end to the myths around duplicate content years ago. Susan Moska posted on the Google Webmaster blog in 2008: Let's put this to bed once and for all, folks: There's no such thing as a “duplicate content penalty.” At least, not in the way most people mean when they say that.

3. PPC Advertising Helps Rankings

Again according to a Google post, PPC ads like Google Ads are paid online advertisements which appear next to relevant searches and other sources of content on the SERP. Running a Google Ads campaign does not help your SEO rankings, despite some myths and claims. However, PPC ads can be useful in reaching out to a broader audience online.

4. Domain Age Is A Ranking Factor

Google's John Mueller confirmed that domain age is not a ranking signal, tweeting, “… domain age helps nothing.” Site age, on the other hand, has more ranking relevance. Very new websites - less than six months old - have trouble ranking.

By the way, many have confusion about the difference between domain and site. A domain is basically the name of a website, a website is what people see and interact with when they get there through a URL which is how to find a website on the internet. In other words, when you book a domain, you have bought the name for your site, but you still need to develop the website itself.

5. Tabbed Content Affects Rankings

Long ago, tabbed content created simply by using JavaScript or any other programming languages was not indexable to search engines as they don't crawl the web pages for ranking JavaScript code, and therefore text inside the code is considered as part of the code and was ignored.

But time flies, search engines are now smart enough to understand JScript codes better and developers are too become smarter for finding ways to manage tabbed content without losing its importance for proper indexing and better ranking a webpage.

6. Google Uses Google Analytics Data In Rankings

Does Google Use Google Analytics for ranking a website or page? Google could not be clearer on this: Google does not use Analytics data for ranking purposes. There is no foolproof evidence to support the idea that Google uses Analytics for penalizing sites or ranking sites on the SERP.

7. Google Cares About Domain Authority

“Domain Authority is not a ranking factor used by Google in determining search rankings and has no effect on the SERPs..” - according to a spokesperson from the Google Webmaster team.

Conclusion

Lastly, some myths have their origins in causation and correlation and others have not.

Now you know how to react to an SEO idea that you can’t say for sure is truth or myth.

Why Would Your SEO Not Be Working?

The reasons why SEO isn’t working for you range from impractical expectations to internal business factors to inappropriate resource allocations. Look into 10 of them here.

Introduction:

There are now only a few developing businesses that don’t bother about their web presence.

SEO is a process that takes more time and effort than almost all the paid media channels.

That doesn’t mean it’s insignificant. It hurts me when I hear sayings like “SEO isn’t working for us” or “SEO doesn’t profitable for us” or any kind of skepticism about the value of SEO.

There are at least 10 reasons why SEO hasn’t work.

Most of the time when SEO fails, it’s due to one or more internal reasons ranging from impractical hopes and beliefs or inborn challenges within the company or organization rather than external factors.

These are just pure realities that might hurt a bit if you can relate.

These are basic necessities to recognize before shutting down SEO operation or if you are unsure it will work for you or not.

1. Impractical hopes and beliefs	If we’re considering SEO as the magical source that will meet all of our goal conversions instantaneously, we need to rethink as, like media channels and other digital marketing disciplines, SEO should be planned and systematic. Search for industry-standard, competitor data, and audience (keyword) research to define and design the SEO road map.
2. Stop trying too early	One thing we all have to remember that SEO doesn’t guarantee anything in short term. Algorithm updates, website’s health and history, backlink profile, and the competitive landscape all make an impact on ROI through SEO and making it difficult and unpredictable. Most business owners hate the unpredictable nature of SEO outcomes when it comes to timing for results. With so many unknowns, the known thing that makes SEO campaigns flop though is giving up too soon. In general, the more competitive the market, the more time you need. Likewise, the more issues you have when you start SEO, the more time you need to wait for producing ROI.
3. Directionless decision-makers	When SEO doesn’t work, it’s often because it is without direction. Strategy means doing research, setting goals, planning out a process, measuring the outcome, and having mechanisms built in that allow to take actions to implement the intended strategy is called tactics. So, strategies and tactics must work cohesively for achieving success.
4. Old-fashioned practices	It’s understandable why even seasoned SEO professionals need periodic updates for their methods and understanding of the SEO profession. The risk of outdated or ineffective practices comes with having someone add SEO to their responsibilities, those that cost measly, or those that haven’t done SEO in the recent past.
5. Lack of demand in the market	I mentioned that most of the time it’s hard to find a case where SEO can’t help a business. That’s not always 100% true. Or, at the very least, I can definitely attest that there are times where it shouldn’t be one of the leading or highest priority channels in the marketing mix. When a company’s target audience isn’t searching for what they offer, that’s a warning sign that SEO won’t work. It isn’t a case where SEO efforts can’t get the site ranked for certain keywords – it’s about the fact that those rankings won’t matter in terms of driving traffic and/or leads and sales. Some examples include products or services that are ultra-technical, have zero awareness, or in selling models that are private and aren’t conducted publicly on the web. SEO is an inbound channel. We have to have people actively coming to a search engine, do a search, find us, and click through to see it work. When there’s no opportunity (or desire) for that, then investing in SEO and working to optimize can be a pointless exercise.
6. Heavy competition	Google search results use to appear with the different layouts and types of content in the SERPs based on search intent and keyword, and organic search results are just one portion of the SERP. SEO expectations need to be filtered by considering how competitive the market is and what feature-set SERPs are displaying against the focus keyword terms and phrases. If organic results are pushed way down the SERP below ads, images, local listings, and other content created by your direct and indirect competitors, the traffic potential for a number one organic search ranking is less than it would be for a page where organic results are above the fold near the top. Rankings don’t support traffic and conversions in such cases. SEO may not work despite the top organic position if SERP features are working against us.
7. IT support issues	I know many system engineers personally. Some of the professionals sometimes don’t understand or like SEO requests. Cloud security, server functionality, and domain configuration data are often seemingly considered unnecessary requests from the SEO team even after providing necessary justification. SEO doesn’t work when the IT infrastructure or support doesn’t work. When SEO isn’t even an option for prioritization by the IT team, the situation becomes worse. If technical site issues can’t be touched, updated, or fixed, things like indexing and site speed can suffer before we even start talking about on-page factors and CMS needs.
8. UX and UI issues	Especially for conversion-focused SEO campaigns, UX and UI can often make or break the opportunity. It’s one thing to get rankings and then targeted traffic. It’s another if that traffic doesn’t convert. You can have the best rankings and alignment with keyword research, supportive content, and apt promotion on the web. However, if the UX and UI is a weak point and people can’t navigate to where you need them to, then SEO will be judged as a failure. Just like the IT team, often the designers are reluctant to address requests that come from the SEOs. Maybe they refrain from reworking on an image. That’s why involving SEO at the time of site design and development is critical.
9. Poor team configuration	Team structure often a hidden issue for poor performance. Whether it’s tied to skill sets, experience, priorities, or commitment of the resources, the team (or individual) responsible for SEO success combined with others that need to support it. Early in my career, I was an individual SEO contributor in an organization. That has changed a lot - which is a positive thing. However, many organizations still run SEO operations with an undervalued or understrength team. If there’s no real commitment and prioritization by all involved, then SEO success is in jeopardy. We need people within or around the team for content, IT, UX, and other levels of support.
10. Lack of investment/budget	SEO traffic is free! This is an utterly false statement. While no direct media dollars are required, internal or external resources are needed to be hired. That means, either pay an agency for outsourced work and/or invest in software/tools to manage SEO for a large/complex site, in addition to the costs of setting up an internal team; so SEO definitely has a price. Many organizations and business leaders still feel hesitant to invest sufficient money for SEO from their marketing budget. Not a fully funded SEO effort with direct and indirect costs cannot keep SEO working. Proper investment of money and resource needs are both critical.

Conclusion:

We all want all of our digital marketing efforts to work.

SEO is no exception.

Whether there are one or more issues or challenges that stand in our way, being aware of the reasons why SEO doesn’t work is key.

SEO is an investment at many levels, especially in a multi-layered organization. Knowing where to resolve encounters or what can sink it before even SEO starts, or after efforts are underway, can have a deep impact on making it work and unlocking the potential opportunities for reaching overall marketing and business goals through it.