Last Update Nov 26, 2024 @ 11:23 pm

What is a Google Ads Custom Audience?

The Google Ads custom audience feature can be a game-changer if you want to target your competitor’s traffic or better engage with your ideal customer.

This tool allows you to create tailored audiences for your campaigns across Google Display Ads, Discovery Ads, and YouTube Ads.

How Does It Work?

Think of it this way: custom audiences let you be specific instead of casting a wide net with generic targeting.

You can build an audience based on particular keywords, websites, or apps related to your competitor’s traffic or interests.

This precision can give your ads the edge by showing up in front of people who are already interested in your industry or services.

A real-life example?

Let’s say you’re a small clothing brand.

Using Google Ads custom audience, you can target users who have visited the websites of bigger brands in your niche.

That means, even though you’re smaller, you’re getting visibility where your competition is.

This targeting might help you level the playing field.

Building Custom Audiences with Google Ads

Creating custom audiences is straightforward but powerful.

Start by navigating to your Google Ads account, selecting “Audience Manager,” and clicking “Custom Audiences.”

You’ll enter keywords, URLs, or apps related to your competitors or niche from there.

For instance, imagine you own a fitness studio.

You might input keywords like “fitness classes,” “yoga,” or even your competitors’ names.

Next, include popular fitness apps or websites that your target audience frequents.

By targeting people who engage with those apps, you’re not just getting random traffic—you’re drawing in potential customers who are likely to convert.

This approach is incredibly useful when used for Google Display Ads, Discovery Ads, and YouTube Ads.

Why?

Because you’re getting in front of people while they browse, search, or watch content related to your business.

How to Use Competitors’ Traffic for Your Benefit

One of the most exciting ways to use Google Ads custom audiences is by leveraging your competitor’s traffic.

By identifying popular websites or keywords that your competitors dominate, you can target users who have already shown interest in those areas.

Essentially, you’re positioning your ads where your competitors are strong—giving you a competitive advantage.

Take YouTube Ads as an example.

If your competitor has a strong presence on YouTube, you can use custom audiences to display your ads in front of their viewers.

Imagine the impact of having your product showcased in the same space where potential customers are already engaging with similar content.

A digital marketing agency I worked with recently had huge success with this strategy.

They were competing with larger agencies for PPC clients.

By using custom audiences, they targeted users who frequently visited the websites of bigger agencies, offering similar services but with a more personalized approach.

The result?

Their click-through rates shot up, and they started landing clients who initially weren’t aware of their brand.

Tailoring Ads for Maximum Impact

A key advantage of using Google Ads for custom audiences is the ability to tailor your messaging.

Since you already have insight into the type of content your audience engages with, you can create ads that resonate with their specific needs or desires.

For example, if you’re targeting users from competitor websites, your ad copy could highlight the benefits you offer that they don’t.

The more relevant your ad feels to the audience, the higher the chances they’ll click through and explore your business.

In a campaign I ran for a client in the travel industry, we targeted users who had recently visited competitor travel sites.

We knew they were looking for holiday deals, so we emphasized our client’s unique offers.

Not only did this boost traffic, but it also increased conversions since the audience was already in a travel-planning mindset.

Use Custom Audiences Across Google Platforms

The beauty of Google Ads’ custom audiences is that they’re not limited to just one platform.

You can extend your audience across Google Display Ads, YouTube, and Discovery Ads seamlessly.

Imagine this:

You target potential customers by browsing their favorite blogs or apps (Google Display Ads), watching industry-related videos (YouTube Ads), and scrolling through personalized content recommendations (Discovery Ads).

Each platform serves as another touchpoint to engage your ideal audience and drive them closer to conversion.

In a real-world example, I once ran a campaign for an e-commerce brand.

We used custom audiences to target users across both YouTube Ads and Google Display Ads.

While YouTube Ads focused on showcasing product features, Google Display Ads highlighted customer reviews.

The combination of both boosted brand recall and led to an uptick in sales within weeks.

The Power of First-Party Data

Another powerful aspect of Google Ads’ custom audiences is the ability to integrate your first-party data.

This means you can use data from your website visitors or email subscribers to create even more tailored ads.

For example, you can upload email lists of people who’ve visited your site but haven’t purchased yet and target them with specific offers across Google’s ad platforms.

If you’ve ever received an ad for a product after abandoning your cart, you’ve experienced this tactic in action.

It’s highly effective and keeps your brand top of mind.

Best Practices for Using Google Ads Custom Audiences

To maximize the potential of Google Ads custom audiences, keep these best practices in mind:

• Refine Your Audience: Don’t just include broad keywords or interests.
  Think carefully about your ideal customer and the specific websites, apps, and search terms they engage with.
• Experiment with Different Audiences: Test out different custom audiences to see which performs best.
  Sometimes a slight tweak, like focusing on niche keywords, can make a big difference.
• Tailor Your Ad Messaging: Customize your ad copy for each audience.
  The more relevant your message, the more likely people are to click.

Final Thoughts

Google Ads custom audiences provide a powerful way to target competitors’ traffic and reach highly specific audiences.

Whether you’re running Google Display Ads, Discovery Ads, or YouTube Ads, the ability to tailor your campaigns based on user behavior and interests gives you a competitive edge.

From personal experience, businesses that leverage this tool often see a noticeable improvement in ad performance, especially when competing against larger brands.

So if you’re looking for a way to get more out of your ad spend and target the right audience, it’s time to start experimenting with custom audiences.

The post Target Competitors Audience On Google Ads To Increase ROAS first appeared on SEO Optimizers.

Last Update Aug 24, 2022 @ 6:19 pm

Also known as entity optimization, entity SEO is content optimization using entities instead of (or to complement) keywords.

This is a type of optimization that is taking a bigger and bigger role in semantic SEO.

We’ll see in this guide what entity SEO is all about, starting with the most foundational of questions: what is an entity?

What is an Entity?

According to Google, “an entity is a thing or concept that is singular, unique, well-defined and distinguishable.”

That means that an entity is:

• One (singular)
• Such that there’s not another one like it (unique)
• Something that has certain qualities (well-defined)
• Separate or different from other entities (distinguishable)

and it might be anything from a person to an abstract concept, and it’s represented by a noun in a language.

That’s quite a lot but still clear enough, isn’t?

An entity is different from a keyword because, while an entity defines something in its wholeness (i.e. a thing, a concept), a keyword is a description or the verbal expression of that thing in a given language (e.g. “capital of Italy” is a description of “Rome” in the English language).

If you’re thinking about “web calendars” you may also think Asana and Google Calendar. That’s what Google’s algorithm may think about, too. They can be used as keywords, but in fact they are entities.

So, from everything we’ve seen so far, we can say that entities can be:

• Person
• Organization
• Location
• Consumer Good
• Work of Art
• Event
• Address
• Price

and others.

Entities and Relationships

Entities can be linked to each other in a graph (with entities as the nodes and edges as the relationship).

Entities are the foundation of Google’s Knowledge Graph and they can also be linked to a Knowledge Base containing entity descriptions and any other information about them.

It’s easier to understand entities if we imagine them as the entries of an encyclopedia or Wikipedia — and these entries are linked to other entries through links or bibliographical notes.

But let’s see it in practice with an example.

In the sentence “buy cheap textbooks to save money in college” there are 3 entities:

• “textbooks”
• “money”
• “college”

linked by relationships.

Below is a graph that shows the 3 entities and the relationships that link them together:

This is easy enough, isn’t it?

And Google Cloud NL API demo tells us exactly the same thing about this sentence:

This leads us to the next question: how are entities used by Google to return search results?

How does Google use Entities?

A 2014 patent titled “Ranking search results based on entity metrics” mentioned relatedness, which depends on co-occurrence, meaning that

the more frequently two entities appear in the same text, the better they are related.

As an example, “best superhero movies” and “iron man” are likely to be mentioned together, leading to results such as the ones below:

Naturally, a lot of factors contribute to ranking, and entities are not a ranking factor in the traditional sense (see later in this post) but they contribute to the shaping of the link graph, and given that Google now uses more machine learning than in the past, focusing on entities as an SEO practice is more than justified.

How to Do Entity SEO?

There are three methods essentially.

Method #1 – Google Images

Take a look at Google Images: searching for “best robot kit” will return a list of entities below the search field, that Google associates with the key phrase:

Here the entities Google Images gives us are:

• arduino robot
• antbo
• toy
• kits for
• lego
• humanoid robot
• arduino uno
• educational robot
• jimu robot
• robot toys
• lego mindstorms

If we were to write content on “best robot kit”, we would make sure to include all these entities.

Method #2 – Google’s Natural Language API Demo

You can also use Google’s Natural Language API demo (we introduced it earlier but it’s worth linking again) to find entities in a text.

For example, let’s take this article on resource page link building and input a portion of its text in the demo field and click Analyze:

We found the following entities:

• Resource page
• Link building
• Resource page link building
• links
• resources
• niche
• marketer
• webmaster
• benefit
• website owners
• suggestions
• readers
• link request

and others (a total of 16 entities).

We know that not all of these look like entities, some look more like keywords — but you can easily realize that they are entities because they don’t describe something, they are something.

The tool also gives us a significant piece of information about each entity: salience.

Salience is the score that tells us how important a word (or group of words) is a text.

In our example, “Resource Page Link Building” has the most importance in our text.

What term has the highest salience in yours?

You can also use the API demo method to find out how to optimize your content for entities:

input your target keyword or key phrase and then see what entities (and other keywords) the tool suggests.

Finally, you can run a competitive analysis for entities using this demo tool: simply input a competitor’s content (the text from one of their pages) in the analysis field and see what results the tool gives you.

Remember to make sure that’s a competitor appearing on page one for your target query for better data to build your content upon.

Method #3 – Wikipedia

You can search your topic in Wikipedia and see what other links or entities that Wikipedia page has in its text.

That will give you an idea of what other topics you can cover in your content that are related to your target one.

For example, the Wikipedia page for Content Marketing gives us, in the introductory text, a list of entities that are strictly related to the concept of “content marketing”:

• content
• target audience
• news
• video
• white papers
• e-books
• infographics
• email newsletters
• case studies
• podcasts
• how-to guides
• question and answer articles
• photos
• blogs

It makes sense because these entities are all part of content marketing. If we had to draw this as a graph, we would have “content marketing” as a central node and then all these entities as other nodes linked to it.

If you don’t want to make this entity analysis yourself, you can run the text of the Wikipedia page you’re researching in Google’s NL API demo and see what entities it returns.

Bonus Tips

There are a number of other optimizations you can do on your content that use entities:

• Optimize for People Also Ask because that gives you related entities you can cover in your content
• Don’t forget search intent — understand what meaning Google gives to specific queries and give it an entity name (e.g. for the keyword “solving puzzles”, Google gives us results on a variety of puzzles you can solve to hone your problem solving skills — so the associated entity is “puzzles”, and you can cover it in its entirety in your content)

Finally, remember to build relevant links — even backlinks shape the Knowledge Graph — and to use Schema to further help Google understand your content.

What the Experts Say on Entity SEO

We asked experts on HARO to share their insights on entity SEO with our readership.

Specifically, we asked:

• How do they use entities in your SEO?
• How do they optimize for entities rather than keywords?

Here’s what they told us.

Nikola Roza (CEO and Owner)

I optimized this page on my site for entities, and not just for keywords. Here’s how!

1. I scooped up all Google Suggest queries and made them part of my content outline as subheadings and sub-topics.
2. I took advantage of PAA boxes that were showing up at the time (now they’re gone) to see what users ask about the topic.
3. I used related searches at the bottom of the page, as these are powered by the Knowledge Graph.
4. I went to Google Images and found new entities displayed in the suggested searches bar above the first row of images. These are also entities delivered by the Knowledge Graph.
5. I went to Google NL API and pasted the text of the first 3 ranking pages. I scooped up all terms with high salience scores.
6.  I went to YouTube and found new queries which were auto-suggested in the YouTube search bar.
7. As a final step, I wrote my article naturally and then came back and tried to include as many entities as I could, in a natural way of course.

I think it worked, because I currently rank on the second page for 20+ keywords, and my page is less than 3 months old.

It’s showing great potential!

Eduard Dziak (Marketing Manager)

Often I am using entities to learn more about semantic meaning that Google associates with the targeted keyword or topic I am going to write about. Understand the particular important key phrases that Google associate with my target topic helps me guide my content and ensure that I provide a comprehensive article with answers that Google and its users are looking for.

Because optimizing only for a keyword often lead to keyword stuffing and doesn’t deliver enough value. Also, I have noticed that the content often leads to fewer indexed keywords if you only optimize for the keyword rather than for semantic and entities.

So to optimize my article for entities I am using keyword research tools along with natural language processing tools from Google and MonkeyLearn Keyword Extractor. These tools point out to me what other keywords are associated with my targeted keyword or topic and thus navigate my content to create SEO optimized article.

Like this I can create articles that I know will rank well and provide the content Google and users are looking for when they are typing my targeted keyword phrase.

Jenna Carson (Marketing Director)

The best way that we’ve started to incorporate entities within our SEO strategy has been to use software that uses extraction of relevant entities for you and identifies Google’s understanding of them – this helps us integrate them within our other SEO techniques and plans.

We do our best to optimize entities by referencing the music entities we’re experts in within a lot of our copywriting and blogs – however, we’ve had the most success in the first quarter of 2021 by stopping the typical keyword-stuffing SEO behavior. We have a list of entities we want to focus on and we now carefully craft content around this, before publishing any articles we look at competitors’ entities’ successes and see how we can tap into this.

Anatolii Ulitovskyi (Digital Marketer, Founder)

Generic SEO is related to finding keywords, optimization them, and providing link building. That’s not the case anymore because of huge competition with around 1.8 billion websites that want to get traffic.

Modern SEO is related to topics [entities], not keywords. Google understands the user intent and ranks content that users want to get. Instead of searching for generic keywords, find topics with a lack of quality content and low competition and jump there.

These topics are not always relevant 100% to your niche but they cover all the stages of a sales funnel and build brand awareness. Most projects fail because they chase high-volume. Over a thousand others do it the same. Search on Google any keyword. There are a million results.

Search systems have a lot of choices. It’s not possible to rank even a tiny percentage of existing content. That’s why I search for topics with outdated content that my competitors ignore.

Zander Buteux (Head of Organic Growth)

At Wilbur Labs, we use a few tools to help us as we generate content at scale — around 40 to 50 pieces per month today, and we anticipate generating 100+ by the end of Q3. Copy.AI, Fraze, and SEMrush are the go-to platforms for us. Copy.AI helps turn a blank page from a keyword into a title, into an outline, and then an intro paragraph. Fraze and SEMrush help turn the outline into not just a body of well-written words, but one that is optimized for the topical entity. Whereby it provides recommendations of questions to answer, related keywords to include, and suggested length of the article based on SERP competition.

This tactic has worked exceptionally well for Joblist, which tackles content generation with a spoke and hub strategy — “hub” being a parent piece that discusses a topical cluster of clusters and the spokes being a deeper dive into the nuanced topics within. Using this strategy of generating strong, entity-focused content that truly helps and guides our target market, our content hub has grown on-site traffic by 1230% Y/Y.

The biggest takeaway here is that keyword chasing will produce momentary growth that will require more hands-on updating over the life of the piece, while responding to entities will generate sustainable growth over the long term and nightmares of algorithm updates ripping away 90% of your traffic can be a thing of the past.

John Pinedo (Founder)

Internally linking entity-related articles helps Google recognize your website as an authority on the entity topic.

If I’m covering an entity topic like landing page software, I’d want to cover as many informational and commercial topics as possible on my site. Google will eventually crawl and index my articles on these entity-related topics, but it’s not until they’re internally linked together that Google starts registering that my website has covered said topic thoroughly.

Soon enough, when someone searches for an entity-related topic, Google can match up to my website as a great fit for the searcher (ranking me higher in the SERP) by cross-checking its knowledge graph with my on-page SEO and site structure efforts.

Are Entities a Ranking Factor?

Not if taken as a standalone entity (pun intended).

Like keywords, entities are not a ranking factor per se, but they can be as something that goes together with content.

Entities are the way content is understood by Google’s natural language processing model and related with other content.

That — content — is a ranking factor, as well as links and RankBrain.

Conclusions on Entity SEO

Entity optimization is the future of SEO. It doesn’t replace keyword research combined with search intent, but it gives a broader meaning to it, for topics are not just keywords — they are entities, which exist regardless of language.

We recommend using the methods we outlined in this guide to do your entity SEO and come up with entities to use in your content.

For further help and guidance, take a look at our On-Page SEO services.

Here’s to your success!

The post Entity SEO: A Quick Guide to Entity Optimization for Google first appeared on SEO Optimizers.

Last Update Aug 24, 2022 @ 6:18 pm

In February 2021, Google introduced 12 new manual action penalties that are unrelated to Google Search. Instead, this time they impact Google News and Google Discovery content.

The enforcement of new policies is probably due to the rise of fake news, manipulated content by political parties and violent acts that were sadly among trending news over the past 12 months.

However, Google doesn’t say if the content that received a manual action will be removed from the listing or demoted. All we know is that there are 12 new manual actions you should be aware of.

Let’s quickly review what is a manual action and then dive into Google’s 12 new manual penalties.

What Is A Manual Action?

A manual action is a penalty applied by a Google employee after they reviewed your website for violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.

The results of a manual action can include:

• Drop in rankings
• Drop in number of indexed pages
• Drop of selected pages from Google search
• Deindexing of the whole website or part of it

If you need an authoritative reference, Search Engine Journal has a complete list of manual action penalties that Google applies to websites in search.

As we learned in February 2021, though, manual actions are no longer restricted to only content appearing in Google Search, but also in Google News and Google Discover.

What Are Google News and Google Discover?

Google News is Google’s news aggregator that gets content from websites that applied to appear as news providers.

Google Discover is a mobile feed that helps you discover (indeed) new content that you might be interested in. It’s based on Google’s Topic Layer in the Knowledge Graph to learn more about you and your interests.

Source: Google

Both News and Discover comes with their own policies (here and here) that webmasters must comply with in order for their content to remain in News and Discover.

Google Introduces 12 New Manual Actions for Google News and Google Discover

Google’s spokesperson Danny Sullivan said on Twitter that Google is already automatically preventing offending content from appearing in Google News and Google Discover, but that manual actions come to the rescue in all those cases the algorithm fails.

See the tweets below:

But if our systems weren't catching things for whatever reason, then we might take a manual action.

— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) February 8, 2021

That still doesn’t say if the content receiving a manual action will be demoted or completely removed from News and Discover, but chances are, since it hadn’t to show up in the first place, it’s going to be removed.

Let’s see which new manual actions Google introduced for News and Discover.

1. Transparency (Google News)

Google may apply a manual action penalty if the site appearing in Google News doesn’t have clear information about who writes the articles, as well clear dates and bylines.

Also, Google may penalize for not having enough information about authors, publishers, companies and any publication that appears in Google News.

Contact information is a must as well. Omitting it is seen as a violation of Google’s policy.

2. Misleading Content (Google Discover)

Think clickbait.

Any empty promise made to the user in the headline or content is considered a violation.

3. Adult-themed Content (Google Discover)

Adult content is not allowed in Google Discover.

That includes explicit sexual material and acts, as well as nudity.

4. Dangerous Content (Google News + Discover)

Any content that could cause serious harm to people or animals is subject to manual action.

5. Harassing Content (Google News + Discover)

If your content contains threatening content, including bullying and harassment, it will be penalized.

That includes any content that will “sexualize someone in an unwanted way, expose private information of someone else that could be used to carry out threats”.

6. Hateful Content (Google News + Discover)

If your content incites hatred, Google will take action on it.

That also includes content that promotes hatred against people with any “characteristic that is associated with systemic discrimination or marginalization”.

7. Manipulated Media (Google News + Discover)

Media that are used to deceive, manipulate or mislead are subject to penalty.

Google includes media that “significantly undermine participation or trust in electoral or civic processes”.

8. Medical Content (Google News + Discover)

Google may take action on medical content that has commercial purposes.

“We also do not allow content from any site that contradicts or runs contrary to scientific or medical consensus and evidence-based best practices”, says Google.

9. Sexually Explicit Content (Google News + Discover)

Images or videos aimed at causing sexual arousal will get a penalty, getting potentially removed from the platform altogether.

10. Terrorist Content (Google News + Discover)

If your content promotes terrorist activities in any way, it’s subject to manual action.

11. Violence and Gore Content (Google News + Discover)

Google will penalize for content that incites to violence and celebrates it, including the sharing of explicitly graphic material.

“We also do not allow extremely graphic or violent materials for the sake of disgusting others”, says Google.

12. Vulgar Language and Profanity (Google News + Discover)

This penalty is for content that contains strong profanities and obscenities.

How to recover from these Manual Actions?

The best practice is to remove the content (we know, it’s a lot of work, but must be done) that violates Google’s policies and then submit a reconsideration request.

Google offers advice in the form of “Recommended actions” to webmasters directly in the Search Console Help page for manual actions. It’s worth linking again, here. We strongly encourage you to follow the recommended steps and any further directives Google gives you.

After that, it might take anywhere from days to weeks to recover, depending on when Google’s employees see and take action on the request.

The best way to avoid News and Discover manual actions for the time being is to abide strictly to Google’s policies for this type of content.

A Takeaway

E-A-T (Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) has never been more important.

Google wants all content from News and Discovery to be trustworthy and come from authoritative, expert voices. It won’t accept anything inferior or misleading even in the slightest.

And we don’t need to tell you that even most of the content appearing in Google Search has to abide to E-A-T quality standards to be able to remain indexed and rank well.

Do you publish content on Google News and Google Discover? Let us know about your experience in the comments below.

Here’s to your success.

The post Google’s 12 New Manual Actions for Google News and Google Discover first appeared on SEO Optimizers.

Last Update Aug 24, 2022 @ 6:20 pm

SEO has continued to change over the past 15 years, so much that 60% of SEO professionals (from a Twitter poll) find it much harder to do now.

Some things that used to work no longer work. Other things have been deprecated and replaced with new things (like keyword density, replaced by natural language processing).

There are plenty of things that now Google no longer uses, too. Things that used to be helpful up to a few years ago now go entirely ignored.

In this post, we’re going to tell you about 13 things that Google ignores about your website and what you can do with these things instead, so they won’t go completely to waste.

13 Things That Google Ignores About Your Website

1. Low Quality Pingbacks

Google ignores low quality pingbacks to your blog.

That means both good and bad news: the good news is that a bunch of spammy blog pingbacks won’t hurt your site in Google and won’t lead to a manual action. The bad news is that Google will see even good quality pingbacks as worthless. In fact, Gary Illyes said on Reddit that “it’s very very likely those pingbacks are marked worthless (meaning they’re ignored) on Google’s end”.

What to do with pingbacks

While Google ignores these links and therefore they have no SEO value, try can still have traffic value. So we believe the best course of action is to monitor the few good ones you got for referral traffic.

2. Forum Profile Links

Google ignores forum profile links.

That means trying to acquire tons of profile links won’t get you any SEO benefits and it might only make you appear spammy.

What to do with forum profile links

When you register to a forum of your interest, the website field in your profile makes for a great opportunity to drive traffic to your website. But how to leverage that? The best way to drive people to your profile and then to your website is to be an active member of the forum, engage in discussions and give great advice whenever a forum poster requests any. Your good reputation will be the number one traffic factor.

3. Links from UGC (User-Generated Content)

Google ignores links from UGC.

That means any links you place in comments and forum replies will not have an SEO benefit.

What to do with UGC

Comment links are still helpful for their referral traffic value. For example, your website link in Website URL field or any links in the body of the comment that the blog owner approves, but even the links you place in Quora and forum replies. These are all links that can bring interested visitors to your website, so while you can’t go after these for SEO value, you can definitely leverage them for traffic value.

4. Guest Post Links

Google’s John Mueller said on Twitter that Google now ignores guest post links, and that they “catch most of these algorithmically“.

What to do with guest posts

The fact that Google now ignores links from guest posts doesn’t meant that engaging in guest post activity is a bad thing. Actually, guest posting is a powerful tool for growing brand visibility, thought leadership and inbound (relevant) traffic.

It’s time to run glorious guest posting campaigns — just not for SEO.

5. Meta Description in Search

According to a 2020 study from Ahrefs, Google often ignores your meta description in search, returning other portions of text that deems more relevant instead.

What to do with meta description

Although only shown 37% of the time in search (still according to Ahrefs’s study), writing your own meta description is not a waste of time because it can encourage clicks whenever it’s shown. Your meta description is an exercise in good copywriting.

6. Capitalization in HTML Tags

John Mueller said on Twitter that Google ignores capitalization in HTML attribute names.

What to do with capitalization in HTML tags

Nothing to do here. Just try to be consistent with your capitalization, as Mueller suggests.

7. Keywords Meta Tag

Google doesn’t use keywords meta tag when ranking content.

The reason is that this meta tag was abused decades ago, with website owners and SEOs stuffing irrelevant keywords in an attempt to manipulate web search.

What to do with Keywords meta tag

Unless you use tools and search engines that still use this meta tag to extract information about your website, you can completely disregard it and leave it empty in your website HTML code.

8. Links from Spammy Domains

John Mueller said on Twitter that Google ignores unnatural links from spammy domains.

That means that you shouldn’t worry about any blatantly bad links your website might get.

What to do about links from spammy domains

Unless they’re causing you harm (e.g. getting you a bad reputation with influencers or sending you spam traffic), in which case you may want to ask for link removal, you can ignore these links altogether and instead focus on getting good links.

9. Nofollow Links

Since 2019, Google treats nofollow links as hints (Bing does, too), meaning that they might use these links for ranking purposes or even just for finding spam. It’s up to Google.

What to do with nofollow links

Getting nofollow links won’t hurt rankings but they may not even help them. They’re still good links for getting traffic anyway.

On your website, use nofollow at your discretion, especially when you don’t want to treat your links as a vote of trust.

10. Affiliate Links

Google treats affiliate links as nofollow links even without the rel=nofollow or rel=sponsored attribute.

Source: Twitter

What to do with affiliate links

Use them normally as you would any other link, but we recommend that you use a rel=nofollow on them to help Google better identify them as affiliate links. There is no real reason to make these links pass PageRank anyway.

11. Length of Title Tags

Well, Google doesn’t exactly ignore them — they truncate them in search results, but what they still do is reading your title beyond what’s displayed, and you can still benefit from any keywords there SEO-wise.

What to do with title tag length

Making your title 60 characters long is still a best practice, but it’s not always applicable (e.g. the title of the post you’re reading), so don’t worry about it and make sure your title attracts clicks instead.

12. Pagination

With rel=prev / rel=next now deprecated, Google is leaving it up to webmasters to handle pagination, deeming it more a UX issue than an indexing one.

Source: Twitter

What to do with pagination

Keep handling it the way you’ve always been handling it. If you make changes, make them based on UX not SEO.

13. The Position of rel= Attributes

Google ignores the position of rel= attributes in the HTML format of an URL.

So whether you have, for instance, rel=nofollow before or after ahref=, it does not matter to Google.

What to do with rel= attributes

It’s up to you. Just keep some consistency with the location of these attributes.

BUT Google Does NOT Ignore Sitewide Links

Neil Patel’s study shows that, albeit less effective than in-content links, sidebar and footer links still help rankings.

That means that obtaining sitewide links is still effective and you don’t need to remove these links because they won’t hurt you (unless they’re clearly spammy).

Conclusions: Don’t Spend Too Much Time and Money on Things Google Ignores

The takeaway from this post is that spending too much time and money on things that Google ignores is not worth it, unless you have a UX and traffic benefit from it.

Some things like guest posts can still be used as a tool for brand visibility even though they might no longer carry value as a link building tactic.

The rule of thumb is that, if your main goal is to optimize for Google, focusing on what Google incentivizes in the SERPs is a much better idea.

Have you been focusing on things that Google ignores?

We hope that this post was helpful to you! Let us know in the comments if you found anything else that Google ignores about your website.

Here’s to your success!

The post 13 Things That Google Ignores About Your Website first appeared on SEO Optimizers.

Last Update May 16, 2021 @ 12:11 pm

Not only are search engines continually making alterations to their algorithms, leaving SEO experts to adapt, but the way people are searching for things is changing too.

More and more businesses with an online presence have to adapt to the new realities of voice searching. With that in mind, we’ll look at some of the ways to optimize your website content for Google voice searches!

Why Do It?

Cost-effectiveness is a big deal in the world of SEO; we don’t always have the time or the budget to do everything that we’d like. Considering that, should you spend your resources on an effort to optimize your website content for Google voice searches?

After all, there are plenty of trends that help you rank on Google – is this one worth it?

In a nutshell, yes. Unlike fads that come and go, voice searching is here to stay. And all estimates show that it will only get bigger as time goes on. In the next couple of years, voice-activated searches will make up half of all online searches.

This is due to the advent of smart speakers and home assistant devices; people that have Alexa or Google Home in their households are more likely to resort to voice searches.

The future of online searching is here, and it’s your voice. Thus, long-term optimizations of website content are necessary. And we’ll tell you where to start:

1. Keyword Optimization
2. Long-form Questions
3. Local Search Optimization
4. Personalization

Adapting To Keywords

We should note that many of the tweaks you’ll do while you optimize your website content for Google voice searches complement the SEO guidelines you’re already following.

The fact that voice searches will become a  bigger deal in the near future doesn’t mean that you should forgo other aspects of optimization.

Whatever happens, website design will still play an important role; your website’s functionalities and visual appearance are still the primary way people interact with your online business.

Still, some aspects of SEO will have to be improved. For instance, the way we approach search keywords is fundamentally changing.

The keywords we’ve used so far are, from a linguistic standpoint, often short and slightly unnatural or awkward.

But now that voice searches are widespread, the focus shifts towards long-tail keywords and entire phrases. Indeed, voice searching makes logical use of the way we naturally talk.

After all, how we type online is radically different from how we speak in real life.

But when we use search engines via digital assistants, it’s a more intuitive process. People will utter entire sentences as their search phrases of choice, and your website content needs to be optimized for that.

“How’s the weather in New York this morning?” is something you’d ask a digital assistant like Google Home, but you’d never type that into Google if you were seated in front of your laptop.

Instead of this natural language, you’d probably go with “new york weather”. Considering this difference is crucial.

Anticipating Questions

While voice searches often come in the form of long sentences, it doesn’t mean that they are less specific. The queries posed to a digital assistant are still precise; after all, you don’t have actual conversations with Alexa.

But the logical question here is: How can you optimize your website content for Google voice searches without looking spammy?

Actually, it’s not that difficult. As a business owner or a niche marketer, you need to think about the long-form questions your target audience will ask most frequently.

You may already see where we’re going with this, but you’d be smart to add a Frequently Asked Questions section at the end of your blog posts or other content.

This tactic is likely to pay off in terms of increased traffic and other positive website analytics. Follow these steps:

1. Search the Internet for niche-related questions about your topic, ones that your visitors ask digital assistants most often.
2. Create an FAQ section at the bottom of a blog page.
3. Structure each question as a subheading that’s succeeded with a paragraph answering the question
4. Use long-tail keywords in the subheadings.

This also gives a new degree of quality to your content. If you ask the right questions and answer them in a useful way, Google will reward the effort with a better ranking..

Local Searches

Studies indicate that a majority of voice searches are local. That’s logical, as people use voice search with digital assistants to find daily services and products. It’s rarely something abstract.

That’s why businesses need to do their best to keep their Google My Business profiles perfectly updated, with consistent contact information across all online platforms and. Here’s how to achieve that:

• Enter your accurate service area and business address
• Don’t choose too many categories while describing your business, as it will make it harder to find
• Only have a single profile for your business to avoid display issues on Google Maps

For example, if you’re a local deli owner, this means including detailed information on opening hours, the exact location of your store, etc.

Of course, you also need to optimize your website content for Google voice searches that are specific, such as “best meatball sub” with a local twist.

While this may seem simple, you’d be surprised at how many businesses fail to complete such tasks promptly. Yes, crucial information like opening hours and street addresses should be available on your website.

But you also need to make sure that Google’s crawlbots can parse this website content.

It’s vital that you don’t put such information in images. Sure, it’s easier for people who actually view your website or Facebook page to see stuff like that, but for Google’s sake (and your ranking), you need to ensure this can be found in HTML as well.

Technically, Google does parse images as well, but you don’t want to leave this up to chance.

Personalized Content

While you optimize your website content for Google Voice searches, there are basic tenets you need to keep in mind; relevance, context, and conciseness.

This can mean a different SEO strategy compared to what you’d usually do before voice searches became an integral part of the online browsing experience.

Voice searches are one of the reasons why personalized browsing has become important in the past couple of years. Google has worked to combine all of its different services into a cohesive system of user profiles.

Apart from being able to provide a better-tailored experience to users, this has also given advertisers more power in terms of audience targeting than ever before.

In terms of marketing strategies, this means that person-based marketing has become the pinnacle of digital advertising.

This methodology for product placement gives advertisers the ability to target their prospective leads with more precision, simply based on how they behave online.

In the past, this had amounted to our browser history. But as language processing tech improves, Google Voice search will gain the ability to learn things about our life through our voice and the background audio.

That information will be used for product placement with our other personal information.

The Future of Google Voice Searches

Once you begin working to optimize your website content for Google Voice Searches, you will realize that this isn’t just about working within the confines of today’s technology. You also need to look towards the future of web searches in general.

Google’s voice search technology has proven to be the bedrock of Google Now — the company’s virtual assistant. The way Google has combined cutting-edge language processing technology with its complex search algorithms has produced something unparalleled in its niche.

Today, Google Now is more powerful compared to all of its biggest competitors, including:

• Alexa
• Cortana
• Siri

What does this mean for website content in the future? Well, if you think that search engine optimization has been disrupted with voice searches so far, you haven’t seen more than the tip of the iceberg.

Platforms used for conversion tracking, such as Google Analytics, are beginning to take stock in voice searches. Google is adding data from voice queries into its all-powerful Google Search Console.

Indeed, Google is aware of the fact that single-device tracking of conversions is going the way of the dinosaurs. These days, our online environment is multi-device and multi-media.

That means our approach to searching for data and information has changed, as have our purchasing habits.

Rising Voice Queries

Data provided by Google Trends suggests that voice searching is becoming more significant by the day. In the previous decade, the number of voice searches has been raised sevenfold.

This is, in large part, due to call functions and navigational queries to Google Maps. Still, the advent of virtual assistants has ushered in an age of increasingly complex voice searches.

How people use voice searches also depends on their age — an important factor when performing audience targeting. For instance, adults most commonly utilize voice search to get local directions.

That’s completely logical, seeing as using such a hands-free option is far safer when you’re driving.

However, younger people have other uses for Google Voice Searches, more relevant to website content. Younger millennials use Google voice searches for local service queries, text message dictation, and playing music.

Why Is The Popularity of Voice Search Increasing?

The incredible growth of voice recognition solutions in tech is due to a couple of different reasons.

Their implementation in both mobile devices and the increasingly valuable niche of smart home solutions (Alexa, Google Home) is constantly improving. And the main reason for that is: it’s easier to speak than to type.

Someone who doesn’t have experience with typing can complete about 40 words each minute. However, an adult can speak almost four times as much in the same period with less effort.

The use of voice searches for hands-free phone interaction in cars is just one example. A quarter of all voice searches happen when people are in situations or locations where typing is not ideal.

Apart from that, voice search is becoming more popular because it’s just getting better. The problem with voice recognition technology in the past was that it was too imprecise and clumsy.

Ten years ago, attempts at voice searches and voice commands looked laughable, with the digital assistants constantly misunderstanding their users’ queries. Indeed, this tech was the butt of many jokes in pop culture.

However, this situation has vastly improved.

These days, Siri and Google are capable of adapting to the unique speech patterns of individuals. After all, each one of us has its pronunciation quirks.

When you factor in accents and different local colloquialisms, even the most basic query can be hard to understand. However, these two platforms have made strides in machine learning that allow their voice recognition software to adapt using complex metadata.

Frequently Asked Questions

1. What is information that any local business should include on their listing for voice searches?

Pet friendliness, working hours, WiFi availability, parking, accepted payment methods, and contact information.

1. How accurate is Google Voice Search?

According to estimates from 2017, Google Voice recognition has reached a 95% accuracy level.

1. When was Google Voice Search created?

The first iteration of Google Voice Search features was made public in 2012.

1. What languages does Google Voice support?

Currently, it supports English, Italian, Spanish, Japanese, German, and French, though most users still use English as it’s the most precise.

The post How To Optimize Your Website Content for Google Voice Searches first appeared on SEO Optimizers.

Last Update May 16, 2021 @ 12:25 pm

“I don’t know, let me Google that.” is more than a common phrase in our vocabulary, it’s become a cornerstone of society. In America, for example, roughly ¾ of Americans have access to the internet, and globally 63,000 Google searches happen every second.

With sites dedicated to every topic imaginable, how does Google know which ones to display after your search query? The answer is their revolutionary search algorithm. It’s constantly being updated, and in 2018, 9 updates were released each day.

This is a testament to Google’s goal of providing relevant content to its users. This article is designed to explain the 7 updates that are more than likely affecting your website, what is causing your website to be adversely affected by the update, and how you can remedy the situation.

In this article, we will cover the following updates to the search Algorithm

• Google Panda
• Google Penguin
• Google Hummingbird
• Google Pigeon
• Google Mobile Friendly
• Google Fred
• Google Top Heavy

We will also recommend several tools to help you optimize your content for the internet, and talk about the benefits of using each product, as well as why you should use each one, before publishing an article.

Google Panda Algorithm Update (Most Likely to Affect Your Site)

This portion of the Google Algorithm looks at the quality of the content on a website. The more unique the content is, the more likely the site is going to be pushed up to the top of the search query. 

“Bland” content uses the same terms over and over again, like this sentence, because “over and over” could have been replaced with repeatability, and it would have worked.

What Causes a Site to Be Negatively Affected By Google Panda?

• Low-Quality Content- If your site has poorly written content full of grammar mistakes, irrelevant images, and content, or a lack of keyword richness hurts your article’s ranking on Google in the long run.
• Plagiarism- Google Panda loves original content. You can use images, upload videos, and add short sections of text as long as they’re in quotation marks. However, blatantly copying another website will adversely affect your Google Ranking.

How to Improve Your Rating if it’s Negatively Affected By Google Panda

• Write original content
• Proofread the page
• Use Grammarly to check for grammar mistakes
• Use Copyscape to check for plagiarism

How to Track Updates for Google Panda

Check your site at least once a month with Website Auditor. Use the SEO PowerSuite function to check for plagiarism, websites with content that is similar to yours, and excessive use of keywords or phrases people are searching for.

Google Penguin Algorithm Update

This program is similar to Google Panda, but rather than looking at the text itself; its focus is on the anchor texts and links being used. You want to use a variety of anchors and links, or it will appear as though your page is trying to link out to a particular site, or you’re using the anchor as a way to attract people to your page.

Using links from trusted sites or scholarly sources can positively impact your SEO rating. Besides, reputable sources linking to different domains like .com, .edu, and .org, can also boost your overall ranking. 

What Causes a Site to Be Negatively Affected By Google Penguin?

• Being Repetitive- As previously mentioned, whether you are repeating an anchor or the website you’re linking to, both affect your ranking. This is because the Google Algorithm sees this as a way to artificially inflate your Google search ranking. 
• Linking to Low-Quality Sites- By linking to sites that Google Panda ranks lowly, pages that are irrelevant to the content of your page, or unsecured sites, this can adversely affect your SEO ranking. 
  • As a quick example, if you have a food blog, linking to a page about the FBI’s most wanted would adversely affect your page’s rating.
• Keyword Stuffing- Although you would think that this would be what Google Panda would be doing, Penguin does it on a larger scale. This is because it looks for keyword richness in relationship to your anchor texts. If you repeat the same anchor, then you’ll have a lower ranking. Strive for keyword richness, not for repetition when it comes to anchor texts.

How to Track Updates for Google Penguin

Use a tool to check for growth and check your backlinks using a tool like SEO Spyglass. It’s an intuitive program, and you can look at your site’s overall visits, and ranking. If you see any spikes, it may be indicative of a problem with either a site you are linking to or a poorly written site, linking to your page.

Google Hummingbird Algorithm Update

This update is our favorite because it’s a great use of AI. What Hummingbird does is it takes what you searched for, and rather than search for what you typed, it tries to guess the motivation for your search, and directs you to sites that match your intended meaning. 

This update works by keeping track of similar searches, and the sites that are clicked on the most, and have people stay on them the longest, will appear at the top of your search. This allows you to have a better chance of finding what you’re looking for.

What Causes a Site to Be Negatively Affected By Google Hummingbird?

• Low-Quality Content- If your content is vague, full of grammatical errors, or anything else that would be an issue with Google Panda or Google Penguin, then Hummingbird will not rank that page highly.
• Not Using Keywords Consistently- When writing an article, think about how people will find your page, and incorporate those searched words and phrases into your article. Have these words in not only the body but also the section headers and, if possible, the title.

How to Track Updates for Google Hummingbird

To get the best results with this update, use keywords and phrases, and think about how people will stumble upon your website. Be sure to include a variety of keywords and add as many similar terms and phrases in your article.

By playing with the syntax and language associated with your site, it will serve as a catchall. Because the site will be keyword-rich, Hummingbird will be more likely to boost you up the rankings, because a variety of keywords and well-written content are positively correlated.

Another tool you can take advantage of in Website Auditor is the Term Frequency–Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF). This will allow you to find synonyms that are commonly searched by people when looking up content relevant to your page. 

It also can display usage rates of keywords found on other pages. Both of these features make TF-IDF useful for evaluating the importance of words and phrases associated with your site.

Google Pigeon Algorithm Update

This update is different from the others on the list because it’s focused on geographic location as opposed to content. Another thing that makes Pigeon different from other updates is that there isn’t necessarily a penalty associated with this update, because it would be hard to change the location of a business.

The way Pigeon displays the businesses is through a map of your area, and the closest business is point A, and there is also a point B and C. This allows you to see the general area of where a business is, before heading to it.

What Causes a Site to Be Negatively Affected By Google Pigeon?

• Distance- Pigeon displays the 3 closest businesses that provide what you’re looking for. The farther the store, the lower it will be on the ranking.

How to Track Updates for Google Pigeon

Since Google Pigeon works through geotags, and there aren’t penalties, rather than focus on updates, focus on how you can incorporate Google Pigeon’s parameters into your text. On your site, you can mention your physical address multiple times, and that may help boost your rankings below the map portion of the search results.

If you use the Website Auditor tool, we’ve been mentioning throughout this article; there’s a roundabout way to boost your SEO in relation to location. Go to Link Assistant, Look for Prospects, select Directories, and enter a keyword and location. By doing this at least once a month, you can be sure that you’re on all the directories relevant to your business.

For example, if you search OB-GYN and San Diego, the directory will show you a variety of pages that list your search parameters. There’s also an email address for each site, so you can email the host, asking for your website to be included. This helps spread links to different parts of the internet to help boost traffic.

Google Mobile-Friendly Algorithm Update

When this update dropped, for a short period, it shook up SEO and rankings in a way that had never been seen before. Rather than focus on content, links, or locations, this update placed more importance on how user-friendly and how aesthetically pleasing a website would be on mobile devices.

A quick example of this update in action is if you Google “Santa’s reindeer names” on a PC and a phone, the order is slightly different, based on mobile optimization. Wikipedia, Holidappy, and Sno.co.uk host the top 3 links for PC, but on the mobile search Sno.co.uk is bumped to second, and Holidappy rounds out the top 3.

What Causes a Site to Be Negatively Affected By Google Mobile-Friendly?

There are a variety of factors that can affect this update, but we’re going to limit our list to 5

• The Design- When creating a website, you should build it in a way to where it can detect if it’s accessed from a mobile device or a PC, and load the page optimized the device. This is done to improve the functionality of mobile devices because tapping in and out to zoom would discourage users from going to your site.
• Device Friendly Content- Be mindful of what is on your page before adding it to the mobile version. This is because some software won’t be compatible with all devices. A great example of this is Adobe Flash doesn’t work on some phone models, and this may negatively impact your ranking, due to inaccessibility.
• Popup Advertisements- These annoy users, but depending on the popup, it could cause issues for the viewer, due to NSFW content, or the possibility of malware. Instead of using pop up ads, consider ads on either side of the text, or used as a way to break up different sections.
• Lack of Functionality- This point piggybacks off of the design feature in the sense that you need to make text and interactive portions huge. This is because everything will shrink on the mobile version, and if you have large fingers, you’ll select the wrong option and have to go back and change your response.
• Loading Speeds- The slower the loading speed for the page, images, videos, and GIFs, the bigger hit it takes from this update. When it comes to mobile devices, they close slow pages faster than their PC counterparts.

How to Track Updates for Google Mobile Friendly

As you probably guessed, there’s an application on Website Auditor that can check for how well a site will read on a mobile device. To access this utility, select Content Analysis, then Technical Factors listed in the Page Audit Tab.

This update dings websites that have poor UX and loading speeds on mobile devices. By using this test, you can quickly check the mobile-friendliness of your site.

Google Fred Algorithm Update

Google Fred is the name for a variety of updates that were released that were designed to hurt the ranking of websites focused on generating ad revenue. When these updates dropped, it seemed as though a variety of pages were receiving large ranking boosts or drops.

Over time people were able to piece together some of the characteristics of all the websites that were positively or negatively affected, and each site had three things in common.

What Causes a Site to Be Negatively Affected By Google Fred?

• Focused on Ad Revenue- Google searches are designed to provide people with answers to a variety of questions. If your site has a large number of ads, then you’ll see a drop in your ranking. This is because Fred is focused on finding well-written content, not generating people money.
• Poorly Written Content- When we say poor, this is bland, repetitive content. This served as an update to Panda because Google Panda was released 6 years before Fred. By lacking original content, or having articles with grammar mistakes, Google Fred lowers your page’s ranking.
• Low-Quality UI and UX- Besides the text, Fred focused on the aesthetic appeal of webpages. Google Mobile-Friendly applied to mobile devices, but Fred introduced the same ranking system for desktop users as well. This leads to poorly designed sites, or those with frequent popups to be bumped from the top of the search results query.

How to Track Updates for Google Fred

Review Google Search Quality guidelines and have good-quality content that fits the parameters of those guidelines. Fred can also tell what is worthwhile content and what is keyword stuff ad pages, so consider keyword richness and fewer ads, to help boost your ranking.

Google Top Heavy Algorithm Update

This update works along the same lines as Google Fred, but this update is focused exclusively on ads. Rather it’s focused on pages that have a large number of ads near the beginning of the site; hence, it’s top-heavy.

What Causes a Site to Be Negatively Affected By Google Top Heavy?

• A large number of ads- If the Google algorithm feels as though you have too many ads at the beginning of your page, you will be moved to a lower position in the search engine results. This is because top-heavy sites are designed to generate ad revenue, and they have low-quality content that is stuffed with keywords to attract people.

How to Track Updates for Google Top Heavy

This page isn’t necessarily updated, but according to Google AdSense, you can have up to 3 ads per page. Also, AdSense has a heat map that shows the best places to insert ads, they’re generally at the top or bottom of a page, or used to break up various sections of an article.

Various Tools You Can Use to Increase the Quality of your Website

To make your site look like it was written by a team of professional writers, you can take advantage of a variety of programs to help create SEO friendly content. In this section, we will take a brief look at five different programs you can use to help boost the ranking of your website.

Website Auditor

This is arguably the most useful tool on the list because it can do the function of the other four and then some. However, it is the most costly option out of the five listed. This is because of the number of features included.

If you host a large number of articles or are trying to broaden the reach of your site, then this is a worthwhile investment, because it’s one of the best programs available for optimizing web-based content.

Grammarly

Grammarly is a proofreading tool that checks the correctness, clarity, engagement, and delivery of a text. Correctness refers to spelling, grammar, and punctuation, and these issues are highlighted in red. Clarity helps make your writing clear and concise and also highlights when you use passive voice.

Engagement looks at the text and makes it more interesting by giving you synonyms to terms, or helping your text match the overall tone of the article. Delivery works along similar lines as Engagement, but it’s more focused on the reader’s attitude. 

Most of the time, issues with Delivery revolve around technical issues that are commonplace in writing, such as ending sentences with a preposition. By using these four broad categories, an article is assigned a value between 1 and 100. 

You should make sure that after using this tool, you have 0 correctness flags because these are what updates such as Google Panda and to a lesser degree, Google Fred will look at. Grammarly also lets you proofread articles in one of four English localizations, which is useful if you are publishing content for both U.S. and British audiences.

Hemingway Editor

Hemingway is a great tool that looks at the readability of your text. It assigns a reading level to it and highlights passages that are hard or very hard to read, the use of passive voice. When it comes to the use of adverbs or terms that have simpler alternatives, it will highlight these and give you the option to change or omit the word or phrase.

When using this tool, you want to have a score between Grade 5 and Grade 9. It’s ok if it’s a lower grade, but the readability of Grade 10 or higher needs to be simplified. An easy way to do this is by splitting up longer sentences into shorter ones.

Copyscape

This checks for plagiarism, which can negatively impact your search engine ranking with updates such as Google Panda, Google Fred, or Google Pirate. The site allows you to copy-paste the URL, or the text into a search box, and check for any piracy flags. 

This will also highlight quotes that aren’t in quotation marks, so you can fix that before Google’s search algorithm hurts your rank.

SEOBook’s Keyword Density Analyzer

This is a useful site for checking the occurrence rate of words and phrases in an article. If the rate is larger than 2.5%, consider lowering the occurrence rate of that word by using synonyms or using words given by Hummingbird or the TF-IDF feature on Website Auditor.

Final Thoughts

It doesn’t matter if you’re the owner of a large website that talks about all things tech, or a part-time blogger, who writes articles about a wide variety of subjects that they find interesting, both can make use of search engine optimization.

By creating original content that is focused on informing the public about something rather than generating a page that’s full of keywords, you’re going to climb up the Google results rankings. This will allow you to share your thoughts, feelings, and opinions with a wide audience.

The post 7 Algorithm Updates Currently Affecting Your SEO first appeared on SEO Optimizers.

Last Update May 16, 2021 @ 12:15 pm

Many people struggle to increase conversions through multimedia content. Some developers add videos to their content. Most web users prefer high-resolution videos. It is necessary to optimize your website using an ideal SEO tool to attract users. We present to you a guide on how to optimize videos.

1. Keyword Research

Video keyword research is different than ordinary keyword research. Typically, YouTube suggests videos to web users rather than through search engines. It is prudent to optimize videos for Google search and YouTube. However, the search generates 25 percent of video traffic for most websites.

Developers get the most traffic from YouTube suggested videos. For example, a keyword that generates 100,000 google searches per month might generate 50 YouTube searches. Here are five effective video keyword research methods:

· YouTube Suggest: This technique resembles Google Suggest. It provides several suggestions when you search for a keyword. YouTube enables you to get the most popular keywords. Insert an underscore before the keyword to get suggestions.

· TubeBuddy Tags: It displays the precise tags which other websites use in their videos. Install the extension in Google Chrome and check out a video uploaded on your competitor’s website. You will get a list of video tags. Green numbers indicate the rank a video has in a typical YouTube search. Add poorly optimized videos with a low keyword rank. You can outrank it by uploading a high-quality optimized video.

· Tubular Labs: A unique program allows developers to view rival channels. Tubular Labs offers attractive topics and keywords for videos. However, you need to sign up in the program and connect it to an active YouTube channel. Click “Insights” to view the videos which your audience watches when they are not checking your website.

· YTCockpit: It is an SEO tool that developers use to conduct infographic research on YouTube. Enter a keyword idea in the tool to get a variety of suggestions. Each keyword has crucial metrics such as CPC and the search volume.

The tool displays Google searches as monthly searches. Although they might be inaccurate, these figures enlighten you about how a certain topic interests your audience. Moreover, it displays the number of comments, likes and the video length for all videos with a keyword rank.

· YouTube Analytics Stats: YouTube Analytics is appropriate for channels with several video views. It provides awesome keywords with ranks. Click on the Traffic Sources and Analytics on the YouTube dashboard. Click on the YouTube Search icon to get keyword suggestions. You could optimize a video around a certain keyword to improve its YouTube search rank. Also, you can create a video for the keyword.

2. Create Videos

Most high-resolution videos have a high YouTube rank. They have five key features:

· Total Watch Time: A crucial factor that earns a video a high YouTube ranking. Total Watch Time refers to the watch time minutes which a video generates. It is visible in YouTube Analytics. SEO experts recommend creating long videos to optimize your watch time. Generally, most viewers watch 40 percent of a video. High-ranking videos normally have an extended watch time. They have high audience retention.

recommend creating long videos to optimize your watch time. Generally, most viewers watch 40 percent of a video. High-ranking videos normally have an extended watch time. They have high audience retention.

· Audience Retention: It is the percentage of your video that an audience views. Focus on the initial 15 seconds of your video to retain the audience. Analyze the retention reports of your videos to assess its performance. You could apply pattern interrupts in your videos to reset the attention of your audience.

· Session Watch Time: It is the amount of time web users spend on a channel after viewing a video. YouTube rewards videos that retain users on the platform. However, there is no precise method you could measure the Session Watch Time. Nevertheless, you can optimize it by creating playlists and include a link in your website. Use YouTube’s End Screen to encourage your audience to spend more time on YouTube.

· User Engagement: An optimized video should actively engage its viewers. YouTube measures how an audience comment, like, share, subscribe or add a video to their playlist. You could ask users to leave comments about your videos or add clear CTAs. Reply to their comments to attract more comments and higher rankings.

3. Video Optimization

There are several factors to consider when optimizing a video. A nice video title contains a target keyword. It has a high click-through-rate (CTR). Write long descriptions for your videos for YouTube to understand their topics. Include YouTube video tags for the video to attract viewers. Upload a clear transcript to ensure that YouTube clearly understands each keyword.

YouTube mainly relies on CTR to rank videos. A video could get a high ranking if many people click on it while searching for a target keyword. Besides comprising a target keyword, a video title should attract many clicks. Thumbnails can have a positive or adverse effect on your video. Ensure that they are interesting and unique. Conduct further infographic research to improve your YouTube profile. Include the URL and follow links to your Facebook or Twitter account.

4. Channel Authority

A channel’s authority determines how videos perform. If you upload a video in a high-authority channel, it is likely to get a high YouTube ranking. Ensure that your channel stands out from those of your competitors to attract new visitors. Include an alluring channel header and an animated logo. The right channel description contains several keywords to boost its ranking. You could ask viewers to subscribe to your channel after watching each video.

To ensure that your channel stands out from those of your competitors to attract new visitors, you can use find YouTube banner templates to help your channel look better

5. Video Ranking

Google uses specific keywords to generate video results. Create videos around keywords with existing videos to get a high ranking. Build high-quality backlinks to improve your rank. YouTube videos get higher ranks compared to self-hosted videos.

Add the video at the top section of your website to display it as the main multimedia content. Publish a detailed transcript below the video to enable search engines to understand it clearly. Optimized transcripts have high readability.

6. Video Promotion

Create an effective promotion strategy to improve your YouTube ranking. You could include them in an email list for your subscribers to view it. Share it on Facebook and Twitter to increase conversions. Some people embed their videos in their blog posts.

Optimizing videos is a challenge for some developers. Infographic research is necessary to create a high-resolution video. Factors such as video title, video ranking, video optimization, and promotion determine a video’s rank in a YouTube search. Use an efficient SEO tool to generate the right keywords for your videos.

The post A Step-By-Step Guide On How To Optimize Videos first appeared on SEO Optimizers.

“If your website loads faster, you make money faster,” says Max Goldberg, digital marketing specialist. Here are some tips to speed up your website, which help improve your bounce rate, and your ranking on Google:

Use Smaller Images

Text loads very quickly on most websites, and usually even pages with thousands of words of text don’t have trouble loading on mobile devices. However, images load much more slowly than text. It’s common for webmasters to not realize that the images on their websites are sometimes a megabyte or more per image, which can cause your load times to be too long for average users. Ideally, you want to make sure that all of the image files on your website are under 100kb in size, which even mobile 3g connections can load quickly.

Use Less Rich Content

Similar to images, any rich media will slow your site down. It’s a balance in improving the user experience with great content, and hurting the user experience with slow load times. If you’re loading video or audio from your website server, consider reducing the file size of the content as small as possible.

The custom display stands page of Decorative Events is a good example of an image-rich site that loads fast.

Use Faster Servers

No matter what the content is on your website, the speed at which your server delivers your content will have a major impact on your site’s load time. The average website on a shared hosting plan from GoDaddy or Namecheap is inexpensive for a reason — it’s not usually very fast. If you can afford a better hosting plan, ideally using a dedicated virtual private server, you will see fast load times, and lower bounce rates.

Use Google’s Page Speed Insights Tool

Google provides a tool for webmasters to check their load speed compared to other websites call the PageSpeed Insights Tool. You can submit your URL and receive a checklist of items which are negatively impacting your website’s load speed. Take note of the major items, and start improving them one by one. You can also enter your competitor’s websites, and see if they are loading faster than you. If you notice that you have slow loading images, and they do not, and they outrank you — you know what you need to do! Remember that the site speed testers are in offices in Shoreditch and all across the world so get a few speed tests done for more accurate results.

Convert New Posts to AMP

AMP is a new open source standard for mobile devices used by Google, which stands for “Accelerated Mobile Pages”. The AMP standard changes how mobile users view your website’s content. Instead all the content loading, Google indexes its own version of your site, stripping it down to mostly just HTML, ensuring mobile devices can load it more quickly. AMP pages are preferred by Google on mobile searches. If you have a WordPress site, you can deploy AMP pages easily using the AMP plugin.

The post How To Speed Up Your Site For SEO first appeared on SEO Optimizers.

Keyword Research: This is where everyone must start, but most skip. Finding high search volume keywords is what makes you money. Ranking for a keyword without any search volume does you no good so please research your keyword before moving any further.Unfortunately, the YouTube keyword tool has been shuttered for good on September 14th. Google has replaced the tool with the Display Planner’s AdWords for video keyword suggestions. You need an AdWords account to access this. This is your best friend for finding relevant keywords to target for you videos.

Another great place to do keyword research is by searching on YouTube directly for your main keywords and seeing what other videos pop up in the top results and how they are aligning their video title with specific keywords. You can also see suggested and related videos for even more ideas.

Once you have a list of keywords you then want to throw them into the keyword planner to ensure they have month search traffic. Find keywords with over 1,000 monthly searches as anything below that is not worth your time and effort (unless you have a high converting high ticket item).

Video Title: This is the most important aspect of your video in terms of on site optimizations. This is similar to the SEO page title tag. You want it to be as close to 60 characters without going over. You want to make it with a compelling title that is both keyword rich and readable for humans. This is tricky and almost is an artform of itself. If you are good at on site SEO then this should not be a problem.

Video Description: Do not hold back when it comes to the video description. Make it as useful and informative as possible. You want to properly describe the video and include any relevant keywords you’re trying to rank for in the description. When using keywords in the description I try and differ them slightly from the title by adding plurals, synonyms, etc. If you want to include a URL you should always place it on the first line on the description as it will always be visible for people to click without having to expand the description.

If you have a transcript of the video is is great to include this here. Google LOVES content and cannot read videos (yet) so the description is where the algorithm looks when assigning relevancy. Adding a transcript to videos is similar to adding an alt tag to images. It helps assign relevancy which will in turn ranks your video.

Video Tags: These are a great place to SPAM as many relevant tags as possible. Do not hold back, the more the better. Keep filling out tags until you cannot add anymore. Stop if you start seeing irrelevant tags, but there is no harm in adding as many relevant tags as possible. it is helpful using the suggested tags as a starting point.

Views, Likes, Comments, Subscribes: It is true that these still work when bought, but if done properly. You want full retention views and it is even possible to get people to search YouTube/Google for your video and then to watch it. It is important not to buy a Fiverr gig for this, but rather find a reputable seller or source. When it comes to likes, comments, and subscribers should from legitimate people as you want this to look natural.

Link Building: For quick easy links use social media and social bookmarking platforms such as Reddit, Digg, Delicious, StumbleUpon, etc. There are thousands of sites like these, but pick and choose the best. To simplify things you can always go onto Fiverr and find a good social bookmarking gig to help get more exposure. A few backlinks are more than enough.

Video Embeds: Video embeds are key to ranking a video. To get the embed code from a YouTube video go to share > embed and grab the snippet of HTML code to paste on third party websites. Web 2.0 properties such as WordPress, Tumblr, Blogspot, etc. are the perfect place to embed videos. make sure to have content surrounding the video that is relevant to the keywords you are trying to rank for. Getting a few video embeds is usually sufficient to rank a medium competition keyword.

Social Sharing: Share the video across all your social platforms such as Google+, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.. You always want to do the social sharing on your own platforms so you hit the correct target audience. it is good to share your videos in relevant groups to get more exposure and to share it will collegues to see if they will reshare it with their audience.

If all these steps are done you should be able to rank for almost any keyword in Google Video Search and YouTube. Start ranking those videos today!

The post Organically Rank Any YouTube Video in Google & YouTube Video Search first appeared on SEO Optimizers.

Last Update Mar 24, 2022 @ 11:16 am

To read Brian Dean’s post at Backlinko, comment backlinks sound not just outdated a technique, but even boring. In fact, he warns readers that they’re “NOT going to find anything about guest posting (blah) or blog comments (yawn)” in his post.

Yet you can still buy blog comment services from most SEO websites (run a web search and often you will post some of these services on the first page in the SERPs).

Matthias Hager at Quora said in 2011 about comment backlinks:

Efficient for SEO? Not usually. Efficient for beginning a relationship building process with bloggers? Sometimes.

He finds me in agreement. Comments are the social side of blogs, it’s where you will create a connection with the blogger and if you run into a very active community, other commenters. Big visibility booster if you play it well.

There are other more effective ways to build SEO friendly backlinks such as guest blog posting on niche relevant websites.

But sending out massive quantities of automated comments doesn’t build relationships — it builds spam, and even Matt Cutts warned against this practice a few years ago.

The Value Of Blog Comments Is In Comment Marketing, says Rand Fishkin

Rand Fishkin of MOZ says, in a Whiteboard Friday dated May 21st, 2012, says:

Comment marketing is this idea that I want to participate in the Web’s communities to earn the trust and respect of other people and the awareness. This is a blog post, right? Here’s some content. You can add comments down at the bottom. This happens all over the Web. There are literally tens of millions of blogs where this could be valuable, depending on your niche, and contributing here and earning the recognition of readers can earn you all sorts of returns.

Comments work because:

1. They reach the blogger and add value they can use to push the discussion further
2. They reach everybody who subscribed to the blogger’s comment feed (possibly other influencers, too)
3. They open possibilities for guest posting and collaborations

All of these opportunities make it easy to earn a backlink. A natural one, of course.

Valuable Comments Earn You Rewards

They did for me. Look at how this comment I posted on Tad Chef’s blog earned me a mention (with backlink) on Ahrefs: I did comment marketing by not thinking about marketing at all. I was myself all along, I commented on Tad Chef’s blog post because I truly cared and truly wanted to leave an helpful resource for him to use. When you pick a number of blogs to read and comment on a given day, forget about marketing — focus on the message your favorite blogger and influencer is getting across, take notes, then write a comment that speaks of humanity, not machinery. In other words, write a comment that provides value and helps without spamming. When you touch a person’s heart and not just their minds, you won.

Yes, Blog Commenting Still Works For SEO

Provided that you share value — and you do it genuinely — your comment still. If you want to do comment marketing at its best, forget about marketing altogether — at least until you have written your comment, before you hit ‘Submit’. As Rand Fishkin states in his Whiteboard Friday post, your comments “need to be build awareness, meaning people recognize you when you’re commenting, they recognize what organization you’re with. You build trust”. Traffic and backlinks are a consequence of trust.

Some more reading on blog commenting for SEO

• Blog Commenting – A Practical Guide For Bloggers by Amit Sharma
• Is Backlinking from Blog Comments a Good or Bad SEO Tactic? by Bill Walls

How do you comment on important blogs in your niche? Do you just seek backlinks or do you try to add value and create connections? Share in the comments.

The post Comment Backlinks: Do They Still Work For SEO? first appeared on SEO Optimizers.

Are you still wondering what domain extension to choose for your new blog or your new project?

Registrars tend to stress the benefits of a certain TLD over another in terms of SEO, but should you listen to that advice?

Actually, NO. There are plenty of myths around the role of TLDs and domain names in SEO and I wrote this post to dispel the most known and talked to help you make informed decisions and avoid damage to your branding and SEO.

TLD Doesn’t Make Ranking

It has been debated over and over in the years, but Google has always denied any benefits of a certain TLD over another in terms of SEO.

Last time it was in July 2015, when John Mueller said on Google+ to clear any doubts and misconceptions: “if you spot a domain name on a new TLD that you really like, you’re keen on using it for longer, and understand there’s no magical SEO bonus, then go for it.”

Also, on the Google blog, Mueller adds:

Q: Will a .BRAND TLD be given any more or less weight than a .com?
A: No. Those TLDs will be treated the same as a other gTLDs. They will require the same geotargeting settings and configuration, and they won’t have more weight or influence in the way we crawl, index, or rank URLs.

Your chosen TLD won’t make or miss any future Google rankings for your website. What it really takes for you to rank is to work smart on your content, marketing and networking efforts.

As Neil Patel says in his blog, “The major factor in whether TLDs have an effect on SEO is whether the domain contains keywords. Of course, you and I know that Exact Match Domain names risk getting penalized.”

What really makes the difference, indeed, is keywords in your domain name, regardless of extension. In fact, Google has been penalizing EMDs (exact match domains) since 2012, so you should by all means avoid exact keyword domain names (like cheap-payday-loans.com) and instead focus on branding (think google.com, walmart.com, etc.).

When Does A TLD Count?

The problem may arise when certain TLDs — as well as certain IPs — are blacklisted or look suspicious because of spamming (mostly email spam), but in general the domain extension of your site does not play major role in your SEO efforts. gTLDs and the new TLDs are no exception. As long as you play it white hat and don’t spam, you’re fine to go.

Ensure that your site is on an IP that is not associated with spam and thus is not blacklisted. You can use WhatIsMyIPAddress.com to find out if your site IP is blacklisted.

Beware of free TLDs, however — because these have been massively used for spam and infection (like CO.CC and CZ.CC), Google has these in blacklist so your website would never get a chance to rank. Always research news about your chosen free TLD to see if it makes a viable choice while you wait to buy standard TLD.

The post Are TLDs Really Relevant for SEO? first appeared on SEO Optimizers.

Does Ghostblogging Work?

Last Update Jun 4, 2024 @ 1:03 pm

Remember how SEO used to go before Google Webmaster Guidelines? Optimizing a website for search engines was a mere collection of tips and tricks that did the job just fine. You could stuff your page with keyword; you could build a gazillion of low quality backlinks and get rewarded for that.

There are webmasters and SEOs who still attempt to ‘optimize’ their websites (or their clients’) using these old tricks, but they end up with a penalty or they don’t get indexed at all.

That’s because they miss out on today’s most important SEO asset: honesty.

I’ve always believed in honesty. I apply it in all things in my life. But I didn’t realize how important this virtue was in SEO until I started to use SEO for work — and no matter how much I may personally dislike Google’s guidelines and defy them whenever I can, I realized I can’t do the same with my clients’ websites.

Being ‘honest’ in Google’s terms means certain things over others and I had to be honest in Google’s terms to make things really work for my clients.

This article is a short case study that takes directly from my 17-months experience as a ghostblogger with SEO and social media duties for a team of blog owners that will remain anonymous in this post, and that I will call ITIPComp (the name is completely fictional).

An initial scenario that required honesty

When the ITIPComp team e-mailed me to inquire about my writing services, they were not just concerned about their rankings, but they also had a urge to build up their blog’s reputation and attract traffic and a human following.

In other words, they needed to:

• Come up with a specific identity of their blog and work it into a sub-niche to make their blog stand out in the crowd
• Spread blog and niche related keywords and key-phrases in deep links and around the Web in natural contexts
• Get their blog known on Social Media
• Get traffic and rankings from Google.

Setting short, long-term goals on a 100% honest ghostblogging + SEO strategy

The first time the ITIPComp team contacted me, all they needed was a writer. My job was to come up with 3 short articles (500-600 words) a week and to use keywords in a way that would help the blog rank and gain traffic without falling in Google’s bad book.

There was a big problem with that newborn blog, though: it was like every other blog in the same niche. It had no special take, no identity. It was never going to rank like that, and if it did, it wouldn’t be for long and users would have had no interest in choosing this blog over another, perhaps more popular.

So I offered to tailor our ghostblogging + SEO plan on a specific angle, a take that would tell the blog part from any other and would help the team stand out for their humor, vision and honesty.

The ITIPComp team worked together to come up with a logo, a vision and an About Us page that would convey all these traits, then the keywords they wanted to rank for, and topics they wanted to offer to the public. they SEO team previously tried to optimize and I analyzed the number and quality of backlinks and citations her company had around the Web.

How to face the challenge of a little known blog without entering the questionable area of black hat SEO?

With my client, I chose to take small steps and to build links and reputation through quality content writing.

I’m a freelance blogger, and writing was the first service she hired me for before I became her SEO. So, why not?

The plan involved intense content production and the following SEO and Marketing efforts:

• Interviews through the MyBlogU platform – involved other bloggers with the blog through interviews and citations.
• Blog Comments – under my ghost (agreed-upon) name or the team name. Comments were consistent with the blog post content and provide value for the owner and their readership to engage with.
• SEO – all posts were optimized for search engines and we used keywords in titles and hastags on both posts and social.
• Social Media Updates and Community Involvement – used social media and web communities to post updates on new content available at the blog and to answer users’ questions and help them solve their problems.
• Content marketing through Social Media and the Kingged web community – user involvement and feedback from all the platforms helped us improve our plan for the growth of the blog.
• Wise deep linking – we made good use of internal linking to boost rankings and help users find related content.
• Weekly or Bi-Weekly Communications / Activity Reports – with percentages of growth or decrease in SERPs and in the traffic rank chart. Social activities were also reported.

On the client’s side, the ITIPCorp team worked on some local marketing.

The results: honest work paid off

The ITIPComp blog slowly but steadly increased in worldwide traffic, Google rankings and reputation. No manual actions were ever present in Webmaster Tools. This blog grew while staying clean in Google’s book.

We never hit more than 100-150 unique visits daily, because doing it

• from scratch
• without an existing community
• entirely trick-less

is hard… but not impossible. The blog earned a small but loyal community and some quality backlinks while the ITIPComp team and I worked together. Here is a screenshot from Google Analytics:

The peak between Jan 10 and Jan 19 was caused by an interview-based blog post we published on Jan 10. The added social shares from the interviewees caused a boost in traffic, confirming the effectiveness of collaborative posts in helping traffic and backlinks grow.

The ITIPComp team still needs to work on their blog community and on adding guest posts to the marketing mix, but the work done over these 17 months has laid a solid base for future work.

Why does honesty in SEO pay off?

Let’s list a few takeaways from the case study:

• Google’s guidelines encourage webmasters to use an honest SEO strategy to earn backlinks and rankings: if you want to stay in Google’s good book and improve your rankings without risking a penalty, you should stick to these guidelines.
• Being honest in Google’s terms doesn’t mean you have to just wait and hope your pages get found, liked and linked to: it takes good on-page SEO and marketing effort to keep your blog alive and thriving.
• It is possible to build traffic and reputation from scratch: it takes more effort, hard work and the patience to connect with other bloggers in the same niche, to be helpful and friendly, to build a community around your blog and to write content that makes the difference in the reader’s life.
• A genuine, truly helpful social media and commenting activity complements SEO and both complement other forms of marketing (online and offline).
• Collaboration with other bloggers, interviews and responsivity to feedback can mean a great deal to the growth of your blog.

How did you build solid traffic, rankings and a community around your blog? Share your story.

The post Honesty in SEO Pays Off – A Ghostblogging Case Study first appeared on SEO Optimizers.

There are WordPress plugins for pretty much every purpose out there, but when it comes to Marketing and SEO, you can count the good ones on the fingers of one hand (maybe two, if your search goes deep enough).

In my 12 years old of blogging for personal and professional reasons, only 6 WordPress plugins made it to my top ranks in terms of user experience and quality of service, and in this round-up post, I briefly review each of them and tell you why it’s a good plugin to use for your blog.

1. SumoMe

Plugin URL: https://wordpress.org/plugins/sumome/

Also known on WordPress’ plugin page as the “Free Tools to grow your Email List, Social Sharing and Analytics”. SumoMe is an amazing plugin, easy to use soon after installation: all it asks is for you to register an account (name and email address), after which you will be shown a list of in-plugin functions you can activate, like a conversion bar, a newsletter, social buttons and more.

Some of the features I have found particularly helpful in running my blog are the lightbox “List Builder”, the full-screen CTA “Welcome Mat” and “Highlighter”, a function that allows readers to select part of the text and tweet it with a link to the full article. One of the big benefits of having SumoMe installed is that this all-in-one plugin will fullfill most of your marketing and SEO needs, so you need nothing else. You may as well have only SumoMe and be done with that.

You can also integrate SumoMe Can with MailChimp or Aweber to have the best of both platform.

2. Social Media and Share Icons (Ultimate Social Media)

Plugin URL: https://wordpress.org/plugins/ultimate-social-media-icons/

Ultimate Social Media is a special plugin, one that asks you questions upon installation. For example, it asks which icons you want on your site and what do you want them to do, or if you want to display share count next to them (more details here). You will then select which icons to use (RSS and Email are labeled as “Mandatory”). Icons come in several designs (16 overall), so you get to choose the one that matches your blog design better.

This plugin allows your visitors to subscribe to your blog via email, too.

3. Marketing Optimizer for WordPress

Plugin URL: https://wordpress.org/plugins/marketing-optimizer/

This is an A/B testing and conversion rate optimization software for WordPress that tracks and analyzes all your content and landing page, as well as offer professional landing page templates.

It helps optimize your conversion rate for better ROI and to work on your most trafficked pages.

4. SEO Post Content Links

Plugin URL: https://wordpress.org/plugins/content-links/

This plugin automatically links to your categories when it meets the keyword in your posts. You can also add lists of keywords and key-phrases to automatically link to each of your posts from other posts.

If you need automated help to complement your internal link building efforts, go for this plugin. As the plugin author reassures, “You own links, that was created without this plugin, will stay untouchable.”

5. Yoast SEO (ex WordPress SEO)

Plugin URL: https://wordpress.org/plugins/wordpress-seo/

When it comes to SEO plugins for WordPress, Yoast SEO is the plugin. Almost all of the most popular bloggers and SEOs out there use it to optimize their websites for search engines.

Yoast SEO can make a difference for your blog posts, because it helps you analyze every aspect of your On-Page SEO, from keywords to readability to alt tags. Every analysis comes with recommendations and a yellow or green light to let you know whether you optimized the post just fine or if it needs more work.

I also recommend you watch Neil Patel’s “How to Fine Tune the Yoast WordPress SEO Plugin” video tutorial at QuickSprout.

6. Broken Link Checker

Plugin URL: https://wordpress.org/plugins/broken-link-checker/

Why is this plugin here, while not strictly SEO or marketing software? Well, first of all, because broken links negatively impact your SEO and UX; secondly, because bad UX leads to lost opportunities to market your content and anything your content tries to convey.

Broken Link Checker monitors your links, internal and external, to see whether they’re broken or not, or if they redirect to some different URL. You can also use an option to make the plugin add a rel=nofollow attribute to all broken links, to save your rankings.

More Plugins?

Check out the following resources (thanks awesome bloggers for sharing these gems!):

• How to Maximize Your SEO Traffic With These Must Have WordPress Plugins by Neil Patel at QuickSprout
• 7 Essential WordPress Plugins for Content Marketing by Syed Balkhi at Search Engine Journal

What plugins do you use to aid your Marketing and SEO efforts?

The post 6 WordPress Plugins for Marketing and SEO first appeared on SEO Optimizers.

Photo Credit: http://www.candidwriter.com (cc)

On September 18h, 2015, a Google Webmaster Blog post came up to shake webmasters and SEOs and give everybody with a website some food for thought — Google is no longer granting an easy and painless reconsideration to those websites that violate Webmaster Guidelines again and again after they have been successfully reconsidered.

To quote the blog post: “Such repeated violations may make a successful reconsideration process more difficult to achieve. Especially when the repeated violation is done with a clear intention to spam, further action may be taken on the site.”

To be honest, I always suspected that, but the fact that Google’s team is making this position public might mean the case has not been rare after all.

What Marketing Experts Think About It

I asked the three Marketing experts I interviewed for the post on HTTPS and blogs what their reaction to this news was.

Here are the responses:

Cormac Reynolds, company director at MyOnlineMarketer.co.uk:

Cormac Reynolds

I think it’s fair enough. You can’t just keep spamming and respamming. Yes, we can all push the boundaries and get hit with a manual penalty, but to do the same thing repeatedly doesn’t stack up well. Additionally, it takes up the manual reviewing time that could be spent on other legit businesses reviews trying to make the effort to go down a straight line.

David Leonhardt, president at THGM Writers:

David Leonhardt

Wow!  this is shocking news.  This implies that for the past decade or more, Google has been repeatedly penalizing sites and letting them offend again with impunity (well, with no more penalty than for their first offence, which is a lot like impunity wearing a mask of contrition).  I had always assumed that Google has a list of “bad boys” that they keep in a special dungeon and periodically send out a special squad of paintball hitmen.

Lukasz Zelezny, head of organic acquisition at Zelezny.uk:

Lukasz Zelezny

Google has never professed to allow black hat SEO, so I’m quite surprised that so many people were shocked by this announcement.  Yes, every webmaster will make mistakes from time to time – just look at the whole guest posting fiasco of 2013 – however when a site repeatedly gets penalised over and over again, I think it’s clear that the site owner either really has no clue what he’s doing, or that he’s spamming the search results.  In the former case, you’d assume that after one Google penalty, you’d start getting clued up, so I believe those that see numerous penalties are aware of what they are doing and haven’t been too worried about it as the short term traffic has made it worth their while.

Webmasters who try to adhere to Google’s guidelines should have nothing to worry about.  But if you do have cause for concern, it’s worth subscribing to the Google blog and staying up to date with what the search giant says.  You may also want to hire someone in the SEO industry to perform an audit of your site to ensure you aren’t breaking any rules.  If you’re not breaking the Google guidelines on purpose, though, you shouldn’t have anything to worry about.  The new penalty should be good news for those of us who stick to the rules.

A Final Thought (And A Takeaway)

It may be easy to fall in the trap to game Google again and again, but while a website might escape an algorithmic penalty, it’s unlikely it would escape a manual one — and manual actions are anything but rare.

Unless you don’t care about Google’s opinion of your website anymore and you prefer other traffic sources and marketing methods, to get caught violating Guidelines a second or third or further time can backfire — long term.

When you find out that Google’s Guidelines are not for you, making an effort to change your traffic and lead generation plan is a more effective and less stressing option than to continue playing hide-and-seek with Google.

What’s your reaction to this news? How do you deal with Google penalties (if you do)?

The post Google Says Less Reconsideration Chances For Repeated Violations first appeared on SEO Optimizers.

Search Engine Optimization Matters

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can make or break a new business, and has a huge impact on whether a new site is commercial success. The general concept, for the uninitiated, is that search engines use criteria from your site, plug them into an algorithm, and then use the result to decide if your site contains the information people are looking for.

In principle, it’s very straightforward. In practical terms, it’s a real challenge because search engines tend to be very secretive about what those criteria actually are. Because of this, there is a whole industry of modern day code breakers attempting to reverse engineer Google’s algorithms day in and day out. Placing higher in the search results is big money, so, sooner or later, the inner workings of the black box are puzzled out.

Booms and Busts

People being people, about a tenth of a second after someone figures out what the rules are, everyone starts gaming them, and optimizing their pages to appease the search engines and inflate their ranking for various search terms irrespective of actual content value.

This is, as we’ve said, a huge industry.

Of course, once everyone starts gaming the system, spam begins to sprout up everywhere, and the overall quality of the search results begins to drop.

SEO Rules Change

The big search engine companies don’t take this lying down, however, no; Google and Bing are constantly updating and changing their algorithms to weed out spam, prevent us from gaming the system, and, also, to improve the predictive ability of their search engines.

That’s why, a few years back, SEO was mostly a matter of keyword stuffing (but not stuffing too much) but 2015 was the year of long-from content and long-tail keywords.

What 2016 will be remains to be seen, but Google has already been busy shaking up the rankings in January, so it’s likely there’s going to be more to see in the months ahead.

What’s New in 2016

The biggest SEO change for developers this year has been Google’s update of their core algorithm. Everything they’ve done and changed isn’t apparent just yet, but there’s not too much mystery, because changes aren’t incorporated into Google’s core algorithm until it’s a fair bet they don’t need to be watched constantly to avoid disaster.

In other words, Google’s probably just taken their big changes from 2015 (and before) and set them free to run without supervision. In other words, Panda has been moved to the core, and no one’s completely sure what that means, but it’s probably important. It seems likely that various mobile search ranking preferences have also been subsumed, but it’s too early to tell.

All of which sort of leads to the question, “If everyone is unsure what’s going on, how am I supposed to keep the sites I manage optimized?”

Well, there are a few things you can do to stay ahead of the curve.

How to Stay on Top of SEO Trends

1. Install Plugins that do most the work for you.

If you’re using WordPress, and you probably should be, unless you’ve got a custom coded site, there are a number of plugins that do much of the heavy SEO lifting for you by automating many tasks and telling you if you’re making mistakes. They update regularly to reflect consensus changes in SEO practices.

The big one is Yoast.

2. Follow a few search engine blogs.

When all else fails, turn to the experts. The thing is, you need to be sure you’re finding sources who stay on top of developments. An expert who knew absolutely everything about SEO in 2014, but hasn’t kept up on things, is the next best thing to useless in 2016.

You don’t have to turn yourself into an expert, but very rarely is knowing more than you need to a disadvantage in life. On top of that, the evolving means and methods of how we find, collate, and deliver information is one of the most salient issues of modern civilization. If the internet is a lever moving the world, then search engines are the fulcrum on which it rests. So find a blog and follow it.

3. Learn the rules of the system.

Google makes a real effort to tell you what not to do, so you don’t get penalized. Make sure you check in on that regularly, or, if this is your first site, learn them. Since they’re setting the rules, even if the exact process might not be clear, following their rules should keep your site from being penalized.

The process is more than worth the time invested, and the will probably help you create better content—which is the next point on this list.

4. Create Great Content

While we don’t ever know exactly what’s going on inside the search engine algorithms, we know exactly what the goal of those search engines happens to be: Delivering users to the best content on the subject they’re looking for.

In this, at least, nothing has changed since the beginning. The take-home, then, is that you should create content with value to the people who find it. If your content is the best answer to a search query then whatever changes Google makes will be with the goal of bringing people to your content (you know, in a large and impersonal sense).

If you’re working to create great content that users will find helpful, well, you’re probably going to make content that’s pretty close to optimized, whatever minor tweaks and changes come your way in the months ahead.

The post 4 Ways to to Stay on Top of SEO first appeared on SEO Optimizers.

Even more controversial after the mass penalty on MyBlogGuest.com and the “all nofollow” reaction from eConsultancy that followed. Guest blogging really seems like a gray area to find your marketing and link building efforts in right now.

But it’s a question everybody keeps asking: “Does guest blogging still help with SEO?”

The answer is neither yes or no, but actually slightly more complicated.

I got two writers to share their ideas for this post. Their insight makes it clear that things have changed, but not so much to the smart (and honest) business.

Read on and take away.

Guest Blogging Doesn’t Help With SEO Rankings As It Used To…

Deborah Anderson from Social Web Cafe recalls when it was easier to rank with guest blogging and why it doesn’t work as it used to:

Previously, there was some SEO benefit with guest blogging because of the “dofollow” links.  Of course, there is no such thing as a dofollow link.  What it really is is the absence of the “nofollow” rel tag connected to the link.  This told Google to follow the link (dofollow) and that provided SEO benefit.

What happened is that some people were putting up very inferior “crap” articles and the search results (SERPs) were reflecting poor quality content.  Therefore, Google singlehandedly put a stop to that benefit, to stop people from putting up poor quality articles only for the purpose of the SEO benefit.  That move hurt the rest of us who didn’t mind the SEO benefit but were guest blogging for the other benefits.

What I just described is the direct benefit.  The indirect benefits of guest blogging still exist.  Those include branding, exposure, building the writing portfolio, networking, etc.  Also, there are some sites that do not use the nofollow tag (in other words, dofollow), but those are becoming fewer and fewer.  What happened back in March of 2014, to MyBlogGuest’s clients (basically all of them) resulted in everyone changing their links, site-wide, to nofollow.  Those who did not remained under penalty from Google.  That caused other sites to also change their links to nofollow so that they would not be penalized by Google.

It was a brilliant move by Google, to inflict fear across the globe, for publishers and writers on the Internet.  In one fell swoop they were able to make a statement about the type of content they want to show in their search engine.  We, as consumers of Google products, are to blame, as well, because we gave them the power to be the top dog for search.   And, what can I say.  I love their calendar and I am the “hangout queen” using the Google hangout product.

There are still indirect SEO benefits to guest blogging (i.e. a viral article that happens to do well in the search rankings), but it is not the SEO benefit that it used to be a couple of years ago.  If you are a writer, your best bet is to write for other reasons and then count the SEO benefits as icing on the cake.  If you are a publisher, your best bet is to nofollow the links that are contained in the guest articles that you receive.

It follows that guest blogging as a way to build links and help with SEO is no longer a viable strategy, even though guest blogging always helped and still helps with your branding efforts and it definitely helps to pull links from the Web in indirect ways, like Deborah suggests, which the next paragraph is all about.

BUT You Can Still Guest Blog To Indirectly Help Your SEO Rankings

Not all is lost with the “guest blogging penalty”. Here is what David Leonhardt from THGM Ghostwriter Service has to say about it:

Anything that spreads your name is good for SEO.  Every time you put your name out there, there is a greater chance that people will look for your website, find something they really like and link to it or share it on social media, and that’s good for SEO.

If there is a hyperlink, even a NoFollow one, that serves the same purpose.  If the link is DoFollow, even better.

The value of guest blogging for SEO depends greatly on the quality of the content on your website.  If lots of people read your amazing guest post, then rush to see what’s on your website, only to ding boring stuff, forget earning links and social shares from them.

When you get nofollow links to your blog posts and articles, users will still find them and link back to them as helpful resources in their posts (editorially) if they deem your content trustworthy and authoritative. That is what I do here at Bosmol as a writer anytime I stumble upon an amazing resource that fits into a post I’m writing— I go ahead and link it, whether that link was originally nofollowed or not.

Continue to guest blog and let users find you, if not search engines. In the end, like the say “all chickens come home to roost”, you will still get backlinks that are beneficial for your SEO efforts.

Do YOU guest blog? Has your opinion of guest blogging changed over time or are you still a fan?

Share in the comments below.

The post Does Guest Blogging Help With SEO Rankings? first appeared on SEO Optimizers.

Last Update Mar 20, 2020 @ 3:14 pm

It gets tough when you are a total beginner at the technical sides of running your own blog or website. I remember it took me a while to figure out the difference between the .htaccess file and robots.txt

Even though I always loved anything IT and computers, the first time you encounter a new object or concept, your mind needs a bit of time to absorb the workings of it.

And .htaccess and robots.txt are the two files in the root folder of your website that you really can’t live without, so learning what they are and how they work is critical.

In this post, I will explain to you what they are, why they matter and how you can use them to your advantage, with a few examples to make learning easier and faster.

The Difference Between .HTACCESS and ROBOTS.txt File

A first general definition of this difference is that .htaccess is used mostly for internal access, whereas robots.txt manages external access.

“Internal” because .htaccess tells your Apache server how to handle page and file names, URLs and a user’s way to access these resources; it’s for your site to handle its own features.

Robots.txt, on the contrary, regulates “external” access, because it tells search engines and other web tools what to read and index and whatnot (but a human user can still browse and read).

Some examples:

.htaccess for a WordPress installation with “nice” permalinks:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>

Robots.txt for a WordPress blog that disallows Googlebot but allows other search engines, but also allows none to crawl their /familypics folder:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /familypics

User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /

In other words .htaccess protects your site from people, robots.txt from machines.

Why You Can’t Live Without .HTACCESS and ROBOTS.txt

Without .htaccess, your site will behave in its default way or may not work at all, depending on the software you use. For example, the standard installation of WordPress doesn’t include an .htaccess file: WordPress automatically creates the file when you configure your permalinks under Settings -> Permalinks. If you don’t set your permalinks, the default configuration for your URLs will stay the “unfriendly” http://example.com/?p=203, with “203” being the post ID in the MySQL database.

Without robots.txt, search engine and tool crawlers (and scrapers) would index or copy your entire website without exceptions, including files you want to keep “private”. See the example from my previous paragraph about this.

The modern Web user doesn’t like “unfriendly” URLs and search engines don’t want to find any “junk” present on your website when their spiders meet it, so having your .htaccess and robots.txt files correctly configured only works to your advantage.

How You Can Benefit From These Two Files

The technical side of these two files is only a small portion of the benefits they can bring to your table. There are also benefits connected with UX (User Experience) and SEO.

With .htaccess you can:

• Create user-friendly URLs
• Redirect users away from specific files and directories
• Manage 301 redirects (you can use a generator tool)

With robots.txt you can:

• Tell search engines what (not) to index
• Disallow crawlers from other services (like Archive.org)

Takeaway:

Configure your .htaccess and robots.txt files as soon as you set up your website or blog. They are critical to the wellbeing of your site in the search index and from a user’s viewpoint.

More resources to check out:

• Introduction to URL Rewriting by Paul Tero at Smashing Magazine
• Robots.Txt: A Beginners Guide by Boris Demaria at Woorank
• Robots.txt Tutorial by Aaron Wall

The post Difference Between .HTACCESS and ROBOTS.txt File first appeared on SEO Optimizers.

Country laws prevent marketers to clutter their recipients’ inboxes and often the simple act of sending a commercial email without the end user’s opt-in is considered unlawful. (That is how it works in my country, Italy, too.)

So you have to make the extra (creative) effort to grow your list while keeping your current subscribers loyal at the same time. (And that can be tough, too! Read what Rand Fishkin of MOZ has to say about it.)

In this post, I will give you 7 ideas to grow your email marketing list without triggering spam filters or getting the law against you.

1. Send Email Outreach Messages, NOT Marketing Messages

Don’t send out unsolicited marketing messages– besides being illegal in many countries, it’s also surefire way to get your efforts in the recipient’s Spam folder or, worse, Trash bin.

If you want to be taken seriously, you need to act like a human being.

Outreach to the recipient, don’t sell them stuff. Be human and generous, don’t ask them to join your list.

Ask recipients if they want to opt-in for a freebie or a special offer, but don’t give the impression that they will have to join a list, too. You can ask them to join your list only after they have received their free good or offer.

Your subscribers should always feel in charge of their presence in your list, never manipulated into it.

2. Leverage Transactional Emails and Support Emails

Transactional emails are all those emails you send out automatically every time a user subscribes or unsubscribes, downloads a freebie, joins a community, and so on.

Support emails are emails you or your team send to users who requested helpin a certain area. Automated emails in response to support requests also belong to this type of messages

The marketing power of these emails is often underrated.

I’ll tell you why.

When users receive a transactional email, they are usually in a relaxed state of mind, so they are more receptive of any gentle offers you may want to present to them.

Of course, you should keep the CAN-SPAM Act guidelines in mind, so such offers should appear after the transactional content, possibly in a “P.S.” at the end of the email, which conveys a sense of one-to-one intimacy that is characteristic of a letter.

You can leverage support emails, too, with support-related offers. For example, if you run a list where you share tips and tutorials for using your products and services, by all means add a note to your support emails to direct your users there!

3. Integrate Email Marketing and Social Media

Last year Bosmol.com co-blogger Lavinia Tauro wrote an interesting post about integrating social media with email marketing. I don’t need to repeat what she said (her post is great, by the way!) but I recommend you follow each social medium’s guidelines when it comes to business communications to avoid being flagged as a spammer.

Everything else is creativity on your part. What you really need to have is a knowledge as profound as possible of your audience.

And did you know you can actually turn your Twitter followers into list subscribers? One way to do this is to tweet special content and offers you know your Twitter audience loves, and to make it available by list subscription only (make it easy! Name and email are enough.)

4. Encourage Re-sharing Of Your Emails

Make it easy to your subscribers to re-share the emails you send them, especially when they come with incentives and free goods that may help attract new subscribers.

Simple “Tell a friend!” links or buttons will work, but you could work out something more complex like “Share this free E-book with 5 friends and get an extra bonus Tutorial!”.

You know your audience, so you also know what is more appealing to it and most likely to convert well.

5. Integrate Email Marketing With Other Opt-ins

If you already use other opt-ins on your website — for example, you ask your visitors to follow you on Twitter or fill a form to get a white paper or a coupon code, or even to place a comment on your blog — you can combine them with list opt-in.

An example from a WordPress blog I run:

There are tons of opportunities to capture and grow your email list on your site; it’s all about finding the right ones. A well-timed popup or a form on a page that’s relevant to your customers’ interests can be just what your customer needs to sign up.

6. Add Your List to Your Business Card, Not Just Your Website

You already have your business number, email and website address on your business card. Why not add your list address, too?

It is much easier for a prospect to subscribe and see what kind of quality you can offer before they actually hire you. (It’s called evidence of trust.)

7. Make Your Emails Pieces to Keep, Not Throw-Aways

Never go sloppy on the quality of your emails— subscribers may forgive one or two over the course of a year, but if you begin to deliver content of lower and lower quality, you are bound to see your unsubscription rate increase over time and put your list in danger.

Instead, make each email you send out to your list a piece to keep— and to share (see #4 in this post).

They will not just keep your current subscribers… subscribed, but they will also attract referral subscriptions through sharing and more subscribers through word-of-mouth.

So growing your email marketing list may not be easy, but it can be done. What are YOUR tips to grow your list?

Further email marketing ideas:

• Top Six Ways to Grow Your Email Subscription List by Linda West at MarketingProfs.com
• 25 Simple Ways to Grow Your Email List by Andy Pitre at HubSpot.com
• 41 Tips that Put Over 10,000 People on My Email Subscriber List by Ramsay Taplin of BlogTyrant

The post 7 Ways To Grow Your Email Marketing List first appeared on SEO Optimizers.

Last Update Jun 10, 2022 @ 12:03 am

In the past, SEO companies used direct submissions and SEO tools to get links. These outdated tools and tactics are no longer useful. In fact, a few of the old techniques can actually attract penalization from Google.

Today, most webmasters are well versed with the advanced SEO tactics to find link building opportunities but analyzing these activities through Google Search is a whole new ball game. To remain on top of this game, you need to be well versed with the search operators.

Search operators enable you to clear the clutter from your search and make it more effective.

The infographic here narrows them down for you through an easy-to-understand description. Below, I’ve explained, in detail, some of the vital search operators that will aid in your efforts.

Find links to your website

 Don’t you wonder which other websites are linking to your webpages? Finding these links which are indexed by Google is easier than you thought.

All you need to do is type “link:” followed by your website and the search results will cough up all the webpages linked to your website.

For instance, if your website is seooptimizers.com, just type “link:seooptimizers.com” (without space and without quotes), but if you check this out then you will find very few links.

This is because Google restricts showing all the links publicly.

Instead, I’ve found a better approach. It involves simply removing the home page links from the query.

To get the complete picture, instead of the above search, try“Link:seooptimizers.com –seooptimizers.com” and see the magic.

Find your webpages pages indexed by Google

 Now, this can be a vital source of information.

To find out which of your webpages have been indexed by Google, simply type “Site: yourwebsite.com” and all the pages of this website indexed by Google will appear before you.

Guide Google to Yield Exactly What You Want

It can be quite frustrating to not get the exact results you are looking for.

Eliminating this problem is actually very simple. Use of quotes in your search query gives you the exact results you are looking for.

For instance, if you are looking for guest blogging opportunities, simply type guest blogging within quotes, like this – “guest blogging.” You’ll be amazed by the number of highly relevant exact matches that Google brings forth.

Check cache to look through Google’s eyes

Not everything that’s on your website might be indexed by Google.

To see how Google views your website, you just need to type “cache: yourwebsite.com”.

This will give you an idea of what Google saw the last time it visited your website.

Get comprehensive info about your website

Using “info:” is perhaps the best way to gather quick information about several aspects of your website at one go. Typing “info: yourwebsite.com” will give you information such as pages that link to your website, cached version, similar pages and all details about your domain.

These are just a few search operators at your disposal but there is a vast array of advanced search operators that can help you to find out more precise results.

I have highlighted several vital operators in the infographic below. Just explore them and get to know them better. Don’t forget to let me know your thoughts in the comment section.

Share this Image On Your Site

<p><a href=’https://seooptimizers.com/advanced-search-operators-for-seo-link-building-infographic/’><img src=’https://seooptimizers.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/A-Detailed-Guide-On-Advanced-Search-Operators-For-SEO-Link-Building.jpg’ alt=’Advanced Google Search Operators’ width=’540px’ border=’0′ /></a></p><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /> <p><strong>Created by <a href=”https://seooptimizers.com”>SEO Optimizers</a></strong></p><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /> <p>

Extensive Guide on How to Use Google Search Operators

If you google almost all the time and do not know what the Google search operators are, you miss out a lot. These operators can make your search twice faster and more detailed because you will find what you are looking for at one go.

How Do I Get Google to Search a Word

Before you learn about Google search operators, review how you can search a word on Google in a fundamental way. You can use your computer or mobile devices like tablets and smartphones to open chrome browser applications.

On the top, you will see an address bar where you can type the word that you want to search.

After typing the word, press enter.

How Do I Do a Specific Google Search

Click the three dots aligned vertically on the top right of the page if you want to find the word within a specific page. After clicking it, click find. A bar will appear on the top right part of the screen.

You can place the word there and find what you want to see in highlights. You may also press CTRL+ F to make this process faster.

If you want to look for the word that you found on a webpage, you can highlight it, press right click and search.

For smartphone users, you can search what you find on a particular page by tapping the word to search to highlight it. A panel will pop below the webpage, tap it to see the results.

Please take note that you should set your default browser to Google to be able to do it.

Moreover, if you want to find the specific results for the word that you are searching on Google, you should use Google search operators.

What Are the Search Operators

Whether you are searching for SEO or anything, Google search operators can make your research easier. The result of Google’s search engine is most likely according to your preference for what you want to see.

These are special commands that you can use on the search engine that tells Google what you want or do not want to see on its search results. You do not have to memorize these operators because they are easy to remember. After all, they are short commands. Additionally, many of them are characters that symbolize their function.

For this reason, you do not have to worry about forgetting it.

Although search operators seem useful for researchers and SEO specialists, it seems like Google is starting to get rid of some of the useful ones. There were tons of helpful search operators in the past that people cannot use nowadays.

Therefore, you should know all the search operators that you can still use. Also, it will be helpful to know which are not working or require some trial and error.

How Do I Use Google Advanced Search Operators

You can combine these commands, but knowing the right combination is not easy to reach your target results. However, knowing how to do it will give you an advantage over the others who do not know it.

Here are the SEO tactics that you can use.

Aim for specific results.

The primary function of search operators is to help you get targeted results. That is why you can use their multiple combinations to acquire the results that you want to see.

Exclude the terms that you do not like to see on the results.

The exclusion symbol to get rid of the words or searches on the result is (-). Typing it before the term you want to exclude allows you not to see it on the results page.

This article will delve into this operator later.

Combine the exclusions with exact terms that you do not like to see.

If there are specific words that you do not like to see on the results, you can combine (-) with (“”). For example, you do not like to see the word ‘lorem’ on the search results. What you will do is this:

-“lorem”

Find out how Google indexes your site.

You can find out how Google indexes your site by using the operator (site:) before the domain name. For example:

site:loremipsum.com

Get rid of subdomains

You can get rid of the staging sites and subdomains by using the (-inurl:) search operator.

Find duplicate content

You can also use search operators to find duplicate content on a site. All you have to do is combine the search operator (site:) and (“”).

You use (site:) to index the domain. Use the (“”) to find the internal duplicate of the word inside this operator.

For example:

site:loremipsum.com “dolor”

Which Search Operator Does Google Enable by Default

There are three search operators that Google sets as default now. The first one is (AND), the second is (OR), and the third one is (~).

Google’s logical default is the operator (AND) between the terms of your searches. Google typically ignores both the operators (AND) and (OR) because these are the search defaults.

Also, Google ignores articles, single digits, and other non-valuable words.

The third one is an unreliable operator because Google’s default is now searching for the term’s synonyms.

How do I Search Without a Word

Google is not human, although it seems like it is intelligent enough to know almost anything. It does not know the specific results that you want to return. As a result, once you search for a word, such as ‘divergent,’ it will return all searches related to divergent, whether it is about the movie or the definition of the word.

To let Google know that you do not want it to include particular searches, use the operator (-). For example, you wish to search for a divergent definition, but you do not want it to return results about the Divergent movie. What you need to do is type this:

Divergent -movie -film

Typing these words will get rid of the search results about Divergent movie.

As you can see, using search operators is easy and fun. They allow you to find all you are looking for without cracking your brain to use more specific words to search on Google.

The post Advanced Google Search Operators for SEO Link Building first appeared on SEO Optimizers.

Problem:

Their problem was that they had a relatively new website, with little traffic and exposure.  The wanted us to come in and optimize their website and brand their company on the internet to make it easy for users to find.

Solution:

Our solution was a six month project where we came in and made some significant changes to their website.  We began by researching and understanding their industry and their potential customers.  We wanted to get inside the company owners head to see what he envisioned.  From there we researched keywords that will best suit their website, targeting customers that are ready and willing to make a purchase.  Once the initial website analysis took place we began to make on-site optimization changes.  This means setting up analytic tracking tools, adding keyword rich content, changing the HTML, internal website linking structure, and adding new pages.  After all the pages were optimized we submitted the website to all the major search engines.  We waited until the site was SEO friendly before submitting to the search engines because we wanted to make a positive website impression to the search engine spiders.

After the on-site optimization was completed we began to make off-site optimization changes.  Starting off with local business searches and extensive link building we were able to properly optimize Hass Libre.  We built their inbound links through articles, press releases, directory submissions, forum posts, and more techniques.  We created a blog for Hass Libre to generate new content, inbound links, and to interact with their customers.  The blog was syndicated to the major site feeds, thus gaining even more exposure through each blog post.

We created a positive brand image through the social networking sites.  We set up accounts with the major networking sites and built a Facebook fan page, Twitter account, and LinkedIn profile.  These accounts let Hass Libre interact with others interested in the same industry.  We maintained a positive image throughout these sites and with their customers.  After a few months we were able to hand off the social networking accounts and the blog to Hass Libre to manage.  We taught them how to make status updates, new blog posts, and how to make them SEO friendly and keyword rich.

Outcome:

The final results are that Hass Libre dominates the search engines for competitive keywords in their niche such as “Eco-Friendly Clothing”, “Organic Clothing“, “Latin Grammy Gift Bags“, “Organic Clothing and Accessories”, and more!  As they continue to update their blog and social networking pages on a constant basis, they watch their traffic grow by at least 15% monthly.  Initially, the website traffic doubled within the first month and since then has continued growing.

Their return on investment turned out well!  They say an influx of new customers that they never could have expected.  They invested only a few thousand dollars and saw revenues that were triple this amount.

The post CASE STUDY: SEO Optimizers Improves Keyword Rankings and Traffic for Hass Libre first appeared on SEO Optimizers.

Title Tags are an important aspect of search engine optimization as they are the way to convey your marketing skills to your target audience. The wording should flow smoothly while containing important keywords. This is where the search engines and your target audience get a feel for what your website is about. You want to stress all the viral information in this limited area of space. This is your area for free advertising, so take full advantage of this. Put information like company name, and your targeted keywords that you have chosen for this page. Every page on your site should have unique title tags and meta tags.

2) Quality Content

Your content is very useful for the search engines in determining whether or not your website is relevant to your topic. You want quality, keyword rich content. You do not want to stuff your keywords, but place them sporadically throughout you site. Keyword stuffing is a black hat technique that will get you permanently banned from the search engines. Make sure that your content flows smoothly and rolls off the tongue easily. Remember humans, not search engines, have the ultimate decision to purchase your product or service. Write your content first for your audience and then add keywords where it makes sense.

3) Acquire Quality Links

Links are a valuable tool for gaining top search engine rankings. Links (back links) are viewed as a vote from one site to another, so the more links to your site; the more popular the search engines think your site is. Higher quality links from authority websites are weighed more heavily when ranking your site. So you want to acquire links from reputable websites that are popular. You want to get links that are related to your line of work to increase rankings. Make sure all your links are related in one way or another to your website. If not then your site will be penalized in the rankings, which is the opposite of what we are trying to achieve.

4) Number of Back Links

Recently, Google began to crack down on link farm sites (sites where you buy links) by penalizing them in the search engine rankings. Avoid link farms or buying links from non authority sites as they will only do more harm than good. Remember, it is not the quantity of links you have, but the quality of those links you do have. Make sure your links appear natural, not like they have been paid for. You must have something of quality to offer others so they will link to your site and increase your search engine rankings.

5) Keyword Relevant Domain Name

Before you purchase a domain name you should look for a URL that has relevant keywords to your company. You want to ensure that your domain name has some relevancy to your website. Your sub domains should not be long and full of strange characters and symbols. This will only confuse the search engines and your human visitors. The simple domain that has your keyword specific to your page is great for the search engines and human readers.

6) Use HTML

Search engine spiders have a hard time reading coding other than HTML. To avoid any confusion for the spider have your website written in HTML not Flash. If you are a large, well known company this does not play as big a role, but if you are a small company trying to make a name for yourself ensure that your programmer is using HTML.

7) Ease of Site Navigation

You want a website that is easy to navigate through. The more confusing and broken links to your site, the less likely it is that the spider will fully crawl and index all your pages. You want to submit a sitemap for Google so it can find and index all the pages in your website. Sitemaps are a necessity for websites getting all your pages indexed and included in the search engines.

8) Fresh, new content

Search engines do not want old, outdated content on their search results, so you must make sure to add new content to your site on a consistent basis. Both humans and spiders like to see new content on your website. Make sure to update your content to make sure it is up to date and relevant. You can make simple grammatical changes to your site or add pages, anything counts as new content. If you stop adding new content to your website then your rankings will start to slip and fall way below your desired results. If you see your rankings start to slip then make sure you add new content to your site.

9) Add a Blog to Your Site

A blog is a great tool for keeping visitors up to date to with your site. Blogs help promote your site and give your visitors another way to locate your website. Blogs and your blog posts get indexed in the search engines quite quickly as well. Start a blog about the industry you are in and you can quickly build up your rankings. Blogs are especially useful for adding fresh content to your site. Blog posts are seen as new content, so post in your blog at least once a week to keep your content new. Blog postings do not have to be relevant to your website, but it does help to keep the content somewhat relevant to build up and authority blog.

10) Make Your Website for Humans Not Spiders!

This is probably one of the biggest that is done by newcomers to internet marketing. They write and organize their website for the search engines to achieve high rankings, yet the traffic that comes in does not make a purchase. You want to have a website that is easy to read and comprehend, not a site that is made for the spiders to read. Ultimately, humans who hold the purchasing power view your site. Ensure that your website is easy to read and does not have any misspellings.

The post 10 Easy Steps to Increase Google Search Engine Rankings first appeared on SEO Optimizers.

In these tough times you want to make sure your bottom line is at optimal conditions, and PPC can assist in these goals. Specified will be some tips and tricks to help you increase conversions and reduce costs. In essence, you want to persuade the buyer that you have the highest quality item for the lowest price compared to the competition.

1. Research Competitors Ads – There is a wealth of free, valuable information out on the web waiting to be used. PPC ads are shown on most, if not all search engines and can give you some insight into how your competition is advertising and what ad text they are using. If you want to go deeper than this you can purchase tools that show you what your competitor’s keywords are, what they are bidding, their ad text, and much more. With this information you will have a good starting point for your PPC ads.
2. Explore Keyword Variations – It is imperative for any successful PPC campaign to search for keywords, look at competitor keywords, and use proper keyword matching. It is important to know what keyword matching is and understand the difference between broad, phrase, and exact keywords. Each has a different effect and using the wrong one can ruin your entire ad campaign. Broad match keywords allow your ad to show up on similar phrases and relevant variations. Phrase match keywords allow your ad to show up on searched that match the exact phrase exclusively. Exact match keywords means that your ad shows up for that exact phrase exclusively. Negative match keywords are used to prevent your ad from showing up on specific keywords.
3. Focus on Low Cost Keywords – Overpriced keywords can cause a leakage in your PPC marketing budget. If you sell a product or service with a low profit margin then you need to do everything in your power to avoid high cost keywords. You cannot afford to pay $1 per click when your profit margin is only $0.75. Some keywords can cost over $5 a click! You do not want to spend this much unless your profit margin is large enough and you know you can compete with the competition. For the rest of us internet advertisers we want to look for highly searched keywords that are not overly priced. Looking at the competition can do this. Do a search for your keyword in your desired search engine and look at how many paid, or sponsored, listings appear. The fewer, the better off you are.
4. Avoid Hyper-Competitive Keywords – Keywords with a large search volume may be a viable keyword choice, but if the competition is too high it may not be the best choice, unless you have an extraordinary budget set in place. The greater the competition level for keywords, the more you will have to pay per click. There are tons, both free and paid that can show you a keywords competition level, monthly traffic, and cost per click. A reliable, free tool is Google’s keyword tool. It is an effective medium for discovering profitable keywords that have not been tapped into yet.
5. Make your Ads with Consumer Savings – People love to see words like sale, save discount, free, promo, buy 1 get 1 free, etc. when looking at paid search results. The more you use these words, the greater visibility your ad will have in the consumer’s eyes. The bigger the savings, the more likely you are to obtain a click through and ultimately a conversion. Make sure to include good values, low prices, and timely promotions in all your ad groups. This is especially if you have a product or service that is being marketed to highly price sensitive shoppers.
6. Be upfront with your Ads – I cannot stress this enough. This is the biggest mistake advertisers can make when placing participating in pay per click advertising. You do not want to lie, or fluff up your ads, in hopes of making more sales. This actually has the opposite effect, in which people will click through expecting what was outlined in the ad and come to see that it was false and misleading. This may get more clicks in organic rankings, but it will still result in an extraordinarily high bounce rate. They will leave the site in frustration that you mislead to them to your site, and you lost money for the cost of a click. Now image this happening on a daily basis for months at a time. How much wasted money can there be before someone steps in and says, “STOP, you are doing this in the complete wrong way!” You need to be upfront and honest to prevent excessive click from searchers expecting something else.
7. Make your Ad Groups Targeted to the Landing Page – To get the best quality score for your PPC ads you will want to make sure the keywords and the ad text relate to one another. You also want to make sure the landing page, where the searcher is taken when clicking on your link, is highly related to your keywords and ad text. This will get you the best results and ensure searchers do not get taken to the wrong page. Do not bunch all your campaigns together; rather separate them into appropriate categories. Then create pages on your website specifically designed for PPC users to land on. You should not send PPC ads to your home page, but rather have targeted landing pages specifically designed for each PPC campaign. These pages should have a call to action inducting the searcher to perform some sort of action that is beneficial to your business, whether it be a email address, or an actual sale. Your end goal is to have the user do something. This will reduce the bounce back rate and increase the chances of converting leads into sales.
8. Review and Analyze your Ads Performance Overtime – This seems obvious, but so many people do not take the time to sit down and really analyze each campaign to see what is succeeding and what is leaking money. Once this is discovered you will want to fix the problem ads and leave the successful ads be. This seems so obvious, but is not done often enough. I encourage reviewing your pay per click campaign once a day. If this is too much, then at least 2-3 times a week. This is your money and you do not want to see it wasted with no returns.
9. Refine your Ad groups to Focus on High Performers – After you have run your PPC campaigns for a few weeks you can analyze the results and see what the top performers and failures are. To make sure this an accurate representation make sure to use many different ad variations and have them set to rotate evenly at first. This will give you an idea of what selling points are working and which are draining your funds. Look at cost per conversion and make sure this does not exceed your profit margin. If so, stop the ad or make some major modifications to it. If an ad group has a low cost per conversion keep this running and let it rake in the money. Refining your ads should be done on a regular basis to avoid failing campaigns and focus more on successful campaigns.
10. Look at the Bottom line – Conversions are king for PPC, just like content is king for organic rankings. If you are doing all of the above and still are not converting sales then it may be time to take a step back and contact a professional to review your campaign and look for any flaws. If you do not have the budget to do this, then pause your ads and just focus on refining one at a time. This will ensure you do not use your entire budget and can spend more time figuring out why you are not succeeding. Once you figure out why one campaign is failing it is much easier to spot other trouble campaigns.

The post 10 Pay Per Click Steps to Reduce Costs and Increase PPC Conversions first appeared on SEO Optimizers.

• Post comments in your own blog 1-3 times a week, with a link in the title back to your website.  Make sure the title is long, descriptive, and contains keywords.  The titles get indexed in the search engines quickly and stay at the top for a week or more, depending on how popular the post is.

• Contact webmasters that run high traffic blogs.  Ask to run a promotion with a free product, coupon, etc. as long as they put a do follow link back to your site in exchange.  Look for these often as they are great links.

• Join social networking websites such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Myspace, etc.

• Create hub pages, wiki pages, squidoo pages, etc.

• Use StumbleUpon.com and add the toolbar.  Stumble individual pages to see a few hundred visitors come to your site that day.  Most will leave, but the ones that stay can turn into potential sales.  It is simple and takes only a few minutes to StumbleUpon your own website.  Use a good description and proper keywords that are related to the sites page.

• Write and submit articles on related topics.  The more articles you write the better.  Try to write one once a week.  Submit your articles to social article sites as well as these free sites:
  * findarticles.com
  * promotionworld.com
  * articlecity.com
  * ezinearticles.org
  * goarticles.com
  * amazines.org
  * articlemarketer.com
  * easyarticles.com
  * articledashboard.com

Then you will want to search for industry news sites and contact the webmasters to see if they will publish your free articles in exchange for a link back to your site.  Usually these sites want original content, whereas the free sites do not care.

• Write and distribute press releases (weekly) to these free sites:
  * 1888pressrelease.com
  * ecommwire.com
  * pr-inside.com
  * prlog.org

• Join forums and create a signature with your link in it.  Usually you have to post a few times to establish credibility and avoid looking like spam.  When entering your signature make sure your link’s anchor text had keywords related to your website.  Answer questions in forums and become a respected contributor.

• Join directories and blog directories

• Join these blog sites:

www.blogtopsites.com
www.blogtoplist.com
www.topblogging.com
www.blogcatalog.com
www.LSBlogs.com
www.MyNewBlog.com
www.TopBlogArea.com
www.Blogifer.com
www.Bloggernow.com
www.BlogsOnTop.com

• Look at competitor’s links, using link:http://www.yoursite.com in any search engine should bring up competitors links.  Browse through the links to see when new linking possibilities arise.  Be sure the links are relevant to your site and are trusted.

• Answer questions in Yahoo Answers with a link back to your site.

• Add an RSS Feed to your blog or website and share it with these sites:
  * Feedest.com
  * Postami.com
  * 2RSS.com
  * FeedsFarm.com
  * RssFeeds.com
  * Feeds4all.com
  * Plazoo.com
  * FeedBomb.com
  * Page2go2.com
  * Feedooyoo.com
  * RSSmicro.com
  * FeedFury.com
  * Octora.com
  * FindRSS.net
  * FeedBase.net
  * RSSmotron.com
  * MoreNews.be
  * DayTimeNews.com
  * Rss-Feeds-Submission.com
  * MillionRSS.com
  * Yahoo RSS Guide
  * MySpace.com News
  * ReadABlog.com
  * GoldenFeed.com
  * BlogDigger.com
  * RSSFeeds.com
  * feed24.com
  * Findory.com
  * WeBlogAlot.com
  * FeedBoy.com
  * Chordata.info
  * BlogPulse.com
  * DayPop.com
  * IceRocket.com
  * Memigo.com
  * Syndic8.com
  * RSS-Network.com
  * Feed-Directory.com
  * Jordomedia.com
  * Newgie.com
  * Feeds2read.net
  * NewzAlert.com
  * Feedcycle.com
  * Bloogz.com
  * FeedShark.BrainBliss.com
  * FeedPlex.com
  * RocketInfo.com

The post Search Engine Optimization Steps to Increase Traffic and Organic SEO Rankings first appeared on SEO Optimizers.