“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.

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.

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.

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.

Everyone has seen the “Rip off Reports” about shady business on the web. Well anyone can post a Rip off Report about your company. These posts tend to rank high in the search engines because this is an authoritative site. This can be bad if your business has a rip off report rating. Now whenever someone searches for your company website, the negative report will show up on the search results, usually in the top three results. This is detrimental and can have huge consequences.

There are a number of other ways a negative report about your business can hurt you. What about a Better Business Bureau low rating, Yelp reviews, negative forum posts, Craig’s List posts, etc. all get indexed within the search engines quickly and tend to rank high. If these sites did not rank so high organically in the search engines then it would not be such a problem, but since they are authority sites they tend to dominate the organic search results.

The consequences of having negative reviews means that customers will be weary to shop from your store or to do business with you. They may even tell friends, family, or coworkers not to shop at your store due to a bad experience or negative reviews. Would you want to buy from a store without positive rankings? I think not. So why would anyone else on the web buy from a site that has received negative feedback.

A good way to check if your site has any negative reviews is to type in different variation of your website/ company name in Google, Yahoo, and Bing. Scroll through the first three pages to see if anything bad sticks out. If something does, then you must take corrective action immediately to thwart these sites.

Now that you are aware of negative feedback and the impact it can have on your business you may be wondering what you can do to avoid this. The simplest and easiest solution is to personally manage any complaints against you company and ensure that angry customer problems are resolved. Unfortunately, sometimes this is not possible and the customer is angry and wants to do everything in their power to spread the word about your service. This means you have to fight back, by building or promoting existing pages for those specific keywords that are bringing up the negative feedback. You can create new sites and make sure they are tailored around specific keywords that bring up negative feedback about your site. Promote these new sites by building links and adding the new sites to directories and other authoritative websites. The other solution is to review the sites just below the negative feedback and try to push those sites up the rankings. Promoting and building back links to these sites can achieve this. In time these sites will surpass the negative results and dominate the search results.

These methods should help remove any negative feedback or remarks about you or your company from showing up on the search results. Remember that this is an ongoing process and the negative feedback will start to reappear if you do not continue to monitor the new sites that replaced the negative feedback. This will show your customers that you truly care for them and will increase sales, revenue, and ultimately your business’s bottom line.

The post Remove Negative Feedback from Organic Search Engine Results first appeared on SEO Optimizers.

Bing’s simple interface with a colorful background mimics that of Google, but with a more ambiance t it. The background is always changing with hot spots that are clickable. Luckily, you can always go back to a past image and find the hot spots, in case you saw something important there. It does not make much sense to have these hot spots and they can be quite confusing, especially since they are constantly changing. There is no warning of when and where these hot spots are until you scroll over them. Then a question related to the image appears with a link to click on, usually answering the question proposed.

When comparing Bing to Google there are more similarities than dissimilarities. For starters they both have a simple interface with a large search bar in the middle of the page. They both display Images, Videos, Shopping, News, and Maps on the homepage. The difference is Google also has Gmail and Bing has travel. The big difference is that Bing has changing images, where as Google has a changing logo against a blank interface.

Bing has decided to market itself as a decision engine, rather than a search engine. What this means is that Bing incorporates e-commerce websites search bar into a fully functional search engine. Microsoft believes that searchers are ready to move beyond the search stage and Bing will help them make better decisions. The search engine results are categorized to make it easier to find results.

The decision engine has been creating tons of search engines ranking for many of my clients with a lower bounce rate than the other major search engines. Does this mean that Microsoft has succeeded with an advanced algorithm that is superior to the major three’s? Or is it a fluke that the bounce rate is visibly lower than the other search engines.

The big question is how do we optimize our websites for Bing? We all want to be ranked at the top of a new search engine, which has the potential to take on the other major search engines. It is simple, do what you do for the other major search engines. From my observations domain age plays a big role. Bing wants to see websites that are established and have been around for a long period of time.

The decision engine, Bing, seems to like websites with tons of original content on the landing pages. Make sure your page titles are keyword rich and appropriate for the subject matter. Bing loves titles with keywords searchers are using. Make sure to have a good, unique title for all your websites pages. Unlike other search engines, linking out seems to be favored. This means linking to other sites from your own site is good for ranking. This may show to Bing that your site shares useful information with its users. This is not to say reciprocal linking is good, but linking to sites that your users may deem valuable is a good idea.

Sign up for an account with Bing and manage your analytics and start a pay per click campaign with them. Their PPC rates are significantly lower than other PPC campaigns because there is not as much competition and keyword dilution occurring. In a few months to a year PPC costs will begin to mimic those of the other search engines, but for now the prices are superb.

The post Achieving Top Search Rankings in Microsoft New Decision Engine Bing DEO / SEO first appeared on SEO Optimizers.

The more you use your computer, the more the search engines know about you. Every time you search for something on the web, these sites are collecting data. This includes tons of personal information along with your web using habits and trends. Pretty soon the search engines will know everything about you, even your most intimate secrets.

The search engines say it is to make your search experience easier and more user friendly, but is that really the case? By collecting this data the search engines can sell it off to other companies, letting them know that you are interested or have been interested in their products or services recently. This is a definitely advantageous advertiser by targeting your specific interests and needs. This means a higher return on investment for paid search advertisers. This can be advantageous to consumers because as a company’s costs decrease and profit margins increase, they are likely to drop the price or run special offers and promotions.

This seems like an invasion of privacy, especially since most people are unaware of this. There is a line that has been crossed. For example, say you did a search for “Marijuana and Teenagers” because you recently discovered you child was smoking marijuana. Now with the customized search results you will begin to see ads related to marijuana and teenagers, even though you are not interested in this topic. This is an extreme case, but it is used to get the point across. People should be careful what they search for because it can come back to haunt them. Pretty scary stuff!

It will become more on topic soon as more and more people begin to realize that the internet and every website is collecting tons of useful data and information about you and your personal life. Some internet users have become paranoid and stopped visiting sites they are worried about. Hopefully, there will be some standards set in place soon so web users know what really is going on behind the scenes.

The post Search Engines and Customized Results Based on Your Internet History first appeared on SEO Optimizers.