SEO – Web Design and Hosting

5 Easy SEO Tips to Boost Your Site in Under an Hour

DougE718 — Fri, 30 Apr 2021 07:48:17 +0000

Trying to figure out how to build a search engine optimization (SEO) campaign from scratch can be overwhelming. But that shouldn’t stop you from getting started with your SEO campaign. There are five simple things that you can do on your site to boost your site’s rankings. Best of all, these tactics can all be done in less than an hour. Without further ado, here’s the first of the SEO tips.

Tip #1: Make Sure Your Onpage Factors are Properly Set-Up

The easiest thing you can do is to work on your onpage factors for all of your pages. You want to start with making sure that your target keyword is the title tag for each page. Then you’ll want to move on to the meta description. While the description won’t help your rankings, but making sure it’s enticing, specific, and relevant will get users to click on your listings. From there, you want to use keywords in your h1 tags, place proper keywords in the image alt tags, and make sure that the URL of the page includes the keyword (i.e. https://www.weddingfavors.com/beach-wedding-favors.html).

Tip #2: Optimize for Mobile and Improve Your Site’s Loading Speed

The first thing you want to do to your site is to optimize for mobile users. It’s estimated that 50 to 60 percent of searches are made on mobile devices, so you have no excuse not to do it. Using a responsive theme is a start but it’s not enough. You’ll want to go further by making sure the buttons are easy to click, changing the layout to make it easier to browse, using readable fonts, and formatting content for mobile screens just to name a few things.

The other part your site’s loading speed. Loading speed is actually a ranking factor now, so it can’t be ignored. You want to do several things to improve loading speed such as compressing your images and other media files, using browser caching, minifying your HTML, and even getting a virtual private or dedicated server. Neil Patel has an amazing guide that lays out all the things you can do to improve your site speed here.

3. Improve Your Site Structure

Site structure is a part of SEO that many people tend to forget about. Making sure that all of your pages are getting link juice from your homepage is essential to increasing their rankings. What tends to help is to build a site using a silo structure. This breaks down your site’s pages into themes and categories while passing link juice from your homepage to all of the pages. Another thing you can do to help your pages rank better is to use breadcrumb links and internally link to other pages when contextually relevant.

4. Focus on Quality Content and the User Experience

There seems to be evidence that Google favors content that is well themed and has a higher word count than average. It helps to use free tools like LSI graph to integrated related keywords into your content. You’ll then want to audit your website for pages with thin or low quality content and rewrite them so that the add value to the user. Now you may think user experience is not that important as long as the content and onpage optimization is all there.

But this article by OptinMonster shows that Google has been tracking various user experience metrics. This includes clickthrough rate which indicates your page is relevant to the search intent, bounce rate which is correlated to the browsing user experience, and dwell time which tells Google that you are providing value to their users. Not all of these are ranking factors yet but it’s very likely that some influence rankings and more of them will be utilized in the future.

5. Gain Easy Backlinks by Identifying Common Backlinks

An easy way to get backlinks is to use tools like ahrefs to analyze your competition’s backlink profile and capitalize on links that are easy to acquire. How do you go about doing this? Simply compare the backlink profile of your competitors in the top 10 search results and find common backlinks between them. In many cases, these links were acquired because they were easy to get. It may be from a publisher that’s accepting a lot of content submissions, a niche site that accepts many guest blog posts, or a wiki page that allows you to contribute to the growing resource.

These 5 easy SEO tips are all doable in under an hour, especially for smaller sites that are only a few months old. It doesn’t take much to see big leaps in your rankings. Sometimes a few tweaks an hour a day can make a big difference.

Google’s New “rel=sponsored” and How It Will Impact SEO Across the Web

DougE718 — Sun, 25 Apr 2021 07:48:08 +0000

Google recently announced a new link attribute called “rel=sponsored” that webmasters can use. What exactly is this all about? The rel=sponsored link attribute indicates to Google that the links in your site that are advertisements, sponsorship, or any kind of compensation agreements. The purpose of this new link attribute is to help Google fight spam links used for search engine purposes.

What Does This Mean for You?

Upon hearing this, it’s likely that you started to assume that you’d now have to go through all the outgoing links to your site and place the right link attribute for each one. Fortunately, this is not the case. If you have been using the nofollow link attribute for sponsored links already, you do not have to wade through all your site links to differentiate them.

In fact, Google doesn’t state that you must absolutely start using the rel=sponsored link attributes for sponsored links on your site. It’s simply a recommendation they are making to webmasters. If you forget and use the nofollow attribute instead of the sponsored attribute, there won’t be any consequences to your search engine rankings.

Surprising Announcements About these Link Attributes

On top of the announcement of the rel=sponsored link attribute, Google has also stated that they will change how they look at these links. Previously, Google would completely disregard nofollow links. This means that the nofollow links would not have any impact on the search engine rankings at all.

However, they are taking a different approach to things. Google has stated that all link attributes including the new UGC attribute would be treated as hints. What exactly does Google mean by hints? As mentioned, Google had completely disregarded nofollow links, but now it seems they will be using these links for some kind of purpose.

According to Google, they plan on using these links and other signals to improve their ability to understand and analyze links for search engine purposes. Obviously, it’s very hazy what they want to do by treating these links as hints. Until professional SEOs start experimenting with these links and see how they will impact search engine rankings, we won’t really know how these new updates affect the SEO process.

And because it was announced on September 2019, it’s going to take many months before SEOs starting coming up with clues about the effect these link attributes will have as well as what Google’s true intentions are.

How Will This New Link Attribute Impact SEO Across the Web?

Google are trying to say some very important things with the announcement. First, they are saying that they want webmasters to take link attributes more seriously. It’s possible that they may decide to get more serious about penalizing websites that are not marking links that are clearly sponsored or a form of spam. SEOs may need to take link attribute more seriously from here on forth.

Second, you never know if Google will change their updates again in the future. Even if you don’t want to go through the trouble of integrating this new link attribute to your site, it may help to future-proof for updates. Google likes websites that are transparent and user friendly. If one website does a better job telling Google the meaning behind their links, it might mean they may give a slight preference to that site. Of course, this is just a theory and is not how things work right now.

Finally, Google has stated that all link attributes will be seen as hints. They announced that the nofollow link attribute will be treated as a hint starting March 1, 2020. Does this mean that nofollow links will have some weight towards search engine rankings starting in March of 2020?

It might actually be possible that nofollow will have some weight (very little) towards search engine rankings. In fact, many SEOs have argued that nofollow links do count towards rankings for a long time. It may be possible that Google is admitting to this fact or simply insinuating that nofollow links will carry a bit more weight. Of course, this is just theory.

What Could Google’s Intention Be?

There are many possible reasons why Google may have made these announcements. First, they may actually have be straightforward about their intentions and wanted to collect additional data to help understand which links to include or exclude towards the search rankings. This could mean that they may want to come up with a way to differentiate different types of nofollow links.

Second, they may want to collect data to better fight spam. They may be using these links as hints to improve their ability to find websites that are using black hat SEO strategies. This can be a good thing for websites that are doing things the white hat way and bad news for websites that have been banking on black hat strategies for a long time.

Whatever the intention is, the one important thing here is that websites need to get serious about setting link attributes. If they are letting advertisers place ads on their sites, they have to ensure that these ads are clearly being marked as rel=sponsored or at least rel=nofollow. Remember, you can be penalized for not marking paid links. It’s possible that the penalties may become more severe.

There’s Still Some Confusion About This Announcement

There are still some grey areas that Google has not clarified. If you accept outside content and your contributors place affiliate links, do you need to mark it as rel=sponsored or rel=ugc (for user generated content). The rel=ugc is the other new link attribute that Google has added with this new updated. It’s a little confusing which one you should be using in this scenario.

The other thing is that Google stated that they wanted link attributes for outgoing links that are advertisements, sponsorship, or any kind of compensation agreements. Does compensation agreements also include affiliate links? Technically, it is a compensation agreement if you’re an affiliate of another business and you promote that business within your content.

It seems like Google has been very ambiguous about this important detail, but it’s safe to say that it may be smart to stick to using rel=sponsored for affiliate links you are promoting on your site. Some have said that it is fine, but Google really needs to come out with an official statement to clarify the issue.

If it ends up being the case that you should be using the rel=sponsored or rel=nofollow on affiliate links, this could mean huge implications for the SEO world. Affiliate networks may have to start telling their affiliates to make sure they put in the link attributes so that they do not get penalized by Google.

You may know that many affiliates use SEO to generate leads and sales for companies or offers they are promoting. Businesses that run affiliate programs may need to provide general training about how to use rel=sponsored and why it’s important to use the link attribute on their sites. This can be a headache for many businesses and affiliate networks.

So What Should You Do with This Knowledge?

Now that you understand what the rel=sponsored link attribute update is all about, what should you do? As mentioned earlier, it’s clear that Google is taking link attributes more seriously. There might be heavy penalties if you don’t clearly label which links are sponsored. Other than that, here are some helpful takeaways:

Make sure that you do an audit of the links on your site so that sponsored links are given the proper link attribute.
Some types of links will now have less value. For example, some blogs didn’t auto set links as nofollow in the comments section. But Google now wants that to be labeled as rel=ugc.
Just to be safe, it might be a smart idea to make sure that the affiliate offers you’re promoting are given the rel=sponsored or rel=nofollow link attributes.
It may be possible that Google will figure out a way to differentiate between different types of nofollow links to give them different amount of weights towards search rankings.
Everything is simply speculation right now about Google’s statement about using these links as hints. It will take a lot of time to figure out exactly what’s going on, so make sure you don’t drive your SEO campaign based on assumptions.
It’s becoming more important to focus on marketing to help you generate links for you SEO campaign. This means that press releases, press opportunities, content creation, viral marketing, and social media marketing will become increasingly more important to SEO.

That sums up everything related to the new rel=sponsored update. While this new update isn’t anything that most website owners will need to worry about, it does pose many implications on how SEO will change in the near future. For now, the only thing that you can do is to wait until all the small details are clarified.

The SEO Metrics That Matter Most

DougE718 — Mon, 19 Apr 2021 06:05:27 +0000

Digital Marketing

Knowing which KPIs – or key performance indicators – for SEO are the most important to track is crucial to the success of your organic strategy and can help guide future content creation. Today, 53.3% of online traffic comes from organic searches. Not only does this mean that SEO is more important now than it ever has been before, but it also means keeping track of your SEO metrics and KPIs is even more relevant today.

What are KPIs for SEO?

SEO KPIs are used to determine whether current strategies are working and indicative of your channel’s performance against your goals. Tracking the correct metrics and knowing which ones are important will help you to drive organic traffic to your site. However, with so many metrics to choose from, which KPIs are most important to SEO?

Some SEO KPIs that will provide value to your website include:

Ranking keywords. Knowing how many keywords you’re ranking for, what those keywords are, and where they rank, will allow you to better understand which keywords you should be optimizing to build a strategy.
Organic conversion. rate Knowing what content resonates with your audience and how they navigate through your site is critical to online success. Leverage your analytics platform to identify pages that need to be optimized for more conversions. If you use Google Analytics and/or Adobe Analytics, use analytic integrations with BrightEdge to find the engagement metrics that matter.
Share of voice. Tracking share of voice will help you figure out how you fare against the competition in the SERPs.
Organic click through rate. Monitoring your CTR will help you determine the success of your content. A high CTR doesn’t always mean success, though. Take note of not only CTR but also, sales or conversions after CTR. If your conversion rate is low, you may be targeting the wrong audience with your content.
Backlink profile. Building link authority will allow your site to be seen as a thought leader and trustworthy to both Google and users. Receiving external backlinks from reputable sites will drive more referred traffic to your site.
Number of pages indexed on Google. For your site to appear in the SERPs, your pages need to be indexed by Google. The more pages Google has indexed, the more opportunity your site has to rank for relevant keywords. You can check whether or not your pages have been indexed via Google Search Console.

Tracking your KPIs in BrightEdge

Leverage Keyword Reporting to determine how many keywords your website is ranking for in the SERPs. Using Keyword Reporting, you can see how you compare to your competitors with valuable keywords. You can also extract rich data sets that include search volume for individual keywords, SERP rankings, universal results, and more.
Use StoryBuilder to create reports and dashboards to keep track of and report on SEO data and KPIs to executives and managers.
BrightEdge offers backlink reporting that is seamlessly integrated with Majestic’s “Fresh Index” backlink database. Leverage this feature and build a strategy around and discover competitor links you don’t have.
Use Data Cube to gain insights into which of your site’s URLs are winning with high ranking keywords. Track the success of your keywords and expand your knowledge of how they perform over time.

What other SEO metrics should I track?

SEO metrics are data points or indicators you should track and monitor to measure performance and keep a healthy, optimized website. Whether it’s to track engagement or reflect on SERP authority, monitoring your SEO metrics can assist you in planning strategies for the future. Chances are, if your SEO metrics are strong, your KPIs will be too.

While there are countless SEO metrics you can keep tabs on, some of the metrics you could most benefit from tracking include the following:

Bounce rate
Exit pages for organic traffic
Pages crawled per day
Location
Local visibility

What are content marketing metrics?

Content marketing metrics are measurable metrics you can track in order to find the relevant data you need to determine the success of your content or campaigns. You can leverage content marketing metrics to evaluate ROI and alter strategies. Some metrics you should consider tracking include:

Social media engagements and shares
Web traffic
Bounce rate
Sales
Retention
Engagement
CTR
Backlinks
Time on page
Email opt-in rates

If your content isn’t performing well, it’s likely that you will see poor CTRs, little time on page and overall low engagement. In order to increase the success of your content marketing metrics, leverage both BrightEdge and analytic integrations, like Google Analytics, to find which content, strategies, and campaigns are performing best. This will give you an idea of strategies to repeat or improve moving forward.