Posted on

Some Link Building Tactics Which Should Be Avoided

Links have their importance since the inception of SEO. This is the reason that Google always seems to focus on the quality and relevance of links.

In this scenario, you may notice that Google chooses to ignore certain links. That is due to the fact that those links do not represent a true recommendation. It means that if you have placed a link on a webpage only for the purpose of promotion, you are not going to get a thumbs-up by Google and other major search engines. A genuine link signal involves linking to the webpage which is relevant to your content.

In this article, we are going to talk about the link building tactics which you actually need to avoid.

Historical data link trap

When links are placed in a piece of content, this link addition is seen as a part of overall improvement of the content. So, if you are adding links without paying attention to the content of the page, this practice is not going to be admired by Google. Therefore, you are going to have to make sure that you are adding links in an existing web page only after improving your content according to the user requirements.

EDU Discount Link Building

In the past, there may have been a loophole which allowed people to get instant traffic to rank their pages by building links in EDU web pages. But now, this practice is blacklisted; and so, you are going to get penalized if you are still building links this way. Google has made consistent algorithmic changes in the previous years, and building links through this tactic is a clear violation of Google’s guidelines.

Content Marketing Links

No, we are not talking about guest posting. There are a lot of ways you can do content marketing. One of the major ways is to establish a site by adding content in it on a regular basis. Another way of content marketing involves hiring a writer who writes the articles and publishes on third party websites. That is called advertising. And that is the content marketing version which has the capability to violate FTC Guidelines.

Viral link campaigns

It is important to note that viral link building can be both successful and unsuccessful depending on the ways it is executed. The good kind of link campaigns mainly involves driving users to the pages which can be beneficial for them. In this scenario, the link campaigns may involve less link creation and more awareness building.

On the other hand, an off-topic link campaign is less likely to deliver results. The reason is that it tends to have no value for the users because it is not created for the purpose of bringing any kind of awareness.

Sponsor links

If you think a bit realistically, you will see that links generated from a philanthropic event are not going to be quite meaningful. This kind of link building is pretty similar to the viral link campaign which doesn’t produce results. If you really want to explain something in a webpage through link building to the users, you are going to have to find another page within your site to further explain what you are writing.This organic link building will not bring quick traffic to your site but it works in the long term.

Posted on

Boosting SEO with Effective Link Building Tactics

Link building remains to be the most important practice to build online traffic to and from your website. But there are many people who claim that link building is nothing more than just a spam practice to give your website a major damage in the long run. But the matter of fact is that the good quality link building is not only there, it is alive and kicking. Without good quality link building, there is no way you can build much needed traffic for your website.

If you are building high quality links, they are going to help your website in gaining authority. On the other hand, bad quality links play a role in the website’s loss of authority. Having that said, there are a few ways you can building links to boost the SEO of your website.

Link reclamation

The easiest and simplest method of building link for any website is link reclamation. The main concept of this tactic is to reclaim a backlink which existed previously but it is broken or removed now. You can get help from the tools like Moz’s Fresh Web Explorer which allows you know about any unlinked mentions of your brand by simply typing in the name of your brand in the search portion of the tool.

Broken link building

Broken link building and link reclamation are essentially the same techniques. However, broken link building extends to other sites as well. You can use a Google Chrome Extension, Broken Link Checker, to discover any broken links on a page.

However, the real research can be conducted with the help of tools such as SEMrush and Ahrefs.

Reverse engineered competitor link building

With the help of SEMrush or Ahrefs, you can download link details of your 3-5 competitors in CSV format of spreadsheet. Then you can filter the spreadsheet and tag by gTLD, industry, DA/PA, geography, referral domains, and other metrics which may be valuable to your campaign.

The basic purpose of this technique is to figure out the process through which your competitors have earned links. By knowing the process, you can do the link building in a better way just to beat the competition.

Guestographics

Guest blogging is a wonderful idea of producing high quality backlinks and building traffic to the website. But the frequent use of this method has made things quite challenging for the SEOs. Instead of finding mediums for the guest posting, another way is to use the current mediums for the posting of infographics. This technique can be referred to as guestographics.

The tools like Buzzsumo and Ahrefs can be used for finding the trending content in the industry. You need to think of the innovative ways to turn content into infographics. Although an extensive research may be required here, the resultant traffic is worth the efforts you make.

Posted on

Things You Need To Know About Structured Data

If you are not yet aware of what structured data is, it is actually a code that helps search engines to understand your website’s information which needs to be displayed in search results.Search engines read the code and use this code to display information search results in a richer way.Putting this code in your website is quite an easy step.

An example here is about the website with food recipes. You are going to want searchers to be able to see extended information about your recipes being shown in search results. You can make this happen with the help of structured data. Your recipes will be shown in much richer way.

Remember, structured data is always in the code format. And one thing that you need to keep into consideration here is that the structured data for different types of websites is going to be different. For instance, the structured data used for food recipes is going to be different from the structured data for the website that sells or shows books.

Things that you do with structured data

The main purpose of structured data is that it allows you to talk to search engines. With the help of this data, you can tell search engines about the ingredients in your recipes. You will be able to tell them about the preparation. You will also be able to tell them about the number of calories the dish will contain once it is prepared.And the most important thing here is that you will be able to give all of this information to search engines in a language they understand. This is what the structured data is all about.

Schema.org

Schema.org is basically a project developed by major search engines. This project allows you to find structured data markup which is supported by search engines. In simple words, Schema.org is basically a large collection of codes which you can use to make structured data.

By looking into this project, you can find the markup which is required for your particular page. It helps your develop the snippet which tells about the features of your product specifically.

JSON-LD

JSON-LD is one of the Schema.org markups. It is simply a way to write code.  There are other markups like Microdata and RDFa also available on Schema.org but JSON-LD is the more effective way of writing codes. The reason is that it doesn’t break your site like other markups. Moreover, it is the markup which is preferred by Google.

Importance of structured data

Your website is going to rank well if search engines know what your site is all about. Telling search engines about what your site is all about is one of the major purposes of structured data. With the use of schema.org, you actually talk to Google and other major search engines in the language they understand.

Posted on

Scientific Method to Find True Ranking Factor

As an SEO, you may wonder about many things to be ranking factors. I am talking about potential ranking factors here. But one thing that you are going to have to keep in mind here is that not all factors are ranking factors for all websites. Something that may act like a ranking factor may not do the same for other sites. So, the best answer to this question is “it depends”.

It’s the age of subjective SEO

Technically, it makes sense to get the same result when a change is tested on multiple sites. However, SEO doesn’t follow this formula. Believe it or not, SEO can be more nuanced than what you would think.What makes more sense here is to treat SEO as subjective. It means that different pages require different factors in order to rank for different queries.

Now, it doesn’t really mean that some confirmed ranking signals should not be worked upon. There are several other ranking factors which may be able to help a website or webpage rank. The main purpose of testing these factors is to know the degree at which these factors may be helpful.

Applying scientific methods to your SEO

Google’s main focus is to serve the best answer to the searchers’ queries. The best answer in this regard is the one which is relevant. And when we talk about relevance, it is worth mentioning that it is a subjective quality. It means that if you want to know what can work best for your site, you are going to have to test.

When it comes to testing SEO theories, there is no better option than a scientific method. There are a few steps involved in a scientific method for SEO.Let’s discuss those steps briefly.

Step 1: Make anobservation

It is quite important to write down what happens to your website. For instance, you might see your pages with fewer internal links ranking worse. Moreover, you can also look at the factors which are putting your site on the right course. This observation is specifically important when you are running a bigger website and you cannot test everything on every page.

Step 2: Do your research

After you have made an observation, you will have to search whether there is any information about this observation already available. Information from credible sources will help you do intelligent hypothesis.

Step 3: Form a hypothesis

Forming a hypothesis is basically a process making an educated guess based on your observation.

Step 4: Conduct an experiment

Conducting an experiment is can be a daunting (or fun, depending on how you see it) stuff. The reason it can be daunting is that it can be difficult to get clean results from an experiment. For instance, it might still be difficult for you to tell if the increase or decrease in traffic was due to the test and not due to an algorithm update. Seasonality can also be a factor here. And this change in traffic may also be due to any other change made in your website.

The best way to solve this issue is to apply the change on several similar pages on the site and leaving a group of pages without doing anything. This way, you will not only be able to get more conclusive result but you will also be sure that you are not wasting your time.

Step 5: Data analysis

In order to draw a logical conclusion, you need to analyze the data. You are basically uncovering whether or not your hypothesis was right.

If there are improved metrics on the pages that you have tested as compared to the ones that have not been tested, your hypothesis was right.

Posted on

Improving Content Marketing by Using Psychology

When you are marketing something, you are actually trying to ride the emotions of the customers in order to convince them about buying your product. This very process can also be referred to as playing with the psychology.

Although it’s a fact that marketing has been used to its wrong potential by promoting something which has not been quite healthy or helpful for the people, there are many companies who tend to use marketing methods for good intentions. Both of these groups try to manipulate or boost certain parts of the customers’ psychology.

Since we are talking about the good part only, it is quite important for the marketers to spread happiness. As a matter of fact, this should be the primary policy or a mission statement.

In this scenario, it is quite important to follow certain psychological principles within a content marketing campaign.

Social proof

According to a survey, about 8 in 10 Americans say that they consult online ratings and reviews when they decide about buying a specific type of product for the first time.This survey is enough to tell how powerful the social proof is.

Reviews and rating grow in strength on a daily basis. This is the reason that they are becoming quite important in the world of digital marketing.

Generally, the social proof is considered to belong to certain channels that share reviews, ratings, testimonies and shares. However, social proofs can be created in a number of other ways.

For instance, you can influence an expert within your industry. That will help your brand to become popular through recommendations by the people who have a fan base.

Moreover, you can make guest contributions in certain major publications within your industry.

Social media is a great platform where social proofs can be quite effective for your brand. More specifically, you will find social media more effective if you sell clothes or baby products.

Admit Previous Faults

When you admit your faults in the past, people tend to feel empathetic towards you. In case of content marketing, this admitting of faults is referred to as honesty, and it rules. The reason you need to admit your faults in the business is that it lets other people feel that you have got the change you were in the dire need of and that you are not heading in the right direction.

Consistency in all efforts

If you want to appeal your current and future clients, you need to be consistent in your content marketing efforts. When you are doing content marketing, you need to avoid sporadically posting videos or guest posts. Instead, you need to complete the process in a consistent manner.

Posted on

Tips To Avoid SEO Misinformation

There is a lot of information about SEO available on the web. If you want to bring your website on the top on search engine page results, you need to use that information according to your needs. But the bad news is that a huge chunk of that information qualifies as bad information, or misinformation.

For instance, John Mueller recently said on twitter that there is no such thing as LSI keywords.

But Google places SEO misinformation on the top of search results

That’s where things get confusing about the Google’s approach. It is easy to for anyone to be misguided.Let’s talk about the LSI keywords. If you type LSI keywords in Google, you will find first result telling about the advantages of these keywords. And the next two search results will suggest LSI keyword generators.

Know the difference between Opinion and Fact-Based Insight

Checking whether the author is referring to the citing reference is quite important. Things like a patent, a Google statement, or a research paper can help you in forming opinions while writing content which is based on fact-based sequels.

Everything else that you write as web content is usually based on opinions or you’re a set of your own opinions. In this scenario, it doesn’t matter much if your content looks reasonable.

In this scenario, it is worth mentioning that the concept about Google putting something above search results is not true.

Statement from Google needs to be taken into consideration

It is a good habit to have diary to write important notes about anything related to your work. If you are doing SEO, you need to get to know about what Google says about SEO. Some people take Google statements and try to relate those statements with their SEO plans.

Now, fear and uncertainty in business are the important elements of any plan. That’s where people working on the plans might find Google putting forward some contradictory statements.

But according to Mueller, it’s the people who get the wrong perception from what Google says. That’s where the misinformation about SEO is formed. Even if you are able to get the right results using your understanding about Google statements, this understanding may not be helpful for the other people.

For instance, if you have seen your website sinking into the bottom of search results, you may assume that you have got a hit from Google’s new algorithmic update. But according to what Google has been doing, the reason you get your website or webpage sinking in the bottom of search results may be due to the fact that Google would have found a better information resource. Ranking of that information resource will automatically cause your website to lose rank. In this scenario, you can tell people that you have got hit from Google’s update. And that’s where you are becoming a source of misinformation.

What needs to be done?

You may ask what needs to be done in this regard. Well, we do not say that you should start reading opinions. But you need to avoid forming your opinions based on the opinions that you read. A simple way is to compare what an article is saying to what Google has said on its official portal.

Posted on

Diagnosing Technical SEO Issues

Technical SEO serves as a backbone for the promotion of your website. If you are working on SEO of your website, you may already know what technical SEO is. So let’s keep the introduction short and, instead, talk about the common technical SEO issues which can bring your website down in no time. Diagnosing these issues is very important because this is now you can get your website back on track.

Don’t be panic

Even if your website has dropped to the bottom of the ranks, you need to calm yourself. Some people try to perceive an emergency situation by creating panic for themselves. This approach is a perfect recipe for even bigger failure. When you face any problem and you find out that problem is a bigger one, you need to get up from the chair, have a cup of coffee and go out in the park for a short walk.

Understand the problem

Now after coming back to your seat, you need to open the email with detail about the problem. To understand the problem, you first need to ask yourself some questions.

  • What does the email say?
  • What is the underlying issue and what does email say about that problem?
  • What do I already know about the problem?
  • What are the symptoms surrounding the issue? (it may help in identifying root cause more effectively)
  • Do I really need to get the problem solved ASAP?

Keep in mind what Einstein said: “If I had an hour to solve a problem, I’d spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and 5 minutes thinking about solutions.”

Make a plan

When you have the data and you know about the problem, you can either start working on solving the issue or you can make a plan.Making a plan and working on it seems a lengthy process through which you might not be able to get the benefits of a quick fix. But the matter of fact is that a quick fix can do more harm than good.

Another major benefit of making a plan is that this process helps you is doing hypothesis – something which is quite essential in knowing about the real consequences of the problem well before the consequences start happening.

Working on the plan (analyzing)

Since technical SEO involves too many things, there might be too many factors contributing in the failure of your website. If you already know about the exact reason for the technical SEO failure and you know that solving the problem is not going to take much time and resources, you are in luck. But the major issue with the troubleshooting of on-page or off-page SEO is that any fix doesn’t make a change in the results on instant basis. You will need to wait for the search engines to do the crawling and give your website a clean chit.

The process of analysis may need you to rely on several tools and metrics. Even if there is a problem with the website structure, you might need to rely entirely on the analytics to know about the problem.

Suggest solution

After you have analyzed things well and got the complete report about the problem, now is the time to work on solution. Based on what you have discovered, you will need to make a strategy to solve the issue. Discuss it with your team and ask about their feedback. Ask for further suggestions. Once you have finalized the solution that you need to work on, you need to work on it.

Posted on

Combining UX and Holistic SEO to Market Websites

Have you ever wondered about the connection between a website’s usability and its ability to rank in search engines? Now, it is the fact that changes in a website’s design can lead to the changes in the ability of that website to rank in search engines. However, the knowledge about this connection comes after years of experience.

https://youtu.be/-nGxqk4Hb90

The fundamentals of SEO are not changed since its inception. However, the technicality of this industry has changed quite a lot. In the early years, there was no emphasis on structural and aesthetic aspects of the websites. However, the scenario has changed a lot since search engines have started paying attention to what users want.

Holistic SEO and UX

You may have heard about the holistic SEO. It is the SEO approach which focuses on every factor which can play even the tiniest role in the promotion of a website. And since search engines pay complete attention to what users want to see in the websites, the role of UX has become quite important. Hence, it can safely be said that any holistic SEO strategy essentially involves UX.

UX pitfalls that lead to poor SEO

A few factors which may indicate that your website lacks in user experience are as under.

  • Higher bounce rate
  • One webpage performing better than the other
  • Duplicated content
  • Unwanted audience
  • Reason that unwanted audience comes to your site
  • The device they use to browse through your website

Web design practices that interfere with Online Marketing Strategies

It is pertinent to note that there are certain design elements which can affect crawlability, usability, readability, accessibility, and discoverability of a website.

With these factors in mind, you can easily conclude that the SEO has become quite difficult, especially in a scenario when web design that overall user experience are not up to the mark.

Here is what Eric Wu has to say in this regard:

“Working with Product Designers and Front End devs is really understanding their motivations and working with them to solve their use cases while making elements successful for crawlers and conversions.”

Importance of a skilled web team

When we talk about a holistic approach to promote a website, we will need to talk about every aspect related to the development, maintenance and market a website. And if you look closely, you will easily figure it out that any conflict or disagreement between the web design and other factors of a website can lead to serious issues with the website. Those issues can directly impact the user experience, affecting the rank of the website ultimately.

In this scenario, it is quite important to employ a skilled team which is capable to work on all of the aspects of a website.

Posted on

Making the Video Ads More Effective

The popularity of videos ads is growing continuously. And if we look at the indicators, it would be pretty obvious that this popularity is far from reaching it saturation point. Research suggests that 87% of the businesses are using video as a marketing tool.

However, there are many advertisers who remain hesitant about using this opportunity for the marketing of their businesses. They mainly worry about getting nothing after investing a lot of money. And the matter of fact is that they are rightly worried so. If a video ad is not properly worked on, it is destined to fail.

Every business is different. And so, the marketing approach for each of the businesses needs to be a different one in order to appropriately meet the business marketing needs. But there are some basic things which you can keep in mind while creating the video ads.

Personalization

It is normal for the people to think about video ads working on the same pattern as that of TV ads. But the matter of fact is that both are quite different. TV ads are broadly targeted ads and they do not care much about the user demographics. As a matter of fact, TV ads need to be inclusive of many things so that a wide range of people with different interests are targeted in one ad.

On the other hand, a video ad can be more granular than you think. You can choose your audience based on location, age, gender and many other factors.It means that you can personalize video ads in the way you want. And you should do this personalization.

Make it relevant

Another major problem with the TV ad is that it interrupts the viewer. When you are watching your favorite show in the TV, you will not want a TV ad to interrupt you from watching that show. In case of video advertisement, you can make the ad relevant to the video content. This way, the ad will not be felt like an interruption. As a matter of fact, it may serve like a value-add.

Capture attention immediately

With the video ads, you will not have to stick with the practice of slowly building the climax. You can actually grab the attention quite immediately. One of its reasons is mentioned in the personalization part. Moreover, you can adopt a storytelling approach to make the video ad something your viewers would want to stick to.

Another reason you need to focus on capturing attention is that there are many content choices available to the viewers. If you are making old-fashioned TV-styled ads, the viewers will not stick you your content for more than a few seconds. So, you need to grab attention from very start of the video.

Collaborate with the creators

This is one of the most effective tricks of creating videos ads. You can collaborate with content creators across different video sharing platforms and ask them to promote your products. They have a fan base which can turn out to be your target audience in the future.

Posted on

How to Research Your Audience for SEO

SEO isn’t just about the numbers and rankings, but it’s about understanding the people that you’re trying to market to, and building a campaign that centers around that. When SEO is centered around the correct audience, the traffic will increase, leading to more, and better conversions. Here are several methods that allow you to analyze your audience and research for SEO. As you look at the list, you’ll see why these are the way to do it.

First, get some keywords to figure out the demographics. Keyword research should be targeted to relevant services and products, which is something already known. Once you have a solid list, select the five that best represent the brand and the demographics associated with this.  From there, you can figure out the audience and who you’re marketing to. Once you have that, you can look for ways to link these in order to target them.

Next, identify who is visiting the site.  This is kind of like painting the target around where the arrow is, but you should understand who is coming to the site to figure out the right audience. You can consult google analytics, and from there, once you enable the demographics and interest reports, you’ll be able to find the correct information that you need of your audiences.

You can also check to see what other brands and competitors are doing. You can look at the demographics and the psychographics, and collect as much information as possible. Quantcast is a good one since it will help you analyze everything that you need to see from your site, and really get a feel for what you’re looking at.

Social insights is another one.  For example, if you do use facebook, you’ve already got that put in. you can look at that and see the audience information, and a good idea of what you’re looking at.  You can what people are looking at when they look at your social media pages.

Then you have surveys, and you can send these out to the current email list.  You can also do this after a customer checks out, and the surveys can be short, and get to the point, and you can literally ask basic demographic questions, overall interests and other needs and such. From there, you can cater to the site, and from there, build it around the major needs of your customers.

Finally, try identifying questions. when google shows answers in the SERPs you want common user questions that are there too.  For example, answer the public, BuzzSumo, and the like can help with figuring out all of this, and you can from there, get an answer about the public that visits the sites.

With the right information, you can create the best SEO campaigns possible, and from here, put together a lot of better options for your business. With the right tools and tricks, you too can get a lot of great results from this, and in turn, create great campaigns.