Category: Search Engine Optimization

Increasing keyword rank seems to be a game of link building because this is the way through which you can get traffic onto your website. But you may be surprised to know that this is not the only way to improve the rank of your website against the keywords that you are targeting. As a matter of fact, if you are not paying attention to the ‘other’ factors that we are going to talk about, you might not be able to get better results just on the basis of an effective link building approach.

It is worth mentioning that rank basically refers to the position of a website everyone sees while looking at the SERPs.Well, Google doesn’t work this way anymore.

The results change with the insertion of subtle modifiers such geo-location, local items like a map pack, and user personalization. Google pays attention to the words entered by the users. That makes it challenging for the websites to retain their visibility even if they manage to come on the top of the search results.

If you believe that only link building can help your keywords to get ranked, you are going to have to develop a complicated, exhausting and, at the same time, robust link building strategy. But the good news is that there are some other factors that you can work on in order to increase the ranks of keywords.

Site crawl and indexing improvements

A few questions that you need to ask yourself here may include:

• Does Google crawl all of your website’s pages well?
• Are there any redirect loops or spider traps?
• Are you, unknowingly or knowingly, creating any roadblocks that are causing difficulty for Google to rank your site?

You can use a tool named Streaming Frog to see how well the pages of your site are being crawled.

Schema

Schema is not a direct ranking factor. However, it contributes in the process which leads to the pages ending up in the featured snippets. So, it is quite important to review the schema and find the ones that best for your site.

You can also go for what Google has been recommending, i.e. the JSON-LD version. It is worth mentioning here that the content of schema is the same which is present in the page.

Improving page speed

According to Google, page speed is the ranking factor. The reason is that it serves as a tiebreaker when your site equals your competitors in every other aspect. Remember, the page speed can be a tiebreaker only when your site’s speed is slightly slower.

Content relevancy and on-page optimization

First you will have to make sure that your page remains relevant right from the title till the end of the content in the page. Title tag is what that appears prominently in the SERPs. The content of your page needs to answer the search queries. This is the reason that it is highly important to make a research about the keywords in such a way that it becomes easy for you to identify and target user intent.

Other on-page optimizations include alt image attribute, H1 tags, a summarizing first paragraph, and captions around the image.

AMP

AMP is not directly helpful in ranking but they can help in the placement of pages at certain positions. For instance, it can bring your page into the Google News program if you want to be in the news counsel.

If you are into the SEO business, you may already know the importance of keywords. In this scenario, it gets important to work on the long tail keywords. Long tail keywords are basically the phrases which are usually longer and more specific. And these keywords are not used for as many times as the normal keywords are used. These keywords do not get much traffic. However, they can lead to higher conversion rates. And the good thing is that they can help you gradually build more traffic to your website.

Now, you need to have a clear vision about your company, products and your website if you want to work with the long tail keywords. In this article, we are going to discuss what long tail keywords are and how they can be used in an SEO strategy.

What are long tail keywords?

These keywords are more specific and less common. The main focus of these keywords is the niches. The name ‘long tail keyword’ comes from the book named “The Long Tail”. This book tells that there is a market for virtually every product. However, this market may be quite tiny. And since we use long tail keywords for the promotion of products on internet, the prospects of forming a market are higher.

Even if you are promoting the same product across different blog posts or pages, the long tail keywords may differ in every post. That’s because of the slight change in the focus in every post or page. And that’s where you are going to have to do the analysis in order to choose the best keyword that is a fit for the specific topic.

Reason you need to focus on long tail keywords

Ranking for the long tail keywords is quite easier as compared to the e-commerce keywords. Reason is that you will not have to compete much for the ranking against that specific keyword. The longer and more specific the keyword is, the easier it is going to be to rank against that keyword. And the good thing is that the vastness of internet will allow you to get traffic to that keyword. Gradually, you will be able to build an audience based on that specific keyword.

Another benefit of long tail keywords is that they are mostly used by highly motivated audiences. Hence, if your website comes up in the search results of a long tail keyword, you are more likely to get an order for the purchase.

Local SEO is just as important as big business SEO.  You need to learn how to connect to your customers, who want to purchase.  Local SEO does bring up a lot of checklists and valuable information, but many enterprise companies won’t target that since they don’t optimize for local searches. But, you should, especially if you want to reach a local market.

The patent for a business only requires you to have four things, a physical address with a legitimate phone number, the H1 matches the name of the business, the URL, and the page has links posting to it from other pages or location and a business name.  The Maps feature also should be utilized, since it forces websites to optimize for the countries, provinces, states, and cities as well.

Since then, the goal of this is to push for local results in websites, and that means that you need to make sure that you have the location specific to the business as well. Otherwise, it’s going to be dropped.  This is something that has recently been used with the Panda and Penguin updates, so remember that.

With enterprises, you want to try to make sure that you claim your business on Google Places, TripAdvisor, Yelp, Groupon, and other location services. But, you want to make sure that you add local links to this as well.  you’ll want to make sure that this manages the local pages, gives you an interface to monitor and respond to various reviews and also pushes the information out to different location sites too.

You should make sure that you establish authoritative pages for the location, the H1 has the location name, the content has the addresses and phone numbers, and you have local schema for the local information in place too.

If you have URLs, you need to make sure that you have the business name as needed. Yext and SweetIQ services will also give you local signals to other locations. You should have everything also optimized for Maps, preferably Google Maps, on pages with the pin to address.  Unique content, whether it be customer reviews, specific location services, links to nearby locations, hours of operation, an event happening, and a location description.

Images are also great because people want to see your business. That way, you’ll be able to show it off, and you should include both text and alt text.  Sub-pages with additional information and internal links to pages as well are also incredibly important.  Ranking for this is super important to have, and if you’re a business who is trying to win in the local market, you need to have a good idea on what it is that you need to do in order to rank in this, so you can do it as needed.

Location is important, and a local business needs this to survive, so always make sure that you’re putting that info in no matter what, since it makes a big difference in the way the business is inevitably ran.

While this is an introduction to effective link building, here, we’ll tell you about Suggest a Link, and why it works.

Some people may call it link begging, but it’s so much more than that, and if you know how to increase conversions, this is integral for it.

This consists of link building to websites and pages like your own and asking publishers to link to the page, and this type of link works amazingly with websites that have resources or link pages. This is great for linking to useful sites, and you can suggest relevant and useful web pages for this.

However, in order to obtain a link, you need a relevant web page, which means you need to take the time to review the links that are listed that you want a link from. The work is exclusive, and it is something that’s excluded, so if you link exclusively to educational or government pages, then you should skip it since it’s a waste of time asking for links such as that.  You will notice that excluding all sites from that is possible.

If your site is commercial, you want to link to other commercial web pages, even if it’s just a singular one, and you should visit the commercial link, and from there identify why the page is linked to there. Is the link to a product specifically, or is the link to an informational article.

If you link to an article, you’ll have a much higher success rate if it’s a useful article. You may also link to a product page within the article, which is the next best thing to do, and it isn’t as useful as going straight to the products page, but it helps. If you have a commercial site, getting natural links about products is ideal, but it’s difficult since many don’t’ link directly, so set your expectations for this in a rightful manner.  Remember that obtaining links does take effort too.

When building links, you should review the pages that are linked, and from there, suggest similarly useful web pages, and link to more than just a page too, but you should suggest other pages as well. You can link from sites whose readers will find this useful. If they don’t already exist, work to create pages that are useful to sites that you want to link from. Remember as well not t worry about metrics including domain authority. As long as it isn’t a spam site, and it’s relevant, then that’s fine.  Finally, you should make sure that you don’t fret if the link is redirect or no-follow.  This is still a useful link at the end of a day, and it can be good for you to try especially if you notice that you need links.

Building links can be incredibly hard, and there is a lot that’s going on, and a lot that you can deal with. The right links and the right building can be incredibly useful.

Link building is the ideal approach to build traffic and authority for your website. But link building alone wouldn’t do anything beneficial. There are some prerequisites which you must fulfill if you want your website to perform well after your link building efforts. I am talking about the technical SEO here.

If your website doesn’t stand well on the technical grounds, it might not perform on the web no matter if you pay proper attention to the quality and quantity of links. In this scenario, it is worth mentioning the top goals of technical SEO.

• Good technical SEO makes it easier for the search engines to crawl through your website.
• It helps your website to attain top cross-platform compatibility.
• It helps the website load faster.
• It helps in efficient implementation of plugins if you are using CMS, e.g. WordPress.
• A technically accurate website doesn’t have any problems with misconfigured Google Analytics code.

Keeping these five points in mind, you will realize the importance of technical SEO for your website.

A few things that you need to consider in order to implement right technical SEO are worth mentioning in this regard.

Focus on website’s ability to let the search engines easily crawl through it

When it comes to making your website an easy ground for the search engines to crawl through, you are going to have to make sure that you have worked on HTTPS secure implementation in a flawless way. Unfortunately, not many people get a chance to work on the website audit while doing such implementations.At least a surface-level audit can be quite helpful in identifying any major issues which can affect the transition to HTTPS.

You will have to see whether or not your site loads on both HTTPS and HTTP at the same time.If you have both of the versions loading, you have issues with the security certificate. In this scenario, you first need to create a full redirect pattern in HTACCESS if you are using Apache or CPanel servers. And if you are using WordPress, you will need to use a plugin to force the redirects from http://.

The website structure should not be complex

While getting your site ready for technical SEO, you have to pay proper attention to the structure of your website’s URL. Things like randomly generating parameters, difficult to understand URLs, and some other factors can cause issues with your technical SEO.

Another problem to talk about is the duplicate content. Duplicate content in this scenario refers to the content which can be accessed through two URLs. Nevertheless, any form of duplicate content is not going to have any SEO benefit for you.

Platform Compatibility & Page Speed

If you have not worked on the coding to make the site design effective, it will result in the glitches which may not leave an ideal impact on the users as well as search engines. For instance, a site that doesn’t adjust properly in different screen sizes usually has the design coding problems. This is what you are going to have to rectify if you want the website design to be efficient and effective.

Another feature to talk about is the page speed. Page speed is directly associated with the user experience.If your website takes more than a few seconds, it might get a reputation of being a slow loading website. This website is going to have higher bounce rate, directly affecting the ranking of your site.

While there are many other technical SEO factors which come into play, the above mentioned factors are the major ones. You have to make sure that you have worked well on making your website technically correct.