Personal assistant search optimization

Jul 02, 18 Personal assistant search optimization

Posted by in SEO

Personal assistant search optimization is the phrase coined to the new art of optimizing and marketing for the new crop of voice activated digital personal assistants. Most analysts firmly believe that this is the future of SEO. This is not too surprising, if you think about where assistants like Goole Home and Siri get their information. SEO will eventually morph into optimization for voice based personal assistants. Here is what you need to know about PASO: Portability Although these personal assistants still need a lot of work, their primary draw is portability. The assistants exist on smartphones, tablets, and other computing device you carry around. Once the platform matures, typing in queries will seem like an antiquated notion. Personal Another reason that personal assistants are the future of SEO is the tailoring of results to the user. The portability provides context to the queries. Add some AI and machine learning and you have contextual responses tailored to the individual. For example a query for “where to have lunch” would return a list of restaurants in the area, ordered by price and rating with your favourite cuisine first. Results The results returned from a personal assistant are limited. Unlike the million or so results you get from Google, a typical assistant returns one to four at maximum.  This has resulted in much higher click through rates than normal search. As a result, being one of the top four results is more important than...

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Setting up AMP for WordPress

May 03, 18 Setting up AMP for WordPress

Posted by in SEO

AMP is Google’s new standard for lightweight content distribution. Google, indexes sites with AMP content and serves the pages (and ads) from its servers. In some cases, Google even preloads the pages with AMP from its search results. AMP pages look basic, have no styling and use standard fonts, but make content access much faster. Here is a guide on getting AMP up and running on your WordPress installation: Plugin Getting AMP compatible pages on your WordPress installation is as simple as installing and activating the plugin from Automattic. Once you do, all posts will be AMP compatible. You can test the pages by adding /amp/ to the end of the URL of any post. Getting pages to work with AMP requires a separate plugin to install. Analytics The next step is to add your AMP pages to your analytics profile. Login to your Google Analytics dashboard and get the tracking ID from the “tracking info” section under account properties. The should begin with UA. Enter this tracking ID in the AMP plugin under analytics. Test Now that you have an operational AMP page setup, we need to test and make sure everything works correctly. The first tool you can use Is the Google Amp Rest. Go to the tool and enter your URL and hit “run test.” Another option is to use the developer tools in Chrome. Open the tools and go to the “Console” tab. Here you will if there are any validation errors for you AMP...

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Link prospecting

Feb 24, 18 Link prospecting

Posted by in Link Building, SEO

Good organic backlinks are very difficult to get. Especially if your website is new to the space. Building up a backlink profile using social media takes time and requires a high level of constant engagement with your audience. Something that might not be suitable for all markets. There is however a way to get links, and that is by link prospecting. This involves some research and outreach. Here are some potential sources of links: Partnership pages: Relevant partner sites are likely to be willing to link to your site or relevant page in request. In some cases you won’t even need to link back. Industry resource lists: These are great for relevant links that both server and SEO purpose and also an online marketing resource for anyone looking for your services. Blog communities: Guest authors or commenters may have their own sites worth promoting to, although this should be limited in order to avoid getting penalized by Google for excessive article marketing. Backlink analysis: Sites that link to your competition can also be sources of links to you. In addition getting links that they have narrows any advantage they will get in the search rankings. Associations: View membership lists for potential prospects. Look at becoming part of these groups and you get linked back from their main site pages. Depending on the industry there are lots of groups. Social communities: Search social communities or forums for other potential link...

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SEO Changes we can expect for 2018

Jan 11, 18 SEO Changes we can expect for 2018

Posted by in Featured, SEO

There are a lot of changes we can expect in 2018 with Google Search and as a result, in the world of SEO. Here are some of the main changes we can expect: Machine Learning The biggest change we can expect is more use of machine learning and artificial intelligence in Search. Google uses machine learning in RankBrain, Cloud Vision, etc. When Google first announced RainBrain, the technology only affected 15% of search queries. Today, RankBrain affects all search queries. We can expect that machine learning will take over more and more components of the search algorithm. Voice Search Google sold millions of Google Assistant enabled devices during the last holiday season. Today, one in five queries are from voice search. With so many new Google Assistant devices in the market, we can expect the majority of queries to slowly switch over to voice. Google will surely increase the proliferation of Featured Snippets, as they are the source of information for Assistant devices. Linkless Mentions Microsoft’s Bing search engine uses a method of tracking mentions that do not involve a backlink and provide credit for the attribution. Google looks to be doing the same, based on a recent patent filing. Once again, Google will use machine learning to find, identify, and track these linkless mentions. Fake News Google will activate Knowledge-Based Trust (KBT), its new system to evaluate the quality of the page based on the accuracy of the content. It will be difficult for anyone to measure the success of the system outside of Google, but it shows that accuracy and truthfulness will become a part of ranking...

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Trends in SEO ranking factors

Nov 14, 17 Trends in SEO ranking factors

Posted by in SEO

At a presentation by Marcus Tober on new ranking factors for 2017 and beyond, there were some noteworthy changes to how Google’s algorithm is changing. Here are some highlights from the presentation. There are three general trends according to the presentation: Page load times are dropping across the board. Both HTTPS and page load speed are new (and public) ranking signals that require little effort on the part of the site owners to implement. Google’s grasp of the meaning and intention behind the content is increasing, and the data shows that more and more pages that rank at the top do not have the keyword phrase in the title. Bigger is better by the looks it as higher ranking correlates quite highly with content length, with the top three positions as much as 45% longer than lower ranked content. Also, there seems to be a tendency to weigh ranking factors differently by industry: The study examined the difference between the weights of ranking factors from one industry to another. For example, Finance sites get a higher boost from HTTPS than a gaming site. On the other hand, larger and better images boost travel sites but show no difference for finance sites. The ranking factors also change for niche sites. Recipe sites get more of a boost when using schema than others. SEO is changing, and Google is getting better and better at identifying good content that matches both the site and the user’s intention. The changes are positive in that they encourage and promote the creation quality content that has value to the...

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Three myths that can have a negative effect on your rankings

May 10, 17 Three myths that can have a negative effect on your rankings

Posted by in Featured, SEO

One of the worst things you can do is take action based on wrong assumptions. There are situations where logic does not apply and basing decisions on logic can have adverse consequences. SEO is the same, and there are assumptions that can get you in trouble. Here are three of them: All organic traffic is the same While it can be true that all organic traffic is the same, most of the time, it is not. Which is why simply doubling your organic traffic will not double your sales. This is why it is important to see what page generates your most valuable traffic and focus on that, rather than all traffic to your website. Outranking the competition A lot of clients always have one specific goal when it comes to SEO: they want to outrank the competition. While it is good to be competitive, it is foolish to divert resources away from the larger plan to increase conversions and growth, to outrank another company for a single keyword phrase. The tools are accurate One of the most damaging myths is that the keyword tools, especially the one provided by Google, are accurate. These are just estimates based on past data and future prediction. Also, the click-through rates, even for position one are as low as 12%, so staking out marketing targets based on these numbers is a bad...

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