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Article Written by : WM SEO How do you build and run the perfect website the way Google sees it? This has always been a tough question to answer. Until now. Thanks in large part to the various announcements that Google makes about changes to search, we can now build an image of what type of site will rank well in Google. Here is what they have said in the recent past: From the announcement post for Google Penguin, we get: “focus on creating amazing, compelling web sites”. Then from the link schemes page: “The best way to get other sites to create high-quality, relevant links to yours is to create unique, relevant content that can naturally gain popularity in the Internet community. Creating good content pays off: Links are usually editorial votes given by choice, and the more useful content you have, the greater the chances someone else will find that content valuable to their readers and link to it.”. Finally, from the webmaster guidelines, we get: “Think about what makes your website unique, valuable, or engaging. Make your website stand out from others in your field.” The message here is loud and clear. Google wants Quality in every aspect of the website. From the design to the content, it demands quality. This is not limited to the website itself. It wants you to get quality links, from quality websites to your quality content. The problem is most websites are built backward. People go looking for links before they have anything of quality. The message here is to build a site full of great content and then do your outreach. There are sites that update once every month or two but still rank high because they have hundreds of links. This is the type of quality Google is looking...
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Article by Pierrr Zarokian PPC, or “pay per click”, is an instantaneous way of getting consumers in front of your products and services. However, PPC campaigns are challenging. Tweaking them to run smoothly is an art. If you’re having trouble with your PPC campaign, here are a few tips to help get you on the right path. Know How to Scale Any digital ad agency will tell you: start your campaigns on a small budget to test the waters. Starting a campaign with a huge budget, not knowing what will convert, is a rookie mistake that could cost your business way more than what your were expecting. Increase the budget slowly after you know what’s generating leads and sales. Tracking It’s possible to run a campaign without tracking, but it’s nearly impossible to cut costs and increase profits without knowing what ads are getting clicks and conversions. A digital advertising agency will setup a tracking code for every campaign that they’re testing to see what ads attract clicks and what ads turn those clicks into leads and sales. So if you aren’t tracking your campaigns, you need to get started doing so today. Split Testing Getting into the habit of split testing ads to see which ad performs the best is another practice that digital agencies partake in to get the best results for their campaigns. When you find an ad that converts well, test another ad against it to try and increase your conversions even further. In time, you’ll see your daily ad spend start to drop and your income grow. Author’s Bio: Pierre Zarokian is a PPC and SEO digital marketing expert out of Los Angeles. He runs a Reputation Management Company called Reputation Stars. You can contact him from these links for further...
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Here are some key points brought up during the keynote at SMX by Google’s Gary Illyes: Authorship Google has completely stopped usage and display of authorship data. Although it has been a long time since the announcement, it has taken till now for it to be completely removed from the index. RankBrain He also said that you cannot optimize for RankBrain. He confirmed that it is a ranking factor, but one that does not have a score or a numerical figure associated with it. This ties in with the assumption that it is mostly used to optimize queries. Panda The panda update is continuous and slow. It can take months for the score assigned to each site by Panda to make it into the actual index and affect search results. Penguin Google is working on another penguin update but at this point there is no definite timeline on when its release can be expected. Mobile index He also talked about the mobile index that Google is still working on. It is meant to be a separate index only for mobile queries. At present both mobile and desktop searches are served by the same index. HTTPS One of the most interesting statistics to come out of this was that HTTPS within the Google index has now hit 34%. This is a huge jump from the single digits in the last few years. He recommends moving to HTTPS as quickly as...
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The accelerated mobile pages (AMP for short) standard by Google appears to be gaining traction with publishers. The standard, is meant to make pages smaller and reduce loading times. It achieves this in two ways. Firstly by narrowing down the technologies used and secondly by serving the pages from Google’s own servers. Here is a bit more detail from Wired: “To use AMP, you create an alternate version of your site that conforms to the specifications published by the AMP project. These standards are a lot like traditional HTML, but pared down to what Google considers to be the bare minimum. Typically you’ll give your AMP-optimized site a separate address, for example: yoursite.com/yourpage/amp. If you use WordPress, there’s actually a plugin will automatically create these alternate versions and help Google find them. But you could, theoretically, just replace your whole site with AMP optimized pages and it would still work in most modern web browsers, though it might be a bit drab.” Now it appears that more and more publishers are adopting the standard to serve on mobile devices. At Google IO 2016, Richard Gingras announced Google has indexed AMP pages on over 125 million documents from more than 640,000 domains across the web. In addition they also announced that updates to the Google Search app on both iOS and Android will now show AMP pages in the results. Recipes and other verticals will also start showing AMP pages by default wherever they...
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When a blog is started, often SEO is not of the top priorities. As a result SEO is neglected and then a lot of work has to be done later. This is harder when you have hundreds of older posts. The best way around this is to follow some best practices early on. Here are a three: On page SEO The best way to maintain quality content is to apply SEO to it after it is written. Do keyword research on the topics in your article and then try to apply related search phrases into the article. Use search terms in your headings subheadings and within the body. You can also modify the title to reflect common search terms. This way the link to the article will also contain the keywords, which is one of Google’s ranking signals. Encourage sharing Backlinks are still the most important method of ranking higher in search engines. One of the best ways to get backlinks is to make sure as many people see your articles. Encourage users to share the content with social sharing buttons and incentives. The more people that see and share your content, the more likely someone who has a blog is going to link to it. Incentives could be a free related pdf for those who share on a given social platform. Market the content This is a little more time consuming but has a high effort to reward ratio. Go to competing websites and find where they get links from. Contact those webmasters and ask them to consider linking to your article. This requires that your content is better than the one they are already linking...
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It appears that Google is running a limited experiment when showing local search results. Some search results are seeing “business cards” appear for local search terms. The result shows a carousel with results from local businesses that match the search result. Google also allows the content to be shareable directly from carousel itself. This is an interesting move. Although it remains to be seen if the link to the individual business or its Google Maps entry is shared. According to SEL: “This was first spotted by Mike Blumenthal, but I have confirmed with Google that this is a real test. Local Business Cards are built on the same display functionality as Candidate Cards, launched a few weeks ago.” At this point the experiment is limited to a few search phrases. One interesting point mentioned: “It’s all custom content and not being drawn from Google My Business or any other feeds. It’s also noteworthy for the fact that it represents the first time that Google has introduced or allowed animation/GIFs on the search results page.” The content could be custom due to the nature of the experiment and we could safely assume that were to go public, then the content will likely be from Google Maps Businesses. There is no official confirmation from Google, but were it to be launched, it could be significant for local...
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When it comes to blackhat techniques to improve seo, the linkwheel was one of the most popular. Linkwheels were basically a collection of web properties which linked to each and to your target page. Blackhat seo involved creating a set of web 2.0 properties, each linking to the next and to the page to be promoted. After the Google Panda update, a lot of the link juice from linkwheels was nullified. Google figured out an easy algorithmic method of identifying link wheels and link juice from such setups were de-emphasized. This did not stop blackhatters from continuing to sell linkwheel services. This would go to show that although effect is minimal, it still exists. There is now however a whitehat approach to making use of the link wheel concept. Googles focus was to kill any link juice passed from web 2.0 property based linkwheels or from sites that only existed for the purpose of a being a spoke in a linkwheel. The new approach is to use legitimate links to generate each of the spokes of the wheel. For example, a guest blog post could credit another element in the linkwheel rather than linking directly to your main site. That next element would link to another property and so on and so forth until the final page which links to your target page. The primary benefit here is that the final page which links to your site would get additional link juice from all the other links that lead to...
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