How many times do you search for a service or a business in your neighborhood?
If you’re like the 88% of people who conduct a search for a local business, you’re going to end up calling or visiting that business within a day.
And guess what…for you business owners out there, this is a REALLY good thing!
When your business is showing up at the top of those search results, the more likely your website traffic, foot traffic, and sales will increase.
This is where local SEO comes into play
According to BrightLocal “Local SEO is an effective way to market your business online. It helps businesses promote their products and services to local customers at the exact time they’re looking for them.” And since we know that customers have increased searching for “open”, “now”, and “near me” 200% in the last year alone, local SEO is clearly a solid strategy to increase quality, relevant leads.
Put yourself in your customers shoes who are searching for “restaurants near me”. Google will first show you the “snack pack” as well as the proceeding top organic search results. These are excellent positions to be in as a local business owner. And when you’re in that “snack pack” or at the top of the organic search results, you’re meeting those customers searching for you, head on
Google My Business optimization – Google My Business is a tool to keep your NAP (name, address, phone number) and other business information up to date. Your business profile appears in Google Search and Maps.
Local on-page optimization – Your website content and meta tags are optimized for local SEO
Localized content – Is your content relevant to your location? Does it connect with other local businesses and your community?
If you’re interested in learning more about local SEO, BCC Interactive, a premier SEO agency in Philadelphia, PA, has put together an engaging and helpful infographic below, demonstrating 15 reasons why local search engine optimization (SEO) is more important than ever.
Author bio:
Cory Young is a creative and innovative internet marketer with 10 + years’ experience in digital marketing, with a specialization in Search Engine Optimization and data analytics. Cory is the founder of BCC Interactive, an SEO agency based in Philadelphia, PA. He and his team are experts at developing holistic digital marketing strategies that help businesses achieve their growth targets.
Make sure to scroll to the bottom of the page to get your SEO audit report.
Are you interested in seeing where your website currently stands in regards to SEO?
It’s always helpful to have some sort of benchmark handy to understand what type of traction you currently have in the major search engines such as Google, Bing and Yahoo.
Doing an SEO audit allows you to focus in on areas where your website needs improvement and can really help you create a customized plan of attack moving forward.
Unfortunately, most people have no idea where to start in this process and do not have the proper tools in order to perform an in-depth SEO audit for themselves.
Luckily, I can help you and have been involved with SEO since 2007, helping businesses and individuals increase their organic presence in the search results.
Before we get into the details of my SEO auditing service, let’s go over a checklist of what I typically look into when I perform my analysis.
SEO Audit Checklist
When auditing a website and looking further into the overall SEO currently in place, it’s important to analyze ALL aspects that could be affecting your results.
This includes both on-site and off-site SEO.
Current Search Engine Rankings
Meta Tags
Title Tags
Meta Descriptions
Header Tags
Image ALT Tags
Content Analysis
Website Speed
Mobile Speed
Desktop Speed
Crawl Errors (404 errors, redirects chains etc.)
XML Sitemap
Domain Authority
Backlink Portfolio Analysis
Social Shares
Business Citations (for Local SEO)
Website Architecture
This list above is a good place to start and will really provide you with the data you need to begin implementing an SEO strategy for your website.
Too many “SEO auditing tools” online miss major parts in this process and mainly because they are not real humans working on it.
Sometimes the information provided by these tools can also be flat out wrong and the level of detail/explanation can be incredibly vague.
Having the expertise of an SEO specialist digging into the nuts and bolts of your website is far more beneficial than some mediocre online tool.
In fact, I don’t know of any tool out there that can give you all the information laid above in a single SEO audit report.
Which brings me to my offer for you below.
Get Your SEO Audit Report!
If the checklist above sounds overwhelming or confusing to you, let me do the hard work for you.
Not only will I provide you with a detailed SEO audit report, but we will also schedule a 30 minute phone call to review your results.
This way I can explain to you exactly where your website stands and what areas we need to focus on next to improve your organic search presence.
This is a report that you will 100% own and have forever to look back on and use as a benchmark.
I can deliver your SEO audit report within 24-48 hours.
I really think you’ll learn a lot once we go over your website’s SEO data and I will even give you specific steps to implement moving forward.
What are you waiting for?
Get your SEO audit report by clicking the button below!
One of my coaching students Mark Newsome runs a great blog over at YouCanMarketOnlineNow.com, which provides tons of valuable content for small business owners, entrepreneurs, direct/internet marketers and much more.
Mark hired me as an SEO coach/mentor to help him drive more targeted organic traffic to his website.
At the time of writing this, I’ve been working with Mark for the past 8 months, helping him really strengthen and tighten up both his on-site and off-site SEO.
Something that we ran into a couple months back is a common mistake that I see SO many bloggers and webmasters make.
What mistake am I talking about here?
Intrusive Popups and/or Interstitials on Mobile
Now that Google has put forth mobile first indexing, it’s crucial that we really analyze our website from a mobile perspective.
Intrusive popups/interstitials tend to take up a large portion of the screen when viewing the website on a mobile device which leads to a bad user-experience if someone cannot easily click out of it/navigate your website.
This can potentially result in decreased search engine rankings in Google and therefore decreased organic traffic.
There have been some websites that have recorded significant decreases in both search engine rankings and organic traffic as a result of having an intrusive popup in place.
So we need to make sure any intrusive popup is deleted, cleaned up and/or modified on your website if you currently have one present.
Example of Mark’s Intrusive Popup on Mobile
As Mark and I dug more and more into the SEO of his website, I noticed that he indeed had an intrusive popup in place that was taking up probably 90% of the screen (when viewing on my iPhone).
See screenshot below:
As a visitor, if you were to try to navigate Mark’s website on a mobile device, there wasn’t even an option to exit out of this popup, which raises major red flags in Google.
Visitors were not able to see the content on his website due to this popup taking up the majority of the screen.
I immediately knew we needed to take action on this to avoid further issues and potentially a penalty from Google.
We located where in Mark’s WordPress site this popup existed, which was in a widget with some Aweber html code pasted in there, and deleted it completely.
This got rid of the intrusive popup on mobile and allowed users once again to navigate Mark’s website efficiently and effectively.
I had a hunch that this would really help Mark’s website in terms of search engine rankings and organic traffic, and thankfully I ended up being correct.
Results From Eliminating the Intrusive Popup on Mobile
I made sure to add an “annotation” in Mark’s Google Analtyics account to track when we fixed his intrusive popup issue.
This way we could see if there were any positive results from cleaning this up on his website.
I knew this may take a couple of weeks to a few months to see any sort of uptick in organic traffic/rankings from our efforts, so we patiently waited as we focused on other SEO work.
Upon checking on this recently, I was really ecstatic to see a noticeable increase in organic traffic over the last couple of months.
Please see the screenshot below to see what I’m talking about (this data is plotted monthly).
Now let’s briefly explain this simple yet powerful chart above:
The bottom red arrow pointing to the “annotation” is when we fixed the intrusive popup which was on September 9th, 2018.
You can see the next two months to follow (October and November 2018), were two of Mark’s highest months all-time in organic traffic!
Incredible that just from fixing this intrusive popup issue, we saw such a large increase in organic traffic both month-over-month and year-over-year.
To get a better idea of the impact of this fix, let’s look at some specific stats:
Month-Over-Month Increases
Organic traffic is up 67.61% when comparing October 2018 vs. September 2018 – (101 vs. 67 visits).
Year-Over-Year Increases
Organic traffic is up 376% when comparing year-over-year (October 2018 vs. October 2017) – (119 vs. 25 visits).
Google almost immediately recognized this change and as a result the organic traffic for Mark’s website increased significantly.
We will continue to monitor this in the coming months, but both Mark and I are thrilled at the initial results we are seeing.
(Note: When making an important change such as this one on your website, a good tactic is to “fetch” your site within Google Search Console. This could result in Google seeing/indexing the edits/adjustments you made faster.)
Conclusion:
The key takeaway here is to make sure that you do not have any intrusive popups or interstitials that are affecting the way users access or navigate your website when on a mobile device. If you do, please consider either deleting them altogether or modifying them so that they take up much less of the screen (like a horizontal banner towards the top of your website – see article here for more examples). This one fix alone can do wonders and improve the overall SEO of your website.
Do you have an intrusive popup/interstitial on your website?
Website loading speed is becoming increasingly important not only from a user experience perspective but also from a search engine optimization (SEO) standpoint as well.
I noticed over the past few months, that my website was loading way too slow and I needed to make some adjustments to improve it.
I know in the past for clients I have worked with, that improving the speed of a website can directly impact search engine rankings and traffic coming into your website.
Think about it for a second, Google will not want to rank a slow loading website high in its search results.
Instead, they will want to rank a website that loads as quickly as possible so users can get the information they need without waiting too long.
At the time of writing this blog post, I just recently made some speed adjustments on my website. Meaning that it may not be for a little while until I see any ranking/traffic increases.
However, I added an annotation in my Google Analytics account (see screenshot below) to reflect the date where I started making these website speed improvements.
I will most likely do a follow up blog post in the coming months, to report on any progress I am seeing as a result of improving this metric on my site.
Now let’s take a quick before and after look at my website speed statistics.
The website I recommend using to check your the overall speed of your website is GTmetrix.
It’s free and they give you a really thorough analysis of what you need to work on to speed up your site.
Website Speed (Before) – 5.9 Seconds
As you can see, my website speed prior to making any adjustments was at 5.9 seconds (fully loaded time).
It didn’t start off that slow, but overtime with the more I was working on my website, adding plugins etc., it started to get a bit sluggish.
I remember loading my home page a few weeks ago, waiting patiently and saying “Okay, it’s definitely time to put website speed at the top of my priority list!”.
As an SEO specialist I know investing my time in areas such as website loading speed will pay off big over the long-term.
Now let’s take a look at my website speed after I made some tweaks/adjustments (don’t worry, I’ll explain exactly what I did to make my website faster).
Website Speed (After) – 2.9 Seconds
My website speed after making some necessary improvements is now 2.9 seconds (fully loaded time).
When comparing my “before” screenshot to my “after” screenshot, you can see that I improved my website speed by 3 total seconds!
That’s honestly a really good start and my website loads much more smoothly and fluently now.
However, this is an on-going effort in order to maintain and even improve my website speed further down the road.
Let’s get into the steps I took to see a 3 second overall improvement in website speed on my WordPress blog.
How Did I Improve My Website Speed In WordPress By 3 Seconds?
It wasn’t one main thing that attributed to my website speed improvements but a handful of adjustments I made after doing some deeper research.
1.) Got Rid of Unnecessary Plugins:
I ditched all plugins on my WordPress site that I wasn’t using and ones that were really making my website slower. First, I deleted all of my “inactive” plugins that were just sitting there collecting virtual dust. Next, I deleted plugins that were indeed active but that I was barely using or that served very little purpose. For example, Jetpack was an active plugin that was making my WordPress site super slow (I didn’t realize until digging deeper) and I was barely even using it. Once I deleted this plugin alone, I saw an immediate improvement in loading speed when testing my site again in GTmetrix.
My advice to you here is to really clean up your plugins within WordPress and delete any that you are not using. This means delete them completely and not just set them to inactive. I think I ended up deleting 8-10 plugins on my WordPress website in total.
Originally I was using W3 Total Cache plugin, but after reading a few articles from resources that really know the subject of website speed, I soon found out that WP Rocket is the best caching plugin…and especially when it comes to improving your website speed. If you have a single site, you can get access to the plugin for only $49 for the entire year. A steal of a deal in my opinion. This dramatically helped with my site speed and every blog post I write now, I have various optimization options that I can check off (see screenshot below). This is after configuring WP Rocket in the proper way.
3.) Downloaded a Plugin Called WP Optimize:
This is a simple little plugin that cleans out a lot of unnecessary junk within your WordPress site and keeps your database fast and efficient. It automatically optimizes your WordPress database by cleaning out post revisions, auto-draft posts, trashed posts, spam and trashed comments and much more.
4.) Compressed/Optimized all Images Using a Plugin Called Smush:
This plugin has really helped improve my WordPress website speed, especially since I’m a blogger and have tons of images uploaded on my website. Smush resizes, optimizes and compresses all of your images with their plugin. Large image files can really slow down a website and this plugin is a quick and easy solution to help optimize your media in the most efficient way possible.
The website speed optimization steps above were the main areas I focused on this last round.
In another 1-2 months, I will re-visit my website speed once again to see where more improvements can be made.
I hope this was a helpful guide and know that even implementing one or two of these steps could really help your website speed.
Remember that this and SEO in general is an on-going effort and will be something that you need to continuously revisit.
Stay persistent, track your progress and remain patient!
Any and every blogger would like to gain more traction within the search engines and generate more organic traffic for their website.
The problem is, the concept of search engine optimization (SEO) can seem so foreign and/or overwhelming to many new and even veteran bloggers.
Many people get freaked out by all of the algorithm changes put forth by Google (yes these happen every year), and how to stay ahead of a marketing strategy that seems to be constantly evolving and changing.
The good news is that if done correctly and methodically, SEO can really help you grow your blogging business and lay the groundwork for long-term success.
And over-time it will just become second nature with the consistent effort that you put in.
In this article, we’ll take a look at a few helpful SEO tips for bloggers that anyone can implement.
Make sure to save this link or bookmark this page so you can refer back to it.
How To Do SEO For Bloggers
1.) Long-Term Mindset
First things first, let’s ensure we have the right mindset when it comes to doing SEO for your blog.
SEO is in no way an overnight process.
There’s a good chance I just lost 50% of people who are reading this blog post after saying that.
You must adopt a long-term mindset if you ever want to see major growth from your blog.
Give your SEO efforts at least 6 months before drawing any conclusions if it’s working or not and continue implementing the other steps that we’ll lay out below.
2.) Keyword Research
In order to get found within the major search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo, you need to target the right keywords.
For this step you can use any of the tools provided below:
Ubersuggest (free)
Google Keyword Planner (free)
MOZ Keyword Explorer (paid)
Keywordtool.io/google (paid)
A lot of bloggers get this step wrong and target keywords that are way too broad and competitive.
I am a big believer in going after long-tail type keyword phrases – meaning terms that have anywhere from 3-6 words in a single phrase (sometimes more).
For example, you may want to target “strategies to make money from home” rather than “make money”.
Although the longer-tail terms may have less monthly search volume, if you rank for enough of these over-time, it can really start to add up to a healthy amount of organic traffic.
It’s important to be realistic here as well…Not every blog post you write will rank on page #1 of Google, it’s just a simple fact.
But the more quality content you produce on a regular basis, the more options you give Google to choose from.
Within this next SEO tip for bloggers, there are two areas to focus on when it comes to content generation.
Consistency and quality.
Master these two and you put yourself way ahead of the blogging competition.
1.)Consistency- When it comes to doing SEO for your blog, it’s essential that you publish consistent blog content.
Google wants to rank a website that they know is updated with fresh and unique content.
Also, if you’re starting to establish a readership, know that your followers are craving more informative content from your end.
Strive to publish at the very least 1 blog post per week…This equates to 4 or so per month.
If you can do even more, that’s excellent…but this should give you a good place to start.
Producing content on a consistent basis also provides more opportunity to rank within the search engines.
As stated in the keyword research step above, you won’t rank or “hit” for every blog post you write, but generating lots of content will increase your chances.
It will also allow you to go after many different keyword phrases…More opportunity means more potential to rank highly.
2.) Quality: You want to make sure that each piece of content you produce is of the highest quality possible.
Now obviously not every blog post you write will be your best…we’re all human and cannot always produce our best content, but the majority of your content should be highly valuable and helpful to your readers.
Do not write low-quality articles just to get something published on your website.
Take the time to craft well-written pieces that will bring people back to your website.
In return, your search engine rankings and organic traffic should improve.
4.) Optimize All SEO Tags on Blog Posts & Main Pages of Website
This is an SEO step that most bloggers get wrong in my opinion…Or if they are implementing these tags, their work could use major improvement.
This is where the keywords you generate in step #2 will come into play.
There’s 4 on-site tags that we will briefly discuss here that you will want to optimize for every blog post you publish.
Title Tags: Your Title Tags essentially hold the most SEO weight and should be optimized with your most important keywords in place. They are seen in the search results as the blue hyperlink (see screenshot below) and also in the browser window tab. Try to make your Title Tags as close to 70 characters as possible without going over.
Meta Descriptions: Your Meta Descriptions don’t hold any SEO weight, but they do affect click-through rate as they are the snippet of text that is seen below the Title Tag, underneath the URL (see screenshot above). It is recommended to write a unique and engaging Meta Description for every page/post on your website. Try to keep them around 150-160 characters without going over that limit.
Header Tags: Like Title Tags, Headers Tags on a website are very important in regards to SEO and pack a lot of punch. These are generally the main heading above any block of text on a blog post/webpage. They help break up the page, explain what a certain section is about and provide Google with another ranking signal of what your content is about. These are the only front-end facing meta tags on a website so it’s important that they read naturally to your visitors, while also incorporating target keywords. Header tags can be used in a hierarchy starting with the H1 tag, H2, H3, H4 and so on. You can see an example of a header tag below:
Image ALT Tags: As bloggers, we most likely have tons of images on our website. The problem is, most people when doing SEO for their blog completely ignore their Image ALT Tags. Whenever you upload an image to your website you have the option to write an Image ALT Tag along with it. This helps Google better understand what the image is about and offers additional optimization.
If you are using WordPress, a plugin that will make this process as easy as possible is Yoast.
If you start optimizing your meta tags from here on out over a long enough period of time, you should start seeing noticeable increases in your search engine rankings and organic traffic.
5.) Copy Optimization & Internal Linking
Optimizing your copy with target keywords helps add more relevancy to each and every one of your blog posts, giving Google a strong signal of what you’re trying to rank for.
Internal links (links pointing to other relevant posts/pages on your website), helps users navigate your site more effectively and also helps spread some link equity throughout your pages.
When it comes to copy optimization and internal linking, try to only add in target terms and links where appropriate.
We do not want to “keyword stuff” here or try and “force” any unnecessary internal links.
Be methodical in your approach with each and every blog post.
6.) Add Schema Markup
Structured data or schema markup helps Google better understand what the content on your page is about.
Google has said that adding structured data to your blog articles can potentially enhance your position in the search results (see here).
This also gives you more opportunity to rank for rich snippets depending on the types of keywords you’re targeting and how you are formulating your content.
There are really helpful plugins to make this process really easy such as this one here.
Any blogger using schema markup for SEO purposes are putting themselves way ahead of the competition.
7.) Build Quality Backlinks
Link building generally comes after much of the on-site SEO work (all the steps discussed above) is completed and should be a strategy that you do on a monthly basis.
Google heavily favors websites who have a strong backlink portfolio.
Websites that rank the highest in Google are normally the ones who have other quality websites linking back to them.
Let’s quickly bring up a very simple link building example, and one of my favorite techniques which is guest posting.
Guest posting is as easy as researching/reaching out to other relevant blogs in your niche and asking if you could write a high-quality article for their website.
Within your content, you would insert a link that points back to your website.
Once your guest post is published to the external website, you’ve built yourself a quality and natural backlink which Google will love.
Again, this needs to be an on-going effort in order to acquire as many quality backlinks as you can.
But over-time, this strategy alone could dramatically help with overall search engine rankings, domain authority and organic traffic.
8.) Track Your Progress
As a blogger utilizing SEO tactics, you must track your progress to see if your work is paying off or not.
You will want to monitor your traffic data, search engine rankings/keyword movement, conversions/goals, crawl errors and more.
This will help you identify trends, patterns and areas where your website could use improvement.
A few tools that come to mind that I believe are essential are:
Get comfortable diving into the data at your disposal and use it to your advantage moving forward.
Knowledge is power and especially when it comes to SEO and blogging.
Conclusion:
To close, implementing SEO on your blog needs to be a long-term marketing strategy and should not be thought of as a quick fix. Follow these steps one-by-one slowly until you get the hang of implementing proper SEO on your own. Be extremely consistent with your efforts and Google won’t have a choice but to notice the changes you’ve made on your website. We are building your foundation here, and the work you put in now will be well worth it in the end.
I was fortunate enough to attend SMX East in New York City this week for a special three-day SEO conference (although, I was only able to make it to two of the days).
This was the first time I’ve ever been to this particular event and I’m very grateful for the experience.
If you’re an SEO specialist, geek and enthusiast like I am, this is the conference to be at.
There were many reputable and influential speakers presenting/teaching and people who came from all over the country to listen in.
Simple to say that there was a lot of good SEO energy at this event.
It really was an awesome experience and I made sure to fill up my notebook with as many notes as I possibly could.
Below I will very briefly break down the two days of my SMX East experience.
SMX East Day #1 – Workshop with Eric Enge
The first day I was in an 8 hour workshop on the subject “Hardcore Technical SEO Tactics & Techniques” presented by Eric Enge.
To say I was blown away by Eric’s knowledge and expertise is an understatement.
He had 14 modules laid out for us and was able to get through them all for this full-day workshop…and in great detail.
Although some of the subject matter was familiar to me, there were definitely topics that I knew very little about.
This is to be expected when you’re learning from one of the top guys in the industry.
One of my favorite parts about Eric’s workshop was him talking about the recent Google Algorithm updates.
There is a lot more involved in some of these recent changes from Google that I was unaware of.
I also really liked how we dove deep into the technical side of SEO which can truly have a large impact on your or your client’s website(s).
Things like canonical tags, meta noindex tags, duplicate/thin content, website speed and much more…
Furthermore, there was really useful information regarding YouTube SEO as well that really got my gears turning…Certain ranking factors that Eric brought definitely set off a few light bulbs in my head!
I can’t go into too much detail on what I learned that day because that is what the workshop is for…And quite frankly, it’s not possible to sum up everything that Eric went over in a single blog post.
However, if this at all interests you, you should really consider attending in 2019.
Eric is a true professional and man does he know his stuff!
SMX East Day #2 – Presentations & Booths
Day #2 of SMX East we were free to attend whichever presentations were going on that day.
It seemed like every 15-30 minutes there was a new one starting.
We could also walk around the conference where there were various booths set up of different SEO companies related to the SEO industry.
Many of these booths were companies whose SEO tools I use on a daily basis, so it was really interesting to venture over to those and chat with the team.
I also listened in on a few excellent speakers that day both in the common area of the conference and then in individual rooms/lectures.
Again, some of the top specialists in the digital marketing industry were speaking directly to us sharing their years of experience and expertise with the group.
Truly an incredible couple of days and an education that I could not have gotten anywhere else.
I can’t leave out too that breakfast, lunch and snacks were served both days I was there, which was very nice.
All in all, as stated above, this is an experience I am so grateful to have been able to be a part of.
If you have a chance to attend SMX East in the coming years, it’s a no-brainer and well worth the money/time invested.
I went in there with a lot of SEO experience already under my belt and am overwhelmed (in a good way) with how much I actually learned from the event.
There is always more to learn and especially when you’re being taught by some of the best people out there.
The practice of SEO is quite common among business owners today, even though very few frequently re-evaluate their SEO strategies.
Tactics that might have worked in the past may not yield any positive results today. Several practices of SEO might attract you unmerited penalties from search engines, and compromise your ranking in the SERPs. The following are six of the most dangerous SEO techniques that you should avoid in 2018:
Unnatural links
Most webmasters understand the importance of link building when it comes to attaining higher search engine rankings and increasing organic traffic. However, the links you build to your website must be of the highest quality, and from legitimate sources.
Unnatural links generally involve stuffing backlinks bought from illegal websites. These are incredibly spammy and low quality links that can really negatively impact your SEO. Some webmasters take the extra initiative of hiding the links so that the audiences do not see them. Whichever way, Google and other search engines have become stricter in observation of these types of practices, and are known to heavily penalize websites that engage in this behavior.
Keyword stuffing
It is easy to get caught up in the excitement of using identified keywords with the aim of reaching as many people as possible by ranking at the top of the search engines. However, like unnatural links, keyword stuffing is distasteful to search engines, not to mention, audiences.
Overusing key terms in your copy not only looks like you are trying too hard to make your article relevant but it also makes your content look poorly-researched and untrustworthy. Instead, you can determine various positions to use your keywords, like titles, metadata, image captions and descriptions, and strategically within the copy.
Further, you want to opt for long-term keywords, not only for the fact that they are more descriptive but also in the way they help in minimizing cases of keyword stuffing.
Unpleasant interstitial ads
Truthfully, pop-up ads can be very annoying, especially to mobile site users who have a small screen surface to work with. Even though ads are an income strategy for websites, it is wise to cut down on unpleasant interstitial ads.
Most people using the internet fret from sites heavily mounted with ads in the fear of catching a virus or attracting hackers to their devices and accounts. Therefore, the wrong use of unpleasant adds increase your bounce-rate, which equates to the rate at which people exit your website after a visit.
If you must use ads, assign them to a small portion of your website, in such a way that the user has enough room to keep scrolling on content that interests them. Remember you should also be keen to ensure a smooth and pleasant user experience, including optimizing page load speed.
Duplicate content
Since there is a high value for content in terms of SEO, it tends to get overwhelming for website owners to constantly develop high-quality and exciting content. As the pressure mounts, it is common for webmasters to generate duplicate content, sometimes similar to previous information on their websites, and other times similar to other content owners.
Either way, Google finds this as a way to manipulate search rankings, and this will directly impact your organic results. In fact, if you check the keyword rank tracker at serpbook.com, Google displays the original content as the source of information, which means the duplicate material may not make it to the SERP.
Furthermore, you risk landing into copyright issues for the reasons of plagiarism and stand the chance of tainting your reputation online. Aim to increase the quantity of content your share by working to remain consistent with your posting frequency, and also, ensure you stick close to originality, with a flair for your brand’s identity.
Article spinning
In a bid to run away from duplicate content, webmasters indulge in article spinning, which is a black hat SEO practice. The idea here is to manipulate a piece of work to come up with a rewritten piece of content that seems to be different from the original one, to impress search engines.
The truth of the matter is, search engines love fresh content, and article spinning is stale and can get your websites flagged as spam, or otherwise penalized on SERP. Also, the use of article spinning software produces low-quality content that is an unreadable version of the original content.
Remember, whether you change the terms and phrases used in a copy to generate a different article or duplicate it as it is, it passes out the same idea, and this does not add any value to your target audience.
Comment spamming on blogs
Commenting on other people’s websites is a great way to remain relevant online, increase your brand’s visibility, form relationships with other webmasters, as well as increase audience engagement. However, comment spamming is a technique that webmasters use to build up a comment section with feedback and links pointing back to their websites, which is a means to manipulate their search rankings.
Today, Google has changed its algorithm to punish such acts. The translation here is that the comments you post on blogs should be informative and value-adding, instead of generic messages. If correctly done, it can be an ideal source of backlinks (although no-follow), therefore, avoid unevaluable comments like ‘great post.’
The practice of SEO is one that is engaging and demanding of commitment to put up with the continuity of bettering your website. However, you must tread carefully when operating online, because your reputation is always at stake, and the internet never forgets.
AuthorBio
Maycon Diniz Lopes is the content manager of Serpbook. Serpbook is an online platform that gives you information about everything you need to monitor, automate and report on your keyword rankings. It also provides you with local and global SEO rank tracking in real time for Google, Bing, and Yahoo.
Are you engaging in any of these harmful SEO strategies?
No matter what your website is about, you need internal links. Why? Internal links are a great way to spread traffic, driving people to more pages of your site, for a start. Links also help readers find what they need, keep them engaged and, by extension, lower your bounce rate. Even better, internal links can boost your overall SEO — as they show search engines how your pages relate to one another and distribute page authority across your site.
So, whether your ultimate goal is more page views for more advertising dollars or better leads to convert into customers, internal links are key. How should you go about increasing them? What are the best practices for internal linking on your blog? Here is a look at what you need to know.
Build a lot of content. Step one to building good internal links is creating a lot of quality content. More pages mean more opportunities to link — leading to a better internal linking strategy for your site.
Use descriptive anchor text in links. Make sure that all your internal links use anchor text instead of images (or images of text) or generic text, for that matter. Rather than using a phrase such as “learn more here,” try telling visitors the context of the link, using relevant keywords. At the same time, the words you use as anchor text should feel natural; don’t try to force anything.
Prioritize the reader experience. Many website best practices go back to a foundational concept: Help the reader. So, in terms of link strategy, ask yourself: What links will be legitimately useful to readers? How can you point them to related resources that will match the context of a page? This helps you know how and where to link.
Link less to the homepage and more to other pages. If you’re like most bloggers, you’re already linking to your homepage throughout your site. This means you don’t need more link juice going to that page; it’s got the strongest authority already. Rather, spread the page authority among your site by pointing to other, lesser-found pages. If you already have an SEO campaign underway, you’ll want to link most often to the site pages that are SEO targets. This helps increase their authority, which is one factor in higher search rankings.
Find related pages through Google search. Sometimes you’ll remember old posts that are relevant to a new one you’re writing, and it’ll be easy to incorporate them into your content. Other times, you’ll need to search. Here’s an easy way to do it: Go to Google and search “site:yourURL.com” followed by your topic. The results will show you related posts you’ve written, which may be a natural fit for internal links.
Aim for about 3-5 internal links per post (per 500-600 words). Filling your posts with dozens of internal links is not a faster path to high SEO rankings. Remember, you’re trying to add value to your readers’ lives. Depending on the type of post (interview, roundup, how-to, etc.), it may make sense to add more or fewer links. In general, though, it’s a good idea to shoot for two to three internal links at minimum. This does not include the homepage or other high-ranking pages such as your “About” page or “Contact” page. Instead, try to link deeper into your archives, to posts that see less traffic day to day.
Use the smallest number of links possible between your homepage and any other page. Think of links like degrees of separation. To make content more findable, you want to minimize the degrees of separation between your homepage and other pages on your site. This is where categories and tags can be so useful. Ideally, you arrange your content like a pyramid — the homepage is on top, linking to a handful of pages (i.e., your categories), which link to pages (such as posts).
Regularly check for broken internal links. Internal links are useful only if they’re working. When one of your blog posts links, for example, to a page you’ve deleted, all that does is damage SEO. Regularly check for broken internal links with free tools such as BrokenLinkCheck.com or DeadLinkChecker.com. Then, either change the link or 301 redirect the broken link to the closest relevant page.
When it comes to blogging, internal links are vital. Build a better site by strategically incorporating relevant links throughout your posts! To make the most of the links you use throughout your site, follow the best practices above.
Author bio:
Shanna Mallon is a contributing writer for Straight North, a professional SEO consultant agency in Chicago. Shanna has been writing professionally online since 2007.
I’ve had a few questions recently about how to set up 301 redirects in WordPress, so I figured it was a good blog topic for today.
Now there’s multiple ways you can set up 301 redirects on your WordPress site, but the one I’m going to show you today is super simple.
But first let’s quickly go over why you would want to set up a 301 redirect on your website in the first place.
When To Use 301 Redirects?
There are a few instances where you would want to use a 301 redirect on your WordPress site.
Let’s go over a few of the most important reasons for this below.
404 Errors:
404 Errors are basically broken or dead links/pages on your website (see screenshot below as an example). What you would want to do in this situation is 301 redirect that broken link to the next most relevant page. This is an SEO best practice for two reasons. One, it will send visitors to a live page rather than them landing on a broken page and two it will pass the link equity from the original page to the 301 redirected page (assuming the original page had some authority and/or backlinks built to it). Correcting 404 errors using 301 redirects can be a quick win for webmasters and is something worth monitoring every month using tools like Google Search Console, MOZ, Screaming Frog and Ahrefs.
Duplicate Content:
In certain cases sometimes your website will contain duplicate content which can negatively affect your SEO. Pages that are too similar to each other can confuse Google on which one they should ultimately rank, which could result in de-indexing and drops in search rankings. Therefore you’d want to 301 redirect the duplicate page to the preferred page (alternatively you can use a canonical tag or write more unique content for the page). Duplicate content can also be caused by having multiple versions of a website. For example, if you have both an “http” and “https” version of your website, this can cause a mess of duplicate content issues which could wreak havoc on your search engine rankings. But simply 301 redirecting all “http” pages to “https” would solve this problem.
Newer/Better Version of a Page:
Sometimes you may want to use a 301 redirect in WordPress for an old blog post. Let’s say one of your blog posts is really outdated and irrelevant at this point and you recently wrote a more updated article on that particular topic. You may want to use a 301 redirect here. Not only will you send visitors to a fresher article, but you will also pass the link equity/authority to this new blog post.
How To Set Up 301 Redirects In WordPress
1.) First things first, login into your WordPress website.
2.) Then in the dashboard on the left hand side click “Plugins” and then “Add New”.
3.) Next in the search box, type in “301 Redirects”.
4.) Install the plugin named “Simple 301 Redirects”…Keep in mind that any of these WordPress plugins will most likely work just fine but this is the one that I personally use.
5.) Then make sure you hit “Activate”
6.) Once this is activated, on the left hand side again hover over “Settings” and then select “301 redirects”
7.) Where the two empty boxes are within the plugin is where you will set up a 301 redirect. The 404 error you will put in first (left box) and then the link you want to 301 redirect to will be second (right box). Make sure you only take the end of your URLs for this to work. For example, if my 404 error was from this URL http://evanhoeflichmarketing.com/nopage I’d just want to copy /nopage and paste it in the left box. Same goes for the 301 redirect. Note: To 301 redirect to your home page simply use / to make this happen. See below for a few examples of my 404 errors on the left and my 301 redirects on the right.
8.) Click “Save Changes” and test out your page(s) to ensure they’re 301 redirecting correctly.
It’s really as simple as that to set up 301 redirects in WordPress using a very basic plugin.
Of course there are other and more advanced ways of doing this, but I think this is great approach for most WordPress bloggers.
I also recorded a tutorial video on how to do this if you’d rather watch that..Please see below.
You can also subscribe to my YouTube channel here for additional blogging and SEO related tactics.
Keyword research can be an overwhelming and confusing task for many bloggers.
I know when I first started out, I had no idea what types of keywords to target and made many mistakes in the process.
Thankfully after years of SEO experience working with a variety of clients and after much trial and error on my own blog, it has become much clearer to me the types of terms to target.
In this blog post we will go over 3 simple steps on how to properly do keyword research for SEO which will ultimately help drive more traffic to your website.
How To Do Keyword Research for SEO- 3 Simple Tips
Step #1– Start With An Idea:
Have an idea of the type of term(s) you’d like to target. For example, maybe you’re interested in targeting the keyword “traffic generation” for a blog post. Just knowing this gives you some direction and is a good starting point that we can use in step #2. If you need help coming up with ideas, analyze your competitors and look into what’s trending in your niche.
Step #2– Plug Your Keyword Into A Keyword Research Tool:
Plug the term “traffic generation” into a keyword research tool to generate additional ideas. The keyword research tool I recommend is Ubersuggest by Neil Patel and it’s also free to use. Here are a few other good keyword research tools below as well:
Ubersuggest (free)
Google Keyword Planner (free)
MOZ Keyword Explorer (paid)
Keywordtool.io/google (paid)
Using Ubersuggest have “Web” selected and “English/ United States” and click “Look Up”. This will now populate a list for you to analyze.
As you can see, “traffic generation” has 590 monthly searches which is pretty good, however (and a big however), that specific keyword is going to be incredibly competitive and difficult to rank highly for since it’s so broad.
Which brings me to my next point…
Step #3– Go After Long-Tail Type Keyword Phrases
The problem I see with many new bloggers when it comes to keyword research is that they try and target the most competitive terms (mainly because of monthly search volume) and wonder why they are buried in the search results and are receiving ZERO traffic.
These keywords are extremely hard to rank for and especially for a brand new website with no authority yet. A better approach to start gaining some traction would be to focus on long-tail keywords phrases. This means go after terms that have anywhere from 3-5words in them. For example, Ubersuggest provided me with a whole bunch of keyword ideas and variations…See screenshot below (this is just a snapshot of the entire list):
After analyzing the list a bit, I found some really great long-tail terms to go after. Instead of targeting “traffic generation” (which we already established is too competitive for a newer website), see below for a handful of keyword phrases that may be a better alternative:
“how to increase website traffic” – 480 searches per month
“how to get traffic to your blog” – 320 searches per month
“how to increase website traffic for free” – 170 searches per month
“get more traffic to your website” – 70 searches per month
“how to get traffic to my website” – 70 searches per month
“how to get visitors to your website” – 50 searches per month
“how to generate traffic to my website” – 40 searches per month
Now some of you may be saying “40 searches per month, that’s peanuts”!
Well, I won’t argue with you there, but if it’s highly targeted traffic from Google it’s still very valuable.
I personally rank on page #1 of Google for keywords with 100 monthly searches or lower that I do very well with…and especially since they are easier to rank for.
Now let’s say that over the next 12 months you rank highly for 20-30 long-tail keyword phrases at an average of 70 visitors per month, that could easily generate you over 1,000 organic search visitors each and every month.
This could continue to build overtime, with the right SEO strategy, and snowball to thousands of unique visitors per month.
Please note: I’m all for going after some competitive terms with high monthly search volume (as I do myself), but not for bloggers who are just starting out.
Before attacking really competitive keyword phrases, you really need to get your website authority up by building quality backlinks.
Conclusion:
The only way to get better with keyword research and ranking your website in Google is through practice, trial and error. The more you do this, the more confident you will be in selecting the right keyword phrases. Remember to focus on long-tail terms at first for the best chance of ranking in the search results. Once your website gains more authority, you can then start to target some broader terms. Watch the YouTube version of this blog post here.
Maycon Diniz Lopes is the content manager of Serpbook. Serpbook is an online platform that gives you information about everything you need to monitor, automate and report on your keyword rankings. It also provides you with local and global SEO rank tracking in real time for Google, Bing, and Yahoo.
