Site Architecture Audits

If you want to rank in Google you have to make sure that you’re using the right keywords for every page. One of the biggest mistakes I frequently encounter is that site owners are optimizing for too generic keywords. Social media is another traffic acquisition avenue that can be pursued by website owners. Promoting to your social media following is great, but this type of traffic isn’t necessarily new traffic. SEO for reputation management is a process for neutralizing negative mentions of your name in the SERPs. In this type of SEO project, you would strive to occupy additional spots in the top 10 results to push the critical listing lower, and hopefully off the first page. Sites that promote “thin,” low-value content run the risk of being penalized by Google; they also tend to have high bounce rates and low conversion rates. A good resource is more than just a long-form 1500 word blog post. It deep dives into topics and can stretch on for pages, combining data and insight that your audience would be hard pressed to find anywhere else.

What is with this hue & cry about backlinks?

The easiest way to get editorial links is to create outstanding content that people will want to share with their readers. Another way is to guest post on a high-quality site that is in your niche. Your competitors can be a goldmine of information that can inform every aspect of your marketing and rocket your website’s traffic. Sites that aren’t optimized for user intent and mobile SEO will fail. According to research by Google, smartphone users have a higher buyer intent than desktop users. They’re focused and ready to buy. It’s your job to be there when they are looking for your products. Google delivers results based on the geographic location of the searcher, which is determined by the IP address of the user.

Are Press Releases right for SEO?

Use relevant and accurate meta descriptions, title tags and alt text throughout your site. Make sure all the links are no follow if you are being paid by a third party to publish a post on your blog. The backlinks which are paid are punished by Google. It applies for both, the page giving it and the one receiving it. There is still a correlation between high rankings and the amount of backlinks, but this trend will continue to decrease moving forwards. Keyword research can be done using free tools. To offer the best possible results, search engines must attempt to discover all the public pages on the World Wide Web and then present the ones that best match up with the user’s search query. Google has worked to smash black-hat and spam-based link-building practices, penalizing link wheels, exchanges and paid links. In 2012 the Penguin update ushered in the link building reality we experience today. With it only natural link accumulation will gain your website & webpages authority.

Discover the connection between content and user experience

Gaz Hall, from SEO Hull, had the following to say: "Optimizing for user intent is not just about providing solutions or using synonyms. The majority of SEO campaigns are built around driving revenue and whilst rankings are great and indicative of campaign success, in reality you won’t retain clients without providing ROI." ‘Mobile indexing first’ means that Google will look at the mobile version of your site to decide how high you should rank. Google doesn’t only consider on-page SEO score when ranking an article. It also takes into account many other factors like social media signals (shares, likes, tweets, follows, etc.), backlinks, domain authority, and many other off-page metrics. Take a moment to consider some of the most popular websites you already have links going to on your own website. Is it possible for you to post content on any of these? You could be building Back Links leading from those popular websites that hundreds of thousands or even millions of other people regularly use. When yourwebsite or website’s content gets shared on social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Google+, and YouTube, it is considered a social signal or citation.

Site Architecture

Search engines like Google can tell the difference between links set up to improve search engine rankings and those that are from trusted, relevant sources. Even though Google search is not the be all and end all to business, having a site that ranks well for commonly searched for key terms helps greatly. Cloaking is when you present different content or URLs to your visitors than you do to the search engines. Along those lines, a “sneaky” redirect is when site owners “embed a link in JavaScript that redirects the user to a different page with the intent to show the user a different page than the search engine sees… If Google decides a site no longer adheres to its quality guidelines, they may apply a site-wide penalty pushing the results down for every page. The more infractions, and the greater the seriousness of the infractions, the bigger the penalty and the further the site will drop. Today, many sites use secondary menus to accommodate for additional content. Loads of site-owners can’t help but state that they “can’t squeeze all they have to say in just a few pages.”

Make a good use of your competitors’ keywords

When you delete one or more posts or pages from your site, there’s often collateral damage. Your SEO writer and SEO expert should be able to communicate with each other and work together to ensure the content aligns with your goals. Website crawl-ability and making a website searchable goes beyond making sure Google can “crawl” the website. Understanding how a website’s users (including Google) are navigating a website is key to building an information architecture. Building the information architecture in a way that mirrors their thought processes will help both user types discover information on a website. The world of search is a big one; even if you serve a niche industry, there are hundreds -- or even thousands -- of keywords and topics to choose from, and your choices could make or break your strategy. One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned is that keywords can really keep web pages focused, which is important in SEO. We look at buyer persona behavior, industry trends, competitors and more to build a list of targeted terms, and then we focus on one term per page. In doing so, we can more easily provide value to our viewers.