DISCOVER HOW UX CAN BLEND WITH SEO TO IMPROVE A SITE'S PERFORMANCE

For many years there has been a debate on whether UX and SEO can really go hand in hand, but this is not the case anymore. Today we’re examining how UX and SEO can make the perfect match.

There’s no need to question nowadays the need to blend UX with SEO when building a website, as none of these two can stand on its own.

User Experience (UX) focuses on target groups of people and usually bases decisions on their design preferences, as well as the industry’s trends, while SEO tends to focus more on the actual site and its data, in order to increase the content’s visibility in search engines.

However, there is a spot that these two meet…

Google made it very clear in its Webmaster Guidelines that even in SEO optimisation, users should be the centre of attention:

Make pages primarily for users, not for search engines.

And this is only a reminder on why SEO cannot work in isolation from other factors that affect a site’s performance, especially when the focus of the old days on keyword-stuffed topics is long gone.

Here are five points that remind us how UX can blend with SEO to improve a site’s performance:

1. Creating content for the user

Both UX and SEO should focus on the user and despite the older perception that SEO’s effectiveness depends on keyword and page optimisation, Google keeps reminding us to also think of the users when creating content.

It’s the human element that both users and search engines appreciate, as it indicates that the main goal is to satisfy the user, rather than the engine, although the latter will also favour the specific page in the ranking.

Whether it’s design or optimisation, the emphasis on the users’ needs help a page improve its performance and the audience will reward this effort with an increased time spent on the site.

2. Readability

Content should aim at relevance, quality and engagement, in order to become appealing and thus, convince the users to spend more time on it.

UX can enhance the appeal and the readability of a page and this may boost SEO, as the quality of the content is favouring a site’s crawlability from search engines.

Readability in SEO is the optimisation of the content in order to be clear, relevant, and informative, covering a topic as much as possible, in order to increase the page’s authority for search engines.

What’s more, keywords and on-page optimisation (even with the simplest steps) favour a post’s readability, providing that they are properly applied to enhance the browsing (and crawling) experience.

There’s no need to focus on target keywords anymore to increase the page’s ranking on SERPs, especially if it affects the quality of the content and its readability, as neither search engines, nor users will appreciate it.

Readability for UX is all about pleasing the users that access a page, ensuring that their first impressions will be positive.

A clear structure and a functional page, which works for all devices and browsers, contribute to an improved user experience and increase the chances of creating an engaged audience.

It’s the concise, legible, functional and properly formatted content that defines readability both for SEO and UX, with the combination of the two making a great match that users will enjoy.

3. Visual appeal

Visual content may contribute to the appeal of a page and both UX and SEO focus on its optimisation.

As human beings process visual elements faster than written information, images, videos and any other types of visual content are becoming important to the user experience.

In terms of SEO, visual content can be optimised to help search engines discover it and provide another way of leading traffic to your page through the rise of visual search engines.

User experience understands the importance of including visual content to a page, in order to increase its effectiveness, although it is very important to maintain the right balance, as visual content should not replace the actual text.

Moreover, both SEO and UX advocates agree that large images may affect the browsing experience, as they may disrupt the layout of a page and increase its load time.

Thus, always optimise your visual content, while keeping in mind the different devices, favouring both the desktop and the mobile experience.

4. Usability

It’s not just the design, but also the functionality of a page that affects the user experience.

An easy navigation allows users to further explore a page and and a proper menu functionality, internal link structure and clear navigation labels contribute to the time the users spend on a page and most importantly, they affect whether they will find what they’re looking for, which was the reason they initially clicked on the page.

What’s more, sitemaps are useful both for users and search engines, as they help the indexing, the navigation and the crawling of a site, which both SEO and UX want.

SEO and UX also agree on the importance of maintaining the right page speed, ensuring that heavy images, ads and faulty functionality won’t affect the time it takes to load a page. As users are becoming impatient with the loading speed of a site, it is critical to measure and improve the page speed, in order to keep the bounce rate as low as possible.

It is also important to test a page’s performance in all the browsers and the devices, aiming for a seamless experience for each user, with an additional focus on mobile users that keep increasing.

Furthermore, accessibility is also significant, both for SEO and UX, and it can be enhanced by ensuring that all pages are useful for readers with visual impairments, for example, who use screen readers to navigate a page.

Is your content descriptive? Is the navigation checked? Are your images captioned?

5. Retain users

UX aims to provide the site experience that helps users browse and find relevant and informative content and the right navigation pattern can guide them to the next steps in an easy and simple way that seems effortless to them.

Navigation and user paths may ensure that you retain users on your site, and by the time this is achieved, it’s time to think about conversion.

Both SEO and UX should have the idea of conversion in mind, either by turning visitors into loyal users, by encouraging them to subscribe to an email newsletter, or by turning them into clients.

Don’t be afraid to create calls to action that will help the users know what you expect from them. After all, users prefer to have clear guidance, rather than being exposed to multiple options that may paralyse them.

You don’t have to create content by simply having the idea of conversion in mind, but still, it’s the ultimate goal to understand what your audience wants and blend a great browsing experience with your business goals.

How UX and SEO optimisation may enhance a site’s performance

It’s not necessarily complicated to blend SEO and UX to improve a site’s performance, and it’s even more important to understand why these two cannot work independently anymore, at least not with the same effectiveness.

It’s SEO that may lead traffic to the site and help it reach a higher position on SERPs, but it’s UX that will determine whether the traffic can be maintained and converted into the set goals.

Thus, every site trying to improve its performance through UX and SEO should offer:

• Quality, informative, and relevant content
• Easy to use structure and simple and effective navigation
• Optimisation of text and images to please both users and search engines
• Appealing design that focuses on accessibility
• Clear call-to-action, both around the users’ next clicks, but also around the desired conversion

Major Best SEO Tactics You Never Hear in 2015

As search engines continue to evolve, marketers must improve their skills to keep up. According to reports 70 percent of the links search users click are from SEO. Also, inbound leads (i.e. SEO) cost 61 percent less than outbound leads (i.e. cold calling). SEO has a better return on investment (ROI) as well. "SEO leads have a 14.6 percent close rate, while outbound leads (such as direct mail or print advertising) have a 1.7 percent close rate," according to the same report. Now that you know SEO is the way to go, here are 11 SEO tactics that you need to know in 2015:

1. Creating Incredible Content That Earns Links

Even after all of the changes with the search engine algorithms, inbound SEO links are still the biggest influence for search engines. This is unlikely to change. On the other hand, other methods of link acquisition have changed. Earning a link from a high-quality, relevant website will not only help with your SEO but also with referral traffic, which can lead to more sales and brand exposure.

Creating incredible content that people will want to share is still the best way to earn links.

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2. Co-Citation Links

Every time a search engine finds your website next to your competitors, it tells them that your company is in a related niche. To get co-citation links, do a search for "best" or "top 10" items in your niche.   Example: top 10 blue widgets

If you do this search and don’t find your business in the results, get in touch with the publisher and ask that your company be added to the list. Be prepared to justify why your company should be included and where appropriate, give them a summary to go along with a link.

3. Editorial Links

Editorial links can be some of the most powerful for SEO because they come from other publications in your niche mentioning your company. They can also come from thought leadership guest posts that you write and get published on third-party sites.

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. Be prepared to create incredible content that may be heavily scrutinized before publishing.

Interviews are another way to get editorial links.

As part of the interview, you should be allowed to cite your work in your responses. This can lead to even more backlinks and traffic.

4. The Broken Link-Building Method

Here’s another white-hat link-building strategy that can be quite effective. In this case, you’re actually helping publishers fix broken links, which can be helpful to their readers. However, this only works if your content is good enough to replace the lost content. To do the broken link-building method, you must find broken links on a site that is relevant to your niche. You then contact the webmaster with the broken link and recommend your site as an alternative to the broken link. To find out more, you can read the broken link-building Bible at the Moz blog.

5. Link Reclamation

Link reclamation can help you get fresh links by finding broken links to your site and having the publisher fix them.

Examples:

• Find brand mentions about your site and ask the publisher to add a link
• Find places where your content has been used without attribution (places where people have used your post or infographics without giving you credit) and request a link from the person

According to Kristi Hines with kristihines.com, "A lot of people think of link reclamation as just 301'ing pages they have moved that still have a lot of great backlinks. But I like to think of reclamation as more than that. I like to think of it as not just reclaiming, but claiming links you deserve."  In order to make this automated, you can set up a Google Alert to email you whenever your company’s brand is mentioned. You can then check that page to find out if they link to your site.

6. Link Outreach

Link outreach is a bit "old school" but can still be quite powerful. To do this, find a website that is relevant to yours and get their contact information from the site. Send them an email or call and politely ask them for link. This works better if the site has a slightly different business than yours but may share a common audience.

7. Competitor Analysis

Competitor analysis is nothing new, and companies have been researching their competitor’s links for years. However, by looking at the competitor’s backlinks and manually reviewing which links are worth having, you can then perform a link outreach and try to get a link from the same referring site.

8. Focus on ROI Instead of Keyword Rankings

While we all enjoy seeing the keywords rank well in the search engines, this doesn’t necessarily mean your SEO campaign is successful. It’s possible to rank number one for many keywords that have no real ROI. Instead, you should focus on metrics that bring conversions.

9. Create an SEO Strategy That Maps to an Audience

Over the past few years, we’ve lost most of the keyword data in Google Analytics and other tools. This has required marketers to change from traditional methods of SEO to create new ways of segmenting their audiences. In order to do this we must find new keywords to focus on, new ways to approach neighboring markets, and determine where our competition is succeeding with SEO and how you can do it better. The days of stuffing keywords into bad content and having it rank are long gone. Now your content needs to focus on your target persona and your keywords need to flow within the content. This is why it’s so important that content and SEO be tied closely together.

10. Optimize for Yahoo, Bing, and Others

Search engines like Yahoo, Bing, and DuckDuckGo may slowly take a bigger piece of Google’s pie in 2015. Yahoo is now the default search engine for Firefox. Safari had a deal with Google, which is supposed to end in 2015, and Yahoo and Bing are both trying to become the default search engine for the browser. As other search engines become the default Web browsers instead of Google, it makes sense to optimize for those search engines as well.

11. Mobile SEO

Mobile is becoming more popular every year. Every website should have a mobile marketing strategy for 2015 and beyond. "May [2014] turned out to be a banner month for mobile as it delivered on some huge milestones which underscored just how impressive the medium’s ascendance has been in the past few years. Mobile platforms – smartphones and tablets – combined to account for 60 percent of total digital media time spent, up from 50 percent a year ago," says comScore.  Mobile should be a core part of any SEO plan in 2015. However, you must be cautious as configuration errors caused a 68 percent loss of traffic, according to BrightEdge.

Conclusion

Creating an SEO strategy can give your company and brand a boost in the search engines. Why not improve your ROI today?

Source - http://searchenginewatch.com/sew/how-to/2396193/11-seo-tactics-you-need-to-know-in-2015

Best SEO Hacks Which Can Save Your Time

Best SEO Hacks

Let me be very clear, when I talk about “hacking” SEO, I’m talking about saving time and doing things as efficiently as possible. I’d never encourage gray or black hat techniques in an effort to game the search engines!

So with that in mind, let’s look at a few ways to speed up the process of performing proper SEO on your site. SEO rules must be followed closely, but that doesn’t mean that you need to waste time doing things the hard way. The following five hacks will cut back the amount of time you have to spend on SEO, while simultaneously improving your natural search performance:

Hack 1: Get keyword ideas from your internal search data. When people search inside your site using your search bar, they’re doing so because the content they’re looking for isn’t immediately apparent. By tracking these searches, you’ve got a supply of fresh new keywords that you already know your customers are interested in. Building content around them automatically pays off in terms of SEO, as you’re helping to satisfy both visitors and the search engines.

Related: Your SEO Checklist: 4 Steps to Optimizing Your Website

The analytics programs of some websites will automatically return this data, but if you have a Wordpress site that doesn’t, take a look at theSearch Meter plugin. It’s free to install and will automatically help you uncover the most popular search terms from within your very own website.

Hack 2: Find keyword suggestions using the Google Adwords Keyword Planner. 

Since most Google Analytics data has turned into “not provided,” you’ve got to get a bit more clever when it comes to getting keyword information from the search giant.

Log into the new Google Adwords Keyword Planner and select the “Search for keyword and ad group ideas” option. Then, enter your site’s URL into the “Your landing page” field, set the targeting option to your country and run your search. The “Keyword ideas” tab that appears will give you a series of phrases Google believes to be related to your site -- all powerful options to target with onsite SEO and content campaigns if you aren’t already.

Hack 3: Add Google Authorship code to your site’s header. There are a few different ways that you can set up and claim Google Authorship (which you really should do for SEO purposes), but the easiest has to be the following:

If you have a Wordpress site, don’t worry about plugins or email confirmations. Instead, simply plug the following code into the header.php file of your site (making sure to replace the profile link with your own code):

Related: 5 SEO Trends Every Entrepreneur Needs to Know for 2014

Doing so ensures that your profile code will be propagated to all pages of your site – right where Google can find it and give you credit for your efforts.

Hack 4: Submit entire domains to the Disavow Links tool. 

When the Disavow Links tool first came out, SEOs were super cautious about submitting individual links only. Certainly, it made sense to be cautious before it was known exactly what impact the tool would have on a site’s performance. If the tool immediately devalued any links submitted, cutting off an entire domain could have an unnecessarily widespread impact -- taking down good links, as well as bad.

However, in a June 2013 video, Matt Cutts, Google’s head of webspam, made it clear that webmasters didn’t need to be too picky about the links they submitted using the tool. Instead of submitting individual links, Cutts recommended submitting entire URLs -- saving tons of time for formerly nitpicky SEOs.

If a backlink analysis of your site’s inbound links reveals a few negative issues (perhaps, a series of articles submitted to link farm networks back when this technique carried SEO weight), don’t worry about being selective in your disavowal request. Submitting entire domains is a good SEO practice, and it’s a good time-saver as well.

Hack 5: Combine Javascript tags with Google Tag Manager. 

Google Analytics, Twitter and Google+ are just a few of the sites that request to install JavaScript code on your site in order to power certain functionalities. But unfortunately, every one of these snippets that you install slows down your site -- and it’s well-known that slow sites are bad for SEO.

To save the time of requiring your site to fire each snippet individually, take a look at Google’s free Tag Manager tool. Simply enter your code pieces into the tool’s tag generator and you’ll be provided with a site-wide tag that will fire each individual JavaScript file according to the rules you specify. Once this tag is installed on your site, you’ll see load times decrease immediately compared to your initial on-page configuration.

Source - http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/231307

How SEO and Social Media Can Work Together

SEO and Social Media

Social has a significant influence on SEO, despite industry gurus suggesting otherwise. 

Last year, Matt Cutts said in a YouTube video that Google didn't count social media metrics such as likes or shares when ranking search results. But fast-forward 12 months and the landscape has changed, with social influencing all areas of search engine optimization, be it on the Web, mobile, or local. While Google doesn't factor likes and retweets into its algorithm, it does use social to gauge what's popular.

Two key drivers that have impacted this change are "convergence" and "empowerment," according to Jason Dailey, head of search at MediaVest. Convergence refers to the different channels coming together, whether it's local, SEO, paid search, social, or video, whereas empowerment is all about consumers. 

"There are a lot of areas that are converging and these are becoming gray territories in terms of where one ends and the next begins," says Dailey. "Consumers are also becoming more empowered than ever to control the media that they receive and interact with brands. That's really [where] social plays a key role." 

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From a technical perspective, Dailey continues, a search engine cares about four things: quality (the actually experience a user has, the content, and the appearance), trust (whether a site is authoritative and useful), popularity (whether a site is the one that people want to go to), and canniness (whether the content is fresh, current and relevant).

"Google says that social is not a signal in terms of search engine results. [But] what we do know is that really good content that people like to share has all of these four things," notes Dailey.

"If you focus on making good content, it will attract lots of engagement. That is what will get more and more people to click and soon enough, it will become more relevant to the search engine."

Antonio Casanova, director of SEO at Starcom, agrees that creating quality content on social is important, as it can help boost a business's local SEO performance. He adds that local search ranking closely relates to the number and quality of citations and mentions that a local business has. Those citations and mentions could happen on social media platforms, blogs, or different sites.

And that's not all. Local social profiles such as Google+ Local, Yelp, and Foursquare also add to a business' local ranking if they contain a number of quality reviews.  

"It's important to have an active social media and customer relationship management (CRM) strategy that can help drive the mentions of your business, reviews of your profile, and links to the local profile. That can definitely help you improve your local search results," notes Casanova. 

In order to leverage social media for SEO purposes, Casanova recommends that marketers use a "two-way street communication" approach. "One way" is by using keyword insights that detect what people are searching for and how they are searching for stuff on Google.

"You can use that to inform your social and content strategy. You may find a topic that is popular, and you may have a social strategy that is based on the content developing around that topic," Casanova explains. "You can also do this the other way around. You can use social listening to mine the insights, to see what people are talking about on a social network, and use that to inform your keyword SEO content and CRM strategy."

For mobile SEO specifically, having an active and optimized social media presence that includes Google+ and Twitter can help a business with visibility in search results, he continues. "That's because more often than not, social networks are making their way into Google search results. Now that Google and Twitter have reached their recent deal that allows tweets to show up in search results, I think we're going to see it a whole lot more," Casanova notes.

MediaVest's Dailey adds a concluding piece of advice for mobile SEO: a business should make sure that it has updated name, address, and phone number information. "The worst experience a consumer could have is to find your site, call the number, and find it not active," he says. "Or they get a wrong time. They go to a store, thinking it's open, but find it actually closed. So managing that name, address, and phone number information both on the site [and] through a directory is very important."

8 SEO On-Page SEO Hacking Techniques You Want To Rank

On-Page SEO Hacking Techniques

After over a decade of doling out penalties, Google has caused the rise and demise of manipulative SEO methods. Many professionals have nearly forgotten the broad space for manipulation enabled by on-page SEO, and are acting on a very basic level, be it as a result of added caution or perhaps habit.

No, this isn't another article about title optimization, keyword optimization, and the importance of tags. Below, I intend to present a list of problems and solutions that will help you improve search engine rankings using on-page elements from less talked about, yet still significant, angles.

To draw a parallel, envision your site as a brick and mortar store. Your off-page SEO would be equivalent to reputation management and PR efforts, while on-page is more about what your store contains: the shelves, the cash register, etc. Each element varies in importance, but all are crucial to the store’s success.

Often, business owners insist on getting quotes for off-page work only, usually content-based, without performing any on-page changes. They may feel extremely confident in their conviction that they’ve done all that could be, but the reality is often very different. A quick analysis typically yields unprofessional and/or non-SEO compatible coding and insertion, which can damage rankings. Advanced implementation of on-page SEO techniques strengthens the site and can have a quick, almost immediate effect on rankings, unlike off-page efforts which usually take longer to bear fruit and are conditioned upon many factors we cannot control.

After nearly 10 years of experience in the field, I’ve stumbled across a lot of strange situations and interesting facts. In this article I’ll round up a few key tips for effective on-page optimization. As you might deduce from the title, this piece is intended for somewhat experienced SEO professionals, so I’ve made certain assumptions about base knowledge and technical ability. If anything is unclear, feel free to ask me questions in the comments section.

The following list of on-page methods is ordered randomly, and not according to significance. Take a deep breath, and let’s dive in.

1. Internal Link Structure Doesn’t Tell a Story

2. Confusing Root Folder

3. Duplicate Content Right Under your Nose

4. Site Loading Speed

5. Full Transparency and Disclosure of Malicious Features

6. Broken Links and Lost URL Recycling

7. Correcting Mistakes and Removing Superfluous Code

8. Latent Semantic Index and Necessary Keywords

The Takeaway

The above tips should get you well on your way to optimizing your site’s on-page aspects, after taking care of basic on-page factors you should all be relatively familiar with. However, note that no site is ever ‘finished’ – maintenance should be ongoing and frequent. Through experience, we should strive to prioritize the on-page tasks and focus on those that yield the best results. Good luck, and get to work!

Source - searchenginejournal.com

Got more expert tips? Sound off in the comments!

A Guide To SEO Timeline for Development Projects

SEO for Development Projects

If you’ve ever worked on a development project from start to finish, and you don’t operate on a fully integrated design, development, and digital marketing team, then you may be familiar with the struggle of prioritizing which SEO steps should be taken when. Full disclosure, this list does not detail how to complete each step in this process. Instead use this as a guide to keep the SEO arm of development on track so that nothing gets left behind because it was forgotten or *cringe* "we don’t have time for that."

Pre-Development

Before development begins you should start discussions about site architecture, technical SEO, such as the need for HTTPS, and defining project goals. Your initial work should lay out like this.

• If you’re redeveloping your site, crawl the old site and complete a site performance analysis. This provides a baseline that you can compare to after the new site launches.
• Talk to the content team (your designers, copywriters, and site owners) about a new site structure. SEO fundamentals are dictated by your content decisions, so you need to get everyone on the same page about what pages are staying, going, or being added to the site. Users persona development can help your team understand how each piece of the site is meant to serve its users.
• Your site structure should help you build a sitemap that the meets your content goals and establishes a strong user flow. Just be aware that you’ll likely revise the sitemap more than once during the development process, and that’s OK.
• Once you have an understanding of the new content direction, determine if you’ll be sticking with the current keyword strategy or revising it to connect with different site users or goals. If you need a keyword strategy overhaul, you’ll want to carve out time for this during the development process.
• Determine any gaps in knowledge among your team as it pertains to technical SEO – if your team is creating a custom CMS, make sure URLs don’t cause duplicate content, or ensure the right canonicals are in place so you don’t get dinged. If your team is using WordPress to build the site, make sure they know which plugins are needed to manage on-page SEO like title tags and meta descriptions. I’d also recommend creating a list of redirects you think you’ll need during this stage of the process. It may feel too early, but thinking ahead is the best way to ensure nothing is forgotten when it’s time to launch. Use a tool like Screaming Frog to make this process easier.

During Development

During development, spend time with your team to understand what challenges they may be facing or what project roadmap changes may occur during the process. You want to ensure there aren’t any surprises in terms of change of project scope or priorities that impact where you need to focus your efforts during development.

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For example, maybe your time is best spent ensuring the technical setup goes as planned. Alternatively, you may need to focus your time on a post-launch content strategy if organic traffic is the primary means of attracting conversion-ready visitors to the site.

• Revisit your keyword analysis. If you need to come up with a new strategy, now is the time to do it and ensure your thoughts are integrated into any existing or new content that is created. Spoiler alert: I bet you’ll realize you need a page you didn’t think you’d need before when you complete this step.
• Create a post-launch strategy. Understand the site goals and needs after it goes to market. Determine the plan for driving traffic and conversions during the first several months after launch. If you’re launching to a new domain or you’re concerned about initial traffic dips after a launch, consider paid media to keep traffic flowing.
• You may also want to make sure technical SEO requirements are in place so you catch anything that should be changed well before the launch.
• Measurement is a key component of any Web project, but it’s often the last thing developers are concerned with – so it’s up to you to ensure your developers are building the site to be thoroughly measured. If you can identify analytics data such as scroll depth or CTA clicks to track post-launch and you can set up tracking code with Google Tag Manager ahead of time, do it.
  
• Be your own data Quality Assurance. If you notice that a sign-up form is being coded as a single-page experience when you know that you’ll need to track users who may fall out of the funnel, suggest splitting the process into multiple steps. You can set up tracking later, or you can speak up early before you become a roadblock for the rest of your team.

Project Launch

When it’s time to launch the project, hopefully you’re able to relax a bit by using this time to double check things, rather than looking at things for the first time.

• Review that technical SEO checklist again.
• Set up tracking for buttons, scroll depth, or goals if you weren’t able to do so before the site launch.
• Crawl your site to check for 404s or any faulty redirects and fix the issues you find as soon as possible.

Post Launch

We’re never really "done" when it comes to digital marketing or SEO. After a project launches it’s time to verify whether or not your assumptions or new strategies work and make adjustments accordingly.

• Monitor your data and compare it to your baseline metrics. This information should help you determine how you can improve the user experience and positively impact conversions.
• Implement your post-launch strategy, whether than means building up site content through blog posts, launching paid media campaigns to draw traffic, or building out a marketing automation strategy. Every step of the way, make sure you’re using a variety of tools to gain user and data-driven feedback to improve your campaigns. Tools like UserTesting.com, HotJar (Note: this is still in Beta), and Google Analytics can help you gain this information.

Summary

Thinking ahead during the development process and staying connected with the rest of your team is always the best advice when it comes to making sure none of a website’s SEO needs fall through the cracks. What are your struggles or tried and true steps when it comes to ensuring SEO is smoothly integrated into development?

Source - http://searchenginewatch.com/sew/how-to/2395381/an-seo-timeline-for-development-projects

SEO Tactics and Strategies You Need to Know This Year

Effective Online Marketing and SEO Strategies

As search engines continue to evolve, marketers must improve their skills to keep up. According to reports 70 percent of the links search users click are from SEO. Also, inbound leads (i.e. SEO) cost 61 percent less than outbound leads (i.e. cold calling).

SEO has a better return on investment (ROI) as well. "SEO leads have a 14.6 percent close rate, while outbound leads (such as direct mail or print advertising) have a 1.7 percent close rate," according to the same report.

Now that you know SEO is the way to go, here are 11 SEO tactics that you need to know in 2015:

1. Creating Incredible Content That Earns Links

Even after all of the changes with the search engine algorithms, inbound SEO links are still the biggest influence for search engines. This is unlikely to change. On the other hand, other methods of link acquisition have changed. Earning a link from a high-quality, relevant website will not only help with your SEO but also with referral traffic, which can lead to more sales and brand exposure. Creating incredible content that people will want to share is still the best way to earn links. Every time a search engine finds your website next to your competitors, it tells them that your company is in a related niche. To get co-citation links, do a search for "best" or "top 10" items in your niche.

2. Co-Citation Links

Example: top 10 blue widgets

If you do this search and don’t find your business in the results, get in touch with the publisher and ask that your company be added to the list. Be prepared to justify why your company should be included and where appropriate, give them a summary to go along with a link.

3. Editorial Links

Editorial links can be some of the most powerful for SEO because they come from other publications in your niche mentioning your company. They can also come from thought leadership guest posts that you write and get published on third-party sites.

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. Be prepared to create incredible content that may be heavily scrutinized before publishing.

Interviews are another way to get editorial links.

As part of the interview, you should be allowed to cite your work in your responses. This can lead to even more backlinks and traffic.

4. The Broken Link-Building Method

Here’s another white-hat link-building strategy that can be quite effective. In this case, you’re actually helping publishers fix broken links, which can be helpful to their readers. However, this only works if your content is good enough to replace the lost content. To do the broken link-building method, you must find broken links on a site that is relevant to your niche. You then contact the webmaster with the broken link and recommend your site as an alternative to the broken link. To find out more, you can read the broken link-building Bible at the Moz blog.

5. Link Reclamation

Link reclamation can help you get fresh links by finding broken links to your site and having the publisher fix them. Examples:

• Find brand mentions about your site and ask the publisher to add a link
• Find places where your content has been used without attribution (places where people have used your post or infographics without giving you credit) and request a link from the person

According to Kristi Hines with kristihines.com, "A lot of people think of link reclamation as just 301'ing pages they have moved that still have a lot of great backlinks. But I like to think of reclamation as more than that. I like to think of it as not just reclaiming, but claiming links you deserve." In order to make this automated, you can set up a Google Alert to email you whenever your company’s brand is mentioned. You can then check that page to find out if they link to your site.

6. Link Outreach

Link outreach is a bit "old school" but can still be quite powerful. To do this, find a website that is relevant to yours and get their contact information from the site. Send them an email or call and politely ask them for link. This works better if the site has a slightly different business than yours but may share a common audience.

7. Competitor Analysis

Competitor analysis is nothing new, and companies have been researching their competitor’s links for years. However, by looking at the competitor’s backlinks and manually reviewing which links are worth having, you can then perform a link outreach and try to get a link from the same referring site.

8. Focus on ROI Instead of Keyword Rankings

While we all enjoy seeing the keywords rank well in the search engines, this doesn’t necessarily mean your SEO campaign is successful. It’s possible to rank number one for many keywords that have no real ROI. Instead, you should focus on metrics that bring conversions.

9. Create an SEO Strategy That Maps to an Audience

Over the past few years, we’ve lost most of the keyword data in Google Analytics and other tools. This has required marketers to change from traditional methods of SEO to create new ways of segmenting their audiences. In order to do this we must find new keywords to focus on, new ways to approach neighboring markets, and determine where our competition is succeeding with SEO and how you can do it better. The days of stuffing keywords into bad content and having it rank are long gone. Now your content needs to focus on your target persona and your keywords need to flow within the content. This is why it’s so important that content and SEO be tied closely together.

10. Optimize for Yahoo, Bing, and Others

Search engines like Yahoo, Bing, and DuckDuckGo may slowly take a bigger piece of Google’s pie in 2015. Yahoo is now the default search engine for Firefox. Safari had a deal with Google, which is supposed to end in 2015, and Yahoo and Bing are both trying to become the default search engine for the browser. As other search engines become the default Web browsers instead of Google, it makes sense to optimize for those search engines as well.

11. Mobile SEO

Mobile is becoming more popular every year. Every website should have a mobile marketing strategy for 2015 and beyond. "May [2014] turned out to be a banner month for mobile as it delivered on some huge milestones which underscored just how impressive the medium’s ascendance has been in the past few years. Mobile platforms – smartphones and tablets – combined to account for 60 percent of total digital media time spent, up from 50 percent a year ago," says comScore.

Mobile should be a core part of any SEO plan in 2015. However, you must be cautious as configuration errors caused a 68 percent loss of traffic, according to BrightEdge.

Conclusion

Creating an SEO strategy can give your company and brand a boost in the search engines. Why not improve your ROI today?

Source - http://searchenginewatch.com/sew/how-to/2396193/11-seo-tactics-you-need-to-know-in-2015