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

A Quick Guide - How Google Work By Neil Patel

Ever wonder how Google manages to serve you just the content you're looking for? You put in a few words, and within a few microseconds, you've got pages and pages of results ready to address your query. It's so fast, so accurate, and so comprehensive, it almost seems like magic. Almost. But we all know there's more to delivering great search results than waving a magic wand. 

So how does Google actually work? Neil Patel at Quick Sprout put together the following animated infographic to break down Google's process for finding and serving up search results. Check it out below:

Source - http://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/how-google-works

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."

3 Myths Of Mobile Marketing Success

SEO Mobile Marketing Success

In the last few years, mobile has evolved into a global force of nature. According to a report prepared by Mary Meeker of venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, mobile device shipments are dramatically outpacing desktops and televisions by four to five times. A study from Cisco points out a similar trend — that in 2014, average smartphone usage grew by 45 percent.

For marketers, mobile was the next frontier yesterday, but even the most innovative companies are struggling to get started — the biggest challenge being that companies aren’t sure how to build high-converting mobile campaigns. What’s holding them back are the following three mobile marketing myths.

1. Mobile Is an Extension of Desktop

The problem is that many marketers think a mobile marketing plan is as simple as a responsive site. Desktop strategies, however, won’t necessarily translate into a mobile campaign — that’s because user experiences are fundamentally different on desktop and mobile.

On the computer, digital audiences are typically stationary and can very easily scroll and type with their trackpads and keyboards. On mobile, interactions are a series of quick swipes and taps — not to mention, digital audiences are often on-the-go and in highly distracting environments. As usability researcher and vice president of product at Hint Health puts it in a recent article for The Content Strategist, "Mobile experiences are often a series of micro interactions – quick tasks that the user performs, often in a highly distracting, public environment using a very small screen. A good mobile experience keeps important tasks quick, obvious, interruptible, and performable with a limited about of input."

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Desktop audiences will have much more space, maneuverability, and flexibility to learn. Mobile campaigns, on the other hand, must deliver information fast.

2. Mobile Conversions Are Challenging to Measure

Campaign attribution is challenging on almost any device — but mobile often introduces an even bigger "black box" in that conversions often start online and end offline with a phone call or in-store purchase. As one example, 70 percent of people have called a business after conducting a mobile search. Marketers, who are often bound to aggressive growth quotas, may feel hesitant to take a "leap of faith" in launching campaigns that are seemingly impossible to measure.

By following this mindset, marketers risk overlooking a crucial part of their mobile conversion funnels. When on their lunch breaks or riding in a car as passengers, mobile audiences don’t want to spend time completing lengthy forms on tiny smartphones. When seeking information quickly, they’d much rather pick up the phone and call.

These conversion events are measurable through call tracking and intelligence technology. Call tracking enables marketers to see the online and mobile interactions that are prompting people to pick up the phone, while NLP can tell marketers exactly what's happening during the conversation.

3. It's All About the Immediate Sale

Marketers have a tendency to measure success by measuring direct sales. The reality, however, is that paths to conversion are often complex and span a series of steps. Especially on mobile, audiences may want to do a bit of research before committing to becoming paid customers.

Marketers should also pay attention to the nuances in key performance indicators (KPIs) between desktop and mobile. On desktop, for instance, high average times on site may represent engagement. On mobile, however, that same metric may represent confusion — an inability for audiences to find the information that they need quickly. In some mobile contexts, bounce rates may be less relevant than they are with desktop campaigns.

On mobile, marketers should pay particular attention to conversion metrics that signify purchase intent. Pay attention to whether audiences are looking up directions to a store, researching product inventory, or making calls. Mobile campaigns will often drive conversions through other channels. That’s why marketers should look beyond whether audiences are making calls. It’s equally, if not more, important to understand what’s happening on that call and tying end conversion data from online interactions back to ROI reporting.

When choosing KPIs, marketers should focus on their mobile audience’s unique story. According to one study from Google and Nielsen, three out of four mobile searches trigger follow-up actions. After conducting a mobile search, 51 percent visit a store, 19 percent call a business, 19 percent continue their research, and 22 percent visit the retailer’s website.

Final Thoughts

Mobile is a blank slate, and the best way to navigate this extremely promising marketing opportunity is to think about what audiences need most. Don’t be afraid to try something new and most importantly, don’t let myths get in the way.

Source - http://searchenginewatch.com/sew/how-to/2396368/3-myths-that-block-mobile-marketing-success

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!