Thursday, March 26, 2015

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:

Major Best SEO Tactics

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.



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

Monday, March 23, 2015

5 Reasons to Avoid SEO

SEO used to be the central pillar in any online marketing campaign. Your website’s search visibility was the sole indicator of online success. Though search visibility is obviously still very important to most businesses, things aren’t as simple or "clear cut" as they used to be. Online visibility is now about so much more than search. With the dramatic growth of the social Web, and the new ways we can now analyze our traffic and results, should we still be focusing on SEO as a primary marketing avenue? Or is our obsession with search visibility blinding us to other, more useful channels?

This article is about playing devil’s advocate. Of course, I’m not suggesting that you should stop all SEO activity. Rather, I want to highlight the other opportunities that you may be missing that have nothing to do with SEO. Here are my top five:

Reasons to Avoid SEO

1. Content

Most marketers approach content creation from a firm SEO standpoint. Each piece of content must have a clear and direct SEO benefit.



Though I do agree that if you are going to create great content you might as well spend some time making sure it’s created in line with SEO best practices, I don’t think SEO should be your primary motivation for creating great content. One of the most important shifts over the last few years has been from the SEO-centric approach to content to the "user-centric" approach that Google now richly rewards. The brief is simple: create great content. Decide on your topics based on what your readers and customers want to read or watch, not what will help your SEO the most.

If you can always make sure that the first 90 percent of the content creation process is informed solely by your desire to create high-value content for your audience, then at the last minute, implement a few SEO best practices, you’re going to be much better placed than if the content was driven by SEO from the outset.

The main advantage of this approach is that it ensures that you are creating content that will see a high success rate through all your other marketing channels, whether that’s social, email, or paid advertising. Every day the search engines improve their ability to identify the content that their users love. The recent announcement that tweets are going to be appearing in our SERPs (again) shows that this trend is only going to continue. For marketers, the message is clear: create content that your visitors love, and your search visibility will take care of itself.

2. User Behavior

If you’re reading this it’s likely that you already have at least some traffic to your website. Sure, you want more visitors, but is that the most effective way to increase your sales, engagement, and conversions?

More traffic is the sole aim of most online businesses. After all, if you double your traffic, you’ll double your sales, right? Well, maybe. But that doesn’t mean it’s the best use of your time.

In almost all cases, increasing traffic is often more expensive and resource hungry than simply increasing your conversion rate. Let’s say you have 1,000 visitors to your e-commerce site each month through search. Your conversion rate is around 2 percent so you make around 20 sales each month. If you were to heavily invest in SEO and, as a result, increase your search visibility by 100 percent, six to 12 months later you would get 2,000 visitors. Your conversion rate stays the same and you make 40 sales. Though it’s difficult to argue that these results are anything less than a great achievement, there are other ways to increase your sales.

There are so many ways to directly and indirectly increase your conversion rates. Everything from increasing your site speed, improving your Web copy, and improving your site’s mobile user experience to something as simple as the color scheme can have a noticeable and direct impact on your conversion rate. Changing a single word or switching the color of your CTA button can increase the conversion rate on a page by more than 100 percent!

By split testing each of your landing pages you can reliably and consistently increase your conversion rate. If this isn’t something you already do on a regular basis, it’s very likely that there are lots of easy wins that you’ve been ignoring. If you do it right, you can probably increase your conversion rate by as much as 300 percent.

Let’s go back to our example. Rather than using all your resources on SEO and increasing your traffic, let’s say you focus on increasing your on-site conversion rates. By increasing site speed, improving your sales copy, and split testing your CTAs, you manage to increase your conversion rate on your main sales page to 6 percent. Your traffic stays the same (1,000 visitors per month), but you see 60 sales. Now that’s a real result.

3. The Social Web

This is probably the most obvious example of how you can increase your traffic without SEO. The social Web has opened up literally thousands of possible traffic sources. One well-targeted, well-timed post, tweet, or pin can result in traffic spikes that most servers will struggle with. With developments like the integration of tweets in the SERPs and the traffic opportunities offered by LinkedIn Pulse, social media is clearly going to continue rivalling SEO as the most important traffic source.

4. Paid Advertising

The effectiveness and relevance of paid advertising is largely dependent on what sector you’re in. However, most marketers and SEOs don’t give it the credit it deserves. Paid advertising allows you to go out and get the specific traffic you want. The data, targeting, and immediacy that paid advertising gives you make it an important weapon in any marketer’s arsenal. Most marketers dismiss paid advertising due to the CPC costs of their primary keywords. Instead, they pour all their resources into ranking organically for these terms. While this is a good long-term strategy, ignoring PPC will deny you many key benefits.

While you are building your organic rankings, paid advertising offers a unique testing opportunity. By running a paid campaign, in just a few days you have the ability to gather more data than you might see in months of organic traffic. This means that, by the time you begin to rank organically, your landing pages can be fully optimized and the quality of your search traffic will be full validated.
Another advantage of paid advertising working alongside organic SEO is the "reinforcement effect." If you are ranking organically, above the fold, and you also have an ad in the top positions in the SERPs, your click-through rate on both these listings are likely to be much higher than if you just had one. The reason for this is that, by having two listings above the fold, you reinforce the trust that Google’s users will associate with your site. Trust me, it works!

5. Traditional PR

Press releases have long been a reliable link-building channel for many SEOs. Obviously, the direct SEO benefits of links from press releases, especially if they are low-quality, are limited at best. However, that doesn’t mean that press releases and outreach don’t have value.

Traditional PR can have many positive crossovers for SEO and online marketing in general. For example, by using a press release as it is intended – to get your news out to the wider world – marketers can see huge spikes in traffic, engagement, and opportunities. If you can get your story picked up by journalists, whether they work for a print or online publication, and if people are writing about your business, it is going to result in traffic, links, and strong social signals. If you can rethink the way you approach the press and traditional PR, they can bring great results.

Summary

The increasingly integrated nature of the Web means that things are never going to be as simple and clear-cut as they used to be. We’re all going to have to explore new marketing channels and continue to measure different metrics as the Web and user behavior evolves.

I hope this article has given you a few ideas to start exploring ways to increase your results without even thinking about SEO. Have you got other channels that you use? Have you found some "easy wins" that you’re happy to share? Let me know in the comments below.

Source -  http://searchenginewatch.com/sew/how-to/2395993/5-reasons-to-ignore-seo

Friday, March 20, 2015

Shocking Google Webmaster Update: Preventing JavaScript & CSS Can Impact Indexing

Google has updated its Webmaster Guidelines, which will likely affect sites that are blocking JavaScript or CSS files. According to an announcement on Google’s Webmaster Central Blog, the tech giant has updated its indexing system to function more like a modern browser, which includes having CSS and JavaScript active.
Google Webmaster Update

Google gave explicit advice on allowing Googlebot to access the JavaScript, CSS, and image files that a website uses:
"This provides you optimal rendering and indexing for your site. Disallowing crawling of JavaScript or CSS files in your site’s robots.txt directly harms how well our algorithms render and index your content and can result in suboptimal rankings.” 


Updated Google Indexing Advice

An upgraded system will require some process changes for webmasters, as Google warns that users should no longer view their indexing system as a "text-only browser." Below is the advice Google provided as it relates to this new phase:
  • Google's rendering engine may support not all technologies.
  • The design of your website should adhere to progressive enhancement principles to ensure that engines can scan the usable and supported content.
  • Page load speed is still very important for users and indexing.
  • Make sure your server is enabled to support serving JavaScript and CSS files to Googlebot.

Fetch & Render

Additionally, Google has updated its Fetch as Google diagnostic tool, which is designed to allow webmasters to simulate how Google is crawling a URL on a website.
How does it work? According to Google Support, the tool functions in the following ways:
"When the Fetch as Google tool is in fetch mode, Googlebot crawls any URL that corresponds to the path that you requested. If Googlebot is able to successfully crawl your requested URL, you can review the response your site sent to Googlebot. This is a relatively quick, low-level operation that you can use to check or debug suspected network connectivity or security issues with your site.
The fetch and render mode tells Googlebot to crawl and display your page as browsers would display it to your audience. First, Googlebot gets all the resources referenced by your URL such as picture, CSS, and JavaScript files, running any code. to render or capture the visual layout of your page as an image. You can use the rendered image to detect differences between how Googlebot sees your page, and how your browser renders it."
Google released a post in May 2014 that informed webmasters that these changes were on the horizon. In this post, it provided examples of some potential issues that webmasters might encounter and ways to prevent them from occurring. These examples included:
  • If your website is blocking JavaScript or CSS, Google's indexing system won’t be able to read the page like an average user.
  • There may be a negative impact on your website if your server is ill equipped to handle the volume of crawl requests.
  • Your pages may not be rendered properly if the JavaScript is too complex.
  • In some instances, JavaScript may remove not add content from a page which will prevent proper indexing of the page.

Wednesday, March 18, 2015

Setting Up 301 Redirects for SEO Can Improve Ranking

SEO Can Improve Ranking

Ever since Web addresses started appearing in print, it’s been tempting to lop the "www" off to make the URL easier to remember and to use. Does it matter if you do that? Is a www address better for SEO? If a viewer uses www, will the page show up differently than if they don’t?

Though the "does www matter" question can spark holy wars, in general nothing bad will happen whether visitors type in www or leave it off. But there are things you should handle with care, lest your SEO campaign suffer.

Should I Use WWW or Not?

When you register a domain name, you register example.com, not www.example.com. That’s because the www part of the URL is actually considered a subdomain, much like blog.example.com, login.example.com, etc. The www largely is a carryover from the days of the Internet when you had to specify that you were using a World Wide Web site and not something like gopher or ftp.


While most of the time typing www.example.com and example.com will take users to the same place, they are technically different URLs that could be set up to display different content.
Now for the bad news. When it comes to domains, Google practices what’s called canonicalization, the process of selecting a "preferred domain" URL that best represents the site. If the site owner doesn’t choose one, Google will decide which URL to index.
If Google picks http://example.com but all your links point to www.example.com, then the fruits of your efforts are being diluted, causing a disadvantage to your SEO campaign.

The Preferred Domain

Thankfully, you can choose a preferred domain rather than leaving it to chance. Log in to Google Webmaster Tools and follow these steps:
  1. Click on your site on the Webmaster Tools home page.
  2. Click on the gear icon and then click Site Settings.
  3. Find the Preferred domain section and select the option you want.
If you built your site without selecting a preferred domain, any links to your non-preferred domain won’t benefit your preferred one from an SEO perspective, unless your non-preferred one redirects to the corresponding preferred version using a 301 redirect.

What Is a 301 Redirect?

A 301 redirect is the HTTP status code for when a page has been moved permanently to a new location or URL.
In our case, if we set http://example.com as our preferred domain, we can set a 301 redirect for www.example.com, Similarly, we also can do this for www.example.com/index.html or www.example.com/index.php.
With a 301 redirect, the value of inbound links as well as historic/trust records for one URL will move to the other, though there’s debate as to just how much of this benefits are passed on to the new URL. While estimates vary, I’ll address this a bit later in this article.

Setting Up the 301 Redirect

To set up a 301 redirect on an Apache server, you have to open your .htaccess in a text editor, then enter one of these snippets of code into your file and save it.
For redirecting a non-www URL to a www URL:
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^domain\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.example.com/$1
[R=301,L]
For redirecting a www URL to a non-www URL:
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} .
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^example\.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://example.com/$1
[R=301,L]
If your website is based on WordPress, dozens of free plugins exist to help you easily set up and manage 301 redirects. A simple one I prefer to use is called "Simple 301 Redirects."
You can test your redirect by simply visiting your old URL; if you’re immediately taken to the new URL, it’s working.

The 301 Redirect and Inbound Links

You might have heard that using a 301 redirect can lead to losing 15 percent of your "link juice." Many sites quote Matt Cutts, Google’s head of Web spam, as having made that statement. To the contrary, Cutts said in this video that links passed from one domain to another using a 301 result in no loss of link juice. However, skeptics remain, and many SEO professionals are hesitant to take Cutts’ word as truth.

What About rel="canonical"?

Some SEO professionals recommend using rel="canonical" instead of 301-redirects because they think that 301 redirects could hurt performance due to a browser having to make an extra trip. Again, Cutts has debunked this myth, stating in this video that while the rel="canonical" tag is effective, browsers and search engines both know how to deal with a 301 redirect.

Conclusion

Using a 301 redirect is an effective, simple fix if you need to permanently move a page from one URL to another, or clean up www vs. non-www issues. It’s easy to set up and is well-understood by Web browsers. Links, redirects, and technical SEO can be tricky to understand. If you want to learn more about technical SEO, see my e-book, "The Definitive Guide to Marketing Your Business Online."

Friday, March 13, 2015

Using ANALYTICAL Research to Help Enhance Conversion

If there is one thing digital marketers want more of, it is success from their sites and marketing initiatives. Of course, no one likes declining sales trends or even the occurrence of just "bumping along." Where do you look for guidance, though? The latest digital marketing book, SEO platform, or digital marketing tool? The secret typically lies in accessing the biggest hammer in your marketing tool bag, analytics!
Understanding what interactions and behaviors are taking place on your site can provide a great amount of guidance as to what you may need to revise on your site to affect conversion rates. The first step in finding reason from the analytical data is realizing that your site users fall into several groups. First and foremost, converters and non-converters, but also several others such as by age group, new vs. returning user, mobile vs. desktop, and so on. Each of these user groups have different needs as well as perceptions of your site. It is up to you to identify there interactions and behavior and take more non-converters and transition them into the converters.

Roll Up Your Sleeves

Our analysis starts with setting custom dimensions. These analytical filters allow us to initially review two type of visitors, those who convert and those who don’t. For many of the sections below it will help to set these segments so you can see the differences between groups. Lucky for us, Google Analytics has predefined segments for converters and non-converters.
google-analytics-segments-1


Choosing only one segment at a time to view the following areas in Google Analytics.

User Flow

Review the typical user through the site by converter and non-converter. First, where does a converter typically enter the site and how many pages do they traverse before converting? Second, where does the non-converter typically enter the site and how many pages do they traverse before we notice a considerable exit rate/drop off.
users-flow
For the converters, is there a noticeable rhythm of great internal linking to keep them traveling through the conversion funnel from the starting point(page)?
For non-converters, where are most people entering the site? Where we see the drop-off primarily happening, is there a lack of calls to action, links to related content, or confusion in navigational linking?

Content Drilldown

While User Flow is a nifty visual for understand page progression and drop-off rates, Content Drilldown is an alternative data view for those a little more linearly inclined providing a table view for you to walk through top content pathways from within our custom segments. Now go your site and click through these pathways and gain an understanding of what may be providing reasons for users to leave the site.

Mobile

Now that we have a general understanding of overarching user flow behaviors of our converters vs. non-converters, we can likely start coming up with a little more insight on where we may be able to improve our conversation optimization efforts based on who these users are and where they are coming from. Since mobile traffic is all the rage these days and its contribution to overall site traffic is on the rise, let’s review our two segments within this analytical vertical.
mobile-users-flow
(Hmm… I think we have a conversion issue with mobile)
Does your percentage of conversions from mobile users compare with the percentage of overall mobile traffic which contributes to total site traffic? If mobile conversions are 2 percent of total conversions and 20 percent of overall traffic, you may have an issue.

Demographics

With our minds still surrounding the segmentation of converter and non-converter, let’s know look at demographic data. We understand how these two types are walking through the site, but who are they? By reviewing gender and age group data with secondary dimensions set to Landing Page, you can get a much better understanding of what demographic lens you need to wear when reviewing certain pages. To gain a better understanding of these underperforming demographics, create a custom segment based on this demographic and review User Flow or Content Drilldown to assess their entire journey through the site and where drop off is likely occurring.
google-demographics
Do call to actions and internal linking on specific landing pages speak to the interests of that gender or age group? For example, your older female age group may be suffering a low conversion rate. If you are selling Osteoporosis supplements and internal linking on a major landing page for this segment to related articles and resources for sports related injuries, you aren’t providing enticing pathways to avoid site drop-offs.

Reverse Goal Path

We have walked through site pages by converter and non-converter segment as they traversed the site but another angle to help assess is via reverse goal path. Of course we now walk away from having to segment by converter and non-converter, as we know that this view is only from those who have converted into said site objectives. In this section we will take a look at the conversion point and what pages recently provided the last few steps to conversion. This is where we will want to walk a few pages back in the conversion funnel and assess calls to action. We know what works and can now compare that with pages we saw earlier which were high drop off points. How can we revise the drop off pages to be more like these conversion funnel landmarks?

Funnel Visualization

For those that have taken an analytical review of improving conversions before, this is one of the oldest methods of conversion optimization review provided by Google Analytics. We have walked through a few user types and their pathways through your site, but Funnel Visualization concentrates more so toward the latter part of the conversion process. Here, we can access drop-off issues in the final steps of the conversion process.
funnel-visualization
If users are dropping out of the funnel but not exiting, what pages are they going to? Why are you providing links in the end conversion process to usher them away from the site?

Multi-Channel Attribution

I think one of the most powerful advancements in Google Analytics over the past few years is multi- channel attribution. It has provided a great wealth of what channels work well together and helped marketers form the mindset that it isn’t just SEO, paid, social, etc. - these channels often times work together. A quick glance under the hood here can let you know a lot more goal information than a quick last touch by default goal attribution by medium view. For example, you may have seen an organic sales slide in the last few months and never realized that paid search is a channel that serves as a first touch point with the site and they return days later via organic. When you axed your paid search budget a few months back, it may be hurting you more than you think!
multichannel-attribution

See, That Was Easy

The beautiful thing about Google Analytics is that there is still a myriad of comparative views we can undertake. We didn’t even take a look at obvious areas of review such as exit pages and sorting landing pages by bounce rate, etc. What I did want to do is provide a few fairly easy ways to review your conversion optimization potential utilizing deeper analytics offerings from Google Analytics via segmentation. The above will likely only take you a few hours to complete, but a few hours that could help you ramp up the conversion percentage of your site visitors.

 

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