 Your new post is loading...
Your new post is loading...
2016 has been a crazy year for social media. A near three-fourths of users are getting their social media fixes via mobile, Twitter is making moves to sell, and Snapchat has unleashed bots that want to use your eyes to create content. But considering the other social media storms we’ve seen over the past year, the fake news story is perhaps the least understood. Critics have spent hours debating the effect these sites had on voters during the election, while Facebook scrambles to filter out these stories under pressure from its users. What few people are talking about, however, is how impressive it is that these websites were able to appear out of utter obscurity, take over newsfeeds, and drive enormous traffic while competing with considerably larger, better funded, and comparatively more reputable media giants. This is a technical feat that many marketers would love to emulate, but it comes wrapped in unethical practices and short-sighted tactics that don’t fit for the overwhelming majority of brands. If we’re able to peel back the layers of deceit, is there anything left for respectable marketers to take away?...
Let me start with a basic statement. Keywords aren’t that important anymore.
How can I be so sure about this? Because the data tells me so. First, let’s look at an example.
In a recent study, we cracked the Hummingbird algorithm code wide open. We analyzed 9.93 million words of content, smashed them together, shook them up and came up some astonishing results. Our focus was to understand exactly how Hummingbird works and how it ranks websites based on their content.
Our study analyzed select sites within a narrow niche and discovered how they ranked comparatively in select topics.
The top-ranked blogs did not necessarily have high keyword saturation, keyword representation or lots of high-DA backlinks.
What did the top ranked blogs have, if not keywords or backlinks?
They had strong topic coverage, few gaps in the topics that they covered and comprehensive content within each of their chosen topic categories.
In other words, they had really strong content, instead of a really strong link profile....
It may seem like an impossible uphill battle to compete with big sites in the SERPs, but there are benefits to running a smaller site that can make a tremendous difference to your SEO. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand explains how small businesses and websites can target opportunities the big sites can't, in spite of their natural advantages.
From blog posts to landing pages to job postings, your website may be made up of tens, hundreds; even thousands of individual pages. But regardless how many pages you have on your site, you'll find that the vast majority of your traffic comes in to a few, very specific pages -- often your homepage, your "About" page, your "Contact Us" page, and maybe one or two of your most popular blog posts. And because so many people are landing on those four or five pages, it's very important that you take special care to optimizing those pages for conversions. Otherwise, you're leaving potentially massive lead and sales numbers on the table. Research shows that companies that take on a structured approach towards conversion optimization are 2X as likely to see a large increase in sales. Trust me: Optimizing these pages can pay off big time in the long run.So, how do you figure out which pages on your website get the most traffic? And once you've found that out, what are the best ways to optimize those pages for leads -- and which tools can help? Let's start with the first question....
These days, it seems like most marketing jobs require at least a basic knowledge of search engine optimization. Even writers need to know about it -- gone are the days, it seems, of simply composing with words. We have to know how to rank, build links, and yield traffic. But many of us aren't sure where to begin. And that, says HubSpot Senior Acquisition Manager Matt Barby, is due to the deluge of information available on SEO. "The problem is that most of it is either ill-informed or just factually incorrect," he explains. Luckily, because Barby's job has involved working with SEO and its experts over the past few years, he's built a go-to arsenal of resources on the topic -- which we're eager to share. If you're feeling overwhelmed by the amount of sites for learning SEO, fear not --- we've put together a list of some of the most comprehensive resources out there. Check them out below....
You can get started by reading my step-by-step guide to SEO. Along with this, you can review my guides to off-page SEO and content marketing. From there, it’s time to implement a few key tools that can help boost your marketing strategy over the final four months of the year. In this post, I’m going to share 10 free SEO and marketing tools that you need to consider, before the end of 2016. Not only will these put you on a better path for the rest of the year, but they’ll position you for success once the new year begins. Now, it’s time to get down to business. Here are the 10 tools that I want you to focus on....
Even with Penguin 4.0 running in real-time, links continue to be one of the most important ranking factors going into 2017. While there are literally tons of over-complicated link building strategies (IFTTT Networks) sticking to these three simple types of links in 2017 will help you rank higher, attract more traffic, and increase leads. While we are not diving into the specifics of each type of link building, this will give you a checklist of link building strategies to brush up on....
Like most, you probably have a general idea of your primary keywords. For example, if you provide web design services in Denver, obvious keyword choices include: Denver website design, Denver website design companies and the like. But, you don’t want to stop there. There are two other things that you need to do: - Make a list of long-tail keywords to target, when creating blog posts and other content. - Learn more about your competition, including their target keywords. With that in mind, let’s review seven tools that you can use to find the best keywords for your business....
One of the top goals in digital marketing is to have strong SEO. Strong SEO means that your content ranks in search, drives organic traffic, and ultimately converts visitors into customers. But there are many parts of SEO that must work in tandem to reach this goal. It’s a multi-part practice that takes time and resources to execute. One surefire way to make sure your site always follows white hat SEO best practices and performs its best in search is a complete website SEO test. In this post we’ll review 2 tools that test website SEO in 2 crucial ways....
Are your blog posts ranking lower in search than you'd like? Discover tools and tips to help you improve the search ranking of your blog posts.
The field of search engine optimization continues to evolve at an alarming pace; SEO techniques that defined last decade are now considered outdated. You position in search engine results pages have a major role in determining how popular your business will be. Only when your website has visitors would you be able to increase revenues and sales and hence derive a high return on your marketing investment. Fortunately, there are many effective tactics that can help you to preserve search friendliness as well as increase website and brand visibility. Being at the top of results pages will bring more users to your site, to learn more about your products, services or other information your site offers. Web design concepts are important to ensure our site looks good once visitors land in your pages. They determine how fast and how easy it will be for users to find what they need once they are there. By employing SEO-friendly web design, you can get the best of both worlds. The following are ten tips to show you how to build web pages that rank highly...
SEO is a marathon, not a sprint. And at some point, your businesses is likely to experience a lull in organic traffic performance that requires you to mix up your strategy to get back on track. One way to do this is through dynamite keyword discovery.
The search landscape is always changing. This includes what people search for, how they search, and what syntax – or combination of words and phrases – they use to search for things.
Efficient and resourceful keyword discovery, done on a regular basis, is key to a strong content strategy and rewarding SEO over the long term.
So whether you’re in an SEO slump, or just trying to start SEO, use these 2 keyword discovery techniques to quickly identify promising terms....
To help you identify what SEO optimizations your website is missing, I have found an infographic that could be your guide. It’s simply called “SEO Ranking Factors” and is created by Coalition Technologies. The infographic lists 200 of the top most important SEO ranking factors that you should have implemented on your site. The SEO ranking factors are divided into ten different categories, and you might have to do some additional research to identify what they mean and how to implement some of them. Doing so, however, will not be too hard. As you might know, SEO is the one most vital aspect of growing the traffic to your website. If you are not already monitoring the SEO scene (and the changes continuously rolled out), you should start now. The amount of traffic that you can have routed to your site by just implementing the right SEO ranking factors is incredible. Whatever you do, do not overlook this free way of increasing the traffic to your site. The SEO ranking factors range from simple additions like implementing size tags on your images to server privacy issues. However, even though you are not very skilled in the makings of a website, most of them are super simple to implement....
|
What’s the point of advertising your brand far and wide if the people down the road don’t know you exist? If growing your business is important to you, then you have to start in your own neighborhood.
The best way to get your name out to your community is by optimizing your local search engine traffic.
In this article, we’re going to explain what makes local search engine optimization so important to your business and the best ways to take advantage of that traffic....
SEO and SMM are like pizza and cheese: you can get one without the other, but, believe me, it isn’t worth it.
Nowadays SEO cannot be effective without well-executed content curation. And that’s where social media kicks in — it helps you unlock untapped potential. Compared to other marketing channels, social media benefits SEO in unexpected ways. It’s not surprising that SEO and SMM have slowly become closely intertwined activities that all businesses want to take advantage of. But how exactly can SEO and SMM work together? Do social media signals affect your site’s visibility in Google? I’ve been investigating this topic for quite a long time and here's what I’ve learned so far
The way we build links has changed quite a lot over the past decade, but links themselves are no less valuable. Like me, you may remember the early days of online marketing, when generating backlinks to a website was as simple as requesting links from link farms and other sketchy sources. Google put a stop to that, so generating backlinks for a brand-new website is a bit trickier these days. That doesn’t mean that it’s impossible, though. The sooner your site has a decent number of backlinks from authoritative, high-quality websites, the sooner its performance on the major search engines will improve. Although this is largely a waiting game, there are things you can do right now to generatefirst-rate backlinks to your new site. Follow the advice here, and you can easily generate upwards of 100 authoritative andrelevant backlinks to your new site in just 30 days....
Google Penguin, in its current form, is two years old. That’s right it’s been two years since the third version of Penguin came out. Google is now updating it again. The fourth version of the Penguin algorithm is set to make significant changes to the results that people get when they perform a Google search. Penguin 3.0 only hit 1% of websites, but this is set to be much bigger. The biggest change of all is Penguin is going to operate in real-time. The new signal will be part of the core search algorithm, which is a big surprise to a lot of businesses. But what is this update and how will it impact search?...
Think you know SEO? It’s all about keywords, content, and optimization, right?Not quite.Despite what you may think you know, search engine optimization has far less to do with content, coding, or site architecture than with psychology.The reason why people search for things in the first place is what matters. That’s especially true when it comes to effective SEO.I know, I know. You’ve been told time and time again to use specific keyword densities and to otherwise tweak the way in which words are arranged on the screen.What does psychology have to do with any of it?...
When The New York Times announced that they had lost half the traffic to the nytimes.com homepage in just two years (80 million visitors), the Internet collectively mourned the “death of the homepage.” Other publishers like GQ, and brands alike, have seen their homepage traffic steadily decline as more users visit their site via article/content pages, bypassing the homepage altogether. Some even say that Snapchat killed the homepage. Well, it’s true. The homepage is no longer the primary point of discovering brands, their content and products on the Web, as social sites have replaced them as the new entry point.The homepage is not dead, however, it just needs a revamp for social Web. Here are four ways to make the homepage a destination again....
You can use schema to tell search engines that another group of words is a review from a happy fan and that those words in the footer make up your address and phone number.
Schema uses a growing number of itemtypes to help identify things like articles, local business, reviews, events, and products.
Now, before your eyes glaze over, you won’t have to learn a bunch of code to take advantage of Schema. You can use any number of Schema code generators to create the HTML code you might need for something like your address.
You can also test your structured data using Google’s testing tool...
It’s important to understand your link profile, as this will give you a clear idea of whether or not you’re on the right track.
In a perfect world, you’d see nothing more than high quality, relevant links pointing to your site. In the real world, however, this may not be the case.
Do you need help reviewing and understanding your link profile?
If so, this post is for you. Below, you’ll find nine backlink analysis tools that are full of features that provide an inside view of your link profile. Let’s check them out!...
SEO is a complicated discipline. There are many components to it, and best practices change from time to time. Add to that the fact that Google updates its algorithm frequently, causing ranking shifts that are known to make digital marketers lose sleep. Additionally, Google often releases new technologies that offer alternative ways to rank. That makes the lives of SEOs even more complicated, as they have to overcome a learning curve to properly serve their clients. One day, it might be easier to become a doctor than an SEO — kidding! (But not really… ) Even now, though, there’s a lot of misinformation (and missing information) about what it takes to rank a page in organic search results. Here are nine things most people don’t understand about SEO....
Search engine optimization is incredibly important for marketers. When you optimize your web pages -- including your blog posts -- you're making your website more visible to people who are looking for keywords associated with your brand, product, or service via search engines like Google.
But it can be a pretty tricky tactic to master with Google's copious algorithm updates.
How do you know what matters and what doesn't? What are today's blog SEO best practices, and what's considered "old-school"? How on earth can you keep it all straight?
We understand confusion is a common issue facing inbound marketers -- and we want to help. In this post, we'll cover how to optimize your blog posts for the keywords you care about, along with a few other optimization tactics you should keep in mind....
SEO is a marathon, not a sprint. And at some point, your businesses is likely to experience a lull in organic traffic performance that requires you to mix up your strategy to get back on track. One way to do this is through dynamite keyword discovery. The search landscape is always changing. This includes what people search for, how they search, and what syntax – or combination of words and phrases – they use to search for things. Efficient and resourceful keyword discovery, done on a regular basis, is key to a strong content strategy and rewarding SEO over the long term. So whether you’re in an SEO slump, or just trying to start SEO, use these 2 keyword discovery techniques to quickly identify promising terms....
It may be hard to believe, but YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world behind Google, and the second most visited site on the web. This is the kind of traffic you can’t ignore. In other words, by harnessing the power of YouTube, you can increase your brand’s visibility exponentially. However, with 300 hours of video uploaded per minute, making your content stand out from your YouTube competitors can be tough – so learning the techniques for getting a video to rank well on YouTube is of prime importance. In this article, we reveal ten of the most important ranking factors that are key to optimizing your YouTube presence. By the time we’re done, you’ll have a far clearer idea of what you need to do to achieve greater success with YouTube....
|
![Top 200 Most Important SEO Ranking Factors [Infographic] | Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight | Scoop.it](https://img.scoop.it/x8DhPPQtjdWBbR8pU8vYvTl72eJkfbmt4t8yenImKBVvK0kTmF0xjctABnaLJIm9)
From the recent fake news stories issues, are there tips that ethical content marketers can use to develop a successful content and SEO strategy? Seems so.