Tag Archive for: Search Engine Journal

How a New Company Can Establish Themselves Online

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New business have a lot to manage in a short period of time if they hope to be sustainable, and one of the most important marketing tools they can use is SEO. Establishing your company online is a huge step towards establishing your business in your community, and the only way to get popular online is to have a website showing up in the search rankings.

In the past, creating a respectable website with good content would have been enough to get your page on the search results page, but the internet is now an incredibly competitive arena. To get your website on the front page, you have to create great content while also managing a number of ranking signals that Google and Bing use to rank websites.

These signals are read by “bots” or “spiders” that index web pages and all of their internal information, which are sorted by algorithms that decide what pages get ranked where. There are seemingly countless signals, and it can be overwhelming when you are just getting started.

Startups trying to understand SEO often feel completely confused by the barrage of technical information out there, but there are some basic steps you can take to get started. Sujan Patel has five rules you can apply to running your website which will help any fledgling business firmly ground their online presence.

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Time Is Of The Essence For SEOs, Use Yours Wisely

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Source: RBertelg/Flickr.com

Source: RBertelg/Flickr.com

Website owners and SEOs have to budget their time wisely. There are a billion different ways you can try to gather traffic, but some are more effective than others. Of course, anyone that preaches that they have a quick way to get visitors is probably pushing questionable or outright terrible practices that won’t actually work, but there are also methods out there that under perform because they have become outdated or just fail to understand the field.

Sujan Patel put together a list of seven of these SEO tasks that waste precious time at Search Engine Journal. Some of these tasks are harmless, but don’t have any actual value. Checking your site traffic every day can be tempting, especially to new site owners. There is a legitimate thrill to seeing people begin to trickle onto your content, and the number of visitors is a helpful metric to keep note of, but checking traffic every day focuses too much on individual visitors and not the overall trends in traffic. Trends in traffic numbers give you much more useful information than seeing every single visitor arriving on your page.

Some of the other tactics Patel points out are downright frowned upon by the SEO community, and the Search Engines are trying to put a stop to them. Buying backlink packages was nothing more than a scheme to get sites to the top of rankings without having any actual value. It was a loophole that many took advantage of, but it has absolutely no real worth, and Google’s algorithm updates have made it very clear that the practice isn’t tolerated anymore.

Monitoring keyword density, unlike the past two, used to actually be fairly useful, but it has absolutely no function in the current SEO climate. Keyword density was never quite as important as some made it seem, but for a period Google’s system did favor sites with a reasonable amount of keywords within the content. That is pretty much completely gone now, and the more advanced search engines favor natural sounding content rather than overstuffed robotic sounding paragraphs.

Patel has even more tasks that are draining your time without giving anything back. It is easy to be tempted by easy paths to high rankings or to fall out of touch with the constantly changing SEO world if you let it happen. The best way to know where to focus your energy is to keep up to date with everything happening in SEO regularly, and to look for practices which offer long-term, sustainable growth for your site.

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Two Things Business Owners Need To Understand About SEO

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When business owners finally decide to use SEO, they are often uninformed or confused on a lot of the basics of the industry. It isn’t surprising, considering how complex and ever-changing SEO is. While trying to explain all of SEO to a client or business owner is impossible, Nick Stamoulis thinks a few key ideas can help orient people new to the industry with a better understanding of what we do.

SEO is Long Term

One of the most common misconceptions about SEO and the internet as a whole is that there is some magic way to dominate search results or gain visitors overnight. There are a select few cases of websites that have sprung up over the span of a couple months, but those are rare, and there were other factors contributing to their quick success.

SEO is a long term process that builds on itself over time. It can take months just to see the kind of effects your SEO strategy is having on your site. For example, content creation and marketing are huge parts of the current SEO field, and SEO companies pump content out steadily through the work week. Most of this content can go unnoticed, while an occasional article gains gets some attention, but in the end they are all positively contributing to the sites SEO strategy and SERP placement.

No one wants to wait to see positive results, but some things you just can’t force.

Always Put Visitors Before Search Engines

Good SEO relies on creating a good user experience. No marketing campaign in the world will raise an objectively bad website out of the ether, because people won’t return to a site, or even stay on the page long enough to matter, if the site doesn’t work well or have interesting information.

The types of people who put all of their focus on what search engine algorithms want are the type of people who try to take advantage of every loophole and questionable strategy they can find. It might even work for a while, but eventually a new algorithm will identify what they are doing and, as Liz Lemon would say, shut it down.

Conclusion

Stamoulis has two more ideas in his article he feels it is important for business owners to understand but these two points identify the biggest misunderstandings the uninitiated have. If you’re a business owner trying to get into SEO, ask yourself why you want to start now. If you want to dominate the rankings to start making tons more money tomorrow, you are barking up the wrong tree (is there even a right tree for that?). But if you are trying to make your already reputable product or brand more available to the masses over time, SEO can help.

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How To Optimize WordPress For SEO

WordPress is easily one of the most popular content management systems available, especially for internet marketers and SEOs. It is easy to use and insanely flexible for a CMS, but it has become the most used by SEOs for the number of tools you can use within the site, and how easy it is to optimize web pages.

WordPress doesn’t just work well with quick and easy optimization techniques though. It is so flexible you can implement almost any more advanced optimization techniques you could want.

Ilan Nass at Search Engine Journal notes three of the more overlooked SEO tweaks you can do with WordPress, and teaches you how to do them in his article. If you want your blog or web page to be as optimized as possible, make sure you are doing these techniques.

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Is SEO Really Bad For User Experiences On Your Site

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One of the most common criticisms hurled at SEO is that is manipulates sites based on what Google or Bing want rather than what users would like to see. Many perceive this as a conflict between SEO and good user experiences, almost as if SEO is antagonistic to an enjoyable website visit.

On the surface, this assumption makes sense, as SEO’s do tend to get wrapped up in pleasing algorithms rather than people, but good SEO and quality user experience don’t have to be mutually exclusive. There are plenty of times where focusing on both aspects of the web page create great sites that are popular for search engines, and many SEO practices actually benefit the user.

Sitemaps, for example, are an essential part of SEO strategy, as search engines do limited crawls, where many sites do not have all of their pages indexed by the engine. Having a well organized and updated sitemap, as well as simple navigation, you make sure the search engines index the pages most important for you.

Source: Flickr

These sitemaps and navigation systems have the added bonus of making users able to easily navigate a site. Nobody enjoys having to scour a website for the specific page they are looking for, and a well done navigation system quickly erases that issue.

Keyword based SEO practices also help both parties, as long as you keep your readers in mind while optimizing your text. All text-based content should be easy to read, but search engines rely on keywords in the blocks of text to understand what your site is about.

The problem is, this makes some SEOs starting placing the keyword every other word which is going to drive readers crazy. The general rules are to include the keyword in the title, headline tag, and body content, but no more than once in the headline tag and title. You can use it a few times in your content as needed, but not overdoing it is important. In fact, including the keyword too many times could actually hurt your site.

Sujan Patel over at Search Engine Journal has even more ways you can combine SEO and a user-experience focus to make web sites that make both the search engines and your visitors happy.

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Blog Post Formats You Can Rely On For Content Marketing

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Yep, it’s time again for a post about content marketing! It looks like there will be plenty of these throughout the next year as content marketing stays on the tip of everyone’s tongue when talking about SEO or digital marketing.

But, pumping out quality content continuously takes a lot of time and effort, which can be difficult for a site or marketing team to maintain for a long time. This causes most to get burnt out and ideas for new content stop coming as quickly. If you’re having trouble coming up with new things to talk about and ways to present your content, Sujan Patel has some suggested formats which might help you get started at Search Engine Journal.

  • List Posts – You’ve almost certainly seen lists before unless you stay away from almost all forms of media and information. If that is the case, thanks for reading this before picking up a newspaper or looking at “the cutest 25 cats sitting on things”. Yes, lists are a super common choice for bloggers and writers of all kinds. They are easy to write, and they tend to be more shared than most blog posts.
  • Interviews – Interviews have also always been popular for media, and SEO benefits for the same reasons. When you get an interview with a subject, you will automatically gain exposure to that figure’s followers and draw traffic to your own content. Interviews are also fairly easy. Make sure you understand the technology you would be using to record the interviews, like audio recorders, cameras, etc., then all you have to do is start asking anyone you would be interested on interviewing. You’ll get a bite faster than you know.
  • Reviews – If you have writer’s block when it comes to coming up with topics, reviews are a great way to keep content coming regularly while keeping it interesting for your viewers. Try to be objective and fair with your reviews, and use specific details to keep others from thinking you are just attacking other writers and creators.
  • Link Round-ups – Similarly to reviews, this is a go-to for those who can’t figure out what to talk about. Gathering collections of links has the upsides of collecting resources you might use on your own, while also earning goodwill for other creators’ content you are sharing.

Obviously, the best way to get traffic to come to your site is to just offer quality content filled blog posts informing peers in the industry. These formats shouldn’t replace the standard blog post, but when you are at a total loss for topics, these formats are handy to have in your back pocket.

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How To Avoid Over Optimizing Your Content Marketing Campaigns

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The breakout star in SEO so far this year appears to be content marketing. It was pretty talked about in 2013, but with Google’s penalties and algorithms it will only be more important as the year progresses.

Of course, just as with any SEO tactic, content marketing has its risks. Google has shown that even using the best practices too much can still lead to penalties, and the Penguin and Panda updates have made it clear that you have to put good thought into any campaign you are going to run. Algorithmic updates by their nature don’t have room for leniency.

If you want to keep succeeding with SEO, you have to follow the rules to the letter. Of course, this is complicated Google’s reluctance to give hard rules for SEO. From what we know, it seems moderation is really the key to content marketing and optimization.

Adam Mason, writer for Search Engine Journal and SEO manager at Zazzle Media, shows the best method of dealing with content marketing optimization is to learn the history and know what has changed in the past few years. If you want to know how to push your content marketing campaigns without being hurt by penalties, his article covers anything and everything you would want to know.

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Which Google Algorithm Update Is Which?

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With all of the changes Google made in the past year, it is easy to get mixed up as to what changes affected what areas of a site’s SEO information, and what was penalized by which algorithm updates. Combine that with a disavow links tool which most don’t seem to understand, and it is a wonder anyone can keep up with Google’s updates.

Pratik Dholakiya, writer for Search Engine Journal, recognized how confusing this all must be, and sought to explain which types of updates affected what, as well as all of the misconceptions surrounding these updates. He breaks them down into three basic types of updates, and each focused on different aspects of SEO.

EMD Algorithm Update – The September update targeted sites with exact match domains (EMDs), or sites named after keywords instead of brands. This change didn’t so much penalize most affected as it removed a special boost they were receiving due to the name of the website.

The only people really penalized by the update were those who had over-optimized their site around the keyword. There is also a misconception the EMD updates were Panda or Penguin related, but Matt Cutts has put that idea to rest.

 

Panda Updates – The main area the Panda updates looked at was your on-site content. Google was trying to weed out low-quality or duplicate content, and they’ve been churning out constant new versions of Panda all year.

Penguin Updates – Despite the close association with Panda, Google’s Penguin updates are actually their own beast, formerly known as the webspam algorithm update. They are targeting all of the spammy sites out there, and unless you’re a spammer, the only penalties you may have seen from these updates were from links.

If you have seen any penalties from these updates, Dholakiya explains how to help fix the problems. The Disavow Links tool can help with that, especially if you’ve seen penalties from the Penguin updates, but it isn’t a magic solution.

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How Does On-Page Optimization Stand Up In 2013?

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SEO as a whole can be split into two different categories: on-page and off-page optimization techniques. On-page optimization is focused on everything you can do to boost your rankings directly on your webpage. Off-page SEO concerns aspects that function elsewhere, like backlink management.

Some might argue that on-page optimization has been weakened by Google updates that have sought to weed out pages using methods like keyword stuffing. While this is kind of true, it does not fully discredit on-page methods.

You can still take advantage of proper keyword usage, titles, and URL management, but as Matt Cutts puts it, “there’s diminishing returns.” Christian Arno from Search Engine Journal explains what still works in on-page optimization, and while some of the old techniques have been cut down, the most effective techniques are still tried and true.

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Using MajesticSEO to Diagnose Bad Links

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MajesticSEO is a tool that is as well-known as it is respected. It is great for site audits and research, but it also has an important use in the current state of SEO where it has become clear that your site can be hurt externally, through bad links.

MajesticSEO can help you diagnose bad links, and possibly a bad linking campaign. Though, it is entirely possible the bad links dragging you down are not coming from external sources, but instead are caused by unscrupulous site owners or SEOs.

Search Engine Journal writer Irish Wonder helps walk you through identifying and understanding bad links with the use of this great SEO tool. They aren’t perfect means of diagnosing your problem, but they can help point you in the right direction if you can’t pinpoint the exact issue.

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