Now these strategies that we are about to present are absolutely within Google’s guidelines and viable for the current year. They were created from the Google driven mentality that the links should appear organically. To quote Matt Cutts who stated:

“The objective is not to make your links appear natural; the objective is that your links are natural”

At competitive level, you just can’t survive with shady SEO strategies. This ain’t another league, it’s another game! So without further ado, let’s start talking about the strategies that will help you dominate the SERPs in 2014:

1. Link Earning

It’s essential for everything you do in 2014 regarding SEO to realize that you should earn links. We’ve talked before about creating organic links and how the content that you create on your site or on other sites should bring real value to the user that sees it. That way you’re not only gaining links but also you’re getting  traffic from people interested in what you have to offer. Getting high quality traffic for your website is what you should aim for.

In order to earn those high quality links from websites with authority you need to start producing content that is interesting enough for both your target audience and influencers. It has to make them tick!

You’ll have to find the right balance to incite them to share your content or browse through your website. You’ll need to scour the internet for hot and engaging topics on your area of interest. Also, you shouldn’t just assume content, even if it’s relevant to the users. You need to process and analyze it, then give it a new spin before revealing it to your audience.

Make your audience read and digest the content from a better perspective! Be unique!

Earned links are usually generated in a natural matter. They are 100% organic and may be considered of high quality. Link earning is not some technique in which you seek to obtain links from websites with great authority. You need to go through all the steps of the process, from the development of content ideas, to the sharing and to the engagement. Once you’ve set the process in motion, the results should start rolling. From backlinks and social signals to new website visitors and higher rankings in search engines.

2. Generate Interest

It’s in your best interest that every action that you do should have a final purpose. And that purpose should either be to create brand awareness, custom educations or satisfaction or to generate sales. However, you’re not going to do that simply by pushing the same monochrome sales proposition over and over again onto the internet and hope people will be hypnotized by it.

The equation is simple – the more you talk, the more people are going to read “you and refer “you”, resulting in more and more visitors.

Everything seems all rainbows and sunshine but it’s quite intricate to get from one position to another. I will try to cement the theoretical information with facts. For example, let’s take the case of a e-commerce site that sells watches. To avoid spamming other websites with links that are placed out of context, you should interact organically by creating discussions or intervening in them. You can see in the picture below an example on what kind of sites link back to the “watch” site. Forums >> Genuine People are talking about watches on internet forums, meaning that this site generates a lot of interest among its potential buyers. You should focus on forums and other platforms where there are debates related to your area. Try and interact with communities that have shared interests with you and that have questions regarding products that you sell.

This is a legitimate strategy which helps and also helps potential customers find the answers that they seek. You draw interest to your website and in the process you’re creating a stronger brand image and a profile of organic links. You don’t have to focus necessary on placing links wherever you post. Even though you’ll obtain quality links that are placed in content, your main plan shouldn’t be building links.

3. Generate Relevant Topical Category Links

Well, if you’re set on earning those links pointing to your site and you’re going to engage in conversations and generate interest in your site over on forums there’s one thing you need to keep in mind. You need to keep it professional. For the sake of continuity we’ll use the same example with the watch e-commerce site.

You’ll want to learn more about your potential customer and dig for some insights.

Who uses watches and what content are they interested in ? Your best bet would be to get links from business and tech categories as depicted in the image below. These sites are relevant to you and your customers.

You need to aim for the right category of websites if you want to get traffic from potential customers. In the end, it’s not about seeing big numbers on your screen and getting great rankings in the search engines. It’s about addressing to the right audience through the proper channels. That’s why you need to research and find out more about your target audience and what relevant website categories they are active on so you won’t waste time and resources attracting the wrong crowd. In 2014, when talking about white hat SEO strategies, you’ll see that everything is about being strongly related on relevancy and creating connections that are helpful for the customer.

Conclusion

Big changes have been brought to SEO in the last years. They not only added something new to the game, they changed everything. The strategies seem harder to implement but it’s worth paying the price. With these type of strategies you’ll be able to not only dominate the SERPs in 2014, you’re also going to have a stronger brand image and your products will become authentic and trustworthy in the eyes of your target audience.

What are the white hat SEO strategies you think are going to be successful in 2014 ?

The post 3 White Hat SEO Strategies to Dominate the SERPs in 2014 appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

Lev Tolstoy, What is Art?

Can SEO be ART?

SEO is ART: Authority. Relevance. Trust.

This interesting statement coming from Barrie Moran got me thinking and intrigued me at the same time. Does online optimization really has any connections with art or is there anything the two of them have in common? To answer these questions I stepped on a journey about Art and its connection to SEO.

Claiming that SEO has anything to do with art is a pretty bold move, but perhaps an even bolder one is to try to give a universally accepted definition of what constitutes art. Of the definitions that can be found in the Merriam-Webster, for instance, two are of interest. One puts art closer to the idea of craft and seems to focus on the person producing the artistic object, as it defines it as “skill acquired by experience, study, or observation”, as in “the art of making friends”.

It’s fairly easy to make the case for SEO being art according to this definition. It is a skill that can honed over time by learning about coding, design or server architecture (study), by testing and trying and even failing repeatedly before getting the right match with search engine algorithms (experience) and by carefully observing the ever-changing policies of page-ranking and seeing how other web sites get penalized by search engines (and for what).

The other – more popular – dictionary definition makes for a more challenging endeavor. The Merriam-Webster also defines art as “the conscious use of skill and creative imagination especially in the production of aesthetic”. Again we have the idea of skill, this time made even clearer with the use of the phrase “conscious use of skill”, and most people would agree that SEO can be understood as such.

We call people in the business “SEO experts”, which implies not only mastering a craft, but mastering a craft better than other people.

It’s probably the other half of the definition that would have people raise an eyebrow. We can get rid of a large chunk of it (and an unnecessarily abstract discussion about aesthetics) by discarding the last part, since the final product doesn’t necessarily have to be aesthetic. What’s left to talk about? The middle: “creative imagination”. Is SEO the place for that?

SEO is Not Science

Yes, we know, defining something by what it is not is usually not a very sound move, but it is illuminating in this case. In the old days (about two-thousand-and-something-years-ago old), when people were still inventing a lot of things (amongst which you could even find democracy), folks like Plato and Aristotle were trying to figure out whether rhetoric, the art of persuading people, was more of an art or a science.

And it would have surely been more appealing to society if rhetoric had been scientific: follow these steps, build your speech a certain way, use these specific words and people will believe you every time. Sounds somewhat familiar? It should, because for a while people wanted to believe the same about SEO: follow these steps, build your website a certain way, use these specific keywords and people will come look for you every time. Neither rhetoric nor SEO is a science, however. And it has nothing to do with exact technology. In fact, what the algorithms did was to make SEO even more of an artistic process.

Algorithms don’t establish business goals, tell convincing stories or know why your audience buys your product. They simply allow room for more creativity.

The truly persuasive speakers are the ones who speak out of genuine interest for their audience, not the ones who use the fanciest words, have the most joyful attitude or follow public speaking recommendations to the norm. While it’s true that so much of convincing another happens through non-verbal cues, the content of what is said is still what matters and what makes the difference. Just as rhetoric exists to enhance the content and not replace it, SEO exists to enhance your website’s content, not replace it.

When someone clicks on a link that sends them to your website, they do so out of a genuine need to find out more about a certain word or phrase. What happens if they don’t find what they need on your site (because there’s nothing to be found)? They get disappointed. And word travels fast these days. If enough visitors get disappointed, others will hear about it, and in the natural course of things people will stop falling for the keyword trick. Google simply bypassed this whole natural process and saved people a lot of hassle. It has made your content the core of the focus and rightly so.

People read good content, not keyword density ratios!

SEO is Authority

Authority cannot be bought or sold, given or taken away. Authority is about what your website stands for and the influence it has on people. Authority is based on the fact of that people believe in you and your web pages if you try and make them. SEO experts try to enable a website to reach first pages of major search engines under keywords relevant for specific types of businesses and quality content marketing approach.

Basically, it tries to make an encounter between a website and a prospective customers. This encounter is hosted by the search engines which evaluates the site and chooses to place it among the first in the SERPs, due to hundreds of factors, including the age, popularity, and the size of that website, in other words, its authority. Therefore, SEO is closely linked to website authority, as this extremely important ingredient helps websites to get quickly indexed and rank prominently in the search results.

Yet, authority commensurate with responsibility. When it comes to search engine optimization, authority and responsibility are closely related and they pretty much go hand in hand. Search engines want to provide users with website results that can be trusted. Let’s say you’ve made the best efforts to optimize your website and convince the search engines that your site is an authority (including high PA and DA) in the field and is worth being listed among the first in the results pages. Yet, being a headliner also obliges you to generate excellent quality and flawless services. On top of that you need to have a high domain authority that can be generated through qualitaty content. It is a site which has web pages that attract links on a large scale and has high search engine rankings.

Being on the top of the results is a vote of confidence that you’ve received both from the search engine and from your audience and you don’t want to let down any of the two.

SEO is Relevancy

Relevancy in SEO is a must. A webmaster must ask himself how relevant is his page content to the keyword query of his visitor. This mean that if you are selling bikes, your content must not go off topic and be related to bikes and not skateboards. When creating your content, you should have in mind the search terms that your “to be” customers are searching for. “Cheap carbon bikes” could be a keyword at high interest among your possible customers while “eco friendly bikes” might not trigger any interest for your audience.

If you don’t make a clear connection between your content and the keywords you are targeting for, your relevance would get hurt.  This way, you will be confusing your audience, the search engines, even yourself and therefore your ranking will get hurt. Search engines are getting smarter and smarter and so does SEO. The link relevance is also an important ranking factor.

Optimization equals relevancy when an in-depth understanding of correctly using keywords and relating them to the proper market niche is done.

SEO is Trust

It is said that trust is difficult to build up, but all too easy to destroy. But what is the basis of this intangible bond? Moreover, what is the base of an online trust?

The search engines needed a way to establish trust, especially in online marketing, and to assign a value to that trust. From the search engine’s point of view, trust is built up from domain age, the periodical updates a site does, the traffic it has or its popularity. If a site ranks high at all of these items, the chances that Google will put it in the first line are very high as it will make Google itself look good. Yet, trust isn’t something you earn overnight.

Building trust is hard and time comsuming, but it come hand in hard with search marketing. 

SEO is a long-term process and as beneficial as optimization might be in the process of consolidating trust, it will take long to impact a website’s rankings, but in the end can be a SEO success.
Just like in human relationships, search engines try to determine trustworthiness by evaluating the company you keep. Which sites link to you? Who are you linking to? Who shares your content? All of these are cues that help search engines decide whether you are to be trusted or not. Also, just like human relationships, once defied, trust can bring you down. 

The trust for a website is given by the equity of the links it has: if they come from reliable sites, if they are relevant, how strong is the connection so on and so forth. There are some SEO tools that can offer you this kind of information such as domain trustworthiness or link trustworthiness – two metrics from Majestic. It is important to focus on them if you’re doing link building. In the chart above you can see the trust flow and citation flow for a specific website. The higher the point on the graph curve, the better the link quality, where the vertical axis represents Trust Flow and the horizontal axis represents Citation Flow. 

A website can be dropped from rankings if it stops reinventing itself, adding fresh content, builds a high bounce rate or just doesn’t attain any click.

The Need of Taking Chances in SEO

“But how will people know how good my content is?” “What if the market is too saturated and I get lost in the stream of information?” “How do I appear different from everyone else on the market?” These are probably some of the questions running through your head at this point. And rightfully so. The good news is, if you’re asking these questions, the present of SEO is such a better time to live in than its past. Everything Google has (officially) done so far has been with the intention of making content matter more and irrelevant things matter less.

Obviously, succeeding mostly through content and organic growth strategies means much more work, in a way. And it’s less of a sure recipe for success. It’s riskier. But that too comes with the territory, as famed movie director Francis Ford Coppola admitted in an interview: “An essential element of any art is risk. If you don’t take a risk then how are you going to make something really beautiful, that hasn’t been seen before?” And the man knows a thing or two about taking risks. While a lot of his movies are now largely acclaimed as masterpieces of cinema (“The Godfather”, “The Conversation”, “Apocalypse Now”), the struggles behind the production of those same movies have also acquired some notoriety.

Sometimes he took a bet by casting still not very well-known actors in the main part: Al Pacino in “The Godfather”, Martin Sheen in “Apocalypse Now”. Other times he made his movies so long that producers felt people were not going to see them: “The Godfather” is just under three hours running time, while the sequel is well over three hours. And time and time again, he made his characters a mix of strength and fragility, and instead of making them heroes to root far from a distance, gave them moral dilemmas that made them likable and easy to connect with. He took all those chances and left us cinema landmarks.

Lessons SEOs Can Learn From ART in General

What’s the lesson to be learned from Coppola’s masterpieces? There are several, in fact:

Have the courage to bet on the unknown horse

In your case, it might be a new social networking phenomenon, or a new sharing feature, or programming language. It’s sometimes easier to be the first (or among the first) at something than to be the best. And if you’re the first, in time, you might just become the best. Dare to walk the less traveled path and you might just notice that there are plenty who will want to follow.

Don’t compromise on your content

Write in ways that are not always bite-size and not always for the MTV generation. Google now relies on algorithms that prioritize quality over quantity, content over keywords, inbound links and several other factors. If you come up with content that is original, or is, at the very least, the result of original research and composition, it might get referred back to naturally, organically, without making additional efforts and to a degree you could not have succeeded by pushing it onto others artificially.

Write to connect with other people

Go one step further and create communities for people to engage with your content and make it better. Make your content available for sharing and make connections with others on the web. Writing guest posts on high or medium authority sites, for instance, can still be an incredibly powerful networking tool, if done right and in an authentic manner.

A Final Thought

Art, as well as SEO,  is in the eye of the beholder. Maybe one of the most impressive abilities online is that of helping people connect over common interests. It is that skill which makes SEO ART, and can make you a bit of an artist.

The post SEO is ART – Authority. Relevancy. Trust. appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

A picture is worth a thousand words!

In order to best outline how search engines changed the way we manage our businesses and conduct our online strategies we created the Google Equilibrium Illustration.

We are in the year 2014 and the search landscape has dramatically changed compared to what it was in the ’90s. Year after year, things seem to get more and more complex and we involuntary wonder how will the world of search, and therefore the online businesses, will look like in the near future. It’s true that progress is made through changes, and any change is always accompanied by some drawbacks or discomforts. Yet, the requests one need to overcome in order to be present in the search engines sometimes seem impossible to fulfill.

All the updates and algorithms can make you feel as a tap dancer on a burning floor.

The digital world becomes bigger and diverse every day and the requirements you need to fulfill in order to survive in the big online world seem to grow constantly. If a couple of years ago, a simple but well-designed strategy used to be enough to keep one on the track, nowadays, the same scenario doesn’t seem to be efficient anymore. The digital marketer’s job has become way harder as he must slip through Google’s volatility, must keep in mind all the updates and algorithms, must comply to all the guidelines and yet, provide successful results.

Getting on the first page of Google is definitely not an easy task and improving your ranking takes a well planned strategy and hard work. Yet, in terms of ranking, there are many things you can do in order to obtain great results, even in the light of all limitations. Restraints can actually boost creativity if we start seeing the constraints more as challenges and less as obstacles. It’s true that the actual landscape might give us a lot of hassle but great satisfactions come from hard work. We don’t have the power to change all the limitations that seem to step on our way but we can definitely change our attitude towards them.

We have to learn how to juggle with all the algorithms in our favor and be prepared for whatever the future might bring. As Frank Sinatra used to sing, the best is yet to come! 🙂

How do you find the “search” and “digital marketing” landscape nowadays, compared to what it was?

The post Google Equilibrium – Tough Job to Work in “Search” Nowadays! appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

Larry King, the famous TV star, used to say to his audience that his father came to the US thinking that America is the land of all possibilities and that the streets are paved with gold. After arriving, he realized 3 things:

1. The streets weren’t paved with gold.
2. The streets weren’t paved at all.
3. He was the one who would pave the streets.

We often tend to believe that creativity leads to success only when it’s built on clear directives and extensive plans, but, as in the anecdote above, creativity might require courage to let go of certainties.

Is creativity only for the chosen ones?

Conventional wisdom teaches us that creativity means maximum freedom of expression, no limitation of any kind and complete boundlessness. That limits the number of creative persons to just a bunch of people. So, if you’re not a wannabe Picasso or a carbon copy of Shakespeare, not much access to the creative field for you.

All you accountants that find fabulous solutions to all sorts of tangled problems, all you clerks that unravel an impossible number of documents and all you, programmers, that need to face so many challenges daily, we are sorry. All your efforts, as brilliant as they might be, are not seen as being creative from the conventional wisdom point of view.

But things are quite different actually, aren’t they?

Just because limitations are imposed, in order to better respond to the customer’s needs, it doesn’t mean that creativity is out of the question. Quite the opposite! The more challenges it takes to overcome all constraints, the more creative thinking is needed. It’s not just thinking outside the box. It’s creating the box, thinking inside the box and when you find nothing more inside, going outside of it.

Humor me and try to do this exercise:

Take a pen and a white piece of paper and begin to write about anything. That’s right, anything. Pretty hard, isn’t it?

You wished someone gave you some directions, pointed out a domain or any indications about the length of the article or at least the language in which you should write. You wished for some limitations of any kind.

This is not a “How to article”!

If you’re looking for 10 easy steps to become creative or 99 ways to improve your creative thinking, you are reading the wrong article. If only “10 easy steps” get in my way of becoming the most creative person alive then sign me in for that session. With one easy search, Google will happily give you a list of “how to” articles, maybe this one included. But talking about creativity and not actually doing it is like a stand-up comedian coming to the stage and instead of telling jokes, saying : “I am funny! You should laugh.”

Creativity in SEO

In such a data driven industry, what has creativity got to do with SEO? you might ask. I won’t deny that joining creativity and SEO might seem a bit odd but not out of ordinary. You all agree when I say that SEO plays a big part in improving a company’s online visibility. It’s a tool that, when used properly, makes wonders for your business. The way a small company gets to swim with the big fishes and manages to reach the top of the search engine results page is not through shady link building and black hat techniques. It’s through smart SEO that uses creativity, innovation and clever thinking.

I don’t know if you’re a big fan of sports, but given the fact that the winter Olympics are on, allow me to make a sports metaphor. In figure skating, the one who goes home with the golden medal is not the one who can make the most jumps, twirls and has an immaculate technical execution.

The one who wins the prize is the one who knows how to sharply combine the elements and give the audience an execution with a personal input.

By analogy, the best in the SEO industry are the ones who can make the best out of keyword variations, link building or organic ranking. Meaning not only using these concepts correctly and productively but also creatively blending them, continuously improving and readjusting them for each  individual case.

Limitation means Liberation

When it comes to creativity, restraints can be your best friend. Being in your bubble of comfort is very pleasant but when you get out of it, that is when the magic begins and your mind revs up the engines. The comfort zone might be the enemy of creativity as creative thinking comes not only on fertile soil but also from a conflict of ideas. When you clean out a corner of your mind, creativity will instantly fill it. Or at least this is what Dee Hock, the inventor of the Visa credit card believed.

Nowadays, talented people working in the field of SEO must face all sorts of challenges. With Penguin 2.0 and all the regulations that Google has imposed, the digital marketing activity begins to look like a dance in two, where you have to be really careful not to step on your partner’s feet.  Should this make you quit dancing? No, it should make you a better dancer. It should motivate you to find the right moves and the exact balance so that at the end of the dance, both of you leave the dance floor with your feet undamaged.

Changing habits is hard, obstacles are difficult to overcome and barriers just seem like they’re stepping in our way. But all of them give us the great possibility to increase our area of perception and reconsider the whole problem from different angles. They allow us to take into consideration a greater range of ideas or possibilities which until then had never even crossed our minds. Yes, the whole process can be unpleasant and uncomfortable but, hey, creation requires some sacrifices now and then.

Newsjacking

There are people complaining about all of Google’s regulations, there are others that back off but there are also the ones that pull themselves together and transform these obstacles into challenges; into better practices, more creative tactics and, thereupon, into better and more efficient SEO strategies.

Let’s discuss an example, for instance, and see if creative SEO is possible and what lesson we can learn from this.

Although at first sight it might sound like a practice with negative connotation, what we’re actually talking about is a SEO artifice that appears to be successful so far.

In newsjacking, content comes first, marketing second.

Within this technique you don’t just throw keywords around randomly in the digital world. You take advantage of the exposure that breaking news have, you produce high quality content and contribute to the overall discussions related to that news. That means you need to have a proper understanding of the “breaking news” niche, you have to adapt and quickly generate researched content so you can finally “borrow” from the news’ fame and notoriety. It might sound unimpressive at the beginning but in fact it is a very clever and creative way of getting tons of links that will ultimately improve your SEO. Whether you’re newsjacking the Royal Baby, Batman or Christmas shops, the idea is to make use of ingenuity and creativity. Used properly, it blows you up where you dream of, in Google’s first rows, by getting tons of  natural links that will improve your site’s link profile authority.

Save the cow! operation

Another creative link building strategy is the one used for John Cow’s blog. I think I’ll bring a smile on your face when I tell you that the owner of the site hacked their own domain. That’s right! Jason Katzenback, the creator of the johncow.com, a full time online entrepreneur that makes a living from internet marketing, hacked his own creation. Extremely foolish at a first sight but incredibly clever at a closer look. The creative idea was to largely involve the audience in John Cow’s brand experience by making the audience responsible for the existence of the site. A sort of brand entertainment. It was up to online fans whether johncow.com, the online making money site that is milking the internet since 2007, was going to “the dark side” or not. With only 1$, you could contribute to “save the cow!” rescue mission. It might be just a drop in the ocean but the ocean is made of drops. Yet, the idea was not to make a bunch of cash, as he donated the amount made to one of his readers.

The idea was to generate “natural SEO”, if you allow me to put it this way, plenty of natural links that highly increased its site authority.

With such a creative stratagem, he reinforced the connection between his audience and the John Cow brand but he also proved that putting “creativity” and “SEO” together is not just a happy coincidence.

May the Creativity be with You!

Lots of creative jugglery can be done in the SEO field if we start seeing the constraints as challenges and, why not, opportunities.

We might have to stop fighting our “enemies” and try to live with them. It is easier and might lead us to unimaginably great results. So, don’t wring your hands and better roll up your sleeves.

And meanwhile, tell us! What creative strategies have you been using?

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