1. Website Speed as a Ranking Factor
2. Reducing the Image File Size Using the Lossy and Lossless Compression Techniques
3. Case Study – Image Compression Tools Tested to the Limit
   1. How the Image Optimization Test Was Performed
   2. Top 6 Metrics Tested for Finding the Best Image Compression Tool

1. Website Speed as a Ranking factor

Site speed, according to Google, “reflects how quickly a website responds to web requests”  and for all intents and purposes serves both the user and the site owner. Users get an enhanced experience, site owners are more likely to get reduced operation costs and… well, more users, who stay on the website longer.

Google thinks the same, as indicated by the very fact that it provides us with tools to check up on our site speed and suggests solutions for sluggish pages. There is the PageSpeed module in the Google Developers section and a Page Speed Insights for making a speed audit for every website.

Even Yahoo has a developer module for page speed improvement, called Yslow. The slew of freely available tools is certainly meant to wear off some of the concerns that only big sites can benefit from this change. In fact, chances are smaller sites have the upper hand here in terms of flexibility and adjusting. Some questions and concerns remain though, the most important being:

What is and how exactly does Google measure “site speed?”

For instance, the difference between “document complete” and “fully rendered” time when loading a page was mentioned. The former means that while not all the elements on a page are showing, you can start clicking and navigating. The latter means that everything is clearly visible on the page, even background stuff like ads and images. Even though it is difficult to pinpoint specifically and with certainty which aspect of speed directly helps your rankings, working on your site loading speed, in general, is bound, at the very least, to enhance your users’ experience. So, for instance, having a “document complete” time which is faster than the “fully rendered time” could help.

2. Reducing the Image File Size Using the Lossy and Lossless Compression Techniques

Images can play a major role in the difference between “document complete” and “fully rendered site” loading times, especially for mobile sites.

One solution is to simply delay loading images. Let everything else load first and then only at the end start loading images. This ensures that your site is functional long before you get to the bandwidth-chugging portions of the page. As with everything else nowadays, there are lots of plugins that can help you. On WordPress, you can try Advanced Lazy Load or Smush. But if you need to do that, maybe the problem is simply that your images are too big and they slow down your site speed anyway. So why not compress your images to begin with?

We used two techniques for image compression for our case study:

• lossless compression, which means the image quality remains largely the same. 
• lossy compression, which means some loss of fidelity may occur, though in general, it may be imperceptible.

Brian Jackson, Director of Inbound Marketing of Kinsta, explained each compression method:

Lossy image compression refers to compression in which some of the data from the original file (JPEG) is lost. The process is irreversible, once you convert to lossy, you can’t go back. And the more you compress it, the more degradation occurs.   Lossless image compression refers to compression in which the image is reduced without any quality loss. Usually, this is done by removing unnecessary metadata from JPEG and PNG files. RAW, BMP, GIF, and PNG are all lossless image formats.
	BRIAN JACKSON
	Dir. of Inbound Marketing Kinsta

You can see below the representation of both reduced files using these two techniques. 

To be more exact on this, the correct term is perceptually lossless. A human can’t tell between a JPEG optimized version and the Original photo. JPEG is a lossy format. PNG is lossless. 

3. Case Study – Image Compression Tools Tested to the Limit

We went out and researched some of the best image compression tools out there which use the lossless and lossy techniques for image compression. After we identified them, we made a list of the most relevant tools that would be up to the job:

• JPEGMini
• Kraken Image Optimizer
• Puny PNG
• Tiny PNG
• Google’s PageSpeed Module

I hope it’s useless to mention that this analysis is unbiased and none of the mentioned tools offered to take us out for a beer or promised any goods in exchange. So we are going to test those 4+1 tools on the same artifact and see if we can notice any difference in loading speed results.

To make the analysis more encompassing we added a 5th element to the comparison (a 5th dimension, if you will), which is slightly different from the other 4: Google’s PageSpeed. Unlike the other image compression tools we have included in our research, Pagespeed isn’t really a compression tool as much as an optimization tool that works holistically through a series of custom filters which are executed when the HTTP server serves the website assets.

What gets it a spot in our test is the fact that it “dynamically optimizes images by removing unused meta-data from each file, resizing the images to specified dimensions, and re-encoding images to be served in the most efficient format available to the user.” Sounds pretty nifty, right? We’ll see if the boast stands at the end of the day.

3.1 How the Image Optimization Test Was Performed

The test had to be the same for all and give these tools a run for their money, so we decided on optimizing our blog’s entire image data (galery), which rounded up at 3,824 images. This was done on a test version of the site and it has not gone live yet. It was designed for testing purposes only. Most of the services we used to compress the images have their own API and some example scripts but for our test, we’ve built our own scripts which send a request for each image.

Some services have a “batch upload” feature, but for consistency, we’ve sent a single image per request since we cannot do a “batch upload” on all servers. We don’t want to lade you with too many technical details. Yet, a few comments on the process are in order. Where an API was not available, the images were processed with the service provided by that particular software.

The first comment is that JPEGMini was the only tool that was a downloadable software, the rest being hosted online. The second is that all of the tools have APIs, except for JPEG Mini. Last but not least, for Pagespeed we used the Nginx module.

3.2 Top 6 Metrics Tested for Finding the Best Image Compression Tool

We measured several metrics, which we could split into two categories:

• Image compression related metrics.
• Page load speed related metrics.

For the first category, we only had results for the 4 image compression tools, since Pagespeed is a bit of a different type of tool, as discussed earlier. It is worth noticing that not all tools had the same workload:

• TinyPNG only compressed both PNG and JPEG format files.
• JPEGMini only compressed the JPEG format files.
• Kraken compresses both PNG and JPEG format files.
• Puny PNG compresses both PNG, JPEG and GIF format files.

The metrics in both categories, however, were calculated relative to the actual work and not to absolute standards. And here they are:

1. Metric 1 – Conversion Time

We ran tests for each tool to see which one of them manages to convert the image faster and our winner was JPEGMini.

Let’s start with the conversion time, measured in minutes. Since the number of conversions wasn’t the same for all tools (in fact, it was slightly different in each case), it makes more sense to look at the number of conversions per minute. The detached leader is JPEGMini, with roughly 113 conversions per minute, or close to 2 conversions per second. The other 3 tools trail significantly behind, with little difference between them, by comparison. TinyPNG and Kraken are at 30, respectively 21 conversions per minute, while PunyPNG is utterly unimpressive at merely 11 compressions per minute.

2. Metric 2 – Compression Power

Next, let’s look at compression power. This, again, is a metric resulting from the relation between two different measurements: the compressed size of the output relative to the original size of the input. The winner, by a margin, is TinyPNG, with a 2.78 compression ratio, with the other three being at less than half the rate (1.19 for Kraken and 1.3 for JPEGMini), or at best, just slightly better than half the rate (1.53 for PunyPNG). So far the format specific tools seem to fare much better than the format general ones.

3. Metric 3 – Pages with Mainly PNG Images

And now for the real test: does any of this impact the time to load the page? For PNG related pages, the time after compression is best improved with TinyPNG (5.29 seconds) or Pagespeed (5.44 seconds). The difference between the two is by and large negligible. Kraken and PunyPNG, however, are significantly lower (with basically no difference at all between them, however: 7.47 and 7.45 seconds respectively).

The latter loading times are more than double than if the web pages used no images and closer to the load speed if there were no compression at all (8.56 seconds). The sizes of images loaded on the web pages are, as expected, in line with the loading times. The average size is 8 MB for Pagespeed and 8.2 MB for TinyPNG, practically half the size of images obtained from Kraken (15.9 MB) or PunyPNG (15.7 MB). For comparison, the average size of the PNG images on a loaded page is 19.5 MB, not much bigger than for the compressed results for Kraken or PunyPNG.

4. Metric 4 – Pages with Mainly JPEG Images

What about JPEG image format? It’s another win for Pagespeed and the format-specific tool. This time, however, the result variation is nowhere near as dramatic as in the case of the PNG files. In fact, the times to load the page are really close:

• 3.24 seconds for Pagespeed
• 3.45 seconds for JPEGMini
• 3.53 seconds for Kraken
• 3.55 seconds for PunyPNG.
• 3.77 seconds for the Original Images
• 3.03 seconds with No Images

Hardly noticeable, isn’t it? Add to that the fact that all of these values are still not that much different from the page load time when there are no images on the page (3.03 seconds) or even when all the images on the page are at their original size (3.77 seconds). As you would expect, the difference in the average size of images loaded on page is similarly unremarkable.

Pagespeed gets the best compression, at 3.4 MB, with JPEGMini following closely at 3.9 MB. Kraken and PunyPNG are both above the 4 MB mark, with 4.3 MB and 4.4 MB respectively. While the first two values are significantly different than the average size of the page with uncompressed JPEG images on it (4.9 MB), they are nowhere near the size of the page with no JPEGs on it (1.2 MB).

Let’s do a quick recap on the JPEG and PNG compression.

Best JPEG Compression (Best is First)

1. PageSpeed
2. JPEGMini
3. Kraken
4. PunyPNG

Best PNG compression (Best is First)

1. PageSpeed
2. TinyPNG
3. PunyPNG
4. Kraken

The best JPEG compression is done by PageSpeed, then JPEGMini , followed by Kraken and PunyPNG. When it comes to PNG files, Pagespeed leads the way, tied with Tiny PNG, followed by PunyPNG and Kraken. Barring Pagespeed, the better tools seemed to be the ones that are geared for specific image formats (JPEGMini and TinyPNG), with the all-around tools doing poorer in terms of results.

5. Metric 5 – Bulk Conversion Speed 

Total Conversion Times by Tool

• JPEGmini – 20 minutes / 2275 images converted
• TinyPNG – 60 minutes / 1460 images converted
• Kraken – 197 minutes / 3824 images converted
• PunyPNG – 328 minutes / 3722 images converted
• Pagespeed – On the Fly Conversion / no initial conversion time

Images Converted per Minute by Tool

• JPEGmini – 113 images/minute
• TinyPNG – 24 images/minute
• Kraken – 19 images/minute
• PunnyPNG 11 images/minute
• Pagespeed – On the Fly Conversion

In terms of bulk conversion speed there are some aspects that need to be mentioned. First of all, PageSpeed executes the conversion instantly, on the fly, and JPEGMini is a downloadable software. So, there are some technical differences between these two tools and the others, which might make the comparison between them a bit harder. At the same time, JPEGMini and PageSpeed’s way of functioning regarding this matter is their competitive advantage so we need to give the credits to Pagespeed and JPEGMini for being the fastest.

PageSpeed seems to be the best as it makes the conversion instantaneously and JPEGMini is the next best thing, but it is limited to JPEG files. TinyPNG and Kraken are tied up in terms of speed (both not very impressive), with the former only being useful for PNG files. PunyPNG, while good for all image file formats, has the least impressive bulk compression speed of all five tools.

The conversion speed indicator is important to take into account when deciding on the tool if you want to use it on web pages that rely extensively on images. If your website’s total count of images is comparable or higher than ours, it might be worth going for PageSpeed or JPEGMini as they have the best results in terms of total conversion times and images converted per minutes.

6. Metric 6 – Conversion Process Easiness

Figures and numbers are highly important but we all know that is not all about them. A software must provide great results but must also be easy to use, intuitive and simple to understand. After all, a software’s success is given by the end user. For instance, PageSpeed is a great product and can be the detached leader in many chapters but is definitely not the most user-friendly product.

If you are not a computer literate and you don’t know how to install and configure the requested Apache or Nginx modules, then no matter how good the results are, PageSpeed might not be for you. In addition, you will need to have the rights to alter web server configurations in order to install the PageSpeed module (it won’t work for shared hosting). Unless you want to turn to a tech expert, the use of this tool will make you feel inadequate and will, paradoxically, make things look harder.

JPEGMini, Punny PNG, Kraken or TinyPNG, on the other hand, have an easy to use interface and don’t require high technical skills. From the easiness of conversion point of view, these tools are made simple, helpful and really meet the user’s needs.

Deciding on the Winner 

Deciding on a winner is hard, yet necessary in order to conclude our in-depth query. Before doing so, let’s take a look at the tools’ overall presentation and take a sneak peek at what they have to offer.

The distinction of the best all-around image compression tool when taking into account all the results goes to PageSpeed: it’s either tied for the lead, or the leading tool in terms of both file size and time it takes to load the page for both JPEG and PNG image file formats and none of the other four tools manage to do so consistently (it shares the distinction with two separate tools: TinyPNG for PNG files and JPEGMini for JPEG files).

So how much does PageSpeed actually help you? Well, the best way to measure this is by looking at the time you save by compression per load on tested page. For PNG, you get from 8.56 seconds (with the uncompressed files) to 5.44 seconds for a page to load. This means the page loads at a 36.45% faster rate. For JPEG files, we got from a loading time of 3.77 seconds (for uncompressed images) to a 3.24 seconds loading time, meaning pages load at a 14.06% faster rate. Less impressive than for PNGs, but still noteworthy.

Think of it this way: every time a user lands on one of your pages, their experience is up to 36.45% faster and better. After all, the life of the web surfer is improved with every second one is looking at relevant information rather than at a blinking hourglass. The one thing to keep in mind with Pagespeed is that there is some loss of image quality with its compression, but it is so small that it shouldn’t be a serious drawback for most websites (i.e., unless high image quality is what you’re actually going for, in which case maybe image compression is not really the best way to optimize speed on your website).

This is the fully complete metrics table data compared.

And the Winner is …

Looking back at all the graphs and figures it is not hard to say that PageSpeed stands out from the rest of the tools. In a world where the user doesn’t have the patience to wait more than 10 seconds before a page loads, Page Speed can be seen as one of the webmaster’s best friends. PageSpeed Modules are open-source server modules that optimize your site automatically. It is definitely not the average webmaster’s tool as it requires high technical skills in order to use it.

All in all, from our research it results that PageSpeed gives the best-added value to a website optimization process overall being, maybe, the best option in what concerns a page’s loading time.

Conclusion

A site’s speed clearly plays an important role in user experience and in the Google Algorithm. People from the SEO industry are making a big investment in content and that is great. Yet, what’s the point of all the struggle if it takes too long to load? Knowing the tools that can help you optimize your site’s speed and make your life as a webmaster a bit better might really come at hand. To summarize the result of our research, we can say that PageSpeed seems like a very helpful tool. Also, you can get inspired from this WordPress image size guide. 

PageSpeed is a free to use tool that can be used on Apache and Nginx Servers and allows you do to all of your changes on the fly. It also has a cache so it won’t put too much burden on the server. If you do not have access to a server configuration, we would recommend using the JPEGMini for JPEG compression and TinyPng for PNGs. You could simply decide on only one format to use and go with the one you choose, since that would make things simpler for you and allow you to use the most efficient tool.

And don’t forget the Lazy Loading technique ;). All these together will make your site “lighter” and “faster”!

Note: This blog post is an improved version of an older one we had.

The post Image Compression Techniques That Will Help You Rank Higher appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

Toxic links have a higher effect on a website now than they ever had before. They can eat your whole website alive and stick it down, in the last pages of SERP. How, you might ask? Well, Google Penalites caused by unnatural links coming from: 

1. Link Networks
2. Footer Links
3. Blogrolls & Other Blocks of Links
4. Site-Wide Links
5. Blog Comments
6. Forum Profile Links & Signatures
7. Web Directory Links
8. Article Directory Links
9. Anchor Text Distribution

To be prepared for the long ride and have a clean website, you should know that it requires two easy steps for a correct backlinks assessment. First, identify toxic backlinks and then remove bad backlinks. Some of the most known types of low-quality links are presented below. We thought on them through a guide to help you easily identify the unnatural links (link networks and low-quality links) that, maybe, caused the drop in your rankings. After that, you are served with tips and recommendations to clean your website of those links. 

The SEO world has evolved so much in the past few years, which means the quality guidelines have become more strict. Links started to become somehow a problem, because of the amount of spam on the web. After reading this post, you will be able to identify low-quality links that hurt your rankings.

How to Remove Bad Backlinks

The steps for a clean website are simple. First, you need to identify the most damaging referring domains that are linking to your website, following the black hat links filtering explained below, and then remove and disavow the unnatural links.

Here are 4 steps to remove bad backlinks for your website:

1. Identify your bad links (you’ll find how exactly from this article).
2. Search for the contact information of the website you have the link on.
3. Contact the webmaster asking him to remove the link. If you don’t get a response in within 2 weeks, go to the next step. 
4. Disavow the links and upload the file to Google. 

Disavowing all the bad links doesn’t have to be a chore. In cognitiveSEO you have to use the Unnatural Detection which it is a helpful buddy. It will save you tons of time, energy and money. Below you can see a screenshot from the tool.

You have to click on the unnatural link bar chart and a new window will all the spammy links will pop-up instantly:

You have to select the links that are bad and disavow them. Either you do that individually or perform bulk actions. All those disavowed links will be gathered in a file-format agreed by Google,  which you can download and send it from the tool directly to Google. 

The disavowing process applies to all category of links explained below.

1. Link Networks

Over 90% of the Link Networks are easy to spot, both by the human eye and by the Google algorithm.

Most Link Networks have the following common patterns:

• Architected from blogs and forums, because they are easy to automate and replicate.
• Links try to look as natural as possible by being put inside the content of a blog post or forum thread.
• The owner of a link network rarely makes the effort to generate links back to each of the generated blog posts. This means that each and every post has a probability of having 0 or a small number of backlinks pointing to them.
• Each site from the link network links out to at least 2 common money sites.

To find the links coming to your website from link networks you need to filter down the backlinks by blog posts and forum thread links, that are positioned in content and have a low metric (link influence, domain influence) and a low number of incoming links to the actual backlink. The hardest part is to filter large lists of links by the tag in Content and type of link (blog post, forum page etc). You can either do it by hand or use a tool that has the ability to make these classifications.

Health Plan to Quickly Identify Backlinks Coming from Link Networks

By using cognitiveSEO, and applying a couple of filters, you can easily find those links exactly. 

Order descending by Link influence to see the lowest quality pages first. Browse a bit through the links and use the link preview feature to quickly preview those pages. In our case we found 316 low-quality links coming from different pages on various link networks. (17% of their entire backlink profile)

To remove bad links, such as link networks, you should know something first. 

Any of the following types of links can be both natural or artificial. The difference is how they were acquired in terms of link velocity and link distribution over the entire backlink profile of a site.

To identify if your backlink profile is unnatural, you should always compare your site to your competitors’ and check for major discrepancies between the backlink profiles of those sites. I usually compare my site with the top 5 leaders in the industry and then compare my site with 5 other sites that are trying to break into the niche. There are always things that come up when doing such an in-depth analysis.

You should compare metric distributions, such as link and/or domain influence, link and/or domain trust flow, link and/or domain citation flow. These are only the basic comparisons that you can make. The more advanced ones are when you start to compare links classified by webpage type, link type, in content versus not in content links, link position and so on. 

2. Footer Links

Footer links were totally legit 6 years ago, but they started to make a lot of mess because of websites who abused of this technique. 

That’s one of the reasons why Google placed site-wide links into the link schemes list. Those links can distort your analysis and do not present any value from an SEO point of view. Imagine if you have one link from one domain compared with 100 links from the same domain. First of all, the value of that single-domain-link is higher than each individual link coming from the same domain. 

There was a question on the same issue on the Google Webmaster help forum:

Are sitewide backlinks considered good or bad by Google? Or do they just count as 1 link from the whole domain?

Matt Cutts answered very clearly:

From an algorithmic point of view, at some point, it becomes asymptotically diminishing returns. And it doesn’t help you anymore.
	Matt Cutts
	Former head of the webspam team at Google

If they see a link form a domain they will count it as one, and if they see multiple links from the same domain, they might still count them as one.

From the manual point of view, you will receive a penalty, because Google doesn’t trust those links and performs manual actions quite often.

In case you have a high number of footer links, you will definitely raise a red flag to Google. Usually, footer links are acquired from sites that:

• sell links;
• are involved in link exchange schemes;
• have widgets or plugins installed (usually for SERP manipulation);
• “powered by” links ( ex: WordPress);
• partners of your business;
• clients that link back to you.

If you find only a few links compared to your entire backlink profile then there is no real problem here. If instead, you get a long list of links, you might have a problem.

There are situations when Google missed to flag footer links. One example is for Godaddy, where they have almost 90% of their links coming from footer links. We checked their site with the cognitiveSEO tool after they were exposed by Yoast explaining the GoDaddy’s spammy link building techniques. Every website created using a WordPress editor through GoDaddy has a footer text with a link such as “Powered by Do Daddy”. The thing is that they are still following this practice, but now you have the option to remove that text by yourself.

Health Plan to Quickly Identify Footer Links

cognitiveSEO.com allows you to select all the links that appear in blocks of links in the footer of the linking pages. For this site, we extracted 625 low-quality footer links (10% of their entire backlink profile).

There are options when you can easily spot the links that came from footer sections or groups of links. In the cognitiveSEO tool, you have a deep-link analysis where you can spot the inconsistency. Take, for example, the screenshot below:

On the site used for this example (www.addictinggames.com) we saw they had lots of links coming from Blog Posts or Forum Threads, which might not be bad (depending on the intent). But the alarming situation starts when you look at the number of links coming from groups of links: 8,024, which is a lot. 

All those links must be reviewed individually and disavowed quickly otherwise, I hear the penalization alarm. 

After a quick research in Site Explorer, we saw that the site suffered a massive drop in rankings because they were penalized. Since then, they haven’t been able to regain their search visibility.

3. Blogrolls & Other Blocks of Links

Blogrolls were abused so much, that they tend to be very carefully analyzed by the Google algorithm nowadays.

This category includes both blogroll links and groups of links that do not fit into the blogroll pattern. Here is an example of a website that used to abuse the search engines and is not a blogroll. The domain uses widgets that are installed on various websites where webmasters get to place their link. Too many links that fit these patterns might be viewed as unnatural by the Google algorithm and you might get penalized for them. Some of those links can fall into the sitewide link category.

Make sure you don’t have advanced link widget networks listed as site-wides, as they might get flagged faster. Like all of the other types of links presented in this guide, it all comes down to how they were integrated into your link profile.

Health Plan to Quickly Identify Blogroll and Groups of Links

A couple of filters away, you will get another list of low-quality backlinks that might hurt your rankings. In our case, we got other 424 low-quality links. 

We analyzed that specific backlink in Site Explorer to see some metrics. We discovered that the page and domain had low influence carrying lots of links (47,365) coming from only 45 referring domains. That is a clear sign of unnatural links. 

The problem was the website had lots of other unnatural issues and their backlinks profile was filled with spammy links. 88% of their whole links are unnatural. 

If you find yourself in a similar situation, all the unnatural links must be disavowed and then you should immediately submit the disavow file to Google to cut the connection with that spammy links that can dreadfully bury your website.

4. Site-Wide Links

Site-wide links will definitely hurt your rankings.

Site-wide links are another example of toxic backlinks. They are old news on the Google landscape. Site-wides are devalued and can hurt your rankings so easy. If your domain does not have the necessary authority and receives a couple of site-wides from some low-quality sites, your site will get penalized by Google.

The idea behind the site-wide links is quite simple. It is more important to have more root domains link to your domain than to have many links coming from fewer root domains that link to your domain.

There are site-wide links that will not hurt your rankings, and it all depends on the site the site-wide is put on. If that site is considered an authority and that site-wide link is not correlated with other factors such as high link velocity, then that site-wide could help you.

Health Plan to Quickly Identify Site-Wide Links

Luckily, it’s quite easy to discover these type of links with cognitiveSEO as it’s a Sitewide Chart, dedicated to this matter. 

You will get a chart with the distribution of sitewide links. If it is a high number, click on the pie and check those links individually. In our case, we got 21% of the whole backlink profile coming from sitewide links. 

The website has lots of sitewide links that carry almost no value. Below you can see an example of a backlink for that website:

There are multiple problems with this link. Besides the fact it is sitewide, it is also hidden, written in white font. I had to highlight it to see the full text. 

Note: A site-wide link is considered to be a link that is automatically replicated across a large number of pages from the same site. Do not missclassify a site-wide as 10 different links coming from 10 different articles on Techcrunch for example. Those are not considered site-wides. Our software has a built-in algorithm that matches different patterns and concludes whether a link is a TRUE SITE-WIDE or not.

5. Blog Comments

Blog comment spam evolved on the back of the search engines.

Comment spam is a form of spamdexing (keyword stuffing) and it has been around since the beginning of the internet. There are several tools that help the spammers post comments automatically with the final aim to reach higher rankings in the search engines. That is why most of the comments are marked as nofollow by the blogging platforms so that Google will not index them. Even so, spam commenting is a huge phenomenon and everyone that owns a blog knows how much comment spam they receive.

Health Plan to Quickly Identify Blog Comment Links

You can easily find both nofollow and dofollow links that are coming from blog comments.

For a quick review of the whole list of links that come from blog comments, you can go straight to the Link Positioning chart and click on the Blog Comment bar. We found a website that focused on building links through this technique:

We looked through their links and found out the website took advantage of this black-hat technique and left spammy blog comments on websites that weren’t even related to their website. Not to mention it used an anchor text that has a spammy appearance, considering the circumstances. The website is a free library of e-books and resources and the website they’re linking to is about website development. Not quite related, I might add.

6. Forum Profile Links & Signatures

Forums are abused the same way blogs are.

Having people discuss around your site in forums is the most natural thing that can happen to a site. It means your site generated some buzz in its niche. But, if you are doing link building using fake forum profiles, signatures and posting content and links automatically on forums, this will appear in your backlink profile and could hurt your ranking when Google will flag it. These kinds of patterns can be easily identified by Google. Below is an example of an unnatural link that comes from a forum. 

Health Plan to Quickly Identify Forum Links

Again, cognitiveSEO makes it easy to identify links coming from forum threads. If you want to check signatures and profiles, you should search for Link Position » Short Paragraph of Text, Group of Links. You’ll get a list of links as you can see in the next screenshot. 

In our example, you can find a preview page with some link info. The link has no influence and nor does the domain. 

In case you want a quick analysis, you go straight to the Link Positioning chart and review the links from the Blog Post or Forum Thread. The website we analyzed had a lot of links coming from this source. 15% of the whole backlink profile is coming from blog posts or forum threads.

7. Web Directory Links

Forget Web Directory submission services that promise hundreds of directory registrations.

Having too many links coming from web directories is not always a good sign. This might raise a flag to the Google algorithm. You do not need hundreds of directories to be listed on, only a few quality ones that are well known in your niche. If you have a high percentage of links coming from directory submissions (manually or automatically), that were created some time ago or are freshly added (it doesn’t matter), you will raise the link velocity flag, and get penalized.

An example of a web directory links you can see in the next screenshot. Basically, it is a list with a short description of brands, with a title and a link. 

Health Plan to Quickly Identify Web Directory Links

If you get a long list and it represents a big percentage of your inbound link profile (similar to the next screenshot), then this might signal a problem that you need to investigate even further. cognitiveSEO monitors backlinks and evaluates the unnaturalness for the whole website by offering percentages for the unnatural links, suspect links and ok links, letting you know if you are in danger.

In case your website has lots of unnatural links and red areas (like the one above) you should use the disavow tool and cut the connection to your website from all the spammy links. 

Out of curiosity we looked through the unnatural links and found lots and lots of links that came from spammy directories, filled with hundreds of outbound links, just like the one below. There you could see that the page had lots of other issues, such as low influence link, thin content, a high number of outbound links and so on. You should remove the link immediately. 

8. Article Directory Links

Avoid cheap content!

This is the best advice you could get. Having too many links from article directories is a sign that something unnatural is going on. Article directories and the sites they linked the most, were already hit by Panda in the last few years. Below is one way to find your article directory links so that you can further investigate them.

Article directories, if not created following qualitative guidelines, can be potentially harmful. 

Health Plan to Quickly Identify Article Directory Links

Below you can see a print screen for the article directory links identify with our tool. We got 49% unnatural link profile out of their total unnatural links (23,594). Their total unnatural link profile is 87%.

The website received multiple hits from Google algorithm updates. This was easy to spot in their search visibility. In the last 5 years, they were hit by lots of penalizations from Google. 

In cases like these, it is very important to disavow all the spammy links in bulk and clean the website. In 2018, a website shouldn’t have such toxic links. Try to monitor your backlinks to never find yourself in this situation. 

9. Anchor Text Distribution

Over optimized anchor text does not look natural at all!

Anchor text is either:

• brand keywords (domain name keywords or the actual brand name);
• money keywords;
• navigational keywords (click here, website, source and so on).

In cognitiveSEO you can easily classify and review your anchor texts. You’ll get an analysis as you can see below. A natural distribution of anchor text would look like this.

An artificial anchor text distribution looks like this:

If your anchor text is over optimized, you are likely to be hit by Google because most of the times commercial anchor texts carry unnatural links. Consider a natural anchor text strategy, collaborate with other brands and influencers. Create valuable content and offer qualitative services to get recommendations and good links.  

Conclusion

I hope all the SEO tips and the step by step guide will help you identify the potentially toxic links that generated problems with the Google penalties. Use the cognitiveSEO tool to investigate your link data and get a comprehensive link audit. The tool shows all the data in one place, and monitors backlinks side by side with your competition.  

Don’t build links that can harm your website, even if they used to work. Now, they don’t anymore.

Use these tactics to identify bad links and remove them before Google takes action and penalizes your site. The sad part is that black hat is bad for everyone, and it is hurting the internet. Be good, create quality and Google will love you.

The post How to Identify and Remove Bad Backlinks That Kill Your Rankings appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

For once, because it works like a riddle – it’s never the thing that first pops into your mind. That very first thing you’re thinking of including in your outreach pitch was probably used by other hundreds of people hoping to stand out. People receive heaps of emails every day. Lots of them get lost in the pile.

So is there anything you can do to get your email read by your potential clients? There sure is! Check out the following cold email tips backed by awesome digital marketing experts and boost your email open rates like never before. 

Since influencers don’t have a lot of free time, you shouldn’t expect indulgence or mercy every time you’ve done something wrong. Most of the times, you don’t get more than a shot, and the better you perform, the more this will work like a snowball.

So let’s take a look at a comprehensive list of wise pieces of advice for cold email outreach from successful people in digital marketing.

29 Cold Email Tips for a Successful Campaign

1. Outreach Gone Wrong! Learn How to Deal with Negative Responses
2. Video Embedded in Email – Perfect Outreach Prospect
3. Focus on What Brings an Advantage to The Influencer
4. Be as Natural as Possible in Writing Your Outreach Proposal
5. Pitch as a Writer, Not as a Link Builder
6. Formulate a Natural Request Without Harassing the Receiver!
7. When Doing Outreach Write Less, but Document Your Emails More
8. Smart Outreach – Associate Yourself with High-Quality Professionals & Create the Ben Franklin Effect
9. Outreach Tip – Even After Sending 1000 Cold Emails – Be Humble!
10. Use the 3 Ps that Make the Outreach Go Round: Personalized, Positioned Properly and Persuasive
11. Be Unconventional in Writing Your Emails
12. Earn Trust by Finding a Common Ground Between You and the Influencer
13. Don’t Advertise Your Product too Soon in the Outreach Process!
14. Get Higher Response Rates by Pitching Your Ideas Honestly
15. Don’t be cheap! Be More Effective Using Dedicated Outreach Tools
16. Diversify the Approach Depending on the Outreach Purposes
17. Write Memorable Emails!
18. When Doing Email Outreach Use Short & Relevant Subject Lines
19. Make the Details of Your Email Impressive!
20. Don’t Be Superficial and Pushy in Your Outreach Endeavor!
21. Respect Three Elements for Outreach Success: Timing, Interest and Personalization!
22. Use Creative Incentives that Don’t Sound Selfish for Your Outreach Prospect!
23. Mistakes Are Unprofessional. Avoid Them with Every Email!
24. Learn How to Find Room In A Busy Influencers’ Schedule
25. The 9 Formulas to Increase Outreach Success Rate!
26. Be Personal and You May Experience a 333% Increase in Cold Email Response Rates
27. Cold Email Principles to Make Your Email Stand Out
28. Avoid Requests When First Contacting an Influencer!
29. Ask Questions to Empower Your Email and Attract the Recipients

1. Outreach Gone Wrong! Learn How to Deal with Negative Responses

There’s no way you can improve your chance of being promoted by influencers unless you decide to actively deal with rejection like a pro. We often forget that networking’s all about creating relationships, not just links on famous, high authority pages. Piotr Zaniewicz explains, in one of his articles, the entire set of possibilities when all you’ve got is negative answers and threats. If you’re the person in charge, you should listen to what Piotr says to help you close more deals.

“Now, you can’t defend yourself if you organised outreach based on, for example, a ready-made, untargeted and unsegmented prospect list. What you did was spamming and all you can say is “sorry” and hope for the best. It’s your job to first make sure you’re writing to the right person before you send the email.”
	Piotr Zaniewicz
	CEO & Founder @Righthellocom

He also offers a great list with some outreach examples that didn’t work out as intended every time. Yet, a lesson about sending cold emails or cold emailing templates was learnt each and every time.

Being Threatened by Influencers May Get You Somewhere

Infuriating People Can Sometimes Point Out Where You’re Wrong

Sometimes You’ll Need to Be Patient

Brutal Honesty Can Be A Valuable Lesson

And Nice “NO”s Will Make Your Day Better

Remember Patience? The Long Road to Success

This is an example of successful cold email example. Patience and ability to adapt to each response to guide the receiver through a positive experience is a desired situation.

2.  Video Embedded in Email – Perfect Outreach Prospect

Sales prospecting is difficult. Madelaine Milani, talks about the sales process (and cold sales) more than networking and promotion outreach. The core idea is actually innovative and useful. In case you’re a charismatic writer with innovative ideas, you can record yourself and get the attention of the influencers you’re reaching out to.

The body should lead the recipient to watch the video, driving more watches and getting your message both seen and heard.
	Madelaine Milani
	Digital marketing at GoMercatus

Starting from the idea that there are 3 key things to include in your effective cold video emails: the introduction, trigger event and call to action, Madeline comes up with some great examples of sending cold emails with a twist:

3. Focus on What Brings an Advantage to The Influencer

Iris Shoor comes with some great insights on the art of cold email outreach.  Every email has to come with a powerful story. And as long as you can outline the essential without getting into boring details, a little context didn’t kill anybody.

“One of the most basic tips when it comes to blogger outreach is to personalize your email. Not only is there a better chance you’ll hit what they’re looking for but you’re also communicating that you’re interested in their blog and not sending the same email to 50 different bloggers.”
	Iris Shoor
	CEO GetOribi

In this article Iris shows examples of success stories of her own and starts with the basic things – such as the fact that bloggers are most interested in getting more readers and quality content.

4. Be as Natural as Possible in Writing Your Outreach Proposal

Take your approach seriously and imagine you’ve already got a connection with the influencer, even when you don’t. This will give you a better focus and sense of propriety. And maybe people will even respond to your cold email campaigns.

The researching and content writing part are as important and challenging as is promoting your content efficiently. You need to have something to say, to be not only relevant but also interesting and to provide a competitive advantage.

While all these things are oddly familiar, Lena Shaw documents examples of positive and negative value to make a very valid point.

“There’s no shortage of email tips and tricks. Lists abound all over the internet. Even the narrowly-defined activity of initial email outreach has long lists of advice.”
	Lena Shaw
	Dir. of Mktg & Growth LeadGenius

In her article, Lena offers some great cold email examples and cold email tips altogether.  An important thing that she outlines is that you have to work for outreach just as much as for every piece of content you write.

5. Pitch as a Writer, Not as a Link Builder 

Before even thinking of composing the perfect email, maybe you should, at least, socialize on a basic level – maybe a Tweet, although it would be preferable to shake hands.

However, as we can agree on the fact that Twitter works pretty much like a social binder, it’s a decent start. Monitor targets’ social media activity and learn something – maybe find an idea of how to pitch your blog.

And when it comes to this, Adam Grunwerg gives some great tips and examples, just as you can see bellow. 

“Retweet [the influencers’] articles or compliment their work before tweeting them from your personal (not brand!) account. Provide a teaser for your content, and ask them permission to send them an email. They will appreciate the courtesy.”
	Adam Grunwerg
	@AffFYI

6. Formulate a Natural Request Without Harassing the Receiver!

Stephen Altrogge has done a great job with his outreach technique – some of the most popular influencers answered to him, most in less than 20 minutes.  Instead of spending time looking for influencers’ emails, he shot for ‘the stars’ by documenting a personal approach, and the result was impressive.

“The Internet is full of endless, boring drivel. Of stupid memes and Buzzfeed quizzes. When something has personality and zest, it majorly stands out from the crowd.”
	Stephen Altrogge
	Writer

His article and examples tell the story of honest success and a natural approach.

7. When Doing Outreach Write Less, but Document Your Emails More

As Alicia Glenn talks about tripling the response rate for the business she works for, there are a few elements that never miss from an email: feature, benefit, human factor and value. These are the secret ingredients she advises us all to use  while also giving some practical examples to guide us through.

“I started writing more customized emails, and surprisingly business owners would respond. Whether it was positive or negative, I didn’t care. All I wanted was a response. My main goal when crafting emails was to convey that I’m human and waiting for them to get back to me. Showing that you’re a real person also builds a sense of urgency.”
	Alicia Glenn
	@IamAliciaGlenn

Here are also some examples she provides in order to back up her story.

8. Smart Outreach – Associate Yourself with High-Quality Professionals & Create the Ben Franklin Effect

The Ben Franklin Effect is a mindset that can help you achieve bigger results after positive answers for small ones. It does sound like there’s a psychological glitch in there, right?

As Tim Soulo underlines, the perfectionists in our niche are professionals we’d like to associate with. And after we’ve done this, research shows people are more likely to accept a bigger favor after they’ve said ‘yes’ to a smaller one. After this, wait until you’re asked to formulate your requests – it’s not all about yourself.

“And there’s no way to maintain a relationship with someone if you’re only willing to use him for your benefit and never actually care about him. That’s why I pick my outreach targets very carefully. I only reach out to a person who I would still hang out with, even knowing that he will never tweet my articles.”
	Tim Soulo
	Head of Marketing ahrefs

In his article, Tim comes with some outreach examples and hacks to make influential people notice you. Below you can read some of these awesome examples. 

9.  Even After Sending 1000 Cold Emails, Be Humble!

You’d think that eventually experience catches up – only eventually is far too many ‘no’s’ from now. Luckily, people like Shane Snow share their experiences.

“Notably, the one thing we didn’t (couldn’t) do with a study this size is research each recipient and personalize the message to them. In our personal experience, reply rates for mentor advice outreach are higher than a typical sales email—and certainly higher than the 1.7% a generic ask generates.”
	Shane Snow
	@shanesnow

His article shares this challenge as an experiment at the end of which lessons were learned.

10. Use the 3 Ps that Make the Outreach Go Round: Personalized, Positioned Properly and Persuasive

Matt Gratt talks about outreach emails that aren’t personalized, positioned properly and persuasive. Lacking any of these characteristics will make your outreach challenge futile – and you’ll only serve as a bad example for a case study.

“Good outreach emails are personalized.  And I don’t just mean ‘successfully got the name and website right’ – those are table stakes to get taken seriously. When I say pitches should be personalized, I mean they should be read by the recipient, and the words ‘form letter’ should never cross their mind.”
	Matt Gratt
	Growth wikibuy

And talking about not-so-good outreach examples, you can see an example below and more of these in Matt’s article.

11. Be Unconventional in Writing Your Emails

We’re in this carousel of accomplishing as much success as possible very fast – it seems like nobody has the time, or the patience for that matter, to build a business properly. We’re always in the urge of automating every process we’re using to save more time to automate even more processes. It makes no sense, and the lack of results show its pointlessness.

So Brian Zeng advises us to look at what people are doing wrong in this process. 

“Personalization doesn’t mean addressing bloggers by their name or getting their website right. This just sets the stage for a personalized email.”
	Brian Zeng
	Digital marketer @brianzengdotme

In his article you can find some good template examples that can help you out. 

12. Earn Trust by Finding a Common Ground Between You and the Influencer

There’s nothing more impersonal than trying to start a relationship from nothing – even online. Networking is about the things we have in common and, the less common they are, the stronger our liaison, as Elise Musumano points out.

“The quickest way to win someone over is to show how much you have in common.”
	Elise Musumano
	Content Marketer Yesware

In her article, Elise gives some great examples to back up exactly that: the importance of common ground. 

13. Don’t Advertise Your Product too Soon in the Outreach Process!

The most important in 7 ways of engaging cold prospects is this – be careful what you’re pitching.

While nothing in business is a simple 3-step recipe, some pillars of online communication should be observed with religiosity. Including humor. And Michael Simone says things as they are: 

“Assuming that you’ve spent some time building rapport with your prospect, send them something based on their interests outside of work. Everyone loves a break from the day-to-day grind!”
	Michael Simone
	Sr. Account Exec Uberflip

While Michael Simone doesn’t stop here, his article revolves around this basic principle, enriched with cold email examples that might make you change your perspective on cold sales, cold calling or social media. 

14. Get Higher Response Rates by Pitching Your Ideas Honestly

Craig Rosenberg gives us four examples of genuinely transparent outreach approaches. He makes it clear that regardless of the purpose, it’s the human touch that spins the wheel of business networking.

“Combine touches within seconds of each other – Leaving a voicemail within seconds of your email will increase the likelihood of your prospect opening and responding to your email.”
	Craig Rosenberg
	Sales&marketer @funnelholic

Although he talks about sales in his article, the principles he’s enunciating make perfect sense when it comes to a promotional approach. 

15. Don’t be cheap! Be More Effective Using Dedicated Outreach Tools

Dave Schneider suggests, in his post, that business isn’t quite the light atmosphere with people who have enough spare time to compose outreach emails all day long – this is why he’s proposing an app to help you keep in touch easily with your prospects. Sounds fun, right?

Inbox mode is an in-app inbox specifically for conversations with your prospects. It is not a place to do outreach at scale from, but a view in which you can more efficiently handle active conversations, new messages, and replies.
	Dave Schneider
	Co-Founder @ninjaoutreach (Update – Dave no longer runs this website, but can be found at lesschurn.io and daveschneider.me)

And here is some example of such an inbox:

16. Diversify the Approach Depending on the Outreach Purposes

In another article, Dave Schneider  presents a more extensive list with cold email templates examples he found worth sharing. With no further introduction, here there are: 

Honest Pitching

Asking For Opinions

Follow-Up

Personalized Approaches

17. Write Memorable Emails!

Sasha Galkin shares 10 practices that every person doing outreach should check off the list before pressing ‘send’. No influencer is going to bother answering to your networking attempt unless you make a good impression.

“Dish out a whopper incentive. Give them a reason to pay attention to the rest of your email.”
	Sasha Galkin
	iAcquire’s very own copywriter @galkinator

This works pretty much like real life – make a good impression, don’t be creepy, show similar interests and qualifications, make it clear that you’re meant to collaborate without sounding like a horoscope. You’ve probably received tons of emails like the one below, right?

18. When Doing Email Outreach Use Short & Relevant Subject Lines

The article written by  John Corcoran is, in fact, a real-life story he’s decided to share publicly. It’s as simple as I suggested in the title – he created a personal bond with an influencer, started giving valuable inputs and got his reward.

“Noah is busy running AppSumo, training new entrepreneurs and riding bikes around Austin sampling tacos. Until recently, he had no idea who I was. And yet here I was, opening my mail to find a box of chocolate chip cookies, with a thank you note from Noah Kagan.”
	John Corcoran
	Attorney @JohnCorcoran

And here is the cool email he was so kind sharing with us: 

19. Make the Details of Your Email Impressive!

When in comes to email outreach there’s no middle way, as we’re going to find it underlined in Portent’s article. From being brief and personal to having a decent signature and a bold, but a relevant subject line, every detail matters.

20. Don’t Be Superficial and Pushy in Your Outreach Endeavor! 

It’s not professional to write a thousand superficial emails, poorly documented and not at all convincing. Try to do your homework – and don’t think that just because you get to someone’s inbox you’re automatically going to be read and answered to.

There are influencers out there who don’t even get to read newsletters that captivate them because there’s no time to waste. You’ve got serious competition here, too. Mike Essex has a nice point of view on this matter: 

“Sticking together two keywords in the hope of some traffic and a quick link just isn’t worth it anymore. It’s no longer an excuse to say you wrote something just for SEO, especially as blog owners have to put their name alongside the content you provide. Rubbish content may fly on generic article sites, but it’s not what blog owners want.”
	Mike Essex
	Marketing Manager blagman.co.uk

Mike gives us a few rushed, unfortunate examples in his post, explaining why it’s not worth messing with influencers’ patience.

21. Respect Three Elements for Outreach Success: Timing, Interest and Personalization!

It’s not success in general, it would be futile. It’s not easy to come with a recipe and we’ve always underlined this. However, when it comes to professional common sense – timing, interest and personalization – we couldn’t agree more. Researching the outreach process before trying to contact influencers on your own is crucial if what you’re looking for is a good response rate.

Put simply, what you’ll think of writing if you don’t have any experience in the area is simply what will cross everybody’s minds. Venchito Tampon gives us a nice insight on this one: 

“Though there are other variables that would affect your response rate, scheduling your emails at the peak hours of your recipients would help increase your outreach’s conversion rate.”
	Venchito Tampon
	CEO/Co-Founder of sharprocketph

To make his statement clearer, Venchito  gives us an example of his own.

22.  Use Creative Incentives that Don’t Sound Selfish for Your Outreach Prospect!

You wouldn’t like to live the impression that you’re going to pay for someone’s effort to respond to your outreach attempt. However, it’s only fair that you propose them some bargain that seem so genuinely altruist and professional, they won’t refuse.

Once you get a response from a blogger, your acceptance rate sky rockets; making it an important part of your outreach.”
	Peter Attia
	Head of Marketing at MeetEdgar

Petter Attia puts together a great list of ideas on how to do this better, starting from his personal experience.

Pitching Personally

Adapting Your Speech To Your Audience

Being Concise

Looking Professional and Genuinely Interested in the Matter

23. Mistakes Are Unprofessional. Avoid Them with Every Email!

Charlotte Varela said it right. It was high time someone made a list of the things people should, by all means, avoid when doing outreach.

It’s impossible to deal with clients as a digital marketer and not get annoyed at some point at their mistakes that seem to be the same over and over. Not knowing how to do outreach isn’t fun for anybody: for the influencer it’s time-consuming and inefficient, for you it’s frustrating because you don’t get the results you expected and as a digital marketer it’s like violating some sacred terms.

24. Learn How to Find Room In A Busy Influencers’ Schedule

Thinking you’re worth being answered to is a mindset that may cause you outreach failures according to this article by Gregory Ciotti.

Twitter has become less and less personal and it’s not always appropriate to call an influencer, especially if you don’t already have a personal relationship with them. So email is where you can leverage your best qualities into a promotion pitch.

“Email is where keystrokes go to die. If you want to get in touch with busy people , you must know how to avoid wasting their time.”
	Gregory Ciotti
	@gregoryciotti

Here are some of Gregory’s examples: 

25. The 9 Formulas to Increase Outreach Success Rate!

Bernie Reeder made a list of 9 formulas for email outreach that have always brought her good results in the outreach endeavors. The bottom line of is that there are indisputable facts of persuasion and content marketing, and while recipes aren’t 100% sure, it’s always worth to take science into consideration.

“Each line of a cold email must persuade the reader to read the next one.”
	Bernie Reeder
	Marketing Yesware

Depending on different factors such as the type of person she wrote to, the type of purpose she had, or simply the structure of the email, here go 9 ideas.:

26. Be Personal and You May Experience a 333% Increase in Cold Email Response Rates

Getting into a prospect flow isn’t an easy job, especially because you have to operate different mindsets, according to Eric Siu in this article. Among the number of issues that may contribute to an outreach campaign’s failure, poor templates and no enough follow-up make the top. Learn from Eric how to write an effective cold email. 

“Separate your prospectors from your sales closer. Don’t combine the two. I did that and failed massively. Here’s an example of how you might structure your team using the Predictable Revenue model.”
	Eric Siu
	CEO singlegrain

The example below is living proof of how you can miraculously recover.

27. Cold Email Principles to Make Your Email Stand Out 

Whenever you’ve thought of a template as a universal formula that works regardless of the influencer you’re contacting, you were wrong. A template refers more to the persona of your prospect combined with the intention of the outreach, as we’ve read from this article by Sujan Patel, a well-known name in the lead generation area.

“You can have multiple paragraphs, but if people see a big block of text, they’re going to be scared off, and possibly miss important details. So keep your message as short and controlled as possible.”
	Sujan Patel
	growing companies Mailshakeapp Linktexting  Pick_Hq

For instance, being naturally personal, using email signature and remembering value-add are some principles to live by when you start an outreach campaign.

Another article by the same author underlines the secret power of content marketing through networking in the niche with influencers.

Matthew Murray recommends that we should stick to the basics and keep our message short and concrete:

Keeping your messaging short and focused is the best way to encourage action. The first sentence tells them why they should pay attention. And the second sentence tells them what to do about their interest (ie reply or visit a resource).
	Matthew Murray
	Managing Director at Sales Higher

28. Avoid Requests When First Contacting an Influencer!

And when I say anatomy, it’s almost religiously precise.  And according to Pawel Grabowski in this article, nothing shows better what you’ve been doing wrong than a bad example.

“Outreach emails are rarely written to guarantee a reply. Sure, they are long. They contain a plethora of information, a lot of which isn’t necessary but that’s another thing. Yet they don’t inspire the recipient to reply.”
	Pawel Grabowski
	Founder and Chief Content Strategist – usermagnet.io

And here are some great examples from Pawel:

29. Ask Questions to Empower Your Email and Attract the Recipient

Just as, Scott McQuin, founder of Roojet says it, you need to make an effective research for an outreach email, especially if it for sales. And the subject email is significant in an emailing strategy. 47% of email recipients open an email based on the subject line alone.

The prospect first looks at the subject line before deciding whether to open the email or not.

If you convince the prospect here that they will gain valuable insights, resources, or market intelligence, they are almost guaranteed to open your email.
	Scott McQuin
	Founder at Roojet/ @AbacusMetrics

Using questions in your subject line is a valuable trigger to entice curiosity. Everyone enjoys a little bit of mystery from time to time, isn’t that right? Ask questions and afterward offer help and solutions as an answer.

Here are are some examples of great sales email subject lines that you can use:

Source: roojet.com

Questions enter an instant dialogue with users, making them more likely to be opened. Litmus says that people respond well when you ask them to do something. It is important to use this tip in your CTA, also. Sephora asks an emotionally-engaging question (really? you care?) with just two words, creating a truly great subject line.

Make sure you don’t make your subject line look spammy, the recipient will definitely delete your email. Be specific and consistent, don’t use words such as discounts, offer, specials, donation or free.

Conclusion

Sometimes it may seem as if you’re only sending an email and it’s not a big deal. On the contrary, in digital marketing every detail matters. The more you behave like a professional the more you’ll be taken seriously. Writing the best cold email template isn’t an easy job for anybody, and clearly documenting is a crucial step -that may change your mind on what works and what doesn’t in your niche.

As, Justin McGill mentioned on one of his articles, cold email outreach isn’t spam. If made wisely, we might add.

We know, is not easy to create the sales emails that will increase your chances of getting responses back just by following a pro tip. But we do believe that the tips tackled above will help you craft an effective cold email campaign. There is no 100% reply rate guide to cold email. And if there are such business books, you might want to read something else as well.

There are a lot of complete guides with cold email marketing tips or even companies (like Criminally Prolific for instance) that try to deliver the best cold email templates. Whatever key elements or automation tool you might be using to boost our response rate, do not forget the “human touch” in everything you do.

Yes, cold email subject lines are important, as well as social proof or the demand to introduce yourself or your company name. But whenever you conduct cold email outreach don’t forget that there are real humans you are sending your cold mailing, not robots. 

Prospects that can boost your image on the web (and, why not, in social media) are usually attacked by hundreds. The bad news is that you can’t just not be annoying, but you’ll have to stand out. Good luck!

Are there any special practices you’ve used that are worth sharing?

The post 29 Powerful Cold Email Tips Backed by Renowned Digital Marketing Experts appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

When running a blog or a website, you probably want to get loads of visitors and traffic to become a perfect competitor. With the right strategy, you can reach your target and convert visitors into potential customers.

Keyword research is one of the best tactics to boost traffic on your website without spending much money. Using long-tail keywords can make sense if it comes to getting more targeted traffic in search engines.

Following the next well-detailed guide, you can improve your long-tails keyword strategy for the all mighty number one position in Google. 

In this article, we’ll talk in detail about how important the long tail strategy is for your whole SEO game plan, then if and how it should be integrated into your keyword strategy. 

Before we start with the hard part, the long-tail strategies and techniques, we must answer 2 important questions: Is the long tail keyword technique still a valid SEO strategy and how can the long tail keywords technique help you in SEO. 

1. Is the Long-Tail Keywords Technique Still a Valid SEO Strategy?
2. How Can the Long-Tail Keywords Technique Help You in SEO?
3. Long-Tail Keywords Techniques That Will Boost Your Seo Strategy
   1. Understand Your Target Audience
   2. Research Long-Tail Keywords
   3. Make Breath-Catching Headlines
   4. Create Intros Rich in Natural Keywords
   5. Use Subtitles with Longer Keyword Variations
   6. Optimize Your Content for Users

1. Is the Long-Tail Keywords Technique Still a Valid SEO Strategy?

Yes, the long tail keywords technique is a valid SEO approach for the time being. There are lots of studies that show how effective this strategy is. For example, WPBeginner, the largest free WordPress resource site for beginners, has managed to increase their organic search traffic by 20% in just two months. Thanks to the long tail keywords strategy!

Optimizing your content for short tail keywords could sometimes be inefficient. Focus on long tail keywords, because this strategy offers lots of benefits. It is much easier to rank for them because they are highly specific to your niche.

Another important aspect is the fact that people who end up on your website through a long tail keyword search are more likely to buy your product or service even though the traffic volume is smaller than for a short tail keyword. 

Whether it is an organic or paid search, keywords play an important role in improving your CTR (click-through rates). Using the long tail strategy, you can improve that. Gary Beal managed to double CTR  and lower the cost of his million-dollar AdWords campaign by around $90,000 when he replaced generic keywords with highly specific long tail search phrases.

At the AMA Content Marketing Conference, Chris Baggott of Compendium disclosed that 70% of search engines show long-tail keywords. They are not quite competitive and have a high conversion rate. For sure, newer researches and new trends like Voice Search changed the rules of the game a bit. Yet, still in long tail keywords’ favor. 

2. How Can the Long-Tail Keywords Technique Help You in SEO?

SEO should focus more on quality and relevancy. That’s when the long tail SEO comes in handy.  

As we mentioned before, long tail SEO can help you rank higher on Google, increase your revenue due to the specific niche keywords, boost the organic search traffic and so on.

To understand better how long-tail keywords can improve your content creation process, follow the next techniques. 

3. Long-Tail Keywords Techniques That Will Boost Your SEO Strategy

3.1 Understand Your Target Audience

Getting more insights from your target audience is a long-term process. To hit the jackpot, you should understand people and know what they want.

Do you know that each keyword in search engines is a simple reflection of a user’s desire?

You have to understand what your target audience thinks about. You should help them by answering their questions and problems. To attract your potential clients, you should create targeted content.

Before making people buy any product, they want to find out more about the products they’re interested in. They should be aware of their needs. Help them to find out specific keywords that meet their purpose of awareness. Use search strings such as “how”, “when”, “what” and “who”.

As soon as you provide them with the necessary information, you should give them all the reasons why they should buy your product or read your blog. Try to show them all challenges that can really help them make the final decision.

You should be careful at this stage as potential clients can be vulnerable and need some time to consider what they need. Try to encourage and move forward your users.

How that happens depends entirely on you. To stir them into action, you can use different comparisons, top lists, best products, reviews, costs, and benefits.

If you diligently follow all stages, the final decision will lie with your site users. To tell the truth, users come to searches with a definite target, and they use certain keywords to meet their needs. To push them, you can use specific keyword modifiers, such as best price, how to buy, buy, order, free shipping, free trial, buy online, etc.

You can use your PPC data, if you have any, to guide you in your long tail strategy. If not, start being a friend with Google Instant’s Autocomplete Suggestions.

To get more ideas, you can use research tools such as Google Keyword Planner and target long tail keywords. It is important to give attention to these points. Using the right keywords phrases and putting them naturally in your content will convert your traffic into potential clients.

3.2 Research Long-Tail Keywords

It’s been proven a lot of times that long-tail keywords can have more chances to increase organic traffic than using head keywords. When you are researching the right longer variations, you should have your strategy about it.

It is important to choose those keywords that can be easily ranked in search engines. I should mention that Amazon gets high conversions and makes 60% of their sales using long-tail keywords. That’s why it is important to be appealing to customers for your online business.

• Use Google Keyword Planner from Google Adwords. Enter your target keyword and click the “Get ideas” button. Find the popular keywords. Look at the competition column for that. Make sure it isn’t low competition. Aim for medium and high.

• Dig into all the keywords, highlight the long-tail variations and add them to your result list. Seek for keyword ideas and see the monthly search for each one.

Today there are many options to simplify your keyword research and avoid wasting your time and efforts. I would like to suggest a few keyword suggestion tools that I really like:

• SE Ranking helps to get long-tail keywords based on your main keyword. This tool has a 14-day trial with a great suite of useful tools including rank tracker, website audit, backlink monitoring and online marketing plan.

• Ubersuggest is a great keyword research tool to find longer variations and suggest more ideas for each one, but it doesn’t show search volume.

• Rank Tracker is another example of keywords tools. It has the advantage of offering complete data in comparison with your competition. It is a more comprehensive tool. If you want to play in the big league or have a big website, this is an excellent option. 

You should understand that we research keywords to help users to get what they are looking for. The new SEO tactics require taking care of your users in order to find their issues. No matter what keywords you choose, either long-tail or head, you should pay attention to the user’s intent, and not to the search robots.

Picking up the right keywords will help you write content with the searcher’s intention.

3.3 Make Breath-Catching Headlines

It doesn’t matter if you are posting on social media networks, websites, forums or blogs; your headlines play a crucial role. According to Ted Nicholas:

73% of the buying decisions that customers will ever make will be at the point of the headline.

If it grabs their attention, users will read your blog post or website.

Compelling headlines are a good guarantee to get high rankings in search engines. There are lots of formulas and tricks you could follow. One of the easiest formulas to use for creating catchy headlines is Jeff Goins’ formula:

Number + Adjective + Rational + Keywords + Promise

Using a relevant keyword in your headlines will boost your website engagement, attract more traffic and improve website positions. Give your target audience what they need to fix their problems.

After choosing the right keywords, it is important to integrate them into your headlines. First, you should put a keyword in your headline and add other words to make it look natural. Do you know how to find perfect headlines? You can try out BrandMentions. Just enter the main keyword and search for good alternatives.

To make your posts viral, you can use numbers in your headlines.

Content Marketing Institute declares that adding odd numbers to them can increase CTR by 20%.

Moz states that 36% of people prefer headlines that contain numbers and these posts get more viral and more social shares.

Using numbers on the headlines makes people define how long they are going to read your posts.

You can easily use headlines from famous magazines. Choose your favorite magazines and find the best ideas for perfect headlines:

I have used this appealing headline:

• The 6 Cardinal Rules;
• 6 Brilliant Tricks from.

As these headlines are posted on famous magazines and have lots of social shares, I will improve these headlines and put the right keywords into them.

• Top 6 Cardinal Rules to Create an Effective Checkout Form;
• 6 Brilliant SEO Tricks from Adam Connell.

To get better ranking results, make sure to use keywords in a natural manner. I guess that is critical today, as there are lots of websites with artificially integrated keywords in their poor content.

That can lead to Google penalties. Take a look at a list of possibly artificial  keywords:

You can use these keywords, but try to use them in a natural way.

Compelling headlines are easy to understand and have good chances to be shared in social networks.

3.4 Create Intros Rich in Natural Keywords

As soon as you integrate your keywords and attract your users with compelling headlines, you should write a good introduction to prepare the reader’s mind for the post.

Actually, there is no certain rule on how to write an introduction. I used to write at least 100 words and naturally put the keywords into the content.

It is a hard task to write a good introduction. Make sure you formulate your opinions in a clear way and include your keywords naturally. I really like the APP method from Brian Dean that stands as Agree, Promise, and Preview. I guess this is a good tactic to write an intro to attract user’s attention.

Before writing an intro, make sure you get the user’s intention with your target keywords in search. Answer these simple questions:

• How can you attract your readers?
• What is your main target?
• What solutions are they searching for?

You should understand that users are not looking for the best options. They just need to learn possible alternatives to solve their issues. Here are a few rules on how to write a good introduction:

• Use natural, top lists and question headlines that can work for the user’s intent;
• Integrate long-tail keywords, but make your content look natural;
• If you want to get a better effect from your blog posts, study posts from authority websites as Google still pays attention to on-page optimization.

3.5 Use Subtitles with Longer Keyword Variations

Using long-tail keywords into your subtitles is another chance to get the user’s attention and possibly increase website rankings.

Subtitles can tell a lot what your blog post is about. People first scan headlines, subtitles, digital content, and media before digging into your blog post. If your subtitles are not impressive and interesting, readers will never come back to your site again.

Follow these cardinal rules to create good subtitles:

• Use the <h2> or <h3> tags to support your SEO efforts;
• Make subtitles relevant to your topic and the headline;
• Use latent semantic indexing. That means using specific synonyms and longer variations to prevent from keyword stuffing.

Make sure that keywords and synonyms in your subtitles look natural and give Google all prerequisites to identify your website as an authority.

3.6 Optimize Your Content for Users

On-page optimization is a mandatory requirement for any webmaster.

It helps deliver the best user experience to your website customers. Creating useful content for users is not only simple, but it will provide benefits for you.

I know there are a lot of articles about on-page optimization, but you just need to understand that the common sense of all your activities should represent “quality”.

Here are top practical tips you should follow:

• Useful: Users need practical tips to easily follow them, enjoy and get effective results.
• Show your purpose: Before creating content, you should let people know about your target. Whether you want to teach customers on how to promote a website or how to install a cell phone spying software.
• Exciting: No matter what your niche is, you should learn to write interesting content.
• Relevant: Relevance is what you should go after in any field. Make your headlines, subtitles, keywords and content relevant.

Keyword research plays a significant role in content optimization:

• Try to put the user’s interests first before getting links;
• Write for the user first;
• Use natural anchor texts when linking out.

Conclusion

There are many tools that can help you make your SEO successful and avoid spending too much time on manual activities. To drive much organic traffic, you should try out long-tail keywords. That might give a long-term success in search results.

Analyze what keywords your competitors use. If you find some great ones, you can integrate them naturally into your content or just search for longer variations with Google Keyword Planner. Keep a sharp eye on how you put them into content.

This article is neither an ultimate guide for finding profitable keywords nor a beginner’s guide to search marketing. Yet, it will give you a helpful hand in what concerns the longtail search.

There are a lot of SEO tools out there that will give you info on a particular keyword’s difficulty score, how to do onpage SEO, quality content or link building. But the truth is that the greatest weapon you’ll ever have is your ability to uncover how your users think and react. You can read articles on the niche, write indepth content, do guest blogging on sites with high domain authority or learn SEO night and day. As long as you understand your users, you can say that you are heading in the right direction.

Imagine you are talking to your potential clients and focus on it to reach the better effect. It is so simple to use long-tail keywords, isn’t it? Let us know how you integrate the keywords into your content. Have you had any success with long-tail keywords? Please, leave your comment below.

The post Is the Long-Tail Keywords Strategy Still a Valid SEO Technique for 2017? appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

In the online world, some may argue that this task is easier since everything is just a click away and there are so many tools to spy on your competition. I could be, but if you don’t know what to look for and more importantly who to look for, everything is in vain.

In the following post, we are going to tackle six unique and easy to implement processes to spy on your competitors. This way you will know exactly what your opponent is doing and you will figure out the best ways to outrank your competitors by using the best analysis tools. 

There is a common business saying that states you should focus more of your energy on improving your own business and less on watching others. While this is true when it comes to the offline actions, we believe it’s essential to do a competitive research for the online presence.

Think only at the fact that if you’re not in top 10 for organic search for your most important keywords, your chances are pretty slim to interact with potential customers. And if you are in those top 10, who are the other 9 ranking for the same keywords as you?

Efficient Steps to Spy on Your Competitors

What strategies have your competitors been using, what business plans did they implement and what processes have they deployed in the past to get there? The following steps may give you some great insights regarding what works and what doesn’t in your industry.

We’ve written another blog post where we are giving you details on some competitors spying techniques by the book.  What we are trying to present you in this blog post are the most efficient and easy to implement “spying” steps: 

1. Identify and classify your competitors
2. Seek advantages in your competitors past evolution
3. Outsmart your competition by following each step they make
4. Identify growth opportunities in your competitors’ social media strategy
5. Discover your competitors SEO strategy to be one step ahead
6. Monitor your competitors continuously to outrank them

1. Identify and Classify your Competitors

Who are your competitors ? this is the first question you should seek answers to. Without this vital information you can’t go any further with your competitive analysis. There are a couple of things that you should keep in mind to discover your competitors – you don’t have to create a comprehensive list with all the competition. You just need to select the most important competitors that you are interested in monitoring.

Keep in mind, the process of selecting your competitors is not through SEO. You need to use your knowledge and expertise in your niche to identify them.

It’s also important, depending on the industry, to classify your competitors. You should split them into two main categories:

• Direct competitors – here you’ll place the most important competitors that are in the same category as you. ( they are also called brand competitors ). Usually they have products that are similar to yours.
• Indirect competitors – companies that develop products/services that can substitute yours. They are also important because you’re competing at fulfilling a need, not selling a product. Don’t look at what product/service you provide, but the problem that you solve for the customer.

You shouldn’t focus on your keyword competitors. You don’t want to slide on this slippery slope, because you’ll end up in an endless pursuit of happiness that will cost your company a lot of resources. You may end up competing with hundreds of competitors’ websites. In the end you should have a list of maximum 10 competitors that are relevant to your niche.

2. Seek Advantages in Your Competitors’ Past Evolution

Usually, you find possible strategies for the future by looking at past evolutions. The data from previous online interactions is the most important starting point. Understanding their previous decisions regarding their strategies sheds some light on what gave them an advantage or what backfired.

You can look for all sorts of data. How people talked about your competitors. What were the tipping points of your competitors in time and how people linked to them.

You can also see what your competitors were most focused on. To do this you should quickly run a few backlink explorer reports and check their link velocity. I always do this in order to understand if a site is still trending or has lost it’s interest to its users.

The monthly link velocity can be read like a trend for a site. If for one reason or another, people stop linking to your site it might mean your business, or your competitor’s business, is not that “interesting” anymore.

Another good tool to to spy and monitor competitors would be Alexa. You can see the evolution in time of your competitors and what are their strong areas. On what keywords they focus on for ranking.

Going through your rivals’ keywords for both organic and paid results can give a significant boost to your SEO and PPC presence. – Alexandra Tachalova, Digital Marketing Consultant

Lastly, you can see from where their traffic comes and what they prefer to visit. Using this technique will help you make a comprehensive competitor analysis.

3. Outsmart Your Competition by Following Each Step They Make

Don’t be shy to stalk your competitors’ sites! You can spy on your competition, to analyze their site and their offers. This means you want to come prepared to the fight and … be sure … they are doing it too. Leaving aside the unjustified shame, you should go, try to experience their promotional offers every time they appear.

All over the internet, you can find lots of monitoring tools with different features such as keyword research, media monitoring, competitors ad monitoring, web rankings and so on. 

There are plenty of good reasons to see what competitors are doing. You can find out if competitors are doing anything better than you and how you can match it and improve your own plans to beat the competition based on data rather than assumptions. – Chris Kilbourn, CEO of TOFU Marketing

OK, this might not be the most orthodox method, but it pays off:  

Create a fake persona and sign up for their updates and newsletters to learn about their communication style and their promotions. How are their offers different from yours and how are they trying to add value to their product/service. Create various accounts on their system to understand their user flow. See how intuitive is their system compared to yours.

Another thing that you need to do is to contact their support to understand how they treat the customers, and also get better to beat the competition.

4. Identify Growth Opportunities in Your Competitors’ Social Media Strategy

Social media strategies are something worth watching closely. If they’ve applied successful strategies, it’s definitely worth figuring out on what platforms they are very popular. Finding the right social network on which your target audience is the most receptive is essential, so you’ll know where to direct your efforts.

You need to know that using the right channel of communication via social media is done through trial and error most of the time. So why not assimilate this information from your competitor’s past experiences. You might find out some insights that even they didn’t observe in the first place.

cognitiveSEO is an example of a tool for monitoring social content amongst other in-depth data analysis features it has. Directly from the tool, you can spot content marketing strategies that work in your niche, audit your content through the power of social shares and spot your site’s strengths and weaknesses using the side-by-side comparison.

Brandmentions, a great alternative for Google Alerts, is another tool that allows you to monitor each social mention of your competitors in real time through an individual analysis. 

The valuable data that you get from dissecting your competitors social media strategies can help you a lot. You can skip through the “trial and error” part of the process. You need to understand the networks and the important metrics.

See what is the most shared content and what type of content works on that certain social network.

This is another important aspect of your inquiry, as it will tell you if you should focus on text, photo, link or video type of content. Take your time and understand who their followers are and where are they coming from. It’s essential for your success, because in the end you share almost the same target audience.

5. Discover Your Competitors SEO Strategy & Be One Step Ahead

After you’ve pinpointed your competitors and you’ve done the research about their offers and their social media strategies you need to enquire about their SEO approach. You should start with a full backlink audit on their site and extract the most vital information.

In order to understand their link building strategies you need to take everything into account from the provenance of the links to the anchor texts. The provenance of the links can offer you powerful information regarding the influence of the domain, and the anchor text helps Google understand what is that link about.

It’s also vital to know what you’re going to do with your competitive data. Changing your entire strategy just because you find a competitor doing something different doesn’t make much sense. – Johnathan Dane, Founder KlientBoost

That is why you have to monitor backlinks and look for competitors keyword opportunities. You need a link prospector in order to reveal a competitor’s backlinks. For a quick review of your competitors’ websites, you can use the Site Explorer. A site’s performance can be simply measured with Site Explorer. In the picture below you can see what information is displayed: links, rankings, anchors texts and many other.

A more complex backlinks analysis can be found within cognitiveSEO’s Inbound link analysis. The nice part is you can find all sort of information about an inbound link that is yours, or your competitor’s. The competitors’ analysis features also allows you to know which common and uncommon links you have with your competition.  

This way you can easily see what websites link to your competitors and get inspired by there. This means tons of linkbuilding opportunities for you. More about this technique can be found here. 

It’s also worth checking into their SEO strategy to understand their penalty risk in Google due to bad practices. You can understand if they have some sort of shady SEO campaign going on. Once you know that the site’s links profile is shady it’s only a matter of time until Google catches and penalizes them.

A major source of information are the links pointing to their site. Get some data regarding the categories of websites that point to that site. And you should also inquire on what type of link it is. If it’s from a forum comment, if it’s in content or if they are site-wide.

Analyze the content they have on the site. You’re going to gain knowledge about what content marketing strategy works best for them. It might work as well for your site. Search for the most engaging content to see what’s interesting for the visitors and seek their best organic keyword to see what are they ranking for. cognitiveSEO, also lets you know which keywords your competitors are targeting.

6. Monitor Your Competitors Continuously to Outrank Them

What we’ve presented in the points above are not one – time processes. You should continuously check and monitor your competition to stay up to date with their search marketing strategies and how they work. You need to know that you have to be on top of your game every time. You may never know when a competitor may start a campaign that will get them straight on the number one place.

Since there are no perfect strategies on tracking and analyzing competitors, I’ve compiled a quick list. You should try to check every point in this list every time you want to create a complete analysis on your competition.

• Track their site structure updates.
• Track their social profile evolution.
• Track their product updates and new offers.
• Track their new links.(you could use some e-mail alerts to be notified when this happens)
• Track their rankings increases and decreases.(same e-mail alerts work here also)
• Track their Alexa growth.

Conclusion

In a world that integrates better than ever, the traditional offline marketing with the omnipresent online marketing, companies should track their competition more than ever with the help of online tools specialized for SEO analysis.

The difference from one rank or another in the search engines can mean a lot of possible clients. It’s only normal that in the online environment you should closely track & spy on your competitors. Competitive intelligence is incredibly important in order to improve your strategies. The SEO tools can come really in handy for a quick and exhaustive analysis. 

Use the processes and powerful tools presented in the article to stay on the top of your game!

Sometimes you don’t need very advanced tools to have an overall picture of your niche. It’s important to be connected to your Google Analytics account, to first know your traffic sources before trying to reveal your competitor’s marketing strategy.

As you can see above, there are some six relatively easy steps you can follow to outrank your competitors. Success is no accident. It is hard work, perseverance, learning, studying, sacrifice and most of all, love of what you are doing or learning to do.

The post 6 Unique Processes to Spy on Your Competitors appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

We’ve compiled a checklist with the most important SEO tasks you should validate to keep your site clean and pretty. All your hard work shouldn’t catch dust. You must verify your site regularly and evaluate whether all your effort was worth it.

Check this list and start boosting your website:

1. Clean Your Site of Duplicate Content
2. Track Keywords – Craft a List of Keywords to Verify Rankings
3. Define a Core Keyword for Each Page
4. Keep Unique and Relevant Title Tags Within Your Website
5. Write Meta Description with Less Than 156 Characters
6. Use Keywords in the Title Tags and Headings for Better Content Optimization
7. Keep the URL as Short as Possible
8. Optimize Images with Descriptive ALT Tags
9. Write Competitive Content Frequently to Stay on Top
10. Have a Blog and Write Smart Content Frequently
11. Monitor Your Backlinks’ Naturalness
12. Make Sure Your Site Is Mobile-Optimized (Accelerated Mobile Pages)
13. Optimize Your Site for a Fast Load Speed Time
14. Diagnose Your Site with Google Search Console Tools
15. Fix Crawl Errors in Google Search Console
16. Monitor Your Site’s Indexation Status
17. Focus on Your Audience’s Demographics
18. Keep Your Returning Users Under the Magnifying Glass
19. Setup Your Goals in Google Analytics
20. Local SEO: Attract Local Customers
21. Run a Website Audit Before and After Implementing SEO Strategies
22. Disavow Harmful Links to Keep Your Link Profile Clean
23. Using 301 Redirects for Broken Links
24. Conclusion

1. Clean Your Site of Duplicate Content

Since duplicate content is not the most orthodox SEO practice, if it’s the case, you should start cleaning your site, so you don’t get penalized by Google. A quick way to identify that is by accessing tools to check your site. Some of the most used tools for checking duplicate content are Copyscape and Siteliner.

Using canonical tags is another way to prevent having duplicate content. If, for example, your site is www.hairoil.net so might be hairoil.net, hairoil.net/index.html or www.hairoil.net/index.html. You need to use the rel=canonical tag only for one URL. You should use the rel=canonical tag to give a hint to Google to know that the sites are one and the same. Below you can find the code to set the URL you mark as canonical:

2. Track Keywords – Craft a List of Keywords to Verify Rankings

You want to rank as high as possible so you should always track the keywords that matter in order to see how your site is performing. First, you need to research and make a list with the keywords you wish to rank for. You don’t have to check them manually. There are lots of tools that can help you with that. After that, you need to keep them in a consistent system in order to monitor them, even daily if possible. You can use a Rank Tracker Tool to do so as it’s a time and money saver.

Each line represents the performance for each monitored keyword. On the bottom you can select the period; if you hover over on each line, it will show you the keyword, the position, the URL and the date. To see the trending lines, you must add the keywords first. Here you can find the guide.

3. Define a Core Keyword for Each Page

Having keyword targeted pages is something to keep an eye on. Finding the right keyword might be hard, but there are tools to help you with that. The well-known Google Keyword Planner is maybe the most used tool for searching keywords, even though it suffered a lot of changes in the last year. To receive specific data you need to have at least one active campaign in Adwords, otherwise you will see limited data in the average monthly searches column, such as 0, 1-100, 100-1K, 1K-10K, 10K-100K, 100K-1M, 1M+. You could also use the Forecasting Tool for more accurate data.

After you set up a list with maximum 5 keywords, pick only one to be the core keyword for your article and use the other ones in your content for semantic optimization.

4. Keep Unique and Relevant Title Tags Within Your Website

After you write the content, you should optimize your title tag to express what you want to convey. It is important to verify if you have duplicate title tags. You do that if you have registered your website in Google Webmaster Tools and look at the HTML Improvements in the menu and search for the titles that are duplicated.

After you see the list, you should modify the duplicate title tags and try to find other ones that are relevant.

As a recommendation, I suggest you have clickbait title tags to increase your CTR. For that you should make sure it has:

• a length of maximum 60 characters;
• the core keyword included;
• the promise you make to the reader to persuade him;
• the brand name (optional).

A simple and an effective way to write the title tag: Primary Keyword – Secondary Keyword | Brand Name

5. Write Meta Description with Less Than 156 Characters

Meta description is an onsite SEO element you need to have for every page. For each meta description, you should have the answer to what the user is thinking: “what’s in it for me?”. At this point, you must differentiate yourself from the competitors and bring to the fore your value proposition. Before you make any decision, make sure you’ve searched the meta description that represents the best option from all that you could possibly think of.

Make sure you’ve chosen the right tone, it is welcoming, it has a call to action, it’s unique and it has the core keyword.

After you’ve encapsulated what I outlined in maximum 156 characters, you can save your meta description. It’s important it has only 156 characters, because that’s the maximum Google will show in the search engine results for every query.

6. Use Keywords in the Title Tags and Headings for Better Content Optimization

Your core keyword should be included in the title tag, in headings and not only. You should also place it in the URL, in the content, in the image alt descriptions, and in the meta description.

 
The title tag for each page must be unique and entice you to click on it. If you have included the keyword in all the elements I’ve listed above, your post will be better optimized, and this could offer you a better ranking position in SERP. On top of all, using a keyword in the URL might simply make a site appear more relevant.

Another important aspect you should check is to have the title tags of maximum 60 characters.

7. Keep the URL as Short as Possible

A good SEO specialist knows that he should keep a simple URL structure. Also, a friendly URL can even help you rank better.  To help improve the readability you should use a permalink without dynamic parameters. The only punctuation you should use are the hyphens (-) instead of underscores (_).

You can match your title with the URL if it’s a short title.

It doesn’t mean that if the title is “7 Dumb Stories People Told Me When I Was Starting a Business” the URL should include it all.
 

The URL could look something like this:
 
http://businessentrepreneurs.com/seven-dumb-things-people-told-me
or
 
http://businessentrepreneurs.com/blog/seven-dumb-things-people-told-me

It looks good either way.

One thing you shouldn’t do is to leave your URL automated because it can include irrelevant stop words (a, the, so,with, for, to, at, etc.).

8. Optimize Images with Descriptive ALT Tags

Another important SEO task you should validate is including the alt description in your image to make your content even more relevant. If you’ve never thought about adding images, please try and add at least one in your content to make it more readable and explicit.

If you’re using an open-source content management system, such as WordPress or Blogger, it’s easy to add an image alt description. You can take a look at the next picture to get an idea:

If you’re using HTML language then you could simply add the alt=”here you can write your alt text” to your image tag.

9. Write Competitive Content Frequently to Stay on Top

You already know that your content must be unique and bring value to your readers. Beside that it has to be a competitive type of content, so the audience choose your site and not that of your competitors. This means that before writing a new piece of information you should see if and how it was debated by your competitor. An easy way to do this is by checking their website. You can do this by searching on Google by the query “site: name of the site keyword” or, an easier way to do this is to check for the type of content you are most interested on BrandMentions.

10. Have a Blog and Write Smart Content Frequently

If you want to bring more visitors to your site and create leads, you might be thinking of creating a blog. Here you can find more reasons on why to do so.

A good SEO indicator is a blog that has fresh content written on a regular basis. Furthermore, a blog can make you stand on top of your competitors in SERP. Having a blog is an easy way to have new content on your site to help you rank higher in the search engines results.

You can present your product more efficiently if you offer blog content to back up the benefits.

In case you don’t have a blog you can create a free version by registering on WordPress or Blogger. Then, you will have to build your blog, select a template, install the plugins you need, create a user account, edit the appearance of your blog, create categories for your blog, edit settings. You will start to write after you’ve checked your site to see if it shows information properly, if it has a fast load speed page, if all the buttons work, if the comments area works and all the other features are set up right. We know it might sound a long complicated task, yet once you started we bet it will grow on you.

11. Monitor Your Backlinks’ Naturalness

On the web you can find lots and lots of useful tools to help you monitor your backlinks’ naturalness. You can use the cognitiveSEO tool to explore statistics in the Unnatural Links History chart, besides other interesting features. The Link Velocity chart will help you discover if you have an unnatural profile due to the different spikes on various time frames.

Below you can see a print screen with the Unnatural Links Detection feature:

A major advantage of this tool is the fact you can review your inbound links using the Unnatural Links Navigator, then disavow the ones you think might cause you problems and export the file to send it straight to Google at a click away.

12. Make Sure Your Site Is Mobile-Optimized (Accelerated Mobile Pages)

A new era for front end developers started early in 2002 when Audi launched a site with a layout that adapts to browser viewport. Then Mashable called 2013 the Year of Responsive Web Design. Nowadays, it is mandatory you have a responsive design to ensure good user-experience.

A responsive website design means:

• an adaptable screen resolution: the site can be viewed on different screen sizes no matter if it’s portrait or landscape;
• flexible media: images and videos are scaled;
• liquid layout: the layout can change for each device as you can see in the next picture;
• a different way to navigate: on the desktop, you scroll while on other devices you tap;
• smaller sized graphics: on mobile devices, the images need to be smaller to load faster.

Source: http://raxadesign.com/Websites/raxadesign/images/responsive-web-design-houston.jpg

Also, you can see how the responsive website design works. For a desktop, it shows 3 paragraphs of text, for a tablet 2 paragraphs and for a mobile phone only one paragraph. Besides that, the desktop has a landscape format and the other devices a portrait format.

Nowadays, there are lots of tools and HTML codes to help you create responsive website designs and improve their load speed time. That is why the Accelerated Mobile Pages Project was born. The AMP is an elegant solution and simpler way to build web pages for static content that render faster. The nice part is that if your site doesn’t use custom JavaScript and it’s mostly static, you probably don’t even have to create a second version of it for AMP. Every AMP document includes the AMP JS JavaScript library that delivers optimum performance by adding and validating a few important rules in your markup.

More information about AMP you can find in the next video:

13. Optimize Your Site for a Fast Load Speed Time

The load speed time and bounce rate go hand in hand. As long as your site has a low load speed page, your visitors will leave your site and may never come back. We live in the fastest era of technology, and some people live on the premises that every page on the internet must load in a blink of an eye.

Site speed is an important factor for ranking in the search results. You can verify the load speed time with free tools you can easily spot on the web. An example of this kind you can see in the next screenshot:

www.rolandia.eu

You can see how fast a page loads. For example, the site tested above loads in 1.25 seconds.

High load times can be caused by lots of factors, such as pages with poor code optimization, server or network problems, analytics codes and so on.

Another example of a Speed Test is the one offered by Google. Below you can see a screenshot of a site:

After the tool analyzes your site, you will receive a score out of 100 for the speed load page for both mobile and desktop. On top of all, you will see a list of suggestions and “how-to” guides to fix the issues.

After 1-2 weeks it is important to verify the site again if you’ve implemented the suggestions from the summary list.

14. Diagnose Your Site with Google Search Console Tools

Another important SEO task you should check is the connection with Google Search Console. If you haven’t registered your site, you should check the guide to see how. If you have registered your site, you need to verify the message board in the left menu (see the screenshot below) to learn which are the first steps before you start making any changes.

In the menu on the left you have 4 categories including search appearance, search traffic, Google index status update and crawl data. You should check each category and try to solve as many issues as you can.

If you have any question, there is a help center with all the information you should know about the tool.

15. Fix Crawl Errors in Google Search Console

The Crawl errors list is placed under the Crawl category in Google Search Console. While some sites may have a few crawl errors, others may have thousands. And there are some which don’t have such problems. Below you will see an example of a site with no crawl errors.

If you are lucky and have a site with no crawl errors, good for you. If you have a site which does have problems, there are ways to solve them. The site errors include DNS errors, server errors and robots failure. To resolve the first issue you could use one of the next options: Fetch as Google tool to crawl each link, check your DNS provider or make sure your server displays a 404 or 500 error code when needed.

If you have server errors, you need to see what type of error you’ve having. The Google support team offers another option:

Use Fetch as Google to check if Googlebot can currently crawl your site. If Fetch as Google returns the content of your homepage without problems, you can assume that Google is generally able to access your site properly.

If you are experiencing robots failure, you need to verify your robots.txt file. Make sure you check the file on a regular basis to never receive any errors in the future.

Besides site errors, there are 4 other types of URL errors on desktop including “server errors”, “soft 404”, “access denied”, “not found” and one type on mobile, including “not found”. You can see a screenshot below:

You need to check every link from the list and mark it as fixed.

16. Monitor Your Site’s Indexation Status

As you’ve probably seen until now, Google Search Console tool came in handy for validating a few of the most important SEO tasks. And monitoring your site’s indexation status is another thing you could check using that tool.

Below you can see a screenshot from Google Console with the index status.

To have all the pages indexed in Google, you need to verify the crawl errors and fix them. Then you should use the Fetch as Google tool to manually send the URLs you’d want to index.

17. Focus on Your Audience’s Demographics

Another important SEO task you need to check is focusing on your audience’s demographics. Google Analytics can help you discover high-value information about your audience composition. Using the tool you can discover if the audience you’ve targeted is really the one that comes on your site.

In the next picture you can see a screenshot from Google Analytics with a demographic report:

The statistical data you extract from Google Analytics will help you set up strategies to turn your visitors into customers by knowing what kind of creative content to write, what kind of media to buy, what kind of audience to use for remarketing campaigns. Knowing and understanding your audience is a key element in every business.

18. Keep Your Returning Users Under the Magnifying Glass

Don’t close your Analytics account just yet. You can see the returning users on the main screen of Audience Overview as presented in the picture below.

The number of your returning visitors is displayed along with the number of the new visitors. You can see the percentage for each group, and if you hover over, you’ll see the actual number of visitors for each group.

The higher the number of the returning visitors, the higher the chance you’ve made an impression on them.

The returning visitors are the most valuable visitors because they know you, maybe they like you, and you have a higher chance to make them convert.

If you have a low number of returning visitors, it seems you might have a problem and can’t capture their attention for a longer time. Maybe the information isn’t displayed well on your site, maybe the page load time is slow. It can happen for various reasons. You need to make some tests and make a comparison between your site and your competitors’ site.

19. Setup Your Goals in Google Analytics

You can set up goals in Analytics to keep track of your conversions. A goal can be a contact form, a request for an offer, a subscription for a product, a subscription to the newsletter, downloads, video plays and purchases. In order to keep your business growing, you should know where you stand.

Metrics aren’t sexy but they are important – Neil Patel

In the following picture you will see where you can set up your goals.

Define objectives and transform them into goals to help you build strategies to push your visitors down the funnel and improve your conversion rates.

To be a better SEO specialist you should set up SEO goals for:
 

• destination page: to see how many people view a specific page;
• page views: to see how many people viewed a minimum of pages on your website;
• duration: to see how many people stayed on your website for a minimum amount of time.

In the picture above you can see the possibilities you have to set up goals in Analytics.

20. Local SEO: Attract Local Customers

Local SEO started to gain more and more power on desktop and on mobile. You need to be more visible to your local customers. There are 3 elements you need to take care of: NAP citations, local reviews and claiming your business on Google My Business.

NAP is the acronym for Name, Address, Phone Number. You must be careful to have correct information displayed on your site and other sites.

If you have your NAP across the web on different websites, it’s a validation you exist and your business is legitimate.

Local reviews can be gathered from your customers in a polite way by asking through a private email or message, without offering anything in return to manipulate what they declare. If you want to stand out and to get ranked higher, you should connect your business with platforms that offer the possibility to get reviews for your products. Yelp, TripAdvisor, Google and Facebook reviews are just a few examples.

Receiving numerous good reviews and a high number of stars can get you in the first positions and this could influence your customers.

Claiming your business on Google My Business is quite easy. You need to log in with an email address into Google and then fill in the information about your company name, address, phone number and business category.

After that, you will receive a code in your physical mailbox with the instructions. It could be a few days until you receive it. After you validate your account, you will have to add information and pictures in your Google+ account.

21. Run a Website Audit Before and After Implementing SEO Strategies

If you have never run a website audit, it’s time to do it now. Before you start making changes to your site or before you start implementing different strategies and after you’ve ended an important activity on your site you should run a website audit.

On the web, you can find tools to help you generate a report and keep track of the data you receive there. There are tools like cognitiveSEO or, Moz, Woorank, SEO Site Checkup and even Google Search Console that can help you generate substantial data after you ran an audit for your website.

22. Disavow Harmful Links to Keep Your Link Profile Clean

The purpose of the disavow tool is to tell Google not to take into consideration the harmful links (the links that don’t observe the Google Guidelines). It is recommended to use the disavow tool with enhanced attention, in case of penalties or if you’ve checked your profile link and discovered links that aren’t relevant or don’t comply with the Google Guidelines.

Matt Cutts himself, Google’s former head of web spam, argues in the video below that you should use the disavow tool even if there’s not a manual action on your site.
 

 
The cognitiveSEO tool can help you evaluate the naturalness of each inbound link using the Unnatural Links Detection feature. You can import your disavow file or export it and send it to Google right from the tool. In the next picture, you can also see an example of a site with an unnatural link profile along with the most common unnatural link issues.

You can filter the links and see a list with those which are unnatural and suspect as presented in the next screenshot. For each link you can see why it is considered to be unnatural. For the example presented below the issues are: low influence link, in-content with suspicious pattern link and extremely low influence.

After you reviewed the link and saw it is harmful you have the possibility to disavow it. If you change your mind you can un-disavow the link before sending the file to Google.

23. Using 301 Redirects for Broken Links

You should verify your site to see if you have broken links by using a broken link checker regularly. Not having 301 redirects for pages with a 404 Error message will lead to losing link juice.

The cognitiveSEO explorer tool has a practical way of checking your website for broken pages. An example of this action you can see in the picture below:

A 301 redirect is the most friendly way for a webpage redirection. There are multiple ways to do this via code and htaccess redirect.

Conclusion

This checklist above includes the most important SEO tasks. I assure you that there are other numerous SEO tasks you should check, but these are the ones you should focus on first.

 
You should track and evaluate your SEO work to make sure you see some results. Always try to improve and strive to clean the site of bad links, broken pages, crawl errors, bad implementation techniques. Metrics are important even though nobody likes to keep track of them.

 
Don’t do your work halfway. Follow the previous checklist and you should be fine. We’ll be happy to hear the good news about the improvements of your sites. If you have any other SEO task you would like to add to this list, we’d be more than happy if you’d share them with us.
 
 

The post 23 Most Important SEO Tasks You Should Validate Now appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

You know that warm feeling you get when you speak with one of your friends? You talk, he listens, he asks questions and so on. You understand each other. A similar feeling can be established with your readers as well. How, you may ask? It’s not a bulletproof formula but for sure it will be extremely helpful to follow the next 23 rarely used copywriting techniques to help you boost your engagement.

1. Use the Serial Position Effect
2. Make Your Visitors Feel Important by Offering Exclusive Content
3. Use the “Bizarreness Effect” to Draw Attention
4. Use “Powerful” Keywords like “New”, “Free”, “Now”
5. Use Copywriting Formulas to Create Captivating Content
6. Be a Unicorn in a Field of Horses
7. Take Advantage of the FOMO Technique
8. Include Emotions, Promise, and Main Keyword to Make Your Headlines Viral
9. Create a Persona Based Content Strategy
10. Be the First to Jump on Trends
11. Ask Your Target Audience to Contribute
12. Pack More Personality into Your Content
13. Perfect Your Writing Tone to Your Readers
14. Craft Good Stories That Sell
15. Give Your Content a Quick Credibility Boost
16. Leverage Emotional Triggers in Your Content Marketing
17. Build Social Media Friendly Content
18. Use Statistical Data to Enhance Your Content Marketing
19. Transform Your Q&A into an Article to Help Your Audience
20. Use Social Proof to Back up Your Content
21. Make Your Content More Visually Interactive
22. Define the Purpose Behind Everything You Write
23. Make Your Content Familiar to Resonate with Your Audience

1. Use the Serial Position Effect

The serial position effect refers to the situation when a person recalls the words from the beginning and the end of a list rather than the ones from the middle. According to a study made by Indiana University, the participants were able to remember the first and last words from a list of 20.

Following this technique, you should write the key points of your sales pitch or any other important information at the beginning and end of your blog post.

Source: https://copyhackers.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/serial-position-effect.png

2. Make Your Visitors Feel Important by Offering Exclusive Content

Another technique you can use to boost your engagement is to offer content your readers couldn’t find elsewhere. Make them feel important; they will start to appreciate you more. Don’t you love it when someone is sharing with you a piece of information that has never been said to anyone else?

Exclusive content comes in different forms: a webinar with a script for those who sign up, training opportunities, e-books for subscribers, news from conferences and events in the industry turned into blog posts.

3. Use the “Bizarreness Effect” to Draw Attention

Using ridiculous material to be better remembered instead of common material translates into the bizarreness effect. This technique is borrowed from Psychology. Studies have shown that people were able to recall nouns presented in bizarre sentences such as “The dog rode the bicycle down the street” rather the nouns from the common counterpart “The dog chased the bicycle down the street”. On the other hand, some specialists say the bizarreness isn’t the thing that enhances the memory, but rather the distinctiveness of the meaning.

You can use the bizarreness effect to be spontaneous and say something indubitably wild.

4. Use “Powerful” Keywords like “New”, “Free”, “Now”

Another valuable copywriting technique is taking advantage of powerful keywords in your content. Persuading words can have a stronger impact compared to other types. When talking face to face, it is easier to make a point due to the use of intonations and body language. In writing, it is a bit harder. The best call will be to use strong keywords to point out key notes in your content.

You can take advantage of powerful words in order to convey emotions. For example, you could use:

• ridiculous instead of stupid;
• entertaining instead of funny;
• delightful instead of nice;
• magnificent instead of beautiful.

Beside using vivid adjectives, you might try having verbs that are more expressive. It is recommended to use first person pronouns such as “I” and “you” to give the impression of having a dialogue with your reader. Also, try to use causal prepositions such as “because” or “due” to give arguments and demonstrate your affirmations. It was proved in a study where people have shown more will to heed to a request after the word “because” was used.

Words like “new”, “now” and “free” can also have a strong impact on the audience if they are used at the right moment.

5. Use Copywriting Formulas to Create Captivating Content

Whether we want to tell a captivating story, write a killer content or have inspiring headlines, you can use these formulas to boost the engagement. Until now, I’ve mentioned the 4 U’s Formula: Urgent, Unique, Useful, and Ultra-specific. A similar formula is the 4 C’s: Clear, Concise, Compelling, Credible.

If you want to offer benefits through a blog post, you could use the Before – After – Bridge formula. “Before” is the situation where you imagine a problem that doesn’t exist. “After” is the situation where you resolve the problem. The “bridge” is the way to get there.

A formula that has been used for a long time is AIDA, where you have to grab the reader’s attention, offer interesting information, develop desire and create the action.

You could also try the Picture – Promise – Prove – Push (PPPP) formula. Using it, you can paint a picture to grab the reader’s attention, then make a promise, provide support for your promise and determine your reader to take action.

A good way to catch the reader on the “hook” is by using the Open Loop tactic. It is used more often in books to create suspense through a cliffhanger. At that moment you hold back information to grab your reader’s attention and make him read the whole post.

The “3 reasons why” is another formula to help you write engaging content. You have to answer three questions, as the name says it:

• Why are you the best?
• Why should I believe you?
• Why should I buy right now?

On the web, you’ll find lots of other formulas that can help you discover what works best for you.

6. Be a Unicorn in a Field of Horses

Be smart and seek guidance from tools such as BrandMentions to spy on your competitors who write about topics you’re interested in. Search and read what they’ve written to find ways to have vivid content, and different approaches to the topic to “steal” their audience. If you have something new to write about, make a research to see if your competitors wrote something similar and how they handled the topic.

After you’ve done your homework, tie it all together with a value proposition. A well-known quote says “Be a unicorn in a field of horses”. For that you can apply the 4 U’s formula: be urgent, unique, useful, and ultra-specific.

If you follow some of the lesser-known copywriting techniques we’ve talked about so far you can create your own formula to differentiate yourself from the competition.

7. Take Advantage of the FOMO Technique

FOMO is the acronym for fear of missing out, and some of you may know this feeling. Taking advantage of this technique involves using information such as limited offers, discounts, and other exclusive events, to lead your readers towards an action.

An example of a limited offer from Starbucks can be seen in the next photo:

This technique works very well for millennials. From a study made by Eventbrite of 2,100 adults (507 of whom were millennials aged 18 to 34) it resulted that 69% of millennials fear missing out social events.

Due to FOMO, it is a blooming era for live events. It works very well for “selling” experiences through blog posts out of a product such as meeting your favorite influencers at a conference, having a personalized balloon ride in your holiday, exceeding your dreams by doing the sport you like, listening live your favorite singers at a festival and so on.

8. Include Emotions, Promise, and Main Keyword to Make Your Headlines Viral

Headlines have a significant impact on whether your content gets opened or not. You have a headline for a blog post, for a SlideShare presentation, for a video, for an infographic, for a news article, for an ad, for a webinar, for a guide, for an e-book, for almost everything you write online.

Around 80% of readers never make it past the headline, leaving almost 20% of them who will read. But before that you need to past the test of showing awesome in the search engines. And these statistics say a lot about how important the headlines are. You should have clickbait headlines to increase the open rate.

We live in the fastest phase of human history, and we can’t afford to make the reader lose interest in our site/blog after reading the headlines. We must create desire and interest from the beginning. Say no to low CTR!

Below you can see an example of a compelling headline for a webinar. Isn’t it true that it makes you sign-up?

It gives you the guarantee you’ll find out hints to recover your site if it got hit by the Penguin penalty.

While searching online, you’ll find lots of useful resources that can offer you guidance on how to create top headlines. Learn how to write killer headlines and to increase your readers’ engagement by following Jeff Goins’ formula. There are five elements. If you combined them, you would be able to trigger the desired actions.

• Number – 3, 10 are best used in the headlines. Using a number in the headline is highly convertible. 36% of headlines use now a number.
• Adjective – use unique adjectives to create a powerful emotion. For example: brilliant, atrocious, stunning, smart, bizarre, dazzling.
• Rational – the way you offer added value such as reasons, tips, secrets, hacks, tricks. Please, don’t ever use things.
• Keyword – a short phrase that tells us what the content is about.
• Promise – what’s in it for me? For example, our headline promises “copywriting techniques that will boost your engagement”.

This is the formula designed for success: Number + Adjective + Rational + Keywords + Promise

Using Jeff Goins’ formula, you can transform lifeless headlines into sparkly ones. For example, “Best Travel Destinations in Europe” can turn into “5 Brilliant Travel Destinations in Europe That Will Spark Your Wanderlust” having “travel destinations in Europe” as a keyword.

Below you can see an example of an inspiring headline for a webinar following the formula written above:

Source: http://image.slidesharecdn.com/buzzsumo-webinar-march-20161-160323161442/95/10-ridiculous-hacks-to-5x-clickthrough-rates-1-638.jpg?cb=1458838636

Also, you can try using BrandMentions to help you to find inspiration for your headlines by looking at your competitors.

It’s important that your content covers all the elements you wrote in the headline.

9.Create a Persona-Based Content Strategy

It is mandatory to know your audience before you even start writing. Start studying what your reader likes, dislikes, what his habits are, what type of content he consumes, in what part of the day he prefers to read, where he comes from, where he is from and other similar demographic and interest characteristics.

After you’ve collected data about your audience, use it to create your content marketing persona. Track your analytics and set metrics to help you deploy trends.

10. Be the First to Jump on Trends

Every copywriter should follow trends in his industry to bring fresh content. A smart way to engage your audience and attract new readers to your site is having worthy content. You can do that by keeping up the news to bring valuable information to your visitors.

A good way to start would be to subscribe to news sites, specialists in the field, watch Google Trends, read publications in your industry, create a Twitter list of influencers you know they deliver hot news as they happen, follow trending hashtags about your main interest. These are just a few ways to keep your eyes open to trending stories. After you’ve gathered all the information, you need to start writing about a trending topic to make your blog post newsworthy.

11. Ask Your Target Audience to Contribute

Smart copywriters know that asking their readers to contribute is an influential copy writing technique. People are anxious to see their work promoted by a brand.

One of the most used ways to ask your audience to contribute is to share photos on social media. Sending emails to contacts to answer a survey, asking questions on blogs or using real reviews to write a blog post are other ways to contribute. Be bold, and try other unique ways to do that.

Kenneth Cole came with an excellent way to make people contribute. The company organized a selfie contest. The brand offered fans the possibility to take a selfie and enter a contest to win free shoes every month for a year.

If you know you visitors take selfies, you should try something similar. Selfies are widespread, and it’s simple to engage with the audience. They are personal and can easily lead to an action. The owner will receive likes, comments, and new followers. You can write an article about the pictures you receive and start a story.

Another example is the Christmas Story by the travel agency Rolandia Travel. Last December, the company wanted to offer its readers a soft presentation of how the Holidays are celebrated in Romania.

Travelers could send a short story about how they spent their Christmas in Romania along with a few pictures as a gift of sharing for those who were far from home, but not only. The best stories were published on the blog every week.

12. Pack More Personality into Your Content

Personality is that something that makes you unique. Personality is that something that can differentiate you from the mass, is that something that defines your personal style. Just like a person has it, a brand should have it also. Brands have been developing through the time; they began to have anthropogenic qualities and be more humanized. The personality of a brand can be translated into a unique selling point, a motto or other forms of expression in order for people to know that is about the brand and nothing else.

For example, the personality of Coca-Cola might be connected with happiness, fun, friends, family, being together due to the images and messages communicated consistently in numerous Coke campaigns. Below, you can see how a Coca-cola ad looked like in the 1940:

Source: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/coke-ads

Now, in the 20s this is how an ad from Coca-Cola looks like:

Source: http://www.realites.com.tn/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/coca-cola.jpg

You can see that the message and the way of showing smiling people remain. Both images express happiness, friends, fun.

For a content, personality can be expressed through a unique voice, a style, maybe a personalized closing or a type of personalized covers for articles and so on. Besides that, the content should always reveal the personality of the brand.

13. Perfect Your Writing Tone to Your Readers

For a copywriter having the right copy tone is like having the perfect light for a photographer to shoot the subject. For a painter it can be the right muse.

Your writing tone can either create interest or kill it. The wrong tone can wreck a good piece of information.

When you talk with someone and use a certain tone, you can determine how your interlocutor will respond. A similar situation can be when you use a specific tone of voice in your writings. If the piece of information is entertaining, then the reader will feel cheerful, if it expresses anger he will get angry, if it’s painful he will feel the pain, if it’s boring he won’t have the patience to read it entirely and will leave your site.

There are multiple ways to express your opinions. Take a look at this questions, for example:

• Would you mind if I borrowed your pen, please?
• Can I have your pen?
• Pass me that pen.

Make a difference between formal and informal writing. If you started writing in a casual mood, then stick to it. Don’t make sudden changes, inject unexpected signs of cuteness to become casual or start using a technical language to become more formal than usual. If you have multiple collaborators that write on your blog, make sure they follow the same language. Avoid being inconsistent.

Here are a few marketing tips to help you shape your tone:

• don’t be too casual or too stiff;
• don’t use dialectic or slang language;
• don’t use offensive language (swear or use racism);
• be clear by ordering your words properly in a sentence;
• use singular pronouns (me, you);
• have a personal way of expressing your opinions and wisdom within a topic.

Now, ask yourself: “Do I sound like my visitors expect me to?”

14. Craft Good Stories That Sell

There is no doubt that a good story can captivate us really bad. Let’s be honest. Hasn’t it happened to you to stay up at night reading a good story to find out how it ends? If you succeed sketching a story in the right manner you could transport the reader down the funnel in order to determine him to take an action.

A good story has the gift to help the reader get into a state of well-being.

But how could you do that, you might be asking? I’ve picked up a few tips to help you with that:

• paint a picture: use imagery and lots of details to be more expressive.
• appeal beyond those 5 senses: remember that there are different types of people. Some of them are more visual, others more auditory or olfactory and so on. Make sure to take advantage of sensory words.
• suspense: you can capture their attention by adding a tint of tension and get them to finish the whole article. Try giving your audience something exciting to read.
• killer opening paragraph: a good story can be used as an opening paragraph to allure the audience into getting to the main part of your topic.
• have a model: To make your arguments stronger, you can use a model to show the changes it suffered. You can take examples from your experience or the ones you’ve heard of. Your audience can relate with the people who went through a similar situation.

15. Give Your Content a Quick Credibility Boost

It is ok to write your opinion and give advice, but are you credible? Are people trusting you?

Credibility can be a point sale. People can decide to buy your product depending on whether they trust you or not. Your affirmations should be based on data.

You can build trust if you follow a few guidelines:

• cite sources: well-known field specialists usually offer credibility due to their background. Search for credible sources and specialists to back up your claim.
• take advantage of your years in business and your experience.
• name innovations and awards: if the context asks for such kind of references, use them. These are evidence of your success.
• offer independent survey results: if you’ve run a small research, use the data to back up your arguments.
• have media coverage: a great impact on your readers’ credibility would be to have presence in the news and business publications. If your brand is newsworthy, then you will also get authority in the field.

16. Leverage Emotional Triggers in Your Content Marketing

On the web, you can find lots of bloggers that offer great advice, write captivating content and give informative tips, but don’t know how to connect with their viewers on an emotional level.

The content can have emotional or rational triggers if we follow the classification regarding consumer behavior from psychology. Leveraging emotional triggers is a technique used in psychology to persuade. It can also be used as a copywriting tip, for the same purpose.

In order to stimulate emotions, you have to write content that helps the reader and make him experience a sensation while reading. You can be informative, but try not to exaggerate using a cold voice. If you do so you risk losing your readers because they won’t recall a thing and might never return to your site. We must remember that we write for people, to create a connection with them and to be on the same wavelength. This means you could talk from your experience in a friendly manner, share personal examples, be authentic, ask your audience questions and try to answer to them, share experiences together.

“Emotions are complex and move in various directions. Modeling emotional feelings and considering their behavioral implications are useful in preventing emotions from having a negative effect on the workplace.” – Boundless

Psychologist Robert Plutchik created a wheel of emotions. The most comprehensive way to illustrate the emotions experienced by a human being.

Source: http://www.efoza.com/postpic/2014/03/plutchik-s-emotion-wheel_309528.png

Studies have shown that the positive emotions toward a brand have a higher influence on the loyalty of the consumer rather than its trust. Also, they can help you to communicate more effectively.

Negative, as well as positive emotions, have an influence on a person. When someone experiences something like that they want to do something to avoid the bad feelings. If you talk to your readers and provoke them negative emotions, they will follow you more carefully to reduce their discomfort.

When people are involved with the message, they listen attentively and process using the central route. Emotional appeals create involvement.

One of the most important characteristics of the emotional triggers used as a copywriting technique is they can lead to actions.

Before you take a step forward, it is crucial you know your business and your audience very well. Although connecting with your readers on an emotional level is important, make sure you resonate with them. Be careful to make your audience feel the emotions you wanted it to experience.

17. Build Social Media Friendly Content

After you wrote your post, you should promote it. To make your life easier and not work twice as much, try and make your visual data expressive and relevant to your content. Always make a cover for your content to boost your reach. It is proven that tweets with images receive 18% more clicks and 150% more retweets.

The cover can be used as social media content. Also, I recommend you to make a short description about your topic that you can write as an intro or meta description, as well as a tweet on Twitter or as a post on Facebook and so on.

If you follow these simple guidelines, your readers could easily share your content, too. The visibility of your content will be improved, and other Social Media metrics could experience growth. There are lots of tools that can help you manage social media channels, such as Kontentino. 

18. Use Statistical Data to Enhance Your Content Marketing

Cartograms, scatter plots, time series, diagrams, charts, histograms, matrix, dendrogram, area maps are just some ways of portraying statistical data in your content to make it more animated. To have traffic-driving content type you can create visual content out of statistics.

You can try and create interactive charts or use gifs to maintain your audience focused on your content and increase the user experience. This is just an example:

Source: https://d13yacurqjgara.cloudfront.net/users/57127/screenshots/1917495/attachments/329078/productpage2-2.gif

You can use Visme for animated charts and Canva or Piktochart for static charts or some other graphic design websites. Below, you can see how a chart in Piktochart looks like.

If you use charts, it is easier to understand and to visualize the information, rather than reading chunks of text and numbers.

19. Transform Your Q&A into an Article to Help Your Audience

You can find value in your Q&A. More than that, you could find value in the questions you receive from your readers. First, you should make a list with all the questions you have, then categorize them. Make them sound actionable and sell the idea behind. After you’ve done the final list, you can start writing your blog post, give examples.

Another great source of this kind is Quora. You can search for the best answers in your industry in Quora and transform them into a new blog post. There is a good chance you will get some helpful information and good feedback from your readers.

20. Use Social Proof to Back up Your Content

“Social proof” is a phenomenon where people think that how others are acting in a given situation is the right way to respond in a similar event.

Imagine you want to go to a restaurant and have dinner. You have the possibility to choose from a crowded restaurant with a waiting list and an empty restaurant. You probably think the second one has crappy food. The waiting list is proof that the first restaurant has good food, right? You’d chose the crowded one, wouldn’t you?

Psychologists name this behavior “social proof”. If there is a crowd, that means it is good. The more the people, the more it means something better must happen there, you’d think. Following the crowd is in our nature. It is a simpler decision.

You can attract your audience with the “social proof” technique if you make a blog post out of reviews for your product, have endorsement for your brand, use testimonials in an e-book, write a best practice post from your clients’ experience, write case studies from the data you extrapolated about your customers.

21. Make Your Content More Visually Interactive

Visual content includes infographics, videos, gifs, pictures, presentations. Images are a great asset because they are stored in our long-term memory. It’s not a secret that infographics are highly shareable.

70% of all your sensory receptors are in your eyes. Sources say it takes us less than 1/10 of a second to understand a visual scene.

The article’s cover comes first on the content. You should be very careful how it looks since it’s the first image the reader sees. Having puppies wearing boots might be captivating, but they are not always relevant.

Source: https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/9a/57/db/9a57dbd3367259a2db12a34a71cbcd0c.jpg

Along with a strong headline, the cover is a core element for boosting engagement, so make sure you chose wisely.

Get creative and combine the visuals to be interactive, to surprise the visitor and engage him and make him stay more on your site. For example, you could create an interactive how-to guide, or you can simply display unique information. Check the next screenshot to see an example:

Source: http://blog.thinglink.com/marketing/interactive-infographic-arsenal

If you hover over the plus sign (+) you can see a pop-up box with additional information.

Biz Brain created an interesting way of displaying information about “where does coffee came from”. It shows a journey from bean to cup through a fun and attractive infographic.

It gives the right amount of information without overwhelming the reader. You can scroll down the page to see the whole process.

It is one of the most detailed infographics I’ve seen. More than that, it offers an experience. The fact that is interactive gives you the feeling you take part in the whole process. In the end, you “receive” a cup of coffee. You engage in the act of planting the seed, harvesting, processing the beans, milling, exporting, inspecting, roasting, grinding and brewing.

It is an excellent way to captivate the reader and share useful information in a way he can remember. You can work with an agency or a freelancer if you want something more complicated or search for tools to help you create the desired visual impact.

More tips to create interactive content:

• make an interactive calendar to follow past and future events;
• have a virtual assistant for an online product or service right on your site;
• create an infographic from a how-to video;
• turn presentations into gifs;

• compile interviews into an e-book;
• upload customer’s videos about your product on your website;

22. Define the Purpose Behind Everything You Write

While the content is blooming and lots of marketers start to write for the sake of having news content on site, the internet becomes crowded. Don’t get me wrong, it is fine to have a big library of content as long as the information is useful, it has a purpose and answers pertinent questions. Don’t get lost in the pile of dull blogs and boring content.

Make a list of topics, research and see which one will bring more traffic, correlate with the trends and what your audience wants. After you’ve done the analysis you can make a plan/structure for your topic to cover it all. Then implement it. Start writing and always remember what you’ve promised in the headline. Your purpose is to bring arguments and examples, show case studies or other types of information that will confirm your affirmations.

23. Make Your Content Familiar to Resonate with Your Audience

Your content should provide value to the readers. What better way than make it personal? But what does personal mean?

Personal content can be written from your own experience. You can collect data and present it through case studies on the blog, convert your presentations into new articles. Below, you have an example of a SlideShare presentation turned into a blog post.

Another way to have personal content is by sharing information from a conference you’ve been to or follow up from a webinar you’ve organized. Beside that, you should use informal writing such as “don’t” instead of “do not” or use the first person pronoun: “We have the possibility to look at our analyzed site and make a conclusion”.

Conclusion

Writing has never been an easy job. Especially now when the internet is constantly changing and the readers are harder to attract on the site.

Think about the fact that you need to be convincing and express more in words to draw attention. People can be easily distracted if you don’t captivate them and keep them engaged. If you are using words that have more sway than others, you might have a positive change in their engagement. Following the “seductive” techniques we’ve talked until now, you’ll have a good change to get the results you’re expecting. Make sure they follow your brand guidelines.

Design your plan and try to implement it correctly. After that, always follow the results and your metrics to increase conversion rates.

The post 23 Rarely Used Copywriting Techniques to Create Fascinating Content appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

CONTENT OPTIMIZATION MISTAKES

1. Writing Poor Quality Content Won’t Rank Your Site Higher in SERP
2. Not Researching Your Niche and Keywords is Bad Practice
3. Optimizing for the Wrong Keywords Will Never Get You Results
4. Using Similar Content in the META Tags
5. Missing Title Tags and Meta Descriptions
6. Missing Alt Description for Image Optimization
7. Optimizing Just for Short Tail Keywords Won’t Bring You Traffic
8. Ignoring Local SEO Won’t Differentiate You from Your Competitors
9. Optimizing for Extra Long Tail Keywords with No Traffic
10. Leaving Title Tags Automated Won’t Help You to Increase Your CTR
11. Writing Short Form Content Won’t Build a Long-Term Relationship with Your Customers
12. Optimizing Multiple Pages for the Same Keyword – Content Cannibalization
13. Not Adding Keywords in the Heading Tags

TECHNICAL SEO ISSUES

14. Stopping Search Engines from Crawling Your Site
15. Deindexing Your Website Needs to Be Solved
16. Migrating Site without Using Redirects
17. Creating Loop Redirects Is Creating Bad User Experience
18. Canonicalizing Irrelevant URLs to Avoid Content Duplication
19. Blocking Content on CDNs Leads to Traffic Loss
20. Depending on Ajax & JavaScript to Feature Content on Websites
21. Having a Slow Website Speed Could Drastically Decrease Conversions
22. Creating a Flash Site Without a Redirect to the Html Version
23. Not Showing a 404 Error When It’s Supposed To
24. Not Using 301 Redirects Will Lead to Losing Link Juice
25. Compromising Content for an Appealing Design
26. Indexing Pages You Shouldn’t
27. Poorly Managing Your Sitelinks
28. Not Designing a Responsive (Mobile) Site
29. Having Annoying Newsletter Pop-Up on Every Page
30. Linking to Untrusted Sources Could Damage Your Link Profile
31. Having Multiple Broken Pages
32. Using Underscores in URLs
33. Including Query Parameters in URL Structure

BAD ADVICE & NOT REALISTIC EXPECTATIONS

34. Collaborating with an Unreliable and Dishonest SEO Company
35. Ignoring Recommendations from an SEO Company or Professional
36. Expecting Immediate Results Is Unrealistic
37. Not Tracking Your ROI/Analytics Data
38. Not Protecting Your Staging Environments
39. Missing Hreflang Tags
40. Not Having an HTTPS Based Site
41. Ignoring Social Elements Is Preventing Your Business from Having a Higher Audience
42. Neglecting Website Makeover & Website Maintenance
43. Not Using Canonical Tags

44. Not Registering Your Site with Webmaster Tools
45. Focus Only on Google and You Might Be Missing New Customers
46. Chasing PageRank Is Obsolete
47. Neglecting Search Engine Guidelines
48. Not Including a Blog in Your Website

1. Writing Poor Quality Content Won’t Rank Your Site Higher in SERP

The rules for collaborating with a dishonest SEO company apply when hiring an untrustworthy copywriter or buying content from who knows where.
 
How can you avoid this mistake?
 
Quality content might be a hard thing to achieve, as it requires work, just like other valuable practices. I mean some people are doing it, why can’t you find someone fair to work with? You must search for a copywriter on authorized sites, not a freelancer that you saw on a site with a high amount of commercial ads.

The relation between you and the SEO company must be based on trust. All the hard work will be rewarded, and you won’t risk getting penalized for black hat SEO techniques.
You need to get rid of all your poorly written content.

2. Not Researching Your Niche and Keywords is Bad Practice

Not researching your niche and not researching for keywords opportunities is not only an SEO mistake but also reflects a bad management practice. If you don’t know your niche, you might bring irrelevant visitors to your site and increase the bounce rate.
 
How can you avoid this mistake?
 
By searching and discovering your niche you will find out what its needs are. Therefore this will help you to do a deeper analysis to understand how to trigger the intent. After a rigorous understanding, you could search for keywords to bring them onto your website and finally make them convert.
 
Another important thing you need to do is to understand which are the keywords that sell and the ones that inform the user.
 
You could bring value to your keywords if they are chosen and optimized correctly.

 
On the web you can find lots of tools that can help you to choose the right keywords or get ideas for new keywords; the most used one is Keyword Planner offered by Google. You can spy on your competitors to see how they are doing and improve your business online by taking advantage of what they are missing. One way you can do that is by using Brand Mentions, a free tool designed to help you with competitor spying.

3. Optimizing for the Wrong Keywords Will Never Get You Results

Wrong keywords might be those that fall into another activity profile. For example, let’s say I sell toothpastes and I have a blog where I write weekly. On my blog, I have articles where I used keywords like “how to choose a toothpaste”, “toothpaste for sensitive teeth” and so on. At one moment I find some interesting news about toothpaste for dogs and I want to write an article about that, using “toothpaste for dogs” as a keyword. I must think twice if it’s appropriate. Perhaps, I shouldn’t as my audience wouldn’t be interested in that matter; or even if it were, it would probably apply to a very narrow niche.
 
Another type of wrong keywords could be those that are not connected at all with your website profile or the interest of the user. For example, you have a site about cosmetics and news about the Pokemon game is trending in the world wide web . I don’t recommend you to write about that just to receive traffic on your site because it’s irrelevant. I’m not saying don’t to take advantage of the trends, but you must be smart and see if you can do that because you could quickly become an epic fail and pollute your website.
 
You will confuse the visitors, and they might never come back to your site.
 
How can you avoid this mistake?
 
After you’ve come to know your niche and searched for the keywords, make sure they are relevant. Optimizing for the wrong keywords will only “bring” you traffic loss.

First, you need to think about the topic and then search for the best-suited keyword after you analyze very well the suggested keywords list (try Keyword Planner from Google for that). It is highly important to see if the keyword you chose is relevant for your users/customers. Is it something they might be interested in? Is it suitable for your content? You will never get the results you want if you target the wrong keyword.

4. Using Similar Content in the META Tags

Another common mistake is using similar content in the META Tags. These tags include meta titles, meta descriptions, and even meta keywords. It is hard for the search engines to choose what page to show from your website if you are using the same keyword or title. Remember that Google lists the results for your query in almost a second. Google might not show the result you want for that query. And another thing you should remember is that Google values uniqueness.
 
How can you avoid this mistake?
 
You should register your site with Webmaster Tools (know now as Google Search Console) to see the pages which have duplicate meta description, meta titles and this can help you to write different content on each page.

5. Missing Title Tags and Meta Descriptions

You should always write title tags and meta description otherwise, you miss being shown correctly in SERP and increase your CTR. You can lose traffic and ranking if you don’t optimize these two elements. They are crucial because if they are written correctly, you can persuade as many visitors as possible to enter your site. So little can do so much. So why not try to do something if it’s for your own good.
 
How can you avoid this mistake?
 
If you are using an open-source content management system such as WordPress or Blogger, you can install plugins to help you to optimize your content better. The most used one is SEO by Yoast, and it looks something like this:

If you have a site written using programming language, you should have HTML tags for titles, descriptions, and keywords.

6. Missing Alt Description for Image Optimization

Not having alt descriptions for images is an SEO mistake because you will lose substantial traffic from image search. And it also shows you act like a novice.
 
If you are using alt description, you can guide the search engines understand what is that picture about and “help” it to appear in the Image search for the right keyword.
 
Images have an important role on a page because they are visually more attractive and if they are properly optimized, they could have higher visibility than the content. You can see an example of this kind below. The first screenshot is for the query search, where you can see that “bran Schloss” is found on page 3 in Google.

The second screenshot is for the image search, where you can see that the picture for the same keyword “bran Schloss”, corresponding to the same site, is found above the fold.

 
The best practice would be to have a strong content, correctly optimized and supported by an optimized image. I encourage you to use the keyword you’d like to rank for in the name and alt description of your image.
 
How can you avoid this mistake?
 
You should include the alt description for every picture, and you can do that by simply add alt=”here you can write your alt text” to your image tag. This is an example:
 

 
If you have an account on WordPress or Blogger, it is much easier. Here is an example of how you can write your alt text in WordPress:

7. Optimizing Just for Short Tail Keywords Won’t Bring You Traffic

There are two types of keywords: short tail (1-2 words) that are usually broad keywords and long tail (more than 3) that are more specific.

 
If you have a site optimized just for short tail keywords, you might not get the traffic you want because the number of results for that query is vast. You shouldn’t use very specific keywords either because nobody might look for them.
 
How can you avoid this mistake?

You should search in the Keyword Planner for the best-fitted keyword for your type of content. Also, you can start typing the keyword in the search engines to the see the suggestions and the number of results for it.
 
Another thing you could do is spy on your competitors, see what keywords they are using and discover on what page they are ranking.
 
I understand that it is hard to find the right keywords, but if you do your job right, you’ll be thanking yourself later.

8. Ignoring Local SEO Won’t Differentiate You from Your Competitors

Why is ignoring local SEO a mistake you might ask? Well, when you or a friend of yours search for a restaurant, for example, don’t you look at the physical location or opening hours, or maybe a phone number to make a reservation. You can find on Google Maps all that information.
 
I searched for “restaurant in Boston” on Google and here’s how the first-page result looks like:
 

You can see that the first results are from Google Maps where you can choose from a list of restaurants, based on location, reviews of whatever choices you might have.
 
If you search for a particular place/restaurant/business you could find a lot of information right from Google, without having to make a single click on a URL. Here is an example of this kind for “Neptune Oyster”, a restaurant in Boston.

So yes, it is a mistake to ignore local SEO because you might lose an important quantity of customers in your physical store, restaurant or business and visitors on your site, ultimately.
 
How can you avoid this mistake?

It’s quite simple, despite what others say. You should create a Google My Business listing and fill out the information. Also, you can optimize your landing page with local SEO keywords within your title tag, H1 tag, URL, page content and image alt description.
 
Another best practice is to create accounts on Yelp and Tripadvisor to receive reviews. You can, also, search for other authority sites that offer local business listing.

9. Optimizing for Extra Long Tail Keywords with No Traffic

Remember what we’ve talked earlier about that type of keywords that are too specific. Well, here we are again with an extensive explanation. Let’s say you have a business and sell trips in Transylvania; you shouldn’t use keywords such as ”haunted hunyad castle tour transylvania”. They are too long, too specific and you can see in the Keyword Planner tool the query has almost no searches on Google.


 
How can you avoid this mistake?
 
Use Keyword Planner to find keywords that are relevant and have searches, so you can receive traffic on your site. In addition, you can search on Google for that specific keyword to see how many results it shows you.

10. Leaving Title Tags Automated Won’t Help You Increase your CTR

Automated Title Tags are those types of titles that are generated instantly after you wrote the title of your topic. You can change them for a more compact version of it. Title Tag is an essential element in the SEO world. Set it right and optimize it correctly.
 
How can you avoid this mistake?
 
For example, if you have a post titled ”Best Case Study of 2016: 10 Inspiring Tips to Help You to Start Writing Content Your Audience Love” you should change it to something like that: “10 Tips to Help You Write Content Your Audience Love”.
 
You can have an idea about how the first title will look in the SERP by checking the next picture:

This is the preview for the second title:

 

If you keep it up to 60 characters you are safe, it will appear nicely in the search results, and you won’t risk getting cut off because it doesn’t exceed the limit.

11. Writing Short Form ContentWon’t Build a Long-Term Relationship with Your Customers

If you write short content (maximum 400 words) with little information about a topic, it could be a mistake because you might lose quality links and traffic. We’ve made a study on this exact matter, to see which type of content ranks better: long or short. Except the fact that you might be placed on better ranks, the longer the content, the more you give them the feeling of trust and the more you can help them by answering their questions.

How can you avoid this mistake?
 
The most important thing is to create useful and long form content to say everything you know about that topic. You must find out how long your content should be for your audience and keep it entertained.

12. Optimizing Multiple Pages for the Same Keyword – content cannibalization

To someone who is an SEO novice, keyword cannibalization might happen. It is a mistake because you can confuse the Google bot, who might not choose the right piece of information to show in the search results.
 

Picture taken from https://d1avok0lzls2w.cloudfront.net/img_uploads/googlebot-confused.gif

How can you avoid this mistake?

You must be careful when you optimize your content. I encourage you to use a “rel=canonical element”. Also, you could try using SEO by Yoast to optimize your content because it tells you if you have chosen a keyword for that article and that it has been used once before so you can avoid keyword cannibalization.

13. Not Adding Keywords in the Heading Tags

This can also be a mistake because search engines make a connection between the content and the words written in the heading. H1 is the most important type of heading, and you should use it just once during a piece of content.

How can you avoid this mistake?
 
This is how HTML Headings look like:

And that is how you can see them:

You should add keywords in your heading tags whenever possible. It helps you to rank better, gain quality traffic on your site, and it is a sign of relevancy and good optimization. However, you must not abuse this practice.

14. Stopping Search Engines from Crawling Your Site

There could be cases when you accidentally stop your site from being crawled by the search engines because of a robots.txt error. It can happen when you launch a site and forget to remove its blocking. There are cases when Google decides to show your site even though there is a no index meta tag in the page’s HTML code.
 
Former Head of Spam Team, Matt Cutts, talks about this particular situation in a video. He says that the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) from California had a robots.txt file that blocked all the search engines. Google saw that a lot of people linked to this page with the anchor text “DMV” and when someone typed the query in the search results Google discovered that the site was relevant for the users. Therefore, the page appeared in the search results even though the page wasn’t crawled.

How can you avoid this mistake?
 
You need to check your robots.txt file to make sure it’s correct and, also, because most of these files include sitemap.xml that increase the speed of bots crawling.

15. Deindexing Your Website Needs to Be Solved

Usually, deindexing your site might happen when you’re updating your site and fail to place the no-index tag in the head of your site:
This is just an example:

 
How can you avoid this mistake?
 
You must be very careful to the changes that your site goes through. Make sure you check the elements of site code. Some tools can help you with that and show you what changes you’ve made. You can search for Versionista, OnWebChange or NetWatcher.

Photo taken from https://en.onpage.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/Post6.png

16. Migrating Site without Using Redirects

If done right, 301 redirects have the ability to solve some big problems for a site. They offer an elegant design instead of an obsolete one, have a better user experience and most important, keep the link juice.
 

Photo taken from https://d1avok0lzls2w.cloudfront.net/uploads/blog/51be0e7b259228.02082021.jpg

And yes, it’s a mistake if you want to migrate your site and don’t use redirects because you’ll lose your visitors and all the link juice.

How can you avoid this mistake?
 
You need to check all the URLs that are redirected. You can do that by accessing your server. Verify the report, download the excel and look after the URLs using VLOOKUP function.

17. Creating Loop Redirects Is Creating Bad User Experience

Having a loop redirect can happen if it is a server configuration issue and a page has multiple redirections. This issue can appear in browser with this message “Error 310 (net::ERR_TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS): there were too many redirects”.
 

Photo taken from http://www.tipsnext.com/images/2013/05/fix-chrome-error-310.jpg

 
How can you avoid this mistake?
 

One solution, also suggested by Google, is to delete cookies. Another solution is to check your .htaccess file, because if you don’t keep this file clean, it might crush your website really bad. You should look for too many redirecting codes and try to clean the file.

18. Canonicalizing Irrelevant URLs to Avoid Content Duplication

Canonicalization is a hard word to pronounce, but a practice not so hard to use. If you have a business about cats and your site is thecat.com, but also www.thecat.com, www.thecat.com/ you need to help Google understand which is the original content with you rel=canonical tag. Not using the tag you might encounter, involuntarily, content duplication.
 

Photo taken from http://www.shoutmeloud.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/canonical-banner.jpg

 
How can you avoid this mistake?
 
You can easily step out the content duplication area by using this code for every version of your website URL to redirect them to the original site.
 

Photo taken from https://hue-marketing.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Canonical-issues-1.png

Because search engines rely on offering better user experience, they rarely show two versions of the same website in the search results. There might be those particular cases when you search for a query, and the search engines show maximum two results that send you to the same website. That happens ONLY when the site has high authority, and it’s relevant to your query (but that only the search engines could decide based on their algorithm).

19. Blocking Content on CDNs Leads to Traffic Loss

CDN stands for Content Delivery Networks. We must not forget that using CDN improves the speed of a site. But, if it’s not properly implemented you might risk blocking the crawling of the subdomains entirely.
 
Nowadays, it’s common for organizations to block domains or IPs. We live in a world that changes a lot from day to day, and there are political, geographical, cultural boundaries and much more. But, if you blocked content on CDN and didn’t want to, you will lose traffic.
 
How can you avoid this mistake?
 
To avoid this mistake, you should be careful and use the SEO setting offered by CDNs and include the canonical tag to the duplicated files through CDNs’ different domains. If you want to be sure if the Googlebot can access the files you can use the feature “Fetch as Google” from Google Console.

20. Depending on Ajax & JavaScript to Feature Content on Websites

Using AJAX to display content was a big hit back in the days, but in 2015 Google announced that it would no longer support the AJAX crawling scheme because it uses too many resources to render the websites and it was a challenging practice. It’s not a question whether Google can or cannot crawl the sites using AJAX or JavaScript, but there is a slight possibility it will show HTMLs with no content. It will look something like that:

Depending on AJAX & JavaScript to feature content on a website is not necessarily a mistake, but it shows you are not offering good user-experience and it’s an example of bad practice.
 
How can you avoid this mistake?
 
You should rely on HTML and not on scripts. Google suggests you use the principles of progressive enhancement to built content:

If you’re starting from scratch, one good approach is to build your site’s structure and navigation using only HTML. Then, once you have the site’s pages, links, and content in place, you can spice up the appearance and interface with AJAX. Googlebot will be happy looking at the HTML, while users with modern browsers can enjoy your AJAX bonuses.
 
Of course, you will likely have links requiring JavaScript for AJAX functionality, so here’s a way to help AJAX and static links coexist: When creating your links, format them so they’ll offer a static link as well as calling a JavaScript function. That way you’ll have the AJAX functionality for JavaScript users, while non-JavaScript users can ignore the script and follow the link.

For example:

21. Having a Slow Website Speed Could Drastically Decrease Conversions

Having a slow website speed is a mistake because you will create a bad user experience which will lead to losing traffic and eventually to killing conversions. The reasons why you have a slow site speed could be:

• not optimized images;
• not minifying CSS and JavaScript files;
• not reducing server response time;
• using plugins;
• fail of making pages to tell browser not to cache.

How can you avoid this mistake?
 
Here are some solutions for the reasons mentioned before:

• compress your images;
• minify CSS and JavaScripts files;
• avoid plugins to prevent content to be visible on other platforms.

You can check if your site is having a slow speed if you analyze it with the GoogleSpeed Tool. Below you have a screenshot to see how the report looks like.

 
You have a score for both mobile and desktop including specific solutions and recommendations to improve the speed and the user experience.

22. Creating a Flash Site Without a Redirect to the Html Version

Just like Ajax & JavaScript, Flash content might have an appealing design, but it’s difficult for search engines to render and show it correctly because a spider can’t read that type of content and therefore can’t index it. It’s a mistake to use the flash content if you don’t provide an HTML version.

Flash is good for enhancing a story, but not for telling it.

(http://www.webconfs.com/)

How can you avoid this mistake?
 
If you insist on using flash to create your content, the right way to do it would be to build an HTML version. A tool that helps you to optimize flash content is SWFObject 2.0.

23. Not Showing a 404 Error When It Supposed To

Google checks if your site has a 404 page and encourages you to create useful 404 pages. It’s important to return a 404 status code to respond to the request and telling it that the page cannot be found.

Since forever, the internet has changed regularly. So has your business. From the beginning of a site until the version it is today it has suffered changes and some URLs may have too, or maybe they were written with mistakes somewhere on the web. Imagine that when you click on that type of link it shows a standard 404 Error without any support to find what you searched for. Something like the example shown below:
  
How can you avoid this mistake?
 
Wouldn’t it be great if you or someone who is a specialist redesigned it to have a pleasant appearance and to be in harmony with the whole site/brand? It ‘s nice to have a custom 404 page because it can minimize bounce rate. A personalized 404 page could look something like this:

24. Not Using 301 Redirects Will Lead to Losing Link Juice

Remember what we’ve said about the importance of the redirect when you migrate your website? That rule applies to all the URLs that you change. The visitors will go to a 404 page if you don’t redirect them and it’s a pity to lose them if you have a choice not to.
 
Here is a simpler way to understand how 301 works:

 
How can you avoid this mistake?
 
Depending on your ISP you can find instructions for every situation you are in by reviewing these methods to implement URL Redirection via code and htaccess redirect.

Picture taken from https://www.gomage.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/img_GoMage_301_302_redirects.png

If you have a 302 Redirect set, the code tells everyone (bots and visitors) to pass from page A to page B, but without the link juice. If you have a 301 Redirect, it moves the visitors, the bots, and the link juice permanently. The 301 redirect must be on the original server to receive the request and send everyone to the new location.

25. Compromising Content for an Appealing Design

There are lots of people who value design more than content. Of course, the look is an important aspect, but you shouldn’t compensate it with content. You must bear in mind that there are people that might not trust your site if it has an ugly design. Even worse, you might have a website with bad user experience. The content is what brings your visitors on the site. If you have a great design, maybe you used flash content just to make it more captivating and make it more beautiful, but the site loads very slowly, sometimes the content isn’t displayed as it was designed to, that’s not very appealing, isn’t it?
 
How can you avoid this mistake?
 
The first thing you should do is not to compensate. If a beautiful design comes with lots of problems, such as slow website speed, bad user experience, HTMLs with no content and so on don’t accept it as it is.

The second thing you should do is to have an appealing content. Afterward, try to make a nice design for your site. Collaborate with a designer that knows what you want and what’s best for you and your site.

26. Indexing Pages You Shouldn’t

Maybe you had pages such as a thank you page, privacy policy page or Terms & Conditions page that you didn’t want a user to enter and it got indexed.
 
Also, there are pages that have no clicks and bring no value and therefore damage the ranking of the whole website.
 
How can you avoid this mistake?
 

First, you need to check the indexed pages from your website using Webmaster Tools or Google Console, as you can find it now. Then you should identify which pages have low rankings and are underperforming and in the end you need to no-index them. You can do that by implementing a page level Meta Robots tag and placing tag. But be very careful not to push the limits. This is the whole procedure to prune your own content.

27. Poorly Managing Your Sitelinks

If you don’t have information about your business and contact details on your site you won’t have sitelinks on Google. On the contrary, if you have them and don’t add information to make them more relevant you risk giving bad user experience to your visitors. This is an example of poorly managed sitelinks:
 

Photo taken from https://media.licdn.com/mpr/mpr/shrinknp_800_800/p/7/005/0b2/207/0991f09.png

How can you avoid this mistake?
 
Even though Google doesn’t say how to get sitelinks, it encourages you to have an account on Google My Business just to be more visible and maybe receive sitelinks.

 
The Search Console Support Team says that you could avoid poorly managing your site links. Here’s what you could do:

There are best practices you can follow, however, to improve the quality of your site links. For example, for your site’s internal links, make sure you use anchor text and alt text that’s informative, compact, and avoids repetition.

28. Not Designing a Responsive (Mobile) Site

Having a website that is not mobile-friendly could easily lead to traffic loss or to a high bounce rate because people don’t waste time on zooming in and out. Google took action regarding sites that have a mobile version through the Mobilegeddon algorithm update. Therefore, mobile friendly is now a must if you want your website to be visible in rankings.

Picture take from https://developers.google.com/webmasters/mobile-sites/imgs/mobile-seo/viewport.png

 
How can you avoid this mistake?
 

You can find lots of methods to make your site more mobile friendly. The easiest way would be to have a site on a WordPress or Blogger platform because they already come with a mobile friendly design. But if you want something personalized you should seek the guide for every software your site is built on.
 
For more recommendations on how to do this you can check Google Developers .

29. Having Annoying Newsletter Pop-Up on Every Page

Having annoying newsletters pop-up on every page proves that your site has bad user experience. Also, it is a mistake if you have a pop-up right after a user enters the site. Timing is crucial if you are using pop-ups. Not only can you become irritating very easily, but you could also make them never come back to your site.

On the contrary, did you know that 20-70% of website visitors will provide their contact details when ‘good pop-ups’ are used?
 

How can you avoid this mistake?
 
To prevent this mistake, you need to check the code and see the triggers for that pop-up. Secondly, you need to pay attention to the timing of your pop-ups.
Remember that “less is more.”

30. Linking to Untrusted Sources Could Damage Your Link Profile

Linking to untrusted sources is a shameful SEO mistake. It could happen to you if you don’t have SEO experience or if, you collaborated with dishonest SEO companies that sold you blind promises or used black hat techniques.
 
How can you avoid this mistake?
 
Although the internet is a big world and you might never know for sure which sites are bad and which aren’t, you can find tools to help you with that. However they are not 100% percent accurate.
 

If you have outbound links, you must place the rel=nofollow tag so that you won’t pass the link juice from a questionable site or SEOed site or a site with problems in general. If you already have inbound links from questionable sources, you could review and check them by using the Unnatural Links Navigator feature from the cognitiveSEO tool.
 
From now on you should follow Google’s Guidelines to stay on the White Hat SEO side so that you won’t get into trouble.

31. Having Multiple Broken Pages

Having multiple broken pages is a sign of bad user experience and Google might not treat your website very well. A site may be losing traffic and rankings because of the broken pages.
 
You can check if you have broken pages by using cognitiveSEO’s explorer tool. By using it you can see the estimated lost link juice. Below is an example of a very large site with multiple broken pages and link juice lost from million of links.

How can you avoid this mistake?
 
You should either repair or redirect the pages with the 404 error. But first, you need to see what content used be on that pages. Maybe it was the URL for a product you don’t longer sell or maybe you’ve done some changes to your site, and some URLs suffered.

32. Using Underscores in URLs

Using underscores in the URLs is a mistake because it is harder for crawlers to understand what that URL is about. It is a bad practice, it doesn’t follow Google’s guidelines and it shows you’re not trying to perform better and bring improvements to your site. Also, it might not be very “readable” to humans.
 
How can you avoid this mistake?
 

If we follow the recommendation from Google’s guidelines about the URL structure, we should use hyphens (-) instead or underscores (_). Also, Google says we should use punctuation to help it understand what that URL is about. For example, it is better to have https://www.example.com/blue-shirt.html than https://www.example.com/blue-shirt.html.

33. Including Query Parameters in URL Structure

In the next picture you can see an example of a URL with query parameters:
 

Photo taken from http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-4ZilHEohMHE/Vpot9PAXBvI/AAAAAAAADE8/_31afn0kcRU/s1600/url-structure-query-parameter-2.jpg

The almighty Google recommends to keep the URL structure simple, and yes including query parameters in the URL is a mistake, a bad practice. The reason is offered by the Search Console Support Team:

Googlebot may consume much more bandwidth than necessary, or may be unable to completely index all the content on your site.

Not only is it harder for the Googlebot to find out what a URL with query parameter is about, but so it is for the visitors. Below you can see an example of this kind.
 

Photo taken from: https://d1avok0lzls2w.cloudfront.net/uploads/blog/54db04aa21cb37.56779977.gif

How can you avoid this mistake?
 
In order to improve the readability of a URL, you must understand what the scales are.
 

Photo taken from: https://d1avok0lzls2w.cloudfront.net/uploads/blog/54daf2683e1285.94585673.gif

Consider blocking the URLs with dynamic queries. Create a robots.txt file to help Googlebot to block the pages that have this kind of problem. Then check to see if you have broken pages and redirect them. Make sure you follow Google’s Webmaster Guidelines to stay on track.

34.Collaborating with an Unreliable and Dishonest SEO Company

Mistakes like hiring an inappropriate SEO company never go out of style (for those who practice it). We even wrote an article about this. In the online medium, you can find lots and lots of shady companies that are offering SEO services at low prices or high prices and promise to rank your site number 1 in no time. Unfortunately, the owner of the site will lose time and money for practices that will only damage his site. An example of unnatural link profile generated from the “work” of a dishonest SEO company could be seen in the next picture:
 

How can you avoid this mistake?
 

Luckily, if I can say so, you can also find tools to monitor their activity and to see if they are doing a good job. The cognitiveSEO tool can help you out with this. You can see some important statistics in the Unnatural Links History chart and also in the Link Velocity chart and much more. In the latter, you can discover if you have an unnatural profile when there are different spikes on various time frames.

35. Ignoring Recommendations from an SEO Company or Professional

It’s a mistake to ignore recommendations from an SEO company of professional because their pieces of advice are concrete and will help your business to grow. Not to mention that’s why you hired them in the first place. They are specialists and know better how to make your site rank better, perform better.
 
If you have an in-house SEO and hire a company or professional in this area, this situation refers to you, too. There are times when you follow your in-house SEO recommendations, instead of following the ones you received from the specialist you hired and then complain you don’t see any results.
 
Matt Lacuesta, an SEO strategist at a marketing agency in Denver, makes a good point about the situation presented above.
 

How can you avoid this mistake?
 

You must accept that the SEO Company is there to help you. Then, you should talk about the recommendations and together find the better way to make them work. It’s ok to have an opinion and express your concerns but don’t start with a NO. It’s all about the attitude.

36. Expecting Immediate Results Is Unrealistic

We all want results, but expecting immediate results is just not possible. If you belong to this group of people, you need to change your attitude or quit because that’s not a healthy way of running a business or working for one. Even when you go to a restaurant, you need to wait for the food to come. You need to wait for almost for everything in life, for that matter. And some things require more time.
 
How can you avoid this mistake?
 
Understand that the rules of SEO always change, the internet is evolving, and so are the techniques and strategies for running SEO. If back in the days we were writing for the search engines to rank better, nowadays we write for the user and help him with answers; just like the next picture proves.
 

Photo taken from http://neilpatel.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/image01-18.png

37. Not Tracking Your ROI/Analytics Data

Let me paint you a picture. You write a relevant article for your business. You are super excited after you finish it and share it on Social Media and other platforms where you are connected. In the end, you don’t know how many people clicked on the link to read your article or what actions they took after entering your website. How could you know what kind of content works and not? Not tracking your analytics data and not having an account on Google Analytics is like you’re like driving with your eyes closed.
 
How can you avoid this mistake?
 
Consider signing up to Google Analytics so you can track your data, discover insights about your audience and its behavior on your site. You can see what content works better and brings higher traffic; find out who your audience is and see demographics, interests and geographic statistics; set goals to see the number of conversions and much more.

 
After you signed up to Google Analytics, you need to add the Analytics tracking code on your site. There are instructions about the proper way to install it. You can install the Tag Manager browser extension to verify if you’ve placed the code from Analytics correctly into your site. The code should always be in your theme’s header.php right after the tag. After you’ve set up the tracking code, you should receive statistics for your website.
 
A tip for the long run is to make an audit of your site from time to time to understand your audience better and to help you take actions based on your data.

38. Not Protecting Your Staging Environments

A staging environment is the last phase before production for final testing. In the next picture, you can visualize the main stages of a project. All scripts and procedures are configured in the staging environment. Therefore, protecting it is crucial.

Photo taken from https://devops.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/Picture1.png

 
How can you avoid this mistake?
 
There are multiple ways to protect your development sandbox. The first choice can be to have a robots.txt file to block search engines’ access to crawl it by using this code:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

The second choice could be to have the ‘noindex’ tag in the robots.txt:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /
Noindex: /

Another suggestion is to set a password with an .htaccess login and the last one is to have an IP address restriction by editing the .htaccess file:

order allow,deny
allow from 123.456.789.012
deny from all

39. Missing Hreflang Tags

The hreflang tag helps Google to show your site in the country (and language) of the visitor. So it is a mistake if you don’t use it. Check this example to understand better why it is so. Let’s say you have a business in France and a site in French, English and German. Your site doesn’t use hreflang and doesn’t show its content in the right language. If a visitor from Brazil who knows only Portuguese and English comes to your site, he might leave it immediately because it appears in French and he doesn’t understand a word.
 
How can you avoid this mistake?
 
You need to place the hreflang tag within your site in the head element. The code snippet looks like that:
 

If you have a site translated into multiple languages, you need to write the tag for each language using abbreviation. For English it is en, for French it is fr, for German it is de and so on.
 
Having the tag on your site will decrease the bounce rate, improve your conversions and increase the time spent by visitors on the site.

40. Not Having an HTTPS Based Site

HTTPS is an internet communication protocol used to protect the confidentiality of the visitor’s data (personal information). The abbreviation explains it very well: Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure. It’s a mistake if you don’t switch from HTTP to HTTPS because it might discourage your visitor when they need to make a payment through your site or send their personal information through a form.
 
How can you avoid this mistake?
 
Google encourages you to have an HTTPS based site because it offers 3 key layers of protection: encryption, data integrity, and authentication.

 
You need to install a security certificate on your server after you read the documentations and you know everything to need to in order to implement it. You should get your certification from a certificate authority who can offer you support. Then you should update your tags and all the content you need from the HTTP. The next step is to use redirects to the HTTPS. After that you should crawl your site with the HTTPS URLs to make sure you don’t have broken pages. Make sure you have a server that supports HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS).
 
All the instructions you need to take in order to make the change to HTTPS are here .

41. Ignoring Social Elements Is Preventing Your Business from Having a Higher Audience

A couple of months ago we wrote on article of the influence of social signals in rankings (http://cognitiveseo.com/blog/11903/social-signals-seo-influence/) Ignoring the social signals is a mistake because you could lose traffic and ranks and who likes that? Besides, having social presence you will prove you have a good reputation and gain recognition and visibility. You can promote your content much faster and reach to your audience easily.
 
How can you avoid this mistake?
 
You can place Social Media icons on your site to make the content easily shared on various platforms. They can be located to the left of the article or the bottom or on the top, depending on they way your site is structured. This is an example of social buttons within the content:

You can also find social icons in the footer of the website so you can easily connect with the brand and explore its Facebook or Twitter page or any other page. This is an example of footer social icons:
 

 
You don’t need to make an account for every Social Media channel; you can choose what would be best for your business. You can start with 2 or 3 to see what’s working and then decide if you continue with those based on your results and engagement and then add another account, drop another. If you have a big team, you can afford to make multiple accounts if your business allows you to.
 

Another thing I encourage you to do is to look at your competitors and see what they are using. Be careful with what you are communicating on those pages because each one of them can be used for a particular type of content. Choose your tone, select the language you will communicate with your audience, so they understand your messages, join groups to share content and bring people to your page, talk with the people that leave comments and take advantage of trends to engage them.

42. Neglecting Website Makeover & Website Maintenance

If you neglect your website and fail to keep it clean, without errors, broken pages and other bad user experiences you might lose an important part of your visitors. It proves you don’t care about your site and therefore your audience and you don’t want to be better than your competitors. I bet you don’t want a site similar to the one from the next picture, would you?
 

stevepenny.com

In the screenshot presented above you can see that all the text is in the left side, leaving more than half of the screen black. You can’t understand what it is written on the site, the font is too smaller and you can easily lose your interest in reading all that information.
 
The good part of the website maintenance is to see what isn’t performing well, what bugs you should take care of, the broken pages you’ve collected and so on. The part that’s not so pretty is the time you need to take care of this issues. If you care about your business, you shouldn’t think “This is fine as it is. If it worked ok until now, it will come from now on, too. Why should I bother if the money comes?” Well, if the money comes now, who says it will until you get old? Maybe in the future, you won’t have the time and resources to correct the mistakes that have gathered over the years.
 
How can you avoid this mistake?
 

You can make an SEO audit to see which are the things that need to be improved. There are tools to help you with that. One of them is offered by cognitiveSEO. Besides the things you can do with the tools you need to evaluate the design of your site whether it’s user-friendly or not (if it looks old you need to change it). Also, you can spy on your competitors and see how their site looks like and what you can do better than them.

43. Not Using Canonical Tags

Not using a canonical tag will lead to duplicate content and it could easily fall into a black hat SEO technique. If you have a site about socks and it’s called sockssocks.com and www.sockssocks.com is also yours, and so is sockssocks.com/index.html or www.sockssocks.com/index.html you should use the rel=canonical tag.
 
There are indeed cases when the tag is mistakenly placed in the . Make sure it’s not the case for you by looking at the page source. If it’s in another place except for the head, it won’t be taken into consideration.
 
How can you avoid this mistake?
 
You should use the rel=canonical tag to give a hint to Google to know that the sites the are one and the same. This is the code to set the URL you mark as canonical:

 

It is possible to have only one canonical URL for each page so be careful you have only one. If not, the tag will be ignored. Something else you should know is to include the tag in the of the page or in the HTTP header. Another thing you should do is to make sure the rel=canonical URL is shown in search results and not in the duplicate URL.

44. Not Registering Your Site with Webmaster Tools

It’s a mistake if you haven’t registered your site with Webmaster Tools because you can’t receive information about your site. Google and Bing have created these types of tools for webmasters to improve their site’s performance and usability. It doesn’t cost you anything to have an account on these platforms and it is an easy way to receive suggestions. You need to know that Webmaster and Analytics go hand in hand.

Marketing without data is like driving with your eyes closed.
Dan Zarrella

How can you avoid this mistake?
 
For registering your site with Google Console you can use the recommended method and these are the steps you need to follow:

• Log in with an email address on Google
• Add a property in Google Console
• Enter your site, let’s say my site is http://www.example.com/
• A new page will open with the instructions for site verification
• Download the HTML file which is shown there. It looks something like that [googlea000aa00aa0aaaaa.html]
• Load the file in your site, http://www.example.com
• Confirm you’ve successfully uploaded the file by visiting http://www.example.com/googlea000aa00aa0aaaaa.html from your browser
• Click Verify

You have an alternate method where you can choose to add an HTML tag on your site, to sign to your domain name provider, to use your Google Analytics or Google Tag Manager account.
 
The easiest way is to add an HTML tag. You will receive a snippet of code that you need to place in the section, before . If you are using WordPress or Blogger, it is pretty simple. You go in the Editor Area and look for the header section on the right. After you inserted the tag and updated the file, you need to go back in the Webmaster Tool and click on verify. If this message appears “Congratulations, you have successfully verified the ownership of https://example.com” then you are ok, if not it means you didn’t copy the tag where you should have.
 
For registering with Bing Webmaster Tool you need to sign up with an outlook email account and follow these steps:

• Add your site www.example.com
• You will receive the instructions for this in your account
• Click on Verify

There are three ways you could register your website to Bing Webmaster Tool:

• Submit sitemap to Bing
• Insert the tag you receive in your default webpage in the section
• Add CNAME record to DNS

The easiest one is to add the HTML tag, following the instruction I gave for inserting the tag for Google Console.

45. Focus Only on Google And You Might Be Missing New Customers

It’s a mistake if you are focusing only on Google because your audience might come from Yahoo and Bing, also, even though Google is used by a high number of people. Maybe your visitor could use Bing on desktop and Google on mobile; you may never know if you don’t search and look for opportunities.

 
How can you avoid this mistake?
 
You can register your site in the Bing Webmaster Tool, sign up for Bing Ads to connect with leads, create online ads with AOL advertising and so on.

46. Chasing PageRank Is Obsolete

It’s a mistake to chase PageRank because, since April 15, 2016, Google removed the PageRank score from the Google Toolbars. It took almost two years for Google to take this decision. The PageRank score was useless because it hadn’t been updated for a long, long time.
 
How can you avoid this mistake?
 

Focus on all the suggestions mentioned above to make your site better, follow Google’s Guidelines to make things right, stay away from the black hat techniques, accept and implement the recommendations from SEO companies and specialists (if you’re working with any).

47. Neglecting Search Engine Guidelines

If you are one of those who is neglecting the search engine guidelines you need to stop and listen to the specialists because they want to make your site better. SEO rookies tend to make this error.
 
You can see that for every mistake I told you until now there is a small line between good and bad and without even noticing you could make an SEO mistake. The right answer for these mistakes stays in the Search engines’ Guidelines.
 
How can you avoid this mistake?
 

If you aren’t familiar with the guidelines, you need to read and understand them in order not to fall into the wrong practice. Check the Google Support page or the Bing one and choose what topic you want, follow the answers to your questions, read the documentation.

48. Not Including a Blog in Your Website

Although not a mistake in itself, not having a blog could lower your SEO efforts. A blog is an easy way to talk from a personal side and show there is a person behind the brand/site/business. You can talk with your visitors, answer their questions and build a relationship with them in order to trust your business.
 
How can you avoid this mistake?
 

You can connect with WordPress or Blogger to easily create a blog and connect it to your current site. You can choose to customize a template to be brand aligned, you can make your own topics/categories, you can create profiles for multiples authors, you can track the analytics if you’re connected with a tool, you can be present in the blogosphere, you can create blogging campaigns, you can easily create new content to let Google know you are doing your job right.

CONCLUSION

Mistakes can happen to anyone, but make sure you notice and correct them. You can correct them if you are permanently monitoring your website; if you respect the guidelines; if you stick to the white hat SEO techniques; if you’re thinking in SEO terms; if you’re looking outside your site – in the web 2.0 world, in the competitors’ garden, at the trends, news and many other places to inspire you. Lots of ifs to make sure you’re on the right track.

The post 48 Fatal SEO Mistakes to Avoid Weakening Your Rankings appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

Using the proper techniques to rank and to get organic traffic can be hard, but it’s the best thing to do. Therefore, try to not fall in the trap of following the next black hat/shady SEO techniques:

I. WEBSITE OVER-OPTIMIZATION

1. Keyword Stuffing – Writing Thin Content or Using Keyword Stuffing Gets You Penalized by Google Panda
2. Over-Optimized Alt Description – Practice the Keyword Stuffing in Your Alt Description Image
3. Commercial Anchor Text on Internal Pages – Using Keyword-Rich Anchor Texts for Internal Links
4. Irrelevant Keywords – Abusing Irrelevant Keywords Just to Rank Will Damage Your CTR
5. Linking Over-Optimization – Trying to Over-Optimize the Inbound Links Will Ruin Your Link Profile
6. Hidden/ Invisible Text and Links – Hiding Links and Text or Writing Tiny Text for the Sole Purpose to Build Links
7. HTML Heading Over-Optimization – Using Multiple H1s on a Page

II. CONTENT SCAMS

8. Copied Content – Writing Copied Content Will Hamper Your Ranking
9. Content Automation – Using Automated Ways to Generate Content
10. Bait and Switch – Fraudulently Using the Bait and Switch Technique to Trick Google
11. Article Spinning – Crafting Manual or Automated Article Spinning
12. Scraped Content – Hatching Scraped Content Is Not Only Forbidden but Also Illegal
13. Cloaking – Using Cloaking Violates Google Guidelines, and You Risk Getting Penalized by Google Penguin
14. Malicious Active Content – Building up Pages with Malicious Behavior
15. Clickbait – Fabricating Deceptive Headlines Will Decrease Your CTR

III. LINK MANIPULATION

16. Web Rings – Building Web Rings to Get Traffic from Related Websites
17. Guest Post Spam – Unrelated Guest Blogging Just to Generate Links
18. Link Farm – Manipulating Your Link Profile by Increasing the Number of Inbound Links
19. Linkbait and Switch – Revitalize Your Content into a Commercial One Using Linkbait and Switch Method
20. Buying Reviews with Links by Offering “Free” Products – Manipulating the Practice of Sending Free Products in Exchange for Reviews with Links
21. Link Exchange – Excessive Link Exchange Is Considered a Link Scheme and It Won’t Let Your Site Appear in SERP
22. Blog Comment Spam – Comment Spamming to Get a Large Number of Backlinks Easily
23. Shady Redirects – Using 301 Redirect with Link Exchange
24. Commercial Anchor Text Keywords – Using Less or Not at All Non-Branded Keywords
25. Spammy Footer Links – Loading the Footer of Your Website with Links Will Only Get You a Large Number of Unnatural Links

IV. PAID LINKS

26. Link Selling – Selling Links Will De-Index Your Website and Cut Your Traffic to Half
27. Buying Links – Stop Buying Links to Receive Link Juice
28. Paid Advertorials – Paying for Advertorials to Pass Authority
29. Directory Listing – Registering and/or Buying Placements on Low-Quality Directories

V. SERP SPAM

30. Parasite Hosting – Setting up a Parasite Hosting to Take Advantage of the Authoritative Domains from Google
31. Google Bombing – Influencing the Rank of a Page by Artificially Increasing the Number of Pages That Link to It and the Anchor Texts Used
32. Doorway Pages or Gateway Pages – Using Doorway Pages or Gateway Pages to Rank Higher in SERP
33. Rich Snippet Markup Spam – Creating Irrelevant Rich Snippets Markup
34. Automated Google Queries – Sending Automated Google Queries

VI. CROOKED WEBSITES

35. Mirror Sites – Designing Mirror Sites to Increase Your Rankings
36. Private Blog Networks – Creating Blogs to Generate Link Juice
37. Typosquatting or URL Hijacking – Putting Your Reputation and Brand at Risk of Facing Cybercrime by Using Typosquatting or URL Hijacking
38. Toxic Sites – Having Links on Toxic Sites Hurts Your Link Profile

VII. ILLEGAL WAYS TO MAKE MONEY

39. Cybersquatting or Domain Squatting – Registering Domains Similar to a Trademark or Business for the Sole Purpose of Getting Monetary Benefits
40. Cookie Stuffing or Cookie Dropping – Making Cookie Stuffing Is an Illegal Practice

VIII. VICIOUS TACTICS

41. Negative SEO – Falsely Reporting Your Competitors to Get Them Penalized
42. TrackBack Spam – Improperly Use the TrackBack Feature to Get Visitors on Your Site
43. Referrer Spam – Polluting a Site with Fake Statistical Data as a Result of Referral Spam Technique
44. Social Network Spam – Sending an Enormous List of Irrelevant Links in the Social Network

I. WEBSITE OVER-OPTIMIZATION

1. Keyword Stuffing

Keyword stuffing is an old technique that had its moment of glory. It was highly popular before the 2000s, until Google started noticing that content with a great keyword density isn’t relevant to the user.
 
For example, if you are the manager of a company that sells chips and somebody asks you if you have chocolate chips, I bet you don’t answer to them “We do have chocolate chips. Our best selling product are the chocolate chips because these chocolate chips have better taste than our simple chips and our customers love chocolate, so chocolate chips will be a better decision. Try chocolate chips.” You sound like a crazy person if you talk like that. I mean, who can actually talk like that? Ever?
 
Repeatedly using a keyword in an article or a small piece of text – is like giving a definition of a word by using the same word over and over again. It’s not natural and healthy, nor unique. It’s bad user-experience and, worst of all, it will get you penalized by Panda Google Algorithm for low-quality content. It’s better to use expressions and write like you’d be talking to someone because the big G values more the content that is written for people than SERPs. But you already knew that, so why not put it into practice?
 
What do you think about the next page?

Does it look natural to you? I bet that you can find a range of online games on the site, but honestly, you don’t need to write it a thousand times to understand that.
 
And since we’ve talked about Google Panda we should see what impact can keyword stuffing can have on several sites.  The website presented below is one affected by this algorithm:
 

www.webopedia.com

Well, that might happen if you stuff your site with keywords; you and your site will suffer alike.

2. Over-Optimized Alt Description

The story goes on with image alt descriptions that are over-optimized. A little trickier than keyword stuffing, this technique is found by search engine crawlers even though you burden your images with a lousy number of keywords instead of your text (content). Ever if you can’t see them, it doesn’t mean it’s not that harmful.
 
Let’s make a thing clear: It is recommended to add images to your articles to make them more approachable. More importantly, you should write alt descriptions to your images, but don’t abuse it.

3. Commercial Anchor Text on Internal Pages

If you read #1 and #2 you can see it is easy to get carried away from the right path – white hat technique. Using keyword-rich anchor for internal links is a clear sign of over-optimized website or overly SEOed, and it will look exactly like this unnatural smiley face.

You need to keep your site neat and tidy. For example, you are writing an article on your blog about your beautiful trip to Barcelona and want to recommend a tour you sell on your site.
 
Recommended: If you’d like to have an amazing trip to Barcelona, you should check out our amazing 6 day trip to Barcelona with a free travel insurance.
 
Not recommended: If you’d like to visit Barcelona, we have a range of tours and activities; just check them all out at Barcelona For You.
 
Google has come with a “solution” for those who are looking for the easy way to rank in the top; it’s called penalty. Some sites have qualitative content but don’t rank so well and some sites rank better, but have thin, over-optimized content.
 
You might wonder which of the above cases is better. Te professionals think that means unique content written for the user and not for search engines and which has meaningful, relevant information. But don’t take our word for it, look at the examples below to see the rankings. In the screenshot below, you can find a site which provides a good user-experience.

www.costume-works.com

The second example from the screenshot below looks like an over-optimized site:

www.weddingdresstrend.com

Now you see it’s not a myth anymore that using keyword-rich anchor texts for internal links to over-optimize your website can bring you a “pretty” penalization from Google.

4. Irrelevant Keywords

Another “joy” of the over-optimization game is taking abuse of irrelevant keywords just to rank. Just to make myself clear let’s say you like to play poker, but we know you are bluffing, just like your visitors will do when they enter your site, and they will run like bats out of hell. And your CTR will suffer.
 
Gaining traffic by using lots of unnecessary keywords to rank won’t work. Cheating, like in every relation, is punished, and Google will take you/your site down.
 
I get that you have plenty of topics in your niche, but stay there, don’t jump the garden to your neighbor. The dog will bite you! You might lose users that could have become clients, and they will buy from your competitors. That happened just because you weren’t honest with them.
 

Michael Panuthos, SEO and SEM specialist says that:

Sometimes your SEO specialist is so eager to get you on the first page of Google, he or she will neglect relevancy. If your SEO specialist gets you on the first page of Google for irrelevant keywords then you may not receive traffic. Relevancy is key.

5. Linking Over-Optimization

Webmasters find all kinds of scammy ways of ranking. This black hat SEO technique happens when you forcefully place internal links on the homepage for pages like “About us”, “Contact us”, “Products” and so on. It’s not only unpractical but also useless because those pages have a lot of traffic as they are, and it’s better to have deep links to strengthen your internal links.

6. Hidden/Invisible Text and Links

Hiding links and text for the sole purpose of building links comes in different sizes and shapes. Google has discovered all schemes: hiding text or links using CSS to position text off-screen, using the same color font as the background, setting font size to 0 or hiding a link to a single character.

You would be surprised, but novices still use this ancient deceiving technique.

Picture taken from http://cdn.elite-strategies.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/blackhat-seo-hidden-or-invisible-text.gif

Not all hidden text and links are bad for your site. For example, using a descriptive image alt description, a script for Java or code for Flash files is acceptable. The last two technologies will help improve the experience of your site with the search engines.

7. HTML Heading Over-Optimizing

Using multiple H1s on a page is a widely spread tactic to influence on-site SEO. Abusing this black hat technique makes your site look stuffed.

Take for example the site below. It exploits the use of headings and keyword “plumber”.

Never-the-less, I encourage you to write headlines, but take in mind that you should always have only one H1, and H2, H3, etc. just when it’s necessary.

II. CONTENT SCAMS

8. Copied Content

Copied content is a type of content that appears on more than one site. Also, it might be content stolen from other places (URLs). It is only giving a hard time to search engines to choose from all the duplicate content, and show the correct piece of information – which usually happens, and Google is showing the original content in SERPs. That because it can’t show duplicate content – it’s not relevant to the user.
 
Oh, the good old days of SEO when copied content wouldn’t damage your site so bad! Nowadays, using this technique will hamper your ranking in a blink of an eye. Besides that, you might put your site at high risk of getting penalized by Google Panda.

A safe way that is not considered duplicate content is using citation for the information you gather from external sources.

Before you submit your content online and make it public you should check it to see if it’s plagiarism free.

9. Content Automation

Content automation means using tools or scripts to generate content automatically and publish it on your site without any effort from your side. The automated content is written with no intent for the user, and doesn’t have any format or style whatsoever, without pictures, HTML headings, paragraph spacing, alignment and so on.
 
Maybe you would think it’s a good idea in the short term because you’ll have a site with a lot of content in no time and effort, but you start to experience significant rank loss, keyword stuffing and worst of all risk of getting blacklisted from the search engine.

There are plenty of tools to do the dirty work for you. But you’d better think of what the consequences will be before you act.
 
I can tell you a safe way of getting ideas to generate quality content. You can try BrandMentions to inspire you to write and generate organic traffic and rank. It is useful and fun to find and search for information or keywords and see what’s trending.

10. Bait and Switch

Bait and switch is a false way of changing your content just to a get a page to rank. The first step is to write a page for Google with a set of keywords, and after it ranks, the author changes it with another project or product. When users enter the site, they see something entirely different. This is indeed a crafty idea, and the person who came up with this technique was creative. This cheesy way of tricking Google might have worked well in the past but now it will get you banned and if you “hit the jackpot” you could be subject to a lawsuit.
 
In 2011, Groupon used ‘’Bait and Switch’ in Search Ads and was accused of running “false and misleading business and advertising acts” by a bus tour company in San Francisco. The keyword they used was “incline village snow play area”.
But when you clicked on the link you would see this on the site:

This is another example of a page that used the bait and switch technique:

Bitcoinspot.nl took action and ranked for the keyword “download games”, but the site is about Bitcoin.

11. Article Spinning

It is the act of crafting a (manual or automated) way of rewriting content just to escape the ”duplicate content” – umbrella and to generate “new” content to look good in front of the search engines. It’s considered black hat because you don’t bring any value and relevant information for the user. If you discovered something new about a topic you already covered in an article, you could just write the new piece of information as an update. This way you can help that article rank better and give it a boost.
 

12. Scraped Content

Scraping content is stealing content from other publishers with a little help from scripts and post it on your website. It is an interesting practice because it was the subject of some cases regarding breaching copyright of the original site owner. Hatching scraped content is not only forbidden but also illegal in the United States and other countries. For example, in 2011 in Canada there was a cased called Century 21 Canada Limited Partnership v. Rogers Communications Inc., 2011 BCSC 1196  which stated that “The prohibited uses expressly include but are not limited to “screen scraping”, “database scraping” and any other activity intended to collect, store, re-organize, summarize or manipulate any Content (whether via an automatic program or a manual process).” It is against Google Guidelines, also. Over the time, thereappeared that sidebar with “latest news” implemented by webmasters, but some of them got carried away and published too much information. You should be careful with how much information you post on other sites so that you won’t upset the big G.
 

This goes both ways. If you are a victim of this act, you can find software to help you discover who is stealing content from you and complaint against the site that has stolen your content.
 
I’m not giving you ideas, just helping you make a difference between what’s wrong and what’s right and get away from the temptations and the bad guys. And I’m not talking about Google, he’s the good guy. Well, he is good as long as you’ve done nothing to upset him.

13. Cloaking

Picture taken from http://www.rochester.edu/news/headlines/jan2015/cloak.jpg

It is a dishonest way of using two pieces of content. One is written for the search engines to rank and Googlebot to crawl and the second one for the users. Using cloaking violates Google Guidelines, and you risk getting penalized by Google Penguin. That is because cloaking is believed to be used to fool search engine’s algorithm.

14. Malicious Active Content

This type of content uses malware software through animated website, Java applications, Javascript, Flash content or relying on browser plugins to display video, audio files or download files on the computer. The most common types of malware are considered adware, bots, bugs, rootkits, spyware, Trojan horses, viruses, and worms. Not only is this kind of behavior against Google Guidelines and will get you penalized big time, but it is also illegal.

On the other side, if you are a user, the best way to avoid being a victim of such software is to install an antivirus and update it regularly, avoid downloading files from unknown websites, keep away from shady sites or to click on ads that look too good to be truth.

15. Clickbait

Clickbait is an eye catching and deceptive headline written with the sole purpose of making you click on it. It says one thing in the headline and another thing on the site. It uses expressions to entice you such as “You won’t believe …” , “Important news about …”, “Shocking!! You need to see this…” and so on and so forth. This deceiving technique will decrease your CTR, and on the long run, it’s bad for your site. Usually, those who use clickbait want to generate income based on the number of clicks. You can see this excessive technique in tabloids, where it is widely spread.
 
An excellent example of clickbait is offered for “free” by Xpango, which says that it can give you a free Apple iPad and even promises in the description that it’s “not catch and it’s free”.

Though, when we enter the site we see that we need “just 25 credits”. No catch you say?!
 
Facebook wants to stop clickbait. The aim is to de-prioritize posts with headlines that hold information and entice you to click just to find out.

III. LINK MANIPULATION

16. Web Rings

Multiple sites that are connected between them in a circular network to rank and get traffic from related websites create a webring. Sage Well was the one who came with a script to develop such concept in 1994, when it began to become popular before Google times. To be a part of a webring, you must receive approval from the webmaster. Even doing bad things became harder and harder.

Picture taken from http://www.blogclarity.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/recognize-guest-post-spam.png

17. GuestPost Spam

There are plenty of people out there that use this technique to get backlinks. Don’t be one of them. They usually send messages to bloggers to publish an irrelevant article with a link and most of the times it’s a dofollow link. Those who send requests for guest blogging on a site can hurt its ranking if the site they link to has bad user experience.
 
An example of a message sent for guest posting might look like that:
 
“My name is NAME and I am a writer. I found your site and I think it is very interesting. I was wondering if I can do a guest post? I write about different topics for different niches and I think I would be a great fit for your audience. My articles have 400 – 500 words, depending on what want. If you allow me, do you think it would be possible to add a single link to our site?”
 
If it doesn’t say the name of the site how could I possible now if it’s relevant? This is kind of obscure.
 
By any chance, if you are one of the bad guys you will pay your debt sooner than you think. Not only will it affect you, the guest blogger, but it will also affect the site that accepted it. In 2014, DocSheldon.com received a manual side-wide penalty for having an outbound link pointing to an unrelated site from a guest post.
 

Matt Cutts, the former head of the webspam team at Google touched a sensible part in the next tweet in 2014.

You need to offer information that will help the audience and send it back to your site to generate traffic, not irrelevant links that will get you down for good.

18. Link Farm

“Old McSpammer had a farm, e-i-e-i-oh,
And on that farm he built some links, e-i-e-i-oh
With a backlink here, and a backlink there,
Here a link, there a link,
Everywhere a link, link…”, by Scott Willoughby, found on moz.com

Picture taken from https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d9/Link_farm.svg/600px-Link_farm.svg.png

As the song says, a link farm is a collection of websites connected with each other, manipulating your link profile by increasing the number of inbound links. It has a negative impact since Google sees link farming as a spammy way of getting links. The content of a site that participates in a link farm looks just like every other site on the internet with an exception: it has text covered with irrelevant hyperlinks linking to random sites. The use of link farms was popular in the days when Google Page Rank mattered, but as time changed, Google also changed, and now this practice will get you penalized because the generated links are considered to be unnatural. Humans do not create the exchanged links for humans, but rather for search engines.

19. LinkBait and Switch

This strategy happens when you “revitalize” your content into a commercial one. The trick is to gain links for a particular article and then change it entirely with a commercial one having no connection whatsoever with the first topic. Even though the content you ranked for was unique and qualitative and the links were natural if you changed it to something else it shows you’ve frivolously looking to gain traffic.

20. Buying Reviews with Links by Offering “Free” Products

Since Google has found many ways of getting rid of those who manipulate the right way of reaching the top of SERP, people get way more creative and not in a good way, but by trying new methods of cheating. And that is how the practice of sending free products in exchange for reviews with links appeared. Don’t get me wrong; it’s ok to ask your clients for a review, but not with links. Using this technique in an excessive way could get you down, rather than up in the search results. And don’t get me started about the fake reviews that appear on your site with the sole purpose of gaining trust, which brings exactly the opposite if you get caught, which happens most of the times.
 
An example in this area is TripAdvisor. An Italian newspaper created an account for a fake restaurant in Italy to see if TripAdvisor’s review moderation and fraud detection team will discover it. The restaurant, named Scaletta got lots of fake reviews and started to look like a real place. After a month it was rated the best restaurant in town. The experiment ended when the newspaper sent a message to TripAdvisor explaining their intent and proved that TripAvisor’s reviewing system is defective.
 

Picture taken from http://www.grubstreet.com/2015/07/tripadvisor-bogus-reviews.html

21. Link Exchange

It refers to an agreement between 2 sites to rank in Google. I will spoil the moment so you won’t get tempted by this method because it’s considered a link scheme and it won’t let your site appear in SERP anymore. The good guys run with the speed of the light when they hear about this black hat SEO technique.
 
At a quick search on the internet you’ll find lots of sites and directories that offer links in exchange. They even make big promises such as free links, quality links for your niche, no footprints and you can even make money through their affiliate program. It is easy to do link exchange and rank afterward, but you will get penalized just as easily.
 

You can see below just one example of many:

22. Blog Comment Spam

It occurs when you try to generate links by commenting on different blogs and sites to link back to your blog/site, despite the fact that the sites are relevant or not to your niche or activity profile.
 

Usually, this kind of technique uses links that go to the homepage. Commenting just to get a large number of backlinks easily is considered a black hat technique.

Picture taken from http://www.webanalyticsworld.net/2011/10/spam-does-your-website-digest-it.html

If you are a blogger that received this kind of spammy comments, you can do something to stop them. You can delete them as soon as you got them, but the adequate way to proceed is to mark the incoming comments as pending and waiting for approval just to avoid polluting your site with links that could get you penalized if they come from bad, toxic sites.

23. Shady Redirects

301 redirect is actually a good practice. You can use it to send a user from a URL to another one if  the original page has moved or changed. Sadly, over the years, it began to be used as a bad SEO technique.  Webmasters take advantage of expired domains to keep the link juice. They are redirecting the old site to their site. In this case, using 301 redirects is a shade of gray hat SEO.  You could easily fall into the dark area of SEO if the expired domain is not relevant. Would it matter if I told you that you might get penalized by Google for this practice? It should!
 

Another shady redirect is practiced on online movies sites. When you click play to see a movie it redirects you on all kind of sites, most of them being unrelated.

301 redirects, as a grey hat SEO, is used to generate traffic on sites not in a natural way.

24. Commercial Anchor-Text Keywords

Commercial anchor text keywords are those money keywords used to generate financial value. If your site has fewer or not at all non-branded keywords, it will show that your Anchor text profile is not organic at all. You can use the Anchor Text Distribution & Classifier from cognitiveSEO tool to see the ratio between commercial vs. brand keywords and to classify them.
 
A brand anchor text is considered to contain the brand name, URL. This is a site that has a natural anchor text profile:

For example, if your brand name is BRAND X and you have a site about website templates, then commercial anchor text is considered to contain words like “website template”, “best website template”, “free website templates” and so on. This is a site that has a spammy anchor text profile:

25. Spammy Footer Links

We call them spammy, junky or scammy footer links because you write them with the sole purpose of ranking and cheating your way up to the top. The links are not written naturally, in an article, showing and explaining the connection between you and the site you’re linking to. Sadly, this is a practice used by many people and in the end it will lead to rank loss. You could end up with a penalization in the worst case scenario.

Loading the footer of your website with links will only get you a large number of unnatural links and this can cause rank loss.

www.hotelsanbada.com

As you can see below, the Unnatural Link Profile can be caused by other practices, too:

IV. PAID LINKS

26. Link Selling

If you’re selling links to pass domain authority, it will de-index your website and cut your traffic to half (if you’re lucky) because it’s against Google Guidelines. There isn’t so much to say about this ancient technique. Just be careful and don’t try this at home or … anywhere.
 
Matt Cutts argues that if the site that sells links gets caught and it was linking to you, all the value you were receiving from that link goes away.
 

You can find some great pieces of advice and explanations from Matt Cutts in this video:
 

27. Buying Links

Remember what we’ve talked about selling links? Well, buying links isn’t so far from that. Even though the site you are buying links from says they are qualitative, don’t get yourself fooled. It sounds too good to be true. Stop buying links to receive link juice. You will lose money and time for ranking. Not to mention that you will need to spend time again to correct the mistakes you’ve made. 

28. Paid Advertorials

A significant change in Google occurred when it was discovered that people were paying for advertorials to pass PageRank and since PageRank was officially declared dead, it doesn’t mean that now paid advertorials are not against Google’s Guidelines. The former head of Google’s web spam team, Matt Cutts, tweeted about the connections between paid links and advertorials pages.

When you use this technique, you have paid links. And paid links could also pass authority.
 
The good thing for those who use this practice is that paid advertorials seem to be indexed in Google News. This loophole appeared in Google’s guidelines, and that gives the possibility to publishers to appear in that section. But this doesn’t mean that it won’t come a time when Google penalizes your site?
 
You can see an example for this situation from Lean Cuisine that paid for an article in Mashable.

At the end of the article, you will see this message: “BrandSpeak is a Mashable Studios program that allows advertisers to share their content with our audience. Mashable news department was not involved in the creation of this content.”

If you want to do good things that will count in the future and want to pay for advertorials, then a good practice will be to set all links as no follow.

You know that saying “What goes around comes around”. Well, that applies to this technique also, as for the rest.

29. Directory Listing

If you are registering and/or buying placements on low-quality directories, it is not good practice. A great importance is the value of that directory and if it proves to be a link scheme, well you know what happens, you’ve got the picture.
 
A real question will be “Are there any good directories that I can register on?”. Yahoo has a directory that could fall into this category. They have a well-put set of rules; not everyone can register, and I think it is a good example. Before that, you should create an account for GoogleMyBusiness, Facebook, Twitter or Linkedin and then see what the best options are for profile and niche. Don’t do what everybody has been doing, be BOLD!
 
The next question will be “Are paid directories held to the same standard as paid links?” and the answer comes from the one and only Matt Cutts.

Cutts says that the Google team looks at the value of the directory and how much work is put into it. “If it’s not substantially a lot of work and, primarily, it looks to be more-less a link scheme, then paid directories are held to the same standards as paid links. “
 
You need to understand that Google will always try to get smarter and offer valuable content for its users and directory listing is an option. At least, not anymore.

V. SERP SPAM

30. Parasite Hosting

It is an illegal way of gaining access to a site, creating a web page on it and inject it with lots of keywords and links pointing to the black hat SEO practitioner’s commercial page. They set up a parasite hosting to take advantage of the authoritative domains from Google. This way they would receive traffic for their site and money from those who want to buy. Usually, this happens without the knowledge or consent of the person who owns the authoritative domain.

Before you get caught, and God knows what will happen to you and your site, you must wonder “Is the black hat SEO worth it?”. Just do good and good will come to you.

31. Google Bombing

It is a way of influencing the rank of a page by artificially increasing the number of linking to it and the anchor texts used for that. A black hat SEO practitioner will manipulate Google’s algorithm by “helping” one-page rank for an entirely different keyword. This happens because it is the same anchor text used for the pages that link to that page in particular.
 
One of the most discussed examples of Google bombing was the query “completely wrong” for Mitt Romney. If you search images for “completely wrong”, Google will show you a picture with Mitt Romney.
 

Picture taken from http://www.empiremedia.com/google-versus-politics/

If you are a victim you must know how to defend yourself by these evil ways of hijacking your site.

32. Doorway Pages or Gateway Pages

Doorway pages refer to the practice of inflating a site for a particular query in SERP using some cloaking and sending the user on a page that doesn’t have any connection with the query whatsoever. It is an adapted way of redirecting, a more crafty one. Those who use this technique want to rank higher in SERP in an unnatural way, of course.
 
In March 2015, Google launched a new doorway page penalty algorithm especially for this type of technique.
 
If you search for “prednisolone without prescription” you will find this result in Google:

And when you go on the site you discover a doorway page. I didn’t find what I was looking for, but instead a list with top pharmacies online.

33. Rich Snippet Markup Spam

Structured markup data can be a great way of formatting how your site appears in the search results when somebody looks for information. Also, it will help index your site. On the other hand, if you are creating irrelevant rich snippets markup you risk getting manually penalized by Google for this scammy technique.
 
For example, if you use snippet markup for reviews and you don’t have a policy of reviewing on your site it’s counted as rich snippet markup spam.

34. Automated Google Queries

Sending automated Google queries means that you use a software to inflate the number of searches for a specific keyword to rank higher in SERP. If you aim at positioning your site higher in the search results in this unnatural way, Google has a way of disappointing you and penalizing you.

VI. CROOKED WEBSITES

35. Mirror Sites

A mirror site is used to reflect the original website content into a new one in order to increase its ranking. This could be another way of duplicating content from your site or other resources.
 

The bad guys out there will try and convince you that they are using this technique just in case of DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks. DDoS is a cyber attack where multiple compromised systems are used to target a single system to access important (personal) information. 

36. Private Blog Networks

Private Blog Networks (PBN) are a collection of blogs created by a person to generate links to a site and to help it rank in Google. It is a powerful way of creating a massive number of links from different domains to a site. The owner of the network has the capability to change the content however he wants, to add how many links he wants and to manipulate the content to his own wishes to boost the rank for a site. This is how a PBN  looks like:

Picture taken from https://searchenginewatch.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/25/cnt-import/sew/IMG/947/301947/private-blog-network.png

Usually, PBNs are created using expired domains. This is because they already have link juice and that can come in handy when you are trying to pass authority to another site that doesn’t have so much. Yet, this is not mandatory.

37. Typosquatting or URL Hijacking

This hijacking method is based on a typographical error to create malicious domains to look similar to well-known brands. This error counts as common misspelling, unnoticed foreign spelling, an abuse of the Country Code Top-Level Domain. The reason for this “affiliating” practice is to profit from the trademark name and brand’s fame.
 
Here you can see the official site of Cartier’s brand.

And this is an attempt of URL Hijacking by Carter:

The downside for this practice is that it will put your reputation and your brand at risk of facing cybercrime.

38. Toxic Sites 

If a site is created for the sole purpose of link building and it has one of the link issues named in the picture below then we might be talking about toxic sites. These link issues are just a few of the possible ones you can stumble upon in the big world of the internet and toxic sites.

If you are having links on toxic sites, they can damage your business. Also, having bad links from toxic sites as a result of a black hat SEO practice should determine you to review those links. An easy way to do this is by checking them within the Unnatural Links Navigator in the cognitiveSEO tool. Directly from this tool you have the possibility to manage them and even disavow them if that’s the case.

VII. ILLEGAL WAYS TO MAKE MONEY

39. Cybersquatting or Domain Squatting

Cybersquatting means registering domains similar to a trademark or business for the sole purpose of getting financial benefits. It contains the word “squatting”, which means acknowledging a public place without permission. Fraudsters who practice this technique could receive lawsuits because they gain money. They are redirecting people who came on the fake domain to an expensive pay-per-click advertising site.

40. Cookie Stuffing or Cookie Dropping

Cookie stuffing is a way of using scripts, pop-ups, toolbars and images embedded in message boards for a publisher to receive money. How does he receive the money, you may ask? Let’s say, for example, a publisher sends a visitor to the Example.com site and he gets credit for every sale made. You must know that stuffing cookies is an illegal practice.

VIII. VICIOUS TACTICS

41. Negative SEO

As the name says it, negative SEO does the opposite of what you would expect and that is to cut traffic and decrease SEO visibility continuously. But who wants that? I would that say a lot of people since we talk about it. They don’t want to do it for their own site, but rather false reporting their competitors to get them penalized.
 
Gary Illyes,  a webmaster trends analyst at Google, tweeted on his account saying that Google hasn’t seen a real example of negative SEO?

The sad part for those who actually get penalized for something they didn’t do is that they don’t know who “buried them alive” but they could get an idea. If you are using the tool from cognitiveseo you can search through the Unnatural Links Navigator to review your backlinks and see where they are they coming from. Also, a great indicator of rank loss can be spotted by visualizing SEO visibility’s graph.
 

An example from a famous SEO agency that got affected by negative SEO technique:

42. TrackBack Spam

TrackBack was used only to facilitate the communication between blogs by sending pings. A ping is a message sent from a blogger to those who are connected to him. Using it moderately or only you have a new article is not considered spam. Though, when you improperly use the TrackBack feature to get visitors on your site and send them numerous pings, it’s counted as natural.

Picture taken from www.conferencesthatwork.com

43. Referrer Spam

Referrer spam is a sort of spamdexing which is manifested by polluting a site with fake statistical data. The spammer aims to improve the ranking of his site. It doesn’t harm the site except for  increasing its statistical data regarding traffic, visitors and so on. The positive side is that you have the possibility to filter the referral spam.

44. Social Network Spam

Social Network Spam is a relative new form of spamming. Since web 2.0 appeared, spammers have found new platforms where they could spread their links. When they are sending an enormous list of irrelevant links in the Social Network, that is when the red flag rises.
 

Spam in Social Networks is known to appear as links in comments to different posts, unrelated to the site; as sharing malicious links in irrelevant groups/pages/people; private messages sent to all kinds of people/pages one time or several times.

Conclusion

To sum everything up, we reiterate a quote from Matt Cutts, who says “The objective is not to ‘make your links appear natural’; the objective is that your links are natural”. You think you could get away if you try some of these black hat SEO techniques, but sooner or later you may lose rank or traffic, damage your reputation, get a penalty from Google, lose credibility and clients, or worst of them all, face a lawsuit. Be an SEO practitioner of evergreen content. Until next time, be good to Google and he’ll (probably) be good to your site.

The post 44 Black Hat SEO Techniques That Will Tank Your Site appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

The things we should all have in mind now are real time penalties and real time recoveries.

Not only Google Penguin is in ongoing mode now, but also the question from every cautious webmaster’s mind: Is my website prepared for all these changes?

Penguin 4.0 – Penalty Case Study

We’ve searched back and forth looking for the havoc that the new Penguin 4.0 might have made. As much as we’ve searched (and trust us, research is our middle name), we haven’t found big traffic spikes (up or down) caused by the fearful Penguin. Instead we’ve found various sites that have slightly incremental or decremental traffic patterns.

There are SERP fluctuations, yet, nothing comparable to the impressive volatility caused by the previous Penguin Updates.

Some other researchers in the field found some websites affected by Google’s newest update, then again, no big fluctuations were mentioned.

After a lot of research conducted for several days, with a high attention on keywords and SERP fluctuations, we’ve found a couple of affected websites. From those we choose one that seems very likely to be affected by the latest Penguin. Without any further introduction, grab a cup of coffee and enjoy reading the complete Penguin 4.0 Case Study:

Metamorphosis, as a biological process, sounds like a word with which you can become a Scrabble champion. In fact, as complicated as it might sound, it designates one of the few constants in life: change.

Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.

This is what probably the “spam fighters” team behind Google Penguin 4.0 had in mind when they’ve implemented the new, Real-Time Penguin algorithm.

The irony is that one of the sites affected by the Google update is a website related, at least with the name,  by the newest real time Penguin.

Metamorphosis Design (www.metamorphozis.com) is an online business that offers flash templates, website templates, web design and site re-design services. Or, as the website itself states, Metamorphosis Design is “everything you want to know about web design”.

The website we are looking at is quite a large one: the almost 2 million links coming from around 9k referring domains place our analyzed website within the medium- large sites. We cannot overlook the Link Profile Influence: more than 98% of the total links have low or no influence at all.  Therefore, if we were to think of the catchword quality over quantity, it doesn’t look like Metamorphosis Design have invested a lot in getting high-quality links. 

More than 98% of Metamorphosis Design’s links have low or no influence at all.

Before going any further with our analysis, please allow me a few moments to explain why is the SEO Visibility chart presented bellow (and fully integrated within cognitiveSEO) is so important and why it’s helpful in easily spotting Google Penalties.

Basically, SEO Visibility is about monitoring the search performance of a website as it presents the historical development of a domain’s visibility in Google.  It is calculated based on millions of keywords that are tracked in Google and their importance and traffic volume. Each keyword has a particular importance and based on that and the ranking of the tracked site, a SEO visibility score is calculated, score which is updated weekly.

The SEO visibility chart can help you identify penalties in a heartbeat.

We, at cognitiveSEO, are trying to make the penalty identification process as easy as possible. And this is why, with the integration of the SEO visibility chart, we take the “penalty identification” process to another level, making it easy to identify what happened to a specific website. We live in a world where we use apps and tools on a daily basis; we have apps to helps us get our schedule right or tools to helps us buy Christmas presents for the dear ones. When it comes to your business I find it only natural to try using the best tools there are out there to be sure that your website will attract customers, not penalties.

Therefore, as we look at Metamorphosis Design SEO visibility, we get an important insight. It seems like a significant drop affected the website in 2012, drop that can be easily correlated with a Penguin update from that time.

And although the site never seems to have completely rebounded ever since, it seems like the new Real-time Penguin has destabilized the flash templates site even more. It’s true that it’s not an abrupt drop like the one from 2012 we are talking about, yet, there is a significant one, and it’s most likely related to the newly released Penguin update.

Luckily, we have the possibility to look at our analyzed site’s link profile and see if indeed the drop might have something do to with this website’s link profile. We don’t know how Metamorphosis Design’s link profile looked back in 2012 when they probably got another penalty, but one thing is sure; if their link profile was similar they did not learn from their mistakes.

With almost 90% of total links being unnatural, there is no big surprise that this site is a Penguin 4.0 “victim”.

Name it; it seems like they have it all: thin content, low influence links, suspect anchor text, footer links, etc.

Metamorphosis is a changing process that involves a conspicuous and relatively abrupt change in one entity’s structure through growth and differentiation. However, it looks like Metamorphosis Design has borrowed only the name but not the characteristics of the metamorphosis process as well. 

With most of the links being placed in short paragraphs of text or group of links, there is no wonder that this website might have raised a lot of red flags for Google Spam Team.

The anchor text distribution and classifier don’t bring extra points in Metamorphosis Design’s defense, as most of the anchor texts are of commercial nature. And as Google is not a big fan of such keywords as it may consider them of being part of a link scheme, the suspicion of penalty in the case of our analyzed website is becoming more and more a certainty.

Some other penalties examples com from  Mary Haynes, who wrote an interesting blog post where she analyzed various keyword fluctuations, highly correlated with the dates of September when Google announced the Penguin 4.0 Update. No big SERP fluctuation found within these examples either.

Google Penguin 4.0 And What You Need To Do

Having in mind the idea of real time penalties, it’s important to stay prepared, regardless of the surprises this Penguin might come with.

As the Penguin update is becoming a real-time part of the algorithm, things are slightly different from the publicly announced updates until now like Penguin, Penguin 2.0 and Penguin 3.0.  This means that the algorithm will become smarter and at a quicker pace than before since Google will be able to roll out changes as needed as opposed to scheduling one massive update.

Google updates have always been of high interest and, as you can see in the screenshot below, the interest on this matter is fantastic. If on Thursday, one day before the big announcement Penguin 4.0 had a few mentions, the next day the interest for the on-going penguin increased 65 times.

One might say that as long as you always work on the safe side and you are developing digital marketing strategies by Google’s Guidelines, you shouldn’t invest much time and energy worrying about this update. However, even when analyzing things within this mindset, two things should be taking into consideration: first, Google’s Guidelines (as many other guidelines) can be subjectively interpreted and second, it is better to be safe than sorry.

This being said, let see what you can do to be sure that your rankings will be safe even with the Penguin being released “in the wild”.

1. Regularly Monitor Your Backlink Profile

As Penguin is here and it’s real time it should get into your routine to regularly check new and lost backlinks, their value and quality, and most of all their naturalness. There has been a lot of speculation related to the fact that this update wasn’t released; we cannot deny nor confirm these rumors, yet, what we can do is take a look at what Google representatives have to say.

Therefore, what you need to do from now on, more than ever, is to constantly keep an eye on your link profile. Manually checking ALL of your links and identifying the unnatural links will get you a lot of time and energy. And even if you were willing to invest all the energy it takes, with Penguin being ongoing, time might not be in your favor. As soon as Google discovers that some links are shady, it will instantly penalize the involved website. And the vice-versa is just as valid:  as soon as links are being removed or disavowed, the Penguin algorithm will process it in real time, and you would be able to recover from a Penguin penalty incredibly quickly.

Ongoing fresh unnatural link monitoring is a necessity with the latest Google Penguin 4.0

2. Disavow Your Unnatural Links

Having a Google Link Penalty or being on the edge of being penalized is not something you wish for, but it’s something that you might have to deal with. In October 2012 Google launched the disavow tool which purpose is to help webmasters clean up their link profiles. Since its launch date, it has become a very used tool to help people recover from link related penalties, both manual and algorithmic. Even though there are a lot of pros and cons on whether a disavow really helps with penalties or not, Google representatives have stated before and are still claiming today, in the Penguin 4.0 update context, that the disavow tool is really helpful and should be used by webmasters.

Google recommends the use of the disavow tool.

If manually identifying unnatural links is a time-consuming task, creating a disavow from scratch can be as time consuming and even more stressful as disavows have a high impact on one’s website. We are not advocating a reckless use of the disavow tool, yet, if it is the case, why not making the process as easy as possible? It’s enough energy invested in the fact that you are in the position of submitting a disavow; the last thing you need is to worry about disavow templates agreed by Google and spending lots of time in manually creating one. What I’d recommend is creating an automate disavow file ready to submit but not before documenting a bit on the disavow myths and realities so that you can submit the disavow wittingly and wholehearted .

3. Monitor New Links That Could Trigger Penalties

Real-time is the baseline keyword in the context of Penguin 4.0. As mentioned before, this means that as soon as Google discovers that a link is unnatural, it will process it in real time, causing penalties incredibly quickly.

Be aware of all of your links and why not, be one step ahead of Google and spot the unnatural links on time.

4. Know Your Anchor Text Ratio

Having a clear overall image of your anchor text profile is crucial, especially if you need to see how many of your keywords are commercial and how many are brand related. Brand Anchor Text is one of the signals that Google takes into consideration when deciding if a site should be “trusted” or not, while the Commercial Anchor Text tells Google what keywords might the site be interested in ranking. Therefore, knowing your anchor text ratio is another feature you should be aware of, not only in your quest of preventing a penalty but also on a daily monitoring basis.

We know that things may seem a bit confusing for the moment, maybe overwhelming and why not, a bit scary. Having the right tools at your disposal might make a difference in your favor: in terms of rankings, invested time, money and energy, website optimizing and even stress reduction.

The post A Rare Penguin 4.0 Penalty Case Study & How To Protect Your Site appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.