Synonyms are managed automatically by Google for years now, but it seems that there are a few smart & simple ways that you will allow you to increase your ranking using the following Synonym Google Ranking Technique presented below.

So why all the fuss about synonyms and Google being able to understand them? “Is it such a big deal?” you may ask. When you have your site ranked for “seo professional” and a query on its synonym “seo expert” lists you way below the first position, you are bleeding traffic. Check how much the monthly searches can differ based on the searched keyword.

Imagine the traffic you may gain by simply optimizing your page for those synonyms too. That is why I randomly picked the 941% in the title of this article as it really depends on your situation. It can be 1% or it can be 10.000%. It is up to your niche and your own research and steps you take in order to conquer those ranks. A search engine cannot distinguish objects in photos and doesn’t accurately understand the meaning of a sentence. At the end of the day, the search engine’s main goal is to return the best results for the user’s search. In order to do that, Google has made efforts in teaching its algorithm “humanish” (aka Google Hummingbird) and has moved well beyond just word matching, to matching based on intent and understanding. The big G invests a lot in understanding concepts and synonyms are only a small example. This is really a revolutionary step in making search engines smarter in order to make order  in the huge pile of information clutter. Ok. So let me tell you how it works and what you can do to increase your traffic on synonyms.

How does Google Rank a Site on Synonym Keywords?

With the risk of over loading you with information, allow me to clear things up a bit about what a synonym is. A synonym is commonly known as being a word or a phrase that means exactly or nearly the same as another word or phrase in the same language. There are simple, common synonyms like “happy – joyful” or “impartial – unbiased” but we also tend to use more subtle synonym expressions like “the East” as a synonym for the former “Soviet empire”. Google is getting better and better at understanding synonyms while it is becoming less and less dependent on exact keyword matches for returning results. If you are searching for “SEO Consultant”, Google will understand that even if a page says “SEO Expert” or “SEO Services” or “SEO company” these all represent the same concept. So it ranks pages that talk about “SEO Experts” and “SEO Companies” for the query “SEO Consultant”.

If your page is not well optimized for the synonym keywords you are losing a lot of SEO Visibility and Traffic.

How does Google Actually Detect Synonyms?

Back in 2010 Matt Cutts, The Head of Google’s Webspam Team posted a blog post about how Google find synonyms where he referred an article about how Google tries to understand language and not only strings. He also goes further to underline the importance of synonyms for Google:

“However, our measurements show that synonyms affect 70 percent of user searches [note from Matt: of course, it could be a subtle change] across the more than 100 languages Google supports. We took a set of these queries and analyzed how precise the synonyms were, and were happy with the results: For every 50 queries where synonyms significantly improved the search results, we had only one truly bad synonym.”

In a recent article, by Bill Slawski, about some Google Patents that Google uses to detect synonyms, an interesting patent is found that evidentiates how they go about detecting synonyms. It shows technique that they may also be using to identify synonyms using internal and external links anchor text. The basic idea is that Google can learn about things from both on-site and off-site factors. Having said that I think it is clear why Synonyms are a very important component when you talk about On-Page and Off-Page Optimization.

You can easily lose or gain traffic due to Not-Optimizing simple things that shall give you what is yours already.

The thing to keep in mind, however, is that in order to teach someone (or something) about any language-specific concept, you sometimes need to go broader. So it is with Google and the synonyms-inclusive searches. What we understand to be a synonym may not be immediately translatable to a machine. Or, as AJ Kohn would put it, while “auto”, “automobile” and “car” are all by default wired in our brains, there isn’t really anything intrinsic that makes one of those words trigger the others. Each of them can be used in a context that makes it no longer related to the other.

Sometimes the synonym that Google takes into account is not necessarily a grammatical one, but rather a logical, or contextual one.

Because the real stake for any search engine is to figure out not “what answer fits your question?” but rather “what did you really want to find out?”. Which is probably why Google will return results for “floral delivery” when you search for “flower shops”. Because that’s probably what you really wanted, isn’t it?

Synonyms vs Co-citation and Co-occurrence as Other Potential Rank Influencers

We need to clear up the terms “co-citation” and “co-occurrence” so we can easily make a distinction between them and synonyms. Why? Because we are trying to figure out how does Google rank a site by using synonyms and no other factors. So, like in any other serious research, we have to take into consideration all the variables that might influence the understanding of our subject (plus the fact that these are some interesting concepts that deserve our attention). Co-occurrence is the process whereby the words on the linking pages influence a site’s rankings. This means that the close proximity of important keywords develops a tight association. For example, let’s say you have a website about cooking. If a webpage with an article about fry pans, recipes, kitchen utensils links to your site, then it is likely that your site will get a ranking boost for these keywords. Google understands the correlation between the two of you and might use it as a ranking factor in its algorithm.

Co-citation is the process whereby other links on the linking pages influence a site’s ranking. As peculiar as it might sound, this is actually the process of link building without actual links. Let me explain you why: let’s say that websites A, B, C, D all link to the websites 1, 2, 3, 4. Even if web pages 1, 2, 3 and 4 don’t link to each other, Google will consider that these web pages are related to each other. The more sites they are linked from, the stronger the relation becomes between them.

How to Identify Your Synonym Problems and Opportunities?

Watching the screenshot below, the one with the “seo expert” search query, we see that Google is doing pretty well at matching the right synonyms.

As we can see, the results are indeed relevant for both cases but they are not  exactly the same. The website that used to be listed 2nd for the query “seo consultant” is listed 6th for the search query “seo expert”. This is because Google identified the synonym between the two words but it ranked better other sites that targeted the exact “seo expert” keyword. If this page was a bit more optimized, by using the phrase “seo expert” a few more times than this page could have ranked higher in the SERPS as the relation between the query and the page was stronger. These differentiated results had us thinking about the effects that synonyms might have in the overall ranking of a site. As we were intrigued enough by this fact, we went further with our research and we found a relevant example of webpage whose ranking is influenced by the Google’s synonym detection algorithm. Just like in the previous case, the site Towerhobbies.com ranks different for the search queries “remote control airplanes” and “radio control airplanes”. But there is more here than meets the eye.

Google understands that RC (or R/C) is a synonym for remote or radio control and highlights it with bold even if we didn’t search for this specific keyword. Even more, www.towerhobbies.com ranks high for the keywords “remote control airplanes” even if it doesn’t contain these keywords in the title, in the domain, in the snippet or anywhere else on the site.

Another important metric that might influence the ranking of this page in Google are the Anchors that might be pointing to this site. Looking at the anchor text profile of this site we found out that the keyword “remote control airplanes” is not used as an anchor text for this site on external backlinks. However, the website ranks very high for these keywords. Quite interesting, right?

• But why does Google bold “RC” when I am looking for “remote control airplanes”?
• How does it know that they are synonyms?

It’s important to know that synonyms depend on the other words in your search query. There are many signals that Google takes into consideration when providing the results. Also, the personalization of the search can mean that you won’t necessarily always see the word “RC” bolded for “remote control”, but only when the algorithms think it is useful. Let’s take another example for a better understanding. When searching for “GM”, there are several potential correspondents to this abbreviation, from General Motors to Gmail. When searching for “GM cars”, you will see that General Motors will be bolded. When you search for “GM corn”, “Genetically Modified” will be bolded. For the search “GM high scores”, “game maker” will be bolded. Apparently, there are dozens of synonyms that Google understands and uses in relation with the “GM” keyword.

How to Find The Important Synonyms for Your Site?

The best way to look for synonyms is really just to use a dictionary, or thesaurus. The latter is better, because it focuses specifically on similar alternatives to a word. And like with many other things (but not all), the online version is often times better than the paper one.

Thesaurus.com, for instance, allows you to look for word synonyms but also to analyze and play around with the results.

You can sort them by relevance, complexity and length, you can filter them by common usage and you can also display them as a proximity graph if you’re a premium user (but if you’re not and don’t want to be, you can use visualthesaurus.com as an alternative for synonym maps). In addition, it lists a separate list of synonyms for each of the primary meanings of the word. To top it off, you also get a list of antonyms, to help you get additional ideas of what would constitute a relevant related word.

Making judgment calls is still necessary even when using a powerful thesaurus tool.

There are other online thesaurus options to be found, such as the Merriam-Webster thesaurus (which, interestingly enough, doesn’t have an entry for the word “thesaurus”) or the Collins English Thesaurus. While both are extremely competent, they are nowhere near as useful, or visually appealing, as the previously mentioned ones. Tower Hobbies , for instance, deals mainly with remote control models. Or is it radio control models? Probably the latter, since that’s the wording they use on the website, and they show up on the first page on a Google search for “radio control airplanes”. What’s interesting, though, is that they also show up on the first page for “remote control airplanes”, even though they don’t write themselves as such. It’s probably a good guess that users look for both, though. Yet, the most accurate way to find out which are the synonyms that are really worth using them is Google Keyword Planner. Here you can check out what the traffic for a certain keyword is and in what direction is worth investing energy and also money. If a synonym looks really great but has a small volume of searches, maybe you should find another one. Let’s take a look at the keyword traffic for “remote” and “radio” and see whether Tower Hobbies did the best choice when they chose their keywords. We see that for “radio control airplanes”, the number of average searches per month is around 1000, which is pretty good, but let’s see how are the things going for “remote control airplanes”.

When it comes to “remote control airplanes”, the average monthly searches are 12 times more than the previous keyword. Then, why doesn’t towerhobbies.com get advantage of this highly searched keyword and uses a similar one but not so successful ? As we saw above, Tower Hobbies already ranks well on the first page of Google for “remote control airplanes”  and if this website would invest in this specific keyword it would only propel itself upper.

It is also important to understand the competition for each independent keyword so that you understand the chances you have to rank on the synonym keyword you target.

Use the Synonyms SEO Ranking Technique and Increase Your Rankings in Days

While the future of Google and other search engines may render this question useless, we’re not quite there yet. So for now, you can still help yourself by helping Google better understand what you’re about. If the object of your business can be expressed through more than one word/expression, perhaps it’s time to add synonyms to your site’s content. Of course, you have to be careful when doing so, because there’s a natural way of doing this, and a not-so-natural-seeming-way of doing it. If, for instance, Tower Hobbies were to present themselves as not only “The World’s Premier Supplier of the Finest in Radio Control Models”, but also, somewhere else on the first page, as the premier supplier of radio & remote control models, this would make a lot of sense and wouldn’t come off as shady . This could simply be achieved by clarifying the terminology in a presentation text, by adding a paragraph to the extent of “Radio control models, often referred to as remote control models, are models whose movement can be influenced by someone using a radio-wave based transmitter”. It’s not only good for Google ranks, it’s good for your audience and good for yourself. For very important keywords you should also alter the titles of the pages as those are very important metrics that are used for ranking. In this case the title should be: “

OLD – Tower Hobbies – Best Source for Radio Control ( R/C or RC ) Cars, Trucks, Airplanes, Boats and Helicopters NEW – Tower Hobbies – Best Source for Radio or Remote Control ( R/C or RC ) Cars, Trucks, Airplanes, Boats and Helicopters

Modify just a few pages at first, so that you can keep track and see if there is any exposure increase in the rankings. Have a variety of presentation texts, so that the use of synonyms is natural, organic.

Don’t feel obliged to bring in the synonym(s) with every occurrence of your keyword(s).

If you notice an improvement, extend the strategy to all of your pages, but do so gradually, otherwise it may look like an unnatural spike. Remember that the synonyms algorithm is making progress, so you don’t always need to spoon-feed it. Synonyms need not be next to each other or even in the same section, but the fact that they can be found on your website creates a certain context. This is, again, a matter of strategic choice and of human judgment.

Is this a safe strategy?

If we’re to believe Matt Cutts is not trying to purposefully steer us in the wrong direction, we should probably take his answer in this video as a reassurance that we’re on the right path in using synonyms, as this is probably helping Google’s dedicated team as well.

While cautiously fending off potential “old-school” keyword stuffers, Cutts’ answer is a fairly clear endorsement of the approach we’ve outlined. If you’re feeling uneasy about it, or don’t fully trust your sole judgment, ask someone else to look at the added text with a critical eye. Do not over-optimize. Allow accurate monitoring by making one change at a time. If something goes wrong with the search rankings, you’ll know the cause and you’ll be able to revert to the previous state.

All in all, it’s worth going for the synonyms. And it is a Very Simple Technique.

Google Synonym Detection Issues

Of course, if you ever tried to guess what someone else wanted at a certain point, there is big chance that you got it not only wrong, but completely backwards. It’s only human. So maybe it’s a sign of evolution that Google seems to make “human” mistakes. Looking up “SEO interview questions and answers for experienced” is, in fact, going to give you results about “SEO interview questions and answers for fresher”. As we can see the word experienced is matched with fresher as synonym. It could be a bug or a feature. A possible explanation would: The “experienced” word was the last word in the search, and thus may carry the least weight. So when someone starts a sentence by saying “I’m looking for SEO interview questions and answers for…”, you’ll probably finish the sentence – at least in your head – with “freshers”. Because they are the ones who probably need such suggestions, not experts, right? And since Google is trying to “think” based on what we think, it’s not hard to see why this may have occurred.

The takeaway here is that the algorithm is still learning, and we can help it to be more accurate by creating the correct semantic correlations.

It’s not a 100% predictable mechanism, but then again, that’s what makes it different from the past, and that’s what makes your job as an SEO expert different nowadays.

Fitting as many words and synonyms of those words into your website is no longer the goal, but rather adding specific content while maintaining a natural look.

Conclusion

It may seem as if history repeats itself.

“Are we back to keyword stuffing?”

But if that’s what you’re thinking, you couldn’t be further from the truth. The evolution of this algorithm is going to lead, in time, to the opposite scenario, where you won’t be able to “fool” the machine in pretty much any way, because it will be able to not only read but also understand what you’ve written. It will “get it”. It’s not there yet, but it’s learning, and that’s quite amazing. And you can play a part in the learning process and win from it also.

Use synonyms smartly on your website in order to rank higher not just because you’re obsessed with ranks, but because your website might be relevant to people who search using similar but not quite exactly the same words.

Mark Twain used to say that the difference between the right word and the almost right word was like that between a firefly and a lightning strike. Help Google bridge that gap by cautiously and organically improving your search – or better yet, your “being found” – potential. If, for instance, you’re dealing in electronic health records, there’s no reason to skip mentioning electronic medical records as well. There may be a lot fewer people looking for the latter than for the former, but they’re probably as much in need. And most importantly, you’re not fooling anyone by adding those words to your search word pool. Find the synonyms whose meaning adds value and are worthwhile ranking on. Integrate them seamlessly in your already existing content and watch what happens. Help Google understand what you’re about and you may find that, just like with people, once it “gets you”, you’ll get along just fine.

The post 941% Traffic Increase Exploiting the Synonyms SEO Ranking Technique appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

Lev Tolstoy, What is Art?

Can SEO be ART?

SEO is ART: Authority. Relevance. Trust.

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

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

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

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

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

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

SEO is Not Science

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

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

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

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

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

People read good content, not keyword density ratios!

SEO is Authority

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

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

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

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

SEO is Relevancy

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

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

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

SEO is Trust

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Need of Taking Chances in SEO

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

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

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

Lessons SEOs Can Learn From ART in General

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

Have the courage to bet on the unknown horse

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

Don’t compromise on your content

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

Write to connect with other people

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

A Final Thought

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

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

Every day, millions of cats wait patiently for us on Facebook or YouTube just to remind us that they own the place.

The Likes are now counted in meows and the link juice is actually measured in cat fur.

Yet, this big cat propaganda machine taught us quite a lesson when it comes to digital marketing and SEO. You spend hours creating quality content and you frantically struggle for a couple of shares when a video with a cat staring at a window instantly gains popularity and thousands of views. It seems unfair, right? But rather than bothering to solve the cat fame mystery, we’d better learn some of their tricks. Now, I know you are angry with cats but let’s see what are the most important lessons cats can teach us in terms of SEO.

Cats are Easy to Like. Your Content Should be Too!

Did you ever wonder why cats are so popular on the internet and not dogs? I mean, dogs are pretty too, they are fluffy and can be very silly sometimes. Yet, dogs are trying too hard. Dogs seem like everything they are doing is to impress you . Cats, on the other hand, do things that seem natural, the right thing to do at that time. This is how your content should look also: interesting, effortless and in timely. You need to create content because it is meaningful and you really have something to say. You should look cool and devoid of any concern about what people might think about you but actually be deeply in control of the whole situation and well thought out. Have you seen cats happily greeting their owner as they come home or wagging their tails with joy as they see their masters? Their infamous independence and controlled indifference are some of their weapons in creating viral content.

Creating good content is one of the most challenging things in SEO nowadays. And as useful as your content might be, if it’s not likeable, people will probably not read it, nor recommend it to others.

It’s natural to want to focus on creating high-quality content, full of great information, but that’s just half of the job. You need to make your content friendly, readable, easy to share and comment. You need to learn the art that cats seem to master extraordinary: saying important things with conviction and convey much in just a few words… or meows.

Also, it is not only about the content but also about the creator of the content. People follow Grumpy Cat with great interest not only for the content it generates but for the cat itself. They read the content because they like the cat. Similarly, if your readers will like you and they can relate to you, they will be more likely to follow and share your content.

Cats Appeal to Emotions. Your Content Should Too!

They make you laugh, smile, they make you say “awww…” in unison with two other friends or even bring a tear to your eyes. The important thing is that cats make you feel something. Cats always appeal to emotions. Always! And maybe you should start doing the same. Cats are very well focused when it comes to delivering emotions. They create specific content for each emotion they want to snatch from you.

Cats offer you cuteness overdose, extra vanity or adorable confusion as they know their behavior will somehow impress you.

It could be a good idea to think at the reaction you want to receive from your audience before starting to create your content. You don’t want to generate something that will leave people indifferent. You want your audience to react somehow after they read your content: you want them to take action, to reconsider their business, to find new strategies for their campaigns, to feel proud about themselves or even angry. No matter what, you want a reaction from your audience. You want the people to feel intrigued enough to share your content with others and to come back to your website. The stronger the emotions, the higher the number of likes and shares. Eventually, people will forget what you said or did but they will never forget how you made them feel.

Cats are Great Hunters! You Should be a Great Idea Hunter!

It might have reached your ears that a well-fed cat will stop killing birds. Well, that’s not true. Cats hunt for the sake of hunting not just for feeding themselves. What can we learn from this? No, not to hunt for our food, but to avoid being self-sufficient. Even if you are on the right track, you shouldn’t stop looking forward for new ideas and fresh strategies. Once you’ve reached the top of the mountain, take a look at the view and keep on climbing.

Cats might seem to purr and sleep all day long but what they actually do is preparing to engage in significant spurts of physical activity.The biggest amounts of energy are not spent on catching the target but on stalking, pouncing and wrestling their prey into submission.

Similar to cats, we should learn that new ideas are built on old buildings.

That means that most of the times good ideas don’t just come out of the blue but they have a strong research behind. For a good prey, a cat can spend even 8 hours a day on a hunt. We should learn how to hunt good ideas and always keep an eye open for a “good prey”.

Cats Can See in the Dark! You Should Stay Alert 24/7 with Critical SEO E-mail Alerts!

Besides being great hunters, cats can also be the prey. Although their online infinite success shows something else, cats are mortal. Yet, they have a set of advantages that keep them away from “the light” as long as possible. For instance, cats can see in the dark.

Humans cannot see in the dark with the “naked” eye but a cautious webmaster can ensure supervision for his website 24/7.

Whether you are using the email notification system from Google Webmaster Tool or you use various e-mail alerts to monitor your site and competitors you must always be in touch with your site’s “health”, with your competitors’ strategies and be warned about important issues that might appear. Cats have acute sight, hearing and smell that allow them to hunt effectively in dim light or at night. In order to be a proficient SEO you need to stay up-to-date 24/7, always be a step ahead of your competitors and a top player in your niche.

Cats have 9 Lives! Your Site Can Always Reborn from the Ashes!

The proverbial curiosity doesn’t usually kill cats… or it does, after the 9th time. Well, cats don’t really have several lives but they leave the impression of immortality. They seem to “return to life” after sustaining fatal accidents. They fall from high places and are trapped in the claws of killing predators but they still seem to make it through the day gracefully. Yet, how do they do it and what can we learn from this behavior? The cats’ ability to survive to all these dangerous situations that would kill humans, is not due to multiple lives, but to several advantages they possess and know how to manage properly. For instance, cats have a great sense of balance we should learn from. This sense of balance allows a cat falling upside down to readjust itself by rapidly determining its position, repositioning itself and making any adjustments necessary to ensure that it lands on all four paws.

Failure is, at some point, inevitable and you might confront yourself with the situation of your website being in a free fall from rankings. The idea is to heed the lessons of failure and find the right balance for your website. Be prepared to always land on your feet and if not possible, to ensure minimal injuries when your fall. This way, your website, no matter how hard has been struck, will be able to resurrect and stay strong in the face of any difficulty. Cats don’t master some secret tricks to keep them alive so you shouldn’t be looking for a magical solution to keep your site always on the good track. What cats have is an inbuilt instinct for physics, for correctly calculating each step in order to take the decisions that would keep them alive or help them resurrect easily each time.

Cats Sleep a Lot! Ignore This Behavior! They’re Only Trying to Trick You!

Cats and sleep is as common a match as peanut butter and jelly. Cats spend at least two-thirds of their lives asleep. Why do they sleep so much? Well, because they can. Because when they are “asleep” they are not asleep in the same way humans are. For them, being asleep doesn’t mean being off the clock. They are pretty much alert, meaning that if something happens in the middle of their beauty sleep, they can instantly wake up and be fully operational. That means that they are kind of tricking us with their sleep, making us believe that they are vulnerable, when in reality, they can transform into ninjas in a few seconds. If as a SEO expert or a webmaster you are doing a great job and you can afford spending 18 hour a day sleeping, there is no problem in that.

The trick is to sleep with one eye open and be fully prepared for action in no time.

Communicate like a Cat! We Call it CATMunication!

It’s arguable whether cats are or not a man’s best companion but they are for sure Internet’s best friend. It doesn’t matter if cats appear in a cutesy video, a funny depiction on Facebook’s walls or in an academic article. Every time it’s with the same results: a long line of shares, views and likes. If we want the same result, it’s important to learn how to approach our audience like the furry felines do. We need to learn how to CATmunicate if we want to improve our chances of achieving the coveted viral content. CATmunication implies ways of expression, body language and posture. Not only a meow or the sound of purring can generate enormous buzz but also a cat’s posture, the ear position or the way it keeps its tail. Nothing is random and each gesture has a specific meaning and communicates something about that cat. Similarly, your content shouldn’t be a result of an editorial agenda but it should really have a meaning and transmit something unique and valuable.

If you ever pet a cat you know that the furry felines actually communicate with you. The look of anger when you’re sitting on their favorite place on the sofa, the cold indifference when they try to suggest you to stop petting them or their excitement when they play with a fuzz on the carpet. Every single time, even when they’re sleeping, they communicate something about themselves and their needs. When it comes to content, communication with your audience is the key while indifference or the lack of response are your biggest enemies.

With the rise of cat-centric social platforms such as Catster or Catmoji, I think it’s high time to admit that cats dominate the digital world. The good thing is that there are a lot of things we can learn from their internet-conquering strategy. Their success is the living proof that Internet audience is hungry for content and is willing to share it in all shapes, sizes, colors and temperaments. We may rule the offline world but the cyberspace belongs to the cats. Meow.

The post What Cats Can Teach us About SEO appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

Much like in the case of this joke, a lot of the beliefs that are popular about SEO are only true “in principle” and some turn out not to be true at all. Some of these ideas may have started as true, while others have always been incorrect or inexact. Either way, it is time for a quick reality check as we put 10 of the most popular SEO myths and misconceptions under scope.

Myth 1 – Links Are Great to Measure Site Popularity!

It’s not that the number of links that send back to your site (backlinks) doesn’t matter, it’s rather that they’re the wrong indicator to use when measuring “popularity”. Take movie box office scores for instance. Setting a box office record is a big deal for a movie, but it isn’t the equivalent of setting a popularity record. Box office numbers tell you how much the movie earned from ticket sales, not how many people went to see the movie. Which matters, because movies that have longer showing periods can earn more, and so do movies that are shown in 3D, because the tickets cost more. So if you want, it might be more useful sometimes to look at the number of tickets that were sold, rather than the earnings from ticket sales. In a somewhat similar manner, the real measure of your spread would be the number of referring domains, i.e. the number of sites linking to your own site. If you have a large number of backlinks but a rather small number of referring domains, it’s quite possible that Google will see this as shady, and even suspect an intentional strategy on your part, such as a paid linking scheme.

If you want to become the popular kid in school, it’s not helpful if just one friend keeps talking about you, in fact, it might be damaging. What you really need is a lot of people talking even a little bit about you.

Myth 2 – Guest Posting is Dead!

Imagine you could write a book that was good enough that it made your favorite author notice it. Better yet, they read and like it and even offer to write the introduction for you. That’s pretty good, right? Now imagine instead that your favorite author invites you to write something for their next book. And you can even mention your own book, or at least the fact that you’re a writer. Now that’s great! You get so much more attention from being featured in someone else’s already famous work. But what if you use this opportunity to talk only about your book? You don’t really try to add something to the book you’re guest writing for, you just focus on promoting yourself. It’s really tempting to do that, and even more so when we are talking about guest blogging and guest posting online. Which is why earlier this year Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s Webspam team, called out guest posting on his blog and suggested that we all find better ways to draw attention upon us in the online world – or better uses for guest posts. Use it to build relationships with other people and other companies, use it to craft an image for your brand through carefully picked associations with other brands, use it to define your identity as an organization. Just don’t use it for a hurried, obvious, self-centered plug.

Myth 3 – SEO is Dead!

The answer to this myth is quite straightforward: No, SEO is not dead. But maybe the idea – or some idea – behind the original meaning really is dead. It’s becoming harder and harder to actually “optimize” the results of search engines by means of shady tactics. The main condition for becoming highly ranked is starting to become, well… that you are actually that good and that relevant. Or, as long-time SEO Jill Whalen said when she quit the industry last year:

“Google now works. The tricks to beat and spam Google no longer work as well. Today’s SEO blogs and conferences are bursting with SEO consultants talking about how, when you create amazing websites and content for your users, the search engines will follow. This means, my friends, that my work here is done.”

Some have even gone so far as to declare the term dead and propose new concepts to take its place (such as OC/DC: optimizing content for discovery and conversion). But SEO has been about so much more than trying to manipulate the results and rankings all along.

As long as there will be search engines, there will be a desire to “optimize” them, whatever that will mean at any given point in time.

Myth 4 – Black Hat SEO Does Not Work!

It depends on what “work” means. A lot of black hat tactics will get you higher in the search rankings on a short-term. Tactics such as packing long lists of buzz words on your page, regardless of whether they actually relate to your content and field of business or not, putting lists of keywords in a color that is the same as the background, in the hopes that these lists will be indexed by search engines, or even including links to pages that the user will never be able to actually see will likely help you rank higher for a couple of days. Are you going to get away with it in the longer run? Most definitely not. You will end up being penalized severely by search engines, and the use of these techniques could even result in your web page being banned from the search engine.

Myth 5 – Anchor Text is Dead!

It’s easy to see anchor text as spammy and unreliable, but when done right, it still matters. When anchor text appears naturally in a post, it helps search engines verify both your site and the site you are linking to. If an anchor text is specific (e.g.: “black hat SEO problems” instead of “click here” or even “SEO”), it gives a naturalness vibe to your page. At the same time, you shouldn’t try too hard to make your anchor text a search engine magnet or target by using commercial keywords. Most recommendations on the matter suggest that no more than a third of all anchor text instances should be targeted. Whether an anchor text is targeted or whether it simply happens to fit remains, of course, a delicate issue and generates a lot of interpretation. Which is why you should focus as little as you can on trying to get traffic and clicks from the anchor text, and as much as possible on choosing anchor text that makes sense and is relevant to the link. As for the linked site, if the anchor texts that link to a certain sites are somewhat varied, this might be another indicator of natural site-building. When all the backlinks are anchored with the same text, it is likely that something at least unnatural is going on, if not shady altogether. Anchor text is still relevant, you just need to pay attention to how you use it.

Myth 6 – Disavowing All Your Links Will Fix Your Problem!

It’s fairly easy to control the way you build your own website so that you don’t do anything against the rules. At any rate, it’s easier than controlling what others might do in the way of influencing your page’s ranking on search engines. What if for one reason or another, a link to your site is found alongside a myriad of other links in an attempt of another site to get their 15 minutes of fame? What if the way your site is linked from another page is through some shady anchor text? What if you get penalized on account of backlinks you had nothing to do with? That’s when you should use Google’s disavow tool to mark those links and only those links to be disavowed by the search engine. If you haven’t been penalized yet, and just want to stay on the safe side, it’s best to try conventional methods first, for instance a reconsideration request. If you decide to use this tool as a heal-all solution because you’re in a hurry, or scared or simply unsure what to do, disavowing all the links in an attempt to “clear your name” with certainty will not return the desired results. On the other hand, you might actually get penalized by Google, because the move seems unusual. On the other hand, you might lose any standing in the search engine ranks anyway because now there’s nothing linking to you so there’s very little to put you in the center of the map. The disavow tool was created to fight unnatural links, and that’s all you should be using it for.

Myth 7 – Disavowing Only “Some” of Your Unnatural Links Will Fix Your Problem!

Since you don’t have to throw out the baby with the bath water, do you have to throw out the bath water at all? What happens if you just disavow some of the unnatural links, won’t that be seen as a sign of good will or at least get you some forgiving? It’s very likely that the answer to all of these questions is “no”. You will just lose time waiting for an answer from Google which will probably be a refusal because the uploaded disavow file is incomplete. If you don’t know which links exactly you should disavow, the very first step would be to conduct a link audit. Include everything that’s necessary in the disavow file, but nothing extra.

If there’s one thing Google frowns upon more than unnatural links, it’s the shallow use of the Disavow tool  to reduce the problem of unnatural links.

Myth 8 – No-Follow Links Don’t Count!

Not with that attitude they don’t. Sure, they don’t bring you the big points, the “link juice”. That doesn’t mean they’re not helpful though. For starters, the issue seems to be a bit more complicated than it meets the eye: while Google abides by the no-follow instruction, it has been suggested that there’s a more complicated dynamic at work, and where a site is linked by both do-follow and no-follow links, both may have an impact. Even if we were to ignore it, the fact remains that, no-follow links make you more likely to seem natural; they show that easy points are not all that you’re interested in, and Google may even check naturalness based on a do-follow – no-follow ratio. Last, but definitely not least, these links can still bring you traffic, which is really what you’re after. Plus, a lot of comments and even posts can be no-follow and still create buzz and social activity around you, which matters towards referral traffic. Remember: you’re trying to build an image that’s strong enough to get you high in the rankings, not get high in the rankings so you’ll have a better image.

Myth 9 – Negative SEO Does Not Work!

Various mistakes such as incorrect redirects, duplicate content, de-indexing your own site, are some of the most frequent reasons for concern, along with black hat SEO tactics. But outside enemies may be on the rise, too! At the very least, the change in tone in Google’s official wording on the matter may be a forewarning. In 2012 Google changed its position on the issue of negative SEO from:

“There’s almost nothing a competitor can do to harm your ranking or have your site removed from our index”

to

“Google works hard to prevent other webmasters from being able to harm your ranking or have your site removed from our index.”

So what could happen? The two most obvious examples would be that malicious parties could try to either leave spam anchor texts on your site, or use low-quality links to point to your site. Either way, these attacks shouldn’t work or do any irreversible damage if you keep a close eye on your links, both inbound and outbound. If damage is done before you identify it, you could still try to fix the situation either manually, by submitting reconsideration requests or semi-automatically, by using the disavow tool.

It also helps if you’re aware of your own site environment:

• Is your website fairly new?
• Are you on a competitive market?
• Have you been using a brand-building slow-growing strategy?

In the end, it comes back to the decisions you make. For now, guarding yourself against negative SEO is still in your power. You can easily get alerted by e-mail when such a think might happen.

Myth 10 – SEO is Easy!

It should be pretty clear by now that it is not! It becomes more and more complex with the layer of abstraction that is added to it. Google aims to make the technical signals harder and harder to read. It took away the ability to get keyword data for users arriving to websites from Google searches. It made fewer and fewer updates to the Pagerank in the past years (5 updates in 2011, 4 in 2012, 2 in 2013, none so far), leading some to speculate that Pagerank might even go away for good. But it also geared its algorithm towards understanding conversational search queries or personalizing search results. By all accounts, SEO isn’t what it used to be. It takes a clearer vision, better crafted site architecture and a more genuine interest towards providing quality content.

 SEO just got a whole lot more interesting. And it’s here to stay!

What myths or misconceptions would you like to add to this list?

The post 10 SEO Myths and Misconceptions that Should Die in 2014 appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

There is a lot more benefits a brand could gain once it has a continuous flow of traffic. But the methods on how to actually do it are more important than the theories.

In this post, I’ll share to you a few ways to improve your blog’s traffic that are scalable and could be performed in any type of niche you’re working in.

Let’s get started…

1. Target social influencers when promoting your content

You already know that it’s not enough to create a content that is tailored to your target audience. Content promotion is a must right after your crafted your content and should be done twice the effort and time you exerted in your content creation.

One of the key ways to amplify the reach of your content is to get in touch with social influencers who could be your brand followers and could make your content promotion easier than the usual tactic (given that they have existing followers who might be interested to read/consume your content).

Type in your industry in the Followerwonk’s search Twitter bio and sort the results by social authority. Social authority is not only based on the number of followers a person gains but also on how he actually engages with his social followers. The higher the social authority of the influencer, the higher is the person’s engagement with his followers.

You can also use CircleCount to look for influencers who are active on Google+. Why do you need Google+ industry influencers? Simply because Google is now favoring brands with engaging Google+ pages and posts that have high Google+ shares are more likely to rank higher on search results.

Type in your keyword/niche in CircleCount and you’ll be able to see influencers who have a lot of followers on Google+. Reach out to them and offer your content. Remember that you don’t need to be pushy in your outreach. Just give them a heads up of your content and they’ll be the one to decide whether or not your content deserves a share.

You can use this email template to reach out to social influencers:

And boom! You could give a boost to your content’s reach with just a few minutes of outreach.

2. Use commonly-searched keywords on your guest posts

As I have mentioned in my guest post on FindMyBlogWay, creating high quality content assets should be done inside and outside your blog. The more you provide good content assets on other sites, the more brand signals you’re sending to search engines. These brand signals could be acquired when people search for your brand-related terms (brand name, offerings, etc..). This actually happens if you could get people remember your brand by providing content that is unique, comprehensive and could be a good resource/reference for blog posts.

Given that the authority site where your will contribute your content have high domain rank, it becomes easy for the blog posts hosted on that site to rank for targeted keywords. The reason is that authority of the main page can be passed to its internal pages.

Take advantage of this by targeting easy-to-rank keywords on your guest posts. If your guest post ranks high on SERPs, it will receive continuous traffic depending on the search volume and seasonality of the keyword used. And the more visitors landed on that guest post, the chance of getting referred traffic through the site is higher.

Referred traffic doesn’t come automatically when visitors landed on your guest post. The content should entice users to visit your site by linking to your site’s deeper pages and adding a call to action to your guest post.

3. Use freshness for your content assets

Freshness had been released by Google to serve users with updated content pieces. This would help small brands to dominate the search results with updated and high quality content.

You can actually use freshness for your content to maximize its potential to rank on top spots of organic results given that it’s actually what the search engines and users are looking for in a content (fresh!).

To determine if your preferred keyword favors fresh content in the search results, type that keyword in Google search. And look at the publishing date of each of the post. Just by looking at the dates, you can already determine if freshness greatly impacts ranking results in your niche.

4. Automate alerts for unlinked/linked brand mentions

If you truly provide utility for your target audience, getting mentions from various web places is nearly possible for your brand. There are several reasons why webmasters would want to link to you. One reason would be the comprehensiveness of your content that it is deserved to be referenced by bloggers for their content.

Bloggers are not always perfect when they link to external sources. Some of them would just link to your homepage though it should be linked to your internal page(s). Others mentioned your brand name or your name but don’t actually linked to your site or even to your social profile.

These instances are common to every brand and you just have to monitor every mentions of your brand to get the most value of them.

Unlinked or linked brand mentions can be easily identified when you use alert tools. The most common among those tools is Google Alerts. You need to setup search queries using the tool to receive emails that list pages where you had been mentioned in. Otherwise, you’ll receive plenty of junk emails in your inbox.

 Here are a few advanced search queries you can use to setup in your Google Alerts (I’ll use my site name as my example):

• Digital Philippines” –site:digitalphilippines.net
• “digitalphilippines” –site:digitalphilippines.net
• “Venchito Tampon” Founder –site:digitalphilippines.net
• “Venchito Tampon” content marketing –site:digitalphilippines.net
• “”Venchito Tampon” link building –site: digitalphilippines.net

Once you received an email, check if the site correctly linked to your page. If not, reach out to the webmaster and ask him if he could link to the right page.

Regularly outreaching to bloggers who haven’t linked properly to your page would help your blog increased its referral traffic (especially if the page that linked to you is of high quality and ranks on SERPs for a certain keyword).

5. Target bloggers’ or peers’ email lists for content placement

If you already started a good relationship building with influencers who have newsletters in their websites, this technique would be easy for you. If not, you still need to reach out to a few of them to get in touch with your brand.

The method is simple. You have to get those webmasters with large number of subscribers in their newsletters to connect with you. You can incentivize them just to have your content placed in their regular newsletters or start to have a good conversation with them.

The higher the number of subscribers in the email list, the higher is your chance to get referred traffic (through email). This tactic still varies as you need to have a good headline so email subscribers would click on your content when they see it in their inbox.

Conclusion:

The main key to obtaining continuous flow of referral traffic is to create high quality linkable assets for your own site and these branded content pieces should be well distributed on different web places.

 Guest post : Venchito Tampon is a content strategist and link builder based in Manila, Philippines. He is the sole author of the content marketing blog, DigitalPhilippines.net. If you have any questions, get in touch with me @venchito14 or venchitotampon [at] gmail [dot] com. I’ll be happy to connect with you!

The post 5 Effective Ways to Increase Your Blog Traffic appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

Photo Credit: Matti Mattila on Flickr

How to Evaluate Guest Posting Opportunities

When it comes to guest posting for links, some SEO’s still turn to Google PageRank as the first (and maybe only) criteria they consider. Guest posting is a strategy that should be utilized for more than just link building – many people have seen a lot of success from it when they evaluate the following.

• Is the blog indexed in search? if you found a potential guest post opportunity via Google search, then you already know the answer to that question. If not, you might want to do a site:domain.com search to make sure the blog is indexed. Otherwise your content and your link will go unnoticed.
• How many social shares do posts receive on average? This can give you an idea of what kind of social exposure your posts are likely to get from the blog’s audience.
• How many comments do posts receive on average? This can give you an idea of whether anyone will actually read your content and potentially click on the link. Blogs without an audience could be content / link farms in disguise.
• How strong is the existing content? Does the content on the site look like it is quality content or just a hub or articles under the title of a blog? If it’s the latter, it’s probably a good idea to skip posting.
• Does the existing content match your website’s topic? Google loves relevancy, so if you are building a link to a wedding site and the blog doesn’t talk about anything related to weddings, then it may not help to have your content or link placed there.

Why didn’t we include the amount of traffic a blog receives as a factor? It’s hard to get a good view of the traffic a blog receives without diving directly into their Google Analytics, especially since many of the traffic networks like Alexa are not accurate. Plus there are ways that blogs can inflate their traffic numbers without gaining any valuable visitors.

How to Evaluate Directory Submissions

Directories are still popular when it comes to link building, but not all directories are created equal. Here are some things to look out for before submitting your website.

• Is the directory listed in search? Along with article directories and blogs in formerly popular blog networks, some directories were also hit by Penguin and Panda so hard that they lost many of their rankings in search. Be sure your target directory still has a good rep in Google search.
• Is the directory relevant to your industry? Some of the best directories you can get a website listed in are those that are industry-specific. If your site is about automobiles, then automotive directories would be the best to start with. There are some good niche directories listed on Directory Critic.
• Are there non-relevant links in the categories you want to be listed in? While directories may have great categories that apply to the website you want to submit, if they allow non-relevant links within them just because someone paid the submission fee, then they might not be a good choice.

Directory submissions are not the cream of the crop, per say, but they can be good for link building to a website that is hard to link build for (i.e. little to no content, tough industry, etc.). But don’t depend on them as your sole source of links.

How to Evaluate Article Directories

While you’d be better off at submitting unique content to other blogs as guest posts, if you insist on article directories, here are some things to look for.

• Was the article network hit by Panda and has it recovered? Using SEMrush, you can find out if an article network was hit by the Google Panda update and whether it has recovered since. Take EzineArticles – you can see from the SE (search engine) Traffic graph that they lost a significant amount of traffic during the first Panda update and have not recovered as their traffic has continued to downhill.
• Does the article network have actual readers? Speaking of traffic, does most of it come from marketers building links or does the network have an actual community of people who read the articles? You can tell by the number of comments top articles have as well as their social shares.
• Does the article network allow for media in their articles? Networks like HubPages and Squidoo allow you to add videos, images, and much more into your text articles, making them higher quality. Both networks also have great built-in communities.
• Is the article network related to your website’s niche? Niche article networks with a community are best because you know people will be there to read the content, and maybe even click on your link.

Why does community matter in an article network? Google is looking to remove low quality content from their index that doesn’t have value to people. If a network actually has a community of people who enjoy the articles, the network is less likely to fall under Google’s hit list.

How to Evaluate Resource Pages

There are different kinds of resource pages: pages created to highlight specific resources on a particular topic and pages created for mass link exchanges. Here’s how to know whether you are looking at a good one.

• Is there anything on the page that refers to link exchanges? If you see anything that eludes to your getting listed in exchange for a link from your website to the one you are viewing, then your likely looking at a link farm for link exchanges which should be avoided at all costs.
• Are there multiple resource pages and are they all relevant to the main website (and yours)? Even if a website isn’t creating resource pages for link exchanges, if they have a
• Are all of the links on the resource page actually on topic? Although it’s good to get your website linked on a page with only a small amount of links, it’s still ok to get your link placed with dozens of others so long as they all have a common theme. The only exception is local resource pages – if there’s one page for favorite businesses in Los Angeles, then it’s ok to have your golf link next to an Italian restaurant link.
• Is the resource page linked from the main website? If you can’t get to the resource page from the main website, then it wasn’t created as a resource for the website’s visitors and therefore may not do a lot of good for your link.

Some of the best resource pages can be found on EDU sites. Universities who allow professors to create their own personal homepage can be a nice source of relevant resources for particular industries.

How to Evaluate Blogroll Links

Are all blogroll links evil? Not necessarily. Here’s what you need to figure out when it comes to blogroll / sidebar links on a blog.

• Is the blog on topic? If the blog’s main topic is closely related to yours, then it might be a good fit. Think of it this way – would that blog’s audience be interested in clicking on your link? If the answer is yes, then it could be a good opportunity.
• Does the website you’re building links for have a blog? If it’s on the same domain, then you can build links to the blog on blogrolls – it’s a natural fit when you find blogs on the same topic.
• Does the sidebar have obviously paid links? They’re generally easy to spot because the paid links will usually not relate to the main blog. If so, steer clear so Google doesn’t think you paid for a link as well.

The best way into a blogger’s heart and onto their blogroll is through interaction. Be sure to comment on their blogs regularly and interact with them on social media before pursuing a link on their sidebar. Also be sure to explain exactly how your link will benefit their audience.

These are some of the most popular (and sometimes risky) link building strategies today. What other strategies do you use to build links and how do you evaluate them to make sure they are going to stand the test of time with Google?

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1. Optimise well for local search

Local search can be really beneficial for small businesses and this opportunity should not be wasted. A really high percentage of people use search engines to research or find local companies. The Venice update has changed local organic search completely and this has introduced many new ways to improve your online presence.

You can optimise for local search by using various link building methods. Commenting on local blogs could be one of those tactics. If you know your local keywords well, it is easy to research for blogs that are talking or writing about your niche or industry. Keeping variations of target URL, for example, Google Plus business profile, company website, etc. can help to get more promising local rankings. Another method could be offering and writing guest posts on local and relevant blogs. This would require a good outreach email and useful content. Providing something useful like interesting content, sponsorships, donations, educational support to local and influential organisations, companies, universities, blogs or listings in a high quality local business directory can help to improve your local rankings considerably. If your business has more than 1 location, then having separate landing pages with content about specific locations would be ideal.
 

2. Do keyword research regularly and use many variations of keywords

Focusing on just one list of keywords for a long time isn’t ideal. Even the high traffic generating keywords cannot promise the same results all the time. Risk assessment and keyword research should be carried out regularly to see any change in the search pattern. People use different variations of keywords to search a specific product or service. Expanding your focus on keywords and experimenting with different variations might not be successful instantly but this method would provide an insight into users search patterns and potentially uncover profitable new keywords.
 

3. Make sure that the technical set up of your website is SEO friendly

Use Canonical tags and 301 redirects

One of the common SEO mistakes that website owners make is not realising that their website URLs can be viewed as both ‘www.example.com’ and ‘example.com’. In this case, search engines identify two addresses of your website with same content on them. A 301 redirect should be used to resolve this issue. Search engines also need to know which page or pages are preferred so that other pages with similar content can be ignored to avoid any duplicate content issues. A canonical tag must be used in this case.

Use image alt tags

An “alt” or alternative tag should be used on all images on a site to describe them with the help of a keyword. This is crucial for search engines and others to identify the image.

Don’t use multiple H1 tags

Even though this is quite basic but I’ve noticed more than one H1 tag on some websites lately. All other content can go under H2, H3, etc. but H1 tag should be just one. This basic mistake could damage your on-site SEO.

Don’t write long meta descriptions

A Meta Description tag should not have more than 156 characters to describe the company. The description must be short and to the point as this has limited visibility in the SERPS.

Update sitemaps regularly and minimise page crawling errors

Every website owner should use Google Webmaster Tools regularly to check how Google identifies or crawls their site. There could be many crawl errors that might be keeping your website from ranking within the SERPS. A sitemap helps search engine bots to visit the site and gather information about your website. Sitemaps need to be updated regularly to get pages indexed quickly by the search engine bots.

Avoid keyword stuffing

If your business is specialising in ‘solar panels’ and your website has the word ‘solar panels’ written too many times or in too many different forms, then you could be a potential victim of a Panda penalty.

Complete page titles and keywords

Using keywords in page titles is imperative to your SEO strategy. For example: Using ‘Support’ as page title for your support page would be wrong and ‘Company name | Support’ would be good. Adding your brand name in the page title shows legitimacy and your willingness to stand by what you are selling or trading in.
 

4. Have a better internal linking structure

Internal link structure can provide good value to the website and this aspect is often underestimated by businesses. A website should have a clear linking pattern of old content or posts with new posts to fully utilise all the content on the website. Referencing old and relevant content in new posts can help to provide complete information to a visitor. Make sure you update your sitemaps, add recommendations of relevant products and link to relevant old posts on your website. This strategy won’t just help to improve SEO of your website but also improve the visitors’ on-site experience.
 

5. Get social

Creating a social media strategy and utilising all possible social media platforms to promote your small business should be a definite yes. This is the most important way to engage with your existing and potential customers and this opportunity must be adopted to increase new and repeat visits to your website which will lead to increased profits and customer satisfaction. No niche can be ‘too boring’ to have a successful social media strategy.
 

6. Take the less competitive path

Apart from doing the obvious and common, like having a presence on platforms like Facebook and Twitter, businesses need to tap the less used path by the competitors. Research your industry and your competitors and then analyse which factors about your business can be used to gain a competitive advantage. Various ideas can be used in the form of hub sites, social media campaigns on Pinterest or being on top for data visualisations.
 

7. Focus on regular original content

We all know that having regular and interesting content on a website is a must. This will not only provide useful information to visitors and web surfers but also increase traffic, improve rankings, engage customers and visitors, improve social media profiles, gain powerful and natural links and improve the overall online presence. However, there are some dos and don’ts for content strategies which I mentioned in my last post.

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