Tag: SEO

A Checklist to Succeed at International SEO Strategy

Posted on by NextJSjointviews

Back in the days, deciding to go international was a huge step in a company’s history. Businesses would enter another country only after 10 to 15 years of success in home country.

This is not the case now. Technology has shrunk the world and accelerated growth stages of a company. Today, companies are going international within a year of their business. In fact, start-ups are being launched with vision of a global presence.

Read on if you are spreading your digital presence online and want to know how your SEO efforts should change country to country.

Launching your site in a different country is more than just translating. In fact language is only one part of your site transformation. Sometimes, your site will have to change according to the region even in two English speaking regions. For example, Amazon has different sites for each country. (This is called country targeting).

A Checklist to Succeed at International SEO Strategy

Follow this checklist to launch your website successfully.

Domain Name viability

There is something that comes even before you figure out your regional hosting, target market and translation. It is your business name feasibility in other countries.

Launching popular Dublin whiskey brand “Irish Mist” was an embarrassing mistake in Germany because ‘Mist’ means manure in German!

It’s important to test your product name, brand name and domain name in another country before you think of implementing SEO strategy. P&G had to change its brand “Mr. Clean” to Flash in Ireland as the name was already taken.

In case of such legal complications and cultural misfit you may want to consider buying a different domain name altogether.

Competitor Market Research

One reason why international SEO strategies fail is because they do not adapt to the different competitive landscape of the new market.

New regions will have new players who could be more competitive or more aggressive in their ad spends.

Besides, Google is not the primary search engine in some countries. China has ‘Baidu’ and Russia has ‘Yandex’ as the most popular search engines.

You will have to find how search results are ranked here and tweak your SEO strategy if you want to launch in these countries.

Looking at the country’s top competitors will give you good idea of what SEO strategy is working. Use tools such as SEMRush and Google Trends to find keywords others are using for successful SEO strategy.

Keyword Research

Keywords are crucial to your SEO strategy. Search terms and context change from country to country depending on products and services.

A search for flights will be more or less similar throughout the world. However, search terms for clothing may be completely different. Soft sport shoes are called ‘sneakers’ in the U.S. and ‘trainers’ in U.K.

This is why going into a new market may mean doing your keyword research all over again.
Never assume the same keyword will work in another country. You will also have to re-purpose your content keeping the new keywords in mind.

Localize Content

The next step after deciding on your keywords is to localize your content of your website.
This includes translation to language, change in currency, metric systems etc.

Translation is a major part of it although you may need to re-position your content in some cases. Remember that different audiences interpret words, messaging, and colors differently. It is advisable to involve local digital marketing firm or consultants to be sure that your brand message is coming across correctly.

Website Structuring

There are various ways to structure your international website. Here is a video of terms you must be familiar with before you consider your options:

Here are some additional terms to know for international SEO:

  • Country code top level domain (ccTLD) – these are country specific such as ‘.fr’ for France in ‘www.example.fr’
  • Sub-Directory- It is simply a folder on the site. ‘fr’ in ‘www.example.com/fr’
  • Sub Domain – A unique subset of the domain name. It appears just before the domain name. ‘www’ in ‘www.example.com’

As of 2018 the international SEO consultants recommend that you use Sub-directories to differentiate country specific sites. This is because Google does not treat this as a separate site and uses your root domain name authority to rank page.

Localization Signals

Google also provides webmasters with various tools to help it rank the right localized page for the intended audience. Here are some tools and signals that your web developer / web master must optimize targeting:

1. Hreflangs – This is an attribute (‘just a part of site code’) which tells Google how different versions of your site are related and which page is meant to be shown in a country / language search.

2. Geo-targeting Settings– You can also set your target country in the country targeting tool in Google Search Console. Select this for site versions that you want to restrict to one country only. Do not set this if you want to target multiple countries with the same site.

3. Backlinks – It would benefit your Germany targeted website if most of its backlinks came from German sites. Backlinks from all over the world could confuse the geo-targeting signals.

4. Server Locations– A server closer to your audience is a signal for targeting the region. This means using a server located in Germany will help to target a Germany target site.

Final Thoughts

We are lucky to live in an era where the whole world is open to businesses old and new. Launching your websites across the globe requires some thought and planning. Checking everything off this list will take your international SEO strategy closer to success.

How AI and Machine Learning Will Shape the Future of SEO

Posted on by NextJSjointviews

Since the inception of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), it has been going through various transformations. It is evident that Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning is going to change SEO soon.

AI is a system which is constantly evolving and changing. Nowadays, SEO prioritizes more on content, links and user experiences.

Machine learning

It is a form of artificial intelligence. Machine learning gives the opportunity to computers to learn without being programmed.

That means software programs will be able to change and grow accordingly when exposed to new data. This will make computers more adaptable to new data.

Machine learning is not a new concept. Even in 1990s, basic machine learning algorithms existed but with minimal usage of applying it.

From recently only, Google started making use of it in its searches and we started seeing rapid changes whenever there are new major updates.

RankBrain

RankBrain is Google’s new game changing algorithm introduced in conjunction with Hummingbird. It was introduced to help in identifying and interpreting the intent of the content and showing result pages which don’t include the words users searched for; but contains information related to the category or idea of the query.

RankBrain is designed in such a way to continuously determine and integrate new features on its own. Even though, you may not have noticed any major changes in searching; RankBrain is definitely doing an outstanding job.

On the billions of searches Google process everyday, 15% of those enquiries had never been processed before. From 2016, Google uses RankBrain to process each of them; where its resources are used to learn how to investigate all kind of queries including the rare ones.

To analyze how AI and machine learning will shape the future of SEO, we need to study about the history and current scenarios of SEO. Let’s take a look at those:

How SEO evolved?

When SEO started, it was very easy to rank top in a search engine as the results were based on keywords used. If you wanted a top position in search results, all you needed to do was use the phrase suitable for your title and the content and you are done! You were guaranteed one of the top most positions in search results.

The basic idea was that the number of times the keyword used was more on your page; your ranking will be higher.

But this also paved ways for some unethical search engine optimisation practices by various companies such as hiding keywords in the background of websites or putting keywords off screen.

Different types of tactics were developed for ranking high on search engine which led Google to change the algorithms used.

As Google had enough with the unethical SEO practices, Penguin 1.0 was introduced by Google on April 2012. It was developed to block various web spam tacticssuch as duplicate contents, stuffing of keywords, link schemes and also unwanted redirects.

Based on Google’s quality guidelines, Penguin decreased those sites’ ranking where it felt has violated the guidelines.

Current scenario of SEO

Various algorithms used by Google have helped a lot in kicking out spam filled sites. Also this scenario forced marketers to create high quality contents to get into search results.

In the past, if the SEO techniques were based on keywords; at present, it’s based on technical SEO, link building and speed of the page.

In the past, technical SEO only makes sure whether you use suitable keyword, but now it also focuses more on creating greater user experiences.

Now it includes various factors such as user behaviour, page speed and responsiveness of mobile pages.

Now Google focuses more on quality content rather than keyword stuffed contents. Engaging on high quality content will always decrease the ranking of low quality content even if it has high keyword density.

Future of SEO

The future of SEO will mostly rely on artificial intelligence rather than relying on a formula to create organic search result listing.

AI will be relying on machine learning, big data and user experience. Using AI and machine learning, search engines can learn from user behaviours and will be able to provide a list of contents users will most likely search for.

The following are the trends that are more likely to shape the future of SEO:

In 2015, Google has introduced RankBrain into its search algorithm. As said before, it has made keyword phrases irrelevant.

RankBrain is the third most important ranking factor in their search algorithms.

  • Understanding user intent

It will play an important part in ranking as major part of search results are based on artificial intelligence. Now, when marketers are thinking of creating content for their website, they need to think more than just keywords to hit the ranking on the search engine results page.

They also need to think what users will hope to find on your web page when they click from the results on search engines.

Marketers should be vigilant to get clues from search intent from their queries. There are four types of queries based on the user intent:

  • Navigational: A user looking for a specific information on a specific website
  • Informational: A user trying to get some information to read
  • Transactional: User trying to pay a bill, creating a new account or even trying to subscribe newsletters
  • Commercial: A user wishes to purchase or trying to get information to purchase later
  • Schema Markups

It is code or semantic vocabulary that you create on your webpage which helps the search engines to have a better understanding of your content.

This in turn enables search engines to give informative and accurate results for the users. It looks like Google will be making use of new schema markup supports for carousels, data feeds, job listings etc.

Impact of AI and machine learning in the future of SEO

Emergence of machine learning and artificial intelligence will definitely bright up the future of search engine optimization. In favour of SEO, AI not only delivers useful content to users but also makes sure of what fits to user’s need.

Rather than sending users to a page that has more likely content, machine learning AI system will send users to the page that not only answer their initial queries but also can answer follow up queries.

It is very evident that AI and machine learning are definitely going to revolutionize SEO in delivering a greater user experience.

So don’t even think of compromising the quality of content on your website because no one wants to get listed last on the search engine ranking.

If you are not sure in creating content that will hit the top rankings in SEO, you can definitely outsource them. Our team is happy to help you with. Learn more about our products and services.

6 Remarkable Ways to Build a Great SEO Team

Posted on by NextJSjointviews

A great SEO team is essential for successful digital marketing. Their job is to get more views on a webpage. This needs skills such as understanding audience behaviour, cracking the reader’s patterns and AI Algorithms.

A recent study shows that 93% of online experiences begin with search engines. This number should be good enough to encourage any business to hire and build a great SEO team. This blog will provide you some tips on how you can do that.

1. Hire a complete Team

 The first step in building an SEO team is to hire the right people. This hiring has to be done by keeping the positions and work responsibilities in mind. The following experts are required to build a quality team:

Manager: Like every team in a company, SEO team also needs an effective manager. The manager must understand the roles of SEO employees in his team.

A varied experience in web development, content creation, social media marketing and other areas of digital marketing is beneficial as right SEO strategy requires knowledge of many areas of digital marketing. Your manager will also be responsible for making an SEO strategy so a strategic thinking will be an add on.

Data analyst: The job of a data analyst is to conduct research on keywords, studying the webpage traffic and giving meaningful insights after number crunching.

Web development: This is an important role in an SEO team as web developers have to take care of page loading time, internal navigation, and indexing. Their job can also require them to design the pages. Sometimes web developers are shared with other teams.

Content writer: To appear on search engines a blog/web page requires lots of content, it requires good content. Without good, creative and innovative content the web page will not show up in the top links of search engine.

Link building: SEO takes into consideration the quality of links pointing to your content to validate the authenticity of your content. Hence it is advised to designate this work to an expert who understands when and where the internal or external links should be provided. Sometimes this role is merged with a content writer’s role.

2. Keep them updated

Search engines keep on updating their crawling algorithms from time to time. Google is a search engine which keeps SEO experts on their toes. Some of their major updates include Google Panda, Google Penguin, Google Hummingbird. These updates mainly depend on the development of Machine Learning. (ML).

To understand how to get more views on a page, SEO teams must be up-to-date with the ever changing algorithms. To ensure that your employees are on the same page as the latest SEO trends, your team must be continuously learning. In fact, research should be a part of their daily activity.

Good research brings good results. Information related to latest ML developments can be found on many websites and online journals as well. Some examples are: Moz, Search Engine Journal, and Google SEO Guidelines. Subscribing to journals and blogs can help the team in predicting the upcoming SEO trends.

3. Train employees

You may not be able to hire the best SEO specialist in the world.  But nothing stops you from training them to achieve world class success in SEO. A good SEO team should comprise of employees who are ready to learn new things. SEO is all about understanding content and what the audience likes to read/watch.

Get them to read all about SEO and conduct SEO related workshops. You could even create courses to train the employees. Make sure your SEO team is working closely with market research to understand their target audience and what they want.

4. Encourage with Awards

Acknowledging the efforts of employees motivates them to work harder. It makes them believe that their efforts have a positive effect on the business and hence it boosts the self esteem of the employees.

Incentives can be provided on a quarterly basis in the form of bonus or it can be given yearly in the form of promotion or raise. Regular recognition of their quality work in the form of awards and titles also works to motivate your team.

5. Create a healthy environment

There is no doubt that a healthy workplace should be provided to employees of every department but the work of SEO operations requires focused attention and sometimes working for long hours. Data crunching, meeting content calendar deadlines and continuous learning can be stressful too.

Breaks for other activities such as games, debates, discussions, art, etc reduce stress as well as build stronger relations. The employees should have good relationship with one another as well. This way they can work as a team together. This would also make them open towards receiving others suggestions as well as giving them.

6. Interact with other SEO experts

Certain exclusive knowledge can be only learnt with experience. Not everything is found online. Make sure your team learns from those who have spent years in the industry. Encourage them to attend conferences, discussions and workshops about SEO operation.

In all these events employees will get tips from the experts, they will witness ideas in the process of being made and most of all these events will inspire them. Seminars are a great way of meeting other SEO teams in your industry and other big influential companies. You team will also pick up new strategies that help them to think out of their daily work.

Final Thoughts

For years businesses have focused on advertisement to attract more customers and in today’s internet age, appearing on the first page of search engines is the perfect advertisement. Try out these tips and prepare yourself to see your business grow.

90 Link Building Strategies to Use in 2018 [Infographic]

Posted on by NextJSjointviews

Higher search engine rankings are based on the authority of webpages. As you probably know, quality links can increase your site’s authority as well as improves its SEO value. Link building helps you to increase the flow of high-quality links pointing to your website. It‘s a proven marketing strategy by many businesses for improving their brand awareness.

Contact Jointviews

Google considers quality links to your site while ranking. Links indicate that whether your page is useful as a result. Search engines only want to show useful results to its users. So, all your SEO efforts for higher rankings are imperfect without link building strategies.

Do you want increase your domain authority through link building? Here is an infographic illustrating 90 linking building strategies that you can include in your SEO strategy in 2018.

90 Link Building Strategies to Use in 2018 infographic

Top 12 E-commerce SEO Strategies to Grow Your Business

Posted on by NextJSjointviews

The E-commerce industry has significantly grown in the last one decade. In fact, both small and medium-sized businesses are looking for E-commerce SEO strategies that help them boost the brand and improve the bottom line.

According to Statista, e-commerce sales were estimated at USD 1.92 trillion in 2016 and are expected to reach a USD 2.35 trillion by the end of 2018.

But just having an E-commerce business and believing in these stats is not going to give you success. What else do you need? Read on to get insights into 12 E-commerce SEO strategies that you need to follow if you want guaranteed growth through E-commerce:

1. Simple Categories

A lot of E-commerce portals forget to label and categorize their products carefully. This confuses the consumer as he/she is not able to find the product they need. Remember to keep categories that are easy-to-understand with logical labels, and filters. Your conversion rates will automatically be promoted.

2. Unique Product Description

This is one of the SEO tricks that will help to break through the competition. It will improve your SEO rankings and drive more traffic to your website. Product descriptions must be unique, not more than 250 words with relevant keywords in the product title and synonyms in the description. Identify high-search traffic keywords in your category before you give your product a title.

3. Attractive Images

Since E-commerce stores take away the touch-and-feel aspect, images play a major role in influencing purchase decisions. You may have a high-quality product but if your image is blurred, consumers will not be attracted to it. Product photos can communicate what copy cannot. Good photos can improve SEO, market your brand and establish an image and also be shared on Social Media for increased sales.

4. Clear URLs

Website addresses should not be complicated. For instance, a www.mystore.com/girls-dresses is more convenient to navigate than www.mystore.com/shop/cat-1245. Have relevant keywords in the URL with every category separated by hyphens.

5. Social Media & Blogging

Sharing quality content on your social media platforms helps to keep the target audience engaged. Inform them about your activities – sales, offers, new product launches, season collections and other details via social media. Maintain two-way communication with your customers, even if it is in the form of a negative feedback.

6. Offer Incentives

This is one of the most important E-commerce SEO strategies. Your customers must feel incentivized from time to time. Such an approach not only increases conversions but also generates loyalty customers. Bonus items, discount codes, and free delivery options over a particular price increases order size.

7. Reminder Cart Emails

A lot of customers search for products, add them to the cart and then abandon the purchase. Sending reminder emails to inform them of their incomplete order is extremely helpful in getting the customer back on your website. Adding a creative copy or discount update in such emails comes in handy too.

8. Focused Re-marketing

This has emerged as one of the most popular strategies to give the customer a hammer effect. Remarketing through Facebook, or Google Search advertising helps to engage all those consumers who abandoned their shopping carts without completing the checkout process. However, do remember that time here is of immense importance. Customers have several E-commerce players to choose from and if you don’t act fast, they would make the purchase elsewhere.

9. Customer Reviews

A lot of customers like a product but are iffy to buy it. Majority of such users scroll down to find the reviews given by previous customers and you must by all means flash all the positive reviews that you have received. Positive customer reviews boost confidence and make a significant impact on your conversion rate. Moreover, reviews help to improve SEO rankings with your product title and some original content posted by other users.

10. Direct Call-to-Action

Calls-to-action actually drive the sales. This must be clear with a single message that does not confuse the consumer. A button that says a little more than ‘buy now’ adds a little bit of urgency to the product greatly convincing the customer to make the purchase.

11. Instant Checkout Process

Most customers hate signing up and leaving in their details leading to cart abandonment. Keep your checkout process optimized with simple instructions to ensure sales success. However, this does not mean that you sacrifice on the security. Assure your customers that their confidential information is safe and secure.

12. Suggested and Recommended Products

It is an art to increase the order size with relevant suggestions at the checkout page. Make sure what you offer as a recommendation is actually suitable and attractive, and does serve the purpose of upgrades.

That’s it! Practice these interesting E-commerce SEO strategies and watch how effectively and efficiently your sales will grow. See how more and more customers start to engage with your brand.

11 Technical SEO Tips to Boost Your Site’s Rankings [Infographic]

Posted on by NextJSjointviews

Technical SEO might be a challenging aspect for even the most seasoned SEO experts.  Technical SEO just refers to any optimization work that is done aside from the content. Essentially, it’s laying a strong foundation to give your website the best chance it can have to rank for relevant search queries and avoid being the bad kid on the block in Google’s eyes. Analysing and fixing technical issues at an early stage will really make a difference to your website rankings. Here’s an infographic illustrating 11 technical SEO tips to boost your site’s rankings.

technical seo tips infographic

Is There any Such Thing as SEO for Mobile Apps

Posted on by NextJSjointviews

The increasing popularity of mobile apps has reshaped the world of iOS App Store and Google Play Store. The number of app downloads and the rating given by users drive the popular apps listed on these platforms to rank higher. This means that improving the visibility of your mobile app is becoming more  challenging today. However, better visibility would increase popularity and  number of downloads for the app.

App store optimization is the first thing that comes in one’s mind when we talk about SEO for mobile apps. But are you aware of the fact that Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can actually be used for boosting your mobile apps download?  Just like SEO techniques help to improve your site’s rank on Google Search, there are also some tips and tricks that help to improve the ranking and visibility of your mobile app in the app store.

SEO tips to get Better Ranking for your Mobile App

If your app has a good Google visibility, then automatically app downloads increase. With increased number of app downloads, the app popularity increases and thereby, it achieves higher ranks on the app store. Hence, it is now a proven fact that higher the visibility on Google, higher would be your app store visibility. Below are a few tips of how you can ensure this in an organic manner:

Tip#1 – Your app name should be the brand name

The brand name should definitely come in the download page URL. You can use the brand name as the link on the page from where it can be downloaded.

Tip#2 – Provide link to download app on the home page or prominent page of your website

You should provide a link to download the app on the most prominent page of the website. These are small tips which majorly all website designers miss. You can build a page which has screenshots, tips, main features, reviews, ratings of the app highlighted. This can definitely leave an impact on the users and motivate them to download the apps.

Tip#3 –Use the brand name on the clickable link text which is used to download the app

You should not lose the opportunity of highlighting the name of your brand here. Many companies make this mistake. You should not have link text like – ‘Download iPhone app’ used for downloading the app. You should rather have link names with the brand name like ‘Download the Amazon iPhone app’. This way you can market your brand and also make it clear to the users what they are about to download.

Tip#4 – Provide QR link for app download

QR codes help to give desktop users an easy way to access the apps. Once you scan the right device with the QR code, the app download should occur. You should not forget to compress the URL length before generating the QR. If the URL length exceeds 50 characters, then the QR code that is generated is heavy and many a times scanning them becomes difficult. The best way is to use a compressed URL to generate the QR code. This concept is surely going to become very popular in the next one year. So, you should probably start experimenting on it from now.

Tip#5 –Promote your app to the browsers checking your website

The whole world is sitting for you to make the correct and suitable app search simpler for them. They want to be able to easily find the relevant apps or mobile pages. Every time any browser hits your website, you should prompt them to download the app for their device for ease.

There are several apps available today which are really good but most of them are either not very popular or not on any top lists. This is the main cause for all the owners of good apps to realize the urgency and need to optimize app pages for better ranking.

The brands with large amount of traffic, good content, and social popularity should use these digital opportunities to increase app popularity and increase ranking. App store and Play Store are new assets for mobile researchers.

So, get set go and start investing time in SEO for mobile apps, if you wish to improve your ranking and get more app downloads.

Is Link Building Still the Most Powerful SEO Strategy

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Link building is one of the important aspects of SEO. It is the process of building links through the web that lead to your page. Google counts these links as votes to your page while ranking it. They indicate that your page is useful as a result. Without links your page would just be an island in the ocean with no roads to reach it.

Google uses metrics that tell about a page’s relevance to rank it. Search engines only want to show useful results to its searchers. Search engines have been using backlinks to rank page since the beginning. This is why any SEO effort to rank higher on search engines is incomplete without link building activity.

In fact, Backlinko did a study of 1 million search results last year and found out that links impacted search engine rankings more than any other factor.

number of referring domains screenshot

It must be clear by now that link building has been and continues to be the most powerful SEO activity. It is also the most challenging activity for SEO. It takes unique and quality content to earn links from other sites. Also, links from just another site will not work to boost your ranking. Google looks at Domain Authorty of the site linking to you to determine backlink quality.

What is Domain Authority?

Domain Authority (DA) is the metric developed by MoZ to measure the quality of your site. The score varies from 1 to 100, 100 indicating extremely good site whereas a score of 1 indicating poor site.

Sites such as Forbes.com or Entreprenuer.com have DA of above 90. You must try to earn links from a higher DA site. A link from 75+ DA site is great but even a few links from 50+ DA sites can do wonders for your SEO. You should have minimal links from any site with a DA of 30 or lower as these can actually pull your reputation down.

Here is what you should know before you start your link building campaign:

1) Link building must be accompanied with on page SEO, quality content and great user experience on your site. Nobody wants to link to poor quality pages that are of little value to readers.

2) As pointed above make sure to earn links from high DA websites. Low DA links can actually harm your rankings on search engines.

3) Do not put links in irrelevant places. Inserting irrelevant links will confuse your audience. Ask yourself who will appreciate this content. This will get you targeted audience that convert better and spend more time on your site. This will in turn improve your ranking.

4) Be patient, link building takes time to show results. Kristina Kledzik found that it takes up to 10 weeks for link building to start showing its magic on rankings.

What can I do to get Links?

So how can you get good DA links to your site? Strategy is the answer here. Since results take time to show, you must have a calendar and strategy that you will follow diligently nonetheless. Here are some smart strategies that winners are using:

Strategy #1 Guest blogging

Search out leading blogs in your domain and offer to write a blog as an expert for them. Insert a link to your page in that blog to drive traffic to your site. Guest blogging is a good way to get new traffic and links from a high DA site. Make your expertise and reputation known to the blog owner when you request for a guest blog.

You can also ask other experts to write on your blog and insert the link in their site. This will only work if you have decent amount of following already.

Strategy #2 Popular Format Articles

There are some types of articles which always earn high number of links. These include:

> Round ups of industry experts. This is where you can ask industry experts for their opinion on a particular topic or issue. For example: You could ask leading digital marketers ‘What is their take on importance of social media?’. You need to then compile all the answers into one blog post. This way you will earn a lot of links from digital marketing blogs as everyone wants to know what the reputed experts have to say.

> Do research in your domain and publish the results in your blog. People always need data to substantiate their opinion and keep the article interesting. You can earn tons of links if you can study on interesting topics and share the results with the world.

> Visual content is very popular nowadays. It is 3 times more likely to be shared. You can even turn a leading text post into an infographic to save the effort of developing fresh content.

Strategy #3 Manual Outreach

This is simply reaching out to popular sites via email and begging them for a link. Leading bloggers like Neil Patel have used this strategy and it works! The key here is to write a piece of content that is valuable and pitching it to lots of site owners.

This is an aggressive strategy and requires high volume of requests to succeed. If your blog is a decent read a few bloggers are sure to respond and link to you.

Strategy # 4 Self created Non-editorial Links

This is inserting links to your page via comments in others blogs or forums.

You can also do this in Quora.com. Search for a popular question in your domain and write a well rounded and expert answer on it. Insert your link in the answer to let people know about your site here. People will visit your page if your insert a bait like ‘visit my site to know the data behind this result’.

However, don’t go too aggressive on this strategy. You don’t want to come across as a spammer and spoil your reputation on these sites.

Strategy # 5 Skyscraper Technique

This technique has been used successfully by many top ranking blogs. In this you pick out the popularly linked posts , study it and then write a post better than it.

You can make your post better by adding more points or presenting it in a better visual format. For example: if you find that a blog ‘5 ways to earn more links’ is highly linked to, then you can write ‘ 21 ways to earn more links’. You can then contact the sites linking to it, tell them about your improved version of the link and request to link to you instead.

Link building requires the most effort in SEO. It also requires a lot of patience. However, once links from good sites are in place you can expect increasing flow of traffic from these sources and see your ranking climbing up steadily.

6 Website Factors That Affect Your SEO Efforts

Posted on by NextJSjointviews

A great website is the foundation to SEO strategy. After all, all SEO efforts are towards getting traffic to your website and converting visitors to customers.

It is also usually the end of the sales funnel where your convert your leads into paying customers. Imagine driving all the hard earned traffic to a site that does a poor job in converting those visitors. That would be a pointless effort, right?

So let’s look at 6 website factors that affect your SEO efforts:

1. On page SEO

One of the ways to drive more traffic to your website is by ranking higher in Google for keywords relevant to you. This is why it is important to optimize your website for search engines. Getting more organic traffic to your website will boost your conversions. Here are some tips on on-page SEO to rank higher:

  • Tip 1: Update the page title, meta descriptions and alt tags in your website
  • Tip 2:  Internal link-building
  • Tip 3: Make sure you target relevant keywords and have relevant content only
  • Tip 4: Update your site regularly with fresh and high quality content.

You can install Yoast SEO plugin if your website is powered by WordPress. We will talk  about more plugins to improve your site in the last point.

2. Site loading speed

Visitors have shrinking attention spans and expect a site page to load within 3-5 seconds. According to research by Akamai, a one second delay in page load can reduce the conversions on your site by 7%.

Tip: Go to WebpageTest to test your website’s page load speed. This site gives you a detailed report on time taken to load each file.

If your site is slow in loading it could be because of server location and size, excess coding, large image files or unnecessary redirects.

3. Shareability

Social media is one of the top drivers of traffic in SEO. It also generates targeted visitors that are easier to convert. Website content must be easily shareable on social media to support SEO. Here are three ways to ensure this.

Tip 1: Use Visual content such as images, infographics and videos. Visual content is 3x times more likely to be shared. Facebook  engagement is highest for posts with photos and videos.

Tip 2: Optimize your images and meta descriptions for social media. Check how the image looks in a social media post. Are the dimensions right? Meta description is the page title and description that shows up in the post. Tweak it to include keywords and interesting lines.

Tip 3 : Have social sharing buttons installed in your website to allow one click sharing and commenting on your content.

4. Web design

The transition for your customers who come to your site from emails, social media or paid ads must be smooth. This means that your web design must be in line with rest of SEO efforts and should give a consistent experience.

Web design is reflected in the website layout, color scheme, pathways of your site. As you may have guessed it drives user experience and branding of your site. It also determines the functionality of your site or how easily visitors can complete tasks they are on the site for.

Tip 1: Optimize your site for mobile devices. Visit Browserstack to check how your site looks on various devices

Tip 2:Use color patterns and themes that reinforce your branding

Tip 3: Keep the layout simple, intuitive and logical

5. Content

This is perhaps the most important website factor that affects SEO.

Content is what attracts new visitors and keeps them coming back for more. You should offer quality content   if you want to succeed in your SEO efforts.

Tip: Research deeply on what your audience wants to read and watch. Develop content that solves their needs not yours.

6. Tools

There are many tools that help you to enhance your website. Some of them increase ranking others help you keep an eye on your traffic. Here are some website tools you must use to support your SEO:

1. Get free analysis of your website on Ahrefs and Similar web. You can see the technical glitches, traffic sources and keywords on your website and get a detailed report

2. Install Crazy Egg to know which features on your site are working and track visitor mouse movements . You can also use OptinMonster.

3. Install Hello Bar plugin to convert visitors into leads. This pop up a form to get email IDs or sign up for offers.

4. Install Google Analytics to get key metrics on your website.

5. Install Yoast SEO to create search engine optimized content

6. Schedule your WordPress post for social media with BufferApp. This will save a lot of time and give out content consistently.

Your website is your owned asset that converts leads into customers on the internet. Use the tips shared above to make sure it does the job of supporting your SEO efforts.

How to Create a Content Marketing Strategy that Works Best for SEO

Posted on by NextJSjointviews

High quality content is still the king in online marketing.  Most businesses are now focusing on creating more content than ever before. The major thing to note is that the content is used everywhere and influences every other type of marketing strategy; let that be emails, blogs, articles, press releases or even social media comments. A smart content marketing strategy helps to drive more organic traffic to your website.

Pushing out fresh content that keeps your audience engaged is the requirement that helps you score better in SEO. Professional SEO companies use advanced strategies to promote your brand and business.

Let us discuss some points that help you create a content marketing strategy that best describes your business goals.

Know your goals – Before you begin planning, define your goals. Think about how your content marketing should help you meet your objectives such as

Your audience is your asset

Determine your target audience and get to know them. Before you start suggesting topics and creating titles, you need to know exactly what your target audience is looking for.

Knowing your target audience needs will help you to produce more relevant and valuable content. Understand your audience clearly either using Google Analytics traffic report or with surveys. Learning to provide the right content for the right reader makes your job much easier.

There are few more tools that provide insight on your audience’s interests and requirements. Tools include

Answer the Public

The auto-suggest results provided by search engines provide insight for content marketers. When users start typing a word, Answer the Public allows them to link the keyword that relates to their product or service, the people’s queries about the concerned service, and it comes up with a number of search phrases drawn from Google, Bing and other search engines.

Twitter Audience Insights

This latest analytics tool from Twitter will provide marketers with relevant information about what kinds of people are interacting with their brand. The tool offers access to information such as key demographics, interests, lifestyle, purchasing behavior, and mobile footprint, which helps marketers know exactly what kind of people follow their brand and what sort of content attracts them to their website.

Competitor analysis, a great way to reach the right path

Grab a list of competitors, analyze them and understand what makes them different. Realizing your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses, and the opportunities and threats helps to find what exactly your customers are searching for in your industry. This analysis also can discover the most useful keywords your clients may be using to search you.

Quality, a priority

High quality, engaging posts with useful details are likely to get more shares on social media platforms. With top quality blogs and articles, even you can get attention from your competitors or even from other industry who take your company as an expert. Also make sure to choose trending topics that are relevant for your business and include a back link to the source, which helps them to know about your article.

Get familiar with content types

Once you establish goals and your target audience, try to provide content that includes informative data that is of use for your audience.

Useful content types include

  • Infographics
  • Video tutorials
  • Case Studies
  • Social media ads
  • Email newsletters
  • Ebooks
  • Templates
  • Podcasts

Don’t just create content, track them too

Set a goal to publish one piece of content daily, weekly or in alternate days. Don’t just leave the content after publishing. Promote them and track the progress of your content. For instance, if you have posted a blog in Facebook, check how many people liked it, respond to the comments, provide answers if any questions were asked and write a follow-up blog with more updated information. This helps to keep your audience in track.

Editorial Calendar helps

Once you have an idea as to how great content can be created, then it’s the right time to go for an editorial calendar. This calendar, which includes social media posts, audit rates and more, helps to keep track of your content. They are extremely helpful to organize our workflow without any error.

Editorial calendar –

  • Provides chance to carefully plan content creation beforehand
  • Helps writers to overcome writer’s block
  • Allows to keep track of every single post in social media
  • Maintain the right track for publishing a well-balanced and diverse content on website

Social media is your friend

Engaging with your audiences in real conversations will bring better results and add more value to your social streams. Know your audience’s priorities as you plan. Focus on what they want to know and not what you want to tell them. Also stay up to date with latest social media changes.

Learn ways to distribute your content

Ways you choose to promote your content is also important. A detailed plan will help. Few suggested ways include

  • Using paid ads on social media platforms like Facebook
  • Preparing a list of sites and bloggers whom you need to contact, which helps in getting a steady traffic and fresh leads
  • Sending Emails and following up them using tools such as Yesware and Mixmax.

Creating a content marketing strategy may be time-consuming, but provide fruitful results for SEO.  If you are not that familiar with SEO or content, consider choosing an experienced SEO firm that can work as an extension to your company.