Standout SEO Advice For People Like You
Ok, so you have your web domain. It’s hosted on a fast platform and you have a cool funky site, great! Now what?
The Google of today looks at many aspects of a domain when deciding how to rank it.
Page Speed is Important
Make sure that your content loads fast and use a tool to assess this. If it isn’t, then make it so, through on page changes and solid hosting.
Mobile Friendly and Useable Across Devices
Make sure that your content renders across devices in ways that users will find useful and useable. Use the mobile friendly page tester to ensure that your site meets the requirements. Strongly consider looking at an AMP (accelerated mobile page) version of your site and seize the opportunities that this presents.
In addition to page speed and user experience, being relevant to the query is the biggest factor in its decisions I could get super granular and break it down further but confusion isn’t the aim.
Being Relevant to the Query
Well duh, who’d have thought that people will actually want to see stuff that’s related to what they searched for! So how does it all work?
In short, you could break it down in to two distinct camps. What you show on the page and what happens off the page.
What you show on the page is…Onsite SEO
When you create a piece of content that you are looking to rank in Google or Bing, you should (in most cases) be in the habit of researching your subject and ensuring that you have an audience that actually searches for what it is you are about to write. You should do this via keyword research, using a tool like Google Adword’s keyword planner. You can get an idea for what it is that people search for, in what volume and where, along with related phrases that you can weave in to your copy.
Research your intended audience
Keyword volumes are a handy way of gauging the potential traffic you’ll receive and enable you to make better investment decisions around the products you are looking to sell or the ideas you are looking to promote. They are the corner-stone to success, as without them, you are shooting at fish in a pond in the dark, and why would you want to do that?
Assess the competition and be realistic
You also need to gauge the likelihood of success – To quote an extreme example, there’s little point in being Joe Bloggs the insurance agent on main street and seriously expecting to be able to rank for ‘car insurance’ simply because the level of competition for such phrases is insane and is targeted by multi nationals with weekly budgets larger than the probably value of your entire business. So take a considered view on what it is you aspire to and be creative in how you are going to target it.
You might have a particular angle for your locality perhaps and you might well have enough local understanding of issues and the landscape to get your content picked up by local news outlets or shared on social media which may then appear in Google in related tweets.
Look at people who you consider to be the competition in your space, see what they rank for, look at the type of content they create, note who shares it, take notes and emulate the best aspects of their strategy, dig deep and see what applies to you.
Put the right pieces in the markup at the right places
The code that outputs your pages is often referred to as mark up – mark up encompasses a multitude of html tags that are interpreted by the browser to display your content and informs the way in which Google and Bing and other properties may output their search results.
If we think of document relevancy and how search engines decide what is and what isn’t relevant we find that some html tags have more weight than others and that the placement and incidences of words throughout them can have a substantial bearing on how relevancy is interpreted.
In the <head> of your documents. ensure that your page contain your aspired to key phrases and ensure that yourdo the same.
In the <body> of your content use <h#> headings to head up your copy with headings that work closely with your target key phrase aspirations and ensure that what you write in your copy also contains mentions of your target phrase, along with semantic variants where possible. Write naturally, don’t force it, and don’t ‘keyword mention’ spam.
Some folk will talk of italicizing certain words, or bolding certain phrases. Others talk of using different font sizes to tell the search engines that some words are more important than others. Like most things, there are sensible things you should do and things that you shouldn’t. If it feels right to play with font sizes to make things stand out, then do so, but don’t expect any direct search benefit as a result.
If you look at how many standard content pieces are written, you’ll pretty much see that most ranking documents use a wide range of methods for displaying what they say. Don’t waste your time trying to reverse engineer some secret sauce, because it doesn’t exist. Just write for your users and pepper your content with a liberal dose of words that make sense to your reader, reinforcing the core of what it is all about.
You can read more about how to position your page content here, from Google itself.
Create keyword relevant urls
Make sure that the urls you create contain your target key phrases – this might be achieved via /filename-with-keyword-phrase-alone.html or use a directory type /key-phrase/related-branch.html approach. It doesn’t really matter which, but it’s important that you use one or the other as to not include the core aspect of your target phrase may well hamper your ability to rank for your aspiration.
Through using keyword rich URL’s you not only give your users a good indication what the page is about should the link be shared in an email, but you may also increase the incidence of keyword diversity when such links are shared as urls.
Use hyphens as a separator, not underscores, partly because that’s what Google used to advise (some Googlers say it doesn’t matter anymore) but also because if shared as hyper links, the underscores can be missed and can create confusion in type in scenarios, whereas hyphens are clear and unambiguous.
They also appear in the search engine results page and act as a re-enforcement in the users mind when submitting their query. Google often emboldens words that match the query, so it’s a good thing to do.
Use a logical navigation structure on your domain with useful anchor text
Make sure that your users will have some insight in to the pages that they are clicking through to.
Don’t use words like product 1 or service 2, be specific, in your menus and site navigation be sure to think about the types of things that users search for and inject these into your structures.
Use solid tried and tested practices that users like and reinforce these throughout.
Consider the use of bread crumb trails to enable the user to see where they are in their journey and reinforce the message to both people who read it and the bots that will spider and index your content.
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Is infinitely better than nothing or something that was devoid of links or product/service mentions. Shows your users where they are, adding context and meaning.
Think about how you name your files and images
Similar to using target key phrases in your URLs, you should also consider how you use and name imagery or files within your content. An image named image1.gif isn’t very useful to bots or people, whereas descriptive-file-name.gif is. This will increase the likelihood of your images appearing in image search and may also have a direct ranking benefit too.
Images should also contain descriptive alt attributes and it certainly doesn’t hurt to use the title attribute too. Be sure to be sensible avoiding the urge to be spammy or ridiculous.
For the more technically adept there’s of course a whole host of other considerations to be had too which will enhance how your content appears across search and other platforms.
Ever wonder how some results in the SERP (search engine results page) have stand out extra graphical elements? These are commonly referred to as rich snippets. Here’s an example of them in action.
Rich Snippet Mark Up
Rich snippets are pieces of code that often generate enhanced search displays, making your content more visible to your target audience. They do this through the use of structured data standard called schema.org microdata. There are a range of different types:
To quote one example, “events” are often seen in the SERPs, and they might look a little like this
We can produce an example of a fictional event, showing both the markup and the visual representation.
The guys at verve search have an excellent run down of the considerations involved so do check out their post.
Twitter MarkUp
Ever noticed how some tweets seem to have an image associated with a shared link?
That’s twitter cards in action and it’s a very simple addition to do.
We can see how it works with this page here – when the page is shared on Twitter, it receives an enhanced preview.
The code that makes that happen can be viewed below
<meta name=”twitter:title” content=”Plan your travels from Bayeux France to La Rochelle France” />
<meta name=”twitter:card” content=”summary_large_image“>
<meta name=”twitter:site” content=”@distantias” />
<meta name=”twitter:creator” content=”@distantias” />
<meta name=”twitter:image” content=”https://mw2.google.com/mw-panoramio/photos/medium/94269660.jpg” />
You can read more about adding Twitter cards here.
Facebook Open Graph Code
We’ve all shared content on Facebook and seen the previews created as we do. The cool thing is, you can actually control how your message is presented and display a custom image to fit.
The code that makes it happen is this.
<meta property=”og:title” content= “Journey Planning From Bayeux France to La Rochelle France “/>
<meta property=”og:description” content=”Plan your travels from Bayeux France to La Rochelle France Create friendships, Earn points , Book Hotels and more”/>
<meta property=”og:site_name” content=”Distantias” />
<meta property=”og:image” content=”https://mw2.google.com/mw-panoramio/photos/medium/94269660.jpg”>
<meta property=”og:image:type” content=”image/png”>
<meta property=”og:image:width” content=”100″>
<meta property=”og:image:height” content=”70″>
<meta property=”go:image:height” content=”70″>
When shared on Facebook, this produces this.
HREFLANG – Calling International SEO
Some companies target international audiences. You can use hreflang to target different geolocations and languages.
The implementation is too lengthy to go into detail here, but if you’d like to know more than you can read all about it here or hit me up and I’ll walk you through it.
What Happens Off the Page is…Off Site SEO
So, in the previous part we took a quick look at various on-site or on-page factors that help influence ranking and page performance, this being just one part of being “relevant to the query”.
In this part, we are going to look at the off page factors and talk about how things work and what you can do to influence your domain in the best most effective way.
As previously discussed, Google use a variety of signals to determine relevancy.
In addition to what they say on the page, websites can boost their perceived importance and score through obtaining citations from across the web from other websites through using a variety of anchor texts (the text used in a link to reference other pages on the web).
The facts of life are that for many queries, in terms of the content contained within the pages that discuss them, there is often more than one relevant useful page for a query. So, when faced with this predicament, the algorithm uses external citations (effectively votes ) in an attempt to sort it all out and decide who should be shown and who should not.
The idea being, that if a page has more links to it around a topic and those pages are adjudged to be authoritative on the topic, then that’s a good signal to use when sorting any wheat from the chaff.
How to determine authority from linking pages
So, this begs the question of what IS an authoritative page and how should you get them to talk about you?
In the old days, people would talk of the concept of PageRank. PageRank was once a a publicly accessible metric displayed by google in its toolbar. Various tools used this number to assess link acquisition worthiness. It was a useful, easy to understand metric.
Google eventually took this number away from the public domain, mainly because it was no longer necessary for public relations purposes and it was used and abused by people seeking to influence its algorithm.
The breach was filled by companies like, MajesticSEO and SEOMoz who effectively reverse engineered aspects of how they believed PageRank may have been calculated and so, developed scoring systems of their own. Domain authority for Moz and Trust and Citation Flow for MajesticSEO to use similar principles to that of PageRank. Not prefect and devoid of other factors used for ranking, but an indicator nonetheless and, in the world of understanding the machinations of black box technology – they are therefore, useful.
Competitor analysis
You should have already identified a handful of competitors and gained an understanding of what they rank for, what they write about and generally assessed their abilities via some kind of SWOT analysis (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) These would have helped inform your content production decisions and given you a pretty good idea of the kinds of things you need to be doing onsite.
Additionally, they should also have informed you on some of the other reasons why they were succeeding via an analysis of the linking domains to their website.
This post from Koozai looks at the variety of tools that exist that help you to do this and there are many of them. SEMRush is my current favourite as it’s highly flexible, and gives you a lot of insight that is actionable in simple easy to understand ways.
Obtaining links
So you’ve done your analysis and you have a hatful of linking opportunities.
If you are thinking of emulating link profiles (think mixed competitor mashup) then you’ll need to asses the likelihood of obtaining those links and ask yourself a few hard questions.
Will they link to you? Are they a direct competitor perhaps? Why should they link to you? What value do you offer to their readership, what’s in it for them?
If you think about those questions first, you’ll be better placed to succeed in your request.
If you are thinking of emulating ideas, then look at how successful those ideas were and do some leg work in investigating why. Use tools like BuzzSumo to evaluate those social shares and take note of who shared and why.
Here’s a couple of other things you should do when link building
Don’t go in cold, take the time to build a relationship.
If they are a blogger, then read about them, find out what motivates them, look at how they write and what they write about. Follow them on social media perhaps, engage with them a few times, retweet their stuff. After a period of time, send them a little email or if you are great on a phone, pick up a phone and talk to them.
Talk about how you can help them, think about how you can help them, in fact make that your focus. If you do that (genuinely) then they’ll be far more receptive and you won’t have to work that hard to get them to like you and talk about you.
If they are operating in the same business sphere as you, then think about partnerships. Talk to them about how you can help each other, focus on the mutually beneficial aspects of the web and your brand and your products and use these to make your case.
If they are a community like a forum, then take the time to contribute, but do so in a way that adds value.
Here’s a couple of things you shouldn’t do when link building
Don’t just send out a boiler plate shitty email, saying your site is great, here is my link, please link to me. That’s lame of course, but don’t think that by tarting it up with sophisticated language that it’ll be any less so.
Don’t pick up the phone and call cold and tell them the benefits of how linking to you can help them.
Don’t go on forums or other places related to your niche and spam the hell out of them. It’ll bite you on your bum if you do. Don’t just expect to be able to rock up and leave your deposit on someones manicured lawn.
In Conclusion
There’s many things that influence ranking, and it’s often an ever shifting thing that you need to watch and refine. You should ensure that you look at your site analytics and webmaster tools daily and keep up to speed with change and innovation in your space. Failure to do so, could cause all manner of downsides for your business, a lot of which can be avoided through regular assessment. I hope this has given food for thought and is of use to you!
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