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Category Archive: SEO Research and Trends

Don’t Let Dead Backlinks Kill Your SEO

Acquiring links is a valuable tool that should be a part of any SEO campaign. SEO link building services allow you to extend the reach of your brand beyond your website while increasing your site’s credibility in the eyes of major websites such as Google. However, you need to be careful when it comes to managing your link building campaign. Not enough people realize the importance of backlinks monitoring and how much damage that poorly managed links can do to your SEO reputation.

broken links

Google and other sites will punish sites if they have links on their website that have been changed or deleted within a short time frame; for the search engines, this is a clear signal that these links have been collected in unnatural ways. The best method of building link popularity is through natural links that appear to the result of other sites posting your links because of the high-quality content that exists on your pages. When a link partner suddenly deletes or changes your links at the same time, this is flagged as a potentially unnatural behavior by Google and could impact your site ranking.

You need to be willing to check your links on a regular basis to make sure that your link partners are keeping your links up and holding up their end of the bargain. In some cases, links can be deleted because the owner of another website has deleted a page on their site and accidentally forgot to move the link; in other cases, the partner might have deleted the link after a short period of time to make room for new links.

Manually checking backlinks one time a day or more is time consuming. One way to work around this is to automate the process with one of the many SEO tools available that do backlink checking. You can purchase and use one of these tools yourself, or you can work with an SEO company like eVisible who can do it for you. Once you’ve determined which links have been deleted or changed, you need to act on it by contacting your partner and convincing them to live up to their end of your deal and restore your link.

12 Non-Content Writing Steps to Improve Your SEO

Google has recently updated its newest algorithm. This has left many SEO companies and online marketers scrambling to determine how to best comply with Google Penguin requirements. However, attempting to pin down specifics about a Penguin update and craft content to fit might be missing the bigger point of effective search engine optimization: it’s about proper on-site SEO practices along with content.

So what are some of the steps that you can take to assure that your on-site SEO meets the best practices for Google?

Check for malware: You don’t engage in black-hat SEO, but if you have malware or someone running a rogue site through your site, the damage could be just as severe for your SEO reputation with Google.

Write short titles and description: Don’t have them go on too long or repeat information. Keep them short and don’t over-optimize tags.

Check your anchor text: Much like with title tags and descriptions, you want to avoid overusing your keywords or optimizing them too often.

Axe spammy user content: Comments on blogs posts are a good thing for organic search engine optimization; however, Google is now punishing sites that allow spam postings on sections of their site such as blog comment sections.

Increase page speed: A fast-loading site makes Google work faster; therefore, page speed optimization makes Google happy and it appears to improve a website’s SEO.

Cut useless optimization: Don’t bother over-optimization sections like headers and footers with the hope that “more is merrier.” It won’t help your ranking and in fact will likely lead to penalties.

Review your links: Penguin 2.0 has reduced the threshold of what they consider too many “spammy” inbound links on a site from 80 percent to 50 percent.

Check internal cross links: It’s easy to have links on one of your sites go to another site you own or partner with; check your links so you don’t get punished by Google.

Be smart with your alt image attributes: Put more of your content marketing services into alt image attributes than you are now: Google can give it as much weight as actual text.

Don’t overload ads: Having too many ads on your site – especially high – is frowned on by Google.

Add 301 redirects: Links that lead to dead ends tell Google that your site is not properly maintained.

Review crawl rates: Make sure that Google spiders are able to follow your site correctly.

Three Steps to Building Site Visitors Through Organic Traffic

Building organic traffic is the most effective way to grow your online business. While using tactics such as PPC and online advertising can get eyeballs to your site and can serve as a major part of an online marketing campaign, organic traffic that naturally flows to your site has its own benefits. When you reach customers organically, you build online loyalty and trust and increase the likelihood that they will share your site with their friends and family, helping it to “go viral” and grow quickly.

attract site visitors

So what is the best way to do this? eVisible has many different tactics that we use with customers to building organic traffic. Here are three that have proven to be the most effective:

Publishing Early and Often: You don’t want to have a limited amount of content available when you first launch; similarly, you don’t want to publish all of your content right away and then go weeks or even months before you add new content. Make sure you are publishing multiple pieces of content every day and try to publish three or four times a day in the early stages of your launch.

Listen to Your Customers: By doing the proper market research, you can have a strong idea of which topics are right for your initial content rollout. eVisible’s simple keyword research tool  will give you a good idea about which topics will naturally fit the keywords you want to target. From there, keep an eye on your metrics and see which topics are getting views and shares; you’ll want to increase your attention on these, since it’s clear it’s what customers are interested in reading more about.

Back Your Content Up With Facts: When you first launch your site, you won’t have the credibility and trust that an established website will have with readers. One way to gain the trust of your readers is to publish content loaded with references to factual information. Including links to research, analysis and news from trusted sources makes you look more reliable in the process.

Four Tips to Optimize Mobile Content Using Responsive Design

Reaching customers using smartphones, tablets and other mobile devices is valuable for any website. Mobile customers are often looking for products in a hurry and are ready to make a purchase. To respond to the needs of mobile web users, many websites have “mobile” versions of their website that are text-heavy and meant to load quickly on web browsers. While this help improve loading times and the customer experience, it also makes it difficult to optimize a page to increase conversion rates.

One solution to this problem is creating a responsive design. This involves the implementation of a flexible code structure that allows the design elements to adapt to the parameters of a mobile device. How the on-screen elements are presented to the reader will depend on the type of which type of device the person is using. A smart website conversion for mobile devices using responsive design also incorporates elements that work well on smaller screens (such as video and audio) and eliminating elements that will distract people reading the page on a phone or tablet.

What are some of the elements that you might want to consider during a conversion to a mobile site using responsive design?

responsive web design

Minimalism is a key element to mobile webpage design. Create a scrollable slideshow of product images instead of having them all appear on the screen. Smaller thumbnails are great for touchscreens.

Enhance the call to action by making it a prominent part of the display. Create a large button or banner that is easy to find and clearly states what the call to action on the page is. Doing this avoids customers not being able to click through to the sales point on your site.

Make pricing clear and don’t force people to search through the site to find it. Because of the small size of the screen, customers might get frustrated and leave your webpage if they can’t find the pricing information they need. This includes sales offers and deals such as free shipping on products.

Highlight reviews and ratings to give customers a sense of confidence before purchasing one of your products.

Make content expandable with one-touch rather than forcing people to click on tabs with small text in order to find out more information about your products.

Three Steps to Competitive Content Research

It wasn’t that long ago that quantity was the king when it came to creative content writing. The general feeling was that search engines only tracked the sheer volume of SEO-driven content that a site was producing – regardless of the quality of the writing. This led to an explosion of online content, much of which was lacking in quality or in informative substance.

Eventually, this became a kind of online scourge, as web searchers would frequently have to fight through page after page of “spam” content in order to find useful links. Users were upset, and eventually Internet search engines listened. Updates to search engine algorithms such as Google Panda were implemented specifically to place an emphasis on the quality of the writing. Specifically, content marketing services and individual companies were forced to consider if their content would be considered both useful and relevant to someone searching online.

content research

In today’s search engine world, content can mean a lot more than just words. Infographics, FAQ sections, videos and social media content are all important parts that can add up to powerful SEO content. It’s important to analyze what your competitors are doing to determine the gaps in your content strategy. Here are three steps that you can take during this process:

  • Visit a site such as SEMrush (https://www.semrush.com) to determine useful information about the URLs of your competition. Focus on individual rankings for major search terms rather than overall search traffic or sheer volume of ranking keywords. Take a look at the URLs beyond the homepage to see which ones rank highly and what type of content they have.
  • Next, go to OpenSiteExplorer (https://www.opensiteexplorer.org) to see the top destination links for your competitors’ high ranking URLs. Find out which supporting content pages are getting a high amount of links back to them.  These pages typically have content that resonates with users and they want to share with others.
  • Finally, visit MutualMind (https://www.mutualmind.com) to assess the social landscape. You can use this site to determine which social media sites are the best fit for the type of content that your competitors – and you – are likely to produce. You are looking for content that other people will want to share and become evangelists for.

Taking the Headaches Out of Enterprise SEO

It’s easy to make the assumption that the search engine optimization strategy for Enterprise SEO — when you are working with a large corporation’s website — would be the same as SEO work for a startup or smaller company. But while many of the same principles remain, there are several major differences between standard SEO and search engine marketing at an Enterprise level.

Many of these issues come from the challenges of doing SEO work as part of a large business. As P.J. Fusco wrote about for Search Engine Watch, departmental barriers often make it difficult for someone doing Enterprise SEO (https://searchenginewatch.com/article/2236950/Enterprise-SEO-in-2013) to produce acceptable results from their SEO campaigns. When someone does search engine optimization consulting for small businesses, they have few approvals to get and can alter their SEO strategies quickly to react to changing search engine algorithms and other factors.

Enterprise SEO

This isn’t the case when you are doing SEO consulting services or working in-house at an Enterprise-level business. The layers of management and departments means that you need “buy-in” from many people to implement an SEO campaign or to make changes to an existing campaign. This can be a major problem — especially if some of the people you need to work with are unfamiliar with the concepts of professional search engine marketing.

So how can you overcome these obstacles? One good tip was recently shared by Ray Comstock in Search Engine Watch (https://searchenginewatch.com/article/2234928/Defining-an-Enterprise-SEO-Strategy). Comstock recommends that you break your campaign up into two parts — a “foundational” stage where you are doing the keyword research and other background along with the early implementation and a “continuous” phase that includes the steps needed to keep your campaign moving through the long haul. This can include link acquisition, social media marketing services and more. Content writing services are a major part throughout all phases.

Another way to reduce headaches in Enterprise SEO is to conduct training with the key personnel who will be involved ahead of time. Chances are that you are the expert in online marketing services within your company, so you need to educate other people on what you know. Everyone understands the importance of ranking highly but they might not grasp the steps that need to happen to improve your search engine ranking. Getting people inside and outside of your circle educated on the different elements of Enterprise SEO will allow you to all speak the same language and improve communications as you move forward with your campaign.