> First of all what are your revenue streams? Would you deceive your site as an authority site? Is it primarily sales, ads, affiliate, dropshippig, or something else entirely? Or perhaps a combination.
99% of the income is from affiliate commission. I sometimes allow for a guest post, but only if it fits with the site, and if the content is strong.
> Does most of your traffic come from SEO or other sources such as free social media or purchasing ads via Facebook or google?
Only SEO. I do not focus on social media or buying ads. I do get social media traffic, but that is from natural sharing and it isn't that much traffic to begin with.
> For some specific SEO questions, do you purchase links or do manual outreach? How competitive would you say your niche was when you started and did you start from scratch or purchase a low performing site and build it out yourself?
Do I purchase links? Yes. That's also pretty general.
In terms of outreach, at first, I was paying providers to do the outreach for me. But after some time, I began doing it on my own. I used the content explorer option on Ahrefs to pull a bunch of sites within my niche. I then hired a VA from UpWork.com to find the contact form on each website, and tailor each email for every site.
So, with the site in question, it's actually a general review site. I have a dozen categories on the site, but there are only a handful of reviews on the site that were set to be my money makers. In terms of competition for those pages, it's hard to quantify, but I would say it's mild. I typically shoot for keywords that pull in 2,000/mo - 15,000/mo searches.
When I started, I registered a domain that was never used before.
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Don't do it? I'm not sure there's any better advice really available; Wix's sites are atrocious.
It's not hard to create an alternate front page template for your WordPress site if you're simply looking to have it not look like just a blog. You can create whatever kind of site you want with WordPress, and have the blog just be a section.
If you were to move to Wix but keep your blog hosted separately, your biggest challenges will be:
the rat's nest of code they use to allow amateur drag-and-drop design will often be totally incompatible with any kind of sensible document structure.
unless you're on a bad host already, your site speed is probably going to slow from all the code bloat.
the URLs of your blog articles are probably going to need to change, as I don't think you can both move your domain to Wix and keep a sub-directory (e.g. domain.com/blog/) pointed to a different host. This means you'll need to setup the blog on a sub-domain (e.g. blog.domain.com), which is worse for SEO and also requires you to create redirects from the old URL structure to the new, or you'll lose 100% of the traffic and SEO-value of all links you've previously received to that content. Even if you do implement redirects, you'll still lose about 15% of the SEO value.
Hey, thanks so much!
So, niche selection is an important part of the process. I usually use these methods:
Hope this helps. :)
>Is this right?
No.
Particularly the bullshit about bolding, underlining and italicizing the keyword phrase is straight outta 2001's playbook, which is laughably bad.
Keyword density is also a bullshit metric.
Slapping a keyword into an Image ALT is also bullshit unless it is actually truly relevant to the keyword, as Image ALT is also a usability issue.
Follow this checklist, and you're probably creating unreadable keyword-stuffed glop. Good grammar and readability are both skipped in this list, and they're both essential. Relevancy does not equal quality, and quality matters.
https://moz.com/blog/most-effective-way-to-improve-sitewide-quality-and-rankings is good.
Good luck finding a category where the editor is still active. It can't hurt to fill out the form, but don't be surprised if you never hear back.
There are many categories that don't even have editors, so your form won't get delivered to anyone who can do anything with it. If you scroll down to the bottom of a category, you'll either see something like you see here where the editor is mentioned, or you'll see "volunteer to edit this category", like here. If you see the "volunteer" link, then your options are to either just turn around and go home, or volunteer to edit the category. The latter is your only chance of getting listed in that category.
Check out this great article, specifically "3. Get a Knowledge Graph result".
The rest is really good too. This is my favorite article on Moz. Thanks for letting me link it.
> I've created a website with Wix.
Nooooooo, in the name of all that all that is holy, ditch Wix and get a proper website whilst you still can. As much as it pains me to link to Moz, see: https://moz.com/community/q/wix-is-it-any-good-for-seo
To address your question about where to start with backlinks - I think it would be negligent of me not to recommend a little caution right now.
As with tax/dentist work/fire juggling, if you are a little unsure of what you are doing, you probably shouldn't rush into things. In the case of buying links specifically, it is actually against the Google Guidelines and so carries a risk.
I would have a think about:
Hope this helps!
Like anything, if you are really totally unsure of what to do, you might be best consulting a professional for help.
Okay, in my experience, the things local wedding photographers get wrong:
They post mostly pictures. No text around the picture. You need to add narrative for every picture that includes location (venue, city), info about wedding theme, etc.
They don't optimize ALT tags, or think "wedding picture by wedding photographer Boise" on every picture = image ALT optimization. It's not. That's like calling clown makeup "beautiful and subtle."
They don't optimize image size. Not all the builders auto-compress. Image-heavy sites load slow. You need to make your images load as quickly as necessary. No one expects perfect hi-res on the website.
Citations, citations, citations. You need a Google My Business page, you need citations. This is a good guide for the non-pro: https://moz.com/learn/local
You need a call-to-action and contact info on EVERY PAGE.
Mobile-friendly. DO IT.
The blog post seems like an opportunity to drive traffic to other posts. Definitely set up some internal linking to other areas of your website. Also, make sure you have a newsletter signup so you can build your email list with the users who enjoyed the article.
The keywords and related keywords you are targeting. For example, if you are building a site for an ice cream parlor in Queens called ICEE, DON'T just put "ICEE Home" in the title.
Put something that people are searching for. Do some research of what people search for in the local area of Queens and get some stats.
Then if you find a few keywords that have lots of searches, try to combine them into a good title and keep it 60 characters or less. You can craft a natural description with more different frequently-searched keywords in the meta description (around 160 characters).
An example might be "Ice Cream Bar & Shop in Queens | ICEE"
Sources:
https://moz.com/blog/title-tag-length-guidelines-2016-edition
Apart from everything @slippernator said (Which was all Good) I would recommend trying out Google's My Business which usually is able to increase your rankings for local businesses. Heres the Link https://www.google.com/business/
I'm not an expert in marketing. But here is what I usually I do
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I recently started another blog (wpspeedmatters.com) that focus on WordPress speed optimization. That one is also getting really good traction. The FB group I started is something I would highly recommend. You can share new posts. Moreover, you get to know what are the real problems of people in your nice and focus on content beneficial for them. Find similar groups/forums related to your nice. Spend a lot of time in that. Analyze the visitor's problems and write accordingly
alexa says that you average less than 2 hits a day to your 'skin care products' page. One of you is lying...
Can we get this person banned from the sub for blatantly lying to the community and misleading with the intent to market their services?
EDIT - post deleted - good. got called out and couldn't defend themselves from the facts.
Brittani from Moz here –
I know we're having some trouble with a few bugs in MozBar :( It has our engineers' full attention and we should have a fix in place soon. Appreciate you all hanging in there while we figure it out.
To answer the question of whether or not MozBar is going to be "paid" or not -- the answer is yes and no, depending on the features you need. PA and DA will still remain one of the free features of MozBar as will Link Metrics and other metrics that have been free since the beginning. That said, you do need to have a FREE Moz Community account in order to view Link Metrics.
The two features we have added recently (Keyword Difficulty and Page Optimization) are part of MozBar Premium – accessible with a paid Moz Pro subscription.
Here's a full overview of what's included with the free version vs. premium: https://moz.com/products/pro/seo-toolbar
However, I am noticing now that the page isn't clear whether PA and DA is included in the free version. I'll have that updated ASAP.
You can use Canonical tag for every duplicate content product url. That tag will allow you to use single content on multiple pages without any penalty.
Know more about this here: https://moz.com/learn/seo/canonicalization
I can't really help directly but I know Moz posted about this recently and did a video on it too.
Also if you're desperate you could just do a 301 redirect to physically redirect the user to that tropics page... but then you'd need to move that other locations page to another part of your site.
>Can you link me to any good guides?
You can't go wrong with Moz's introduction guide. It gives you a good overview of the fundamentals.
>How long would it take?
This is difficult question to answer. It will come down to how competitive the specific keywords are that you're trying to rank for.
>Would I need paid software?
Not really. You can get by with Google's Keyword Planner, Trends, and a few other free versions of paid tools (SEM Rush, moz, etc). Keyword Planner and Google Trends will show you how many people are searching for your keywords. Then, you're next move would be checking out the current sites that are ranking.
>I have a mac
Most tools are browser based. Any that you need to download will run on a mac (I haven't seen any decent tools that don't).
>Is it possible for me to do it? (I'm 14. Only general knowledge about computers but a fast learner.)
It will all depend on how competitive the market is that you're going after. If you aim for long-tail keywords ("Organic dog food stores in Denver" instead of "Dog food"), you'll have a better chance of success. It's awesome that you're keen to get started so young. Even if you don't get good results, you'll get some good experience.
Well, unfortunately the 7-Pack is gone. It's now a 3-Pak.
But start here: https://moz.com/learn/local
There's a ton more than just creating citations on local directories. If it were easy to rank in these spots, I wouldn't have a job :P.
Are you set up with Google My Business?
And SEO changes can take months and months to effect some results.
Start with this: https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo/keyword-research
I think your points are really solid and I can't say enough how much more there is to SEO than just "writing content" and jamming keywords onto a site.
The timing of this post is actually funny because just this past Friday Rand put out a Whiteboard Friday post defending the skill needed to truly have talent in this field. He mentions a lot of the areas /u/ispyty lists and the validation Rand gives did a lot to reaffirm my own confidence in the professional skills I've earned in the field in the last few years.
https://moz.com/blog/modern-seo-requires-technical-creative-and-strategic-thinking-whiteboard-friday
Okay, here's the thing.
Google has already indexed your tag URLs. Adding them to robots will not de-index them.
You need to allow them to be crawled, and put a no index tag in the page header.
This was actually touched on in a recent Moz WhiteBoard Friday: https://moz.com/blog/controlling-search-engine-crawlers-for-better-indexation-and-rankings-whiteboard-friday
I think this is a 'yes' and 'no' answer.
'Yes' in that Google's new Hummingbird algorithm looks at more than just one keyword when determining results. Instead it takes into account a semantic theme. For example, if your website is about 'mortgages', the algorithm matches your content to the other hundreds of thousands of sites about mortgages it has indexed on the web. From these sites, it has learned that most pages that contain the word 'mortgages' are also likely to contain the words 'advice' or 'finance' or 'home loan'.
For this reason the order of the words do not matter all that much. Rather, it is what words are grouped with other words. It's called Fuzzy Logic and is how the algorithm determines that 'Apple' the computer company, is different from the fruit. e.g [Apple, computers, iPhone] vs. [Apple, fruit, seeds]
However, it is not that simple. And this is the 'no' part.
When it comes to doing keyword research and you are using the AdWords Keyword Planner, Google has removed the ability to do Exact Match searches in order to find the exact search volume for a specific phrase. Instead, searching for 'mortgage advice' will likely also include search result volume for 'advice mortgage' - though we do not know because it's hidden. Rand Fishkin did a very good Whiteboard Friday explaining this and how to get around it: https://moz.com/blog/keyword-research-and-targeting-without-exact-match-whiteboard-friday .
The lesson here is not to get hooked up on a particular phrase. Instead, think in terms of themes and topics. What words are likely to be mentioned in association with each other around a particular subject? Check out this post by Marcus Tober of Searchmetrics who explains their research behind the fall of the keyword: https://moz.com/blog/searchmetrics-ranking-factors-2014
After one week? Bless your heart.
this is a marathon, not a sprint. Individual pages aren't going to rocket up unless they're on a really solid domain. You shouldn't be focusing all your efforts on two landing pages. You need to work on the entirety of the site, including technical factors, internal linking, and above all else inbound links from other sites and sources.
The obvious factors likely keeping them from ranking? Poor domain authority, age, lack of linking, working on landing pages in a vacuum.
Suggest you read the Moz guide for SEO: https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo
Here's a post on the mobile update
Local SEO is optimizing your site to capture local visitors. Usually important for smaller companies without the national / global reach of other larger enterprises, namely retail sites.
You'll want to set up a Google plus page for that with a robust profile, and then get Local Citations throughout the web.
It has 18% of U.S. traffic. Also, if your core demographic uses Bing. Think about this scenario: An older person gets a PC. They don't change any settings. This means their primary browser is IE and their search bar is Bing by default. At least that's my logic.
Viral is a term that's being thrown around lately. Of course, everyone wants their product to "go viral".
My opinion is most don't for two reasons:
They don't know their customers.
Their product sucks.
Who is your primary customer? How will they find out about your website? What story do you have that will help bring this website to them?
Paid Search (PPC) will allow you to reach your customers quickly, but may be costly.
Make sure the usability is great and your users don't have to think to use it. Is it optimized for mobile phone usage or only desktop?
Launch the site now and start getting feedback on what to change/update before you go live.
Also, take a look this article on marketing your business and how to position it.
One thing I would recommend is the Google Primer App. Although it's by Google, it's not about SEO but marketing and PR in general. But it does include sections on how to approach bloggers and the like to get PR which can equal links so is relevant to this question. But there's also good stuff for noobs in other areas of marketing too.
I highly recommend it as a quick low bullshit intro to marketing with practical examples.
https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/primer-marketing-lessons-for/id918628107?mt=8
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.android.apps.primer&hl=en
These are UK links so you might need to search your local App store for "Primer - marketing lessons for startups"
There's another issue, since you're on a shared cert you can get lumped in with some not so savory sites, which can result in:
Being falsely blocked as porn: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9020646
Being falsely accused of sharing a host with scam sites: http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/03/ted-cruz-for-presidents-ssl-certificate-nigerian-prince-headache/
I have paid accounts for SemRush and Sistrix. If you need free, but not as up-to-date, use k-meta.com (I have no affiliation with them and they might or might not slap a paywall in front of it once they're big enough.).
Just don't tell them the traffic numbers. If you send out a letter where you say something like "It seems like your traffic is 100k/month..." you will look like an ass, for several reasons.
So there's no way you can guess website's traffic.
Check out this article that we've recently published: https://serpstat.com/blog/how-to-sell-your-seo-services/ it should give you an idea on how to prepare a valid offer.
Focus on metrics that you know better than website owners, like how high their competitors' visibility is or how many keywords there are in their niche that they ignore and etc. And if you'll be interested in trying Serpstat for this purpose - shoot me a PM, I can get you a trial code. Cheers.
1) There are many factors, but it usually comes down to relevance (Is the page relevant to the search term? Is it used in the title, header, body content, url, etc...?) and authority (How many websites are linking to this page? How many websites are linking to those pages? What sort of social signals are being sent to that page? etc...)
2) Here's a good beginner guide to get you started: https://moz.com/learn/seo
Good luck!
Tell her to get rid of it.
All it does is charge you for submitting the site to google, and bing. Which by the way if free. Plus your not going to see any real uptick in traffic. Also I think it might give you separate ISP hosting, which some people call SEO hosting. This is not really SEO.
It's also SEO for 6.99- To me this is a red flag. Preying on people who don't know a lot about SEO.
Yoast is fine for getting some of the meta tagging, and page description, and title tags. Meaning it provides a good user friendly on-site SEO architecture.
I'd have her pay for premium Yoast instead. Here is a link for setting up Yoast the right way.
Hope that helps.
I was in that position half a year ago. My first keyword research ... oh man, my team mate kept it as a gag and won't delete it.
It seems like your education is not structured, mine wasn't either, it was also a small company.
Fact is, Web Analytics reporting, Keyword research, On-page SEO, Technical SEO, Website auditing, PPC Auditing and PPC campaign creation are all noticeably different animals with their own nuances.
Besides being quite shit at everything, what field of the above are you having the most trouble with?
Moz has a simple SEO guide you can download the whole thing as a PDF
I would take a look at the list of SEO agencies by Rand Fishkin at Moz.com. Rand is known as one of the top SEO practitioners in the field. He gives good advice. Here is the list of agencies: https://moz.com/community/recommended
In the past there was a program called get listed that used to search for all your listings so that you could edit them. Recently and I mean very recently, like today recently, moz has released moz local. It looks exactly like what you are looking for and costs $49 annually (which IMO is worth) per location.
Here is the link to their new service: https://moz.com/local/how
I use the Moz tool crawl test: https://moz.com/researchtools/crawl-test, but you have to have a pro account.
You can also try the "screaming frog" crawling tool: http://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/
hope this helps :)
I like to use the Hemingway Editor, http://www.hemingwayapp.com/
Basically, it encourages you to cut out any crap. More often than not, you create a better and more useful piece of content. It's all about improving the readability of the article.
Added bonus: SerpWatcher comes as part of the Mangools.com suite.
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So you get a ton of tools including Majestic link data and the widely praised KWFinder.com.
It's a great all-round tool for solopreneurs. Designed for smaller outfits rather than enterprises but im a big fan.
I use SerpWatcher from Mangools. It is a part of a package that includes my favorite keyword tool, KWFinder.
I have tried many, but these tools are great value and work well,.
Have a look at KWFinder, It includes two additional tools called SerpWatcher and SerpChecker. SerpWatcher lets you track your ranking over time for your keywords. KWFinder is the fastest tool I have found to build gorgeous keyword lists.
Hello there,
I’m not an SEO expert but a web designer and developer. In my opinion, WordPress will definitely be a better option for you as it will give you more freedom.
Make use to use https://wordpress.org instead of https://wordpress.com. Nowadays many hosting providers offer a WordPress one-click installation, such as CloudWays or SiteGround (managed cloud hosting).
IMO if you don’t rank yet it’s best to make the move now rather than later. When you create your new blog and import your content, make sure to keep the same permalinks or use 301 redirection.
Last thing, try choosing a hosting that provides a server location in the same country from which your blog is currently hosted.
Hope this helps a little.
In my opinion, Moz.com offers the best content for learning SEO from scratch, and goes all the way up to advanced skills most well-experienced SEOs aren't experts in. There are many other great resources as well, but I think that's your best place to start.
You don't necessarily need your own site right at the beginning, but when you're ready (and it's fairly inexpensive to get a site up and running) I suggest going with Wordpress since it's the most popular platform.
Good luck!
Hey man. We've literally just started working on white label, stage one was released yesterday: https://serpstat.com/blog/we-started-developing-serpstat-white-label-check-out-the-first-results/
Check it out if you have time, the tool is freemium but I can hook you (or anyone who's interested) up with a trial coupon so you can test it with higher limits.
Hey, man. I think I can help you out here. We're making this: https://serpstat.com
and there is quite a lot of stuff to take care of.
1st you need powerful servers to store the data, data is recorded 24/7 and the speed is only limited by HDD recording speed.
You also need a lot of proxies to parse the data for different regions without having to enter captchas and etc.
Then you need a couple of math and analytics experts to sort the data and come up with formulas to calculate stuff like competition, difficulty, visibility and etc.
then you need to write a bunch of scripts for various sorting methods to provide the reports.
I'f I didn't miss anything, that's the foundation. And then there's much much more stuff to work on.
Hi, guys! Greetings from Ukraine :)
We are a new-ish tool called Serpstat and we do Keyword Research, Competitor Analysis, Backlinks, Rank Tracking and Site Audit.
We'd love if you could take a look at our tool an tell us what you think – https://serpstat.com
We've recently been featured on Producthunt and scored a #1 in tech and top 3 of the week (alongside Google Pixel and Facebook Marketplace).
We'd love to have some feedback, constructive and destructive criticism and basically anything that will help us make it better.
Thanks and feel free to contact us here about anything Serpstat-related. If you want a disocunt or a free trial or a demo so we can show you how everythig works – just let us know! Cheers.
Ok, this post is 100% advertisement, but it's relevant to OP's question, so don't get mad if you can.
Serpstat shows the precise search volume.
Our cheapest plan costs $19 and you get keyword research, competitor analysis, backlinks, rank tracking and site audit. It's freemium, give it a go and if you'll have any questions – let us know. https://serpstat.com/
Don't target what you sell in your title, target what people will be searching in google. Your most popular relevant query is obviously "travel hammock", but it's not really good for content.
Who's your audience? I assume people who love camping and travels? Then you should write for them. Example "5 things for better camping experience"
Or even better, use search suggestions that google shows for the word camping, especially the ones in forms of questions: https://serpstat.com/keywords/questions/?query=camping&se=g_us
http://i.imgur.com/wal04zS.jpg
seems like "what to bring camping" is your best option, so "What to bring camping: 5 things that will make your trip much better"
Then list some common bullshit things and add that hammock to the list
He's not right and it's gross that it's upvoted.
https://moz.com/blog/rel-confused-answers-to-your-rel-canonical-questions
2 and 3 apply. Particularly the part about it "appearing manipulative." Basically, when you repost on Medium and try to canonical back to yourself, it looks like you're trying to hijack some of Medium's sweet, sweet Domain Authority for yourself, and Google is going to ignore that shit.
With a canonical on Medium, there is a second issue, addressed in https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2013/04/5-common-mistakes-with-relcanonical.html. I don't believe you can put the canonical in the head when you post on Medium. A canonical in the body is a no-no and will be ignored.
It looks great, I'd reduce the padding on the header though, on my PC it looks huge and covers a lot of your page.
Yes it does load slowly between pages and that will have a negative effect on your SEO.
Have a browse through https://moz.com/learn/seo/page-speed and take some notes from there.
I'd concentrate then on a few 500 word blog posts per week, 2 minimum and work on building backlinks :)
EDIT: Remove the right click protection thing, it's just annoying and pointless. If someone wants to go steal your images, they'll just screenshot them or do what I did and install an enable right click plugin or disable javascript. If you've watermarked your images and people take them, it's free advertising.
De-indexing tags and category pages prevents cluttering up your indexed pages with duplicate content.
Is useful, but not entirely necessary: https://moz.com/community/q/dupe-content-canonicalize-the-wordpress-tag-or-noindex
https://moz.com/search-ranking-factors/correlations
Go down to Page-level keyword agnostic factors... There are more important things that should be noted first since SSL is only a minor boost in comparison to other things...
Not a comprehensive one, but this article on Moz shows how to use the site search report in GA to identify gaps and topics your audience may be interested in - https://moz.com/ugc/how-to-use-six-google-analytics-reports-to-complete-a-website-content-audit
She needs to do Local SEO, which is more about business listings and citations than the website. Google My Business is a start, but you have to do a lot more.
This means her competitor may be closest to the control of that suburb in terms of actual service address.
This is a good starting point: https://moz.com/learn/local-marketing
This might be useful for you, but I suggest you consider reviewing the entire guide (not affiliated with Moz) https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo/growing-popularity-and-links
In short, first focus on creating content that actually successfully answers a searchers needs before trying to get links of any kind. Once you are confident you have something that people will find useful, begin looking for logical sites that a link to your content might help and then develop relationships with the owners of those to see if they would be interested in linking to your content.
Also, be prepared for link outreach and promotion to be the most difficult thing you've ever done, and expect to get rejected... a lot. It is going to take time, patience, and a very methodic approach to learning how to earn links back to your site/web pages.
SEO stopped being a quick fix a long time ago.
First, alexa rank does not say much about the site. Second, you can out rank with perfect onpage optimization, just depending on how well your competitors optimization is. Third, try analyzing more SEO factors. A good tutorial is the https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo
Its better to host everything on a single domain ( with folders / directories in it) i.e. ourdomain.com/blog . See what the SEO Wizard Rand Fishkin has to say about it - https://moz.com/blog/subdomains-vs-subfolders-rel-canonical-vs-301-how-to-structure-links-optimally-for-seo-whiteboard-friday
Everyone else here seems to be hating on the very idea of you. Which is kinda fair. You're basically saying "hey guys, how do I fake my way into your industry?"
Try reading this:
https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo
I guess. You can learn the buzzwords and, depending on what's up with the company, you can probably fake it until you make it.
I don't think it's so much about CTR from SERPs as people returning to SERPs after choosing your result may push you down in rankings.
https://moz.com/blog/solving-the-pogo-stick-problem-whiteboard-friday
It's called Popgsticking which is frankly a silly name because "The Yoyo Effect" or "The SERP Boomerang" is a way better name. People have semi tested this.
As for using Google Analytics as a ranking factor? Google don't do this or so they claim. Google Analytics is ridiculously easy to fake.
When I first started learning SEO there were a few resources which I used to first beef up my knowledge, and then I jumped into practicing what I had learned-- here are 2 of my favorite guides to learn from:
https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo
Start here; it's spells things out in an easily digestible fashion and is an amazing walkthrough for those new to SEO.
http://www.quicksprout.com/the-advanced-guide-to-seo/
Once you've completed the Moz guide, this is a comprehensive guide which will bring you closer to achieving "expert status" on SEO.
I use a few different tools for my SEO adventures, but I'm currently focusing on long-tail keywords, as well as some on-page SEO. Google Adwords has a useful Keyword Planner, and a few other sites like UberSuggest are helpful as well.
Hubspot is great for mapping out your site and monitoring its traffic, but it can be rather expensive. Overall, Moz is definitely a first-class resource.
I hope that helps!
Because the local pack relies heavily on physical address: https://moz.com/blog/top-20-local-search-ranking-factors-an-illustrated-guide#two
NAP -- name, address, phone -- are the Father, Son and Holy Spirit of local search. Without consistent use of all three, the local pack is not going to be a place you appear. Most citations also require all three.
If you don't want to list a home address, consider renting a virtual office address near the center of the city.
Also Check out Moz.com Blog and YouMoz.
There's a gold mine of posts that will help fill in the blanks. There is a filter on both blogs letting you choose a particular aspect. Start with Basic SEO and go from there.
Best of luck with your journey.
Top right corner of each ranking factor/"element" has a weight (either positive or negative). Here is what I think you want: (Moz 2013 Search Engine Ranking Factors)[https://moz.com/search-ranking-factors] or (Searchmetrics 2014 version)[http://www.searchmetrics.com/knowledge-base/ranking-factors/]
The links that you built via Fiverr are crap. There is no point in honey-coating it. You made a bad decision and you will have to do some hard work to get ahead because when they DO take effect, they will hurt you.
Sorry to tell you the truth.
What you'll need to do:
This seems to be an intended behaviour. (either in your CMS settings or .htaccess or control panel of your hosting environment) IF you preferred to have the www and not the non-www, then you will have to reverse your canonicalizing redirect.
Read more on redirects.
More on canonicalization
Okay, but here's why I'm saying this. You're trying to tackle a big beast (Keyword Research, Content Marketing & Audience Engagement) without the right equipment. Like using a pool skimmer net to catch a killer whale.
Even Paid tools can only do as much as you tell them to do. There is still research involved, and some SEO legwork of your own.
You don't really mention what your goals are, which really helps determine the tools you should use to accomplish them.
From the vague description you give in your post, it seems like you want something that can help you find target keywords for your audience, and then give you content ideas for articles based on that research. I'm assuming you're going to fill in the blanks on your own for what to do at that point. But like I said it sounds like you're trying to automate something that shouldn't (and really can't be) automated.
And besides, do you really want a machine coming up with story ideas for you? Get in touch with your audience, innovate, find out what they are asking and talking about. Blow their minds with unique, clever ideas and thought provoking stories. Compel them to SHARE YOUR STUFF. You can't do that with a tool, paid or not, I'm sorry.
I will recommend you read this article. Should be good for you. Also the author of that post is a superb content marketer and knows a thing or two about identifying marketing targets. You should follow him on twitter too.
> There has to be something out there that does this
There is. It's called an In-House SEO Specialist / Copywriter.
You can at least create some google local for him here is a like to google mybusiness: https://www.google.com/business/ . It is not SEO but it will help him to appear on the map and on the right of the search result. It is easy to do and doesn't require any skills.
He's lucky. House flipping in Australia doesn't work. Fees everywhere, Capital gains tax and local governments just screw it as a business proposition. EDIT: /u/locololo2 has it. Don't forget to Google his business and have it verified with snail mail to the location.
1 - I started share free stock photos at pixexid.com but at this moment we don't have too many variations but I'm working on V2 and i have a lot of free images to upload when it's ready. Also, you can use pexels.com, unsplash.com or pixabay.com
2 - the images should complement the copy, separate it i some text blocks, use alignment left and right
3 - if you are using WordPress i suggest use optimole plugin or imagekit.io they have a good free quota, both compress and deliver the images on the right size of the user screen
4 - i don't have in mi mind right now.
Thanks!
Content strategy is based around creating truly GREAT content. I have taught myself to never look at the person ranking #1 and say "okay, yeah I can't do that lets look at what #2 is doing" I always strive to genuinely push out the best content for the keyword I want. I do choose my keywords carefully though so I don't waste my time on keywords that will take forever to rank.
To expand on that, ill share my keyword research strategy with you just because why not.
For the images, I used some from Google and got hit with a copyright infringement case. I didn't have many, but any other "straight from google image search" images I replaced with ones from pixabay.com or pexels. For product photos I took the time to reach out to every manufacturer to ask permission to use their photos. Very time consuming but peace of mind was worth it.
I have a system set up wherein I have a group of people who help me with manual outreach. Its a combo of skyscraper, guest blog posts, sponsored posts, broken link building, etc. I normally manage to place around 10-12 links per month.
That's strange it's so low, I agree. There are still tweaks you can make but it should be higher than 18k/month.
Here's some tools I use:
from a professional point of view I would tell you to start again, but as a possible solution, you could download it with this https://www.httrack.com
but bear in mind, from that point onwards once you’ve removed the old site on wix, you will have to manually edit the html if you want to change anything.
This will say it better than I could https://www.keycdn.com/blog/http-to-https/
I wasn't saying that you should leave your http pages with a rel="canonical" of http. When you enact the .htaccess redirect, you won't have http pages. Those will no longer be crawled because anytime a user or user-agent attempts to acces the http version, it will resolve to https.
I did forget to mention that any hard coded absolute URLs on your site will need to be updated, otherwise you'll have a ton of redirecting links within your site.
It wasn't a mistake to delete the http sitemap, I think you were right about what you did, and why you did it.
Test your website in this tool
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/
If its mobile friendly, check for page speed and you'll have an idea where is the problem.
I agree with /u/ashleybalstad and you should also look at site speed, Google SpeedTest tools reports your site as pretty slow: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.geekwrapped.com%2F&tab=desktop
As others have said, speed is your main issue I would bet. Try looking at the server response time:
Also load Chrome up, open the console and go to networks then load your site after doing a clear. You'll see a long response time causing the main load time issue. (~5s for me) - the rest of the site loads in 2s. This happens when I try to visit any page on the site. Maybe contact your host if you can't see what is wrong.
Try going into the page speed section of Google Analytics and plotting speed and bounce rate over as long a time as possible. Does the speed always look slow? If it does does that correlate with high bounce rate times?
Edit: Better yet - here is a dashboard I just made exactly for this. Just import it and make the date go far back:
You also have a popup ad that pops up asking me to subscribe before I even get to see your site. This is a big turn off. Lose the popup and put the subscribe option on a normal page somewhere.
Online option
http://www.brokenlinkcheck.com/broken-links.php
Any domains that shows up as "bad host" are worth checking to see if they are expired domains.
Download option (Windows, OS X, Linux):
http://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/
Start the spidering and sort by "Status Code". This will show Status Code of 0 and Status of "DNS lookup failed" at the top. Those are possibly expired domains.
Note: neither of thee two tools show expired domain availability unfortunately. Nor can they do multiple sites to scan in succession AFAIK
http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/
If you put your domain into that tool, then you will get a fail / pass and specifically why.
Some format visually well on certain phones, but Google might misread how it renders. All that really matters is how Google thinks it is, not how it actually is. ;-)
My understanding is that they have had a very soft skew for this already, but now are far more forcefully removing / strongly demoting any which do not render well.
I've used BuzzSumo a few times to get article ideas. Just input what you're targeting and it shows you which articles (on that keyword) have been shared the most. Use this to figure out what you should write to complement/support/contradict. There's also a bunch of alternatives
I really like KWFinder. It is the best keyword research tool I have found, letting me build lists of high traffic key words in a fraction of the time it used to.
It also tracks the keywords you are trying to be found for.
There is a free version you can try. The Basic version is enough for most small business owners.
I can show you how I use it if you PM me.
The string of words the user uses will help to reveal their intent. Someone who searches "Nike shoes" isn't as close to converting as someone who types in "white Nike shoes size 10 free shipping".
Certain keywords reveal ecommerce intent (buy, free shipping, purchase, the name of a product with specific sizing details, etc). If your search term has reputable ecommerce sites ranking for it and the PPC is fairly high it's probably got ecommerce intent.
I use https://kwfinder.com to find my keywords. Certain informational keywords are good as well if you feel as if you can build authority within your niche.
It sounds like you want to archive a baseline. You may get some solid responses at r/semrush.
Use these existing templates:
As was already stated, add the site as a project, and pretty much run all of those tools/audits. I would include any combination of these:
Also, pull a full report from gtmetrix.com for a page load speed audit.
Maybe u/semrush can chime in with some more ideas.
I take Google Page Speed results with a grain of salt. It's a good starting point to identify big issues, but don't try to force a square peg into a round hole. You'll probably get a better idea of how your site is doing speed-wise from GTmetrix.
This is so true!
A strong article brief can turn a good writer into a great one.
Usually I include instructions explaining who will be reading the article, content guidelines and the language style.
Something else I've learned is that on the first few rounds, you have to be willing to read and edit the content (usually best in Google Docs). If your writer knows you won't make any changes, they'll naturally slack off. Plus revisions help writers understand your style of writing.
Also, if you're not already using it then I'd recommend checking out WorkFlowy.
This will help you structure a detailed list of contents and topics to cover, and you can include headlines for the H2, H3, H4 sections etc.
If you need an article brief template, PM me :)
I used a Google Searchbot a few years ago this guy created that initially worked in tandem with HideMyAss until Google got wind of it and started recognizing the various IPs we were using.
I like this Microworker idea if it works for search manips, but I also see they offer other options.
That wasn't a statement on ranking. It was a statement on crawl, though.
On other occasions they have said that all else being equal an SSH site will get a slight bump. But it's really rare all else is equal. They have also said that in some cases, SSH is necessary -- Your Money or Your Life (YMYL) content.
Just outsource all your link building to India (check their work & make sure they are not doing blackhat shit) and do the basic onsite stuff yourself.
Google actually has their own guide to get you started, but the onsite shit is pretty easy, given you already extensive html knowledge, you can learn most of it all in a day.
Here's the Nginx version: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-redirect-www-to-non-www-with-nginx-on-ubuntu-14-04
Here's the Apache version: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-redirect-www-to-non-www-with-apache-on-ubuntu-14-04
Returning a 200 could end up in a soft 404. Those are a pain in the ass. Always try to return the correct response
Here's a good list of the different responses and what they are for
https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-troubleshoot-common-http-error-codes
For an SEO company, Omniranks sure isn't impressive.
You 100% should learn Wordpress at minimum. Self-hosted WordPress at that, not wordpress.com. Get your site up/hosted and running. It's a learning experience but your hosting provider can help you along most of the process. I use Fastcomet, you can get started for pretty cheap and their staff is A+.
You don't need to know any coding at all but it does help. Honestly, I don't and I'm ok. Most of the coding stuff was done by the support of the plug-ins I paid for. Don't worry about that stuff, though. Focus on getting a site started and running, you'll regret you didn't start sooner.
Path Auto is the first drupal module you should look at regards URLs, https://www.drupal.org/project/pathauto
Content types and Taxonomies are important in regards to setting the urls up.
mywebsite.com/content-type/node-page-about-whales mywebsite.com/taxonomy-vocabulary/taxonomy-term
A couple of examples above, is that what you were on about?
Someone already mentioned this in the comments, but you should run a log file analysis review to see where Google is going. Here is a link where I had over 20% errors from a Google crawl compared to 1% from Bing.https://www.slideshare.net/gregorykristan3/how-log-file-analysis-will-boost-your-seo?qid=37c8af59-d46b-437e-b5da-81e38705a110&v=&b=&from_search=21
>What I mean by that is, if I do not get any traffic, could I still potentially go and target other keywords in my niche which might suite my niche better, but wont convert as well?
Absolutely, yes. Have a look at things like long tail SEO.
Moz.com has some well written blogs, I think they will be worth your time.
I forgot to say, something to do early on is to register in Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools. You won't see much if anything in the early days, but as time goes by they will become ever more useful.
Hi there,
First of all Kudos to your initiative. Practising SEO is a good step for everyone, at least some basics can be implemented by anyone with prior knowledge.
Take care of the following technical things first:
Further, you can increase your website's issue by:
There are various other aspects that can be implemented and you can learn them online my reading a few blogs such as moz.com and searchengineland.com
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Their traffic isn't that great, I would rather pay yelp to be featured.
http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/yellowpages.com http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/yelp.com
Compare the ranks and traffic, yellowpages is a dinosaur really. They will probably say something about how amazing their brand is, which maybe to older people that use to use the yellow pages, but even they don't google yellow pages. Do they track traffic? Can they show you how well your featured ad is doing, if your'e confident they're not doing well ask them numbers.
I disagree... Did you look at their source code? They have an image in the h1 tag. If they want their image to be hidden, but still take up space, sure visibility:hidden would work. If you are going to think like that, display:none, would be a better route to take, because it doesn't take up real estate on the page, but neither of these are options work in this situation because of the image within the h1 tags.
edit: Sorry I just noticed that you wrote "Would" at the beginning of the sentence. Sorry to sound condescending, i thought you were telling me not asking me.
edit2: OK i just noticed a mistake I made, they need to remove the image from between the h1, and use that image as the background image of the h1
edit3: here are your options for hiding the text in the h1 and keeping the image. I like the last one: http://jsfiddle.net/mZNLX/ (do you see how visibility:hidden leaves a space before the image?)
Go Ahead with WordPress.
WordPress is easy and open source platform.
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It has free version WordPress.com and another one is hosted version (WordPress.org)
You can choose it as per your budget but the hosted version is perfect for creating a website. WordPress has lots of collection of ready-made themes and plugins which you can easily install it to create an attractive website.
Hope you find the WordPress platform useful for you.
There are lots of uses for RSS, just check out IFTTT recipes for feeds for a few ideas.
Social media publishing should be fine, syndicating is probably ok, but you should make sure that the site republishing your content is reputable and isnt' just a spam blog or it could potentially hurt you under Penguin.
Since no one has mentioned it, I'm a big proponent of Positionly. They're very price efficient and if you've got some patience you can get an amazing deal. I got suckered into the autumn deal iirc.
https://serposcope.serphacker.com/en/
Could potentially try this. Unlimited, keywords and campaigns are supported, but you are going to need plenty of proxies and a significant wait time if you want to get decent results.