Book notes: SEO 2020, by Adam Clarke
Mergewords http://mergewords.com/ Prefix - buy - where do I buy Middle word - NFL jerseys - NFL uniforms - NFL jackets Suffixes - online Combined keywords - NFL jerseys
keywordtool.io.
To get a realistic idea of your chances for ranking high for a particular keyword, you need to understand the strength of the pages currently ranking in the top-10 search results for that keyword. A great tool for this is KWFinder’s SEO Difficulty report. With KWFinder’s SEO Difficulty report, simply enter your keyword into their tool, click “check difficulty”, and it will show vital stats for pages appearing in the top 10.
KWFinder – Keyword research and analysis tool https://kwfinder.com/
Ahrefs – Competitor Research Tools & SEO Backlink Checker https://ahrefs.com/
Moz - Keyword Explorer https://moz.com/explorer/keyword/ Moz – Link
On-page SEO includes the following considerations:
1. Making sure site content is visible to search engines.
2. Making sure your site is not blocking search engines.
3. Making sure search engines pick up the keywords you want. Most on-page SEO you can do yourself, if you have a basic level of experience dealing with sites.
Next up, you need to ensure you have a handful of LSI keywords on your page. LSI stands for Latent Semantic Indexing. Don’t be discouraged by the technical term, LSI keywords is an SEO term for related phrases. Google believes a page is more naturally written, and has a higher tendency to be good quality and relevant, if it also includes relevant and related keywords to your main phrase.
Ubersuggest is a great tool for finding keywords Google considers related to your main keywords—it does this by pulling suggestions from Google’s auto-suggest box.
The title tag has a character limit of roughly 70 characters in Google. Use any more than 70 characters and it is likely Google will truncate your title tag in the search engine results. The meta description tag has a character limit of roughly 155 characters. Just like the title tag, Google will shorten your listing if it has any more than 155 characters in the tag.
Google’s former head of web spam, Matt Cutts, publicly admitted fast load speed is a positive ranking factor.
Common load speed improvements.
Host your site in the city where your customers reside and load speeds will increase.
Alternatively, use a CDN (content delivery network) to host your site on servers all over the world. Visitors will get super-fast load speeds regardless of location. Popular CDN services include Amazon CloudFront, MaxCDN and Cloudfare.
Enable load speed technologies like caching, compression, minification and HTTP/2. Most platforms have plugins for this, e.g. W3 Total Cache is a popular plugin offering most of these features on WordPress.
Find large files on your site and shrink them. Use software like Adobe Photoshop and you can compress image file sizes from 3MB down to 250KB without visual loss in quality, by using Photoshop's "save for web" feature. An easy-win for image-heavy sites.
Load speed analysis tools
1. Google Page Speed Insights https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights Google's great free tool, Page Speed Insights, will give you a page load score out of 100. You can see how well your load speed compares to other sites. You can also see how well your site loads on mobile and desktop. Scores closer to 100 are near perfect.
https://testmysite.thinkwithgoogle.com/ Around late June, 2017 Google updated their mobile load speed testing tool, Test My Site, to include benchmarking reports against industry competitors. This tool is both easy-to-use and indispensable for finding easy-win load speed improvements for mobile users—and handy for seeing how your website performs against competitors. You might be shocked the first time you use this tool—many site owners discover they are losing up to 30%-50% of traffic, due to poor loading time on 3G mobile devices, not a great outlook.
To account for this, you should always ensure a special tag is placed on every page in your site, called the canonical tag. The canonical tag indicates the original version of a web page to search engines. By telling Google the page you consider to be the “true” version of the page into the tag, you can indicate which page you want listed in the search results.
Mobile friendly Test - Google https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/
Track your link-building efforts and keep them in a spreadsheet. This way you can monitor your anchor text and make sure it fits in with best practices. Link
To find relevant directories, use the below search terms in
Google, replacing “keyword” with your targeted keyword or industry, and you can find relevant directories for your niche: keyword + submit keyword + add url keyword + add link keyword + directory keyword + resources
Here is a short list of business directories to get you started: https://www.manta.com/add-your-company https://www.linkedin.com/ https://www.hotfrog.com/AddYourBusinessSingle.aspx http://www.angieslistbusinesscenter.com https://www.merchantcircle.com/signup http://www.citysearch.com https://biz.yelp.com
You might be wondering what a successful link baiting campaign looks like. I've listed examples below:
WordPress SEO https://yoast.com/articles/wordpress-seo/ Joost de Valk is well known in the SEO industry, in some part due to his one page guide to WordPress SEO that is updated every month or so. This guide has earned many links and shares over many years.
101 Motivational Business Quotes https://www.quicksprout.com/2009/12/07/101-motivational-business-quotes/ Excellent example of a great link bait article that went viral, and could be outsourced for pennies on the dollar.
Try the following search queries in Google, replacing “keyword” with your industry, niche or topic, for finding guest post opportunities. And use the Google Chrome extension, Link Clump, to copy and paste the search results into a spreadsheet, so you can reach out to the blogs for a guest post placement—which will be covered later in this chapter. keyword "guest post by" keyword "guest post" keyword "guest article" keyword "guest author" keyword "contributor" keyword "guest contributor"
Broken linkbuilding - $67 monthly http://www.brokenlinkbuilding.com This tool is comprehensive, but comes at a price. By typing in keywords you are targeting, the broken link building tool will find a solid amount of broken link opportunities. Saves time and finds quality opportunities.
Broken brand mentions. Broken brand mentions are a fast, simple and reliable form of link building you can use for almost every SEO project. It goes like this: in some cases, when someone mentions your brand they forget to post a link. Track mentions of your brand, and where suitable, reach out and ask for a link back
Here's a direct quote of the combination of factors Google consider bad-practice, as discussed in their guidelines published May 2017, about large-scale article campaigns: - Stuffing keyword-rich links to your site in your articles. - Having the articles published across many different sites; alternatively, having a large number of articles on a few large, different sites. - Using or hiring article writers that aren’t knowledgeable about the topics they’re writing on. - Using the same or similar content across these articles; alternatively, duplicating the full content of articles found on your own site (in which case use of rel=‘canonical’ and rel=‘nofollow’ is advised).
Google are mostly concerned the articles are relevant, high-quality, posted on relevant sites, aren't stuffed with extreme numbers of links pointing to your site, and you're not annoying a billion site owners with spammy unpersonalized email blasts filling up their inboxes. Avoid these practices, and you'll avoid getting a slap by Mr. Google.
1. Create a Twitter profile. Adding a link in a Twitter profile is a big opportunity disguised as a small opportunity. Simply by creating a Twitter profile, and listing your website in both the “website” and “bio” fields, you will get a handful of links from high domain authority aggregators that scrape your information from Twitter. Sites that do this include Klout, Twellow, Twitter Counter, and many others. To make these links more powerful, you can make your profile active without a large overhead of time.
Create your own authority links. The most powerful link building strategy is to simply go out and make your own authority links. By buying a previously owned website or domain, you can turn it into a blog and unlimited source for powerful, highly relevant links back to your site.
If you’ve been following the online advice on blogging and link building in the past couple of years you will have noticed a recurring theme: building relationships with other bloggers in your industry is a powerful way to earn strong backlinks to your site.
Instagram limits the amount of links you can post, which essentially means the links from your profile on Instagram are much more powerful. If you work in a fashion or image-heavy industry, Instagram is a must-have social network to incorporate into your SEO and overall digital strategy.
Other web analytics tools. There are many web analytics tools out there to help with improving the performance of your site. Google Analytics is great for understanding overall traffic performance, but if you want to delve deeper, check out the following tools for greater insights:
Crazy Egg - Free to start. Plants start at $9 per month. https://www.crazyegg.com/ If you want a visual indication of how visitors behave on your site once they arrive, Crazy Egg is a fantastic tool. With Crazy Egg, you can get heat maps of where visitors click on the page. You can also see heat maps of how far visitors scroll down the page.
Visual Website Optimizer – 30 day free trial. https://vwo.com/ Visual Website Optimizer is a popular split-testing analytics tool. With Visual Website Optimizer, you can split test different variations of your site, and see which version makes more sales or conversions
For greater results, post your question on all of the sites below, and sit back and wait for the answers to come in. You will get more answers and will be in a better position to consider which solution is best.
Moz Q&A https://moz.com/community/q
Pro Webmasters https://webmasters.stackexchange.com/
Quora https://www.quora.com/
If you think about it, if a restaurant is really popular in a city, a whole bunch of links from all over the world probably isn't the best factor to determine how valuable the business is to the local area. A better indicator of the importance would be mentions of the business’s name and phone number across the web, customer reviews, and details on the website that show the business is based in the area being searched.
Moz's Local Search Ranking Factors https://moz.com/local-search-ranking-factors
Local SEO ranking checklist & essential resources.
While looking at your local competitors and working to beat them is probably the best overall strategy, progressing through the following checklist will put you on your way to ranking high at the top of the local search results. 1. Verify your business profile on Google My Business. 2. Fill out as much information as possible on your Google My Business profile, including description, category associations,
Submit your website to the major business directories like Yelp, Yellow Pages, CitySearch and so on. You can use tools like Moz Local to submit your business to all of the major directories in one go.
Moz Local. https://moz.com/local
Google, Yahoo and Bing joined together in 2011 to hit the nail on the head and created a standardized approach with schema.org—a reference site for markup technology, which allows you to cover all your meta-data needs.