Category: SEO Tips

SEO Tips – Part X – Build up your Reputation

By SEO, SEO Tips

Let’s talk about website’s “Reputation”.

Google way of ranking websites has changed dramatically over the last few years. Rank-Brain got smarter.
The focus moved away from backlinks and now is all about “Reputation”, which obviously is harder to build and sometimes easier to lose.

“Reputation” still includes backlinks, though, but Google is looking now more at the quality of the backlinks.

Google developed a complex way of weighting the links before they are passing the juice to your website.

They are looking at:
On top of the old way of analysing links – Page Domain authority, number of linking domains, number of links from bad neighbourhoods, anchor text, link title.

Here are some newer ways of assessing the links quality.

  1. Links in the ads vs links in the content – content links are more powerful.
  2. Links Location in the content – near the top of the content more powerful they get.
  3. Word count of the linking content and quality of the linking content – links from short snippets or spun content don’t have too much value.
  4. The diversity of links – having a large number of links coming from a single source can be seen as spammy.
  5. Forum links – almost ignored due to a spammy past.
  6. Sitewide links – they count as 1 link only.
  7. Links from real websites carry more weight than links from blogs…trust issue, again.
  8. Experts talk- it’s valued – the easy way for Google to identify the experts talk to experts is to check if their page title (of the linking page) shares the same keywords with your linked page.
  9. Country TLD of the referring page – gives you a boost in that country.
  10. Nofollow/Follow Links ration – gives Google an idea if your linking campaign is ‘natural’ or ‘unnatural’.

OK. What else is building up your “Reputation”?
Obviously, quality content is a huge factor.
If people like it, click it, talk about it, sometimes link it, then it is improving your reputation. Pages with lots of comments are seen as interaction and quality which will boost your ranking.
Doesn’t happen overnight, but you will see it happening, in time.

A natural way to get quality content is to write about something that you have real experience on it, you can relate to it and you can naturally write at length about it. Google likes pages to cover the topic in-depth instead of just briefly touching the main points. Google also likes you to be original – no copied content, just write your own…
If content doesn’t look legit, people will know it and Google does it too.
Google can identify gibberish content aka auto-generated or spun content and they score your content (like Grammarly does) and check for spelling and grammar mistakes…
Everything matters these days, is all for better User Experience.

Another thing that improves your reputation is About page. Don’t forget to create one and talk about your experience and not only about your degrees and certificates, but real-life experience matters too.

More things to do, write books, ebooks, participate and speak to conferences, create resources and share them.
Not all these are easily done, but if you have a product, create a presentation for that product and share it – Slideshare is a good place to start.
That’s all that we’ve had to say about building up your “Reputation”, for now, but probably we’ll re-edit the article pretty soon…

Cheers, Nick

Behind the scene – backlinks report – Alexa top 5 to 10 websites – Wikipedia, QQ, LinkedIn, Windows Live,Twitter

By Internet Statistics, SEO Tips
Top 5-10 websites on the web  – lets have a look at next 5 websites that top the web.

6. Wikipedia
7. QQ

10. Twitter

As you can see Amazon was kicked out from Top 10. Would be interesting to see why?

Social Media

Backlinks


So, why did Alexa kicked out Amazon from Top 10?

Twitter is better at Social Media Chapter, I guess, not Google+ though:

Backlinks are telling quite the same story Twitter wins by far!


One parameter from here…is very much liked by Google (and Alexa) and can swap the position of these sites at any time in the Top, with minimum variation.

Which one will be?
Your Answers below….

 

ERAWTFOSKCIN

By Internet Statistics, SEO, SEO Tips

Well, dummy words have no search or competition on the WEB. Let’s write NickSoftware reversed erawtfoskcin and see how quick Google index it and how this mini article will rank in SERP.

My guess, in two minutes, it will be ranking page 1 in SERP for keyword erawtfoskcin.

OK, let’s count.

Got number one in SERP in two days.

Cheers,
Nick’s Software
ERAWTFOSKCIN

Behind the scene – backlinks report – Alexa top 5 websites – Google, Facebook, Youtube, Yahoo, Baidu

By Backlinks Report, SEO, SEO Tips
Top 5 websites on the web  – everybody would like to get there, but for now the privilege is still within big boys reach only.

As per Alexa Top Sites the TOP 5 websites on the web is:

We all know how these sites look like and what they offer.
Also we know that they are very popular among us, and we ALL use them daily, more or less.

But, what’s behind the scene? 
What’s the domain comparison between these “.com(s)”? 
Why are in top 5, besides their obvious impeccable content and attraction to us? 
Why is Google number one and Facebook number two?

Social Media 

Google is mentioned 3mil+ times in Google+, when Facebook has only 22K links in Google+, Youtube is a champion in Google+ with 7mil+ links and then Yahoo has 100K+ and Baidu about 3K.

On Twitter Facebook is the leader of the pack with 52K links followed by Youtube with 17K, Google and Baidu with 7K and Yahoo with few hundreds…

FLikes – of course Facebook leads the pack again with about 3.5mil, Google and Youtube follow with about 1mil+ and the other guys are below a mil.

FShares – Google has more than Facebook!!! – but both are close together at 4.2mil+ with Youtube coming next at 3mil and Yahoo at 900K and Baidu at 9K…

Backlinks
How many links the top 5 have?
Answer is lots….

Facebook – 7.7 billions 
Youtube – 3 billions
Google – 1.9 billions
Baidu – 240 millions
Yahoo – 39 millions

What’s their backlinks profile?


















How many referring domains do they have?























So, why Google is first?
I think, because Facebook doesn’t have a search engine yet and Yahoo is all about rich content, Youtube is in no aggression pact area and Baidu is a non english search engine….

Will it change in the near future?
Can’t see any big challenger coming from outside top 5:
7. QQ
10. Amazon

But for sure I would like to see how top 5 will unfold once Facebook enters a bit more seriously in the search engine market.

What’s your view…
Leave a comment below.

Cheers,
Nick

  


Search Engine Optimisation Tips – Part 4

By SEO, SEO Tips


Off-Site Optimization – Link Building

Are many articles on the Internet about links building and what to avoid and what to do…

I just want to point out that Google treats links as appreciation of your site from others and it gives value to each inbound link that you get.
More value, the better, so a good source to get valuable  links would be websites with high PageRank and less outbound links,because value of a link is direct proportional with page PR and inverse proportional with number of external links that that page has.

On the other hand, quantity matters, even if you get links from Sites with low PR and lots of external links, you still get some value for your links and, most important, these Sites could evolve in the future and get higher PR.

How to get links?

If your Site is new, a good source for links could be link-exchange. Software Packages like SEO Powersuite offers  powerful tools to get started and manage your link-exchange campaign.
Link Assistant let you find link partners, sends customized emails, tracks  status and scans their websites to find your links. Link Assistant is a very useful tool to control your link building campaign.

Of course, you should ask all your friends and family to posts ONE WAY links on their sites. ONE WAY links are powerful. If you can get SITE LINKS – links posted on each page of a website – they are more powerful, if not at least bargain for a link on a main landing page – like HOME PAGE.

A pretty easy way of getting valuable links is commenting on BLOGS – especially blogs that are posting DO FOLLOW links. Search in Google for “Do Follow Blogs” and you will get a list of them.
Important thing when commenting on Blogs is to read the article first and get a response that is relevant and not SPAMMY.
If you SPAM your comment will be probably deleted by BLOG Admin/Moderator.
Try to be reasonable first time….

Many people are saying that WEB Directories are DEAD… I wouldn’t say so, it still important to get your Site enlisted to the major ones and then if you have time and patient send your sites to more directories. A manual submission is preferred, or at least a smart semi-automatic.

I would recommend you to submit your Site to DMOZ and any directory that you find and has a page rank higher than 6. Many directory lists could be found just searching Google.

Witting articles is a good source of links and a good way of growing content. Articles could be sent to Article Directories, published on your on Site Blog, posted on external blogs, other blogs.
Just remember, from our experiments – Blogspot and WordPress pages are indexed each 5-15min. It’s a good spot to publish something cool/explosive/viral….you name it.

Don’t forget about social media – a strong presence in social media will give you links and visitors.
Social media sites are extremely valuable because they are free to join and have high PR. It takes few minutes to join a social media site and set up a page that contains a link to your website. Are sooo many, start with Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Tumblr, Foursquare, Digg.
Search “list of social media sites” in Google and find a huge number of Social Media Sites not mentioned here.

These are only ‘the classical’ way of getting links.
More details are coming soon.

What should you use as links title?

Of course links are valuable, but are more valuable if are using as title your most marketable keywords. Use your keywords as title for these links, vary them to get similar amounts of links for each and don’t forget about image links. Use ALT attribute to key in your keywords.

Another important step in link-building is to scan your competition and analyze what links they have, which are more valuable and how did they  advance in SERP (Search Engine Results Page).
You could do it using Yahoo linkdomain search operator or you can expand this analysis using professional software – SEO SpyGlass  – it offers a range of professional reports that surgically analyze your competitors pages and their most powerful links. Get links from same source and you could get in front of them, in SERP.

That’s about it, for today.

Cheers,
Nick

Search Engine Optimisation Tips – Part 3

By SEO, SEO Tips

On-Site Optimisation
 
Content matters, but few things have an immediate, positive effect upon your Site, so add them in your TO DO LIST of ON-SITE Optimisation.

Write your Meta(s) – Meta Title and Meta Description are the most important ones – for people and for Google bot.

Meta Title is the blue underlined text displayed in the search results page for each site.

Meta Description is the black text that usually follows, underneath the title.

Both represent the essence of your business, you have less than 100 characters to summarise your activity in your title and a bit more than that in your meta description.

They both need to contain your most valuable keywords, written in a human-friendly and Google-friendly way.

Once you have done this, could be enough to get your site listed in Top 100. Of course is not enough to be in Top 100 and everybody wants to be in Top 10.

If you want to play tough, on-site optimisation could be applied further and you should optimize your:

  • meta keywords – add more keywords
  • body text – stuffed with your most marketable keywords, do not over-do it
  • H1 Headings – good place for a strong keyword
  • bold text – another nice place for few more strong keywords
  • anchor text -add your most valuable keys
  • image alt texts – first thing, all images should have ALT text; secondly, they should be stuffed with keywords – smartly put – human readable and BOT friendly
  • Don’t Forget – Site Load Time Matters – if you have a huge, highly optimised Site, which is very slow – it will not DO well – speed matters a lot and keep an eye on it.

If you need software help to DO all these ON-SITE OPTIMISATION stuff, WEBSITE Auditor is a nice software, that lets you analyse and export pretty useful reports.

You can try it for free from here.
For more  info about ON-SITE OPTIMISATION – drop us an email at: customDB@nicks-software.com

Cheers,
Nick

SEO Tips – Part 2

By SEO, SEO Tips

Choose carefully your keywords

As I mentioned before, choosing carefully your key-phrases is crucial for your SEO campaign.

How to do it right?

Start from obvious keywords that describe in the best way your activity, ask your friends how do they search Internet if they want to get what you offer, use software tools to get more suggestions.

After you have run out of suggestions, the next place to go is Google, type “AdWords keyword tool” – Google offers a free key suggestion tool.

You need a Google Account to get rid of annoying CAPTCHA, but it is working without an account just fine, just go to “Reporting and Tools” and pick up “Keyword Tool”

Type in your best key-phrase and click search. The “Keyword Tool” will come back with suggestions, see example below – suggestions for keyword ‘games’:

 

It provides you enough information to get an idea about the value of each suggested key: 

  • Competition, 
  • Global Monthly Searches, 
  • Local Monthly Searches.

A good way to sort the key-phrases is based on their ‘Key efficiency index’=KEI.

A good formula for KEI is:

KEI=((4-R)/3)*Sv*Sv/C

Where we have:

Relevance (R): it is how closely your keyword is related to what you offer to your customers. 

Use a three points scale:

  • 1 for Excellent
  • 2 for Good
  • 3 for Poor

Search Volume (Sv): it is how many queries are made for a keyword per month. 

Competition (C): that’s how many websites are already more or less optimized for this keyword.

The easiest way to calculate the KEI is, export in Excel your preferred suggestions from Google’s keyword suggestion tool, create a column for ‘Relevance’ and add your best assessment there (remember 1 to 3), then create another column called ‘KEI’ and calculate it based on above formula. 

Coz Google’s data about competition is less than one – you should multiply it with 10^6 or 10^8 for reasonable results (avoid huge number).

Once you have the column ‘KEI‘ calculated, you should sort your keywords descending based on column KEI value and voila, you have the first logically ordered list of key-phrases.

Few things to remember when you work with  “Google’s keyword Tool”:

  • use Match Type = [Exact] to get a realistic number for Monthly Searches
  • use Local Monthly Searches – forget about Global (if you use this free tool – think local first – start small, grow big)
  • due to the fact that competition number is not terribly accurate, better don’t use it – get your competitors number from Google, just type in your ‘keyword’, press search and read the competition as shown below:

KEI is not all that you need, to be able to pick up the most marketable key-phrases for your niche… You need to apply few more filters, do more research, in order to get to the honey.

 You need to get more data about your competition and the real dimension of it.

How many webpages are optimized for the same potential key-phrases? 

How many links are out there having these key-phrases as anchors?

You should answer these questions before picking up your ‘most marketable’ keys.

Google helps and let you use search operators to figure out these answers, and the ones that we want to use are INTITLE and INANCHOR.

Example – Type in Google:

INTITLE:[keyword]

INANCHOR:[keyword]

Having the number of sites optimized for a specific keyword, gives you the real dimension of your competition = number of websites that have the ‘keyword’ in their title.

If this number is in billions…then you are totally screwed (big boys are using your keywords), if number is in low millions that’s more achievable and if number is less than a million just GO FOR IT.

 

Best thing is to add few new columns to your previously put together Excel file and recalculate the KEI (Keyword Efficiency Index) based on INTITLE (replacing C-Competition with INTITLE number), then you can sort the keys descending by this new column (INTITLE KEY).

Continuing example given before with keyword ‘games’ – below are the top 20-ish keywords, ordered descending based on their true key efficiency – giving you the TOP of your ‘most marketable’ keys…

Many keys will have similar descending patterns on both KEI columns (“KEI” and “INTITLE KEI”), but you can see that are some surprises.

BY example [car games] based on KEI=465.51 should be placed higher in the list, but due to a relatively high number of optimised competitors web pages = intitle:[car games] = 49,000,000 it will be downgraded having INTITLE KEI lower than [shooting games] by example, which has only 2.5 mil sites that have this key in the title (compared with 49 mil for [car games]).

 

You could use more formulas and more filters if you want and need – free imagination always helps and by the way….if you have a favorite key that doesn’t qualify based on formulas, but your gut feel says use it, then use it.

 

Formulas are good in SEO, coz give you a sorted list based on some logical assumptions, but your gut feel can be the missing parameter that can send to you millions of visitors. 

So keep an eye on your gut feel.

 

Keywords Selection, Hard work? Yes, if you have to do all these stuff manually, or using just EXCEL (or similar), then you need time….a lot of time.

 

If you don’t have time or just need to be quicker…you can do it using SEO software. 

Which one? Are so many out there and all cost money and promise miracles….

I can tell you about my choice SEO POWERSUITE from Link-Assistant. 

Rank Tracker (part of SEO Powersuite) – it slashes your SEO workload in half and does all above and much more….

FREE version is fully featured, no restrictions, it is easy to use and in this way it is not hard to figure out if you truly like it or not.

 

Next time at SEO Tips – we talk about On-Site Optimisation.

Cheers,

Nick

SEO Tips – Part I

By SEO, SEO Tips
Search Engine Optimization Tips – Part 1
 
Note: This article is old, but still valuable that’s why I updated it with SEO tools relevant today (2019).
 
SEO is so important for any Site, without a proper SEO campaign you can’t get known and high in any SERP.
 
But what exactly you need to do in order to be ranked higher?
 
I. Choose carefully your keywords – they have to be relevant for your business and also achievable. Check KEY, INTITLE, INANCHOR numbers – rank your keys.
 
II. On-Site optimization – optimize the meta title and meta description of all your landing pages – using your targeted keywords.
 
III. Make links using your targeted keywords – do follow, no follow, exchange links, one way links, web directories, articles, blog articles, blog comments – all matters – use your targeted keywords as anchors.
 
IV. Have a strong presence on Social Media – all these help getting more links and traffic – Youtube, Linkedin, Facebook, Twitter…
 

V. Maintain BLOG(s) – have a blog on your domain – easy way to grow your content – maintain few other blogs on Sites highly ranked and indexed very often – Blogspot, WordPress, Posterous, Squidoo….

VI. USE SEO Software Tools -  of course is much easier to use software instead of manually tracking your progress. Useful SEO software like SEMRush or AHREFS.

 
 
Starting with “Search Engine Optimization Tips – Part 2†we will give you more details about SEO categories 1 to 6 highlighted above.
 

Search Engine Optimisation

By Internet Statistics, SEO, SEO Tips
Note: This article is pretty old, but still valuable that’s why we updated it with latest best SEO tools available now (2019).
For those interested in SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) I will share here few things that I have found to be useful and few SEO software that I like to use in my work.
SEO…it’s quite a young discipline, but you can find on the Internet so many books and articles about it.
Many claim that they discovered the ‘Holy Grail’, when it’s quite hard to believe that in few clicks, as they tell you, you can achieve the top ranking how you are told…
SEO, as I know it is though work and perseverance.
Another thing is that using the right software tools you can reduce substantially your workload, but still need your brain to be involved and take the right decisions. I can’t see SEO, as a ONE click job how many sites pretend, advertise  and sell ($$$$).
Search Engine Optimisation, how I do it, is, methodical, structured work.
What is SEO?
Search Engine Optimization is the process of improving the visibility of your web site in search engines via organic search results from Google, Bing, Yahoo and other search engines.
A website that shows higher on a search engine results page normally gets more visitors, more potential customers and ultimately more sales…
Where do we start?
I. Search Engine Submission
Send your site to major search engines.
Why you don’t need to send your site to thousands search engines…
Because they are irrelevant.

Why? Over 95% of all searches come from Google, Yahoo or MSN. Many other minor search engines use the BIG THREE for their results.

II. Get your keywords for a good start
Firstly, yo need to brainstorm (involve more people) the best keywords and keyphrases for your site.
And remember the fewer things people know about SEO, the better keywords ideas come to their mind.

Then shortlist keywords  based on KEI (keyword efficiency index).

A good formula for KEI is:
KEI=((4-R)/3)*Sv*Sv/C
Where we have:

Relevance (R): it is how closely your keyword is related to what you offer to your customers.
We use a three points scale:

  • 1 for Excellent
  • 2 for Good
  • 3 for Poor
Search Volume (Sv): it is how many queries are made for a keyword per month.

Competition (C): that’s how many websites are already more or less optimized for this keyword.

III. Play search engine rules
Make your site to follow the ROBOT rules; create sitemap, robots file, fix broken links, correct HTML mistake.
IV. On Page optimization for 5 landing pages
Based on your most marketable keywords go and analyze how optimized your site is for this keywords.
Based on audit report (we use SemRush Site Audit)  go on and implement the recommendations. Now your site is fully optimized and better than your competitors.

This will have an  immediate, positive  effect on your rankings.

DO regular reports to show your Search Engine Ranking Performance (SERP) and Analytics to keep you informed with your website performance

V. Link Building

As you probably know, links are very important to your website’s ranking. Saying that you don’t want links from any website that promotes spam or adult content. Bad neighbourhood links are deadly for your online presence and need to be avoided at all costs.

That’s why a link building campaign, we always start it with a Status Report. The Report analyses exiting backlinks quantity and quality,  based on many factors including their domain rating and anchor phrases relevance and quality.

Based on Status Report we define the link building strategy and if necessary, we highlight links that might need to be disavowed.

A good link building campaign is based on good neighbourhood Sites:
• complementary sites in your industry
• every social media site on Earth
• blogging sites
• PDF submission sites
• business directories
• any “good neighbours” from those almost 2 billion websites available on the Internet

We use SEMrush and AHREFS to get your site ranking better. These tools are the best white hat SEO tools on the market that will help you get the highest possible ROI for your SEO campaigns.

Cheers, Nick