How Usability, Experience and Content Affect Search Engine Rankings – The Beginners Guide to SEO The search engines constantly strive to improve their performance by providing the best possible results. While "best" is subjective, the engines have a very good idea of the kinds of pages and sites that satisfy their searchers. Generally, these sites have several traits in common: Easy to use, navigate, and understand Provide direct, actionable information relevant to the query Professionally designed and accessible to modern browsers Deliver high quality, legitimate, credible content Despite amazing technological advances, search engines can't yet understand text, view images, or watch video the same way a human can. On Search Engine Rankings There are a limited number of variables that search engines can take into account directly, including keywords, links, and site structure. Signals of Quality Content 1. When a search engine delivers a page of results to you, they can measure their success by observing how you engage with those results. 2. 3. For Search Engine Success
SEO Spyglass: Website Back Link Checker Tool & Link Popularity Checker Link Building Strategy in 2018 – Stephanie Venus Charlton A Simple Step by Step Guide to SEO When it comes to search engine optimization for a new website, some businesses can be intimidated due to the amount of information out there. And often, if they don’t have the help of an experienced in-house SEO or consultant, they will do nothing. Today, we’re going to look at some easy things you can do to start your website’s SEO on the right foot — even if you can’t hire a professional to help you out. 1. Some of the most important elements for search engine optimization happen on your own website. Source: How To Do Keyword Research - The Beginners Guide to SEO It all begins with words typed into a search box. Keyword research is one of the most important, valuable, and high return activities in the search marketing field. Ranking for the right keywords can make or break your website. By researching your market's keyword demand, you can not only learn which terms and phrases to target with SEO, but also learn more about your customers as a whole. It's not always about getting visitors to your site, but about getting the right kind of visitors. The usefulness of this intelligence cannot be overstated; with keyword research you can predict shifts in demand, respond to changing market conditions, and produce the products, services, and content that web searchers are actively seeking. How to Judge the Value of a Keyword How much is a keyword worth to your website? Even the best estimates of value fall flat against the hands-on process of optimizing and calculating ROI. Understanding the Long Tail of Keyword Demand Keyword Research Resources
Majestic®: Marketing Search Engine and SEO Backlink Checker yoast Links are important for SEO. And link building should therefore definitely be part of your holistic SEO strategy. But more importantly, link building should be part of your growth strategy. Links should help generate traffic to your site directly. In this post, I’ll describe 6 important steps for a successful link building strategy, the holistic SEO way. Before we dive in, if you want to learn more about link building strategies and other essential SEO skills, you should check out our Basic SEO training! Link building as part of your growth strategy Links will help your pages to rank higher in Google search results, this post explains why. A good link, first and foremost, drives traffic to your site. Step 1: Get to know your audience If you want your audience to grow, you need to find out how to expand your audience or how to find a new audience. Step 2: Make a list of websites that appeal to your desired audience Step 3: Write amazing content Step 4: Match content to websites
The Basics of SEO Friendly Design and Development - The Beginners Guide to SEO Search engines are limited in how they crawl the web and interpret content. A webpage doesn't always look the same to you and me as it looks to a search engine. In this section, we'll focus on specific technical aspects of building (or modifying) web pages so they are structured for both search engines and human visitors alike. This is an excellent part of the guide to share with your programmers, information architects, and designers, so that all parties involved in a site's construction can plan and develop a search-engine friendly site. In order to be listed in the search engines, your most important content should be in HTML text format. Seeing Like a Search Engine Many websites have significant problems with indexable content, so double-checking is worthwhile. Whoa! Using the Google cache feature, we're able to see that to a search engine, JugglingPandas.com's homepage doesn't contain all the rich information that we see. That’s a lot of monkeys, and just headline text? Keyword Abuse
Link Building 101: How to Conduct a Backlink Analysis Every day, individuals who are new to SEO need to learn the basics of link building and important concepts and strategies within a campaign. This link building 101 post will continue the education of new link builders, this time on the topic of how to perform a backlink analysis Being able to perform a thorough backlink analysis is a fundamental element to any link building campaign. What's more, running backlink analyses can help develop your fundamental knowledge of links, link building strategies, and link quality. What are the elements of a thorough backlinks analysis: Total number of linksNumber of unique domainsLinking domains vs total linksAnchor text usage and variance – branded, keyword rich, etc.Fresh/incoming linksPage performanceLink quality* *Learned only by experience, running multiple backlink analyses, and manually checking links. The Importance of Link Portfolios A link portfolio (or profile) is a fancy way of saying all the sites currently linking to your site. 1. 2. 3. 4.
Why & How to Tackle Technical SEO Before Link Building Editor’s note: This is a chapter from Search Engine Journal’s Illustrated Guide to Link Building. So your website isn’t perfect. Sure, it’s got some broken internal links, perhaps a few small pages of thin content, and maybe just one too many pages without the canonical tags. In a perfect world, on-page optimization happens before offsite SEO. Why? Because building links with a website that looks like a Lisa Frank Trapper Keeper is like eating a Thanksgiving turkey without gravy. Worthless. SEJ conducted a survey and discovered that 39 percent of SEO professionals tackle technical SEO first. Before I begin developing my link building strategy, I perform a technical SEO audit. I want to fix what’s broken on-site before starting off-site. By analyzing site structure for internal link placement and top-performing pages for linkable assets, I’m able to discover existing content that can help guide my link building strategy. Find Your Top Pages Find 404 Pages Then plug in their 404 pages in Moz. Summary
SEO Tools and Search Engine Services - The Beginners Guide to SEO SEOs tend to use a lot of tools. Some of the most useful are provided by the search engines themselves. Search engines want webmasters to create sites and content in accessible ways, so they provide a variety of tools, analytics and guidance. These free resources provide data points and opportunities for exchanging information with the engines that are not provided anywhere else. Below we explain the common elements that each of the major search engines support and identify why they are useful. 1. Think of a sitemap as a list of files that give hints to the search engines on how they can crawl your website. You can read the full details of the protocols at Sitemaps.org. Extensible Markup Language (Recommended Format) This is the most widely accepted format for sitemaps. Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary Easy to maintain. Txt Text File Extremely easy. 2 Robots.txt The following commands are available: Disallow Prevents compliant robots from accessing specific pages or folders. 3. 4.