Month: December 2018

7 things that hurt your SEO rankings and how to fix them – Part 2

In Marketing, SEO by Jay / December 28, 2018 / No comments

[vc_section][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]A bad SEO entails practices that are outside the boundaries of Google webmaster guidelines and it affects the optimization of your website for search engines.

There are many techniques that can hurt your SEO rankings if implemented. Serpstat, in 2017, found about 300 million errors when they indexed 175 million pages with an SEO audit tool. These errors stemmed from not doing SEO the right way and while we have discussed 7 of these errors, here are more things that could hurt your rankings and how you can fix them.

Accessibility and indexation

The accessibility and indexation of your site contribute greatly to how your website pages can be seen on search engines. Some of the categories to consider include:

Canonical Tag: duplicate content makes it difficult for search engines to decide on a page to show users, which could affect the visibility of either page. If you will be implementing a rel=canonical tag, ensure it is done correctly, to avoid losing your website ranking. Situations, where you may implement wrongly, may include:

Incorrectly installing a code, by inserting it in <body>, instead of the <head> section
Implementing a rel=canonical to a 404 page
Launching without checking the code, which triggers search engines to de-index.

Noindex Tag: if you do no longer need a noindex tag on a webpage, ensure you remove it as soon as possible. With the tag still there, search engines will not index the webpage, which could leave you wondering why your SEO isn’t improving. Always keep track of your pages to know when a tag is no longer relevant.

Robots.txt: always check for pages hidden in robots.txt and take them out when necessary, to help improve your SEO rankings. If you have redirects in the webpage hidden in your robots.txt file, the crawler will likely not recognize it.

Nofollow links: nofollow links have no SEO value but you could be penalized by search engines for not using it properly. Many websites easily fall victim of this, as they often have links featured in their web pages that are unrelated to the content of the page. This ends up dropping their SEO rankings.

Links and bad redirects

While links are great to help drive traffic and boost your SEO ranking, they could also ruin your SEO efforts if they aren’t managed well.

Broken links

Broken links on your web pages should be rectified or removed as soon as possible. Reasons for broken links could stem from entering the wrong URL, removal or permanent move of the linked webpage by the destination website, or a software on the user’s end that is blocking access to the destination website. There is a WordPress plugin for WordPress users that can be integrated into the website to get rid of dead links. You can also manually check for broken links by using the broken link checker plugin.

How to disavow negative backlinks

Google has a Disavow Tool that can help protect your site from penalties that may arise from bad linking and also help remove bad links. This tool simply sends a signal to Google to ignore negative backlinks. To disavow negative backlinks, look for the links you want to disavow, create a disavow file and then upload to the Google Disavow Tool. Once this is done, the specified links will no longer be considered by Google

Bad redirects and best redirects – 301 and 302

301 and 302 redirects might look similar to a user but definitely not to search engines. While 301 is a permanent move to a new site, 302 is temporal but a lot of users get to mix both up and use either, without thinking much about the difference. If you use 302 rather than 301, search engines might view it as a temporal move and still continue to index the old URL, which could affect your SEO rankings.

Not maximizing Google Search Console

Google Search Console is packed with lots of benefits that should be maximized in order to have the best SEO experience. Some of the things to pay attention to in Google Search Console include search analytics, links to your site, mobile usability, robots.txt tester, sitemaps, index status, and security issues. Once an identified issue is fixed, your rankings will be improved and your website will gain more traction.

Meta tags

Meta tags are important for SEO and usually one of the first things to learn in SEO training. Your key meta tags, including keywords attribute, title tag, meta description attribute, and meta robots attribute should be taken seriously, as they help search engines understand what a page is about.

Don’t use too long or too short titles and descriptions. The optimal number of words for your title required for the best SEO practice is 10-15 words, which is about 78 characters, following Google’s current meta title guideline.

Your description should be between 110 and 120 characters, for easy optimization for both mobile and desktop. While you ensure your title and description aren’t too long, you should also be careful not to make them too short. Your meta tags should provide enough info about the page to help the search engines understand the content.

Google encourages creating good meta descriptions; ensure there’s a description for every page on your site and they must be different for each page. Duplicate content could mess with your rankings. You should also include clearly tagged facts in the description and use quality descriptions.

Conclusion

Doing SEO wrongly will affect your SEO rankings and following the accurate SEO practices, based on Google standards, will help your website success. These common errors should be avoided at all cost. If you are also caught flouting the SEO rules, you might be penalized by Google which could cause a huge drop in your rankings.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_message message_box_color=”orange” icon_fontawesome=”fa fa-external-link”]This article was originally posted at Search Engine Watch by Guy Sheetrit on December 5, 2018.[/vc_message][/vc_column][/vc_row][/vc_section]

7 things that hurt your SEO rankings and how to fix them

In Marketing, SEO by Jay / December 14, 2018 / No comments

[vc_section][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]The top listing in Google’s organic search results draws 33 percent of traffic while the second spot garners 18 percent, a study by online ad network Chitika confirms.

After that, it’s a fight to see who secures enough traffic, and of course, in this sort of scenario you need all the help you can get.

Being penalized by Google and experiencing a drop in SEO rankings is one of the worst things that can happen to a website. Now, fluctuations are par for the course, especially considering the rapidly evolving Google algorithms.

When your search rankings take a huge tumble, you need to adopt a proactive approach before your site gets lost organic search obscurity. And this “approach” involves fixing the seven cardinal SEO mistakes listed below:

Avoid keyword stuffing

Use the same keywords repeatedly? You might want to stop! Of course, if it is necessary for your content to make sense, then you’ve got no other choice. But if you seek to optimize your copy in this manner, then you’re in for a rude awakening.

Not only does it discourage visitors from reading or interacting with your content but it signals the search engines that you’re attempting to outsmart their algorithms. And that is not something Google takes lightly.

The above comic strip reimagines keyword stuffing as part of a normal conversation. See how many times the man uses “lunch,” “fine,” “talking funny,” and “mean” in the 1^st, 2^nd, 3^rd, and 4^th panels, respectively. If it’s THIS irritating in regular dialog, imagine how your readers would feel reading content like this.

https://c1.staticflickr.com/1/724/21695308292_443d1a2570_b.jpg

Use an online tool like Live Keyword Analysis or Addme.com to calculate the keyword density. Remove excess keywords to keep your density around 1.5 percent. Mention your keywords in the title, the description, your opening paragraph, and once or twice in the body of your content. Make sure it all sounds natural. That should do the trick and help you regain some of your lost SEO rankings.

Check your website speed

Almost half of the online users expect a web page to load within 2 seconds or less, and they abandon your website if it does not load in 3 seconds, revealed a survey by Akamai and Gomez.com. So, ensure quick load times for your website by leveraging browser caching, optimizing images, minifying codes, and activating resource compression.

Achieve all this by using a free tool like PageSpeed Insights from Google to determine the current speed of your website. Also, look at the actionable recommendations offered by the tool to increase your load times.

Source: CWC

Never buy links

Give your website enough time to become successful. Creating good content is hard work but it pays off in the end. Resort to shortcuts and you get penalized.

One of these no-no shortcuts involves buying backlinks, especially from unreliable sources. As soon as Google finds out, they cut your rankings significantly. 22 percent of web admins still buy links without disclosure, according to a survey.

So, the next time you spot an SEO ad promising hundreds of links along with a first page ranking for a ridiculously low price, ignore it. Links from social networking accounts and spammy, untrustworthy sites hurt your website. A few of these companies claim to protect you by creating a “link pyramid” or “link wheel” that point to an intermediary page.

The truth is, these might work for some time, but as Google continues to evolve and deal more strictly with spam content, they will learn about this practice and shut you down.

Become mobile friendly

With Google prioritizing a mobile-first approach, make sure your website is mobile friendly. According to Google, 85 percent of all websites in mobile search results now adhere to the mobile-friendly label. Become a part of the trend and enjoy a smooth flow of traffic.

Otherwise, if your site is not responsive and people are unable to view you on tablets and smartphones, then not only will your rankings suffer, but your customer inquiries and conversions will too. That’s because users will leave your website and visit one that actually fits this requirement.

Use tools like Screenfly by Quicktools to check whether your site is responsive or not. If not, use another tool like Bmobilized to convert your existing pages.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f6/Wikipedia_%22Encyclopedia%22_article_on_a_large_Android_phone%2C_2015-04-16.jpg

Get rid of ads

Recent changes made to AdSense rules by Google indicate that stricter rules are going to be put in place for sites “with more advertising than publisher-provided content.” So, if you’ve been indulging in this practice, get ready to bid your SEO rankings goodbye.

Ads prompt users to leave your website and impacts your experience metrics. Once your user experience metrics become critically low, it is usually a sign to Google that your website holds no value for your visitors. They will demote you over time.

Plus, ads have led to the rise of ad blocking. In fact, a report by Adobe and PageFair concluded that the approximate loss of worldwide Internet revenue because of blocked advertising in 2015 was $21.8 billion. So, unless you want to be penalized without any payoff, all you need to do is get rid of the ads and your site will be fine.

Handle technical issues immediately

Technical problems like network outages, poor hosting, slow connectivity, and server downtime can affect your site rankings.

If Google constantly abandons attempted crawls on your site, in due time, your SEO rankings will go down. Of course, short server outages don’t matter, but if it becomes a regular occurrence, then you need to look for a new host.

Identify the problem first. This might not be easy, but it becomes quite obvious if your site goes down every 10 minutes. Or, use an online tool like Downforeveryoneorjustme to check whether your page is up or down. Determine if the problem lies with your host and not your Internet plan. You will find plenty of decent web hosting options, like Liquidweb.

Maintain the quality of your guest posts

Guest blogging can be a great tool for SEO and lead generation. Unfortunately, as of 2015, only 6 percent of bloggers published original content as guest posts. That’s a dismal number when you consider what an amazing way it is to give your website an edge against the competition.

Use scraping tools like the one from Guestpost.com to conduct automatic scrapes of every website that accepts guest posts related to your keywords. However, when it comes to your own website, make sure you accept only high-quality guest posts.

Feature fresh writers on your site and post original and relevant content that appeals to your audience. Also, make sure you maintain a balance between content produced from the site and content offered to your page in lieu of an author bio and a link.

Source: https://cdn.searchenginejournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/low-quality-guest-post.png

Final words

If you want to survive the virtual world and stay relevant, then you need to focus on raising your SEO rankings. Follow the steps given above to help you fix bad SEO and regain your rankings.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_message message_box_color=”orange” icon_fontawesome=”fa fa-external-link”]This article was originally posted at Search Engine Watch by Guy Sheetrit on November 27, 2018.[/vc_message][/vc_column][/vc_row][/vc_section]

7 Essential SEO Browser Extensions & Plugins

In Marketing, SEO by Jay / December 5, 2018 / No comments

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]The vast majority of people use browsers to access the web.

But most SEO professionals take it a step further and use those same browsers to do a lot more.

In fact, some of the most important tools in my arsenal are my browser and its extensions.

So, let’s dive right in and see what we can do with them. And the best part is, all of them are free.

1. Ghost Browser

Ghost Browser is built on Chrome so everything available to you there is available in Ghost Browser… and more.

The biggest reason I switched to Ghost Browser is for what they call “sessions.”

Essentially a session is a fresh instance of Chrome that operates within new windows or even tab(s).

In the image above, you’ll see there are four different colored tabs, each with a different site up.

Each of these colors represents a session and they’re independent, which is why one of them is not logged in, one can be logged in, and another is logged in from a different location.

You can run multiple tabs for each session.

So, for example, I can be logged into one session as me to manage an AdWords campaign but also logged in through a different account to access the client’s analytics and Search Console (where they aren’t controlled by the same account).

Similarly, each session can be used to log into different social accounts, etc.

Ghost Browser also has Tasks. Essentially, you can save sets of tabs with their login state as a project and not have to log in and out or open all the different tab sets you likely regularly do each time you need to access them.

The free version supports three sessions at a time – so even it is three times better than what you’re likely currently working with.

There is a pro version. I found it worth the investment based on my usage, you may not.

Either way, after using the free version for a bit you’ll wonder how you ever survived without it.

Note: I also discussed Ghost Browser in my article on non-SEO tools for the SEO.

2. Chrome Developer Tools

There is virtually no way I could cover all the features, functions, and uses of Chrome Developer Tools in this article.

The tool is built into Chrome and is accessed via Chrome Menu > More tools > Developer tools.

Easily the most common tasks I use it for is to find code, determine the size of elements, and troubleshoot them.

As illustrated in the image above, the tool allows you to hover over and select an element on a given webpage and it will display its code and (in this case) the computed output characteristics.

You can even adjust the code right in the Developer Tools to see how it would render prior to making the changes to the live site. You can do this on the desktop site or set it to render the page as it would on many popular mobile devices.

This isn’t the most advanced of its functionality, which includes various speed, security, and troubleshooting capabilities ranging from generating waterfalls of resource load times to indicating which resources are slowing down the site load.

The advantage to all this vs. some of the other online tools you might use?

The results are real world.

That is, you’re seeing how your browser on your connection is impacted by the resources being loaded.

Read the tool’s page and explore. There’s a ton in there.

When you know what data you have access to, you’ll know where to look when you need answers to related questions.

3. SEO Quake

SEO Quake is a classic among the extensions and plugins used by SEO pros – and for good reason.

Essentially, SEO Quake gives rapid access to an array of data that we all want.

On any given webpage a simple click to pull in the metrics will list backlinks data, cache dates, indexing information, and more.

With a couple extra clicks you gain access to the internal and external backlinks data, keyword density information (if you’re interested in that), and a ton of information regarding the use of Schema, heading tags, metas and more.

SEO Quake is not a replacement for site audit and analysis tools but gives an excellent quick snapshot of a page’s information.

Perfect when you need just some limited info or are on a phone call and need to pull up some core metrics.

It even ties in with SEMrush to yield some basic traffic stats as well – handy for competitor research, especially when considering new content strategies.

4. User-Agent Switcher

This is extremely helpful when developing new sites – especially when that site is built using less predictable technologies.

Essentially User-Agent Switcher is exactly what it sounds like: an easy to set up plugin that switches the user agent info sent allowing you to view a site as a different browser or bot.

I can’t count the number of times I’ve used it to troubleshoot crawl issues or uncover differences in how Googlebot is viewing a page versus a browser.

Obviously, it can also be helpful when determining how a site will load with different browsers or operating systems as well.

5. Tag Assistant

Google Tag Assistant is an extremely useful tool, especially for those who use Google Tag Manager.

It can also be handy when you simply need to identify issues with analytics or other tracking codes (AdWords, etc.)

The icon for the extension changes color depending on whether there are issues detected and makes note of the issues when clicked.

Search Engine Journal gets a green light, as illustrated above, but warnings and errors get reported when there are duplicate or empty tags or tags not configured properly.

Tag Assistant also reports on duplicate or analytics code issues.

It handily lets you record a session allowing you to navigate paths within your site (or other’s) and then review the recording to find errors and issues.

It’s an invaluable troubleshooting tool across an array of scenarios.

Here’s Google’s video outlining some of its core features:

6. Show Title Tag

By no means a critical plugin but a handy one, Show Title Tag simply displays the page title within the browser.

You can move it to any of the corners of the browser and the red text indicates where it’s likely to be cut off in search results.

It’s helpful when viewing competitors’ sites to quickly seeing how they’re doing their titling beyond the short snippet that would appear in the tab and without viewing the source or opening Developer Tools.

This plugin is also helpful when you’re navigating your own site, highlighting instances where your title might be too long.

7. Ghost Proxy Control

The Ghost Proxy Control extension comes pre-loaded with Ghost Browser.

Basically, you can add your proxies in and access them easily via the extension.

One of the big perks to the combo of Ghost Browser and Ghost Proxy Control is that you can load different proxies into different session and basically have a tab for each location.

I’ve found this incredibly useful for checking SERP results from various location and having the ability to view them at the same time, side by side.

It’s specifically interesting for local SEO.

The ability to check not just rankings from different locations but compare easily how the layout might differ.

The control allows for a proxy to be assigned to a single tab or an entire session (indicated by multiple tabs of the same color).

While the extension is free, proxies generally are not.

Although free proxies are available, I pay about $20 per month for 10 dedicated proxies.

Conclusion

There are definitely more browser extensions and plugins than what I’ve included on this list of essentials.

However, most of those require subscriptions, are too similar to one of those noted above, or don’t apply to the duties of virtually every SEO pro I know.

For example, Moz and Buzzsumo have great extensions. But they can be quite frustrating unless you have a paid subscription.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_section][vc_row][vc_column][vc_message message_box_color=”orange” icon_fontawesome=”fa fa-external-link”]This article was originally posted at Search Engine Journal by Dave Davies on October 14, 2018.[/vc_message][/vc_column][/vc_row][/vc_section]