Get ready for our FREE training: SEO for beginners

Want to know what makes your site rank higher in Google? Understand how Google works? This is your chance to learn it… for free! For the first time ever, we’re launching a completely free course: the SEO for beginners training. In this course, you’ll take your first steps in the world of Search Engine Optimization, also known as SEO. The course will be launched on May 7 and is easy, fun and free! So what’s stopping you?

Learn what to do to make your web traffic grow. Create a My Yoast user account now and we’ll give you access to the course on May 7!

Why take this course? You want to rank higher

Whatever your expertise is, whether you’re a hairdresser, a consultant or a plumber, you probably have a website. And you want it to rank on top in Google. But what if the competition is outranking you? You can beat them through search engine optimization or SEO. SEO is the art of creating a website that search engines and users like. This can give you a head start on the competition that’s still in the dark about SEO. In the SEO for beginners training, you’ll learn why Google likes certain websites more than others. So you’ll know what to improve on your own website.

It’s easy

As this course is for beginners, it doesn’t matter if you know nothing about SEO or not so much about websites yet! We won’t use too many technical terms. We want everyone with a website to be able to understand what makes one website better than the other.

It’s fun and for free!

And on top of that, it’s free and much fun to do! You’ll get access to over two hours of instructional videos, lots of reading material, and challenging quizzes to train what you’ve learned. 

What will you learn?

In this training, you’ll learn which factors make a website rank high in Google’s search results. It will give you a fundamental understanding of how search engines work. You’ll learn about keywords, why they are important and how to choose them well. Also, you’ll get insight in writing SEO-friendly posts and how structuring your site well can improve your rankings.

Why is this course free?

At Yoast we believe in fair changes in the search results for everyone. We think SEO isn’t something only the big companies should be able to do. Small businesses or non-profit organizations, or great ideas in general should get a platform and should be easy to find on the internet as well. That’s why our Yoast SEO plugin is for free, you get a free eBook when you sign up for our newsletter and next week we’ll even add a free course to the list!

How do you get access?

As of May 7 you’ll be able to enroll in this course. It’s completely free. If you don’t want to miss it you can already create a My Yoast account. The course will be automatically added to your account on May 7. We’ll send you an email when it’s available!

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GDPR: What You Need to Know

On May 25, 2018, the General Data Protection Regulation will now take effect, and will look to change the way people use and protect data for the foreseeable future. This regulation is seen as one of the biggest steps towards data control and protection on the internet, which has been one of the biggest issues on various websites that require user information and private data.

The passing of the GDPR is seen as a timely event, especially with Cambridge Analytica controversy, which affected millions of Facebook users and saw important data being misused. This case also sparked the need for stricter data regulations, and the GDPR aims to become the starting point for future data regulation laws worldwide.

The Beginning

The first proposal for GDPR was released in 2012. This was created as a response to the need to improve the existing data regulation law, which was the 1995 European Data Protection Directive. The 1995 law is one of the earliest data protection policies that were enacted into law. Despite the being put into law, the need for a more improved and comprehensive law was apparent, as the rapid growth of technology-enabled websites to transfer data at a faster rate, especially data transferred through social media platforms.

Before GDPR was launched, there have been numerous data reform policies that have been enacted by the EU, which eventually led to the European Parliament supporting the current GDPR. The process of approval took 2-3 years, with numerous improvements and reforms being sought before settling with the current set of regulations.

Data Mismanagement

One of the goals of the GDPR was to protect user data that is stored in various social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. Social media platforms are some of the most popular sites on the internet, with billions of registered accounts worldwide. This makes these platforms some of the biggest archives of personal and private information in the internet.

While this might be of little concern to a good number of regular users, this amount of information has the potential to get to the wrong hands, and be manipulated to attack various people, groups, or even major companies and brands. This concern has become more alarming when numerous cases of leaked personal information from personal social media accounts have been released to the public over the past few years.

Leaked personal information includes personal videos and pictures, message threads, , and contact numbers. This has sparked major concern and asked the question on who can view these types of data, and how are they being used. With the Cambridge Analytica case putting this concern to court, the worldwide awareness and need for data protection and regulation have been put into perspective.

Other than social media, various companies and brands tend to request data from their registered users, as there have been issues with regards to data safety. One major data breach incident during the past few years occurred when numerous user accounts of Sony PlayStation Network users have been hacked, causing servers to temporarily shut down for the issue to be resolved.

These types of incidents can affect the customer’s trust in a company, as they will already assume that their data may not be safe in their hands. With the GDPR in place, users will now be able to know important details on what happens to the data that they share on a website, which ensures trust between them and the websites they visit.

The Purpose

Once the regulation has been put into effect, internet users will now have more freedom and control over their own private data hours for transparency purposes. Permission to access personal has been optimized as well, with more refined guidelines that require clear consent to whatever data is being used.

Users can also request copies of their own data from these companies and websites, which clearly informs them of how the data is being used. This also means that privacy and user-agreement policies will now be clearer and more detailed to provide more specific details and guidelines. This is done to ensure that users will no longer agree encounter vague and misguiding rules and regulations with regards to the use of their own personal data.

Major companies and websites will also follow new rules and regulations, which include deleting data that would no longer be in use and ensure that data is protected from malicious software and hackers. As for which websites will be affected by these regulations, it was made clear that websites from the EU, and websites that offer services to EU countries are affected by the changes. To an extent, this applies to a large majority of websites across the internet, since a good number of business and companies are going international.

Will This Affect SEO?

On the SEO side of things, the biggest impact that these regulations will have will be on website subscription and registration services, as you would have to comply with data protection policies and data consent, which will become more prominent in the next few months.

On the ranking side of things, the user experience will be impacted due to the data permissions and prompts that must be present to inform the users. Analytics is another area that will change, as users must be informed of how their data would be used in website analytics. There has been no clear indication that the GDPR will affect ranking factors. However, with Google rolling out numerous updates over the past few months, changes may be in order.

Key Takeaway

The GDPR is a huge step towards data protection across the world. With information moving at a very fast pace, this comes in as very timely, and would really ensure that data is used properly and ethically.

If you have questions and inquiries about GDPR and SEO in general, leave a comment below and let’s talk.

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Best Top Sample Basic Local SEO Presentation 2018

The people at The BDX Summit were nice enough to invite me to Austin to speak to a group of homebuilders about SEO. While I gave my presentation, Graphic Recorder & Illustrator Katherine Torrini drew this poster. It was an amazing thing to see. It reminded me of when my mother would sometimes take me to children’s concerts at Lincoln Center and a woman would stand in front of the orchestra drawing pictures of what the music represented.

If you want to see more of Katherine’s work check out the gallery on her site, Creative Catalyst. I particularly dig Coke CMO Summit Be the Brand.

“If Barbie can change…YOU can change.”

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Nest Video Door Bell VS Ring Video Doorbell

 Nest Video Door Bell VS Ring   https://ift.tt/2KjUuEN  Whenever a new model comes into the market, it is expected to have an edge over the existing range of products in one or many aspects. Similarly, the video doorbell reviews brings in many of the features in its functionality, security, compatibility, and scalability factors. In this

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Duplicate content: causes and solutions

Search engines like Google have a problem. It’s called ‘duplicate content.’ Duplicate content means that similar content is being shown on multiple locations (URLs) on the web. As a result, search engines don’t know which URL to show in the search results. This can hurt the ranking of a webpage. Especially when people start linking to all the different versions of the content, the problem becomes bigger. This article will help you to understand the various causes of duplicate content, and to find the solution for each of them.

What is duplicate content?

You can compare duplicate content to being on a crossroad. Road signs are pointing in two different directions for the same final destination: which road should you take? And now, to make it ‘worse’ the final destination is different too, but only ever so slightly. As a reader, you don’t mind: you get the content you came for. A search engine has to pick which one to show in the search results. It, of course, doesn’t want to show the same content twice.

Let’s say your article about ‘keyword x’ appears on https://ift.tt/2HzipT2 and the same content also appears on https://ift.tt/2r7vSWS. This situation is not fictitious: it happens in lots of modern Content Management Systems. Your article has been picked up by several bloggers. Some of them link to the first URL; others link to the second URL. This is when the search engine’s problem shows its real nature: it’s your problem. The duplicate content is your problem because those links are both promoting different URLs. If they were all linking to the same URL, your chance of ranking for ‘keyword x’ would be higher.

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Info

Table of contents

• 1 Causes for duplicate content
  • 1.1 Misunderstanding the concept of a URL
  • 1.2 Session IDs
  • 1.3 URL parameters used for tracking and sorting
  • 1.4 Scrapers & content syndication
  • 1.5 Order of parameters
  • 1.6 Comment pagination
  • 1.7 Printer friendly pages
  • 1.8 WWW vs. non-WWW
• 2 Conceptual solution: a 'canonical' URL
• 3 Identifying duplicate contents issues
  • 3.1 Google Search Console
  • 3.2 Searching for titles or snippets
• 4 Practical solutions for duplicate content
  • 4.1 Avoiding duplicate content
  • 4.2 301 Redirecting duplicate content
  • 4.3 Using links
  • 4.4 Linking back to the original content
• 5 Conclusion: duplicate content is fixable, and should be fixed

1 Causes for duplicate content

There are dozens of reasons that cause duplicate content. Most of them are technical: it’s not very often that a human decides to put the same content in two different places without distinguishing the source: it feels unnatural to most of us. The technical reasons are plentiful though. It happens mostly because developers don’t think as a browser or a user, let alone a search engine spider, they think as a developer. That aforementioned article, that appears on https://ift.tt/2HzipT2 and http://www.example.com/article-category/keyword-x/? If you ask the developer, he’ll say it only exists once.

1.1 Misunderstanding the concept of a URL

Has that developer gone mad? No, he’s just speaking a different language. You see a database system probably powers the whole website. In that database, there’s only one article, the website’s software just allows for that same article in the database to be retrieved through several URLs. That’s because, in the eyes of the developer, the unique identifier for that article is the ID that article has in the database, not the URL. For the search engine though, the URL is the unique identifier to a piece of content. If you explain that to a developer, he’ll start getting the problem. And after reading this article, you’ll even be able to provide him with a solution right away.

1.2 Session IDs

You often want to keep track of your visitors and make it possible, for instance, to store items they want to buy in a shopping cart. To do that, you need to give them a ‘session.’ A session is a brief history of what the visitor did on your site and can contain things like the items in their shopping cart. To maintain that session as a visitor clicks from one page to another, the unique identifier for that session, the so-called Session ID, needs to be stored somewhere. The most common solution is to do that with cookies. However, search engines usually don’t store cookies.

At that point, some systems fall back to using Session IDs in the URL. This means that every internal link on the website gets that Session ID appended to the URL, and because that Session ID is unique to that session, it creates a new URL, and thus duplicate content.

1.3 URL parameters used for tracking and sorting

Another cause for duplicate content is the use of URL parameters that do not change the content of a page, for instance in tracking links. You see, https://ift.tt/2HzipT2 and https://ift.tt/1CRUpLZ are not the same URL for a search engine. The latter might allow you to track what source people came from, but it might also make it harder for you to rank well. A very unwanted side effect!

This doesn’t just go for tracking parameters, of course. It goes for every parameter you can add to a URL that doesn’t change the vital piece of content, whether that parameter is for ‘changing the sorting on a set of products’ or for ‘showing another sidebar’: they all cause duplicate content.

1.4 Scrapers & content syndication

Most of the causes for duplicate content are all your own or at the very least your website’s ‘fault.’ Sometimes, however, other websites use your content, with or without your consent. They do not always link to your original article, and thus the search engine doesn’t ‘get’ it and has to deal with yet another version of the same article. The more popular your site becomes, the more scrapers you’ll often have, making this issue bigger and bigger.

1.5 Order of parameters

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InfoAnother common cause is that a CMS doesn’t use nice and clean URLs, but rather URLs like /?id=1&cat=2, where ID refers to the article and cat refers to the category. The URL /?cat=2&id=1 will render the same results in most website systems, but they’re completely different for a search engine. 1.6 Comment pagination

In my beloved WordPress, but also in some other systems, there is an option to paginate your comments. This leads to the content being duplicated across the article URL, and the article URL + /comment-page-1/, /comment-page-2/ etc.

1.7 Printer friendly pages

If your content management system creates printer friendly pages and you link to those from your article pages, in most cases Google will find those, unless you specifically block them. Now, which version should Google show? The one laden with ads and peripheral content,  or the one with just your article?

1.8 WWW vs. non-WWW

One of the oldest in the book, but sometimes search engines still get it wrong: WWW vs. non-WWW duplicate content, when both versions of your site are accessible. A less common situation but one I’ve seen as well: HTTP vs. HTTPS duplicate content, where the same content is served out over both.

2 Conceptual solution: a ‘canonical’ URL

As determined above, the fact that several URLs lead to the same content is a problem, but it can be solved. A human working at a publication will normally be able to tell you quite easily what the ‘correct’ URL for a certain article should be. The funny thing is, though, sometimes when you ask three people in the same company, they’ll give three different answers…

That’s a problem that needs solving in those cases because, in the end, there can be only one (URL). That ‘correct’ URL for a piece of content has been dubbed the Canonical URL by the search engines.

Ironic side note

Canonical is a term stemming from the Roman Catholic tradition, where a list of sacred books was created and accepted as genuine. They were dubbed the canonical Gospels of the New Testament. The irony is: it took the Roman Catholic church about 300 years and numerous fights to come up with that canonical list, and they eventually chose four versions of the same story…

3 Identifying duplicate contents issues

You might not know whether you have a duplicate content issue on your site or with your content. Let me give you some methods of finding out whether you do.

3.1 Google Search Console

Google Search Console is a great tool for identifying duplicate content. If you go into the Search Console for your site, check under Search Appearance » HTML Improvements, and you’ll see this:

If pages have duplicate titles or duplicate descriptions, that’s almost never a good thing. Clicking on it will reveal the URLs that have duplicate titles or descriptions and will help you identify the problem. The issue is that if you have an article like the one about keyword X, and it shows up in two categories, the titles might be different. They might, for instance, be ‘Keyword X – Category X – Example Site’ and ‘Keyword X – Category Y – Example Site’. Google won’t pick those up as duplicate titles, but you can find them by searching.

3.2 Searching for titles or snippets

There are several search operators that are very helpful for cases like these. If you’d want to find all the URLs on your site that contain your keyword X article, you’d type the following search phrase into Google:

site:example.com intitle:"Keyword X"

Google will then show you all pages on example.com that contain that keyword. The more specific you make that intitle part, the easier it is to weed out duplicate content. You can use the same method to identify duplicate content across the web. Let’s say the full title of your article was ‘Keyword X – why it is awesome’, you’d search for:

intitle:"Keyword X - why it is awesome"

And Google would give you all sites that match that title. Sometimes it’s worth even searching for one or two complete sentences from your article, as some scrapers might change the title. In some cases, when you do a search like that, Google might show a notice like this on the last page of results:

This is a sign that Google is already ‘de-duping’ the results. It’s still not good, so it’s worth clicking the link and looking at all the other results to see whether you can fix some of those.

4 Practical solutions for duplicate content

Once you’ve decided which URL is the canonical URL for your piece of content, you have to start a process of canonicalization (yeah I know, try to say that three times out loud fast). This means we have to let the search engine know about the canonical version of a page and let it find it ASAP. There are four methods of solving the problem, in order of preference:

1. Not creating duplicate content
2. Redirecting duplicate content to the canonical URL
3. Adding a canonical link element to the duplicate page
4. Adding an HTML link from the duplicate page to the canonical page

4.1 Avoiding duplicate content

Some of the above causes for duplicate content have very simple fixes to them:

• Session ID’s in your URLs?
  These can often just be disabled in your system’s settings.
• Have duplicate printer friendly pages?
  These are completely unnecessary: you should just use a print style sheet.
• Using comment pagination in WordPress?
  You should just disable this feature  (under settings » discussion) on 99% of sites.
• Parameters in a different order?
  Tell your programmer to build a script to always order parameters in the same order (this is often referred to as a so-called URL factory).
• Tracking links issues?
  In most cases, you can use hash tag based campaign tracking instead of parameter-based campaign tracking.
• WWW vs. non-WWW issues?
  Pick one and stick with it by redirecting the one to the other. You can also set a preference in Google Webmaster Tools, but you’ll have to claim both versions of the domain name.

If you can’t fix your problem that easily, it might still be worth it to put in the effort. The goal would be to prevent the duplicate content from appearing altogether. It’s by far the best solution to the problem.

4.2 301 Redirecting duplicate content

In some cases, it’s impossible to entirely prevent the system you’re using from creating wrong URLs for content, but sometimes it is possible to redirect them. If this isn’t logical to you (which I can understand), do keep it in mind while talking to your developers. If you do get rid of some of the duplicate content issues, make sure that you redirect all the old duplicate content URLs to the proper canonical URLs. 

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Info 4.3 Using rel=”canonical” links

Sometimes you don’t want to or can’t get rid of a duplicate version of an article, even when you do know that it’s the wrong URL. For that particular issue, the search engines have introduced the canonical link element. It’s placed in the section of your site, and it looks like this:

<link rel="canonical" href="http://example.com/wordpress/seo-plugin/">

In the href section of the canonical link, you place the correct canonical URL for your article. When a search engine that supports canonical finds this link element, it performs what is a soft 301 redirect. It transfers most of the link value gathered by that page to your canonical page.

This process is a bit slower than the 301 redirect though, so if you can do a 301 redirect that would be preferable, as mentioned by Google’s John Mueller.

Read more: ‘ rel=canonical • What it is and how (not) to use it ’ »

4.4 Linking back to the original content

If you can’t do any of the above, possibly because you don’t control thesection of the site your content appears on, adding a link back to the original article on top of or below the article is always a good idea. This might be something you want to do in your RSS feed: add a link back to the article in it. Some scrapers will filter that link out, but some others might leave it in. If Google encounters several links pointing to your article, it will figure out soon enough that that’s the actual canonical version of the article.

5 Conclusion: duplicate content is fixable, and should be fixed

Duplicate content happens everywhere. I have yet to encounter a site of more than 1,000 pages that hasn’t got at least a tiny duplicate content problem. It’s something you need to keep an eye on at all times. It is fixable though, and the rewards can be plentiful. Your quality content might soar in the rankings by just getting rid of duplicate content on your site!

Keep reading: ‘ Ask Yoast: webshops and duplicate content’ »

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Content is king – 20% off our SEO copywriting training

Today is King’s Day! At least, it’s King’s Day in the Netherlands. April 27 marks the 51st birthday of our King Willem Alexander and is a national holiday for all Dutch people. This year, we wanted to share our celebrations with all of you by giving you 20% off on our SEO copywriting course! Although Willem Alexander is king of the Netherlands, content remains king of SEO. In this post, I’ll explain why content is so very important for SEO, I’ll share the three most important aspects of content SEO and how you can benefit from that 20% discount.

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Start ruling your rankings and grab this 20% discount now:

Get The Yoast SEO Copywriting Training Now$199 $159.20 (ex VAT) Only today - April 27!

Why is content king?

Content SEO is crucial because search engines read your website. The words you use on your site determine whether or not your site will rank on their results pages. Google’s algorithm decides the ranking of your site largely based on the content you publish. Of course, your website should also be well-designed, have a great user interface, and all the technical stuff should be covered. But without high-quality content, your site does not stand a chance in the search engines. Google just wants to give the audience a result that fits the search query. This means you need to be writing awesome and engaging content that answer the needs of your audience.

So how do you write awesome content?

Content SEO includes everything related to writing and structuring content on your website. There are three major elements you need to consider to produce content that will make your website rank well: keyword strategy, site structure and copywriting.

Keyword research

Proper keyword research will make clear which search terms your audience uses. This is crucial. Optimizing content for words that people do not use doesn’t make any sense. Doing proper keyword research makes sure that you use the same words as your target audience.

Site structure

The way your site is structured gives Google important clues about where to find the most important content. Your site’s structure determines whether a search engine can understand what your site is about and which pages it will rank highest.

Copywriting

Finally, you just need to write compelling copy. Texts that are original and readable. Stuff people like to read. And you should optimize those texts for SEO.

20% discount on the online SEO copywriting training

The very best way to get started with content SEO is by doing our SEO copywriting training. Our online courses consist of lots of videos and reading material. And, we have lots of challenging questions to test whether you understood the material. This course also has 2 assignments which will be corrected by an SEO professional at Yoast. You’ll be asked to do your own keyword research and to write a blog post. You’ll receive feedback on both of your assignments. Our SEO copywriting course will help you become King (or Queen) of SEO! Good Luck!

Get The Yoast SEO Copywriting Training Now$199 $159.20 (ex VAT) Only today - April 27!

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Customers Don’t Want Content – They Want a Better Path

I’m in the business of helping companies use tech to drive better customer interactions. I help companies earn more customers. The most common way people employ me is to help them build content marketing projects, expand their existing ones, or in general, turn their marketing, sales, and communications efforts into something more effective.

Well guess what?

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Optimize Your Instagram Marketing with These Strategies

Despite being one of the “younger” social media sites, Instagram has become one of the most popular platforms. With millions of active users, among them some of the most popular brands and personalities, it has become a viable marketing tool that can become viral with the right strategy.

After being integrated into Facebook, Instagram has gotten much bigger, which made a lot of big brands to take notice of its potential to capture the audience’s interest. The impact and importance of Instagram as a marketing tool have been well-stated, and there are a good number of ways you can make it work with your brand. Here are some of the most effective strategies you can use to optimize your brand’s Instagram account.

Take Advantage of Instagram Stories

A feature that allows users to post photos and short videos that last over a 24-hour period, Instagram Stories has now become the most used feature in the platform. This helps keep users updated on current events and happenings of their fellow users. For digital marketers, this is a powerful tool that can be used to help promote their brand using the platform.

The current edition of Instagram stories has added features like polls, live video, GIFs, a “swipe up” feature, and more filter options that allow for more creativity. Numerous brands have taken notice of this wonderful feature and have used it to promote things such as upcoming and current events, new products, or important announcements.

There are many examples of brands using stories as a part of their digital marketing strategies, such as Papa John’s and PlayStation.

As you can see from the two examples, they used their Instagram stories for announcements such as discount codes and video game releases. One of the best things about using Instagram Stories is the fact that these posts expire after 24 hours, which means that there is less clutter and utilize regular posts on different matters.

Another great thing about Instagram Stories is the ability for users to send in their messages, and the option to swipe up to access certain pages. The convenience of sending in messages directly allows your brand to be able to respond to various inquiries as soon as soon as your story has been posted. The “Swipe Up” option allows users to visit different web pages, which is a great way to increase traffic to your main website.

Overall, using Instagram Stories is an effective way of marketing your brand online, and increase audience engagement and traffic.

Instagram Live Video

The number of live video streaming platforms have increased over the years, with the likes of Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter all offering live video services to their users. Not to be outdone, Instagram has Live on Instagram, which allows you to stream videos live from your account.

Starting a live video is as simple as creating a story, all you need is a stable network connection, and then you’re set after a push of a button.

Upon starting, Instagram would notify the followers of your account, which helps increase the number of viewers who can interact with you, which can also help in spreading the word to their fellow users. Live video can be used in different events like press conferences, announcements, and even concerts. While it may be simple in design, Live on Instagram allows you to start live videos in an instant.

Optimize Hashtags

Like Twitter, Instagram makes use of hashtags, which is a way for users to search for content that they are interested in. When it comes to the number of hashtags in a single post, it is best to choose the best ones that would make your content easier to look for.

Ensure that the hashtags are related to the content that you would be posting, as you would be able to attain your ideal target market, which generates more interactions and traffic. Just remember, the more focused your hashtags are, the better.

Optimize Your Bio

First impressions always count and having a good one always bodes well for a lot of brands and people. This is why it is important to make sure that your Instagram bio represents what your brand is. You can put a short description of your products and services which helps your audience know what you offer.

Some accounts change their description for various announcements, which is one way users are informed or access more content beyond the accounts itself. Whichever method you choose, it is best to keep it concise yet useful.

Local Optimization

Location is another way for users to discover more content on Instagram, and it is best to take advantage of it. Applying location tags would help inform your users where your brand’s store or office is located, or where an important event is. There are brands on Instagram that offer quality products and services but do not get high conversions simply because users do not know where their establishment is located.

Similar to local SEO practices, it is best to input the location of your brand to increase searchability. It is also worth noting that clicking on the location not only allows users to view content from that location but also links you to Google Maps, which allows you to know the directions going there. For establishments, this is a helpful and handy feature that would help more people go to you.

Key Takeaway

Instagram has become a powerful social media platform that can be used for digital marketing and socialpan> media management. With the right strategy, you would be able to create viral and high traffic content that would bring in more conversions and interactions. With these strategies, you would be able to make full use of your Instagram account and create content that can get viral.

If you have questions and inquiries about Social Media Management or SEO, leave a comment below and let’s talk.

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9 Reasons Why You’re Losing Freelance Writing Gigs

What are the most frustrating words you can hear (or read) after spending hours writing a proposal?
“You’re too expensive. We’re going to go in another direction.”
ARGH!
But, here’s the thing…
We’ve all gone beyond our budget and spent more than we’ve expected.
We buy a slightly more expensive car because it has better safety ratings.
We buy organic produce

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PageRank Updated

A popular search engine developed by Google Inc. of Mountain View, Calif. uses PageRank.RTM. as a page-quality metric for efficiently guiding the processes of web crawling, index selection, and web page ranking. Generally, the PageRank technique computes and assigns a PageRank score to each web page it encounters on the web, wherein the PageRank score serves as a measure of the relative quality of a given web page with respect to other web pages. PageRank generally ensures that important and high-quality web pages receive high PageRank scores, which enables a search engine to efficiently rank the search results based on their associated PageRank scores.

~ Producing a ranking for pages using distances in a web-link graph

A continuation patent of an updated PageRank was granted today. The original patent was filed in 2006, and reminded me a lot of Yahoo’s Trustrank (which is cited by the patent’s applicants as one of a large number of documents that this new version of the patent is based upon.)

I first wrote about this patent in the post titled, Recalculating PageRank. It was originally filed in 2006, and the first claim in the patent read like this (note the mention of “Seed Pages”):

What is claimed is:

1. A method for producing a ranking for pages on the web, comprising: receiving a plurality of web pages, wherein the plurality of web pages are inter-linked with page links; receiving n seed pages, each seed page including at least one outgoing link to a respective web page in the plurality of web pages, wherein n is an integer greater than one; assigning, by one or more computers, a respective length to each page link and each outgoing link; identifying, by the one or more computers and from among the n seed pages, a kth-closest seed page to a first web page in the plurality of web pages according to the lengths of the links, wherein k is greater than one and less than n; determining a ranking score for the first web page from a shortest distance from the kth-closest seed page to the first web page; and producing a ranking for the first web page from the ranking score.

The first claim in the newer version of this continuation patent is:

What is claimed is:

1. A method, comprising: obtaining data identifying a set of pages to be ranked, wherein each page in the set of pages is connected to at least one other page in the set of pages by a page link; obtaining data identifying a set of n seed pages that each include at least one outgoing link to a page in the set of pages, wherein n is greater than one; accessing respective lengths assigned to one or more of the page links and one or more of the outgoing links; and for each page in the set of pages: identifying a kth-closest seed page to the page according to the respective lengths, wherein k is greater than one and less than n, determining a shortest distance from the kth-closest seed page to the page; and determining a ranking score for the page based on the determined shortest distance, wherein the ranking score is a measure of a relative quality of the page relative to other pages in the set of pages.

Producing a ranking for pages using distances in a web-link graph
Inventors: Nissan Hajaj
Assignee: Google LLC
US Patent: 9,953,049
Granted: April 24, 2018
Filed: October 19, 2015

Abstract

One embodiment of the present invention provides a system that produces a ranking for web pages. During operation, the system receives a set of pages to be ranked, wherein the set of pages are interconnected with links. The system also receives a set of seed pages which include outgoing links to the set of pages. The system then assigns lengths to the links based on properties of the links and properties of the pages attached to the links. The system next computes shortest distances from the set of seed pages to each page in the set of pages based on the lengths of the links between the pages. Next, the system determines a ranking score for each page in the set of pages based on the computed shortest distances. The system then produces a ranking for the set of pages based on the ranking scores for the set of pages.

Under this newer version of PageRank, we see how it might avoid manipulation by building trust into a link graph like this:

One possible variation of PageRank that would reduce the effect of these techniques is to select a few “trusted” pages (also referred to as the seed pages) and discovers other pages which are likely to be good by following the links from the trusted pages. For example, the technique can use a set of high quality seed pages (s.sub.1, s.sub.2, . . . , s.sub.n), and for each seed page i=1, 2, . . . , n, the system can iteratively compute the PageRank scores for the set of the web pages P using the formulae:

.A-inverted..noteq..di-elect cons..function..times..fwdarw..times..function..times..function..fwdarw. ##EQU00002## where R.sub.i(s.sub.i)=1, and w(q.fwdarw.p) is an optional weight given to the link q.fwdarw.p based on its properties (with the default weight of 1).

Generally, it is desirable to use a large number of seed pages to accommodate the different languages and a wide range of fields which are contained in the fast growing web contents. Unfortunately, this variation of PageRank requires solving the entire system for each seed separately. Hence, as the number of seed pages increases, the complexity of computation increases linearly, thereby limiting the number of seeds that can be practically used.

Hence, what is needed is a method and an apparatus for producing a ranking for pages on the web using a large number of diversified seed pages without the problems of the above-described techniques.

The summary of the patent describes it like this:

One embodiment of the present invention provides a system that ranks pages on the web based on distances between the pages, wherein the pages are interconnected with links to form a link-graph. More specifically, a set of high-quality seed pages are chosen as references for ranking the pages in the link-graph, and shortest distances from the set of seed pages to each given page in the link-graph are computed. Each of the shortest distances is obtained by summing lengths of a set of links which follows the shortest path from a seed page to a given page, wherein the length of a given link is assigned to the link based on properties of the link and properties of the page attached to the link. The computed shortest distances are then used to determine the ranking scores of the associated pages.

The patent discusses the importance of a diversity of topics covered by seed sites, and the value of a large set of seed sites. It also gives us a summary of crawling and ranking and searching like this:

Crawling Ranking and Searching Processes

FIG. 3 illustrates the crawling, ranking and searching processes in accordance with an embodiment of the present invention. During the crawling process, web crawler 304 crawls or otherwise searches through websites on web 302 to select web pages to be stored in indexed form in data center 308. In particular, web crawler 304 can prioritize the crawling process by using the page rank scores. The selected web pages are then compressed, indexed and ranked in 305 (using the ranking process described above) before being stored in data center 308.

During a subsequent search process, a search engine 312 receives a query 313 from a user 311 through a web browser 314. This query 313 specifies a number of terms to be searched for in the set of documents. In response to query 313, search engine 312 uses the ranking information to identify highly-ranked documents that satisfy the query. Search engine 312 then returns a response 315 through web browser 314, wherein the response 315 contains matching pages along with ranking information and references to the identified documents.

I’m thinking about looking up the many articles cited in the patent, and providing links to them, because they seem to be tremendous resources about the Web. I’ll likely publish those soon.

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Personal configuration review: Train your skills and get our feedback

Today we’re launching the Personal configuration review: an extra personal assignment you can add to the Yoast SEO for WordPress plugin training. You can now test if you’ve understood the subject matter of our training well and do an extra assignment – on your own site! When you’ve configured Yoast SEO on your site, we’ll check it for you and give you personal feedback. This assignment is only available in combination with our plugin training. Buy them together now for only $99!

Get The Yoast SEO Training + Configuration Review Now$99 (ex VAT) for training and assignment

What is it?

The Personal configuration review is an extension of the existing Yoast SEO for WordPress plugin training. In this new assignment we’ll take you by the hand and guide you through the settings of Yoast SEO, like the Search appearance section, the integration with Google Search Console and the Social tab. For instance, we’ll help you decide which content you should have indexed and which not. Get ready to apply the skills you’ve learned in the training!

You can only do this assignment when you buy the Yoast SEO for WordPress training. We recommend doing that because it will give you the opportunity to test your comprehension of the Yoast SEO plugin. And even better, you’ll know directly if Yoast SEO is configured optimally for your type of website.

How does it work?

Adding this extra assignment to your course is easy! Just follow these steps:

1. Buy the course and the assignment together (the assignment is only available as an extension of the training).
2. After you’ve finished the course you’ll get access to the Personal configuration review assignment.
3. Get started and configure Yoast SEO on your own website with help of the assignment.
4. Once you’re done inform us that you’ve finished it and grant us access to the backend of your WordPress Install via a guest account.
5. We’ll check your configuration and we’ll provide personal feedback by email.
6. If you’ve set it up well, you’ll get an additional certificate and badge.

Why this assignment?

At Yoast we want to deliver the best online SEO courses. We believe good training requires some personal attention. That’s why we’ll top up more courses with assignments that will be checked by members of our team in the future. Because nothing is more valuable than true customized feedback by SEO professionals!

Get The Yoast SEO Training + Configuration Review Now$99 (ex VAT) for training and assignment

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We researched longer meta descriptions: here are our findings

A few months ago Google changed the length of the meta description from 160 to 320 characters. This caused quite a buzz in the SEO community and a lot of people wanted to know whether they should change their own crafted meta descriptions. In the meantime, we already changed the length of the meta description in the Yoast SEO plugin, but we also wanted to investigate this change more thoroughly. So, we started our own research! It appears that Google very often creates a meta description by itself, based on the first paragraph of your article.

What did we do?

For this research project, we picked 100 of the most visited pages on our site. Before we made any changes we did a baseline measurement, by gathering data from our Google Search Console account. We wanted to know how high these pages ranked before we changed the meta description with Yoast SEO, in order to compare it to the rankings afterwards.

We divided the 100 pages into 4 groups and created four types of meta descriptions. In the first group, we wrote a long meta description to match the new length set by Google and we mentioned the focus keyword of the post only once in the description. In the second group, we wrote a long meta description as well, but used the focus keyword more frequently. For the third group, we didn’t change the meta description and left it the way it was. So this group had the old meta description length. In the last group, we deleted the meta description, so that we could see if Google would replace it with a long meta description it selected itself.

What did we find?

First of all, we analyzed new Google Search Console data after two weeks and compared it to the baseline measurements. The first thing we noticed was that Google created a lot of the meta descriptions itself, regardless of the ones we wrote and of the group a specific page was in. This means that we didn’t see a clear difference between the various groups we had created. So, in other words, it didn’t matter if we’d created long or short meta descriptions and whether the description was written with a high or low keyword density.

Secondly, we looked at which part of the copy Google used to extract a meta description. In two-third of the cases, Google used sentences from the first paragraph. It’s not a guarantee, whatsoever, but it is a clear indication that writing an introduction for your article should be done with the meta description in mind.

Learn how to write awesome and SEO friendly articles in our SEO Copywriting training »

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Info Some conclusive thoughts

Let me start off by saying that we conducted this research on only one site. A site that has quite a few high rankings and high domain authority, as well as a lot of extensive articles. This makes it a good example site to test on, but the results might differ from other sites. In the future we’d like to do more research on various types of sites.

One of the questions that we can’t answer is whether Google creates a lot of meta descriptions itself, based on our content, because we simply write decent content that matches the search intent. We’re curious what happens if we would test this on site that has less content, for example, a photographer’s website. Will it become more important to craft your own meta descriptions, if Google has little options to pick a description itself? We’ll let you know if we know more about that!

So… should you change them all?

We won’t advise you to go and change all your existing meta descriptions. What would make sense, for most sites at least, is to take a look at your best ranking articles and make those descriptions longer and meaningful. In all other cases we’d recommend to focus on the content of your article. State clearly what the article is about in your first paragraphs, so if Google picks a description itself it’s likely to be a good one!

Read more: ‘Content SEO: the ultimate guide’ »

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Google, SEO’s and ‘Quality Content’

Whoa, Dan! How did you get a time machine back to the late 90’s to show us this rockin’ GeoCities site (personally, I was an AngelFire guy)? Well, easily surprised reader you are wrong! This is slammin’ retro site is so totally tubular that it ranks on the first page of Google searches for a query bucket that has 250k monthly searches!

Wait, what?

Yup, you read that right. This site was previously ranking 3rd/4th for all variations of “wish promo code” (though now it’s settled in comfortably at #8). Check out the search volume, per keywordtool.io:

I think 250k monthly queries related to a major brand makes this a pretty competitive query wouldn’t you say? Not only that, it came out of nowhere and is rapidly ranking for more and more search queries. Just check out the organic keyword report from SEMrush:

Seriously, you should check out the site, it has no main navigation, it’s written very poorly for the language it’s in (English), and it doesn’t have a meaningful link profile to speak of:

So if they aren’t ranking this site for its link profile, then I guess it’s ranking because of it’s ‘quality content’ right? After all ‘quality content’ without links can rank…

What does this mean for SEOs

Honestly, why are we as an industry still taking comments like this at face value? And aren’t comments like this detrimental without any context?

How often is this true? Is it for high volume or low volume searches? How often does Google rank low-quality pages by these processes aka what’s the fail rate? Google spokespeople hype up the ability of their machine process to solve incredibly complicated problems. And they do it! But they don’t do it anywhere near 100% of the time. And without the context and data, it feels irresponsible to run your digital business (whether agency side or in-house) based on statements like these.

Traditional SEO practices still work, Google doesn’t programmatically understand qualitative concepts like content quality nearly as much as they want you to think they do.

SEO isn’t dying anytime soon, and solid technical SEO, links etc still work etc.

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What is keyword research?

Keyword research is your first step in optimizing your website for certain keywords. Without keyword research, you might find yourself lost in your own lingo and battling giants in your industry that can’t be beaten in the search result pages just like that. There is a variety of factors you have to take into account when doing keyword research and setting up your keyword strategy. In this article, we’ll discuss your mission, your audience and your competition. 

Learn how to write awesome and SEO friendly articles in our SEO Copywriting training »

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Info What makes your company unique?

Before you do anything, and this is key, you need to know what makes your company unique. You need to have a clear concept of the mission of your company. You need to determine exactly what you have to offer. Because that’s what’s going to make you rank. It’s that simple. SEO is just like regular business. If you’re doing everything on the same or inferior level as your competition, you’re not going to stand out. If you’re not the best result, why should people want to find you? Why should Google rank you? This seems simple, but this factor is often forgotten.

Meaningful keywords

We often hear people say: we can’t come up with meaningful keywords. If you struggle with that too, take a step back and look at your business at large:

• What do you have to offer?
• What is your mission?
• What are your core values and strengths?
• How can you branch out from your core selling points to very specific bits of information or service? Use these to stand out from the crowd.

You don’t have to be better than your competition at everything, as long as you identify enough things to build a keyword strategy around. For smaller companies, this means that you probably have to be better at the things bigger fish haven’t thought of. Or at the things, these companies aren’t actively looking to do. If you can’t come up with anything, you have a bigger problem than just coming up with keywords…

The role of your audience in your keyword research

Once you’ve determined what you have to offer, it’s time to consider your audience. In the end, SEO is all about making sure your users are able to find you. So the first thing you have to do is find out what words your potential audience uses to find the information they’re looking for.

Let’s consider an example. At Yoast, we think of our courses platform as “Yoast Academy”. So at first sight, it seems very logical for us to optimize for the keyword “Yoast Academy”. However, when we analyze traffic data, it turns out that our audience uses “Yoast courses” way more. So it makes much more sense to optimize for that term instead. Every company has its own internal vocabulary, which often doesn’t match the vocabulary of its audience. Therefore, you should always choose your keywords from the perspective of your audience. You can use Google Trends to research how often search terms are used compared to other terms.

What about your competition?

Lastly, you simply can’t devise a proper keyword research strategy without taking your competition into account. Too often, websites optimize for terms they have absolutely no chance ranking for. So you need to research your competition.

You can go all overboard and make a thorough analysis of all the competitors in your field, and that can certainly be worthwhile. But let’s stick to the basics for now. It’s actually quite easy to get a general idea of your SEO competition. Just google some search terms you would like to rank for! See what companies show up and where you rank. How big are the companies you are competing with for top three rankings? Would your company fit between these results? This is all quite easy to determine using just the Google search results.

But be wary! You can’t just trust the search results because Google tailors them to your search history. So logically, your site is going to come up higher for you than for others that perform the same search. You can use an incognito screen to circumvent this, although there’s still a local search component even in an incognito screen. If that is a problem for you, you should consider using VPNs to mask your location.

Expanding your strategy step-by-step

Big sites can rank for the most general terms. Smaller sites within a very specific niche can do the same. Of course, it’s also easier if you’re writing in a language that is not spoken all over the world. For most smaller sites that are writing in English, however, the general rule of thumb is this: start with a big set of long tail keywords which have little traffic but you can rank for more easily. Then, work yourself up the rankings step-by-step. Once you’ve gained some SEO authority, start optimizing for more general keywords. And in the end, maybe you will even be able to rank for your head keywords!

Keep reading: ‘Keyword research: the ultimate guide’ »

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Elements of a Viral Social Media Campaign

Social media has become the world’s most popular digital platforms over the past few years. With billions of registered users in all platforms combined, this has helped create an interconnected world in which communication, interaction, and promotion has now become much more efficient and accessible.

The rise of social media platforms not only changed the way people communicate, but it also helped various companies and their brands to find new ways to communicate with their audience as well. With digital marketing becoming the new standard in promoting businesses, the use of social media has been a game-changer, as it can help obscure brands become household names in a short period of time.

The increase in popularity of these brands is a result of viral social media campaigns. Becoming “viral” on the internet means that a topic or brand is popular over a certain period of time, being mentioned on multiple websites and social media platforms. Creating a social media campaign that can get viral takes a lot of effort and the right timing, along with key elements that make it all work. With that in mind, here are the crucial elements of a viral social media campaign.

The Right Platform

Getting viral on social media begins by promoting your content on the right platform. Currently, the most popular social media platforms include Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. It is best to know which platform your audience prefers to use regularly and picking the right one would help boost traffic and interactions by a huge amount. For example, when it comes to news and major announcements, Twitter is the best platform to use. As evidenced by this Tweet from Disney announcing an upcoming movie.

The right platform makes a big difference, as it would be a starting point in which your content would gain traffic and be shared to other platforms.

Knowing Your Audience

When it comes to any social media marketing strategy, audience targeting will always be the key, as it would help you identify and narrow down their preferences and interests. Various brands and products ensure that they cater to the right audience to be able to achieve the best impression. One example of a successful social media campaign is the Know Your Lemons campaign, which aimed to inform and educate women around the world about breast cancer.

For this case, the target demographic is clear and well-defined, which allowed the campaign to become successful and reach multiple countries across the world. When it comes to establishing campaigns, it is best to know what the audience wants and needs before taking further steps.

Have a Purpose

Things become viral on the internet for many different reasons. Whether it be a fun and creative Super Bowl commercial:

Or a hilarious tweet that people can relate to:

The most viral social media campaigns have at least one of these two ingredients: entertaining or informative. An entertaining social media campaign always gets people talking about it for a long time. However, if you are a company that wants to sell through viral marketing, taking the informative approach is the best way to go. These kinds of campaigns make full use of images such as infographics and video marketing to become viral.

A fine example of an infographic that is informative and sells is Home Depot’s “Color Theory”, which informs the audience about how different colors mix and work together, which in turn advertises their paint products.

As you can see, infographics not only help sell a product to their audience but also provide useful information that makes it something that is beyond entertaining. Once again, creating helpful content is a great way to sell and promote your brand, and eventually, go viral.

Evoke Emotion

One of the best ways to gain audience interest using social media campaigns is by evoking emotions that they can relate to. Some of the most successful social media campaigns evoke happy and positive emotions, like Norway’s #SheepWithAView campaign, which promoted tourism in the country through the use of sheep that guide people to some wonderful destinations. This is an example of a lighthearted social media campaign done right.

An example of a more serious social media campaign is WWF’s #EndangeredEmoji, which promotes awareness of the world’s most endangered species.

Emotions help sell the product and keep the audience invested, which prompts them to share it with people they know through social media.

Timing Matters

One of the best ways content can get viral on the internet is by posting and sharing it at the right time. For brands, this can mean many different things. Some viral campaigns take advantage of certain events, like sporting events, where a bulk of viral marketing has happened in the past few years.

Brands can also take advantage of seasons like Christmas to promote their products, which helps increase your chances of going viral.

As you can see, timing counts, and taking a “Strike while the iron is hot” approach will pay dividends for your social media campaign.

Key Takeaway

Social media campaigns are some of the best ways to sell and promote products and advocacies to today’s audience, which is why getting viral is crucial to make it successful. By having these aforementioned elements, you are bound to have a social media campaign that would help bring success to your brand.

If you have questions about Social Media Marketing or SEO in general, leave a comment below and let’s talk.

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Google My Business Reviews From The Web Rate 0 ⭐

I was checking out LSG’s GMB description after Colan Nielsen had posted about them showing up in GMB Knowledge Panels the other day (They’re gone again btw) when I noticed in the “Reviews from the web” section we had a lousy 3/5 rating:

Like any business owner, I wanted to see where these reviews came from and what I could do to turn those three stars into five. Imagine my surprise to find the source was that well-known business reviews site CMac.ws:

Isn’t that a beauty? Hard to imagine the site even has four users let alone that all four of them would bother to rate LSG.

Besides the fact they are using a screenshot of our homepage that is 2 years out of date, you don’t even have to sign in to click the star rating. And of course you can open the URL in a private browser, vote, open the URL in a new tab and vote again ad infinitum. Not that anyone would ever do such a thing:

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that this site is getting such prime placement. After all, as Google says in its Review Snippet Guidelines:

“When Google finds valid reviews or ratings markup, we may show a rich snippet that includes stars and other summary info from reviews or ratings.”

Nowhere in its guidelines does it say “When Google finds valid reviews”. It’s only the markup that needs to be valid.

And Cmac.ws has Aggregate Rating markup, although it is missing a “required” field. But you know, when Google says “valid”, it doesn’t always mean “valid”. It’s a RankBrain thing.

You may want to check if your business is rated on CMac. If not, who knows, maybe you might even want to add your business and get it rated? NAP consistency and all that, right? Hey, and maybe just for kicks you might want to rate your competitors’ businesses? They deserve a star or two right?

Joy Hawkins and Jason Brown are constantly beating the #StopCrapOnTheMap drum. Think it may be time for  #KillReviewScrannelInTheKnowledgePanel (you try finding a good word that rhymes with “panel”).

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