How to Choose the Right Domain Name

In SEO, all of the important elements must be aligned in order to generate positive results. Factors like finding the right keywords, creating quality content, and optimizing backlinks all help create a successful strategy. However, all of these can crumble down when one element does not meet the standard.

You might have quality content, and the right keywords, but this would all be put to waste when you do not have the right domain name. Surely, users will be able to find you through keywords, but not having the right domain can greatly affect the amount of traffic that you would be able to receive.

This is why choosing the right domain name matters a lot, as users would be able to identify your brand much better, which helps improve your visibility and authority. We at SEO Hacker ensure our clients that they get the right domain name for their brand, and here’s how you can do it too.

Make it easy to spell and remember

The goal of promotion and advertisement is having your audience remember your brand. This means it pays to have a catchy name that your audience would easily associate with your brand. The same must be applied to your domain name in order to instill a sense of familiarity.

When it comes to picking domain names, keeping it short and sweet is one of the best practices, as it makes it easy to remember. Have you ever encountered a situation wherein you wanted to know more about a brand, but can’t remember the name because it’s hard to remember? This is what you should avoid for your domain name. Sometimes, the simplest domain names are the most effective, and looking at famous examples makes this point even truer.

These famous examples include sites like Google (google.com), Apple (apple.com), and Facebook (facebook.com). While these brands have been recognized for the services that they have provided, their catchy and memorable names sure have helped in making them more memorable.

Keywords in domains

Since SEO is about making use of keywords to improve website visibility, using keywords in the domain name itself is also a viable strategy. We have had clients that use keywords as their domain name in order to make users find them faster. This approach works best for products and services, as it helps get users straight to what they would be looking for.

Having keywords as a domain name also boosts your search rankings much quicker, which helps increase website traffic, and create more conversions for the brand.

Area-specific domains

Other than keywords, using domain names that include your brand’s location is also effective, especially for local SEO strategies. This is another strategy that we use on the websites of our clients, as they have region-specific services that they want to target for their brand. Common types of locations that are used include cities, countries, and even provinces.

This not only helps generate more traffic within a certain area but also help users look for your business much better. With the upcoming Google Maps update, and the increasing number of users using voice search, expect area-specific domains to become more common in the near future.

No numbers and hyphens

While there are a good number of brands that include numbers in their names and are well-known for doing so, it is still advisable to avoid using them as much as possible. Going back to the first pointer of keeping the domain name memorable and easy to spell, adding numbers and hyphens would only add an unfamiliar element that can make it more challenging to remember.

Imagine having to remember a domain with a hyphen. One of the common problems would be that users tend to have a hard time trying to remember where the hyphen is placed in the domain. This type of confusion would end up with a lot of incorrectly typed domains, which would lead to less traffic. Eliminating these distracting elements would help make things more helpful for your users, as it makes recalling brand name domains much easier.

Social Media ready

You might have your website domain acquired and ready to use, however, can the same name be used for your brand’s social media accounts. If the answer is no, then you have a bit of a problem in your hands. Using similar domain name and social media handle helps push and reinforce your branding and makes it easier for social media users to look for these channels.

It is best to do some quick background research on your domain name and check if it’s available on platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram before deciding on your domain of choice. Some social media handles and domains have copyrights and trademarks as well, which means using them can cause some legal ramifications that you definitely want to avoid.

Use tools like Ahrefs

Since some of the best domain names can also be keywords, one of the best places to look for possible domain names is on keyword research tools such as Ahrefs. This is one of the most effective keyword and content research tools available in the market, as it provides you with detailed statistical data on how well certain keywords perform.

You can use the same data to assess if your domain name can generate traffic as well. Assessing performance before purchasing the domain is crucial, and Ahrefs helps get the job done.

Key Takeaway

Choosing your domain name can be a very challenging task in itself. With so many websites present on the internet, the amount of domain name choices become fewer as each moment passes by. With these tips, you ensured that you would be able to find the domain that fits your branding and service, and generates the best amount of traffic.

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

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Media / attachment URL: what to do with them?

In our major Yoast SEO 7.0 update, there was a bug concerning attachment URL’s. We quickly resolved the bug, but some people have suffered anyhow (because they updated before our patch). This post serves both as a warning and an apology. We want to ask all of you to check whether your settings for the redirect of the attachment URL’s are correct. And, for those of you who suffered from a decrease in rankings because of incorrect settings, we offer a solution that Google has OKed as well.

Is redirect attachment URLs set to “Yes”?

You need to check this manually: unless you have a very specific reason to allow attachment URLs to exist (more on that below), the setting should be set to “Yes” . If the setting says “Yes”, you’re all set. You can find this setting in Search Appearance, in the tab Media.

Is your attachment URL set to “No”?

If your attachment URL is set to “no”, there are two different scenario’s which could apply to you. You could intentionally have set this setting to “no”, but the setting  could also be turned to “no” without your intent.

Intentionally set to “No”

If you intentionally put the setting of the attachment URL to “No”, you’ll probably be aware of that fact. In that case, your attachment URL’s are an important aspect of your site. You’re linking actively to these pages and these pages have real content on them (more than just a photo). This could for instance apply to a photography site. If you want this setting to say “No”, you’ll probably have put a lot of thought in this. In this case, you can leave your setting to “no”. You’re all set!

Unintentionally set to “No”

It is also possible that you notice that the setting is set to “No” and this was not intentionally. You’ve suffered from our bug. We’re so very sorry. You should switch your toggle to “Yes” and save the changes. Perhaps you need to do a little bit more, though. There are (again) two scenario’s:

Traffic and ranking is normal

Ask yourself the following question: have you noticed any dramatic differences in your rankings and traffic in the last three months (since our 7.0 update of march 6th)? If the answer to this question is no, than you should just turn the redirect setting of the attachment URL to “Yes” and leave it at that. You did not suffer from any harm in rankings, probably because you’re not using attachment URL’s all that much anyway. This will be the case for most sites. After switching your toggle to “Yes” and saving the changes, you’re good to go!

Traffic and ranking have decreased

In the second scenario, you notice that the redirect attachment URL setting is set to “No” and you did indeed suffer from a dramatic decrease in traffic and ranking. We’re so very sorry about that. Make sure to switch the setting of the attachment URL to “Yes” immediately.  In order to help you solve your ranking problem, we have built a search index purge plugin. Download and install this plugin here. More on the working of this separate plugin below.

What to do if you’re note sure

If you’re not sure whether you’ve been affected by this, and your Google Search Console is inconclusive: don’t do anything other than setting the setting to “Yes”. See “What did Google say” below for the rationale.

What do attachment URL’s do anyway?

When you upload an image in WordPress, WordPress does not only store the image, it also creates a separate so-called attachment URL for every image. These attachment URLs are very “thin”: they have little to no content outside of the image. Because of that fact, they’re bad for SEO: they inflate the number of pages on your site while not increasing the amount of quality content. This is something that WordPress does, which our plugin takes care off (if the setting is correctly turned to “Yes”).

Historically, we had had a (default off) setting that would redirect the attachment URL for an image to the post the image was attached to. So if I uploaded an image to this post, the attachment URL for that image would redirect to this post.In the old way of dealing with this, it meant that images added for other reasons (like say, a site icon, or a page header you’d add in the WordPress customizer), would not redirect.  It also meant that if you used an image twice, you could not be certain where it would redirect.

In Yoast SEO 7.0 we introduced a new feature to deal with these pages. Now, we default to redirecting the attachment URL to the image itself. This basically means attachment URLs no longer exist on your site at all. This actually is a big improvement.

What did the bug do (wrong)?

The bug was simple yet very painful: when you updated from an earlier version of Yoast SEO to Yoast SEO 7.0-7.0.2 (specifically those versions), we would not always correctly convert the setting you had for the old setting into the new one. We accidentally set the setting to ‘no’. Because we overwrote the old settings during the update, we could not revert this bug later on.

The impact of the bug

For some sites our bug might have a truly bad impact. In Twitter and Facebook discussions I’ve had, I’ve been shown sites that had the number of indexed URLs on their site quintupled, without adding any content. Because with that setting being “No” XML sitemaps was enabled for attachments. As a result of that, lots and lots of attachment URLs got into Google’s index. Some of those sites are now suffering from Panda-like problems. The problem will be specifically big if you have a lot of pictures on your website and few high quality content-pages. In these cases,  Google will think you’ve created a lot of ‘thin content’ pages all of a sudden.

The large majority of the websites running Yoast SEO probably hasn’t suffered at all. Still, we really messed up. I myself, am sorry. More so than normal, because I came up with and coded this change myself…

What did Google say?

We have good contacts at Google and talk to them regularly about issues like these. In this case, we discussed it with John Mueller and his first assessment was similar to mine: sites should normally not suffer from this. That’s why we don’t think drastic measures are needed for everyone. Let me quote him:

“Sites generally shouldn’t be negatively affected by something like this. We often index pages like that for normal sites, and they usually don’t show up in search. If they do show up for normal queries, usually that’s a sign that the site has other, bigger problems. Also, over the time you mentioned, there have been various reports on twitter & co about changes in rankings, so if sites are seeing changes, I’d imagine it’s more due to normal search changes than anything like this.”

We’ve also discussed potential solutions with him. The following solution has been OK’d by him as the best and fastest solution.

What does this search index purge plugin do?

The purpose of the search index purge plugin is to purge attachment URLs out of the search results as fast as possible. Just setting the Yoast SEO attachment URL redirect setting to “Yes” isn’t fast enough. When you do that, you no longer have XML sitemaps or anything else that would make Google crawl those pages, and thus it could take months for Google to remove those URLs. That’s why I needed to be creative.

Installing this plugin will do the following two things:

• Every attachment URL will return a 410 status code.
• A static XML sitemap, containing all the attachment URLs on a given site will be created. The post modified date for each of those URLs is  the activation date and time of the plugin.

The XML sitemap with recent post modified date will make sure that Google spiders all those URLs again. The 410 status code will make sure Google takes them out of its search results in the fastest way possible.

After 6 months the attachment URLs should be gone from the search results. You should then remove the search index purge plugin, and keep the redirect setting of the attachment URLs set to “Yes”.

Advice: keep informed!

We try to do the very best we can to help you get the best SEO out of your site. We regularly update our configuration wizard and there is no harm whatsoever in running through it again. Please regularly check if your site’s settings are still current for your site. We do make mistakes, and this release in particular has led us to a rigorous post mortem on all the stages of this release’s process.

We regularly write about thing that change in Google, so stay up to date by subscribing to our newsletter below. If you want to understand more of the how and why of all this, please do also take our new, free, SEO for Beginners course, which you’ll get access to when you sign up.

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Time-saving SEO Practices You Should Try

SEO is one of the world’s fastest growing industries over the past few years. With a growing amount of companies looking to improve their presence and branding, it is best to look for the best and most effective SEO strategies and techniques that would help save your time.

Time-saving practices are present in different industries, especially in SEO, where complex processes can be simplified to generate quality results much faster. Here at SEO Hacker, we always aim to look for these types of practices, as it helps us find the best solutions that help our clients grow and establish their branding and presence. With that in mind, here are some of the best time-saving SEO practices that you should try out.

Shift Focus on Long-tail Keywords

Keywords are the most important elements of a good SEO strategy, as it is the key to getting more traffic to a website. With the rise of AI assistants and voice search, long-tail keywords have become more effective in generating more search traffic to websites. Long-tail keywords cater to more exact and phrased search terms, which has become more common in voice search.

Long-tail keywords contain at least 3 words and have become some of the more common keywords being used in search engines. While this may be a simple change and has become a more common practice, it is still important to keep this in mind and optimize your keywords for better performance.

Use Chrome Extensions

When it comes to SEO functionality, Google Chrome is the best browser to use. With a bevy of extensions to choose from, you can turn your browser into an SEO hub. Need a website audit tool? Install the Google Lighthouse extension. Do you want a list of all the links in a webpage? Get Link Grabber. Want to see some quick website stats? SimilarWeb is the right tool for the job.

These extensions are not only budget-friendly, but they also allow your browser to perform functions similar to some of the best SEO tools available. We have used a good number of these Chrome extensions, and I can say that it is definitely helping us perform tasks much faster.

Strategize with Mobile in mind

Mobile SEO has become more prominent than ever, with mobile ranking factors being updated by Google this year. With the increasing number of mobile users accessing the websites through their browsers, it is no surprise that mobile optimization is something that every website must do in order to gain more mobile traffic.

When it comes to mobile optimization, it is important to implement it as a major part of your SEO campaign. Having mobile optimization in mind would help ensure that whatever strategies that you are doing would be mobile-friendly. These strategies include implementing AMP and responsive design, along with improving loading speed to enhance user experience. SEO looks to become mobile in the next few years and doing these strategies will help prepare your website for the future.

Make use of Productivity Tools

One of the main reasons why work can end up getting disorganized and chaotic is because that there is no proper platform or tool that helps a team organize and delegate tasks properly. As a team leader myself, I make sure that our tasks are well-organized, and that I am able to communicate with my fellow teammates on a regular basis. Thankfully, I am able to perform these very well using some of the best productivity tools available.

One of the productivity tools that we use is Trello, which is a handy tool that can be used on desktop and mobile. Trello allows us to list down our tasks in detail, set deadlines and objectives, and share it with the rest of the team. The tool is also user-friendly, which means that you would not take too much time listing down and organizing your tasks. Other than tools like Trello, you can also use browser tools that block websites that are not related to work, which helps improve your focus. Overall, productivity tools can drastically improve your performance, and help your office become more efficient.

Key Takeaway

Working on SEO means having to be adaptive to numerous changes and updates, along with being quick and efficient with your work. While SEO really takes a good amount of time for it to work effectively, it is best to make full use of this time by doing some time-saving practices. With these practices, you would be able to become a more effective SEO team.

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

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Enhanced Tracking for Analyzing Your Content’s Impact

If many people view life’s value in relation to its impact on others, what if you viewed the content your company creates in the same way?

How does your content actually impact your end users, and what value does it provide to their decision making process?…

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What is Google Tag Manager and What Does It Do?

If you don’t have organization when working with analytics, you’re gonna have a rough time.

Analytics tracking at its core is largely technical and this can elevate the barrier to entry for those that are unfamiliar. However, tools like Google Tag Manager (GTM), make the tag management process much, much simpler.…

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How to Win With Guided Selling, Part 5: Organic Promotion

Outreach to bloggers and influencers is one of the more obvious tactics for organic promotion, as it can be very effective. However, the space is becoming more and more competitive as bloggers are becoming more aware of the opportunities available to those with a following.…

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How to Win With Guided Selling, Part 4: Paid Social Media Promotion

After you spent all the time creating a great piece of content, you want to make sure it gets in front of your target audience.

Before putting any dollars behind promoting your content, you should sit down with your team and plan out key considerations for promotion such as defining your audience, determining KPIs, setting a budget, and the duration of the project.…

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How to Win With Guided Selling, Part 3: Design & Creation

The first thing we do before kicking off the detailed design work on any project is a thorough review of the existing audience research. We then combine it with competitive and visual research to get an overarching view of what we need to solve with the design.…

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How to Win With Guided Selling, Part 2: Audience Interviews

We all have experience in our industries, but that can sometimes give us blinders into thinking we know everything about our audience. It’s important to get the audience’s perspective and see what they’re really looking for and need.

Sometimes, we can also have the tendency of cycling one anecdote or another any time a subject comes up, but it’s good to get new perspectives to refresh what we know about people and expand our understanding of them, their journey, and their needs.…

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How to Win With Guided Selling, Part 1: Prioritizing a Topic

Choosing a category from a million possibilities for your digital asset is more than enough to drive us crazy. But it doesn’t have to be!

Follow these six steps to making sure you’re choosing a category that’s inspired by data, has high success potential, and most importantly is in line with your whole team’s goals.…

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Is Your Site Leaking User Info into Search Results? Get GDPR Ready

What do you do when your site is leaking user information into search results? Well, let’s take a step back and look at what kind of personal information this could be:

• Form information that contains first name, last name, email address
• Actual address information, including zip
• Unsubscribe confirmation URLs that contain email addresses and/or names
• Online ordering information like what recently happened to Panera

There are a number of ways this information could be seeping into Google’s index.…

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How to Master Meta Descriptions With the Google Snippet Trick

The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Last week, I came across a Yoast article discussing Google’s longer meta descriptions (Google doubled the room we have for meta descriptions last year — from 160 characters with spaces to 320.)
The first paragraph contained a sentence that made me laugh:
“It appears that Google very often

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Why You Should Bid on Your Own Brand Terms

It’s a challenge for a business to achieve the performance and reach the goals you set for yourself in such a competitive PPC space. Who doesn’t want to increase ad performance and see the most value possible for the money spent on paid search?…

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How to Optimize for “Near My Area” Search Results

Search has been evolving over the past few years, with numerous updates and new applications that helped enhance the experience and provide users with the best results. 2018 is another year of many changes, with Google shifting its focus to mobile and voice search and testing out new AI technology in the form of Google Duplex.

These Google updates aim to not only optimize search results but also make search more accessible across all devices. With the development of AI technology, voice search will also be optimized, which means that we will be seeing more exact and phrased search terms that enables AI assistants to look for the best results on search engines.

“Near Me”

One of the most popular voice search terms that people use is “Near Me” or “Near my area”, which allows voice search to look for the places near your immediate vicinity. When it comes to using voice search and AI assistants, this is one of the most convenient ways to receive the best local results.

When using Google Assistant on the Allo app, I gave the command to search for the best Japanese restaurant near my area. Upon inputting the command, I was able to view a detailed list of results of the best Japanese restaurants, along with reviews and even articles that mention these restaurants. When it comes to local SEO, one of the most important elements that you need to optimize if you have a business is your Google My Business account.

Having an account means that your Business is recognized on Google and that people would be able to look for it on Google Maps. Users would also be informed about important details such as contact number, address, and business hours. With the improved services of Google Maps, users now have the ability to look for places they want to go instantly, which makes local SEO even more important.

Optimizing for “Near Me”

Along with optimizing your Google My Business account, it is equally important to show up on “near me” search results as well. There are many ways to do this, and here are some of the most effective techniques:

Localized Content and Keywords

When it comes to local SEO, one of the best ways for search engines to have an idea of where your business is located is by creating content related to the area that your business is located. This not only helps with identifying the location of your business but also provide some free promotion as well. Some great examples of local content that helps promote your business include “Best Restaurants Near (City Name)” or “Best Places to go Near (Business Location)”.

When it comes to keywords, It is best to use geo-targeted keywords that specify the location, as these would help people find your business in search engines much faster. In fact, some of our clients request a number of geo-targeted keywords for their businesses, which has definitely helped increase their traffic and target their intended audience. Here are some keyword examples that are local SEO-friendly:

• Health Care Service Near Me
• Italian Restaurant Near My Area
• Business School (City Name)

These samples might seem straightforward and simple, but this helps generate the best local search results and help target your intended audience.

Online Reviews

When it comes to looking for businesses and establishments near your area, Google takes into account the review scores for these places to asses which results are of the best quality. It is best to observe proper online reputation management in order to show up in search results more often. Reviews are a great indicator of what a business offers, and a good review makes your business a much more attractive option for users. If you are looking for a guide for proper Online Reputation Management, we got you covered.

Business Directory and Link Building

One of the best places to look for different kinds of establishments is online business directories, which provides you with a list of various businesses within a specific area. This is a great opportunity to provide outbound links to your businesses. Most websites, like city and tourist websites, provide a list of recommended places that people can visit, which is a nice link building opportunity that brings in traffic to your website.

Another way to bring in traffic to your website is to guest blogging, which allows you to build more links from different websites, which helps increase your visibility while generating quality content that is helpful. You can also directly contact different websites and ask their owners if they can post your website link to their website. Social media is another tool you should use, as there have been numerous businesses that have become famous after being constantly recommended by social media users. Social media platforms have millions of registered users and tapping into the right audience help generate a lot of buzz and traffic that helps your business grow.

Mobile Optimization

With the increasing accessibility of the internet over the past few years, the use of mobile devices has now become more prominent. With that in mind, more users now look for the nearest businesses using their mobile devices, and it is best to help optimize their experience.

Mobile optimization is one of the standard practices that you should do for your business, as more and more people are accessing the internet using their portable devices. A great starting point would be applying responsive design and AMP to your website, which allows it to become more mobile friendly as the size and layout of your website adjust accordingly while retaining the same functionality. If you have applied these and want to asses your website’s performance, you can use tools such as Google Lighthouse and Woorank to identify the best steps to help improve your website.

Key Takeaway

With the rise of voice search and mobile usage, the use of exact and phrased search terms have now become more important than ever. By optimizing your “Near my area” keywords, your audience would be able to discover your business much better and generate traffic that helps your brand grow.

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

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Is “Near Me” SEO Moving Farther Away?

Local SEO Twitter was slightly a flutter yesterday after my bud John Mueller apparently mentioned you should avoid placing “Near Me” in titles if you want to rank for “Near Me” searches:

Want to rank for ‘Near Me’ searches? Avoid placing ‘near me’ in your titles, make sure your address is on your site and get your Google My Business profile setup and verified… results are predominantly based on the users location. Confirmed by @JohnMu #LocalSEO #Google pic.twitter.com/MvdUvJ70Al

— Daniel Brooks (@seodanbrooks) May 15, 2018

Back in the day when Google reps were a bit less vocal, we crazy SEO types had to come up with ideas based on what we were seeing on Google and test them. Sometimes, to our surprise, they worked wonders. For example, I discovered that putting phone numbers of local businesses in the title tags of their yellow page profile pages would reliably generate an extra 2-3% traffic lift as it would help that page rank for phone number queries. That one worked for years. I probably put my kids through college with it and got some of our clients nice end of year bonuses to boot.

So a few years ago when we noticed that Google was basically forcing people to search “near me” by making it a top suggested search for almost any query that had local intent, what did it expect us to do?

Near Me Local SEO Ranking Factors

So we rolled out “near me” strategies to any client that targeted local queries and it worked. A few % lift every time. And it was easy. We always used to show Trip Advisor’s very subtle Restaurants Near Me page as the canonical example:

I get why Google wouldn’t want to reward sites that use this tactic as a “near me” query is basically just a geographic search that should show results near the searcher v. documents that use the phrase “near me”, but Google created this by forcing users into “near me” searches and showing documents that use the phrase “near me” at the top of the results for years.

And while Google definitely seems to be tamping down on these results, I am still seeing plenty of “near me” documents showing up:

And if “near me” really is the same as a geographic search, why would Google show different results for this query?

The problem is Rank Brain still doesn’t think these are exactly the same queries. And I don’t think it’s because “near me” suggests a different radius than “pleasanton”. I think it’s because Google’s algorithm isn’t always sure if you want something near you or a document.

Of course you could take the position that these pages are ranking for “near me” queries despite their titles because they are on strong domains like Thumbtack and Angieslist but Homeguide.com?

No offense HomeGuide, but you need get going on the linkbuilding…your welcome.

And how much do you want to bet that Savior Plumbing would move up this SERP if it added “near me” to its homepage title tag?

As long as Google leaves gaps like this, SEOs are going to step in and fill them. Why wouldn’t they?

You can rant all you want about how it feels icky,  but your feelings probably aren’t a ranking factor. Oh, and here’s a search you might want to check out.

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SEO Hacker’s Guest Blogging Guide for 2018

Guest blogging is one of the fundamentals of an effective content marketing and link building strategy. If you have a website that is looking to get more traffic, starting out by guest blogging is usually one of the best ways to go. This helps expand your online presence, promote useful content, and establish quality and authoritative links.

The practice of guest blogging has become standard for various websites all over the internet, and with 2018 being a year that will bring in more changes to how we all do search and SEO, there are some new techniques and strategies that will help you get ready for the year.

The main goal of guest blogging will always be helping a website gain traffic through quality content, and while this objective has remained the same for quite a time, here is a handy guide that will help your content become relevant and visible in 2018.

Quality above all

A guest post brings in a good amount of traffic, but only when the content is something that is relevant, useful, and has good quality. With the abundance of choice in the internet, users want to make sure that they are getting the most out of what they are accessing on a regular basis. Guest blogs won’t bring in traffic unless people click and read them, so ensure that your content is something worth reading from start to finish.

Our blog management teams are in charge of our content marketing, and they ensure that the articles that they send in are of top quality, and beneficial for our client’s readers. We ensure this using top grammar checking software like Grammarly and using keyword and content research tools like Ahrefs to look for the best content ideas.

There are many elements when it comes to writing quality content, and combining these elements is guaranteed to help you craft a guest blog worth sharing and reading. Here are some of them:

Doing your homework: Informative articles are some of the most abundant types of articles around, and users will always want to read content about something that the author has substantial knowledge on. Doing some background research on what you will be writing about will help make sure that you have accurate and reputable information worth taking a look.

Make use of interviews: Interviews are the best way to pick someone’s brain on certain topics and bring valuable insights that you will not be able to get elsewhere. Thanks to the internet and social media, conducting interviews can now be done online, and finding them is usually just a few clicks and keyboard taps away.

Create an identity: One reason why a lot of users go back to articles from the same website or author is that of their distinct writing style. Having a unique or accessible writing style helps bring in familiarity to readers and adds more personality to your posts. Having character adds more color and dimension and makes things much more interesting.

Choose your words wisely: First impressions count a lot, and if the user is greeted by an uninspiring topic title, the chances of getting a good amount of traffic lessen even more. Using actions words and strong statements help get to the point and make help increase interest and pique the curiosity of a lot of readers. Asking a question in your title also helps bring the same effect, and adds a sense of wonder that makes them click.

Experiment and explore: With so many articles scattered across the internet, you can expect that a lot of the topics that you are thinking of have already been written in one form or another. With that in mind, a great way to find topics, or make your own twist on a familiar topic is to explore different sources and write a topic in a way that it may not have been written before. You can also use different tools, practices, and applications to help you learn more. For example, when I wrote about the potential of Google Assistant to be the most intelligent AI assistant, I tinkered around Google Assistant myself to gain a better idea of what it can do.

The Right Pitch

After finishing a guest post, the next challenge is to be able to pitch it to a website of your choice. Doing a pitch may seem difficult at first, especially when a blog that you have been writing about has been rejected, but these experiences help you learn and refine your process to a point that it will come off as second-nature.

The most important thing to know when doing your pitch is to learn about the site or person that you are pitching to. Doing some background research on the website that you want your post to appear on helps you know if your topic fits their interests, and helps you get to know about the people behind it as well.

Link Responsibly

With guest blogging being an important part of link building, it is best to ensure that people click on them. This means placement and the amount of links are key. Most websites provide an allowance to at least one dofollow link to your website, along with the request that they provide a guest post of their own in return.

When it comes to link placement, having an anchor text that piques interest and curiosity is the best way to go. This might be simple for certain links, but it can take a while to find that anchor text that can make people click.

More Sources

We have written about content marketing and guest blogging before, and it is worth taking a look again to help expand your knowledge on how to create quality blogs. Here are some of them:

Good Content Marketing Means Avoiding These Types of Content – This is a guide that helps you know what types of content you should avoid when writing your guest blogs.

SEO Hacker’s Content Strategy for SEO – This article discusses some of our best practices and techniques when it comes to crafting and distributing content.

Why Content Is King and How It Can Benefit SEO – This is a handy guide to how to write SEO-friendly articles, and why content is still king in the SEO world.

Key Takeaway

Guest blogging remains as an SEO fundamental. While there have been many changes and Google updates that have changed the way we do SEO, this simple yet effective practice still generates a great amount of traffic when done right.

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

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Make Me Feel Smart

It’s amazing how many opportunities we get as buyers to feel dumb. Imagine you need a new laptop and maybe it’s been a while since you last purchased one. What would you look for? You’d probably glance at things like processor speed and storage capacity and hope you got what you needed. But a company could make you feel smarter if they said, “This is a great laptop for most people’s business needs.” Or “If you’re doing any video editing or want to play games, this would be the best laptop for you.”

Make Me Feel Smart

It’s not any one technology that helps us feel smart. An airport with lots of great signage can help us feel smart because we can navigate ourselves through the process. When you order food at a restaurant, if the menu describes any uncommon words, you’ll feel better about knowing what you’re thinking of getting. An air conditioning and heating expert can sell the right sized unit and services for a company by walking the prospective facilities management team through the sizing and provisioning process in a simple calculation spreadsheet.

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Yoast SEO 7.5: Привет, Россия

The Russian language is huge; 265 million people have Russian as their first or second language, making it the world’s eight most used language. What’s more, according to W3Techs Russian is the second most used language online — following English by a huge margin. As of today, all of the Russian language WordPress users can get their content checked thanks to new language support in Yoast SEO 7.5.

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Info Russian language readability analysis and internal linking

We’ve been steadily growing the number of language we support in our readability analysis and internal linking tools. We started out with English, but now support a rapidly expanding roster of some of the world’s most used languages, like French, German, Spanish and Italian. The next language to join that club is Russian.

Now, Russian is a complex language that has its own set of rules and needs to be addressed differently. Natalia Shitova, one of our developers, researched, built and tested the Russian language support for Yoast SEO. I asked her how she did it.

Building the Russian language support

“When I joined the Yoast team two months ago I was the first Russian-speaking member. It was immediately clear that my #1 task would be to develop the Russian readability analysis. Our lovely Russian-speaking users could use something more than SEO checks and I could have fun with developing an analysis for my mother tongue,” Natalia says.

Working with Russian morphology

“The hardest part was the famous Russian morphology – think different forms of words that you need for different cases, numbers, tenses, voices, and combinations thereof. For instance, the word “mom” in English has two forms – “mom” and “moms”. The Russian “мама” has nine. And how many ways are there to use the word “one” in English? I see two again – “one” and “ones”. The Russian analog (fasten your seatbelt now!) has 13. Thirteen! Any meaningful content analysis will have to deal with morphology. After all, you need to know that all these 13 forms are the same word. Luckily, the Russian morphology is very well described in books, but we had to think about how to feed that monster to our butterfly plugin, which should work on the fly inside your browser. So this release is our first attempt to build lightweight yet powerful content analysis for a language with a mind-blowing morphology. More improvements are coming soon!”

“This release is our first attempt to build lightweight yet powerful content analysis for a language with a mind-blowing morphology”

No Russian Flesch Reading Ease check yet

Russian support is almost complete, but you won’t find the Flesch Reading Ease score yet. According to Natalia, it’s quite a challenge to adopt the well-known Flesch Reading Ease check to produce something that’s useful for the Russian language. Natalia explains:

“You might notice that contrary to other supported languages we did not include Flesch Reading Ease check in the Russian readability analysis. Yes, there is a well-established formula for calculating Flesch index for Russian. No, we were not happy with how it worked. We tested the formula using a massive corpus of texts and it was almost impossible to receive a score above 50. This means no green bullet for you unless you write for small kids. “That is not kind,” we thought, “not encouraging, and totally not helpful!” I adjusted the formula a little, so that it returns a somewhat more realistic estimate of readability. With that recalibration you can use our Flesch readability check from the next release onwards.”

This work is now done and we’ll add the results in the next release, Yoast SEO 7.6.

Bug fixes

It’s always great to add support for a new language, but that’s not all we did. As always, we’ve fixed a number of bugs. Also, we improved the accessibility of the plugin. For instance, we fixed a bug that treated sentences ending in multiple sentence marks, exclamation marks or ellipses as multiple sentences. We’ve also fixed a bug where OpenGraph images with specific aspect ratios were causing unexpected results if you wanted to share these on Facebook. For the time being, we’ve removed the aspect ratio check completely. Of course, you can find all bug fixes and enhancements in the changelog on WordPress.org.

Update now to Yoast SEO 7.5

So there you have it: Yoast SEO 7.5 is another great update. This update brings our readability analysis to millions of Russian language users. As a result, each and every one our users can now improve their online content using the world-famous green bullet system. Here’s to better Russian language online content!

Keep reading: ‘Why every website needs Yoast SEO’ »

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Don’t Be Content with the Content Analysis Bare Minimum

If many people view life’s value in relation to its impact on others, what if you viewed the content your company creates in the same way?

How does your content actually impact your end users, and what value does it provide to their decision making process?…

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A Look Into the Upcoming Google Maps Update

One of the notable updates announced during the past week is for Google Maps, which will be having new features in the upcoming months. Maps is one of the most popular Google services, as it provides users with a platform that allows them to navigate and travel more conveniently than before. It is also an essential local SEO tool that helps businesses and important locations become more visible.

Being one of the most important services that Google offers, it is fitting that it receives some of the most important updates that will help improve its user-friendliness and introduce new features that help expand its functionality.

Explore

One of the updates will be a newly redesigned Explore tab, which allows users to browse new and nearby locations conveniently. The explore tab is already one of the integral features of Google Maps and seeing it receive an update will help make improve its performance, and provide users with the best choices.

The current explore tab has options that allow you to look for the nearest places, such as restaurants, cafes, ATMs, gas stations, pharmacies, and groceries. While this feature already provides you with some quality choices, the update will streamline this feature, and present more top options, with reviews being taken into account more.

Personal Preferences

Along with the new Explore design, a new tab called “For You” will also be launched. Personal preferences have been taken into account more when it comes to search and other Google services, and this is ones of the updates that continues the trend.

The “For You” feature acts like a newsfeed which presents the user with recommended places to go. Users also have the ability to “follow” certain location and receive updates on new and upcoming places that might interest you. The look and feel of this new feature is similar to a social media site, which makes the interface much more user-friendly, and ensure that you would not need to use a different app to look for the best places nearby.

Users also get a list of events and weekly trends, which comes in handy when you are going out to try something new. Google Maps will also look into various local news articles which are about places you want to go as well, which helps give the best results that are tailored for your preferences.

Google Lens and Street View Integration and AI Technology

Along with improved user-focused features, Google Maps will also be receiving an augmented reality upgrade with the integration of Google Lens, along with AI technology. AI technology is one of the technologies that are currently being developed by Google, with Google Duplex soon becoming a part of Google Assistant.

The Google Lens integration also comes with Google Street View and is used to help users navigate using the Lens and Maps. Using this new feature, users would be able to receive directions on where to go and prevents one from getting lost. Adding Google Lens allows you to identify various street signs and landmarks, which would then be linked to Maps and Street View. The AI technology is used to interact and guide the user to their destination and provide the best routes.

Group Planning

Lastly, another major Google Maps update is the addition of Group Planning, which allows users to pick the best places to dine with your friends and family. This simple yet effective feature allows you to select a number of suggestions from the list of nearby places, which you can share with your friends and family. This is a great feature, as it helps make deciding where to eat much easier by helping narrow down the selection.

Key Takeaway

These features will be launched by mid-year on mobile devices, which pushes Google’s mobile-first agenda further. The best thing about these updates is that it makes one of the most reliable Google services even more versatile and effective, by adding extra features that make it more intuitive and user-focused. We are surely looking forward to trying this out once it gets released locally.

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

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Annelieke’s analytics: What are dimensions and metrics in Google Analytics?

Anyone who has browsed through Google Analytics should have come across a whole lot of variables in the reporting stats. The reports consist of dimensions and metrics; Google Analytics calls these the building blocks of your reports. And if you want to create a custom report in Google Analytics or Google Data Studio, you have complete freedom in what dimensions and metrics you put in this report. But be careful, you might create a useless report. In this post, I’m going to explain what the difference is between dimensions and metrics. And what to look out for when combining these two yourselves.

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Info What are dimensions in Google Analytics?

All the data you see in Google Analytics, all variables in reports is either a dimension or a metric. Google explains dimensions as:

Dimensions are attributes of your data.

So in a way, a dimension is a description, a characteristic, a feature or aspect of your data. It’s not a quantitative variable but more a qualitative variable. Let me make this clear by giving you a couple of examples of metrics:

• City
• Device
• Source/Medium
• Campaign
• Page
• Goals
• Products

Notice what they all have in common? They all consist of words, not numbers. Of course, some dimensions are expressed in numbers, like hour and date. But still, the dimension is an aspect or feature of the user itself, but not how or what the user is doing on your site. Dimensions describe the data that’s collected.

You can see dimensions in the first column of your reports.

The report also gives you clues on what other dimensions there are and there are sooooo many. If you’re curious on what other dimensions you can add to, in this example, the Acquisition: Source/Medium report, click on the Secondary dimension button.

When you click on ‘Display as alphabetical list’ you can browse through all dimensions you can add to this particular report. It’s an easy way for you to get familiar with dimensions.

For instance, you can add ‘User Type’ as a secondary dimension, to see which source drives more New visitors to your site. You can add ‘Page’ to your report, to check which pages people land on from a particular source. You can do a lot of cool things here, and quite easily as well. But before you go all out; what’s the question you’re trying to answer?

What are metrics in Google Analytics?

Metrics are the numbers you see in each dimension. Metrics show you what a user did on your site, expressed in numbers. For example, if we look at the Behavior – All Pages report:

The page is the dimension; it’s the variable in which specific metrics are collected. Pageviews and entrances and such are metrics; these variables show you numbers on what users did in this particular dimension.

Metrics need dimensions, for context, otherwise, it’s just numbers.

The standard Google Analytics doesn’t allow you to add a secondary metric, because not every metric is collected for every dimension. It might raise your eyebrows, and it’s a bit confusing. But it gets less complicated if you know how Google Analytics collects data.

What’s scope in Google Analytics?

Ever wondered why Google Analytics shows certain dimensions and metrics but leaves out other seemingly essential dimensions and metrics in their default reports? That’s because Google Analytics doesn’t want to combine these two, it would show incorrect data and will let you draw conclusions based on the wrong data. Now, why is that? Why does Google Analytics want to prevent you from combining this? It all has to do with how Google Analytics processes its data: Google Analytics scope. Each dimension and metric can only have one of the following scope-types:

1. Hit
2. Session
3. User
4. Product

Hit

You can see a hit as everytime a user (cookie) does something on your site, it will send data to Google Analytics. Every single action is stored. The hit scope is the lowest level of data storage. A page is a hit-level dimension, just like language and page title is. Pageviews, time on page, load time and total events are examples of metrics on hit-level.

Session

The session scope is more time-based and is one level higher than the hit-level. A session consists of hits that happen in just one session for the same user. Dimensions and metrics on session-level collect data about a session. Examples of dimensions on a session-level are Source/Medium, Landing Page, and Device Category. Examples of session-level metrics are sessions, bounce rate, exits, goals, and pageviews per session.

User

The user scope is the highest level in which data is organized. Users can have more sessions, and a session can have more hits. Examples of dimensions that belong to the user scope are user type, days since the last session, gender. Examples of user-level metrics are users, new sessions, and percentage of new sessions.

Product

The product-level scope has everything to do with data about a product.

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Info Combining dimensions and metrics: do’s and don’ts

The session-level dimensions and metrics contain data about specific sessions. But hit-level dimensions and metrics don’t have data on session-level variables because they’re independent of sessions. So if you decide to combine pages with sessions in a custom report because you want to see how many sessions a page has gotten during a session, you’d be looking at something else than what you were expecting.

This report will show you something like this:

But if you think that page 1 was viewed in 1,199 sessions in total, then you’re wrong. What you are seeing is how many sessions began on page 1. because that’s the first hit of the session. There are a couple of common reporting fails described by LunaMetrics that explains this in more detail.

We just learned that you couldn’t combine dimensions and metrics that don’t share the same scope. Best practice is obviously to check whether or not the dimensions and metrics you want to combine, do share the same scope. But how can you find out? Google has a Dimensions and Metrics Explorer. On this page, you can find all dimensions and metrics. When I first saw this huge list and expanded a couple of items, I got confused. I couldn’t make sense of it.

But it helps if you use the UI Names, the names that you see in Google Analytics itself. And by expanding them all, you’ll have a nice overview. Don’t click on the dimension or metric, instead click on the checkbox. Some will turn to grey if you do that, then you’ll know you can’t use these in combination. Still, if you select ‘pageviews’, the ‘sessions’ metric doesn’t turn grey. And the list doesn’t show you on which scope every dimension or metric is processed. So this tool isn’t foolproof when it comes down to combining your dimensions and metrics in a custom report. Unfortunately, defining which scope it is, is something you have to do yourself.

Conclusion

When creating custom reports, segments or you’re going more advanced with custom dimensions and custom metrics, think about what you want to measure first. Think about on what level, or scope your dimensions and metrics are. And think about if it all makes sense. In general, if you want to add the Sessions metric to a custom report, make sure you stick to the Session-level scope! And don’t combine hit-level variables with session-level variables.

Read more: ‘How to guide: Tracking your SEO with Google Analytics’ »

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Ask Yoast: Canonical for PDF magazine

There are many occassions when you may want to put a PDF on your site. For example, when you’ve made an online magazine, when an article you wrote was featured in a book or magazine, or when you’ve written detailed instructions for a DIY project. So far, so good.

But things can get a bit more complicated when you also have the content from this PDF somewhere else on your site, or on another website. To avoid duplicate content, you need to set a canonical URL. But how do you do that for a PDF document? And what is the best way to do that? Let’s discuss in today’s Ask Yoast!

Karen Schousboe emailed us her question:

I plan to publish a PDF magazine under medieval.news. Some of the articles in each issue will also be freely available on a sister website. How should I handle that? Do I link canonical from the articles to the PDF magazine or from the magazine to the website?”

Watch the video or read the transcript further down the page for my answer!

Canonicalization and PDFs

“Well, you can have a canonical HTTP header and what I would suggest doing is canonicalizing from the PDF magazine to the sister website, because HTML pages just rank a lot better than PDFs, usually.

In fact, I would suggest publishing everything in HTML and not necessarily in PDF because PDF is just not very easy to land on from search. You can’t do any tracking, you can’t do a whole lot of things that you can do with HTML. So I would seriously consider doing all of it in HTML pages and then canonicalizing between them. Good luck.”

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Info
Ask Yoast

In the series Ask Yoast, we answer SEO questions from our readers. Have an SEO-related question? Maybe we can help you out! Send an email to ask@yoast.com.

Note: please check our blog and knowledge base first, the answer to your question may already be out there! For urgent questions, for example about our plugin not working properly, we’d like to refer you to our support page.

Read more: ‘rel=canonical: the ultimate guide’ »

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Google Duplex

At college, after getting demolished in squash against, Mike, a hyper-competitive pre-med, he asked me what I planned to do for a career. I told him I wanted to get into television. He sneeringly countered how he was going to become a surgeon and extend his patients’ lives by many years. The implication being I was wasting my life with something as trivial as TV. “That’s awesome Mike,” I responded enthusiastically, “You know what your patients are going to do with all that extra time on Earth you so generously bestowed them? Watch fucking TV.”

Google Duplex is rightly the talk of the tech town at the moment. It’s pretty amazing.

Sundar Pinchai closed his talk on Duplex with the following (emphasis mine):

“A common theme across all this is we are working hard to give users back time. We’ve always been obsessed about that at Google. Search is obsessed about getting users to answers quickly and giving them what they want.”

We all want more time to do the things we really want to do, but as I watched that video in bed on my phone shortly after I woke up yesterday morning, I couldn’t help but think that all most of us really want to do is the Internet equivalent of watch fucking TV.

The Jerky Boys are going to have a field day with this technology.

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What If B2B Keyphrase Research Doesn’t Work?

Looking for B2B keywords?
What do you do when conventional keyphrase research tools do you wrong?
Here’s what I mean.
Last February, I spoke during AWAI’S Web Content Intensive (woot — what a fun event!) During my presentation, a woman asked how she could find reliable keyword research metrics for her niche B2B.
Her problem? Conventional research tools, like

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Why Google Assistant Can Be The Most Intelligent AI Assistant Yet

It is no secret that Google optimizes all of their services on a regular basis, with 2018 being a year that has been introducing another set of updates. Some of these updates include the implementation of infinite scrolling on Google mobile search, removing the “View Image” option, along with the addition of title tags on Google Images, and the addition of Google Speed in the next few months.

Another major Google service that will be receiving updates in the near future is Google Assistant, which is one of the best AI assistants currently available. While this app can already perform functions such as open applications, search for nearby locations, and respond to search queries, Google demonstrated what else it could possibly do in the future.

At the I/O Developer’s conference on May 8, 2018, Google CEO Sundar Pichai presented some of Google Assistant’s upcoming features. One of the most notable features is the ability to make a phone call, which was met with awe from the audience.

The video above shows how Google Assistant is able to converse in a casual manner similar to how a person will do. If you were to listen to their conversations, you may not even know that it is being done by an AI assistant. After the first demonstration, Pichai discussed how this is all done using a new technology called Google Duplex. While it might be still under research, with more testing done during the summer season, this shows Google’s willingness to develop their technology, and turn Assistant into perhaps the most intelligent AI assistant available.

Google Duplex: A look into the future of AI

With the announcement from Sundar Pichai, Google Duplex is an AI technology that aims to allow AI assistants to be able to perform natural conversations to accomplish specific tasks. These tasks can be booking a hotel room or setting up an appointment with a nearby hair salon. While still being relatively new, the AI system is being trained to handle more natural conversations in order to communicate much better.

When it comes to overall convenience, Google Duplex allows users and businesses to be able to accomplish basic day-to-day tasks much faster. These calls are being done without user supervision, which frees up more time to perform more important tasks. Another great thing about Google Duplex is that it would be able to create a clear line of communication, especially when it comes to language barriers. With further testing being done, expect Google Duplex to be a system that will be able to interact seamlessly with human communication, and accomplish tasks with full autonomy.

Other Updates

Along with the announcement of Google Duplex, Google Assistant will also be integrated into different Google services and receive new updates as well. One of them is the addition of Custom Routines, which enables users to program a set of actions that Google Assistant will perform after a specific voice prompt. These routines can be set at certain times as well. For example, when you say “good morning”, Google Assistant will respond by performing assigned tasks that you instructed, such as playing some music or even turn some lights as well.

Another update is the integration of Google Assistant into Google Maps, which will help users find nearby places, such as restaurants and business establishments. Users will also have a personalized set of recommendations based on their preference and review scores. The popular service will also be integrating Google Lens, which would help users look for important places using images and Street View, and navigate much better. This feature can also be used to integrate augmented reality as well, which can be used by local businesses to tap into possible customers.

Google News will also soon be powered by AI, allowing for more personalized choices, and provide the latest news stories to its users. Users would also be able to subscribe to over thousands of digital magazines and provide quality news articles.

SEO Implications

With the continued development of AI across different platforms, especially with digital assistants, search is indeed getting smarter for its users. We have discussed previously how voice search aims to become an integral part of SEO this 2018, and how phrased searches would make be more prominent on these types of inquiries. Google has also received a good amount of updates, which include semantic search to allow it to understand language much better and generate better results. With Google Assistant receiving new updates, expect voice search to grow more in the next few years.

Key Takeaway

Google Assistant looks to become the best AI assistant available through new features that make it smarter and more efficient with its process. These new updates will not only make Assistant more efficient but also help make our daily tasks and work much faster through accomplishing more tasks and generating quality results.

If you have questions about Google services and tools, or SEO, leave a comment below and let’s talk.

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