Faster
Look, everyone wants to tell you that this or that is dead. It is. Everything died. And then there are new things. Those are alive. Until they die. Good. That’s out of the way.
Tuesday, October 3, 2017
Faster Deeper
How to avoid common SEO mistakes
A few weeks ago, I gave a lightning talk at WordCamp Nijmegen (my hometown in the Netherlands) on how to avoid common SEO mistakes. And this seemed a great topic to write a post about as well, so here it is! I’ll describe the most pressing SEO problems I find on sites I work on as an SEO consultant. Of course, I’ll also explain how to avoid them!
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It’s important to start with Yoast’s vision on SEO, namely holistic SEO. This means that we don’t just focus on the technical aspects of your site, but also see content and User eXperience (UX) as an important part of SEO. Therefore, the tips outlined in the article below will not only cover the strict definition of SEO, but also include a wide range of other aspects that site owners should pay attention to as well.
#1: Forgetting that faster is betterThe first thing I’d like to touch on is site speed. The faster your site, the more Google will favor it. There’s a very useful tool from Google itself to check your site speed: Google PageSpeed Insights. This tool gives you an overview of what aspects need improvement to boost the speed of a particular page.
One of the recommendations I frequently give as an SEO consultant is to optimize your images. A lot of websites have images that are relatively large, which take a lot of time to load. Resizing your images can increase the loading time. If you have a WordPress site, this can easily be done by installing a plugin that does that for you.
Another tip that I frequently give people is to enable browser caching and gzip compression. Both of them will speed up your entire site. The first makes your site faster to load for returning visitors and the latter compresses static files, which makes them faster to load into your browser.
In case of a WordPress install, I also recommend taking a good look at the plugins that are activated. Are you actually using all of them? Perhaps some of them can be replaced by another plugin that combines those functions? The best advice I can give you on this topic is that less is more. The fewer plugins that are activated, the faster your WordPress installment can be loaded.
#2: Trying to rank for the wrong keywordsIf you want to rank in Google you have to make sure that you’re using the right keywords for every page. One of the biggest mistakes I frequently encounter is that site owners are optimizing for too generic keywords. If you are a relatively small business that wants to rank for ‘rental car’, you’re aiming too high. You should try to come up with something more specific than that. Otherwise, you’re competing with all the car rental companies all over the world, which is impossible to do! So at least make sure you add the area in which your company is located to the keyword. This will make the keyword more long tail, as we call it.
The longer and more specific the keywords are, the higher your chances of ranking for this keyword. Of course, this also means that the search volume for this keyword decreases, but you can compensate for this by optimizing a lot of pages on your site for different long tail keywords. Your site will eventually gain more traffic for all of these keywords combined, than it ever would if you optimized for one main keyword, for which you could never rank page 1 in Google.
#3: Failing to invite people to visit your siteMetadata is what appears on search engine result pages (SERPs) when a website comes up for certain queries. It includes the title of the page and its meta description. The page title is still one of the most important ranking factors for Google, so you have to make sure it’s optimized correctly for every page. This means adding the relevant keyword to each particular page and making sure that your page title isn’t too long. If your page title is too long (currently 400 to 600 pixels), it will get cut off in Google. You don’t want potential visitors to be unable to read the full title in the SERPs.
The meta description is not a ranking factor, but it does play an important part in optimizing your Click Through Rate (CTR). CTR gives some insight into how likely potential visitors are to actually click on your site in the SERPs. If you optimize your meta descriptions with clear and attractive extracts on what potential visitors can find on your site, it becomes easier for them to see if the information they’re looking for is on that page. The more likely potential visitors are to think your site will provide an answer to their search query, the more traffic a page will gain.
#4: Neglecting to write awesome contentA lot is already written on this blog about writing awesome content, but I still frequently come across sites that do a poor job in writing content. It’s important to make sure every page of your site has decent content, at least 300 words. You can’t expect Google to see you as an expert on a certain topic when you have only written two sentences about it. This indicates to Google that your page probably isn’t the best result to match the search query.
Keep in mind that you don’t need to think of Google as your audience. You write for your visitors and not for Google. Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and provide the best answers possible. Therefore, writing quality content for your audience is also something that will immediately lead to Google’s approval.
Writing quality content means writing original content. This is also important to avoid duplicate content with other sites. And it means that sites have to stop stuffing keywords into their texts. Your text has to be easy to read for your visitor. Obviously, your visitor doesn’t benefit from a keyword stuffed text, because this decreases the readability.
#5: No call to action for your visitorsOnce visitors are on your site, an important goal is to keep them on your site. You don’t want your visitors immediately bouncing back to Google once they have read something on your site. This is why you need to encourage visitors to click through your site. The best way to do this is to create a call-to-action (CTA), which usually is a button that offers an action to your visitor. This can be, for instance, a ‘buy’ button on a product page, or a ‘sign up’ button for the newsletters.
Make sure that every page has one call-to-action, so the goal of the page is clear. If you add multiple buttons, you lose the focus of the page and your visitors won’t get where you want them to go. So think about what the right goal is for every page. Also, make sure that the CTA stands out from your design, so it’s clearly visible and cannot be missed. If the button blends into the design of your page too much, it will attract fewer clicks than when it stands out. So don’t be afraid to use a distinct color!
Keep reading: ‘Calling to the next action’ »
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Info #6: Not thinking ahead: The future is mobile
Since Google has announced that next year they will switch to mobile indexing first, you should be busy preparing your site for this change. ‘Mobile indexing first’ means that Google will look at the mobile version of your site to decide how high you should rank. So if the desktop version of your site is set up brilliantly, but your mobile site isn’t responsive at all, you have a lot of work to do if you don’t want to suffer a rank drop over next year.
A great way to test if your site is at least mobile friendly is to use Google’s mobile-friendly test. This gives you an indication if Google thinks your site is fit for displaying on mobile devices. But don’t stop after checking this. The best advice I can give you is to visit your site on your mobile phone. Browse your own site for a while and try to click on every button, image and link to see what happens. Is everything working as expected? Can you actually purchase something on your site while using your mobile phone? Are all pages displayed correctly? You will see that most sites have some work to do this fall.
Read on: ‘Mobile SEO: the Ultimate Guide’ »
In shortAs SEO consultant I’ve seen many sites making the same mistakes. Learn from the ones I listed in this post: focus on site speed, write great content and optimize for the right keywords. If you make sure people want to visit your site, have great calls-to-action and prepare for mobile, you’re already on your way to a well-optimized website, the holistic way!
http://ift.tt/2fNnPxbNegative SEO Protective Measures
The release of the Penguin update only increased the effects of negative SEO. Fortunately, Google released some solutions that can control it, but the overall defense against negative SEO is still up to, us, the SEO specialists. But what does negative SEO really mean?
Negative SEO
Negative SEO could be considered as the “foul play” of the SEO industry. It is the practice of using black hat SEO techniques to de-rank competitors. It could be a powerful tactic if done correctly. However, it’s still disliked by the majority of the SEO community, and its practitioners are not doing anything helpful towards the SEO industry.
Negative SEO can happen in a variety of ways. It could be through numerous spammy links, forceful crawling, and, in rare cases, plagiarism. However, if you’re diligent enough, you can prevent these attacks from causing irreversible harm to your website.
In case you are a victim, a potential target for attacks, or you simply want to protect your website, here are ways in which you can detect and prevent negative SEO from harming your website.
Link AuditsRoutinely auditing links is a good practice that most SEO specialists do. Fortunately, link audits can also help you detect if you are the target of a negative SEO attack. Constant monitoring of your link profile’s growth can help you discover suspicious link activity before it causes further harm to your website.
A standard graph of your link profile growth should look something like this:
However, if you notice a sudden increase or decrease and you have not worked on any link building campaigns, it should be a clear sign of a potential attack.
This attack happened to WP Bacon, a WordPress podcast site, back in 2014. It was the target of link farm spam that gave it more than a thousand links with the anchor text “porn movie”. This caused a major drop of more than 50 spots in the rankings for the majority of its main keywords.
Luckily, they immediately disavowed the attacking domain and was able to recover their rankings and traffic.
You can use a link auditing software like CognitiveSEO or manually audit your links, just as long as you are able to properly monitor your link profile’s growth. If you are already a victim of link farm spamming, immediately notify Google and disavow all the suspicious links.
Content ScrapingContent scraping is the process of taking content from a much more authoritative website and publishing it as your own. This happens because not everyone is good at content creation which leads them to plagiarize content.
It is worth noting that content scraping is done by small, underperforming websites, and not by authoritative, high-performing websites. Consequently, the usual victim of scraping are the high-performing websites.
If you are the victim of content scraping, you can expect consequences if the copied content gets indexed before yours. Your page might lose value and consequently, lead to a decrease in rankings.
You can use tools such as Copyscape to find copies of your content on the web. If you find a domain that has plagiarized your content, you can either ask the webmaster of the site to remove it or report them by using Google’s Copyright Removal form. You can use the form by filling out all the necessary information that Google needs and submitting it. This is what it looks like:
Bartosz Goralewicz experienced something unnatural with a client’s site back in 2014. The site was receiving more than a thousand visits that landed on a certain page that would instantly bounce. Since user experience is an important signal, the high bounce rate looked like very bad UX.
He found out that somebody had actually programmed a bot to target specific keywords that his client ranked for, it lands on the page, and then bounces right after, which leads to the creation of a false SERP bounce rate.
You can detect this attack by regularly monitoring the CTR of your keywords. To monitor, you can use Google Search Console. You can do this by:
- Going to Google Search Console and logging in
- Clicking the Search Traffic drop-down button
- Clicking Search Analytics to check your keywords’ CTR
- Bonus: Here’s a more in-depth look at Google Search Console’s Search Traffic Section
If you find any sudden spikes for no reason at all, immediately contact Google and disavow the links.
Site SpeedAnother ranking factor that negative SEO can potentially attack is your site speed. Practitioners of negative SEO can forcefully crawl your website and cause a heavy server load that will lead to the slowing down or even crashing of your website.
If you notice that your site has slowed down, you can use a crawling software like Screaming Frog to discover anything suspicious. If you do find something that proves you’re the victim of an attack, immediately contact your webmaster or hosting company to find out where the heavy server load is coming from and block them using robots.txt or .htaccess.
Security UpgradesAside from negative SEO, cyber attacks are still prevalent today. Making sure that all your software is updated, they possess all the available security patches and ensuring that your CMS software has top-notch encryption are just some of the things you need to improve your security.
Another important upgrade is to switch to HTTPS. It does not only give you better site security, it also serves as a good ranking signal that might help improve your rankings.
An instance where an upgrade in security can help you protect your site is when someone is trying to hack your website. If your website is hacked and the person involved has malicious intent and they tamper with your robots.txt file, it could lead to a complete de-indexing of your site and a massive drop in rankings. It is highly recommended that you use a rank tracking software to check your site’s visibility. If there are sudden drops, here’s how you can use Google Search Console to fix it:
- Go to Google Search Console
- Click the Crawl drop-down button
- Click the robots.txt Tester button to check if your robots.txt files are properly setup
- Bonus: Here’s a more in-depth look at Google Search Console’s Crawl Section
Numerous negative reviews might be a sign that someone is trying to ruin your brand image through fake reviews. However, reviews of your brand are not considered as negative SEO, but it can still damage your brand image and reputation.
Be aware of your Google My Business Listing and your online reputation by using a social media monitoring software. And if you notice anything suspicious about the reviews, here’s how you can flag it:
- Look for your business on Google Maps
- Scroll down to the Review Summary on the left panel
- Click the # Reviews button
- Click the three dots menu to open the Flag function
- Click the Flag as Inappropriate button
Being a victim of negative SEO, your best course of action is to monitor the totality of your website, isolate the problem before it causes more damage, then report it to Google.
Negative SEO might not be common, but do not be complacent. It is better for you to be protected than to suffer from irreversible damage. Simply take note of the things mentioned above, and be competent enough to monitor suspicious changes in your site and be responsible enough to increase your site’s security.
Do you know any other protective measures against negative SEO? Tell me in the comments below and let’s help each other out.
http://ift.tt/2hJ6eXCMonday, October 2, 2017
CBM100217
This live video was all shot using Ecamm Live (client), the best way to do Facebook Live for Mac.
Ask Yoast: www or no www?
If you own a website, you have probably, at some point, thought about your preferred URL. Perhaps you chose between www.yoursite.com and yoursite.com straight away and never thought about it again. Or maybe you switched to or from www at one point. While in the early days of the internet www was the norm, these days a good many sites of great repute -Yoast.com included ;)- don’t use www. So, are there any SEO-implications to choosing either option? I’ll get into that in this Ask Yoast!
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Dirkje Evers emailed us her question on this subject:
A Dutch hosting company told me that it’s better for Google to use the domain www.exampledomain.nl instead of exampledomain.nl. Should I take their advice or not?
Watch the video or read the transcript further down the page!
Should I use www for Google or not?“Dirkje Evers emailed us about a Dutch hosting company that had recommended to them that using www.example.nl was better than using just example.nl for Google. And whether they should take that advice or not. Well, no… That’s what we call…nonsense. In terms that I can use on video. Because I’m actually up to use some other terms. It’s absolutely nonsense, you don’t have to use www for anything. The only reason why you would use www.something is if people would otherwise not recognize your domain name as a domain name. Which is something that is bound to happen, if you have a somewhat older target audience. But other than that use whatever you want. Use www or do not use www, whatever rocks your boat.
Good luck!”
Ask YoastIn the series Ask Yoast we answer SEO questions from followers. Need some advice about SEO? Let us help you out! Send your question to ask@yoast.com.
(note: please check our knowledge base first, the answer to your question may already be there! For urgent questions, for example about our plugin not working properly, we’d like to refer you to our support page.)
Friday, September 29, 2017
What’s the ‘Best’ Word Count for Google? [Updated for 2017]
Have you wondered how long a blog post or landing page should be for Google?
Over the years, that number has been a moving target.
Once upon a time, SEO consultants recommended that every page has at least 250 words.
Amazingly, some people considered 250 words “too much content.” “People won’t read all of it,” folks complained. “I don’t
It’s 2017. Is SEO Copywriting Training Still Needed?
Have you shelved SEO copywriting training for your in-house writers, figuring the money was better spent elsewhere?
That strategy may put your company at a competitive disadvantage.
Conductor recently reported that half of all content jobs require some SEO skills.
That means companies (like your competitors) are valuing SEO copywriting knowledge more than ever before.
Are you ready?
This statistic shocked me. Yes,
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