Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide - Equinet Academy€¦ · Starter Guide Equinet Academy. Table of Contents Part 1: Introduction to SEO Search Engine Optimization Theory -

Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide

Equinet Academy

Table of Contents

Part 1: Introduction to SEO

Search Engine Optimization Theory

- What is SEO? 1 - Push Vs. Pull Marketing 2 - How do Search Engines Work? 3 - White-hat Vs. Black-hat SEO 4 - Summary 6

Part 2: Internal SEO

Writing Unique and Engaging Content

- Planning Your Keywords 7 - Writing Unique and Engaging Content 8 - Examples of Engaging Content 10 - Quality Deserves Freshness (QDF) 11

On-Page SEO

- Keywords 12 - Use Synonyms 13 - Title & Header Tags 14 - URL 15 - Main Content Area 16 - Meta Description 17 - Image Optimization 18

Advanced On-Page SEO

- Robots.txt 19 - Index and Noindex 20 - Rel=”Nofollow” 21 - Canonicalization 22 - Rich Snippets 23

Site Structure

- Planning Your Site Navigation 24 - Main Navigation Menu 25 - Extended Site Links on SRPs 26 - Breadcrumbs and Pagination 27

Other Internal SEO Factors

- Site Speed 28 - Avoid Broken Links (404 Pages) 29 - Avoid Duplicate Content/Titles 30 - Sitemaps 31 - Do Not Overload Site with Ads 32

Part 3: External SEO

PageRank and Site Authority

- PageRank 33 - Site Authority 34

Backlinks - Backlinks 35 - Anchor Text 36 - PageRank and Relevancy 37 - Location of Backlink 38 - Site Identity 39 - Reciprocal Linking 40 - Link Diversity 41 - History of Inbound Links 42

Introduction to Link Building - Link Building Strategies 43 - Link Schemes 44 - High Quality Directory Listings 45 - Participate in Niche Discussions 46 - Link Baiting 48

End

Part 1: Introduction to SEO

What Is SEO?

Copyright © Equinet Academy 2013 - 2014 All Rights Reserved ®SEO Guide

Why Should You Learn SEO?

SEO or Search engine optimization is the process of affecting a website’s visibility on the search engine results pages for a target set of keywords/keyphrases.

There are millions of people using search engines to search for information - from general information to information on businesses, products, and services.

If you have a website featuring your company's products and services, search engine optimization can make your site more visible to your customers.

Better Visibility = Increased Sales

Research has shown that 87% of consumers in the “research phase” use a search engine (over 60% use Google) to gather information on a product or service before making a purchase decision.

If you owned a business providing car repair services in your area, and there were over a thousand searches a month for the term “car repair services in [your location]“, wouldn’t it make a lot of sense to be on the 1st page of the search results where you’ll be visible and prominent to your target customers?

Hell yes!

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Push Vs. Pull Marketing


Attraction Marketing

Back in the old days, traditional marketing methods, or rather push marketing, were very effective.

Launch a newspaper ad back then and you’ll get a ton of responses the following day. Sadly, they are no longer as effective as they were in the past.

Today's ideal marketing strategy is “attraction” or “pull” marketing, and search engine optimization is one of the most effective attraction marketing strategies you can apply to virtually any business!

The Effectiveness of Search Marketing

People who search for your industry-related keywords/keyphrases and discover your website are more likely to convert into customers than people who receive your promotional flyers.

Notice the use of the word “discover”. Today’s consumers don’t like the idea of being marketed to or sold to. They prefer to be the ones who “make the discovery” or make the decision of a purchase.

By making your website visible on the search results where potential customers are searching for information, you are marketing your business in an indirect and subtle manner.

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How Do Search Engines Work?


Crawling and Indexing

Search engines work to deliver the most relevant results for any search query keyed in by the user. They do so by sending millions of tiny robots or spiders to crawl millions of webpages.

The data is then fetched back to the database, sorted out, indexed, and displayed on the search results pages.

Search Engine Algorithms

Search engines use a complex set of calculations or algorithms to determine which pages to display for any given search query.

Yes, we are looking at hundreds of ranking factors.

These algorithms are constantly improved and updated to combat web spam also known as black-hat SEO. We will take a further look at the difference between white-hat and black-hat SEO.

What is PageRank?

What is PageRank? PageRank is basically what Google assigns to a webpage to indicate how authoritative the page is. Google crawls the web in decreasing order of PageRank.

What this means is, the higher your PageRank, the more often Google will crawl your site, and the quicker your pages will be found and indexed.

PageRank is calculated on a scale of 0-100 and is determined by the number and importance of other websites linking to your site.

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White-hat Vs. Black-hat SEO


Black-hat SEO

Web spam is known as black-hat SEO and search engines are on a never ending battle against web spam. Let’s take a look at some examples of web spam:

Keyword Stuffing

Here’s a visual example of keyword stuffing:

Trying to rank for target keywords – “Cake decorating tutorial” and “How to decorate a cake”.

Cloaking

Cloaking refers to displaying different content to search engine bots and humans. An example would be making some text white on a white coloured background in an attempt to cloak the text and fool search engines. Unfortunately, this only screams “penalize me!” to search engines.

Comment Spam

Comment spam is one of the oldest and dumbest black-hat SEO techniques and surprisingly it is still used very frequently by web spammers today. Comment spam is commonly executed by bots, but some do it manually. An example of blog comment spam would be a completely unrelated comment with keyword-stuffed sentences and a link back to the spammer’s website.

We’ve only scratched the surface of the common types of black-hat SEO techniques. We’ll cover more examples of black-hat SEO as we go along.

View Google’s Webmaster Tools guidelines on Link schemes.

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https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66356?hl=en

White-hat Vs. Black-hat SEO


White-hat SEO

Now let’s take a look at some white-hat SEO examples:

Quality Content

The foundation for effective SEO is writing quality content that is engaging and encourages readers to share it on their own.

Quality content isn’t 100 words or less with a ton of target keywords hamburgered into every paragraph. It’s 300-1000 or more words with the target keywords mentioned throughout the article in a natural-sounding way.

Natural Links from Topic-related Websites

Acquiring backlinks from websites that share the same topic or from the same industry as yours will help push your search engine ranking results. The key to getting natural links is having value-added content on your website and getting in touch with other webmasters in your industry.

Well-designed Site Structure

Use HTML for your webpages and use less of javascript, flash, or any other code language that is difficult for search engine bots to crawl through. Site navigation also plays an important role in crawlability for search engines and ease of navigation for users.

Here’s a good rule of thumb. If your users are having a hard time finding the inner pages of your site, very likely will search engine bots as well. Make sure that the inner pages of your site are adequately linked to by other related pages within your site.

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Summary of Part One


Build Your Website For the User, Not For Search Engines

The conclusion is to build your site for the user, not for search engines. Search engines were created with the user experience in mind – to provide the most relevant search results for any given search query. So if you follow this rule of thumb, you'll be well on the right track!

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Part 2: Internal SEO

Planning Your Keywords


Relevancy

Relevance is one of the most important and heavyweight factors that Google uses to determine which position a particular page should show on the search results for a given keyword search query.

It is also important to put yourself in the minds of your potential consumers and anticipate what they might type in to search for something on Google.

Use Google Keyword Planner

Let’s go back to our cake decorating tutorial example. If you are a cake decorating tutorial website and plan to write an article promoting a cake decorating class, first do some keyword research using Google’s Keyword Planner to see what search queries people are typing into Google.

Key in a short keyphrase to start off i.e. “decorate a cake”.

In this section, we will cover internal ranking factors of a website and how to optimize your site internally to rank better on the Search Results Pages (SRPs).

Tip:

If you are just starting out, a good strategy would be to aim to rank for long-tail keywords (3 or more words in a search query) first. There are two reasons for this:

1. Long-tail keywords are usually more targeted and specific search queries resulting in higher conversion rates. i.e. (Buy a cake online).

2. It is more often easier to compete in the SRPs rankings with longer tail keywords.

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https://adwords.google.com/ko/KeywordPlanner/Home

Planning Your Keywords


Google Keyword Planner Data

As we can see, Google’s Keyword Planner gives you a couple of keyword ideas that are related to your original search term and even provides you with the monthly average number of searches for each related keyphrase.

Notice how users type in search queries such as “How to decorate a cake”?

Build a List of Keywords

The next step is to list these keywords down somewhere and insert them into your content wherever appropriate, preferably in the title tags if you want to rank for a specific keyphrase.

Repeat this step as many times as you need until you’ve gathered a sizable list of keywords that your page can potentially rank for.

Relevancy is Key

Remember, the key here is relevance.

If your article title is “How to Decorate a Cake”, your content should be talking about cake decorating and giving tips on how to decorate a cake. You want it to sound as natural as possible.

The key is to let it flow naturally as you write, not worrying about when or where to insert the keywords. Then once you’ve finished writing the article, go back and insert the keywords wherever appropriate.

Tip:You also want make sure that you diversify your target keywords, and you do that by looking out for synonyms of your targeted keywords. For example, a synonym of “Cake baking classes” can be mentioned as “Cake baking courses“.

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Writing Unique & Engaging Content


Importance of Quality Content

Content. Content. Content. You’ll hear this over and over again.

Quality content is important not just for SEO, but also for getting repeat visits to your site and ultimately achieving your conversion goals. It is the foundation and pillar of your site’s success.

Writing quality content is so essential that even if you ranked on the 1st page of the search results, you may not achieve your expected conversion rate if users do not find any importance in staying on your website.

The Key to a Successful SEO Campaign is to Focus on Quality Content

Creating useful and engaging content will naturally encourage readers to share your content and create a word-of-mouth buzz.

They may post links to your site through their own blogs, social media platforms, forums, or other means which could build your site’s reputation and authority with both the user community and Google.

Tip:Note that Google takes into account(a ranking factor) how long a user stays on your page and how many internal pages of your site the user navigates through after clicking and landing on your page from a search result.

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Examples of Engaging Content


Create List Posts

Here’s an example of a headline that will catch your readers’ attention – “Top 10 Ideas of Starting Up a Business From Virtually No Investment”. If you’re going to write on something that sounds really compelling and unbelievable, great! But be sure you’re able to deliver your promises.

Gather a list of interesting points and expand on it. People love reading list posts, especially if the content is compelling and engaging.

Interview Experts in Your Industry

Find an expert in your industry and email them, politely requesting that you would like to interview them. Be sure to mention that you respect that their time is valuable and that you would really appreciate if they could take five minutes to read your email and answer a few questions.

After you've interviewed them, create a post quoting your interviewee and expressing your opinions. Don't forget to link back to your interviewee and shout out/tweet him/her a thanks.

Create Fresh, Unique Content on Trending Topics

If you ever run out of ideas on topics to write about, do some research using Google Trends to find out what are the trending search terms in your related industry.

If you own a car website and are looking for trending topics to write about, you can do a search on Google Trends by keying in a car brand name, which will return different related trending search terms such as a particular car model, then do a fresh and unique review post on it. Which leads us to the next point – Query Deserved Freshness (QDF)

Below is an example of a Google Trends report:

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http://www.google.com/trends

Query Deserves Freshness (QDF)


What is Query Deserves Freshness? (QDF)

What in the world is Query Deserves Freshness?

If you’ve ever done a search on any trending topic, you may have noticed a couple of webpages topping the Google search results pages, then disappearing all of a sudden and are nowhere to be seen after a few days.

That’s what Google does from time to time – apply the QDF algorithm to fresh content on trending topics.

How QDF Works?

1. Whenever there is a spike in the number of searches for any given period of time, Google kicks in the QDF algorithm. As we can see in the “BMW i3” example above, the number of search queries spiked around July the 29th and if we do a search on the “BMW i3″, we see fresh content ranked above older content on the 1st page of the search results.

2. Next, Google starts looking for related fresh content that fulfills an array of freshness attributes. For example how recent were inbound links pointing to the fresh content.

3. Google then calculates the freshness score and displays the most appropriate results for the trending search term.

“Google Loves Fresh Content!”

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Keywords


Plan Your Keywords Before Writing

Always identify potential keywords that could drive traffic to your site before you begin writing your article. Use Google's Keyword Planner.

You don't have to include your target keywords in your article straight away, you can always go through the article after you're done writing and slot them in wherever appropriate.

Having your target keywords in mind will give you a better idea of what to write and also help you to create a more relevant article to your keyword topic.

Keyword Density Myth

Have you heard about the keyword density myth? Is it fact or fiction? Here’s the answer.

It’s fiction.

Back in 2007, keyword density was one of the ranking factors in Google’s algorithms. But many web spammers started abusing it, trying to game Google, hence you started to see many instances of “Keyword Stuffing” on many webpages across.

The keyword density situation got worse when SEOs started speculating the “appropriate” percentage of targeted keywords that should be on a page in order to rank higher on the search engine results pages (SRPs) – 2%, 5%, 7%, 10%.

None of this is true today. Even just mentioning the keyword once in the main content section can get you ranked on Google for that keyword.

“Fiction!”

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https://adwords.google.com/ko/KeywordPlanner/Home

Use Synonyms


Use Synonyms of Your Target Keywords

Contrary to what you may think, Google actually understands synonyms associated with your target keywords.

Take for example the keyword “automobile”. Google recognizes its synonyms and automatically associates “cars”, “transportation”, and “vehicles” with the original keyword “automobile”.

If you are dealing with car spare parts and want your website to rank well on Google for “car spare parts”, be sure to include “car spare parts” as well as “automobile spare parts” throughout your webpages.

Finding Synonyms

So how do we find synonyms?

One of the easiest ways is to go to www.thesaurus.com and type in your target keyword and you'll get a couple of synonyms.

Another way is to go to Google’s Keyword Planner, key in your target keyword, and search for some related keyword ideas.

Once you’ve identified a couple of synonyms with acceptable search volume, form a list.

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http://www.thesaurus.com/

https://adwords.google.com/ko/KeywordPlanner/

Title & Header Tags


Title Tags

<title>Title Tags</title> should not be confused with <h1>Header Tags</h1>.

Title tags should be placed in the <head></head> section of your page to let search engines and users know what your page is about.

WordPress automatically does this for you, and even adds a <H1> header tag to your title. Including your target keywords in your <H1> tag is good SEO.

Header Tags

<H1>, <H2>, <H3> are sorted not just by order of font size, but also by order of importance.

Search engines pay attention to which header tags you use and whether you include your target keywords in the header tags.

A rule of thumb – try to avoid using the <H1> tag more than once on a page unless you have good reason to. If unsure, use <h3> and you should be in good shape.

Title Tags

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URL (Uniform Resource Locator)


How to Write Your URLs

Your URL i.e. (http://www.example.com/page-title-with-keywords/) should be short, descriptive, and have your target keywords inserted into it. It also good practice to keep your URLs in good structure by creating descriptive categories and parent pages.

If your URLs contain more than one word, put a dash or an underscore to separate the words. Dashes are recommended.

Should Target Keywords Be Included in the Primary Domain Name?

The answer is - not necessarily.

Exact keyword match domain names used to have a high ranking factor. Such as “www.onlineshopping.com” had a high chance of ranking for the search term “Online Shopping”.

Not anymore.

As long as the keyword is within the entire URL (i.e. www.shoponline.com/online-shopping”), it is still calculated into the overall page ranking factors.

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Main Content Area


Tips For Your Main Content Area

1. Include your target keyword high up in your opening paragraph. (In the first one or two sentences)

2. Write as naturally as you can with the reader in mind. If you write for users, not search engines, you will future-proof your SEO efforts as that is what search engines are heading towards.

3. Include synonyms of your target keywords throughout your main content.

4. Write 300 words or more. There is no fixed rule, use it only as a guide. If you go over 2000 words, it may be a good idea to separate the content into two or more different pages.

5. Separate different sections of your content into catchy, descriptive headings.

6. Make your content easy to read by using HTML text and standard font-size.

7. Add pictures or any visual imageries whenever appropriate

8. Try to keep each paragraph at 3 – 4 lines as a guide. The longer a paragraph, the lengthier it seems to the reader, and this might scare away wordy-paranoia people before they even begin reading the first sentence.

Main Content Area

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Meta Description


What is Meta Description?

Description meta tags give Google a summary of what your page is about. Google may or may not use your meta description on the search results pages (SRPs). It really depends on what the user search query is.

If the search query matches some of the keywords in your meta description, then Google may show it. Otherwise, Google will automatically generate a snippet from your page content to show on the SRPs.

Meta Description Code Example

A meta description is always a good option to include in your page’s HTML code. Heres an example of the code:

Meta Description for WordPress Users

If you are using WordPress, you may install the WordPress SEO plugin by Yoast. The meta description box will be on every page and post editor. See example:

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http://yoast.com/wordpress/seo/

Image Optimization


Why Should You Optimize Your Images?

Optimizing your images may bring you some additional traffic from Google Images Search. It is also considered a ranking factor for your page's overall ranking.

Image File Name

Include your targeted keywords in your file name (i.e. “bmw i3 car model.jpeg”).

It is also a good practice to store all your images in one directory, so that the path to your images is simplified and easier for search engines to crawl through.

(i.e. http://example.com/images/bmw-i3-car-model.jpeg/”)

Title and Alt Tags

You will also have the option to include the title image and alt tags. Include your target keywords in both of them but pay closer attention to the alt tags, as Google will look at your image alt tags to have an idea of what your images is about.

So make your alt tags more descriptive.

Your title tags will show up when the cursor hovers over the image.

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Robots.txt


What is a Robots.txt?

Search engines use bots or spiders to crawl the web, and if there are certain pages on your site that you do not want these bots to crawl through, you may use a robots.txt file to instruct search engines not to crawl a particular page.

However, only some bots obey the robots.txt file (i.e. Google Bot and other major search engines), so there may be spam bots that could still crawl your content.

For this reason, we recommend privatizing or password-protecting content that you want to keep confidential.

How to Create a Robots.txt

To generate a robots.txt, you may create it manually , or use a robots.txt tool generator. Once your robots.txt file is generated, upload it to your domain’s root server via cPanel or ftp. If you are unsure, contact your web hosting provider.

Robots.txt

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https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/156449?hl=en&ref_topic=2370588

http://www.mcanerin.com/EN/search-engine/robots-txt.asp

Index and Noindex


Index or Noindex?

When search engines like Google crawl your pages, they will look to see whether you want your pages to be indexed in their search results or not.

If for some reason you do not want any page in your site to show up on the search results, you may add a robots meta tag to an individual page to prevent search engines from indexing it on the SRPs.

How do You Noindex a Page?

You can add a robots meta tag on any page to tell Google not to index any particular page.

Example of a robots meta tag in your page’s <head> section to tell search engines not to index your page:

Noindex a Page on Wordpress

If you're using Wordpress, you can skip the technical process and easily select noindex from the page editor of any particular page.

However you first need to install the Wordpress SEO plugin by Yoast.

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http://wordpress.org/plugins/wordpress-seo/

Rel=”Nofollow”


What is Rel=”Nofollow” Tag Used For?

Whenever you link to another website with an anchor text, you are passing some PageRank to the page you just linked to.

PageRank will be further explained in the External SEO section of this course.

Basically the more links a webpage gets, the higher the PageRank (measured on a scale of 1 to 100) of the webpage.

Now there are some instances when you do not want to pass PageRank to a particular source you link to. For example your blog comments section. Blogs are always a target for web spammers trying to put links into comments.

Google has link policies about linking to unrelated, spammy websites and if you are found linking extensively to spammy websites, you could get penalized by Google.

To prevent any link juice from passing on to a spammy website, the rel=”nofollow” tag is used.

How to Use the Rel=“Nofollow” Tag?

There are two ways to use the Rel=”Nofollow” attribute.

1. To block all links on a page from passing page rank, the following code is place the in the <head> section:

<meta name=”robots” content=”nofollow” />

2. To block a specific link from passing page rank, the following code is used when creating an anchor text:

<a href=”http://examplelink.com” rel=”nofollow”>example link</a>

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Canonicalization


What is Canonicalization?

What is canonicalization? “Canonicalization is setting the preferred version of a set of pages with highly similar content.” – as defined by Google.

www. or no www.

When you create a site, you have to option to set a preferred domain either:

http://www.example.com or

htpp://example.com

If you are using WordPress, you can navigate to the Settings => General and set your preferred domain.

You can also setup a Google Webmaster Tools account and tell Google which is your preferred domain.

Types of URLs You Should Canonicalize

Example of a set of pages with dynamic url and highly similar content:

http://example.com/product-category/web-tools/wordpress-themes/?filter_license=20

http://example.com/product-category/web-tools/wordpress-themes/?filter_format=template

Why is Canonicalization Important?

When Google crawls your site and finds several pages with similar content, it may only index one version to display on the search results.

Therefore, if you want to specify to Google which page is the one you them to index, you can do so by adding a html code:

<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://example.com/shop/product.php?item=psd-download”/>

in the <head> section of your page.

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https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/

Rich Snippets


What Are Rich Snippets?

What are rich snippets? When you do a search on Google, you may notice that certain search results have different elements such as review ratings, date of post, video preview, etc.

Why use rich snippets? Rich snippets present your content more attractively on the SRPs, increasing your click-through rate and ultimately driving more traffic to your site.

How Do You Apply the Markup?

There are a couple ways to create rich snippets:

1. Microformats2. Microdata3. RDFa

We will go through Microformats for this example.

The following HTML code is a review of a basic fondant cake recipe:

<div>How to prep and execute a basic fondant cake.You will need: … The frosting may be pushed outby the weight of the top tier but this if fine. … 3 …Rating: 5Stars based on 30 ratings</div>

What Are Rich Snippets?

What are rich snippets? When you do a search on Google, you may notice that certain search results have different elements such as review ratings, date of post, video preview, etc.

Why use rich snippets? Rich snippets present your content more attractively on the SRPs, increasing your click-through rate and ultimately driving more traffic to your site.

The markup code will look something like this:

<div><h1 class=”title fn”>Basic Fondant Cake</h1><span class=”author”> by <a href=”/member/MVMann/” title=”view MVMann’s profile”>MVMann</a></span><span class=”review hreview-aggregate hidden”><span class=”rating”>rated <span class=”average”>5</span>stars based on <span class=”count”>30</span> ratings</span></span></div>

For more examples on how to create rich snippets, visit this link.

For WordPress users, you may install a variety of plugins to generate rich snippets.

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https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/99170?hl=en&ref_topic=1088472

https://www.google.com.sg/search?q=wordpress+richsnippets+plugins&oq=wordpress+richsnippets+plugins&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i64.4157j0&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8#fp=a70c8018b0426e41&q=wordpress+rich+snippets+plugins&spell=1

Planning Your Site Navigation


Importance of Easy Site Navigation

Navigation is very important not just for search engines to understand your site better, but also for your visitors to find content they are looking for easily.

If all your pages are well connected to each other and easily found within a few clicks, you will find that your pages get indexed faster and do better on SRPs.

Planning Your Site Navigation

A good guide to follow is to plan out your site’s navigation starting from the homepage. Can the deeper and more nested content be found within 2 clicks or less from the homepage? Take a look at the example:

Each page is within 2 clicks from the home page

(i.e. Home => Products => DIY Tools)

Interlinking Your Posts and Pages

Every new page created should have at least one link to it, either from the main navigation menu, sidebar, or another page/post.

When your posts and pages are well interlinked, not only will you find that your content gets indexed better, your visitors will also stay longer on your site.

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Main Navigation Menu


Importance of Main Navigation

When a user lands on your site, one of the first few things he or she looks at is your main navigation menu. Just looking at the items on the main navigation menu can give the user a good basic idea on what your site is about.

What to Include in the Main Navigation

Your main navigation menu should include the most important pages of your site such as your about, contact, and products/services pages.

Organizing Your Main Navigation Menu

If you need to include more than 10 links, it would be recommended to include drop down bars or a secondary navigation menu placed below your primary menu.

Drop-down Menu

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Extended Site Links On SRPs


Extended Sitelinks on Search Results

If your site navigation is very well structured, search engines like Google may add sitelinks to your search results pages.

Having sitelinks can have a positive effect on the Click-Through Rate (CTR) of your site’s pages, generating more visits to your site.

How Do I Get Extended Site Links?

Sitelinks are automatically generated. There are some factors that Google uses to determine whether a sitelink should show or not.

One of the factors is the popularity of the page (how many visits on a particular page).

If you’d like to remove a sitelink from the search results, Google Webmaster Tools allows you to submit a request to “demote” the sitelink.

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Breadcrumbs and Pagination


Breadcrumbs

Breadcrumbs are a row of internal links located at the top or bottom of the page that allow visitors to easily navigate back to the root page or previous section.

Having breadcrumbs also allows search engines to understand your site structure better.

Pagination

Pagination are usually seen in blog categories or resource lists.

The same theory applies to pagination as to breadcrumbs – better ease of navigation for both users and search engines.

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Site Speed


Does Site Speed Matter?

Site speed is one of those things you don’t really have to worry about, unless your pages take 10 minutes to load. No, actually 8 seconds or longer and Google may start to take notice.

Research has shown that people have an average attention span of 4 seconds for a page to load before navigating away to another page.

If your site takes longer than 8 seconds to load, you may want to take a couple of steps to ensure that your page loading time is reduced.

How to Analyze Your Page Speed?

First, let’s check out how to analyze your page speed.

1. Navigate to Google Page Speed Insights.

2. Enter your webpage url.

Page Speed will give you insights on how you can optimize your page speed by solving a couple of issues such as minifying HTML, CSS, optimizing images, etc.

For WordPress users, it is recommended you install a plugin such as W3 Total Cache to reduce your page load time.

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https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/

http://wordpress.org/plugins/w3-total-cache/

Avoid Broken Links (404 Pages)


Broken Links (404 Pages)

Broken links will take the user to a 404 page – a page notifying the user that “The page cannot be found”.

If you have one or two broken links within your website, you shouldn’t have too much to worry about. But if they aren’t fixed after some time and your 404 broken links start to increase, then your rankings will start to drop.

How to Check for Broken Links?

Use a free broken link checker tool such as Broken Link Check to spot and fix any broken links found within your entire site.

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http://www.brokenlinkcheck.com/

Avoid Duplicate Content/Titles


Avoid Duplicate Titles

Creating unique, short but descriptive page titles increase your chances of any of your pages ranking on the 1st page of the SRPs.

Avoid having duplicate titles or duplicate content, as this confuses the search engines and either duplicate pages may not get indexed at all.

Taking Measures

If for any reason you decide to have duplicated content, then you can take measures by adding noindex / nofollow to the page.

Instead of having two pages with the same title (i.e. “Introduction”), expand the title a little bit (i.e. “introduction to SEO” and “Introduction to Social Media”)

DuplicateDuplicateContentContent

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Sitemaps


What is a Sitemap?

Sitemaps for a website are similar to internal directories in a shopping mall. Sitemaps help tell Google and other search engines the overall structure of your site, as well as deep pages into your site that search engine bots may not otherwise discover.

It would be recommended to create 2 types of sitemaps – One for the user, and one for the search engines.

How to Create a Sitemap

A sitemap for users may just be a simple page with headers and links to help the user navigate through your website at anytime. A sitemap for users can be in HTML format. A sitemap for search engines is in XML format (XML Sitemap).

For reference on how to create a sitemap manually, view this guide.

To generate a sitemap for your site automatically, click here.

For WordPress users, installing the Wordpress SEO Plugin by Yoast will auto generate a sitemap for your WordPress site.

Submit Your Sitemap to Search Engines

To submit your sitemap to Google, create a Google Webmaster Tools account and submit your sitemap through the admin panel.

To submit your sitemap to Bing, create a Bing Webmaster Tools account and submit your sitemap through the admin panel.

There are a lot of things to take in to consideration when it comes to optimizing your site internally for search engines. Google itself calculates hundreds of ranking factors before deciding which page is the most useful and relevant to a user search query.

We’ve just gone through several major ranking factors, now let’s look at a couple more internal SEO factors to take note of and/or avoid.

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https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/183668

https://code.google.com/p/sitemap-generators/wiki/SitemapGenerators

http://yoast.com/wordpress/seo/

https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/

http://www.bing.com/toolbox/webmaster

Do Not Overload Site With Ads


Avoid Overloading Your Site with Ads

Have you ever been to a site that is full of ad display banners, ad text links, ad popups and pop-unders?

Overloading your site with ads provides a poor user experience and Google has measures in place to devalue pages that are overloaded with ads.

General Rule of Thumb

Cap your ads at 1 to 3 per page

Keep your ads out of the main content body. Place them in the sidebar or header area.

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Part 3: External SEO

PageRank


What is PageRank?

PageRank is a measurement of the relative importance of every page on the web. (PageRank is measured on a scale of 0 to 100, 100 being the highest.)

The higher the PageRank of a given web page, the more trustworthy or important it must be.

A web page’s PageRank is mainly calculated by the number of citations (links pointing from other websites to the web page) it has, and how important or trustworthy the citations are.

If a web page has one link pointing to it from a Yahoo page with PageRank 7, it will be deemed more important and trustworthy than a web page with a hundred backlinks from low quality sites with PageRanks of zero.

PageRank Flow Diagram

Let’s take a closer look at how PageRank flows.

Looking at the diagram on the right, we can see that a page with a PageRank of 100 has two outgoing links.

Each of the outgoing links are carrying diluted PageRank (50 and 50) to the linked page.

A page with PageRank of 9 with three outgoing links pass a page rank of 3 to each linked page.

What we are looking at is a simplified representation of how PageRank flows throughout the web.

In this section, we will cover external SEO and link building strategies that you can apply to rank your site better on the Search Results Pages (SRPs).

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Site Authority


What Determines the Authority of a Site?

What separates a useful, informative, and trustworthy page from a useless page that’s packed with junk info and jargon?

The answer would be – The majority of votes by users.

The more useful or valuable a particular content is, the more naturally people would want to share and recommend others to it. And search engines use this signal as a very strong ranking factor.

The key to becoming an authority in your niche is to try and acquire as many links from as many trustworthy sources as possible.

To understand in detail how Google crawls the web and calculates site authority, read this report.

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http://ilpubs.stanford.edu:8090/347/1/1998-51.pdf

Backlinks


What is a Backlink?

Well, what is a backlink? A backlink is a text link from website A pointing to website B. The words in the text link are also known as anchor text.

Typically, you want the anchor text to contain the keywords that people are searching for on Google. This will help Google better understand the context of the backlink.

Factors of a Quality Backlink

A backlink from a particular page is considered highly valuable if the following components match:

High domain authority

High PageRank

Page title relevance

Content topic relevance

Keyword relevance of anchor text

Backlink is placed within the main content body

Dofollow links

Age of the page

Age of the backlink

.edu and .gov sites

Spontaneous/Natural reference as opposed to

unnatural linking pattern

How Do I Get Backlinks?

There are a lot of ways to get backlinks. Creating quality content and sharing it on social media sites can increase the exposure of your content and increase the likelihood of people linking to your content.

More examples will be discussed in the link building section later in this guide.

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Anchor Text


Importance of Anchor Text

Before there was SEO, links were just links. Until Google and other search engines counted the anchor text of a link as a ranking factor.

The anchor text in a backlink indicates to Google that the context of the linked website is related to the keywords in the anchor text.

Therefore, if a website has a lot of backlinks with the target keywords included in the anchor text, it will rank better on Google for the target search keyword.

Anchor Text for SEO

If a musical instruments store (i.e. www.musicinstrumentstore.com) had ten PageRank 3 websites linking to their website with the anchor text “musical instrument store”, this website would do pretty well on the Google SRPs for the keyword search phrase “Musical Instrument Store”.

Anchor Text for SEO

Diversify your anchor texts with synonyms and variations of the same word.

For example, instead of having 10 anchor texts with “Musical Instrument Store”, having “Music Instruments Shop” for 5 of them would seem more natural.

Tip:Keyword variations and synonyms in your anchor texts will look more natural in terms of white-hat SEO. 1000 backlinks from 100 PageRank 0 websites with the same anchor text (i.e. “Musical Instrument Store”) is a signal of black-hat SEO.

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PageRank and Relevancy


PageRank of a Backlink

Google takes the PageRank of the page linking to your website into account when crawling your site’s backlinks. If an authority site is recommending your site, that must mean that your website has some importance.

Relevancy of a Backlink

The second factor is relevancy. Is this authority site that’s linking to your site related to your niche? Is a high authority shoe review website recommending your shoe store? If you have lots of links from relevant authority sites in your niche, you will stand a high chance in ranking for keywords that you are targeting in your niche.

Wikipedia Example

If you Google the search query “shoe”, you’ll find wikipedia on the very first position of Google’s search results.

Let’s take a look at a backlinks report for [en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoe] from MajesticSEO. (We will go through MajesticSEO more in section 3 – Spying on Your Competitors with Advanced SEO Tools.

Let's take a look at the top 10 sites with the most backlinks linking to [en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoe].

Almost all of them are shoe websites.

Wikipedia is on the 1st page search results for two main reasons:

1) Wikipedia.org itself has a very high PageRank of 97.

2) Coupled with many niche related sites linking to its shoe page, [en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoe] gets the 1st place on Google’s search results.

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Location of Backlink


Backlinks in the Main Content Area Carry the Most Weight

Let’s say a page has 3 outgoing links. One in the main content area, one in the sidebar, and one in the footer area. The backlink in the main content area will carry the most weight.

The reason is that links in the main content area are somewhat like word of mouth referral. If you are writing an article on a certain topic and you decide to include a link to another source that contains more in-depth information on your topic, it shows that you find the other article helpful to your readers and it makes sense to link to them.

Sidebar and Footer Links

Links in the sidebar don't carry as much weight as links in the main content area.

The reason is that the same links on the sidebar are present on almost every page, thus there is very little recommendation value in these links.

Footer links are the least valued links.

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Site Identity


Does Site Identity Matter?

Does the identity of the site matter? In other words, will Google devalue backlinks from websites pointing to another website that are all coming from the same webmaster?

Yes.

Let’s say you own 3 websites, and you have 2 of your websites linking to 1 of your websites. So Website B and C are linking to A. That shouldn’t raise any alarms.

But if you have 10 websites and 9 of them are linking to 1 website with the exact same anchor text keywords, that will raise some alarms.

So how does Google know exactly who owns a ring of websites?

Well they don’t actually know the identity of the webmaster. But they do know if a cluster of websites share the same IP or Class C Subnet, meaning the website domains are all hosted under the same hosting server of a single webmaster.

Unique IP and Class C Subnets

Using an SEO tool like MajesticSEO can tell you if a cluster of websites belong to the same Class C Subnets.

First, what is a Class C Subnet? Read Moz.com’s thread answer.

Looking at a report generated by MajesticSEO can also tell you how many referring IPs and Class C Subnets a website has.

What you don’t want to see is 100,000 external backlinks and 1 referring subnet. Basically, you want to have a diverse portfolio of backlinks from a variety of unique websites, not tons of links from the same C Subnet.

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http://www.majesticseo.com/

http://moz.com/community/q/what-is-a-class-c-subnet-and-why-should-i-care

Reciprocal Linking


Is Reciprocal Linking Bad for SEO?

Is reciprocal linking bad for SEO? Black-hat SEO?

The answer is – Not really.

If you have a couple of niche-related websites with the same Class C Subnet and you link them together (reciprocal linking), you should be fine.

But if you have 1,000 backlinks from 100 websites and your website is linked reciprocally to every single one of the 100 websites, it will look very suspicious.

Think about a scenario where people knew about the value of acquiring backlinks. They would start trading or exchanging backlinks with other webmasters.

Google sees this way of acquiring backlinks as unnatural, and these reciprocal links will start to be devalued by Google.

So if you were ranking on the top 3 positions due to a large percentage of reciprocal backlinks in your backlink profile, then you may start to see your rankings drop after awhile.

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Link Diversity


Diversify Your Backlink Portfolio

You want to make sure your site’s backlink portfolio is well diverse.

You’ve heard the saying before – “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.” It's exactly the same when it comes to link building.

Don’t just submit your site to 1432 directories and stop there. In fact, limit your directory submission to around 5 a month, and focus the rest of your time on creating great content.

Once you’ve gotten great content on your site, share it on social networking platforms, join blogging networks and interact with other bloggers in your related niche, and participate in discussions in forums, groups, and blog comments.

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History of Inbound Links


History of Inbound Links

The historical pattern of your inbound links are also taken into account. Does the historical pattern of your backlinks look natural?

A good example of a natural backlinking pattern would look something like this:

What Looks Natural?

As you can see in the graph, we have a somewhat consistent wave of backlinks.

An unnatural backlinking pattern would have sharp spikes in the number of backlinks at one time period, and no down-sliding waves immediately after the sharp spikes.

What if you purchased a domain name with a bad link history caused by the previous owner? Will it have trust issues with Google? Click here to see video.

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http://youtu.be/iKDlEKnT1Ko

Link Building Strategies


Introduction to Link Building

Link building can be a very long and tiring process. But with perseverance, the results can be very rewarding.

When doing link building however, be sure to avoid violating Google’s Content Guidelines. Violating any of Google’s Content Guidelines will be considered as Black-hat SEO and get your site removed from Google’s index.

Future-Proof Your SEO Efforts

In order to future-proof your SEO efforts against Google’s algorithm updates, you have to plan and execute a successful link building strategy.

Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. And for that, constant algorithm updates are inevitable, as Google’s initiative to combat web spam and return only the most relevant and useful results to any search query is imbued into their core mission statement.

In this following sections, we will go through some outdated link building strategies that have been used and is still being used by web spammers today.

We will also be going through successful link building strategies, social media SEO, and some advanced link building strategies.

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Link Schemes


Examples of Link Schemes

- Blog Comment Spam

- Forum Comment Spam

- Large-Scale Article Marketing or Guest Posting Campaigns with Keyword-Rich Anchor Text Links

- Large-Scale Press Releases with Keyword-rich Anchor Text Links

- Mass submission of Site to Low Quality Directory or Bookmarking Site Links

- Buying or Selling Links that Pass PageRank

- Text and Graphic Advertisements that Pass PageRank

- Use of Automated Bot Software or Services to Create Links to Your Site

- Embedded and Widely-Distributed Links on Widgets or Footers

- Excessive Reciprocal Linking

How to Request For a Recondsideration

If your site violates any of Google’s Content Guidelines, you may still submit a reconsideration request.

More details on how to submit a reconsideration request here.

Say No to Web Spam

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High-Quality Directory Listings


Directory Submission

When your site launches, one of the first things you want to do is to submit your site to free high quality directories.

Here’s a list of directories you can submit your website to to get a head start in building backlinks.

Before you submit your site to any directory, do your own assessment of whether a directory is low or high quality

Do Your Own Assessment of Quality

Some ways to check whether a directory site is low quality:

1. Read and assess the submission procedures. Does the directory manually review and approve site listing submissions or is it relatively easy for spammers to submit without an review and approval process?

2. Do a Google search on the directory site’s domain. Type in “www.directorysite.com” and if the site doesn’t even show up on the search results, you can be sure this site directory has issues with Google.

3. Manually go through some of the sites that are already listed on the directory. Do they look like low quality spam websites? If they are spammy-looking websites, you don’t want your site listing nestled among a bunch of links to spammy-looking websites.

If the directory you are planning to submit to doesn’t raise any of the above alarms, then it should be okay for submission.

Tip:Submit your site to directories gradually. Do not submit to 10 directories every single day. About 5 submissions a month will suffice.

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http://www.cucumbernebula.com/blog/a-list-of-link-building-lists/

Participate in Niche-Related Community Discussions


Building Relationships in Your Niche

One of the best ways to build links and drive traffic directly to your site is to be involved in the community of your niche.

But first, how do you find out where these discussions and groups are hanging out?

Using Google Discussions Search and Google Search Tools and Filters

If you are dealing with properties in Singapore and want to find out where discussions on buying properties in Singapore are taking place, you can use Google’s Discussion Search.

1. Key in your search query i.e. Buying properties in Singapore.

2. Select the “More” drop down and select “Discussions” (Figure 1.1)

You’ll see a different display of search results. Mostly Google Groups, forums and discussions taking place. (Figure 1.2)

You also have the option to sort search results by freshness or relevance with Google’s Search Tools and Filters. (Figure 1.3)

Creating Relevant Blog Posts to Answer Niche-Related Questions

From here, you’ll be able to browse and participate in any niche-related discussions in the community.

An example of how to drive direct traffic and generate potential backlinks would be to search for question-related forum posts and answer only part of the question, while linking out to a specific blogpost of yours in order to get the rest of the answer.

Figure 1.1

Figure 1.2

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Participate in Niche-Related Community Discussions


Creating Relevant Blog Posts to Answer Niche-Related Questions

Here’s a detailed example:

1. Random forum user asks a question on a dating forum such as, “How do I get my ex back?”

2. You reply with this, “Chances of getting your ex back really depends on the nature of the breakup. However here are a few tips to increase your chances of getting your ex back.”

3. You give a couple of pointers, then stop at around 3, and say something like, “read this post on 10 ways to increase your chances of getting your ex back – www.mydatingtipswebsite.com/how-to-get-your-ex-back/“.

There are few things that could happen here to your advantage:

1. You’ve just earned yourself some direct traffic from a couple of forum readers who are read this post and clicked on your link out of curiosity.

2. This forum post may get on the first page of Google SRPs and more traffic to this forum post means more potential clicks on your post link.

3. After some time, you may notice other bloggers linking to your post titled “How to Get Your Ex Back”.

Whether you get links or not really depends on how valuable the information you provide is.

Figure 1.3

Tip:Always focus on creating quality content. The more valuable and useful readers find your information, the higher your chances of them linking to you and acquiring backlinks to your site.

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Link Baiting


What is a Link Bait?

A link bait is any content or feature, within a website, designed specifically to gain attention or encourage others to link to the website. Matt Cutts defines link bait as anything “interesting enough to catch people’s attention.” A link bait can be an extremely powerful form of marketing as it is viral in nature. – Wikipedia

Now that you have an idea of what link bait is, let’s discuss some successful link baiting techniques and examples. But first, let’s understand the importance of creating quality content.

Quality Content is Link Bait Itself

Creating interesting and useful content will encourage sharing on its own. Take for example, you’re writing a blog post and you’re doing a comparison between commercial plastic bottles and BPA-free plastic bottles for your ecommerce store promoting BPA-free plastic bottles.

As you’re writing your post, pointing out how commercial plastic bottles that aren’t BPA free can increase the risk of cancer, you realize you need to reference a reliable source to justify the claim.

So you do a search on Google and find a reliable source – the FDA, a government website has written a detailed report on the harmful chemical found present in many hard plastic bottles.

What do you do then? You include a link to the report to justify your claim, and now some of your PageRank flows to the FDA web page report.

This is a classic example of backlinks being acquired naturally by important and useful content.

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End of SEO Starter Guide


“Thank you for reading our SEO Starter Guide.”

We've come to the end of this guide. Check out our Link Building Action Plan for more advanced link building strategies.

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Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide - Equinet Academy€¦ · Starter Guide Equinet Academy. Table of Contents Part 1: Introduction to SEO Search Engine Optimization Theory -