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5 Things You Can Do to Increase Your Adwords Quality Score

Posted on: December 13th, 2014 by John

If you want to increase your Adwords quality score, there are a few things that you can do. The benefits are enormous, and include getting higher placement of your advertisements, increasing your CTR (click-through rate) and getting lower minimum bids on the keywords that you want.

If you are running an Adwords campaign you already know that Google will assign you a quality score for each keyword that you are using in a campaign. This score is very important because it has a huge effect on the performance of your campaign. If you know how to increase your score, it can definitely give you an advantage over the competition.

Google awards advertisers who are giving their searchers the best possible experience through the ads that they post. That does not mean that it is reserved for those who spend the most money. Even though Google wants to make money, they also want to provide their users with the best experience possible, and that means that not only will you make your visitors happy, you’ll make Google happy as well.

Quality-Score-Factors

Your quality score is a variable that each of your keywords will receive and has an effect on where you rank and how much you pay per click. Want to pay less? Increase your quality score. Knowing how to use this information starts with understanding how Google assigns that all-important quality score. There are three things that the Big G looks at:

 

  1. Your Click-through Rate, commonly abbreviated as CTR. This is how many people see your ad and click on the link.
  2. The relevance of your ad to the keyword being searched for. If you sell office supplies but try to advertise your site using keywords for women’s clothing, Google won’t like that.
  3. Your landing page. Google wants to see relevant and high quality landing pages that load fast and on sites that have a good reputation.

You can find out more about how this dynamic works by using Google’s Adwords Help Center. For now, let’s get to the five ways that you can increase your Adwords quality score.

 

One: Campaign Structure

You want to try to structure your ad campaigns into targeted ad groups. When you structure your campaigns this way, you are creating more relevancy between the keyword being used to see the ad and the advertisement itself. So, use many different ad groups that are more specific and directly related to the keyword that they contain. This can be a little time consuming but it is completely worth it.

You don’t want to have just a couple of ad groups that have all of your keywords in them because your ads aren’t going to show up as relevant that way. Also, have a smaller number of keywords for each ad group. In fact, the smaller number of keywords that you can use the more relevant your ad will be seen as. Keyword variations should be very closely related, like plurals.

Take your keywords to a Word document and group them into lists where they go together logically. You can use categories like branded, not branded, specific products, services and the like to categorize them. That way you know where you can use them and how they go together and it will help you set up small ad groups and keep them focused and relevant to the keyword. Also, don’t forget to use negative keywords as well because it will improve your performance. The trick to getting a great quality score is to organize your account as efficiently as possible, so plan your account and take the time to get your keywords and ads organized properly. It will work much better that way and you will find you get a higher quality score.

 

Two: Optimize Your Copy

You want to choose ad copy that is closely related to your keywords. This will increase the relevance of the keywords being used to find your ads. That not only increases your quality score, but it will also create a dramatic increase in your click-through rate. Get your keywords into your ad copy if you can. There are two basic options: insert them manually or use DKI (dynamic keyword insertion).

 

Three: Target Landing Pages

You want to target your landing pages as much as possible. You don’t just want to send the visitors who click on your ad anywhere, you want them to land on a specific landing page that is optimized for that particular ad group. While it may take some extra time to design a landing page for each keyword group (depending upon how many you have) you will definitely benefit from the relevancy bonus. Your end goal should be for the user to click on an ad and then land on a page that they would expect to find for that ad. You can use the Google Adwords Keyword Tool to see what Google sees by typing in the URL of your site. Google will tell you what keywords it thinks the site is relevant to.

 

Four: Know Your Quality Score Factors

These were discussed a little further up the article, but there are more comprehensive charts out there that will give you a much better idea of how the Quality Score is calculated and more importantly, how you can use that information to increase your quality score. You can use your own charts to track your campaign and your quality scores as well.

 

Five: Decrease Your Load Time

Many people simply aren’t aware that Google looks at your load times as part of your quality score. You want to decrease the loading time of your landing page as much as possible by removing anything that doesn’t need to be there, and changing elements of the page that are too slow in loading. Check each one of your landing pages and reduce them down as much as possible. Some of the possible culprits to slow loading times include:

 

  • Slow or Multiple Redirects
  • Interstitial Pages
  • Meta Refreshes
  • Hosted on a Slow Server
  • Large Page Size
  • Page Elements That Are Slow Loading

 

Google Webmaster tools will help you test your page speed and your loading time. These five things will help you to increase your quality score and that in turn will cause you to be ranked higher in the SERPS and pay less for the privilege. Although some of these changes may require some work on your part, it is well worth the effort if it means that you’ll be able to lower the cost of paying for your Adwords ad blocks and be able to reap the sales that come from increased click through rates and happy visitors who find what they expect.

 

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What Exactly is ‘Evergreen’ Content?

Posted on: December 13th, 2014 by John

If your any sort of internet marketer or involved in search engine optimization, even a beginner one, it is likely that you have heard of evergreen content. But hearing about something, and understanding what it is, and more importantly how to create it, are very different things. So, what is evergreen content and why should make sure you are always posting it?

This article will explore evergreen articles, including how to create an evergreen post or article and explore how evergreens can make your SEO strategy stronger and takes it to the next level.

The first thing we must do however, is define evergreen content.

Evergreen content, put simply, is content that could be read years from now and have the same impact it does now. Basically, it is content that always reads as “fresh.” Evergreen content is so named because evergreen trees (like the ones you chop down and put in your living room at Christmas-time) is a symbol of perpetual life. In essence, the evergreen never dies – and that’s exactly what sort of content that you want.

In order to more fully appreciate what is not evergreen content – that is – will not be relevant a year from now. Here are some types of content that are definitely not evergreen content.

Evergreen-Content

  • News articles and political ramblings
  • Articles that contain statistics or reports that will be outdated eventually.
  • Articles about a holiday or season or year.
  • Articles that are about a current trend, fad or pop culture item.
  • Articles that are about this year’s (or any year’s) fashions.

Evergreen content will be relevent to readers years (and maybe even decades) from now and will still be valuable to readers when they come to it long after the post date. For example, if you write about politics in general, it will probably be relevant for many elections to come, but a post about this year’s candidates or issues will expire as soon as the election has run its course. The reason for this is clear – the keywords that people use to find that expiring post will stop being used and you will get no traffic to your site for that content. If you want to write evergreen content, here are some great formats that you can use to create it. This doesn’t automatically mean that your content will be evergreen (this depends upon the topic) but it is a useful way to know how to structure evergreen content.

 

  • Lists – especially lists of more general things rather than specific, dated things.
  • Top Tips – Again, these should be general tips not very specific ones.
  • Instructions – How-to tutorials and guides
  • Product Reviews – These may not last as long as others depending upon the product/version.
  • Encyclopedia Articles – Think Wikipedia
  • Videos – Especially how-to videos that will last for a very long time.

 

There are also quite a few topics that are so timeless that they will remain evergreen as long as human beings walk this earth (and surf the web).

 

  • Food & Recipes
  • Taking Care of Your Pets
  • Losing Weight & Fitnss
  • Financial Topics
  • Parenting Tips
  • Jobs, Careers, Work Relationships
  • Love, Romance, Dating

Obviously, you want to cover topics that are related to your business, not just any topic that you come across. So, for example, if you are in the business of dentistry, you want to cover topics like taking care of your teeth, what different procedures are and benefits of dentistry among others. No matter what type of business that you are in, you are sure to find ways that you can post content related to your business.

However, do keep in mind that many of the common (in fact, most of the common) evergreen articles have already been covered, and covered, and then covered again. If you cover the same topics that everyone else has already covered to death, you probably aren’t going to get much traffic, unless you can rank higher than all of that other content. However, you can cover topics that are more specialized, more unique, and most importantly, have long-tail keywords. In case you aren’t familiar, a long-tail keyword is one that is several words long. For example: ‘blue octagonal shaped widgets’ is a much more effective keyword than ‘widgets’.

 

Examples of Evergreen Content

Here are a few examples so that you can understand better what evergreen content is and how to create it.

How to Care For Aging Cats – There is no danger of cats going extinct anytime soon, and as long as people have them, they will have to care for them when they get older.

10 Great Chocolate Treats You Can Make at Home – Again, people will always love chocolate and want to make chocolate treats.

How to Sooth a Crying Baby – People are always going to have children and babies will always cry. This is a great piece of content that can be used for years or even decades.

As you can see, all of these are titles and articles that will be relevant far, far into the future. Some of the top websites that create evergreen content regularly include: About, Wikipedia, IMDB and Ehow.

These are great sites that consistently get recognized by the search engines for producing quality, evergreen content. Pretty much anything you search for will have a Wikipedia page in the first ranking spot. They don’t always have quality content however, which is where you might be able to sneak in and offer something better to the search engines.

Combine Your Evergreen Strategy With The Right Keywords

Evergreen content is your best strategy for sustainability but without the right keywords, you will have great content that doesn’t get found. That’s why you need to combine evergreen content with keywords that people search for. When you have an evergreen piece to post, research the right keywords – keywords that will bring people who buy what you have to sell to your page.

You should also ensure that you are following normal SEO strategies like optimizing your site (on and off) for the right keywords, using relevant images with the right alt text and including social media sharing buttons. The more of the correct strategy that you use the higher you will rank in the search engines. You want your content to be seen, linked, shared and ranking as high as possible.

 

Four Tips For Writing Evergreen Content

 

  1. Don’t Write For an Expert Audience: Just because you are an expert in a field doesn’t mean that you show off your expertise with your topics. The majority of your readers aren’t going to be experts, they are going to be beginners that want the basics. Also, experts don’t search for help very often anyway – thus the reason that they are called experts.
  2. Don’t Use Technical Language: You want your readers to read your entire piece and find value in it, and too much technical terminology will make them go find an article that is easier to read.
  3. Avoid Broad Topics: The more narrow a topic that you can write about the better – as long as it is a popular topic that gets a lot of search traffic. Most of your readers are going to be looking for a specific idea or answer, not an explanation of the entire topic. You want to answer the question that they are searching for, not answer every question that they might have in the future about the topic.
  4. Link Your Related Posts: Readers will often read related posts, so if you have several posts around the same basic topics, then link them together and you will see traffic increase. Besides the value for readers who want to learn more, there is also value for the search engines in linking related content. It will help you rank higher if you interlink relevant content across your site.

 

Write Other Stuff Too

You should definitely write a lot of evergreen content, but there can be value in other types of content as well. If you publish the right piece at the right time, you can get a huge amount of traffic, and while it may not last as long as your evergreen content, it will bring in serious traffic while it lasts.

For example, suppose that you wrote an article about the current presidential election. Obviously, after the election was over, the content would slowly wane and eventually you would get almost no search traffic from it, because people stopped searching for the keywords you used. But in the meantime, you can benefit from a huge amount of people searching for the keywords that you used. Six months worth of traffic on a hugely popular topic can rival an evergreen article that lasts for years.

So, don’t think that you only have to write evergreen content. While this should definitely be your main strategy, here and now content also has its place. Your goal is to drive as much traffic as possible to your website and then sit back and reap the rewards.

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The Top 6 Mobile Device Emulators – Test Mobile Devices for Free with a Simple Click of a Button

Posted on: December 8th, 2014 by John

In the past, when browsing content on the internet was limited to tiny screens and text and links only, it wasn’t really that important to optimize your content for mobile content. However, the percentage of people that use a mobile device to access the internet is huge and soon the people who access the internet solely through a conventional computer will be a minority. You simply can’t ignore mobile devices.

The best way to make sure that your content works across all mobile platforms is to test it on those platforms, but unless you own every one of those devices this might be difficult to do. That’s where mobile emulators come in. There are a number of mobile emulators out there now that will let you see exactly what your website looks like on the iPhone, tablet and other devices. This will allow you to make adjustments so that your website displays perfectly no matter what device someone is using to access your content.

 

MobileTest.me

The MobileTest.me is a website that is specifically designed to display a site exactly how it would show up on all devices. With how popular smartphones and the tremendous amount of search mobile is now taking up are, you can’t ignore this platform. Just type in your URL and see how it displays on all devices.

 

MonileTest.me

 

General Mobile Phone Emulator

This Mobile Phone Emulator will allow you to see what your content looks like across a wide variety of formats and mobile manufacturer platforms. This includes Samsung mobile, BlackBerry and more. Best of all it’s free.

 

Mobilr Phone Emulator

 

iPad Emulator

The iPad or other tablet devices are quickly becoming the most popular way to access the internet, and the iPad is definitely the most popular within those devices. That’s why the iPad Peek is the perfect emulator to let you see how your content will look on a tablet.

 

Ipadpeek

 

Response Time

The responsiveness of your website is one of the factors that Google evaluates when ranking your website, and besides, you want your visitors to arrive and browse without frustration. That’s why you should check your site with ResponsivePX.

 

ResponsivePX

 

MobiReady

MobiReady is such a valuable tool because while it checks mobile compliance, it also gives you detailed error reports that can help you make changes easily. Also, you can check your code for errors which might be valuable later on, if you encounter a problem and aren’t sure where the issue lies.

 

ready.mobi

 

 

Screenfly Emulator

The value in using Screenfly is that it tests your content across a wide coverage of platforms and you can customize it to show your website under a variety of conditions. While you should make use of the other emulators as well, testing under different conditions can be useful.

When it comes to your website, you have to optimize for mobile content across as many platforms as possible, because if you are only targeting computer users, you are missing out on a huge number of visitors, and in the very near future, those mobile users that you are ignoring are going to make up most of your potential audience.

 

Screenplay

 

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How to Set Achievable Google Analytics Goals

Posted on: December 3rd, 2014 by John

How to Set Achievable Google Analytics Goals

Using the goal function in Google Analytics can be an intense experience for anyone who has never used it before. There is a lot of information that it presents to you, and much of it seems unconnected or extraneous. But the fact is, using Analytics goals can be extremely useful if you know how to properly set it up. Here are some ways that you can make Google Analytics goals work for you.

Logging In & Setting Up Goals

Once you have logged into your Analytics account, you need to go to the setup panel. This isn’t where you see Goal Results. Your setup panel is actually accessed by clicking on the sprocket in the upper-right corner. You’ll see the ‘Goals’ tab and then the profile below that.

You can set a maximum of 5 goal-sets and then have a maximum of five goals within each set. You want to think carefully about what you decide to put in these sections because changing them isn’t as easy as just deleting them and starting a new one. You want to set up goals that will allow you to view a great deal of information for one specific goal, so you don’t have to break your goals down to their very basic parts – at least at first.

google analytics picture

Three Goals for E-Commerce

If you are running an e-commerce site, then you want to figure out what the bottom-line goal is for your website. It is usually three basic objectives: First, did the visitor search for and find something that they wanted. Second, did they add it to their shopping cart. Finally, did they complete the transaction. Depending upon what kind of website you have, you might not have an actual shopping cart, but the idea is the same.

It is valuable to understand how a visitor to your site navigates through the search, and you want them to finish searching for the product that they want, so the first goal that you set might be “complete a search.” Your next step will be to make the goal “Active” and set the goal type. You might want to use URL destination, Time on Site or Pages per Visit, but URL destination is a good starting point for this type of goal.

On Goal Details, you want to put in the URL that you want your visitors to get to. For example, if you have a URL that they come to when completing a quick search, you can put that in. However, if you use session ID or parameters in your URLs then you’ll have to enter wildcards or the goal won’t work. But you don’t have to worry about that right now. Also, make sure that you check to box if you have case-sensitive URLs.

Now, you’ll set up the goal funnel, or the way that visitors can achieve the goal. The boxes for the funnel will appear and you decide what steps a visitor should or could take to reach the goal. However, keep in mind that first, you want to keep it simple, like homepage, content pages, goal page. Second, you don’t want to make them required steps because then you will lose other ways that visitors might reach your goal, and that will provide you with valuable information. You’ll see every single way that visitors enter and arrive at your goal as long as you don’t make them required steps.

Watch Your Results

Now, your going to save your goals and watch your results. If you don’t have a thank you page, then you won’t be able to track it normally, so you’ll have to set up virtual pages that will help you track sales. This can be a little technical but with some practice you can figure it out. The main thing is to understand whether or not you are achieving your goal, and more importantly, why you’re not achieving it. This will allow you to make adjustments in the way that your website is set up, and to learn more about your website, and improve the percentage of people that are making it from point A to point B. And that is exactly the purpose of Google Analytics.

 

 

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7 Reasons Why Content is Super Important

Posted on: December 3rd, 2014 by John

You might still be wondering if content really is the most important thing that you can do when it comes to ranking your website. Content is more important than ever: more important than links, more important than a flashy website, even more important than keywords and headlines. Content is one of the most important ranking factors, and so not only do you want to make sure that you have it, but you want to make sure that it’s correctly written, so that it achieves the goals that content for the web should achieve. Here are seven reasons why content is so important when it comes to ranking your website.

Content for SEO

  1. Content helps drive traffic. The new Google algorithm updates all have one thing in common – they are friendly towards real, valuable content that is well-written. This isn’t to say that keywords don’t matter, because your content still needs keywords. In fact, keywords built naturally into your content are often the reason that you are ranking above other sites in that niche. But even if you never did a single minute of keyword research, you would still find yourself doing surprisingly well because of quality content.
  2. Content increases search engine density, and again, therefore, traffic. The more quality content that you have the more keywords that you will be placed into the search engines for. So, ranking high on the SERPS for the keywords that you are targeting isn’t the only objective – you should also be looking for those “accidental” keyword combinations that get you traffic. Some of those long-tail keywords that got put into the content naturally could net you a whole lot of search engine traffic – traffic that you didn’t even have to pay for.
  3. Quality content engages readers, making them return on their own. If you can post a piece of content that moves, touches or makes a reader think, they will come back for more. The internet is filled with garbage content that simply regurgitates what others have said (and usually better). That’s why you want to make sure that every thing that you publish is as good as it can possibly be, well-written, well-researched and compelling.
  4. Content means natural links from other websites, which increases rankings. If you post good content, you will get natural links from other websites. You don’t have to go on a link-building campaign and pay out the nose for links to (maybe) rank your website a little higher. Readers will link to you in great numbers if you can affect them in some way, and you’ll get more views from the links, as well as ranking juice.
  5. A reputation cannot be built by claiming to be an expert: you have to show it. If you want people to trust you as an expert in your field, you can’t just tell them you are an expert. They want proof. Anyone can walk into a hospital and hand in a resume that claims that they are a doctor, but they’ll have a major problem the first time they try to operate on someone unless they actually are a doctor. You need to show your readers that you really are an expert in your field and the best way to do that is through quality content that proves your expertise.
  6. People do not share promotional content, they share content that affects them. This works the same with links, except now we’re talking about social media. People share what they like: things that made them laugh, content that made them think, things that really affected them in some way. That’s what they put on Twitter and Facebook and other social media, and so that’s exactly why you want the right content on your website.
  7. Quality content makes your business human. When people go to a business website they see, well, a business. But if they read content that was written by a human being, especially good, relevant content that they really enjoyed, they see a human being. Content can put a human face on your business in a way that is otherwise difficult to do online.
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Is Your Yahoo and Bing Paid Traffic Showing as Organic in Google Analytics? Here is How to Fix it.

Posted on: November 28th, 2014 by John

When running a PPC campaign of any sort, getting accurate data on performance is incredibly important. This is what will allow you to fine tune your strategy to ensure you get the maximum CTR from the very most targeted and highly relevant traffic.

If you are using Bing and Yahoo then, it can be very helpful to have all that information available in Google Analytics alongside the rest. This will make it as easy as possible for you to quickly check how your ads are performing versus your organic traffic. Are you get worthwhile ROI for your efforts? Do you need to change your keywords?

To find out, you need to change your destination URLs in order to provide effective tracking by Analytics. This way you can differentiate visitors from your paid results versus organic search and you can identify precisely which of your ads is bringing in the most traffic.

Google Analytics is a powerful tool already for tracking visitors from Google, so all you need to do is to make a few changes with a workaround that will let you see the CPC coming from your CPC from search engines other than Google. I.e. Yahoo and Bing…

Fortunately things have been made a little bit easier since 2010 when Yahoo integrated their campaign management tools into Bing’s (which is called ‘Adcenter’). This makes the process even simpler and easier. Just follow the instructions below and you’ll be able to get all your information in one place with Google Analytics…

Step by Step Instructions for Viewing Bing and Yahoo PPC Data in Google Analytics

Step 1

First you need to create a custom tracking URL. You can do this by using the URL Builder provided by Google (see here).

Just follow the instructions as they come up on the screen and you’ll get your own custom URL string. You can include a unique identifier like ‘Bing-PPC’ which will help you to identify it even more easily.

Step 2

You should see a parameter that says ‘keyword’. Replace this with any placeholder and when Bing generates ads this will be automatically populated. Where it says ‘Campaign Term’ in Google’s instructions use the term ‘{QueryString}’ or ‘{KeyWord}’. Now when someone sees and clicks on one of your ads, you’ll be able to see which search term they used in order to see that ad.

Step 3

Head to the Bing Adcenter and here use the custom URL you just created as your tracking URL in the campaign.

Change the ‘Destination URL’ at the Ad Group Level to make sure that you aren’t using the same URL for every single keyword. To do this, choose ‘Ad Group’, then ‘Ads Tab’. From here you want to click on ‘Ad Title’ and this will give you the option to paste your destination URL. Remember to click save before exiting!

Do the same for each ad group. It shouldn’t take too long unless you have a massive campaign.

Step 4

Once you’ve done this you will start to see your data but this is going to be the combined data from both Bing and Yahoo. If you want to break it down so that you see the specific metrics for each then things will get a little more complicated.

First you’ll need to set up a new profile in Analytics. Now you can create a new filter (use the Admin section of Analytics). Here you’ll want to place the following in Field B:

Extract B case is: http?://([^/]+)

You don’t really need to know what’s going on here but suffice to say that the referring domain will now show with the campaign source which will let you tell whether your clicks came from Bing or Yahoo.

Step 5

It will take a couple of days for these changes to take effect. Come back in two days and you should start to see your data clearly divided by source and whether or not it was paid traffic. It should look as follows:

Bing / CPC

Bing / Organic

Google / CPC

Google / Organic

Yahoo / CPC

Yahoo / Organic

If that’s what you see then congratulations – you’re good to go! Remember though, search engines do make changes to the way they work from time to time so you might need to take further action in future. For now though, enjoy all those metrics and use it to hone your campaigns to perfection!

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Do You Need to Rewrite Your Title Tags?

Posted on: November 28th, 2014 by John

Most likely Yes….A lot of attention has been given to Google decision earlier this year to shorten the length of their title tags. With all this hubbub we decided it was high time to weigh in on the subject and especially in light of the increasing number of questions we’ve had about the topic. A lot of people want to know if they need to shorten their title lengths to meet the new 55 character restriction and it seems that much of this commotion has been caused by a post from Authority Labs called ‘Google Doesn’t Think Your Titles Are Good Enough Anymore’.

Either way, it’s time we had a think about what this all means and whether it indeed is wise for you to cut them down.

What We Know

So is it true that titles over 55 characters are going to get truncated from now on? Certainly Google have recommended that title tags from now on should be 55 characters and under but this doesn’t actually mean that your titles will be too long in every scenario. The reality is actually a little more complicated than that you see and it seems there are a range of factors that will impact on how much of a title Google shows.

Here’s what we know:

  • Google now shortens more title tags than they ever have done in the past
  • Google will sometimes partially or entirely rewrite titles as they see fit
  • Titles displayed can now be anything from 40-70 characters with the average number of characters being 58
  • This means that your 58 character titles are probably okay and so might your 59 word ones be
  • Once you start edging above 60 though, you are risking getting your titles being rewriting
  • And 55 characters is the safest limit if you want to be absolutely certain that Google won’t edit your titles

So the approach has definitely changed and you certainly need to rethink your own strategy moving forward but not every one of your old titles needs to be revised.

What Should You Do About Your Old Title Tags?

There are other factors to consider here too. For starters, rewriting titles can actually damage your current listing in Google and that means you might cause your pages to drop down a few pegs in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). Remember that Google consider title tags in their algorithms and if you change your title tag then they might view your page as less relevant to your target keywords or to other long-tail key phrases.

This means you need to weigh up your options to decide the best course of action. Just because Google isn’t showing your title verbatim, that doesn’t mean that they aren’t including that in their index. Really then the only effect this will have is on your potential visitors. That means you have to ask yourself whether that matters.

The risk is that letting your titles get revised could impact negatively on your CTR (click through rate). You no doubt came up with your title tag because you wanted something that would catch the eye and encourage people to click. If that then gets butchered, people might not want to click on your link. In order to actually get clicks and to get people to visit your site, you want your listing to be prominent in the SERPs and you want it to look the part. Both are of equal importance as long as they are impacting on your views and serving your goals.

So what you need to do is to focus on the numbers. If your new title has created a drop in your click through rate then you may want to rethink. If it hasn’t, then you might want to leave it as it is. The only time you might not follow this logic is if you think your new title could be hurting your brand.

Of course one other factor you need to consider is the sheer time it could take you to rewrite your titles. Do you have that time available? And would you even know how to go about shortening them without losing their oomph?

How to Tell if Your Title is Impacting Your Clicks

All this means that you really need to be able to accurately discern what impact if any your shortened title is having on your views. This is where things get a little tricky. You can use ‘info’ in Google Webmaster Tools in order to look at your CTR and if you know roughly when your title started displaying differently then you might be able to ascertain whether or not it had a direct impact. This is a little ‘iffy’ though, seeing as there are many factors that impact on your CTR and on your ranking, meaning that any number of things could have contributed to the changes in traffic that you’re seeing. Likewise, it’s possible that there would only be a small change anyway, which would potentially be almost imperceptible.

Creating Great Title Tags

Ultimately, as is often the case with SEO, your focus should be on providing your traffic with quality and that means choosing title tags for more than just the way they affect your site in the SERPs. You need to walk a balance between meeting Google’s guidelines and staying true to the style and nature of your site and brand.

Here are some tips that can help you to think about title tags correctly…

Recognize Their Importance: The first and biggest tip when creating title tags is simply to recognize just how important they are and to accordingly give them serious thought rather than just bashing them out. The right title will make all the difference when someone considers clicking on your link either in the SERPs or on social media, so don’t rush it!

Get to the Point: Google has a point – often it’s unnecessary to write long title tags and in fact these can simply waste time and be distracting for the user. Rather than writing long titles, try to pack more meaning into fewer words. That means selecting the correct vocabulary but it also means choosing to use things like abbreviations, commas, dashes etc.

Branding: Including the name of your site or company in the title tag can sometimes be a good idea and especially if you’re trying to rank for that. But in other cases this can just take up valuable space, particularly if your site/company name is in the URL. Learn when to include your brand and when not to.

Reflect Your Content: While you want your title tag to grab attention and clicks, you also need to make sure it accurately reflects the content on your site. Not only is it misleading to do otherwise (which upsets your viewers) but it’s also bad for your SEO. Ideally you want your keywords to appear both in the title tag and in the body of your pages.

Stand Out and Pique Curiosity: It’s important to stand out among the crowd and that means choosing the right working for your title that will get attention. You don’t want to stray into spammy ‘click bait’ territory but do try and create titles that will evoke and emotional response and that will encourage further reading.

Consider the Description: Your title tag does not act in a vacuum, it also works alongside your description tag, so think carefully about how the two will work together.

Follow these golden rules, consider what we’ve discussed regarding length and you won’t go wrong!

 

 

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Setting up Your Robot.txt after Recent Google Change

Posted on: November 1st, 2014 by John

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Changes with Google Webmaster

Earlier this week, Google made a significant update to their Webmaster guidelines. In the past, the original Webmaster guidelines stated that Google bots could render a site in old, text-only browsers, such as Lynx. Those kind of outdated browsers were unable to render advanced web designs and images. Google announced that in order to have optimal indexing and rendering on websites, webmasters must allow bots to access CSS, Javascript, and other image files found throughout the site. In fact, Google also stated that disallowing robot.txt to crawl on the Javascript or CSS files will directly and negatively impact how their algorithms render your website and how your site pages are indexed and ranked.

 

More Efficient Search Bots

Now instead of viewing and indexing the text exclusively, the bots can crawl the site like web browsers. Doing so allows them to interpret Javascript, CSS, and images along with the text content found on each page of the website. Now, Google is indexing based on page rendering, which means that text-only browsers are simply not an accurate or up-to-date form of indexing. This update makes for a more modern web browser that creates optimal indexing.

 

Tips for Optimized Indexing

To help with these changes, Google has offered some tips to get the most out of the new indexing system:

 

  • As you allow Google bot to access Javascript and CSS files, you need to make sure that your server can handle the additional rendering load.

  • Follow the practices of Google Developer’s page performance optimization. Making sure that pages can be rendered quickly will make it easier for users to access your content and also make it easier to index your pages. You can do so by eliminating unnecessary downloads, merging separate Javascript and CSS files, and setting up your server to serve them as compressed files.

  • Use only the most common systems and technologies on your server to ensure that everything operates smoothly between different web browsers.

  • Use the updated Fetch and Render as Google feature in webmaster tools to see how their system renders your pages. With it, you’ll be able to identify indexing issues.

 

How to Test for Optimized Indexing Using Fetch As Google

In order to check if CSS and Javascript is being allowed on your website, you can use the Fetch and Render as Google in the webmaster tools. We’ll walk you through the steps below:

 Screen Shot 2015-03-31 at 11.17.03 PM

  • Select “Fetch” under the Crawl tools, and enter your webpage URL. (If you want to render your homepage, just leave it blank). Then press “Fetch and Render,” and Google bots will begin to crawl in the webpage.

  • Click “Submit to Index” once the crawling is complete. Results will appear, each one labeled as “complete, “partial,” “unreachable,” or another term according to the test. (You can find more descriptions and details of Fetch as Google diagnostics here.)

  • Click on the results to check the blocked scripts and files. Doing so will help you see what is intentionally and unintentionally blocked by you and your server. From there, you can follow tips listed above for optimized indexing on all of your necessary web pages.

 

 

photo by Roland Molnar via Flickr.

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Parasites for SEO: Why and How to Use This Powerful Ranking Strategy?

Posted on: July 11th, 2014 by John

If you’re involved in the SEO world, you have probably heard of the powerful ranking effects of “parasites”. Parasites are inner pages on authority sites which piggyback of their positive stature in Google’s eyes. These pages typically can rank easily and thus can be an awesome traffic source as well as an excellent SEO tactic for funneling link juice to your main site. Sites such as Buzzfeed.com, PRweb.com, and LInkedin.com are all examples of sites that allow you to create inner pages on them. Once you create these inner pages they can rank very quickly.

Why Should You Use Parasite SEO?

Well, it’s quite frankly the best strategy out there in terms of ROI and speed of results. Sites like Buzzfeed.com and PRweb.com rank incredibly easily and can function as landing pages for your business. Parasites dominate the SERP results for many affiliate keywords such as “Fat Loss Factor” (most of the results are parasites for that term). Parasites are also extremely cost effective as they are easy to set up and cost nothing to create (beyond the cost of content and links to rank them).   You can also use different media forms with parasites, including videos, images, and written content. Parasite SEO can be an excellent method to rank multiple positions on the first page for a reputation management term. In fact, if you have a tough reputation management term to tackle, parasites should absolutely be your weapon of choice.

Since you can rank multiple parasites on page 1, you can literally dominate an easier niche with little effort. If you’re a local SEO, you should look into parasites as a way to shut out your competition from the first page and horde all the traffic to yourself.

Terry Kyles at SEO Traffic Hacks has an excellent case study on Parasite SEO where he absolutely dominates with the strategy. In his case, he was using it for affiliate marketing and he ended up getting his Buzzfeed parasites onto the first and second pages for a ton of profitable keywords. However, you can clearly see that Parasite SEO is amazing for reputation management as well as branding purposes.

How Do You Use Parasite SEO?

First you must figure out which parasites you want to use. If you’re promoting a product and have an explainer video, perhaps you can rank Youtube, Vimeo, Dailymotion, and other video parasites. There are dozens of different parasites on the web, and you can pick and choose which parasite you want to use.

Video Sites

These are perfect if you have a video already created for your business/niche. Youtube ranks very easily on the SERPs. Vimeo and Dailymotion also tend to rank quickly. Create a relevant and useful video and this can be an excellent marketing strategy.

Press Release Sites

PRweb.com, PRlog.com, and Sbwire.com are all press release sites that rank easily. Remember that once you submit your press release you can’t change it, so make sure it’s 100 percent before sending it out. You can even use your press release as a landing page if you do it right.

Forums

Threads on big internet forums can rank very easily. That makes them a perfect parasite page. Do your research and find an authoritative forum in your niche, create a link back to your page, and then rank it.

Social Media

Facebook, Pinterest, and LinkedIn can all be used effectively for Parasite SEO. There are dozens of social networks out there that you can experiment with.

Buzzfeed and Other News/Popular Sites

Sites like Buzzfeed, Digital Journal, and Daily KOS all allow you to create accounts on them and publish content.   It’s not the easiest to get an inner page on them, but once created they tend to rank very well.

Product Pages

Amazon, Udemy, Itunes, Themeforest.net and other online store inner pages rank very fast. You will need to have an actual product though, whether it is an online course for Udemy, or a podcast for Itunes, or an actual theme for Themeforest.

Ranking a Parasite

There are various different methods you can use to rank parasites. For example, some people like to use Private Blog Networks (PBNs) to rank their parasites. You could alternatively use spam (think thousands and thousands of links) to help you rank parasites. There are various spam providers on marketing forums like Wicked Fire and BlackHatWorld.

Terry from SEO Traffic Hacks had excellent results ranking Buzzfeed pages with PBN links. In addition, he used a 301 strategy (buy an aged domain with links and 301 redirect it to your parasite). You can even build dirty links to the domain you’re 301’ing for more power.

Building parasites are the way to go because of how easily they ranked. Since they are pages on authority sites Google has no choice but to rank them. They are versatile and can be used for many purposes, whether it’s direct monetization through the parasite page, a solid SEO pumper, branding, or for reputation management purposes.

UPDATE 2/23/16

A bit of an update regarding parasite SEO, and how it has evolved since this article was originally written. I now use parasite SEO for all kinds of different methods. From brand building, to reputation management, to ranking pages to make money.

Let me show you a couple examples.

 

For brand building

Search term: “SEO Doylestown PA”.

parasite SEO for brand building

 

For Reputation Management

**This was a company who stole money from me. Woopsy!

parasite seo for reputation management reputation management parasite seo

 

Think outside the box with this one folks. There are a million ways to make money with this.

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Press Releases: How to Use Them and Topic Suggestions

Posted on: June 30th, 2014 by John

Press Releases are a vital part of every company’s marketing strategies. Press releases are written communications that are aimed at members of news media. A successful press release may get you noteworthy news coverage as well as significant traffic. Online press releases are an extremely popular marketing method, and often provide significant ROI. Press releases have been around for more than a 100 years and are a proven marketing tactic.

Benefits of Press Releases

Each press release you write may have a different goal.   Some press releases are targeted at local media as an attempt to get local news coverage.   Others may be targeted at industry journalists, or perhaps at major mainstream outlets.   Press releases also may be used to directly get traffic from interested customers, or for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) or Reputation Management Purposes.

Press Releases To Get More Coverage

Press releases targeted at getting more coverage for your company should be newsworthy, relevant to the journalists receiving them, and must be written extremely well. Your press release should be worth covering. You should ensure that the press release is sent to the right journalists. For example, a finance journalist should not receive a press release about how your company just donated to an environmental charity. Journalists absolutely hate receiving boring press releases that aren’t relevant to them. To ensure that you reach the right people, you may need to hire a press release company or a public relations firm.

Some great ideas for press releases include new product and service launches, a new technological breakthrough, maybe your involvement in a charity. Perhaps you can reveal the scrupulous behaviors of others in your industry. The options are endless with press releases, and there are literally hundreds of different angles you could use.

Additionally, you can also use tools such as HARO (Help a Reporter Out) to gain coverage. HARO allows you to share your expertise with reporters who need them. In exchange you get free publicity. HARO is used by some of the biggest news agencies include FOX, ABC, and AP.

Another useful strategy is to use press releases to have your business comment on popular news in the press release. This is an extremely popular strategy as it can help you position your company as the authority regarding that niche.   The key is to find relevant and trending news that your company can provide valuable commentary and expertise on. Some company’s press releases often comment on a competitor’s blunders and differentiate themselves from their competitor.

The reward of a press release that gets picked up by journalists and gets covered is that it can often result in new traffic as well as new clients.

Press Releases for SEO and Reputation Management

Press releases can also be used in your company’s SEO strategy quite effectively. Since press releases are distributed to hundreds of authority sites they can be extremely useful link building tools. You need to keep in mind most press releases are no-follow links, and Google frowns upon people using keyword anchors in press releases. The best way to use a press release is to build branded links with your company’s name instead of the keyword you’re going for. For example, if your company is called Coco Solutions, and you sell consulting, use “Coco Solutions” as the anchor text instead of “Consulting”. I suggest that you target your best and most newsworthy press releases at journalists, while using less interesting topics for SEO, branding, or Reputation management purposes.

Reputation Management is the art and science ensuring your business’ reputation online is protected.   That includes suppressing negative news in the search engines down, and filling the search engines with your own positive results. Press releases are a powerful tool in this method as they rank easily and can help drown out other search results. They are an essential part of any reputation management strategy.  Additionally Press Releases often show up in Google News, which can be a massive help in sticky reputation management cases where there’s harsh news coverage on your company.

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