SECRETS OF SEO TRAFFIC FROM YELP
I got to attend OpenCamp this weekend- a conference in Addison dedicated to developers, bloggers, Social Media and all things internet. Of course it’s always great to share knowledge with like-minded professionals, but I would have to say one of the highlights of the conference was talking to Nikki Bonds, aka Yelper Nikkanore and Yelp Employee Extraordinaire, who writes the Dallas Weekly Yelp Newsletter. I love the newsletter because every week there’s a new subject- the last one was about who has the best potatoes in town– but Nikki herself combs through all the listings on Yelp to find the best companies to showcase in the email. So of course I had to ask- how does a business find its way into the inboxes of thousands of DFW Yelp members?
Nikki works with a different theme each week, but some repeat- for example, in the past there’s been “spa week” and “drinks week” that come back from year to year. But Nikki goes for both mainstream choices and destinations off the beaten path, so don’t be concerned that your mom & pop operation won’t find its audience. Make yourself easy to find with great descriptions including key words and terms.
The main thing is to have a fully fleshed-out profile- Nikki looks for profiles with correct, complete information about the venue, quality pictures, and good reviews. So taking the time to really complete a business’s Yelp profile and encourage your patrons to post reviews can pay off in big traffic increases when Yelp takes note. So go ahead and Yelp away!
BLOGGING YOUR BRAND: ARE YOU POSTING ENOUGH?
Whenever I work with a company who complains that they don’t get enough traffic, my first question is “How often do you post?” Because if it’s not at least once a week, then you’re not posting enough. No one routinely checks websites that never change. If you establish a pattern of new content cropping up every week (more than that is even better), people will learn to check your blog more often, bringing you more traffic. Keep it somewhat unpredictable though, that way you keep your readers on their toes.
If you don’t know what to write, look through your inbox. Do you consistently get the same questions over and over about a particular product or service from your customers? Your blog is a perfect place to spotlight that with an informative and useful post. Take a look at your analytics: does one of your main keywords need a rankings boost? Create a blog post with optimized links and anchor text back to your website. If you have an interesting take on a current event related to your industry (i.e. a software company’s opinion on the iPad) that’s a great topic too. You have a lot to say, but you may not have considered blogging as a marketing/PR channel for your brand. That should change.
If you simply haven’t got the time each week to sit down and blog, consider writing a few posts in one sitting and then using your Content Management System (what you use to manage your self-hosted blog, but we’ll get to that) to schedule the posts and stagger out the days they actually publish. That way your readers keep coming back all month long for new content, even if it only took you one morning’s work. If you’re just not the writing type, consider an audio podcast or video blog/vlog. These mediums can be used to great effect and can easily go viral if the content behind them is solid. Get creative! Post consistently on your company blog and new visitors and potential clients are sure to come your way.
BLOGGING YOUR BRAND, PART 1: WHY BOTHER BLOGGING?
One of the easiest ways for your company to enter the social media sphere is through establishing and maintaining a company blog. This is an excellent communication channel between you and your customers, your investors, or the general public. In a rapidly shrinking world, thought leadership is the most important product you have. With a company blog, you control the tone, topics, and style of your company’s voice online in a way you can’t with a third-party site like Facebook or Twitter, an important consideration for image-conscious industries like law and finance.
While they require regular attention, don’t be intimidated by starting a company blog. A good post should be about 250 words, and in that short span of text you have opportunities for optimized links for SEO, viral content possibilities for Social Media, and new material for increased traffic. Blogging adds humanity to an otherwise stuffy, static corporate website, and generates goodwill toward your brand because readers connect with your company.
Google loves blogs. In an effort to provide users with the best search results Google will often rank blog posts and news articles higher, equating their time-sensitive nature with having the most relevant and up-to-date information. If you write more, Google will notice and index your site more often, improving your rankings. There are so many benefits to starting a blog that the effort to maintain it should only be a minor consideration. However, social media is a marriage, so be prepared to stick with your blog once you start.
This series will look at how you can start your corporate blog, but will also incorporate tips to improve current corporate blogs and hopefully answer some questions you might have about your own company blog. If you have a question you’d like covered, please feel free to contact us.
WHAT IS A PAGERANK?
Google updated their PageRank a few days ago, and I discovered that many of my sites had improved! This motivated me to talk a little bit about PageRank. Named after Larry Page, it’s the original metric that defines Google search algorithm. Google scores pages on a toolbar from zero to 10, separating all the real PageRank values of every page these 11 different ranges. This toolbar scale is not linear— it is logarithmic. A page with a toolbar PageRank of six does not have twice as much real PageRank as a page with a toolbar PageRank of 3: its real PageRank value would be much higher.
Though PageRank has nothing to do with relevance for a particular search query, and is not the only factor in ranking in competitive terms, it nevertheless plays a large part in site ranking today. To help you better understand PageRank, I’ve created this diagram that shows how it is determined. Calculating the amount of PageRank that is passed from one site to the next is fairly simple. Every page has an arbitrary PageRank of one. We’ll call this “link juice”. When one site page links to another, the original page passes 85% of its “link juice” to the second page. If linking to one page, it would pass on .85 of its “link juice”, but if it had two outgoing links, it would only pass .42 for each link. Obviously, a very strong page that had many incoming links could have a very high link score, and when it gave a link away, that new link would be very valuable. So, you could have a page with a link score of 100 that had three links to other pages on the web, and each of those links would be worth roughly 28 points. As you can see, this link is significantly more valuable than a link from a brand new page worth just .85. Google calculates a site’s PageRank by adding up all its “link juice”, and by representing that with a number between one and 10and calling that –PageRank!
As you might imagine, it’s exponentially more difficult to achieve each PageRank score. You’d need roughly six times more “link juice” to receive a PageRank of four than you would for a PageRank of three.
TIPS FOR USING LINKEDIN FOR SEO
For a long time I have been telling clients and friends to use LinkedIn to get an easy free link to their website. But now it looks link LinkedIn added no-follow tags to their links; I still think it is a good idea to put the links on your public profile even if they don’t do much for SEO anymore. See the video for the full story.
Transcription
Hi! This is Eric with Globe Runner SEO. I was about to do this great video about how to put links on your LinkedIn profile, and I still think it’s very important, but this is really breaking news, to me at least, LinkedIn has now put no follow tags on their profile links, which is a brand new thing. So, let me show you what I’m talking about. This is a good chance for me to talk about no-follow tags in general.
So, a no follow tag, you’ll find it in the code of a website, and it’s after a link, so you can see on my profile here, I’ve got these links that are outbound links to different websites that I own. BabySafeTravel.com is another company that I own and I wanted to put a link on there so that everyone that is connected to me on LinkedIn and viewed my public profile could go to my website. Just this last month, these were valid links that actually passed link juice, that actually promoted the page for BabySafeTravel.com, and gave it some link juice. I just found out that LinkedIn, probably with their connection with Twitter, have added no follow tags. I have a tool here that shows no follows, it highlights them in pink. You can see that now we have no follow tags added to those links on the page. I’ll just go ahead and click over to Twitter, to show you guys Twitter and you can see that Twitter does the same thing. Here are the links inside Twitter, and they have no follow tags on all of the links on their page.
So, I will go ahead and show you how to put these links in your profile because I think it’s important to have them, but now that they have no follow tags, they are not going to pass link juice or boost your SEO, but you will get traffic if you have a lot of connections. People will look at your profile and follow it to your website. The links go right here under “website,” you can edit them and add them here, and you can add up to three. The way to make them public is by going under “accounts and settings,” and scroll down to “public profile,” and right here you get to pick what you want to be public and what you do not. So, I want everything public on mine but you may not want any past positions or things such as that public. Here is the important part, “website”, you want to make sure that is checked and that those links to your website are in the public version so that everyone can see websites that you are associated with. If you are a company owner, I highly recommend that you get all of those employees to put your company on there. You don’t just want them to say “my company,” it’s much better to get them to actually use the name of the company. To do that, I will just show you one more thing. If you look at these links right here, you can say “edit,” and I will go ahead and edit BabySafeTravel.com, and I want to make sure that it says BabySafeTravel.com or GlobeRunnerSEO.com, NOT “my company.” Simply using “my company” doesn’t give the user any information. Select “other,” then type in the company name. This way, people know what website they are going to and what they are going to be looking at. It’s a valuable thing to do whether it passes link juice or not.
I will show you on BabySafeTravel.com for instance, we use no follow tags on some of our links. No follow tags were created to stop spammers from spamming comment boxes and things of that nature. It’s something to think about when you want to use them and when you don’t want to use them. When you are gathering links on the web, you can look inside the code and find the no follow tags. Let’s see if we can’t find these tags on LinkedIn. I’m going to view my public profile, then I’m going to view source.
This may take me a bit to find but let’s see what we can do. What you need to do is scroll down until you find your websites. Here are the links to my websites and it says “ref = no follow,” and that makes it a no follow link. Although it is a valid link, Google will not actually count that as a valid link and pass link juice through it for SEO purposes. No follow tags are a great thing to know about for this reason. Thanks so much for your time, we will come back and do some more great tips for SEO soon!
Please follow us and leave us your comments, we would love to hear from you! Thanks again, this was Eric from Globe Runner Search Engine Optimization.
CALCULATING RETURN ON INVESTMENT WITH SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION IN MIND
Determining your potential return on investment (ROI) with search engine optimization (SEO) is fairly straightforward. Better yet, by considering the potential search volume that best fits your business, we can provide an accurate ROI picture before any money is spent!
First, we find the words that are most relevant to your business and will likely bring you more business. We use the Google Keyword tool to see how many people search for those words every month. (Check out my previous post for a video that discusses the differences between “phrase” and “broad” matches when using Google Keyword. For this type of projection, we’d use “phrase”.) Then, we use an independent study to determine click-through rates. Click-through rates on the first page range from 3% all the way to 40% for the top position. We usually use a conservative 5-10% for our estimations.
Next we determine a conversion rate: out of 100 customers, how many would need to buy your product or service in order to generate a profitable return? For most businesses, a conversion rate of just 1-3% would be enough to turn a profit! We can then determine your ROI for any one search term, based on calculations using search volume numbers, click-through rate, conversion rate, and profit-per-conversion. Using Excel, we create a spreadsheet using the words we believe will achieve results, and list out the search volume for each word, targeting anywhere from 5-25 words at a time. Then, we multiply the total search volume by 8%, multiply that number by a conversion rate (let’s use 2% for argument’s sake) and profit-per-customer (let’s use $100 as an example). So if the search volume is 100,000 per month, then the click though would be 8,000 with 160 sales / conversions giving you a gross profit of $16,000 per month. At this point, using these calculations, you can clearly see the campaigns potential and calculate your return on investment.
CULTURE OF LINK BUILDING
It is important that everyone on your team understands the value of search engine optimization and you implement a company culture of link building. The video goes over some great first steps in developing a culture of link building. These tips are effective for both small businesses and large corporations.
KEYWORD & ON-PAGE BEST SEO PRACTICES FOR 2017
Each year Google algorithms grow and change, and keep Internet marketers on their toes for the latest updates. As the industry transforms, so should your practices, and skills.
Before you jump headfirst into the New Year, it’s best to brush up on what the latest trends, and practices are for your SEO page optimization. Following along closely with the most recent updates, here are a few easy tactics you can use in order to maintain the best and most efficient on-page and keyword practices for the start of 2017!
Keyword Research
1) Prepare A List
Just like any other project or assignment, compiling a list ahead of time will only help to make the planning process easier, and maintain organization. Jot down as many keywords as you can think of that you want to rank for. Your keywords should include a thick list of searches that your customers would use to find your page. It’s best to also involve keywords that revolve around specific products and/or services that your business provides in order to lead customers to your page. This will help to narrow search results down to your company, and lead customers to better results that specify what your business provides and stands for.
2) Take Advantage Of Auto-Suggest
Auto suggested keywords are just as important as those that you come up with yourself. This tool also helps to generate ideas while you’re making a list if you find yourself stuck and unable to come up with new keywords. If you’re unfamiliar with the auto-suggest tool, it is a simple feature that will automatically generate new ideas once you start typing in a word. These often show you what people are already searching for, and can lead you to more creative and complex keywords. Auto suggest is an easy way for you to enhance your keyword research and improve SEO.
3) Understand Your Audience
If you’re truly trying to enhance your page using keyword practices, it’s important to understand what your audience is interested in, and help them answer any questions they have. The feedback and questions that your audience is asking about a particular product or service when pertaining to your business, can be an easy way for you to create a blog post, or enhance the FAQ sections on your site. A little research goes a long way, and truly targeting the precise information that people are already searching for regarding your business, will only make it easier to enhance the content that currently exists, and add to the exact information that is key for your search rankings.
4) Monitor Your Rankings
One of the best ways to engage in proper SEO practices is to download your keywords and monitor their current rankings. Once you have all the data you need, take some time to fully understand and analyze your rankings. Do you have keywords ranking on the first and second page? Take a look at the pages that are ranking for those keywords, and see if there is any way you can improve or increase the rankings. Simple solutions to SEO rankings could simply be adding more content to your site, updating current title tags, or heading tags.
On-Page Practices & Advice
1) Title Tag
This tag is considered one of the most important when it comes to your pages’ SEO. Title tags are used as the primary means of explaining the document itself, and will appear within the browser, search engine results pages, and external sites. Since this is such an important aspect to the success of your SEO, there are a few suggested practices you should take into consideration when creating your title tag. Keep the tag short and sweet, between 50-60 characters. The more characters it has, the chances are that the search engines will cut off part of the title. It’s recommended to use keywords at the beginning of the tag, and brand names towards the end to optimize ranking results. Don’t forget to get creative, and write a title that will really stand out to a user and grab their attention!
2) Meta Descriptions
Meta descriptions are still important, especially for increasing click-through on search engine result pages, also known as (SERPs). The meta description carefully uses keywords to form a short excerpt to entice searchers to click on the site. Keep in mind that the meta description should not be confused with the meta keywords tag, which is no longer recommended. It should be catchy, yet informative, and quick to read. Readers will find that the meta description will easily tell you what the business is about, or what types of products or services they have, and will be enough to encourage them to click on the page.
3) Alt Tags
Alt tags are a type of HTML attribute that is used with image tags to help search engines better understand the purpose of the image. Images are crucial for many people when visiting a site, and are sometimes the primary reason why they are on the page in the first place. Since search engines cannot interpret the true importance or significance of an image within a blog, webpage, or text, then the alt tag provides the search engine with the information it needs to read it. Alt tags are also known as, “alt attributes” or “alt descriptions”, and can be used on pictures, such as product images. When an alt tag is used on a product image, the ecommerce site will see an increase in search engine rankings.
4) Internal Links
An easy way to enhance your sites SEO practices, while also promoting your own work, is to include internal links in your content. Internal links are considered links that take you to another page on the same domain you’re already on. For example: if you’re visiting a blog site that features recipes, and you’re reading an apple pie recipe, the blogger might include a link using the word “apples” that takes you to another apple recipe on the same site. This type of linking will help to build your site structure, and increase ranking by enhancing the overall flow of the site. Since the content already exists on your page, it’s very simple to include multiple links, and is a sure way to make your site structure rich and in-depth. Although you might think more links are better, it’s best not to overwhelm the reader with too many. Keep it to a happy medium, and try to space out the internal links throughout the entire page of content. Too many internal links can get cluttered, and could potentially make the reader unhappy, and want to leave your site.
5) H1/H2 Tags
These headers differentiate from others as they are often the first thing that some readers see on the page. Since they have a nice, bold style that stands out, H1, H2, and headers enhance your page format, and separate the paragraphs on your page in a clean and organized way. It’s more important to include your keywords within H1 or heading tags rather than within the content itself, as this improves rankings and SEO results. The simple combination of relevant content, with SEO keywords in a bolded, larger, and more distinct font is the perfect way to catch your readers’ attention, and make them more likely to engage or click on your post. The H1 tag is the most effective, so you’ll want to truly target your main keyword when using it. H2, H3, and other H tags are good to use as well, but are not as effective as the H1. It’s important to include keywords in the following H tags, but the H1 should be your primary focus when building a new page, and should be structured to pertain to the interest of your audience.
6) Schema
Schema or schema.org, is a highly effective way you can upgrade your SEO by implementing vocabulary tags into your HTML, thus improving your SERPs. How exactly does it work? Google, Bing, Yahoo!, and Yandex collaborated to provide the most ideal way to markup your HTML in order to receive the most efficient search engine results. By simply adding or enhancing your rich snippets located under your page title, it improves your page visibility in SERPs. This type of structured data is versatile for many different types of SEO purposes. For the best practices, you can use Schema to markup various content, such as recipes, events, places, products, etc. For example: if you’re describing a book you can mark it up with properties, such as title, ISBN, author, etc. Although there is not solid evidence that supports Schema affecting rankings, it is valuable to your SEO, and is linked to improving click-through on SERPs. Readers understand the importance of detail, and the more informative a page is, the more likely a reader will want to return to the page since it provides what the reader is searching for. This is where schema comes into play, and helps to fill out missing details on your page, that not only help improve your SEO, but make the page more appealing to an audience.
7) Page Load Speed
We have all experienced a webpage that takes too long to load, and instead of waiting patiently, moved on to another search. The page load speed is important to SEO best practices, as Google uses it in their algorithm to rank pages. The slower the page speed, the less pages search engines can crawl using its specific budget. This would effectively lead to a negative impact, and affect your overall ranking. Page load speed, as stated earlier, leads to a higher bounce rate, as the user becomes impatient and leaves the page. This of course leads to a lower average time on the page itself, and negatively affects the conversion rates as well.
When gearing up for the New Year, it’s important to take some time to clean up, and organize your site. Use these practices to polish your pre-existing content and structure, and tune it to the perfect combination of SEO practices that will have your site leading in ranking in no time!
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