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5 Mistakes Many Smart People Keep Making in SEO

Posted on by Mario

5 SEO Mistakes many Smart People Keep Making_YWF-01

Before starting this article, I would like to remind you that everyone makes mistakes, so whether you have been in this industry for years or a new player, you will likely make mistakes and the only way to minimalize the mistakes is to learn about your mistakes. There will be many SEO mistakes to talk about, but primarily, we want to share some of them with you, so that you can identify and avoid them and then hopefully, it can gain you success faster and more efficiently. If you are a business owner, don’t forget to share this knowledge to your SEO services agency too.

  1. Serving Bots Before Humans

If your SEO efforts are still all about chasing algorithms, or trying to trick search engines, you’d better leave it all behind, since now what it takes to rank well today is exactly the same as what it takes to satisfy visitors.

Unfortunately, many people still think about putting bots above actual humans which can result in ineffective tactics like keyword stuffing, specific content length, and manipulative linking schemes. I understand that this kind of thinking works in the olden days, but in today’s SEO environment, you really need to change your paradigm.

This is because the main priority in SEO is to always focus on your human visitors, since they are the people that will buy and use your products or services. For example, the main idea of creating a mobile-friendly website is to satisfy mobile users with lots of useful, original, and well-written content that can load quickly.

  1. Thinking about Tactics Instead of Strategies

Many people still mislead between tactics and strategies. In fact, this confusion has become a big problem which causes people to be inefficient and aimless. Therefore, it is important to achieve significant long-term success by having a clear understanding of the difference between the two; here are the simple ways to differentiate them:

  • Strategy: A big picture objective that will give you a significant competitive advantage.
  • Tactics: The actions you have to take to achieve that strategy.

For example, when you want to sell things online, you will use social media selling as your strategy, but providing lots of content per day to make people aware of your products is the tactic.

  1. Failing to Accurately Track Performance

It is important to know exactly how you’re performing, so that you can see whether you’re making sufficient progress or not. Furthermore, instead of relying on your gut instinct, you can try to track your performance through so many powerful tools available that can range from Google Analytics and Search Console to paid tools like Raven, SEMrush, and Moz.

With those tools, you can increase what is working and fix or eliminate what isn’t working well in your campaigns. Besides, you can detect any problem early and it will also allow you to correct it early.

  1. Taking Advice from Questionable Sources

With internet, you can easily find a lot of information, but you need to be careful as information that you get from the internet may have been out-dated, or they can be hoax too. On the other hand, SEO has changed dramatically over the last 20 years. This surely makes it is easy for you to find information that is flat-out false. Therefore, you need to stay on top of SEO by reading the top publication from the trustworthy sources. Furthermore, since SEO is a constantly and rapidly evolving industry, you need to keep learning from many reputable sources.

  1. Not identifying Worthwhile Key Performance Indicators

In SEO, there are many things that you can use as your key performance indicator. However, not all things can be used as a good KPI; it depends on the context. For example, if you determine the number of new links on your website as a KPI, then you will call it a win if there are a lot of links coming from one website, and this is not true, as the links can also come from comment spam.

Therefore, your KPI must be objectively measurable and tied to a specific business goal, such as getting in front of ideal prospects, generating positive PR, or generating revenue, such as a link within content that’s relevant to what you do.

By knowing the 5 mistakes that even smartest people often do, you can prevent yourself from doing the same mistakes. Hopefully, after performing good SEO strategies, you can easily run a good SEO performance for growing and improving your business.

How to Scale your business on search engines internationally

Posted on by Mario

How-to-Scale-your-business-internationally-on-search-engines

At some stages, mostly many online sites have a desired to expand. The only way to do it is by creating and offering more products to an international market.  This is not an easy or simple task by any means. Therefore, as a SEO services, web developer or online entrepreneur, you need to learn more about its risks, research and steps involved in expanding your business into an international market.

Considerations and Research
The first thing that you need to know is whether it is the right time to go international. This relates closely to the future and the current needs of the business. The only sign that you are ready to start implementing an international SEO strategy is when you see visitors increment from international locations. Besides looking for international visitors’ increment, you can take some questions below as part of your consideration:

  • Are you able to implement ALL technical fixes?
  • If targeting a different language, do you have somebody to translate?
  • Is the business ready to carry out international orders and process transactions?
  • Do you have the resources to carry out the work and manage each variation in the future?

After asking yourself some basic questions above, now you can move on to further research. As with any new website idea or build, it’s all about making sure it’s a worthwhile venture.

Moreover, conduct a keyword research will be one of the biggest researches to know if there is demand in the locations.

Website Structure
There are many types of different implementations of international, each having different pros and cons. One of them is by leaning towards using subdirectories, but it will depend on the type of targeting you will be using.

These are the main structure types:

  • ccTLD – Domain variations such as example. Fr, example.au
  • subdomain – fr.example.com, au.example.com
  • subcategory – example.com/au/, example.com/fr/

Below is an example of the set up for a website with the subcategory URL structure for the UK and France.  Place your main website on a .com as this tends to be the norm now, but this work the same with .co.uk.

You’ll see variations that include both language and location, but this can be done with just language or just location.


This would mean that we add the following code to our website:

<link rel=”alternate” href=”http://example.com” hreflang=”en-gb” />

<link rel=”alternate” href=”http://example.com/fr-en/” hreflang=”fr-gb” />

<link rel=”alternate” href=”http://example.com/fr-fr/” hreflang=”fr-fr” />

<link rel=”alternate” href=”http://example.com/en-fr/” hreflang=”en-fr” />

We can also add an X-default tag to this piece of code to be safe. This will tell search engines that if there is a URL that is not using this structure that it should default to the URL specified. This would change our code snippet to:

<link rel=”alternate” href=”http://example.com” hreflang=”en-gb” />

<link rel=”alternate” href=”http://example.com/fr-en/” hreflang=”fr-gb” />

<link rel=”alternate” href=”http://example.com/fr-fr/” hreflang=”fr-fr” />

<link rel=”alternate” href=”http://example.com/en-fr/” hreflang=”en-fr” />

<link rel=”alternate” href=”http://example.com” hreflang=”x-default” />

The above links are for our example website. Internal links reference the specific URL rather than the homepage, they use this code with the URLs changed. In fact, example.com should pass through a redirect if you were to change example.com to example.com/en-gb/.

Sitemap Implementation
They tend to be referring to implementing localization through the use of sitemaps, when people talk about using sitemaps and international SEO. In fact, this is another possible solution for different language and countries despite of hreflang. It works the same with hreflang, but sits within a sitemap rather than in the website’s source code.

Metadata & Content
Based on different languages, you can figure out where the demand is by conducting keyword research. This causes metadata needs to be used for each language variation. Moreover, targeting the right variation of the word is used is also important. For example, if the hreflang is aimed to say the page in Japanese, it should be written in Japanese. This is a basic thing that everyone must know, but still many people get it wrong. In-house resource or outside help are also other important factors to help you complete this all before launch.

Above all, do not translate directly from English; this will sound awkward and probably not understandable in another language. In fact, you need to take considerations on some cultural differences when writing new content or trying to sell a product in a different market.

International Google Local
This section will be very important if you have a physical location in the new countries. Moreover, you can create a listing giving full details of their company along with the location through Google My Business. This will be important in building up an organic search presence in a new location. Below are the main steps of local SEO that you can follow:

  • create the location here https://www.google.co.uk/business/
  • add as many details as possible
  • add the address to the most relevant page on your website
  • mark the address up with local schema
  • obtain links from relevant websites in the area or region

Summary
In the end, good preparation is the key to success before scaling a business to target an international market. Without good preparation, it will be impossible to achieve what you initially set out to do.

Why Machine Learning, Limited Organic Space, and Voice Search can Cause the Death of Organic Search?

Posted on by Mario

voice search

As google will always update their search results, the work of SEO services in maintaining client’s rank site is a never ending process. Recently, many webmasters have noticed that some changes have caused the death of organic search. This includes machine learning, limited organic space, and changes in voice search. So, why these three areas can interrupt your organic search result? Here are the reasons:

  1. With hummingbird algorithm, Google is able to understand conversational language better.
  2. Before the existence of machine learning, Google could address device, location, personal preferences, and etc. But with machine learning, all these things can be addressed quickly and effectively.
  3. There is only less space for organic results in the traditional desktop and mobile formats as the space is shrinking. In the end, it makes the organic result less visible.
  4. Paid listings get more space in the search result.
  5. Mobile internet users have surpassed desktop and will keep increasing.
  6. Voice search users grow quickly.
  7. Personal assistant will be added to all modern Android devices.

All of the above reasons show that with so many algorithm update, Google is getting better and faster at understanding the data. In fact, Google even improves their understanding of conversational language which the result now becomes more excellent.

In the end, all of the facts above don’t mean that SEO is entirely dead it just that it doesn’t look like it does now. So, it’s a time for us to start thinking about how your site should appear and what you can do to improve it. Here are a few suggestions for heading into a brave new world.

  1. Create content that will rank for Q&A and informational queries.
  2. Searcher’s eyes are going to change dramatically and therefore, the quality indicators will also change along the way. Providing the best possible product images, information, videos, guides, etc. will be what separates the results. There will likely be result sets closer to an image search result than a typical SERP now for e-commerce queries, and other query types will likely also change. Staying on top of these changes will be more critical than ever.