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The Not-So-Smart Moves that Smart People Shouldn’t Have Made in SEO

Posted on by Mario

SEO mistakes you should avoid

There are many business owners nowadays and they keep increasing in number. Each and every one of them wants the same thing; success. They may have learned about business, they may have attended business school – even some of them may have gone to the same school, but somehow their business’ progress may not turn out to be the same. Some fail, some grow. That being said, it is only natural for a business to be in an up-and-down situation. However, if you are a business owner, would you let your business keep going down? Well, we are living in a world where everything changes for better or worse. There will always be cool new things in the future that will support what have been made in the past or the present.

In the business world, there are many components that can support the progress of a business. One of them is Search Engine Optimisation, or better known as SEO. SEO is a business ‘instrument’ that can help people find your business by increasing or boosting your online visibility through your website. Many business owners hire SEO companies to do SEO services for them so that their business can grow. However, many of them too, may have chosen the wrong people to do that, which led to SEO’s dumb mistakes that resulted in unwanted situation in their business. Identify what kind of SEO mistakes that can lead to failures, only in this article. Keep reading to find out!

Too much keyword stuffing

Back then, using keyword stuffing as much as possible could really get you ranked high on search engines. However, having too many keywords being placed all over the content or articles can make your content or article lose its meaning and values, especially in the eyes of your readers or visitors. That being said, Google’s algorithm update called Panda has put an end to this in 2011. Since then, many SEO marketers in their right mind have stopped doing this mistake, and if there are some who is still doing this bad practice, you know what kind of SEO marketers they are.

The annoying pop-ups

Have you ever clicked a link to a website to see their content, only to be interrupted by a super annoying pop-up that was really disturbing you, especially if you wanted to know the information in the content? Yes, anyone who’s got pop-ups on their website will likely get their visitors annoyed by the sudden interruption covering the content they want to see.

Irrelevant inbound links

Yes, links are important. However, it’s not just any link. No matter how many backlinks you’ve got, if the majority of those links came from irrelevant sites, it would not give any values for your website. In fact, Google would find your website not credible and not deserving high rank in the future. Therefore, if you are doing any blog commenting, or writing articles, make sure you are doing that in relevant places and talking about relevant topics as well, so that you can get relevant backlinks.

Those mistakes mentioned above are not the only ones many SEO marketers have done. It may come off as trivial, but if you keep doing those mistakes, it would result in damage on your reputation in the long run. Keep in mind that when you are doing SEO, you should be patient and serious as well as focused, because it may take time for you to see results.

Improper Optimisation: A Guide on Negative SEO in 2018

Posted on by Mario

SEO tips

I know what you’re thinking, how can an optimization be negative? Questionable terms aside, the practice of negative SEO itself indeed do exist although it’s not as prevalent enough to be considered an epidemic and that recovery is usually relatively quick and easy. Google has never considered this to be an issue major enough for them to take seriously and usually, their algorithms are smart enough to pick up on this but that doesn’t mean the risk is not there.

How negative SEO works

If negative SEO rubs you the wrong way, a more familiar and not dissimilar term would be Google bomb. An example is this campaign launched against U.S. politician Rick Santorum by writer Dan Savage. While this Google bomb works by raising a site’s popularity to usurp traffic from a certain keyword, in this case Santorum’s name itself, a negative SEO works by negatively manipulating the rank of a certain page by using underhanded tactics. It is the digital equivalent of ‘Mediscare’ campaigns.

Because of the associated resource required to run a negative SEO campaign like that, it has never been a widespread practice and that negative SEO attacks aren’t a focus with SEO services. Recent times however have shown that the internet’s collective mind is akin to a sleeping giant. A slight poke could cause a disturbance disproportionate to what caused it in the first place. These examples of 4chan’s past ‘accomplishments’ should give you an idea just what are they capable of.

Tactics associated with negative SEO

Ironically, a lot of the methods associated with negative SEO is actually the same ones employed in SEO, just with a negative twist. If you’re familiar with the terms whitehat and blackhat SEO, negative SEO uses the same tricks considered blackhat but directed on competitors’ websites in the hope that search engine providers will penalize them for the infractions. Some of the methods associated with negative SEO are:

  • Content scraping

Scraping is the practice of copying contents regarding a particular subject across the internet and present them inside a new skin as new contents. This is a lazy, creatively deprived practice and is a stone throw’s away from outright plagiarism. The sad thing is, with the rise of tools like Contentbomb and Spinnerchief, this technique is also very easy to employ. When it comes to negative SEO, this technique is used to publish your contents across different sites in the hopes of Google mistaking a copy for the original.

Thankfully, you can fight fire with fire as tools like Copyscape can be used as an online plagiarism detection device. Google has also made it easier for webmasters to fight plagiarism using their copyright infringement form. Generally though, unless you’re sure that your contents were copied with nefarious intent, it might be a good idea to contact the offending webmasters first as it might be the work of a rogue agent.

  • Spam links

Normally, link bulilding, defined as the ongoing process of amassing backlinks to your site, is one of the most basic rules in SEO, given that backlinks are one of the factors search engine uses to determine page ranks. Negative SEO twists this concept by using spam links. Instead of having backlinks from reputable sites and/or sources, negative SEO uses less trusted sites and misleading anchor texts to give the impression that some funny business is going on, opening you to a penalty from Google.

You can however monitor the number of backlinks to your site using a number of tools available online, such as the free SEO SpyGlass. Anyway, using any monitoring tools of your choice, see if there’s a visible uptick during a short amount of time in your link profile. Most monitoring tools allow webmasters to check out the particular details of a backlink and an analysis of the quality of such links. If it seems like a spam to you, disavow them using the tools provided by Google.

  • Site hacking

When this happens to you, your ranking considerations shouldn’t be a priority and if someone actually went to the extremes of hacking your site, negative SEO is usually not the goal they have in mind. Still, any sign of that could potentially alert Google that your site was hacked could lead to a message of “this site may be hacked” on the results page being displayed next to your website. Worse comes to worse, there is a chance that Google will derank your website to protect users.

Cybersecurity is still a somewhat niche topic as the world is so focused on building walls in the real world that they haven’t been paying attention to the security of their virtual space. It is a fact for example that anyone’s life can easily be traced on what information they have in their e-mails and calendars. Anyone with access to mine would be able to tell exactly where I’m going to be spend Saturday evening for example. If you haven’t properly beefed up your security, negative SEO issues aside, you should make it a priority.

Closing thoughts

Think of negative SEO attacks as flesh-eating bacteria. They’re so rare that at times, they’re more like bedtime stories you tell to scare children but everyone who has been a witness to one would never doubt their severity. What I’m trying to say here is this, there’s little chance that what I’ve described above can happen to you but if, God forbid, that it does, you’ll be very happy to know that you are prepared for the occasion.

Be a Web Marketing Championship with These 3 Aspects

Posted on by Mario

Win the web marketing championship with these 3 focuses-01

Everybody wants to be a champion, but a champion isn’t made in a night. In fact, to be a champion, one should know several ways to make them being a champion. This rules also works the same in web marketing, there are 3 main aspects that you should consider if you seriously want to have a successful online marketing or SEO service. Here are the points.

  • A Clear Definition of Success

In web marketing, the definition of success cannot be measured only by how many traffics, downloads, sales or rankings it produces. It maybe varies depending on who’s saying them and what studies are performed. Those are often fluid, depending on the business and what site visitors want. In fact, what you may think is obvious about your success may not be obvious to your marketing team at all.

Moreover, success only can be defined if you and your marketing team have the same marketing goals. By determining your definitions and metrics for success, you can make sure that everyone is on board and everything being done is working toward achieving those goals. It does no good to point out how much engagement you’re getting on social media if that’s not what you’re most interested in.

  • The Aggressiveness of Your Web Marketing Campaign

How aggressive are you in doing your marketing campaign from scale 1-10? Is it 10? The most interesting thing about this fact is that mostly people think that they already do their best in their marketing campaign while in fact, they do not. For example, you have 100 web marketing items, and you think you are only able to handle 6 or 10 tasks per month, while your competitors do their best to handle 20-30 tasks per month, you can see that you may need to take a much longer road to success rather than your rival.

Therefore, it is better for you to focus on any given area so that it will play a significant role in how fast you will achieve your success. Unmistakably, being in the high level of aggressiveness level is good for your business, but sometimes time and budget makes that impossible. So, sometimes the best way to accept the level is by understanding that success may take time.

  • Your Own Expectations

One of important things to determine your success is actually your expectations. For all of the things that have been said above you need to discover if your client expectation line up with the reality of the situation. Whatever expectations you have for the success of your web marketing campaign, you need to make sure those are adjusted to align with each of the considerations above.amitra