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The SEO Checklist to Look Out for in 2018

Posted on by Mario

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We all know that being placed in the first page of Google can’t be done in one night; in fact, one must burn in the midnight oil if they wish to achieve that result in a short period of time. Besides, there are a wide variety of detailed subjects that any SEO services should handle. Therefore, in order to make it easier to remember things that you’ve got to cross off to rank in the year, we have collected 8 hints that any SEO analyst should take a look of.

  1. Crawl-able, Accessible URL in which content Google can easily crawl and parse.

When we use SEO services, we surely want the Googlebot spiders to visit our pages and understand the content that’s in there, whether it is a text, images, video, or embeds or anything else. In fact, this is actually one of the crucial things that matters.

  1. Keyword Research

Another element that is as important as the previous one is keyword research. Most business owners want to know what kind of words and phrases that searchers are actually using. By knowing the primary keyword and a set of related secondary keywords, business owners can discover the searcher’s intention while the SEO engineer can discover and apply the right optimization efforts.

  1. Investigate the SERP

The next thing to do is SERP investigation, in which you will perform a search query in Google and see what comes back to you. Then, analyze what Google believes to be relevant to the keywords searches. Some of SEO specialists think that content will answer this searcher’s query. In fact, you can easily take over that ranking position when you find questions but no one is serving this and many people are actually looking for the answer.

  1. Have the most credible, amplifiable person to Create Content that’s going to serve the searcher’s goal and solve their task better than anyone else on page one

By having a credible person to create the content, you will make amplification, link building, as well as social sharing way more likely to happen. As a result, your content becomes more credible, both in the eyes of searchers and visitors as well as in Google’s eyes too.

After that, you have to try to serve the searcher’s goal and solve their tasks way better than anyone else does  on page one. This will show how you have optimized a lot of these other things and reduce the possibility of visitors to rank on those other people higher.

  1. Craft a compelling title, meta description

Some of us think that Google does not use the Meta description quite often, if you think the same, you are in the same boat. However, the fact is, there’s a high percent of the time when an actual Meta description from the page is used even higher than the title is actually used. In fact, the snippet is something that is crucial to your SEO efforts as it determines how your business is displayed in search result. It will determine whether people want to click on your listing or they prefer to click on someone else’s site. Actually, it is your opportunity to promote your page and generate clicks. Therefore, in order to win, you have to know the kind of words and phrases  people want.

  1. Employ those primary secondary, and Related Keywords

Even though now people prefer to see visuals content, such as video or some other embeddable format, Google can’t necessarily and easily parse out, so they might not count it as content on the page. As a solution, you have to prove to Google that you have the relevant keywords on the page.

  1. Use Rich Snippets and Schema Mark up to Enhance the Visibility

You don’t always need rich snippets and schema mark up, but if you want to get into Google news or you have a featured snippet opportunity and you can get the visual for that featured snippet along with that credit, or in the case where you can get rich snippets around travel or around flights, other verticals that schema is supporting right now, you actually need rich snippets and schema mark up.

  1. Make Sure the Page Load Fast and Look Great

The last but not the least, you also have to pay attention on your website look as your website look is still important, so make sure it looks great from a visual, UI perspective and UX perspective, such as, does your page accomplish their tasks in an easy, fulfilling way on every device, at every speed, and make it secure? You can try many ways to ensure the safety of your web-pages, but HTTPS is one of the things that will continue to be a focus for Google in 2018.

Have you checked the  list above? Make sure you keep them as a part of your efforts. We are sure if you perform all the efforts above, you can achieve a better result in this year!

4 Tips on How to Deal with Duplicate Content Issues

Posted on by Mario

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If you work as a content writer for SEO service, you certainly have to face or deal with duplicate content issues. There are many definition of duplicate content that you can discover. But, among so many definitions, some people still love referring to Google’s definition. According to Google, duplicate content generally refers to substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely matches other content or is appreciably similar.

Broadly, Google categories two types of instances of duplicate content. The first type is for duplicate content on the same domain. The other type is for duplicate content across multiple domains.  This way, you can review whether you have that kind of duplicate content on your site.

Problems caused by Duplicate Content

After reviewing the existence of duplicate content on you site, now, you have to know the problems that can be caused by having duplicate content.

  1. Link Popularity Dilution

You will end up creating and distributing different versions of your site links as you start link-building. This is because search engines could not interpret that all the URLs pointed to the same target location as you don’t set a consistent URL structure for your site.

  1. Showing unfriendly URLs

When Google discovers two identical or appreciably similar resources on the web, it chooses to show one of them to the searcher. Mostly, Google will select the best one to be displayed on search engine result lists. But, sometimes Google might show a poor looking URL version of your site.

There wouldn’t have been this confusion and the user would only see the best and most branded version of your URL, if you avoided the instance of duplicate content in the first place.

  1. Zapping Search Engine Crawler Resources

Since Google will surely crawl your site, so it is important to understand how search bots will crawl over your new content. These crawler cycles could have otherwise been used to crawl over and index any freshly published content that you might have added to your site. This not only will waste crawler resources but also will hurt your SEO.

Solutions for Treating the Duplicate Content Problem

  1. Consistency

In the earlier section, you can see that a majority of instances of duplicate content occurs when the URL structure is inconsistent. Therefore, it will be better to standardize your preferred link structure along with proper use of canonical tags. To let Google knows your preferred URL version, you can set your preference in your Google Webmasters account. Here some things that you could opt to set your preferred domain:

  • Sorts duplicate content issues with the www and non-www version
  • Retains link juice

Next step after setting your preferred domain in Google Webmaster Tools is to set up 301 redirects from all of the non-preferred domain links on your site to your preferred ones. This step will make visitors learn about your preferred version.

  1. Canonicalization

Canonical tags can be implemented through several ways, such as follows:

  • Set the preferred version: www and the non-www
  • Manually point to the canonical link for all the pages
  • Set up 301 redirects
  1. Use the hreflang tag to handle localized sites

Hreflang tag is important to help the search engines choose the right version of your content, especially after you use translated content. For example, you translate your English site into Spanish to meet the local audience language, you should add the tag, “<link rel=”alternate” href=”http://example.com” hreflang=”en-es” />” to the Spanish version of your site.

Following this method will avoid you from the risk of search engines considering it as duplicate content and in the other side, it will also improve the user experience when they want to be served in their native language.

  1. Use the hashtag instead of the question mark operator when using UTM parameters

To measure the effectiveness of different Channels, it’s common to use tracking URL parameters like the source, campaign and medium. But, when you create a link like http://yoursite.com/?utm_source=newsletter4&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=holidays, search engines crawl it and report instances of duplicate content.

Hence, an easy way is to use the # operator rather than the question mark. In order to avoiding duplicate content issues, search engine bots come across the # sign in a URL, they ignore all that follows the sign.

Reasons Why Your SEO Campaign is Failing

Posted on by Mario

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Do your SEO efforts satisfy you? If the result doesn’t produce what you have expected, then your SEO efforts may be failed. Below are several things that you consider about as these things can be the greatest source why your SEO effort is failed. If you work in SEO service field, this article is for you.

  1. Your Website is Outdated

Check on to your site and see if there are few main aspects of your website that can cause your site rank bad.

Website Architecture

Figure out if your site cause high bounce rate. Bounce rate can be caused by a too complex website structure which users require three or more clicks to get to the page they’re interested in. The other factor is difficult navigation between pages and drop-down menus.

Here are some good website’s qualities that you can apply on your site:

  • Main pages should be available from a header on the homepage
  • Site structure should follow a logical and predictable order
  • Use breadcrumbs to help with navigation
  • Optimize HTMLS and CSS code to improve crawlability

Website Speed

Speed is also one of the biggest factors that will keep the users satisfy. You can install Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool to improve the loading time for your site. Here are several things that can be improved:

  • Upgrade your server or invest in better hosting
  • Use external hosting (such as dropbox or AWS) for large files
  • Resize and compress images
  • Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN) to deliver images
  • Minimize redirects
  • Clean up your code

Responsiveness (Mobile-First Indexing)

Recently, mobile is quickly overtaking desktop in terms of searching and browsing the internet. That is why responsiveness becomes important. In fact, Google has showed more seriousness by issuing few recent moves, such as the creation of the AMP project in 2015 and the newest one is the announcement on mobile first indexing.

HTTPS

Provide your site with better security by moving from HTTP to HTTPS.

  1. You Haven’t Nailed On-Page SEO

There are many SEO elements that you need to look for. They are:

URL

Create a clear URL structure that will not confuse users and search engines.

Meta Tags

In order to make your page appear in SERPs, you need to add good and relevant Meta tags. Meta tags have two most important aspects, title tag and meta description. There are several was that you can try to improve your meta tags:

  • Include the primary and secondary keyword in the title tag + brand name
  • Don’t go above 60 seconds in your title tag
  • Use unique title tags for every page
  • Aim for relevance, avoid keyword stuffing
  • Make the H1 heading different from the title tag

Link Structure

On-page SEO is not complete without a good link structure and without cleaning up your broken links. The more internal links you have that go deep and are relevant, the better for users and for your ranking. Here are some things to keep in mind for your internal links:

  • Link between pages and posts on your site including to “deep” content
  • Use relevant links
  • Make anchor text comprehensive, natural, and relevant
  • Use follow links
  • Do not link excessively

Moreover, you need to investigate whether you have any broken links.

  1. You’re not Building Links Properly

Building inbound links is considered as the second most important ranking factor after content. So, you need to follow several strategies such as follows:

  • Vary anchor text when publishing guest posts
  • Do not participate in link networks
  • Disavow any low-quality links pointing to your site
  • Focus on generating content on your website that is valuable and can be used as a resource by others so that they will want to link back to it
  • Discover your competitors’ backlinks and learn about their techniques and sources
  • Build relationships, ask for links, and suggest that mentions are turned into links
  1. Your Content is not Performing well

Content is the core of SEO campaign. Therefore, it is important to make your content long enough and relevant.

  1. Your Content is Not Converting

A good content will speak to everyone who reads and as a result readers will be interested in becoming customers. Here are several ways that can turn readers into customers.