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July 6, 2020
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5 SEO Link Building Strategies – Step by Step Guide 2020

5 SEO Link Building Strategies – Step by Step Guide 2020 admin admin https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/ac4c132f340a1c08106672a42225886f?s=96&d=mm&r=g July 6, 2020 July 6, 2020

link building strategies

In the past years, link building strategies were based on links quantity and not quality.

But today, Link building is a totally different game. Links are still very crucial to Google. It is practically impossible for Google to decide the value of any page if there are no links to it — regardless of how helpful, new, or in-depth the page content may be. Link building comes under Off-page SEO. Let’s understand this in detail.

Off-page SEO caters to the activities that are done away from your website to get it ranked in the Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs). Though many people relate off-page SEO with link building, it goes way beyond that. Off-page SEO is not only about the links, it simply tells Google what others think about your website. For instance, if your website pages have a lot of valuable links then search engines will assume that your website has got great content, that adds value to the user; otherwise, no one will link to it.

Your search engine rankings majorly depend on the pages where you build links, especially the authority and the quality of those pages. Content still plays a major role; consistently blogging leads to an increase in your inbound links by 97%. Besides blogging, there are also other proven ways to build high-quality links and securing the highest position in the search engines.

SEO experts say guest-posting content strategy is the most effective way to grow a website’s backlink portfolio, according to the research from SEMrush.

link building strategies

In this blog, we will discuss 5 link building strategies that will help you get good results in 2020.

Let’s start with the first and the best SEO link building strategy that is Guest Posting.

Strategy #1: Guest Posting

Guest posting is one of the oldest link building strategies; in which you write and publish an article for some other website in your niche. You can also link your page to that article. Follow these steps to start with the Guest Posting:

Step 1: Find Guest Post Targets

The first step is to find a website to guest post on. I am listing out some techniques to find guest posting websites.

Technique1 – Google Search Strings

Where you have to write your “Keyword” + “write for us” search string and search for it, you’ll get a lot of websites from which you have to manually check each website you can guest post on. Here are some examples which are generally used to find out sites:

Keyword “guest post”
Keyword ”write for us”
Keyword “submit article”
Keyword “guest post opportunities”
Keyword “submit post”
Keyword “submit content”

Technique 2 – Google Reverse Image Search

Find someone who writes a lot of guest posts in your niche, right-clicks on their image, and click on the copy image address.

link building strategies

Take the URL and search it on Google, and you will get a list of websites they have guest posted on.

link building strategies

Technique 3 – Twitter Search

Twitter is a goldmine in terms of guest posting. It genuinely helps to find high-quality guest posting sites. Here is the trick to find websites to guest post on, through twitter. The twitter results are much fresher than even Google’s index, which means you can get websites that are actively on the hunt for guest posts.

First, go to twitter and search for basic guest post search strings like “[your keyword]” guest post.

link building strategies

Then, look at the results to find guest posting targets.

Step 2: Ready your Guest Post

Now, list out the websites that accept guest posts and shortlist the websites that are a good fit for your guest post.

Only post high-quality content
Can bring you targeted traffic
Websites should be in your niche
Have a significant amount of social media followers

Step 3: Send your pitch

Create an effective pitch that can help you get your post published easily on different websites. Given below are some tips to make your pitch effective.

Start your pitch with something specific about their site
The pitch should be short and simple (< 150 words)
Give them at least 3 topics to choose from
Soft sell them your content
In the end, mention your experience & published work

Step 4: Write your Guest Post

When the blogger has accepted your pitch, you have to give them something really valuable.

Long articles give much more value than short posts, the length should be at least 2500 words.
Include a lot of screenshots & other visuals
Add some internal links as it is great for SEO

Step 5: Follow up

Don’t just post & leave it, actively respond to all the comments within the first 48 hours.
Always promote your guest post on social media platforms.
Send a thank-you note, it keeps the lines open for the next time when you want to guest post on their website.
Blog comment bonanza – reach out to the people who have commented on your post and ask them to publish your post on their website.

Strategy #2: Competitors link:

You may find that your competitors are getting links from major news sources. When you find that your competitors are positioning higher than you in the search engine, they may be on the path of success. You can be there, as well.

There is nothing as incredible as keeping an eye on your competitors to know where their links are coming from. The process of keeping an eye on your competitors is called “competitive analysis”. Here, you figure out what keywords they are ranking for, where their best links are coming from and what they are doing as of now that encourages them to succeed. So how to check your competitor’s backlinks? Follow these steps:

Step 1: Identify your major competitors

You can easily find your competitors in search engines, But just to be sure about it you can use ‘ahref’ tool to find out your major competitors. Log in with the tool, then click on the site explorer tab, put your main keyword in the search bar, and search for it. Scroll down and you will see the web pages which are currently ranking in the Google organic search results.

Step 2: Find all the backlinks of your competitor and export the file

In the left corner under the backlink profile, click on “backlinks”. You will see all the backlinks that are linked to your competitor’s homepage. Now, select one link per domain and add a dofollow filter and then export the file.

Step 3: Visit every website manually and make links on the websites having high DA with less spam score.

Strategy #3: Broken Link Building

Most of the websites have 100’s or 1000’s of links, where some link internally and some externally. For some reason, these links can easily break and stop working. Most site admins don’t even realize this when it occurs and it can break their client experience, reputation and SEO.

Broken link building is the white hat SEO technique to get the right kind of links. Finding broken links can be a superb opportunity for you to:

Build a relationship with the site owner
Increase the value to them
What’s more, above all, get a high-quality link

Broken link building is the SEO link building strategy used by Nikolay Stoyanov, to get 15 connections in 1 day with a 15% conversion rate. It truly is one of the most underutilized third party link building strategies. Here are the steps to do it:

Here are the steps to do it-

Step 1: Find out broken links of your competitors

Log in to ‘ahref’ and then click on site explorer, enter your competitor’s domain and search for it. On the left corner, under the backlink profile click on broken links then you’ll see a list of broken links of your competitors.

Step 2: Find a relevant broken link on a website

Visit each link and find out the best relevant broken link which we can replace with our link easily.

Step 3: Now, we have to create similar content to the broken resource

Analyze the competitor’s content and create a similar kind of content that can easily be accepted by the website admin.

Step 4: The final step

Ask the website owner to replace the broken link of your competitor with your link.

Strategy #4: Outreach

Outreach link building is the most common type of SEO link building strategy, which is widely used nowadays. In this, you have to reach out to the people in your niche in order to introduce your content to them. The main objective of outreach is to convince those who have a large targeted audience to provide a link to your website and to talk about your content or product.

Outreach is extremely important for every business. There are two approaches in outreach:

The Sniper Approach: Advocates of the sniper approach select their “targets” carefully and send highly-customized outreach emails to each one of them. They consider that effective outreach is all about providing some kind of value to a relatively small list of targeted prospects and expecting something positive in return.
The Shotgun Approach: Under this approach, the advocate sends the outreach emails to the broader list of targets without investing much time in personalizing those emails. For them effective outreach is all about scale, the more you send emails the more you will get the links.

Steps to do outreach:

Step 1: First your prospect

You should not send an outreach email to simply anyone. You have to do your research to figure out which organization, blogger, or master’s webpage your content fits in with.

Step 2: Find the right contact details

This is the genuine bottleneck with regard to executing blogger outreach at a scale. Discovering email addresses is time-consuming, tricky, and tedious; at least, if you care about finding the correct contact details.

Step 3: Craft your pitch

Most of the outreach guides will tell you to come up with a template for your campaign which looks similar to this:

Hello %First_Name%,

I just went over your article: %URL_of_their_article%

Extraordinary stuff!

I saw that you linked to this post: %URL_where_they_link_to%

It’s an extraordinary post, yet I composed a far superior article on that same subject.

Look at it here: %URL_of_my_article%

I trust you can add a link to my post in your article or if nothing else tweet it.

Thanks!

Here are some tips to create a pitch-

Always evoke curiosity with your subject line
Pretend like you know them already
Try to avoid fake flattery
Explain your purpose of getting connected with that person
At the end add CTA (Call to action button)
And always use your best work

Step 4: Follow up

Regardless of whether you’ve heard from the recipient or not, you need to follow up. Permit 3-4 days before initiating a follow-up email. The recipient may be occupied and read your email, however needs a couple of days to reply. At this point, you have to send a follow-up email and point back to the original pitch but tweak the message accordingly while still demonstrating your value.

Hold up an additional couple of days after sending a follow-up email. After following up twice, if you still don’t get a response then it is an ideal opportunity to proceed ahead. You can still contact this person later on but wait for a few months. Each follow-up email should be professional and polite, no matter how disappointed you are.

Step 5: Track your campaign

All email outreach campaigns need to be tracked carefully. It’s the most ideal approach to measure your response rates and see which companies are outwardly saying “no” to your pitch and which ones are showing interest.

Strategy #5: Link Roundups “seo” + “link roundup”

A link roundup is basically a blog post that highlights links to other blog posts. Usually, you will find them on a weekly or monthly basis and they are themed around a topic related to the blog that’s facilitating it. You can discover them in virtually any niche, too.

The thought behind it is to share content with your readers from different sources, which is our main motive when we are curating content for our social media channels. Follow these steps for link roundup:

Step 1: Finding out the right link roundup to jump in

You have to participate consistently but you do not need to do link roundup for every blog you publish. Let’s keep it for the best blogs. Now, start searching on Google:

Niche + link roundup
Niche + best-of roundup
Niche + link up

By searching for these phrases, you will find a good number of places to start with. But, there are also different ways to try like “best of”, “Tuesday link up” (where you can submit on any day of the week), and so on.

Go to Google & search for “seo” + “link roundup” to find link roundups on SEO, same way you can change the first keyword which is “SEO” & replace with your niche. If it’s social media marketing then “Social media marketing” + “link roundup”, the same way “PPC” + “link roundup” for PPC related link roundups.

By searching these phrases you’ll find a good number of places to start with, but there are also different ways to try, like “best of” “Tuesday link up” (where you can submit on any day of the week), and so on.

Step 2: Getting featured in roundups

There is no mystery magic formula for getting featured in a link roundup. It helps you build a relationship with the host blogger, but if you don’t, that is not a reason to give up. First, you need absolutely stellar content. If the content is the same as the regular old stuff that is out there or does not provide any value, you can not expect that anybody will really mention it.

When you connect with different bloggers, you establish genuine relationships with them. One of the best approaches to remain off their radar is to approach them and inquire as to whether they would mind mentioning your posts. Some bloggers set up their own roundups of what they find fascinating. So, to expand your odds of getting featured, ensure you are consistently doing your absolute best and trying to promote your work.

If you find a roundup where it is possible to include the link yourself, you can generally do that. You will get the backlink to your site, if nothing else.

Step 3: Publishing your own link roundups

If you need to generate more traffic to your website, think about publishing your own link roundup. In case, you are generally referring to other blogs in yours, it can pay off enormously. It may not make sense to connect to other blogs and expect it to bring traffic back to your site, but it can and it frequently does.

There is a decent possibility that the bloggers you link out will stop by your post and leave a comment to thank you. At that point, they will likely share it with their own crowd since it helps them to show they were featured somewhere else; and thus get more traffic and exposure. They will know who you are, which means building relationships and networking. Also, they may start to include your blog posts in their own roundups; thus bringing you much more traffic and exposure, and a completely new audience.

Final thoughts:

The link profile of your site is vital in determining the rank on search engine results. Google does not care how many links you have linked to your pages, but it is concerned with the experience you create for your users.

What is link building and why does it matter?

Link building is a SEO technique of getting other websites to link back to your website. It's important as it is one of to best way to increase your Website Credibility / Domain Authority. The more your website is credible / authorized in your market, the easier it becomes for you to rank for any keyword.

Do backlinks still work in 2020?

One of the major factors for Google Algorithms to assign ranks on Google SERP. Link building is as important as on-page. So to answer your question Yes, it will always work as it is the other half of SEO. Paid Linkbuilding might die being a black hat technique of link building (don't try).

Is link building still relevant to SEO?

Google always welcomes Genuine Links. Link building is a part of SEO so yes & it always works.

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June 24, 2020
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The Most Common SEO Mistakes to Avoid 2020

The Most Common SEO Mistakes to Avoid 2020 admin admin https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/ac4c132f340a1c08106672a42225886f?s=96&d=mm&r=g June 24, 2020 June 24, 2020

With a lot of content being created and promoted online each second, the competition to capture your audience’s attention and also rank on search engines has become more cut-throat. Hence, we apply all the advanced SEO techniques hoping that we can outperform our competitors. But, we are so focussed on advanced SEO that we end up making some small and most common SEO mistakes that can lead to insurmountable errors.

We can miss the chance to rank for the dream keywords if we avoid or think that these are all tiny issues and don’t provide that much importance. The below infographic by SE ranking shows the SEO mistakes to avoid in 2020.

seo mistakes
With over 2 trillion searches on Google every 12 months, search engine optimization is about finding a balance between audience-centric content and convincing search engines that your content is worthy enough to rank. It isn’t that easy to stay on top, with many people falling into the trap of common SEO mistakes. Therefore, we need to understand what are the SEO mistakes to avoid in order to get the desired results.

seo mistakes

SEO Mistakes to Avoid:

1. Using incorrect keywords:

One of the most usual mistakes while selecting keywords is neglecting what search engines and customers want and focusing on your preference instead. Sometimes you might focus on a keyword that does not fully consider the subject of the content or be opposite to the user’s search intent. Hence, it’s important to do keyword research before you begin optimization.

Always remember to choose keywords with maximum search volume and least competition. You can use tools like Keyword Planner, Ubersuggest, or even do competitor research to decide on the best keywords to use.

2. Keyword stuffing:

You might think that overusing the keywords in your content would boost your ranking. That is a common misconception and an incorrect strategy. Going overboard with the targeted keywords is considered as keyword stuffing or overusing your supposed keywords. Such an approach makes your content useless to its targeted audience.

Google currently employs a special type of search called Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI). This will recognize the topic of your content without having to fill in your content with repeated target keywords.

3. Not checking for plagiarism:

We all know that duplicate content is penalized and we should focus more on creating original content. But what we fail to realize is that sometimes unintentionally our content may be plagiarised, leading to a penalty.

Hence, it is recommended to always check for plagiarism after creating new content. There are various tools for plagiarism, why not start checking right now.

4. Forgetting about website speed and mobile-friendly experience:

The quality of your website, particularly its performance on mobile devices, is very important for users today as most people use smartphones to browse on the internet. When the website is not smartphone friendly, Google and other search engines will downgrade your website.

The same goes for the website speed, which is often given preference when ranking on SERPs. You can check your speed using tools like Pagespeed Insights.

The most valuable strategies for increasing site performance involve leveraging browser caching and optimizing images. You can optimize images with the help of a plugin known as Smush.

5. Not using anchor text for internal links:

We know that Internal links are very important for SEO as it helps in indexing our website. But, we do not add Anchor Text to link to our pages.

What is anchor text? Anchor text is basically a clickable word or a group of words that are connected to another page on our website and usually, they appear in blue color. But that’s not all we should know. The Anchor text we provide should link to an article/page with that relevant subject mentioned.

The anchor text should not consist of words like “click here”, because it does not relate to its destination article. Use your subject keywords to internally link your web-pages, to make it user-friendly.

6. Not including relevant external links:

To make the most of SEO, it is important to take into account external links as well. It is advisable to link back to websites that have given you backlinks, as that would attract traffic in the future. Always remember to link to reputable/leading websites.

7. Not focussing on good quality backlinks:

We all know that a backlink is important for off-page SEO but we forget the importance of good quality backlinks and start participating in link schemes.

Link schemes can include buying or selling links, link exchanges, or creating multiple websites, and providing backlinks. This is considered as spam by Google and it downgrades your website.

You should focus on creating natural backlinks by guest posting on top blogging sites. You can also reach out to influencers and share your blogs with them. If your blog content is relevant, they are likely to give you backlinks.

8. Not creating title tags and meta description that increases CTR

We all know about Title Tags and Meta-description and we optimize them according to the keywords. But what we do not ask ourselves is, if our Title and Meta Description is enticing enough to get a click.

We might be ranking higher than our competitors but does that mean we are getting more clicks?

For example, you are an SEO institute and you have mentioned in your Title and Meta-description “Award-winning SEO institute. Book a demo session now.” You are likely to get higher CTR through this than just vaguely mentioning that you offer an SEO course.

9. Avoiding Content Marketing:

Content Marketing is all about creating the right content in the form of blogs, videos, or articles that help to build a strong relationship with your audience.

The most common SEO mistake we do is creating thin content by using article spinning software or not adding any value to the audience. It is not only about the quantity of your content but the content quality is what matters the most. So invest your time, money, and effort into creating unique and engaging content.

10. Improper site structure:

When you create a website you have multiple sub-domains. But you have to ensure that all the subdomains which are aligned follow a proper structure.

Let us take an example:

seo mistakes

As you can see, the Home page comes first, followed by About us, Services, etc. Instead, if you keep the ‘Services’ tab after the ‘Home page’ tab, it makes no sense as the viewer wants to know about your business first and then about the services.

11. Not doing regular Website Audit:

Another thing that we overlook is not doing a timely website audit. Ideally, you should conduct website audits every month since it is important to check for broken links or any other issues.

Also, google algorithm keeps updating so it is important to keep auditing your website. You can do a website audit with the help of tools like Screaming frog, Google Analytics, Uber suggest and Moz trial. Ideally, you should also keep checking for any website issues/anomalies with the help of Google Search Console.

12. Not checking bad links:

We know that getting good backlinks can help us in the Search Engine Ranking Position (SERP). But what can we do about backlinks from websites which are spammy or low quality? Use the disavow tool from Google webmaster tool to control link juice.

In this way, we are telling Google that “don’t attribute the link being provided by those spammy websites”. Hence it is advisable to regularly find out which links are devaluing your ranking and use the Disavow tool.

13. Not having bing business listing/Not optimizing for other search engines:

We all optimize our websites for Google, but there are other search engines as well. Even though they are not that popular as Google, they should also be optimized. We can get customers from other search engines as well as there isn’t much competition.

Bing, by Microsoft, is a search engine that has a market share of around 2.44% worldwide. If we optimize for Bing, we can get those customers as well. Also, we should not forget Bing business listing, which is similar to Google my business and helps with local SEO.

Since we are talking about local SEO, we should also understand that if our target market is outside India we have to optimize for country-specific popular search engines. For example, Baidu for China and Yandex for Russia.

14. Not using Bing Webmaster tool:

In reality, Bing Webmaster Software is more sophisticated and it offers more resources for SEO practitioners than the Google Search Console. So, when we are already thinking of optimizing our website for Bing, we should not forget the Bing webmaster tool.

Now, that you are aware of the common SEO mistakes to avoid, you should aim to improvise them by 2020. Also, keep yourself updated with the latest SEO updates to remain ahead of your competitors. You should also learn about the entire online ecosystem and know more about other categories of digital marketing since everything is interdependent.

What are some common SEO mistakes?

No h1 tag, duplicate title/descriptions, no xml sitemap, pages with 4xx response, duplicate description etc.

What is bad SEO practice?

Bad SEO is also called black hat SEO, which are the activities done to get rankings in less time by violating search engine's terms and policies for example keyword stuffing, hidden text, etc.

What are the best SEO tools?

There are various free and paid tools for SEO, some of them are: Google search console, Moz, Semrush, Ahrefs, Majestic SEO are some common SEO tools.

What are SEO keywords?

Keywords are the words or phrases that define what your content is all about, in terms of SEO, they're the words that searchers enter into search engines, also known as search queries.

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May 21, 2020
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How To Increase Organic Traffic In 2020

How To Increase Organic Traffic In 2020 admin admin https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/ac4c132f340a1c08106672a42225886f?s=96&d=mm&r=g May 21, 2020 May 21, 2020

Are you a business owner, blogger, or an online marketer searching for techniques on how to increase organic traffic to your website?

Are you finding yourself pinned down against the wall in trying to increase organic traffic to your website

In fact, when you search for “how to increase organic traffic” on Google, millions of articles appear on the results page and you can be easily lost reading all of them.

Fortunately, you don’t have to go through that struggle. I’m sharing with you some of the Quickest ways on how to increase organic traffic.

| RELEVANT, USEFUL, QUALITY CONTENT

Content is the Ultimate King of SEO!

Original content is the number one driver of the search engine ranking. Providing quality content increases organic traffic into the website, thereby improving the domain’s authority and the page relevance.

Yes! Search engine loves content, just like we do. Updating your site content regularly influences Google’s ranking algorithm and your page relevancy. So, always keep your content fresh and give your viewers a reason to come to your site.

‘Dwell time’, it’s the amount of time a user spends on a website before returning to the Search engine result page. An increase in the Dwell time is a signal for better Search engine ranking. So, take this opportunity to provide useful content making the user stay longer on our site page, in turn ranking your website higher and increase organic traffic.

Here are few tools you can use to check the content duplication on your website – CopyScape and SiteLiner

With the right content strategy, your SEO is in for the win!

| KEYWORDS. KEYWORDS. KEYWORDS.

Yes!! Keywords are the way to increase website ranking and there is no shortcut to SEO than a keyword-rich content. Using the right keywords will definitely help to increase organic traffic by ranking your website higher in the search results.

Take a look at the Components of Google’s ranking algorithm, keywords play a major role in your SEO ranking. The primary step to increase organic traffic is doing a comprehensive keyword research.

What is Keyword research?

Keyword research is a practice search engine optimization professionals use to find and research alternative search terms that people enter into the search engines while looking for a similar subject.

So, begin by identifying the Keywords phrases that your viewers are using to search for your business online.

Think about how a visitor might search for specific information on your site (with keywords like “catering services in Bangalore”, “best wedding catering” or “corporate catering”). Then, build a keyword strategy based on its search volumes, competition, and bids. Incorporating Long tail keywords in your content can help you reach specific customers, who are in the exact search of your product.

In this example, you can include “vegetarian caterers in Bangalore” as the keyword to highlight your service. By doing so, you attract visitors who likely might turn to be a conversion in the future. Quality web traffic is the key to your page relevancy.

Hence, integrate & use the selected keywords comprehensively in your Titles, Paragraphs, Images Alt Texts & the Anchor Texts used for internal linking to increase your organic traffic. However, overusing keywords can ruin your ranking. The accepted industry norm is to have a keyword density of 2.5% – 3% on a page.

So, use them naturally within your sentences and increase the organic traffic of your website.

| PAGE-LOAD SPEED

Did you know? A site’s loading speed directly affects the conversion rate of your business.

Page loading speed is one of the major factors affecting the search engine rankings. Researches have shown that 40% of viewers abandon the website and 80% of viewers don’t return to the website that loads longer than 3 seconds. Amazon examined that, one-second increase in its site’s loading speed will lose the $1.6 billion sales per year.

Many Business owners fail to include this aspect in their website optimization but Page load speed can have a direct impact on your website rankings. We encourage you to use industry-leading tools such as Pingdom, GT Metrix, and Google Page Insight will help you identify every element’s loading speed on the website. Use the analyzed information to optimize the elements that affect your page-load speed. This aids in increasing the website ranking & in turn, will increase organic traffic into the website.

Let’s look at an example of a page-load result of a Food catering company. Here, the file size of the page is kept to a minimum, making the load time faster. As a result, the website is able to rank higher in the search engine page, resulting in a surge in organic traffic.

| OPTIMIZE META TITLE & META DESCRIPTION

Meta labels are the key elements for all web indexes. Meta tags, Title tags and Meta descriptions should be present and relevantly optimized on every page of your website.

All the Meta tags show up in the HTML code of a site page and tells the web crawler what the page is about, and are the initial introduction and point of contact for all web crawlers.

Using appealing, keyword-rich Title and descriptions is a marketing tactic to attract visitors to your website. But, excessively short or too long titles and descriptions can decrease your SEO rankings, so it’s best to lead a review of your site to identify any issues with these components.

Let’s look at an example of the Title and Description of a food catering website. Here, the keywords are included in their titles and descriptions. Also, the content is kept to point making it clearer and appealing for the visitor to understand the company.

| INBOUND & OUTBOUND LINKS

Linking your page content to authorized web sources can increase the dwell time and the relevancy of the web-page. Outbound links not only improves search engine ranking but also increases the website traffic.

Focus on using descriptive internal links on your keywords. By Using internal links, you can easily redirect your viewers to another page on your site. However, hyperlinking too many text can sometimes distract the reader to get through the content.

Here is an example of internally linking the text “MOSHI MOSHI” to our MOSHI MOSHI’s blog site.

| Link Building:

Link building is the process of earning links on other websites. Common link building strategies include content marketing, building useful tools, email outreach, broken link building, and public relations.

You can go about link building in a many number of ways, the most prominent among them are:

Profile creation is one link building technique in which we create a profile in different platform’s website such as forum sites, social networking & web 2.0 websites and give our business details in it and also give our website link in that profile page from which we can get a backlink to our website.

Guest Posting outreach is a strategic way to connect with your target audience on other websites they use. It expands your reach and promotes your brand. But you can only effectively use blogger outreach if you get noticed by editors and get published on the right platforms.

Business listings are public profiles which can be viewed by anyone. A typical business listing contains NAP (Name, Address, Phone Number) details. Advanced details such as website, working hours are also captured by certain business listings.

Google still rewards high-quality links, actively aims to ignore lower-quality links, and will still penalize real-time spamming activity using manual actions such as shadow banning – reducing the discoverability of your website on the internet.

So when practiced in the right manner, link building can be an effective tool to increase organic traffic to your website.

Apart from these 6 major techniques, here are a few brownie techniques to increase organic traffic:

404 Redirects are server response code informing a user that the web page he or she is looking for cannot be found; either due to user error when typing the URL, or the web page he or she is looking for is not an actual web page.
Rich Snippets are structured data markup that site operators can add to their existing HTML, which in turn allows search engines to better understand what information is contained on each web page.
XML Sitemap is a text file used to detail all URLs on a website. It can include extra information (metadata) on each URL, with details of when they were last updated, how important they are and whether there are any other versions of the URL created in other languages. All of this is done to help the search engines crawl your website more efficiently, allowing any changes to be fed to them directly, including when a new page is added or an old one removed.
Robots.txt file is primarily used to specify which parts of your website should be crawled by spiders or web crawlers. It can specify different rules for different spiders. The standard specifies how to inform the web robot about which areas of the website should not be processed or scanned.
Content Updation is another trick in the hat to increase organic traffic. Get Google to crawl your site on a frequent basis, just by updating the content on a timely basis. There’s nothing Google loves more than fresh content, giving you a great advantage in the webpage rankings.

In this digital age, SEO is a must and there is no turning back. It will be something your site needs to focus on the present moment and later on too.

In case you’re just beginning to concentrate on your SEO, it’s certainly not very late to execute the methodologies I just discussed.

Do not get overpowered. Begin with a couple of SEO methods, and proceed onward to the others. Screen your outcomes regularly and implement new strategies based on the results.

Moshi Moshi, is a Creative Ad Agency in Bengaluru with young professionals meeting business needs along with the changing trends of the Advertising Industry.

For any professional assistance and quality services in Digital Marketing, Get in touch with us.

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May 18, 2020
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What is SEO and How Does it Work?

What is SEO and How Does it Work? admin admin https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/ac4c132f340a1c08106672a42225886f?s=96&d=mm&r=g May 18, 2020 May 18, 2020

what is seo and how does it work

I am pretty sure that if you are a beginner when it comes to SEO, you’ll probably want to call it Severely Exhausting Optimization. So why not learn what is SEO and how does it work?

I completely empathize with you but once you start understanding the concepts and applying them, you will realize that it is quite interesting.

SEO is Search Engine Optimization.

Why not relate it with our life? That’s how I learned.

Imagine SEO being a person who is put on a pedestal in society. But, it requires some effort to achieve that.

Let’s imagine that society is the internet and you are a website. You want to be number one, which you can achieve only through hard work since a huge inheritance isn’t in the cards for you.

Google ads can be compared to the few fortunate ones who have achieved name, fame, money in a short time through their billionaire parents. But I am an AAM AADMI (not from the political party). I am a middle-class person and I am willing to put in all the hard work even if it takes time. Let’s understand what is SEO and how does it work?

There are two types of SEO:

On-Page SEO
Off-Page SEO

What is meant by search engine optimization (On-Page) is that Google checks if the basic elements of your website are optimized. This optimization is not limited to the appearance but extends to the following factors as well. Let us look at On-page SEO in detail.

On-Page SEO

Appearance matters and so does your abilities. Imagine you went on a first date, shabbily dressed, without putting on any perfume, not taking the extra effort to look your best (even if your heart is gold). Of course, your date would not be pleased and you would not be preferred over the next date they matched with on Tinder. They would assume you do not want to make an effort to win them over. If you are only good-looking but your brain processes slowly, it can yet again hamper your image.

This is exactly what happens when Google search crawlers (robots) visit your website. They assume the website is of low quality because you have not optimized your page and it is slow in loading and Google ranks you lower.

Through On-Page SEO, Google checks if the basic elements of your website, design, fonts and color are optimized. The following factors are crucial elements of On-Page SEO.

1. Keyword Research

This is the most crucial part of On-page SEO. Here, we’re going to discuss Keywords which are basically what our audience types into their search engine.

Keyword research is very important to rank on the website. Website content should contain target keywords, to let Google know that you provide the information, services, or product that the consumer is looking for.

Here, we’re going to discuss two different techniques for doing keyword research.

Keyword research using Search Engine Result Page
Keyword research through Your Competitors Site Analysis

|Keyword Research Using Search Engine Result Page

This technique is a very simple and smart way to get started with keyword research where you don’t need any paid tool. Here we’re gonna use Google’s SERP and it’s features to get our keywords.

Let’s say you want to do keyword research for “SEO agencies in Bangalore”.

How do you start?

STEP 1

Type in the generic terms you would use if you were to look for an “SEO agency”. You would get the list of related searches and Google suggestions for that particular keyword. Pick out the ones you feel like could be targeted.

what is SEO and how does it work?

STEP 2

On the same page, go to the bottom and as shown below, find the related searches. Take all the keywords you feel are the best matches for your services/products.

List out all the keywords that you got from step 1 and 2.

what is SEO and how does it work?

STEP 3

Go to Google Keyword Planner or any keyword research tool as mentioned below, and analyze all the keywords that you have based on Search Volume & Competition.

Note: You will see other keywords that people are using to find services/products like yours. Pick the good ones that you can rank in case you pick up High Search Volume + High Competition keywords.

Take the keywords with maximum search volume and the least competition. Remove all the other keywords after you pick up your target ones from the list.

STEP 4

Repeat the same for all of your Services/products to get all the keywords you want and then you start Keyword mapping.

There are other tools such as – Ubersuggest, Answerthepublic, Keywordtool.io, and WordStream Free Keyword Tool. You can follow the above process using any of these tools.

|Keyword research through Your Competitors Site Analysis

This is another way of picking out the best of available keywords. Your competitors have most likely done all the keyword research and they might have even used paid tools for the same.

Why not get some keywords from them? Right?

I’m sure by now you’d have guessed how to go with this technique. But to make sure, I will list out the three small steps.

STEP 1

Search on Google with very generic keywords for your services/products.

I.e. SEO Company India, Digital Marketing Services, Social Media Ad Company.

These are the top keywords in the Digital Marketing Industry on Google. You will find 7 websites on PPC ads and 10 organic SERP sites.

STEP 2

List out all the 17 websites from page 1 and 2. You will get another 14-15 websites that you can add to your list.

Analyze all of these websites pages (homepage & services pages) one by one and extract the target keywords from that page. Keywords will be included in Title, Description, and Content. Make sure you get the right keywords.

STEP 3

After you are finished with keyword extraction, go to any Keyword Research Tool and look for Search Volume & Competition.

2. Canonicalization

A canonical tag (rel=canonical) in the back-end tells the search engine that the particular URL is a master copy.

E.g., we have an HTTP version and an HTTPS version of the same website. Search engines can get confused about which version has to be shown in the SERP (Search engine result page).

That is why having a canonical tag prevents the problems caused by multiple versions of the same website.

How to put a canonical tag? This is a code that goes in the back-end of the website.

what is SEO and how does it work?

The canonical tag indicates that the page on which this tag is put should be treated as a duplicate of the mentioned URL.

3. Header Tags Optimization

Header tags are mostly headings on your post. They are HTML codes that provide structure to your content.

The most significant heading tag is the H1 tag and the least significant is the H6 tag.

We have to follow the hierarchy that is the H1 tag followed by H2, H3, H4, H5, and H6. This helps crawlers understand the content better.

4. Internal Link Structuring and Optimization

There should be a proper internal link structure that the user can navigate through, to find relevant pages on the website.

Just like in a family, if the family members are not connected, then there would be a lot of misunderstandings.

Similarly, website pages need to be interconnected.

5. Image Optimization

Image optimization is making images readable by crawlers so that they can understand what the image is about.

Go to the back-end of your website in the media section and put keywords in the Alt Text. Let’s take the following example:

STEP 1

You go to the media library.

STEP 2

Select an image from the media library.

STEP 3

Go to the Alt Text part and describe the image. Enter the title, caption, and description. It is advisable to put the keywords here if they are relevant.

6. Robots.txt Creation

Robots.txt is a text file that tells the crawlers/robots, which pages to crawl to or not crawl to.

When the robots crawl a page, they look for – allow or disallow attributes to know what their instructions are.

This is done on the back-end of the web-page.

Disallow attributes are relevant for financial transactions mainly on e-commerce websites.

This tells the crawlers not to crawl through those pages.

7. XML Sitemap

An XML sitemap is a blueprint of the website. It is a guide to tell search engines which content is available and how to reach them. It helps web robots with faster indexation. It’s an important one. So, don’t ignore it.

There are plugins for the same. Like Yoast, Google XML generator.

8. SEO Friendly URLs (URL Rewriting)

URLs should be written in a user-friendly way and the keywords should be integrated into the same.

Why should it be user-friendly?

So that the user/person can easily understand what the page is about when they look at the URL.

Think that you are looking for some info on “personality_dev” online and you open some link with /xmlsajd/ types of URL which has all the info you are looking for and another one is /personality-development/ which to has almost all the info that you need. In these 2 URLs, you know for sure that the second one has the info you need but you are not sure whether the first one has the info you are looking for or not. That’s why having a user-friendly URL is important. It helps increase your CTR.

9. Title Tags and Meta Tags Optimization

Title tags and meta-description is the title and description that we get on search engine result pages. It should contain the targeted keywords that you are trying to rank on.

The title plays a very important role in ranking your keyword as well as making your prospects get onto your website. Meta descriptions, on the other hand, do not help in ranking your keyword but help in increasing your CTR (Click-through rate).

As you can see the keyword is “Australian shepherd puppy,” and it is present in both, the Title and the description (meta-description). Similarly, ensure that your keyword is used in these places.

10. Page Loading Speed Optimization

The page load speed forms an integral part of On-Page SEO. Google gives the utmost importance to speed. It has released the mobile-first indexing update and checks for mobile-friendly websites.

You can check your page load speed here.

Let us take an example of the following website:

what is SEO and how does it work?

The score here is low since the higher speed score is between 90-100.

You can increase the mobile speed by using Better Amp.

Another plugin to optimize the images is the Smush plugin.

11. Structured Data Implementation

Google shows schemas (enhanced description) if you add structured data to your site which is a piece of code.

Search engines read the code to create these enhanced descriptions. There are plugins available to create the code without coding knowledge.

what is SEO and how does it work?

In this case, the highlighted sections like group tours, contact us, and stores are part of structured data. It enables your site to rank better for a wide range of content types like articles, local businesses, restaurants, TV episodes, ratings and reviews, Movies, and Products.

12. Content Optimization

Finally, we have content optimization where keywords should be included but keyword density should always be within 3%. The content of the website also forms a crucial part of On-Page SEO. If you provide irrelevant content by keyword stuffing your rank may go down.

By ensuring that you address the On-Page SEO, you show the search engines that you know how to target your audience by providing a smooth experience to the users.

Off-Page SEO

You are known by the company you keep and networking matters.

Let’s say you are a very good person but you often hang out with goons. So you are more likely to be misjudged.

However, if you have associations (links) with the right people then you would also be respected and trusted.

Just like in human nature, socializing is one of our many priorities.

Making the right connections, having the right friends, or knowing how to carry yourself at social events adds weight to your portfolio.

Social engagement is a crucial skillset, and it would be beneficial for you to hone it. What is meant by search engine optimization (Off-Page) is exactly this. It is always about the right connections and associations. If you get backlinks from the right website/page which has a high domain authority or page authority, you will be given priority by Google.

These connections can be made in the following ways:

1. Creating Shareable Content

It is important to create extraordinary content that is both informative and engaging. This would help get organic backlinks when people share your content on different social media platforms.

2. Using Influencers

If you have created shareable content then you must reach out to influencers and ask them for backlinks if they like your blog.

3. Guest Posting

There are several blog websites available for guest posting like Medium. Post your blogs on them and get a backlink.

4. Social Bookmarking Sites

There are multiple social bookmarking sites, like Reddit and Tumblr, that can get traffic to your website when you bookmark your blog page or website.

5. Forum Submission

Take an interest in forums that identify with your site and business, and make associations with that network. Answer threads, individuals’ inquiries, and offer your recommendations and guidance. Utilize “Do-Follow” links.

6. Directory Submission

Directory Submission attempts to assemble quality backlinks. Pick a viable catalog and select an appropriate classification.

It requires some time and investment to convey great outcomes, but these outcomes stand out over a greater timespan.

7. Article Submission

Submit your article in a high-quality article submission directory. Make sure you do not do keyword stuffing.

8. Question and Answer Sites

Try websites such as Quora to increase traffic to your website. Provide solutions to queries related to your business. If required, provide links to your website.

9. Video Submission

Another technique is to submit engaging videos on video submission sites, like YouTube. Ensure that you give a title and description tags to the video.

10. Image Submission

Submit your images in popular image sharing websites such as Pinterest, Instagram, etc. Optimize with the correct URL and title tag.

11. Document Sharing

Create unique documents in PDF or PPT format and share them on sites like Slideshare, Scribd, etc.

12. Newsletters

A newsletter is a cost-effective technique to communicate with your target audience.

Plan your newsletter by incorporating recent content from your site, along with some fresh content.

For the most part, you should keep your newsletter short, however, loaded with intriguing and applicable data.

While creating content, ensure that you provide proper valuable guidance and relevant data so that you add value to your subscribers’ content consumption.

But make sure that you abstain from sending an excessive number of bulletins because you will end up irritating your users and will begin to lose them.

So now you have learned what is SEO and how does it work, you will want to know how to check your SEO score. There are a few sites that permit you to check your SEO Score. One such site is SEMrush.

Another option is to hire an agency and learn more about what is meant by search engine optimization. They will also help you optimize your website and other content to be SEO friendly.

Tools Summary

Tools Mentioned	Function
Keyword Planner	It researches on keyword search volume and average bid cost
Ubersuggest	It finds trending keywords and search volumes
Answer the public	It searches and maps keyword suggestion that you see when you perform a Google search
Keywordtool.io	Generates hundreds of relevant long-tail keywords
Wordstream free keyword tool	Allows marketers to pull out lists of actionable keywords to use in their marketing campaigns
Yoast SEO	It gives you tons of flexibility over your site’s content by letting you set up titles, meta descriptions and manages sitemaps
Pagespeed Insights	It calculates your website speed and gives recommendations
Better Amp	Improves loading speed of your website in mobile search
Smush Plugin	To optimize images
Google XML Generator	To create sitemaps

What is SEO in simple words?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization which is done to improve the ranking of a website on search engine results pages (SERPs).

What is the purpose of SEO?

The main purpose of SEO or Search Engine Optimization is to gain organic traffic to your website, to increase the visibility for your website, and to increase the possibility of the conversion.

Is SEO important in 2020?

SEO has been around for more than a decade and a half and contributing in the share of traffic for successful websites, optimizing your pages for SEO is going to be even more important in 2020 as organic search continues to rise above other search traffic.

What is whitehat SEO?

It is a practice that improves the website rankings on the search engine result pages without doing any unethical activity.