Wednesday, 1 August 2018

You need 23 keywords in a blog post to rank well. Not.

As a search engine optimization (SEO) content writer who participates in many SEO-related Facebook groups, I am frequently asked the same question:

“How many keywords should I use in my posts?”

People seem to be looking for an exact number or percentage that defines an ideal “keyword density” for web pages and blog posts. They feel there is a sweet spot, and if they hit it, the traffic will come pouring in!

Sadly, that’s not exactly the case. In fact, keyword density is a useless metric when it comes to writing content optimized for search engine traffic and conversions.

To help anyone looking for an answerto that question, I want to try and debunk some common misconceptions about keyword density and show there is no magic keyword number. I will also share a handful of strategies I feel are useful for writing SEO-friendly content.

Debunking keyword density

There is no clear correlation between keyword density and how much organic traffic is generated by a post or page. In this case, the lack of evidence may be evidence in and of itself, as no SEO expert has been able to pinpoint the ideal ratio of keywords to content for generating traffic. I’ve tried and failed more times than I care to admit.

That’s not to say keywords don’t matter; they do and will continue to matter for the foreseeable future. However, it’s important to think beyond keywords and understand there are many more important factors coming into play.

[Read the full article on Search Engine Land.]


Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Marketing Land. Staff authors are listed here.


About The Author

Jessica Foster is the Founder and lead SEO Strategist at Keys&Copy – an SEO agency with a focus on content marketing and SEO copywriting. She is also the founder of TrueToast Magazine, an online resource for and by millennial entrepreneurs. She lives in the very beautiful and very hipster Seattle, Washington.

This marketing news is not the copyright of Scott.Services – please click here to see the original source of this article. Author: Jessica Foster

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The ultimate guide to HTTP status codes and headers for SEO

In the client-server architecture of the World Wide Web, the interaction between browsers and websites is handled through the hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP). This protocol was introduced in 1991 and is an official web standard. Almost all traffic on the web is handled through HTTP.

When search engine spiders like Googlebot crawl a website, they behave like browsers requesting web pages from a site and rely on HTTP for this exchange. This is why it’s important for search engine optimization specialists (SEOs) to understand how the HTTP protocol works and the impact it has on search engines’ crawling and indexing of web pages. In this column, I’ll explain everything you need to know.

But first, let me tell you about the tools you’ll need to perform the necessary tests on your site. Google Chrome DevTools allows you to view a uniform resource locator (URL) full HTTP response, but it can be cumbersome to view. I prefer using the Ayima Page Insights and Ayima Redirect Path Chrome plugins to show me a URL’s full HTTP response.

Using the Ayima Page Insights plugin in Chrome, this is what an HTTP response looks like:

Another tool that does the same job isLive HTTP Headers for Chrome.

[Read the full article on Search Engine Land.]


Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Marketing Land. Staff authors are listed here.


About The Author

Barry Adams, Founder of Polemic Digital,  is an award-winning SEO consultant specializing in technical SEO for news publishers and e-commerce websites. He’s been active in SEO since 1998 and has worked with a wide range of clients from micro-businesses to the world’s largest media companies. Barry enjoys sharing his knowledge and experience with the industry; he regularly speaks at digital conferences around the world, delivers annual guest lectures for several universities, and is the chief editor at popular European marketing blog State of Digital.

This marketing news is not the copyright of Scott.Services – please click here to see the original source of this article. Author: Barry Adams

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What Advertisers Can Learn From Facebook’s Rough Quarter

Facebook made headlines again last week, albeit not in a way that the tech company would have wanted to. On Thursday, July 23, Facebook posted the largest single day decline in stock price in the history of the US stock market, posting a market capitalization loss of ~$119 billion. This sharp loss was a response to a disappointing quarterly report, which showed that users in the US and Canada (their most profitable regions) had stayed static at ~185 million users. That marks the 4th straight quarter that Facebook failed to grow their US and Canadian active users, leading some analysts to wonder if the platform has plateaued. Additionally, many are drawing a link between outrage at Facebook’s handling of user data (as well as more general criticism related to the 2016 US elections). While its unclear how large a role those issues played in Facebook’s failure to grow, it seems likely that they were at least contributing factors.

  1. Even if Facebook’s user base has plateaued at ~185 million users in the US and Canada… that’s still 185 million users. To put that in perspective, Twitter has ~68 million active daily users in the US. While up-to-date statistics regarding Canadian active Twitter users are not readily available, even a generous estimate would have Twitter at less than half of Facebook’s user base.
  2. At risk of sounding like a Facebook public relations spin doctor, I think it’s possible to reframe the lack of growth positively. Consider: Facebook faced its most consistent and serious negative headlines of its history in Q2 2018 and managed to maintain its large user base. If you think that those negative headlines contributed to its lack of growth, and you think that the worst of those headlines have come and gone, then it’s not out of the question to predict greener pastures ahead.
  3. Facebook continues to be the most developed and featured social ad platform. Compared to its relatively nascent competitors, Facebook offers the best advertiser experience and the most options for targeting. Even if its relative user-base advantage dwindles, it still has a massive head-start on advertising tool sophistication.
  4. As other traditional outlets such as television and print media decline, those advertising dollars are following users to the digital spaces that increasingly occupy their time. This trend doesn’t look to slow anytime soon, and the resulting rising tide should lift all digital boats, Facebook included.

So, does that mean that Facebook advertisers have nothing to worry about, and that Facebook’s decline will have no impact on the social media giant as an advertising channel? Not necessarily. While Facebook is likely to retain its primacy as the social media advertising giant, we’re already seeing signs that the platform is responding to those privacy concerns in ways that impact advertisers.

One such change is the deprecation of partner categories, which are audience behaviors and characteristics that rely on third party data (if you’re interested in the effect of this change and how to adapt to it, be sure to check out our article on Facebook Shutting Down Partner Categories.) Facebook is also experimenting with giving users in some markets the ability to view a page’s advertisements, a move that could impact competitor research and an advertiser’s ability to test different messages on different audiences effectively.

More than any specific platform changes, though, I think the most important thing advertisers should learn from Facebook’s tough Q2 is that users are increasingly aware and critical of poor advertising and privacy practices. While Facebook has thus far absorbed the brunt of that ire, advertisers should put some serious thought into whether or not their practices on the platform would fare well under intense public scrutiny. Whether you work on behalf of a client or are part of an in-house team, think carefully about whether or not your advertising practices could spark outrage and alienate your audience. Specifically, you should ask yourself:

  • If you’re using customer match data, are you handling that data responsibly? And if you’re collecting customer data from lead form ads, are you following IT security best practices for protecting that data?
  • Are the ads you run forthright and truthful? Do they contain objectionable or offensive content?
  • Are you serving ads in a non-discriminatory manner? Even if your ads are approved by Facebook, it’s well-worth familiarizing yourself with how your industry is impacted by anti-discrimination law.
  • If you’re running ads on Facebook’s display network, are you excluding content that your brand would not want to be associated with or seen as supporting? If you’re not sure how to do that, learn How To Add A Facebook Ad Placement Block List!

So, is Facebook close to shuttering its digital doors or significantly changing its ad platform in the near future? Probably not. Still, advertisers would do well to take heed of its rough 2018, and think seriously about whether or not they are using the platform in ways that would withstand public scrutiny.

Questions? Feedback? Reach out on Twitter @ppchero!

This marketing news is not the copyright of Scott.Services – please click here to see the original source of this article. Author: Dan Rocklin

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Google Search Algorithm August 1st Update Rolling Out Now; Might Be A Big One

google update

It looks like there is a big update just starting to happen in the Google search results this morning. It is super early but based on the initial chatter I am seeing within the SEO community, this one might be a very big one. It is so early that most of the tracking tools aren’t even picking it up yet. But the chatter within the community looks to me that this might be a big Google search update.

Why big? Just based on the number of posts and what they are saying within a short time period. It can be some weird Google bug or it can be a new algorithm update that is causing a shift in the core rankings in Google.

SEOs at Black Hat World and WebmasterWorld are currently discussing it, mostly as of this morning. Here is what they are saying:

Yes, Seen in last 3-4 hours, 20-30% decline in traffic.

Yes, my main site has lost pretty much all page 1 rankings, game over.

Huge drop in ranking in the past 24 hours, wow! Its not a speed issue, site loads on average less than 3 seconds. Is anyone else noticing a drop in ranking? Biggest drop I had for more than a year.

My site’s traffic is down from 50k to 35k in last 24 hours with majors changes across all positions. Frop #1 to god knows where.

My last site (controlled by seo company, not me) was killed post march update, went from generating 80k revenue per month to peanuts. After this non sense drop in last 24 hours, I am done.

My competitors are using pop ups, pop unders, ads on click and other garbage while I have zero adsense ads, zero annoying ads or anything.

I am also seeing folks on Twitter and other areas complaining about rankings. I am not sure if this is targeting some spam tactic, a bug, or feature or something else.

Currently, the only tools showing real changes are:

SEMRush:

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RankRanger:

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Here are some of the other tools that might be delayed or not picking up on these changes:

Mozcast:

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Accuranker:

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Advanced Web Rankings:

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SERP Metrics:

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Algoroo:

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Cognitive SEO:

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Again, this is super early but it seems big to me. Check your analytics and let me know what you see throughout the day.

Forum discussion at Black Hat World and WebmasterWorld.

This marketing news is not the copyright of Scott.Services – please click here to see the original source of this article. Author: barry@rustybrick.com (Barry Schwartz)

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Google Datasets Schema Now Live In Search Results

Google announced they are launching datasets schema in the search results. We saw this coming as we reported the other month it is coming soon. The weird thing is this comes from something Google launched in 2016 named science datasets. In fact, it is the same help document with some added content.

Now Google says “we identified an opportunity to improve how tabular data appears in Google Search and in doing so make it easier for all people to find the data they’re looking for. It works like this: news organizations that publish data in the form of tables can add additional structured data to make the dataset parts of the page easier to identify for use in relevant Search features.”

News organizations add the structured data to their existing html of a page, which means that news organizations can still control how their tables are presented to readers.

They even shared this screen shot of how it will look when it goes live, which I think is soon?

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Schema guru, Aaron Bradley posted on Google+ saying:

The (somewhat laconic) example Google provides in this announcement is impressive: what surfaces from this ProPublica dataset isn’t simply information about the dataset, but specific data points from that set that satisfy the searcher’s query.

All of this is consistent with Google’s decade-long trend of expanding from being a provider of linked document descriptions to providing data directly from those documents (or more precisely, in this case, from linked resources described by a document).

No appearance yet in the Search Features or Search Gallery pages, but I think it’s fair to call this a new rich results type. While the announcement example closely resembles a featured snippet, featured snippets haven’t to date been based on structured data: I wouldn’t be surprised if we start to see the line blur between what are currently featured snippets and rich (and/or enriched) results.

Of course, you have a lot of people scratching their heads – so we should give Google our data in a better format for them to use as they please? You already do if you are not using the noindex tag. 🙂

Forum discussion at Google+.

This marketing news is not the copyright of Scott.Services – please click here to see the original source of this article. Author: barry@rustybrick.com (Barry Schwartz)

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Google Tests Image Icons In Related Searches

Valentin Pletzer shared a screen shot with me on Twitter of Google testing showing image icons in the related searches box. When they are expanded, they load what looks like a featured snippet. I am not sure if this is a bug or a feature, to be honest.

Here is a screen shot from Valentin of it in action:

Here are some more examples of this in action:

It is like Google is combining features snippets with related searches. They also look like the expandable featured snippets but again, this is in the related searches box.

Have you seen this?

Forum discussion at Twitter.

This marketing news is not the copyright of Scott.Services – please click here to see the original source of this article. Author: barry@rustybrick.com (Barry Schwartz)

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Ways to improve your link building

With the right strategy in place, link building can be a hugely effective way of building strong authority to increase longer term, sustainable organic visibility. Unfortunately, it’s very easy to find yourself returning to old, outdated methods. With so many different approaches to link building, it’s important to take a step back and look at the bigger picture to make the greatest impact.

There are a variety of link building tactics that don’t require a huge amount of resource or expense, so whether you’re working for an agency or in-house, dust away the cobwebs that are plaguing your strategy and step up. Below are just a few ways you can improve your approach to link building.

Don’t forget the basics

The first step is not to forget the basics, it’s so easy to forget these – particularly when you’re constantly being served with ‘inspirational content’ that promises to be the best and only method you’ll ever need. Revisiting old, unlinked brand mentions and fixing broken links can have a huge impact, particularly when from a strong authority site.

Immerse yourself in the brand

If you are working with an agency, having a ‘brand immersion’ or ‘discovery day’ can be incredibly useful if you approach it correctly. Start out with a full list of everything you’d want to know about a client, their product or brand – and pretty much interrogate them.

A client of ours recently said he’d been running his business for so long he assumed everyone knew everything he did about their business and products, when in fact they were probably only conveying 10% of their USPs digitally. If a client holds their cards close to their chest, a brand immersion day is an opportunity to get a grasp on who they are as a brand and how they work.

Even better, this is a chance to meet with their PR representatives and see how you can work together to make the best of each other’s work. There may be things you uncover that can be used as an asset, things that they would never consider telling you proactively. For example, new product launches or an existing relationship with a site that you’ve been trying to crack for months.

Future-proof your strategy

If only one thing is certain in life, it’s that Google will continually change its algorithm. Unfortunately, we can’t predict the future and may spend a long time securing a link, only for it to suddenly have no value.

Bend fate in your favor by thinking about the bigger picture, and developing strategies that are built solely on authenticity. Build good solid links from authoritative websites. Be real and genuine, provide value in your content and insights. Always drawback to why you’re building links, whether it’s for the brand awareness they could build, to the referrals they could bring.

Monitor your own backlink profile

Monitoring your own backlink profile is a vital part of growing it, and is surprisingly something a lot of link-builders put to the bottom of their to-do list. It’s essential to see which new sites are linking to you, so you can build that relationship and contribute more great content or insights.

Second to this, a lot of sites will link to you but won’t tell you, so it’s crucial to keep on top of this. It’s also vital to see which sites stop linking to you, as there will be opportunity to try and get that link back, or try and build a relationship with that site.

Relationships over anything else

Having a good relationship with a site or influencer is almost as important as how good a piece of content is. Follow them on Twitter, comment on their activity, be a familiar face and a name that is regularly in touch with pitches and ideas. You will find that they start coming directly to you for content and ideas – instead of the other way round.

Keep a close eye on the competition

Monitoring your competitors’ activity is a very cost and time-effective way of identifying new sites to contact, new content opportunities and outreach methods to use. Using competitor links for your own gains are always fruitful and don’t require a lot of time or creativity

To make things even easier, it’s something you can automate by setting up Google Alerts or backlink alerts and reports on tools like SEMRush. Competitors are always acquiring new links, so this is something that should be continually monitored.

Don’t be afraid of a nofollow link

As mentioned above, we should be focused on the bigger picture and future-proofing link building strategies. Sometimes this means getting a nofollow link or an unlinked citation now and again. Some sites have a policy, some sites do nofollow links automatically. If a citation is genuinely driving traffic and brand awareness, then the fact that it’s a nofollow or unlinked shouldn’t be troubling you too much.

Most link building tactics fall under the category of ‘quick-wins’, and the results can have a huge impact on your site’s authority and brand awareness. Fundamentally, staying wary of the latest link building developments is key, as an outdated strategy can distill your wider SEO strategy and hold back the success of your site.

Related reading

This marketing news is not the copyright of Scott.Services – please click here to see the original source of this article. Author: Bethanie Dennis

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