#for whatever reason the link gives a 404 error message
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Akira Toriyama has passed away.
https://en.dragon-ball-official.com/news/01_2499.html
#rip king#akira toriyama#dragon ball#dragon ball z#for whatever reason the link gives a 404 error message#but ill add it anyways
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11 WAYS TO INCREASE TRAFFIC TO YOUR WEBSITE IN 2023!
Do you want to increase traffic to your website in 2023? Some businesses wonder why it’s important to get website traffic, but in today’s highly competitive & digital world, a website is an absolute must to build your brand, gain more customers & to build trust amongst your customers. Your website is your online storefront where visitors can learn more about your offerings, brand & will eventually become leads & customers.
If all you can think about is “Why can’t I drive traffic to my website like this?” If you’ve struggled with driving traffic to your website then you are not done. As a lot of people struggle with the right content strategy which is one of the top divers of website traffic.
1. WEBSITE ANALYSIS
It is important to learn about your audience before you drive traffic to your website and to do this, analyze your website using platforms such as SEMrush, google analytics.
With this information, you can create the right content to drive the right traffic to your website.
2. ON-PAGE SEO
On-Page SEO ( Also called on-site SEO) is the practice of optimizing web pages to rank higher in search engines and bring in more traffic.
On-Page elements include sitemap, title tag for links, canonical URL’S, keyword density, robots.txt, silos structure, error page 301/404, site performance, meta tags, internal links anchor text.
On-Page SEO will increase customers by decreasing bounce rate and will help in creating brand name.
BUILD BACKLINKS
Backlinks play an important role in improving your search engine rankings. If website with high authority link to your site, that gives you more credibility.
By constantly earning high quality backlinks from relevant websites, you will improve your rankings in SERP and therefore it will contribute in driving more traffic to your website.
They are also known as external and inbound links.
SOCIAL MEDIA ADVERTISING
In the online world, it is getting increasingly complicated to get your message noticed, as user attention is increasingly becoming a scarce resource.
Social media advertising is significantly impactful as it allows you to deliver your message to your ideal buyers throughout their purchase journey.
According to a survey, 71% of consumers who have had a positive experience with a brand on social media are likely to recommend the brand to their friends and family.
26% of users who click on Facebook ads end up buying the advertised product.
These compelling stats provide a clear picture of how integral social media advertising has become for organizations to grow their business.
Social media on the contrary, enables brands to connect with the ideal buyers based on their geographic, demographic, psychographic and behavioral characteristics and traits.
WRITE INSATIABLE CONTENT
Content is king, as long as you create relevant and accurate content on your site or blog, you will keep the visitors coming back for more & more. Also the better your content is, the more engaged your visitors will be.
Website content will also shape whether they return in the future and whether they become or remain a customer.
UTILIZE EMAIL MARKETING
Email marketing can help you build a relationship with your audience and is a great way to drive traffic to your site or blog.
You can even segment your emails and target users by demographic so you are only sending people the messages they want to see most.
LEVERAGE GOOGLE RE-TARGETING ADS
Re-targeting Ads is a feature that lets you customize your display ads campaign for people who have previously visited your site & have left for whatever reason without completing a sale.
Google re-targeting ads are a terrific way to get more traffic to your website. This involves the usage of a conversion pixel for purchases and it’s a great way to reach people who have already been to your site and aggressively market to them on google search engine shortly after they have left.
GOOGLE MAPS ADVERTISING
Most businesses are working locally, have a local customer base, so it’s quite obvious -local SEO is an amazing way to get more traffic to your website.
One of the most powerful local SEO techniques is google maps marketing. 67% of people use google maps as a navigation tool, this means that google maps virtually controls 2/3 of the online navigation market-which is a lot of traffic.
TARGET LONG-TAIL KEYWORDS
A long-tail keyword is a phrase that is generally made from 3 to 5 words. Since these keywords are more specific than generic terms, they allow you to target niche demographics.
With long tail keywords, you are able to attract more high-quality traffic to your website which is more likely to lead to conversions.
Over 70% of search queries are made using long tail keywords, meaning that if you are not targeting them as part of your SEO efforts, you are missing out.
10. START GUEST BLOGGING
Guest Blogging is the act of writing content for another company’s website. Guest blogging offers mutual benefits for both the guest blogger and the website hosting the guest content.
It offers a no. of benefits for any business, by sharing your expertise on other companies’ websites, you can establish yourself as an authority figure within your market, securing a guest post on a reputable site can increase blog traffic to your website and help you build relationships with other leaders in your field.
11. GET ACTIVE ON SOCIAL MEDIA
In today’s competitive world, it is not enough to just share content through social channels -you need to actively participate in the community too.
Answer questions and engage with your audience. Nothing affects your business, the way people use social media as a broad cast channel- use social media as it was intended and actually interact with your customers.
HOW TO INCREASE WEBSITE TRAFFIC: RECAP
That’s a wrap, Here are the 11 ways to increase traffic to your website.
WEBSITE ANALYSIS
ON-PAGE SEO
BUILD BACKLINKS
SOCIAL MEDIA ADVERTISING
WRITE INSATIABLE CONTENT
UTILIZE EMAIL MARKETING
LEVERAGE GOOGLE RE-TARGETING ADS
GOOGLE MAPS ADVERTISING
TARGET LONG-TAIL KEYWORDS
START GUEST BLOGGING
GET ACTIVE ON SOCIAL MEDIA
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6 Surefire Strategies to Help You Build More Backlinks to Your Website
Whether you have been around for long or are just getting started with SEO, you must have spent some time researching it and discovered how much links matter to rank organically in the search results. Google sees links as a lot more than just a ‘sweet gesture.’ To Google, it acts as a vote of trust that your site is reliable and credible. Over the years, marketers and SEOs have tried and tested numerous different approaches to increase their site’s backlinks and expand their overall backlink profile. Among these also emerged some unethical practices that made room for link schemes and other black hat SEO practices.
As more and more websites started adopting SEO practices, the link building realm became overly populous – making it all the more so challenging to stick out and earn links from the vastly popular domains.
Simply put, the conventional backlinks outreach is simply no longer as effective as it used to be once. Today, even highly personalized emails can hit the skids. Building backlinks to your site is no longer an easy feat. If you want to increase your website’s domain authority, you need to go above and beyond to seek new options.
And that is exactly why we are here. What follows are six surefire strategies that are a must-try for you if you, too, are struggling to earn backlinks from credible domains.
1. PRODUCE LINK-WORTHY CONTENT
SEO trends will keep shifting, but great content never gets outdated.
However, what ‘great content’ means really depends upon who you are asking – it will vary from person to person. But if you ask the definition of ‘great content’ in terms of link building, then it is simply a piece of content worth linking to.
In order for a piece of content to qualify as ‘link-worthy,’ it should meet at least one of the following benchmarks:
Deliver original or aggregated data
Offer a unique way or point of view
Be the most authentic and apt resource on the topic
For instance, in an article featuring the latest update introduced by a brand, most websites will link to that particular brand’s article only about whom the content is written. Why so? Because clearly, it will offer the most accurate resource on the specific topic.
While there would be plenty of other websites covering the particular topic just as accurately, the brand is the original source of this data; thus, it seems to be the most reliable one. Therefore, it is the most ‘link-worthy’.
Your content creation strategy should be aimed at producing A-1 content that builds links by itself. If you are able to make great content and optimize it well enough that it acquires one of the five top-ranking positions in the SERPs, you are in a prominent position already.
It’s very straightforward. Let’s understand it with another example. You are creating a comprehensive piece of content on the topic “link building.” You need to include some examples as well, but you have not covered that subject in any of your articles yet. Now since linking to your own content is no longer the option, the next thing that pops up in your mind is to head out to Google and search for content that will be most useful to your readers. So you search on Google and found that the first-ranking content in the search results best suits your needs and also provides additional information to your readers. So you link to it.
You saw what happened there? A high-quality content optimized for SEO will generate backlinks on autopilot.
However, the crucial thing to note here is that this strategy will take time to yield results. You can’t publish a piece today and expect to earn ten backlinks by tomorrow.
This strategy works best when paired with other effective modern link building strategies.
2. PR DRIVEN OUTREACH
Right after reading this, you might be wondering what does SEO and PR even have in common?
However, establishing relationships is one of the leading techniques to get the job done when it comes to link building, which also happens to be the key to successful PR.
Begin with interacting with the people in your industry or niche and those working at the most sought-after online publications. This does not mean bombarding every connection in your LinkedIn network and soliciting backlinks or media placements. It means building bonafide and mutually profitable relationships.
Start leveraging social media platforms and establishing a brand for your organization as well as your thought leaders. Connect with people in your industry and start sharing creative and original content and ideas.
You do not necessarily need to be the CEO of your organization in order to build yourself as a personal brand.
Moreover, how you demonstrate yourself online is still an extension of the organization you are currently working for. Expanding your own brand will also help increase awareness for your organization.
As you start building connections and become well-recognized among your peers and industry, you will realize that it is a lot easier for you now to pitch them for media placement opportunities.
Again you must be wondering how media placements can result in the generation of backlinks?
It’s pretty simple – when a publisher decides to feature your brand on a webinar, podcast, or live show, they will also promote this feature on their website and across social media platforms.
Once you have successfully obtained the placement, ask your POC (point of contact) to add a link back to your website, as it will be helpful for the audience. Since if the viewers or listeners want to know more about your company, they can do so by simply clicking the link, which will save them the trouble of searching you online.
Building relationships is a long-term game, but the rewards make it worthwhile.
3. CREATE GUEST POSTS FOR EXTERNAL PUBLICATIONS
Guest posting for various external publications comes with a range of marketing benefits. It helps in positioning your brand as a thought leader in your industry, reaching your target audience in a new way, thus expanding your reach, and just like you, though – building links!
However, similar to numerous other link building strategies, guest posting too became too spammy too quickly. People started assembling mediocre content, incorporating as many links as possible into the content and sending it to any site that would post it.
Consequently, the majority of the publications formed rigid guest posting guidelines to wipe out writers who were merely producing content to acquire backlinks.
Google, too noticed this. Recently, one of Google’s Webmaster Trends Analysts warned SEO professionals and marketers to refrain from leveraging guest posting as a spammy link building strategy.
Having said that, guest posting sure works well to grow your site’s domain authority provided that you approach it in an ethical way.
To begin with, only approach publications that your target audience often visits. Putting in the effort to create content for a publication that your audience does not even visit in the first place is a clear-cut waste of time and resources.
You may be able to earn a couple of links, but it won’t be in front of your target audience.
In addition to all this, always focus your efforts on the quality of your content and the value it offers to your readers. Only because the content you are writing will be published on an external website doesn’t mean you should give it any less attention than you would if it was for your own site.
4. BUILD INFOGRAPHICS
Infographics can immediately raise a piece of content from great to invaluable.
However, without the presence of appropriate resources, the creation of infographics might not be the easiest thing to do. These can be easily time-consuming and resource-intensive, all the more so if you are gathering original data.
This is why most content creators and writers choose to hunt for infographics online and link to them in their posts rather than take the time and effort to build their own. And as one can figure out, this brings forward another viable link building opportunity by using original infographics. In place of simply featuring an infographic on your website, you can also choose to pitch it to external publications in exchange for backlinks.
Indeed a great deal of work goes into building a single infographic, but the backlink potential is immense in the long run. Just like a great piece of content can continue to generate backlinks for several months or even years after it has been published, a compelling, informative, and engaging infographic can have the same impact.
5. RECLAIM LOST BACKLINKS
When it comes to increasing your site’s domain authority, you don’t always need to reinvent the wheel.
A great way to rack up a few quick wins is to analyze your own website and look at the lost backlinks. Every link is a reward for all the hard work you have put in, and losing them is indeed baffling but regaining them is not as hard as you may assume.
Various reasons can be behind the loss of your links. Maybe the linking page was removed (404 error) or redirected, or maybe the publisher simply removed the link.
Regardless of whatever the reason is, it is definitely worth the trouble to try and reclaim those hard-earned lost links. At the end of the day, there was a reason that writer chose to link to you. There is also a possibility that they have no idea that the original page is removed or redirected.
You can check for lost links using some SEO tools. There are plenty of them available in the market with in-built features that let you see the links you have lost and why.
As soon as you have discovered all the lost links, the next thing you need to do is reach out to the publisher/writer. While emails are the most convenient way to do this, LinkedIn InMail is just as good. When contacting the publisher, remember to keep your message short and crisp and be sure to point out why your content is still useful enough for them to link to.
Just like in any other type of link outreach, there is a slight possibility that the publisher might not get back to you. This brings us back to the point – it is easier to reclaim a lost backlink from a website that has already seen the value in your page than starting from scratch trying to acquire a fresh one.
6. LOOK FOR UNLINKED BRAND MENTIONS
Another hack for a quick win – check for unlinked brand mentions.
Each and every positive brand mentioned on the internet is a window of opportunity to acquire backlinks. If a website is taking the time to mention your brand somewhere, it is a clear-cut indication that they already see some value in offerings, content, or point of view.
Moreover, if they are citing your brand’s name somewhere, inserting a link back to you will help their site visitors as they will know where to click if they want to know more about your business.
You can utilize advanced Google Search or some third-party tools to search for pages where your business is mentioned.
If your brand name is similar to some common phrase or word, then you might want to narrow down your search using some keywords related to your solution or industry.
Once you discover an unlinked mention, you can quickly send an email or a LinkedIn InMail to the publisher asking for a link. The best practice is always to tell them how it will be beneficial for their readers.
Doing this every now and then is a great way to generate links and also get insights into how people perceive your business.
Wrap Up
To conclude, link building is no easy feat.
Nor is there any silver bullet that will grow your website’s backlink profile overnight. Want to know the actual key to successful link building? – Merging long-term strategies with short-term techniques.
When planning your long-term strategies, consider writing ‘link-worthy’ content, and start building connections with other people in your industry. Besides this ongoing process, take out some time to carry out some more short-term tactics that will help you score some quick wins, like searching unlinked mentions and reclaiming your lost links.
Link building requires a lot more than just sending a few cold emails and keeping your fingers crossed in the hope that the publisher will get back to you. Similar to every other SEO strategy, this too requires all-encompassing planning and lots of patience before you start seeing the results of all your hard work. However, what makes it worth the wait is the long-lasting, immense potential of backlinks that can do wonders in making your SEO efforts successful.
Hariom Balhara is an inventive person who has been doing intensive research in particular topics and writing blogs and articles for E Global Soft Solutions. E Global Soft Solutions is a Digital Marketing, SEO, SMO, PPC and Web Development company that comes with massive experiences. We specialize in digital marketing, Web Designing and development, graphic design, and a lot more.
SOURCE : 6 Surefire Strategies to Help You Build More Backlinks to Your Website
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Search engine optimisation, or Search engine marketing, is increasingly crucial for anyone who would like their website to get discovered. In case your site doesn't appear on top of page one of online search results, you are likely to overlook lots of visitors. This post will offer you many ways on how you can increase your site's look for ranking.
Should your webpage is going through the search engines optimizing transformation, you will probably attempt to incorporate your keywords more frequently with your textual content. Nevertheless, you must maintain your written text natural and legible. If the addition of search phrases interrupts your producing style, it will make the site's text look less than professional. Take your time and also be imaginative once you improve the amount of keywords and phrases from the site's articles. Have useful and educational information on your web site. In the event you produce a source of information centre for folks to visit, not only will you draw in clients and customers, and also you are going to entice the various search engines too. This is significant to be seen on yahoo and google, just among others. Ensure that you have got a relevant label and meta information on every webpage of the internet site. Without having a unique web page title, it is rather tough to ranking very in the sale listings. The meta label isn't needed for great lookup search positions nevertheless, it will generally show listed below your listing in the effects therefore it is useful for inspiring just click by way of. Make sure you possess a "connect to" solution offered to your potential customers. Through buy organic traffic and weblink text message that have keywords or essential key phrases, website visitors may choose to hyperlink to your website. You should think about offering this by way of e mail for your advertising list at the same time. It is really an good way to get the website known, and more related with search engines like google. It is actually by no means a poor thought to incorporate yet another top quality segment to your web page. Once you put articles on your internet site in whatever develop, you will make your web site more useful to the clients and get higher search engine awareness. Consequently, you in turn will receive more visitors and you will definitely convey more opportunities to find their focus. To aid your SEO, always offer a 301 redirect for just about any URLs you retire or transform. Search engines reply to information sent through the servers of no-lengthier-pre-existing sites, and 404 site errors damage your ranking the most. By using a 301 redirect makes certain search engines like google take note the URL alter and utilize the page ranking results linked to the aged Web address. If you need a internet search engine to incorporate a couple of page from the site with their effects, you must create back links in your site from one page on the other. Generate web pages with information and facts linked to a similar topic to ensure diverse web pages will appear as relevant to the search engines. Be sure to study your keywords well before placing them into your information. Try using sites like Google's Key phrase Outside Tool or Word Monitor to find out what key phrases are "popular" with regards to your material. By strategically employing and setting search phrases similar to this, you can boost your ranking in the search engine results. You will find research ranking resources available that allows you to easily keep an eye on where by your internet readers are coming from and what search terms these are utilizing to locate you. Make certain you check this data regularly so that you can change your concentrating on methods if neccessary. Be sure to use a phone to action on each and every page with your website. All things considered the look for optimisation job you've done, wouldn't it be awful if no-one bought your products or services? Don't do this a lot search engine optimisation function that you simply forget about the explanation you're performing it. Consumers will probably buy if you remind those to. Shell out-for each-click on advertising will not damage your rankings unless you directly link to a spam web site. Crawlers generally usually do not browse the ads on your own pages, and for that reason experiencing certain advertisements will not increase, or damage, the chances of you increased ratings. Remember that your consumer may not much like the advertisements, so generally give total disclosure. Incorporate key word-abundant descriptions of the images inside the ALT label, to enhance your search engine optimisation endeavours. Online search engine spiders usually are not effective at recognizing pictures or comprehending the text message included throughout the artwork on your internet site. To help you the spiders recognize every single picture, write a key phrase stuffed outline from the appearance ALT tag. Now you understand how to buy your web site around the cutting edge, get ready for a circulation of brand new visitors after you've used search engine marketing tactics using this report to the business website. Soon you'll see the big difference in better variety of buyers interested in your services.
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What is a Landing Page? Different Types of Landing Pages
As you browse and maneuver around the internet, gorgeous landing pages are always waiting for you.
A landing page is the first thing you see when clicking on an advertisement or call-to-action button.
Landing page is a website home that has the objective of converting visitors into leads.
We help you build compelling landing pages that convert better.
With our amazing landing page design services, we'll have your customers begging to sign up with a single click!
A successful site will generate more and better qualified prospects for your business, so it's important to take advantage of this opportunity by using one now!
What is a Landing Page?
Landing pages can be customized based on your company's needs.
A landing page is a webpage that appears when someone clicks on a link or searches for your company online.
Landing pages are important to help customers find what they need and keep them engaged, so make sure you have the perfect one before launching!
You will want to decide if you are creating a click-through page that leads users away from the landing site
It is for lead generation where potential customers provide contact information in exchange for an item like an eBook, free trial, contest entry and webinar registration.
A good landing page persuades visitors with whatever incentives they have available as well as providing them more of what they need to know before submitting their personal details by including relevant links at the bottom of each section.
Landing pages can either be found through general searches online or via the following hyperlinks directly back to its original source.
There are a lot of different Types of Landing Pages out there. It's hard to keep track, but luckily I'm here! Below is an overview.
Lead Generation Landing Page
The lead generation landing page is designed entirely with input from the visitor in mind.
It's goal is to persuade visitors into giving up their 'lead' (contact information) and anything that does not directly support that goal will be cut out completely.
This means that you'll rarely see bells, whistles or an elaborate design on a lead generation landing page since it's sole purpose is to obtain leads and not impress you with over-designed graphics.
landing page can be quickly skimmed by potential customers while retaining valuable information and leaving them wanting more through effective content creation/layout.
A successful lead generation landing page can be quickly skimmed by potential customers while retaining valuable information and leaving them wanting more through effective content creation/layout.
Click-Through Landing Page
Click-through landing pages are used to advertise a service or product.
They're designed to grab the attention of potential customers and will usually include an eye-catching design, enticing copy and/or a video demonstrating how your business can solve their problem.
This form of landing page is typically only intended as one in a series (of multiple) that end with an actual purchase.
So you should see information about additional products/services they may be interested in when visiting your site through this landing page It's important not to overwhelm them before even giving them what they want!
To keep things simple, click-through landing pages often lead directly to another sales page after asking for contact details.
Viral Landing Pages
Viral landing pages are designed to quickly spread your message as far and wide as possible in the shortest amount of time possible.
They're created with an eye towards search engine optimization (SEO) so that they'll attract more visitors organically (without any additional effort on your part).
These kinds of landing pages commonly redirect visitors to other social networking sites.
They can quickly like, share or otherwise support your business by spreading the word about it.
There's no beating around the bush here: these landing pages are spammy at best and borderline illegal at worst.
Do not make one unless you want a bonfire burning in front of your house 24/7!
Squeeze landing pages
Squeeze landing pages are designed to get the absolute most out of your visitors in return for minimal information. They're focused on a specific goal and will usually offer a situation-specific freebie, sample or service to entice you into giving them contact details.
But this is where they stop short of actually providing that same freebie/sample/service before asking you for said contact details.
Squeeze landing pages can be used for lead generation but their primary purpose it to get more of what you need
Sales Landing Page
Sales landing pages are designed to give you exactly what they promise: a specific product for the price indicated directly on the page.
The idea is that visitors will read through your sales pitch and be seduced into buying whatever it is you're selling because of how well written your copy is; not because of flair or flashiness!
While this might sound boring, remember: boring works - especially if it's clear, concise and has all the information necessary right there for them.
It's also a good idea to include an incentive like free shipping for customers who buy immediately as well as any other available discounts.
Sales landing pages are one of the most common types, and for good reason: people like buying things!
404 Landing Page
404 (Page Not Found) landing pages are designed to show visitors the error in their ways and invite them to explore your site again or try a different path/search query.
One thing that is important about this page is that it should be direct and to the point so they understand immediately what has happened there’s no need for confusion if you can simply solve the problem by relaying the message within seconds!
You should also include an incentive/gift/discount to entice them back into gaining access.
it was they couldn't find originally; otherwise, you could just end up in a vicious cycle of perpetual 404ing.
Unsubscribe Landing Page
Unsubscribe landing pages are designed to give users the opportunity to opt out of whatever it is you're sending them (i.e.: emails)
So they don't have to see it anymore and can get on with their day/night/weekend without interruption!
Every business should include an unsubscribe landing page even if you don't use email marketing, there's always something that visitors might be sent (marketing SMS text messages, etc.)
Where email marketing is used as a funnel into a database that is segmented by SEO-friendly URLs for one reason or another and unsubscribing from your list is just as important to the success of your business as a functioning website!
Splash Landing Page
Splash landing pages are designed to give visitors the opportunity to try your service/product without having to deal with signing up, setting up an account or any other hassle that goes along with making a purchase online.
These landing pages often times have mobile-specific versions and also work for basic web services like "signing up" for a blog or newsfeed subscription.
Short-term trial offers are also popular on the splash landing pages
They offer you an opportunity to determine whether or not customers will pay you back before going all-in on something long-term which is why display ads that lead directly into splash landing pages can be so effective!
Conclusion:
It really depends on what your campaign goals are but generally speaking a more focused landing page will convert better.
The conversion rates of standalone pages, versus sending visitors to the homepage, is 25% higher (source Omniture).
They bounce your message back to you, so that it is easier for others to understand what you want them to know about why they should buy from us or join our email list.
Landing pages are extremely important in the world of marketing. With so many options, it can be hard to know what type is best for your business.
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5 Ways to Organize Content on Your WordPress Website
When was the last time you organized your WordPress website? Maybe you’re running a blog, provide cool games like Survivor Game, or share the latest cooking tips. If you’ve been doing it for years, chances are your site is packed with content. Even if you started using WordPress with a clear plan, things could still get pretty disorganized over time. Perhaps you don’t know anymore where all your old blog posts are, or you’re getting confused by your WordPress categories. And guess what? Your visitors will be just as confused as you. And they will probably leave your site before reading anything.
So it’s time to get organized and do some spring cleaning on your WordPress website. And here are our five top ways to do that. But first, let’s go over some more reasons why you should keep your site nice and tidy. Ready?
Why Is It Important to Organize Your WordPress Website
There are two main reasons why your WordPress website content needs to be easy to browse. Firstly, a smooth user experience generates more quality traffic and curbs your bounce rate. It means that if everything looks professional and well-organized, then people who arrive at your site will most likely navigate further into it. Everyone gets frustrated fast if it’s too difficult to find what they need.
Secondly, an organized look also improves your WordPress blog SEO. The bots that scan your site to give it a search engine ranking will rank you lower if the site is difficult to understand.
And now, let’s take a look at some of the best practices to organize your site:
1. Link The Posts
Linking your posts on the WordPress site helps your visitors to navigate. And smooth navigation is crucial to keep the browsers interested in your page. Plus, it helps to make the search engines understand how your posts are related to each other.
So make sure to include links to your older posts in every new post you write. If you haven’t done this already, then you can go through your freshest post and look for opportunities to place the links to your older posts wherever it suits. But don’t try to insert the links arbitrarily. It will make your content seem amateurish. Place the links only where they organically fit the text.
2. Main Menu Optimization
Is your main menu easy to understand, or is it cluttered with unnecessary elements? Sometimes, when starting a WordPress website, people try to fit every page into the main menu. It is not necessary. You should only include the most important links in your main menu. It makes it easier for users to navigate your site.
3. Review Your Categories
Did you know that every piece of media in WordPress is given the label “uncategorized” by default? So if you don’t categorize your posts yourself, it shows “uncategorized” on your pages. Why is this bad? For two reasons. Firstly, it makes your site look unprofessional. And visitors are not going to go through your carefully written content unless you appear to be an experienced expert in your field. But secondly, uncategorized posts will hurt your SEO. It’s important to look at the categories from the website user’s point of view. What helps them to navigate? Maybe you have too many categories and need to remove a few to simplify the browsing experience. The friendlier your site appears to users, the higher it will appear in the search engine results.
But if you’ve heard of WordPress tags, you might wonder if they’re the same thing as categories. The simple answer is no. They’re different in the way you use them. The primary purpose of a category is to specify the genre of a piece of content. So they’re never too lengthy. Tags, however, can go into more detail and describe a post more in-depth. The important thing is to avoid the overlapping of categories and tags because this would confuse your readers. Plus, it would confuse the tools Google uses to scan your site, resulting in a less favorable search engine ranking.
4. Remove Dead Ends
Just imagine a reader going through one of your posts, clicking on a link to get more information, and instead of a new post getting an error message. It doesn’t matter what website you’re running. Users will get frustrated by the 404 errors whether they’re navigating a travel blog or an online casino.
The broken links can exist for numerous reasons. Maybe you’ve moved to another domain, or changed the URL, or the requested page simply doesn’t exist anymore. Whatever the reason for the missing page, the bottom line is this: 404 errors ruin the user experience (and they also ruin the search engine rankings of your site).
So, to avoid users leaving your site irritated by the missing pages, you should change the errors to redirects to existing posts. But doing it by hand would take a long time. You would have to go through every post and every link. Luckily, there are plenty of WordPress plugins that can help you scan and remove the dead ends more efficiently. Here are some of the best tools for the job:
Broken Link Checker
It is a free WordPress plugin that enables you to easily find broken links and mend them on the WordPress dashboard.
W3C Link Checker
This plugin allows you to simply enter the URL for a quick review via a Check button.
Google Search Console
Google Search Console comes with plenty of tools that will help you make the site more Google-friendly. You most probably already have the search console set up. All you need to do is ask Google crawlers to examine your pages to find all the 404 errors.
5. Database Clean up
As you keep producing new content, your database continues to grow and can become unwieldy. After only a few months, you can have too many tables that can cause problems like crop up during file export/import or slow loading. So what’s the solution? A database clean up. It will speed up the backup and improve your website’s speed and performance. Here’s how to do it:
First, empty the trash.
Then reactivate and delete unused plugins.
Delete spam.
Creating a WordPress-Powered Website for Gaming Content
Gaming is an industry that keeps getting bigger every year. It attracts people from all over the world regardless of their location, sex, or age. And one of the main reasons why gaming has become so popular is the ease of setting up a gaming-related website. Thanks to the easy WordPress setup, nearly anyone can start providing event game reviews, streaming communities, and even e-commerce stores.
Needless to say, even with gaming sites, the content needs to be well organized and optimized. But thanks to numerous gaming-specific WordPress plugins and themes, it’s quite an easy task.
Here are some ways to organize a WordPress site if you want to turn it into a profitable gaming-related online venture:
Community function
You can add the social function of any gaming-related website with a plugin. The forum plugin is the most popular choice, but many people find this solution a bit outdated. You can also go with a plugin called BuddyPress, which gives your site the ability to register user profiles. Plus, it enables you to create discussion walls.
Some theme developers come up with their own plugin for the community function. Some of these self-made plugins can include submission systems, leaderboards, badges, rating systems, user profiles, etc. So you have plenty of options to get the exact plugin that you need for all the functions you plan on having on your website.
The best themes for gaming-related WordPress sites
Boombox: enables you to put together a social magazine with a system for post reactions.
Arcane: Skywarrior’s gaming community theme.
PlayerX: excellent for eSports.
In addition to the community function and neat themes, WordPress provides its users with plenty of other tools to build a website without knowing much about coding. Your main responsibility as a site builder is simply to produce quality content that you can add with only a few clicks.
Conclusion
Look, you can always opt for a full content audit to delete any irrelevant content. But implementing the steps mentioned in this article should be enough to organize your WordPress website and give it a more professional appearance. These little changes make a big difference. Your visitors will stay on the site for longer, and you’ll rank higher in search engine results. And what could be better?
How do you keep your WordPress sites tidy? Share your hacks in the comments.
The post 5 Ways to Organize Content on Your WordPress Website appeared first on Scoop.it Blog.
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5 Ways to Organize Content on Your WordPress Website
When was the last time you organized your WordPress website? Maybe you’re running a blog, provide cool games like Survivor Game, or share the latest cooking tips. If you’ve been doing it for years, chances are your site is packed with content. Even if you started using WordPress with a clear plan, things could still get pretty disorganized over time. Perhaps you don’t know anymore where all your old blog posts are, or you’re getting confused by your WordPress categories. And guess what? Your visitors will be just as confused as you. And they will probably leave your site before reading anything.
So it’s time to get organized and do some spring cleaning on your WordPress website. And here are our five top ways to do that. But first, let’s go over some more reasons why you should keep your site nice and tidy. Ready?
Why Is It Important to Organize Your WordPress Website
There are two main reasons why your WordPress website content needs to be easy to browse. Firstly, a smooth user experience generates more quality traffic and curbs your bounce rate. It means that if everything looks professional and well-organized, then people who arrive at your site will most likely navigate further into it. Everyone gets frustrated fast if it’s too difficult to find what they need.
Secondly, an organized look also improves your WordPress blog SEO. The bots that scan your site to give it a search engine ranking will rank you lower if the site is difficult to understand.
And now, let’s take a look at some of the best practices to organize your site:
1. Link The Posts
Linking your posts on the WordPress site helps your visitors to navigate. And smooth navigation is crucial to keep the browsers interested in your page. Plus, it helps to make the search engines understand how your posts are related to each other.
So make sure to include links to your older posts in every new post you write. If you haven’t done this already, then you can go through your freshest post and look for opportunities to place the links to your older posts wherever it suits. But don’t try to insert the links arbitrarily. It will make your content seem amateurish. Place the links only where they organically fit the text.
2. Main Menu Optimization
Is your main menu easy to understand, or is it cluttered with unnecessary elements? Sometimes, when starting a WordPress website, people try to fit every page into the main menu. It is not necessary. You should only include the most important links in your main menu. It makes it easier for users to navigate your site.
3. Review Your Categories
Did you know that every piece of media in WordPress is given the label “uncategorized” by default? So if you don’t categorize your posts yourself, it shows “uncategorized” on your pages. Why is this bad? For two reasons. Firstly, it makes your site look unprofessional. And visitors are not going to go through your carefully written content unless you appear to be an experienced expert in your field. But secondly, uncategorized posts will hurt your SEO. It’s important to look at the categories from the website user’s point of view. What helps them to navigate? Maybe you have too many categories and need to remove a few to simplify the browsing experience. The friendlier your site appears to users, the higher it will appear in the search engine results.
But if you’ve heard of WordPress tags, you might wonder if they’re the same thing as categories. The simple answer is no. They’re different in the way you use them. The primary purpose of a category is to specify the genre of a piece of content. So they’re never too lengthy. Tags, however, can go into more detail and describe a post more in-depth. The important thing is to avoid the overlapping of categories and tags because this would confuse your readers. Plus, it would confuse the tools Google uses to scan your site, resulting in a less favorable search engine ranking.
4. Remove Dead Ends
Just imagine a reader going through one of your posts, clicking on a link to get more information, and instead of a new post getting an error message. It doesn’t matter what website you’re running. Users will get frustrated by the 404 errors whether they’re navigating a travel blog or an online casino.
The broken links can exist for numerous reasons. Maybe you’ve moved to another domain, or changed the URL, or the requested page simply doesn’t exist anymore. Whatever the reason for the missing page, the bottom line is this: 404 errors ruin the user experience (and they also ruin the search engine rankings of your site).
So, to avoid users leaving your site irritated by the missing pages, you should change the errors to redirects to existing posts. But doing it by hand would take a long time. You would have to go through every post and every link. Luckily, there are plenty of WordPress plugins that can help you scan and remove the dead ends more efficiently. Here are some of the best tools for the job:
Broken Link Checker
It is a free WordPress plugin that enables you to easily find broken links and mend them on the WordPress dashboard.
W3C Link Checker
This plugin allows you to simply enter the URL for a quick review via a Check button.
Google Search Console
Google Search Console comes with plenty of tools that will help you make the site more Google-friendly. You most probably already have the search console set up. All you need to do is ask Google crawlers to examine your pages to find all the 404 errors.
5. Database Clean up
As you keep producing new content, your database continues to grow and can become unwieldy. After only a few months, you can have too many tables that can cause problems like crop up during file export/import or slow loading. So what’s the solution? A database clean up. It will speed up the backup and improve your website’s speed and performance. Here’s how to do it:
First, empty the trash.
Then reactivate and delete unused plugins.
Delete spam.
Creating a WordPress-Powered Website for Gaming Content
Gaming is an industry that keeps getting bigger every year. It attracts people from all over the world regardless of their location, sex, or age. And one of the main reasons why gaming has become so popular is the ease of setting up a gaming-related website. Thanks to the easy WordPress setup, nearly anyone can start providing event game reviews, streaming communities, and even e-commerce stores.
Needless to say, even with gaming sites, the content needs to be well organized and optimized. But thanks to numerous gaming-specific WordPress plugins and themes, it’s quite an easy task.
Here are some ways to organize a WordPress site if you want to turn it into a profitable gaming-related online venture:
Community function
You can add the social function of any gaming-related website with a plugin. The forum plugin is the most popular choice, but many people find this solution a bit outdated. You can also go with a plugin called BuddyPress, which gives your site the ability to register user profiles. Plus, it enables you to create discussion walls.
Some theme developers come up with their own plugin for the community function. Some of these self-made plugins can include submission systems, leaderboards, badges, rating systems, user profiles, etc. So you have plenty of options to get the exact plugin that you need for all the functions you plan on having on your website.
The best themes for gaming-related WordPress sites
Boombox: enables you to put together a social magazine with a system for post reactions.
Arcane: Skywarrior’s gaming community theme.
PlayerX: excellent for eSports.
In addition to the community function and neat themes, WordPress provides its users with plenty of other tools to build a website without knowing much about coding. Your main responsibility as a site builder is simply to produce quality content that you can add with only a few clicks.
Conclusion
Look, you can always opt for a full content audit to delete any irrelevant content. But implementing the steps mentioned in this article should be enough to organize your WordPress website and give it a more professional appearance. These little changes make a big difference. Your visitors will stay on the site for longer, and you’ll rank higher in search engine results. And what could be better?
How do you keep your WordPress sites tidy? Share your hacks in the comments.
The post 5 Ways to Organize Content on Your WordPress Website appeared first on Scoop.it Blog.
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New Post has been published on https://randykopplin.com/a-sure-fire-way-to-lose-an-online-business-and-reputation/
A Sure-Fire Way To Lose An Online Business and Reputation
A Sure-Fire Way To Lose An Online Business and Reputation
Broken links, lost domains need to be well managed to prevent hacking, trojan horses and viruses being distributed to your visitors and members.
Broken Links Are Bad For Business. What Is A Broken Link?
Broken links are links that don’t work. Some of the reasons why links don’t work include:
A website is no longer available
A webpage was moved without a redirect being added
The URL structure of a website was changed
Linking to a third-party page, and not knowing when they change the URL or move the page
Whatever the cause, broken links are frustrating errors that need to be addressed immediately. If you click a broken link, you’ll see a 404-page error or similar message explaining the webpage is not available.
Broken Links Negatively Affect SEO
Search engines see links as a vote for a website’s quality. Links to your website and links within your website can affect where your website ranks in search results. Google frowns upon dead links. Because of this, it’s best practice to either remove or update broken links.
Cleaning up broken links can add context to your website, improve user experience, and make content within your website easier for visitors and search engines to discover. On the other hand, websites with too many broken links can be a signal of low quality to search engines.
The natural tendency for links to eventually break is called link rot, and it’s a widespread issue. It has been found in past studies that you can expect to lose about a quarter of the links on your website every seven years. One of the main reasons link rot exists is because websites become unavailable when they are abandoned or when interests change. Both websites and active links aren’t active forever, so regularly fixing broken links is a good practice, especially since links within your website can affect how high your website ranks in search results.
Lost Domains Are Very Often Hijacked
Domain Hijacking is a form of theft where the attacker takes access of a domain name without the consent of the original registrant. Hijacking can happen due to security flaws on your end or the end of your domain/hosting company.
How is it done?
These days businesses are coming online, and their web properties are a major asset to companies. One reason that can cause your domain name to be hijacked could be your negligence towards security. When you register a new domain; the provider gives you access to the domain’s Control Panel. This panel lets you change your domain’s settings that point to the original server. You will have provided an email address to gain administrative access. If the hacker can access this administrative email account, he can also have control over the domain’s control panel and eventually all the settings.
Another reason is that your domain registration expired, and auto-renewal is disabled. Someone may register your domain in the meantime and you will be left with nothing. You cannot take any actions on the hijacker as his/her actions are completely legal. So to avoid this from happening, you have to make sure you’ve enabled auto-renewal on your domain names and register domains for longer durations.
What are hijacked domains used for?
Malicious use
Usually, the hijacked domains become inaccessible, and if the website was a source of income, you’ve started losing your money as well as your online identity. The hijacker might replace your website with another similar looking website and misuse it for Phishing or other malicious activity. This might fool your users and lead them to enter their sensitive credentials on a fake website.
Domain Transfer
The hacker may transfer the domain’s ownership to some other name. In this case, it is very difficult in fact almost impossible to get your domain back. The hacker may impersonate you and request the domain provider to transfer the domain to some other account or entirely different domain provider. This is a very difficult scenario as you may need legal help here. Also, if you are not able to convince the domain provider about your situation, the company may decline to cooperate.
Recovering a stolen domain name is not always an easy job, and it is therefore imperative that you maintain adequate website security. You need to be protected from any form of website hijacking and theft. There’ve been many cases where the website owners were forced to change their domain names as they were left out with no other option and legal help was way too expensive. So, to avoid any such circumstances, you should keep your Control Panel & email account password secured and enable Domain Privacy Protection.
Using Your Website Resources For Financial Gains
Cybercrime is big! Many times, hackers will try to use your site to direct visitors to:
Some other website that will pay commission to them
Look-alike websites that will steal your personal and financial information
All they need to do is to insert a link that you won’t know is present on your website. When search engines like Google crawl your site, it will index the malicious link and present it on the results page. If somebody uses that link, they will be directed to some other websites and hackers can make money out of that redirection.
The look-alike, spoof websites are more common as they benefit hackers more by providing them with your information. Once your information – such as email ID or credit card information is with them, they’ll use it for personal gains.
What Is A Trojan Or Trojan Horse?
A Trojan is also known as a Trojan horse. It is a type of malicious software developed by hackers to disguise as legitimate software to gain access to target users' systems. Users are typically tricked by some attractive social media adds who then directed to the malicious website thereby loading and executing Trojans on their systems.
Cyber-criminals use Trojans to spy on the victim user, gain illegal access to the system to extract sensitive data.
These actions can include:
Deletes Data
Copies data
Modifies Data
Blocks Data
Disrupts the performance of the target computers or networks
How To Prevent Hacking
There will always be attempts to compromise your site. But if you are prepared, you can prevent hacking by a good percentage. Think of the following as precautions that will help you:
Use A Good Web Firewall
This prevents and shuts down the website as soon as an offensive is launched. And make sure that it is configured correctly.
Update Your Blogging Software & Plugins.
Plugins related to WordPress are often updated, but website owners do not update the ones on their sites as they are unaware or scared to go for the update. They fear the website may be affected as a result. If you are using WordPress you should update the plugins regularly.
SNAP does have some tech-savvy skills to get it to work properly. Most people will just throw in the towel and not even bother with it as it can give problems connecting to social sites due to the recent changes in algorithms and security updates. Markethive has the answer with its SNAP Department. Professional setup and maintenance are available to ensure the safety and ongoing success of your business.
Conclusion
If you own any type of website, social network, blogging site or marketing platform, you need to be on top of your game when it comes to maintaining security. It’s ferocious out there so there’s no room for complacency or ignorance. Even if you don’t own a platform but are working from it, check that the owner has fully complied with these extremely important housekeeping rules for your safety and the safety of your followers. Failing to do so will see its inevitable demise of both your business and reputation.
Deb Williams Market Manager for Markethive, a global Market Network, and Writer for the Crypto/Blockchain Industry. Also a strong advocate for technology, progress, and freedom of speech. I embrace "Change" with a passion and my purpose in life is to help people understand, accept and move forward with enthusiasm to achieve their goals.
FOLLOW US ON…
Website: https://markethive.com
Token Site: http://markethive.io/
Telegram: https://t.me/markethive_support
Twitter: https://twitter.com/markethive/
Github: https://github.com/markethive /
Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/markethive/
Crunchbase: https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/markethive
Medium: https://www.medium.com/@markethive
Bitcointalk: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3309067.msg34535452#msg34535452
Telegram News: t.me/Markethive
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Facebook: https://facebook.com/MarketHive
Youtube: https://youtube.com/Markethive
Randy Kopplin
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404 Error - What to Know About 404 Error Page?
What's the least demanding approach to dispose of an awful house visitor? Why guide them to the entryway obviously! What's the speediest method to motivate guests to leave your site? Demonstrate to them an unmistakable, clear "Page Not Found" error 404. At the point when guests click on a connection on your webpage that attempts to call a non-existent page, the server your site is facilitated on consequently creates the 404 Error. The site guest sees a page without any connects to some other pages on your site. The main alternative accessible to them now is to click their explorer's Back button. Tragically, a lion's share of your site guests will simply leave. It's far more terrible when the connection from another person's site drives guests to your 404 pages. For this situation, guests should utilize the Back button or type another web address in and away they go - from your website, your items, your administrations and your benefits.
Since you do have unlimited oversight over your internal links (interfaces on your site to different pages on your site), you should be careful in your testing and observing to guarantee the links work appropriately. Outside links, or connections from another person's site to yours, are substantially more troublesome, if certainly feasible, to control and address if there are errors. You should attempt, however, by reaching the webpage proprietor or website admin with the right connection address and grapple content for the outer connection.
How to Fix 404 not found Error
While it might sound somewhat depressing now in our discussion, you can utilize a 404 “Page Not Found” error further bolstering your good fortune. I do get a kick out of the chance to tell my readers that the page they're searching for can't be found and an extremely short depiction of how it could have occurred. No requirement for an excessive amount of detail there, on the grounds that you need them to peruse whatever is left of the page. This page can be your sitemap or a one-time item offer as an approach to keep them on your site despite the fact that they've not gotten to their planned goal. Your 404 page ought to be reliable in format and structure with whatever remains of your site and incorporate your logo and contact email and telephone number. Related Post:- Best SEO Services What is SEO? Ensure particularly that the route on this page is steady with whatever is left of your site, and triple check those connections to be certain beyond a shadow of a doubt they work. You doubtlessly won't get another opportunity if the guest clicks a link and sees this equivalent page once more. Putting a link to your sitemap from this page will urge your guests to investigate somewhat more. When they get to the sitemap, they'll have the capacity to discover all the data and items or administrations they're searching for very effectively. Remember to add items you'd like to grandstand on this page as well so you can give your guests thought of the nature of your merchandise, with links to more items like it. On the off chance that you utilize Page Not Found error page to put a duplicate of your sitemap, you should make sure to refresh it similarly as you do your HTML or XML sitemap.
Ideally, you don't need guests to locate your 404 Error page. I can say no ifs or buts it can happen to all sites sooner or later, so utilize your innovativeness to make it advantageous for you. "Page Not Found" This is something pretty much everybody seen at some time in the event that you've spent whenever online by any stretch of the imagination. The "web" term for these pages are all 404-pages.
Using Robot.txt File
Presently you are presumably thinking for what reason is a "page not found" or a 404 error page a site botch, and that would be a reasonable inquiry to ask, so give me a chance to clarify what this mix-up is, the means by which you can profit by it and how to address it. First, we've just referenced "what" it is nevertheless given me a chance to clarify how "individuals" arrive. 404's are generally found either from a broken connection on your site someplace, or somebody has endeavored to type in a URL to a particular page on your site and has either mistyped it or the page is no longer there. It is conceivable that you will find in your details that there have been solicitations for your robot.txt file which is a typical record that web index arachnids search for, and in the event that you don't have one, at that point a 404 page would be activated or Free SEO Analysis for the better result. Related Post:- What is Digital Marketing? Top Social Media Site List What is Email Marketing? Presently to clarify how 404 pages can "help" you. There is a ton of dialog about what ought to or shouldn't be shown on your 404 pages or in the event that you ought to try and show the blunder page. My genuine belief is to show the page yet have key components on the page, for example, a logo or look and feel of your site, alongside a message saying that the page they are searching for was not found but rather click here to go to the landing page of your site. Another alternative is if the guest hits your 404 pages, consequently divert them to the landing page of your site. This alternative works truly well, yet in talks, I've heard individuals state that the guest is somewhat confounding about what simply occur. By using the custom 404 pages, you don't pass up the chance to associate with that guest. With no data on that page, the guest would simply enter something different into the web address bar and go elsewhere. The most straightforward approach to cure this issue is to sign in to your control board (panel) and search for the symbol that says "Page Not Found Pages". This will list every one of them, make sure to tap the 404 and enter your data there. On the off chance that you are uncertain what to put there, you can look Google to see a few precedents. Read the full article
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What is SEO? Search engine optimisation (SEO) is a broad marketing discipline that encompasses a wide variety of different techniques for improving a website’s rankings in search engine results. SEO techniques are often categorised as either ‘on-page’ or ‘off-page’ – both of which will be explored in the course of this article. As this is a beginner’s guide, you don’t have to have any prior SEO knowledge to understand the concepts we’re discussing. It’s designed to give you a good foundation without you needing to read anything else. However, if you’re familiar with some aspects already or you’re looking for a particular refresher, feel free to use the table of contents below to skip to the most relevant section. Why is SEO important? Organic search engine traffic (i.e. traffic that hasn’t come through paid ads) nearly always makes up the largest chunk of web traffic to a site. Improving in this area can, therefore, have a significant impact on the number of visitors and conversions you see each month. The above graph shows traffic to a small lead generation company from April 2018 to March 2019. The blue line is organic traffic, the orange is traffic from ads and green is direct traffic (from users typing the site into their browsers). It’s easy to see why it’s important for this company to spend a lot of time focusing on SEO. In this particular example, organic traffic makes up a full three quarters of the site’s sessions and 72% of their online conversions, which leads us on to another crucial point. SEO is not just about driving traffic to a site, but driving traffic that converts. Do we optimise for all search engines or just Google? Search engine optimisation is a broad discipline, but you’d be forgiven for thinking that Google is the sole focus of the industry with the amount that it’s talked about. While it’s important not to ignore all the other search engines out there, there’s good reason for all of Google’s attention. According to Statista, Google’s UK market share is a staggering 89%, with Bing in second on just 7%. The American information giant handles around two trillion searches every year, which equates to roughly 63,000 searches a second. It’s no surprise that companies want a slice of that visibility. Google has built up to such impressive stats through industry leading technology. The search engine runs on powerful algorithms and even includes bleeding edge machine learning technology to help it understand unique search queries. Over the years, it has made a number of significant changes to its core algorithms that have moved the goalposts for SEOs everywhere. A large part of our job is ensuring that websites are optimised to achieve and maintain rankings regardless of what Google does in the future. Because of the quality that Google demands, in the vast majority of cases we find that optimising for the search giant also stands us in good stead with its competitors. In this beginners guide, we’ll look at current best practices that we believe will stand the test of time. These techniques are grouped under three key components of SEO: Optimised content Technical excellence Relevant link building Optimised content Content has been important to SEO since the earliest days of the discipline, as all search engines use a website’s content to determine which searches it’s eligible to rank for. Whenever a user enters a search query, Google scours its index for pages that contain relevant content, then uses a number of other ranking factors to determine the order it should show these pages. Because of this, keyword research is a crucial first step in any content optimisation strategy. Keyword research Keyword research involves using tools to discover the language with which your audience is searching. This should help to shape the language you use on a page, and can perhaps even help you decide which categories, products or services to prioritise in your wider business strategy. Most keyword research tools, such as Ahrefs, SEMRush and Google’s Keyword Planner, provide estimated monthly search volumes for specific keywords. Ahrefs and SEMRush are both excellent, but require paid subscriptions, whereas anyone with an active Google Ads campaign can use Keyword Planner. Whatever tool you use, your starting point should be finding the search volumes for all the phrases you can think of that relate to your categories, products and services. Most tools will also give you further suggestions, which can broaden your ideas once you’ve collected data for your core phrases. With this information at hand, you’re all set to optimise your content. Crafting targeted content As great as Google is at understanding language, it’s still really helpful to make sure that a page’s primary keyword is prominent in its heading and copy. However, we’ve moved past the days of needing to mention it in every sentence. Instead, it’s much better to mention your target keyword a couple of times, then use variants or semantically related terms elsewhere. When determining if a page should rank for a particular keyword, Google now takes into account that page’s topic, and whether or not it includes phrases that the search engine considers to be associated with the target keyword. It’s critical that you create content for your human users first, not for Google. Keep your target keywords in mind, but any content that doesn’t read well to a regular human probably won’t rank well now, and almost definitely won’t rank well in the future. Understanding user intent Whatever keywords you’re targeting, you need to be able to understand the intent behind them. Google divides search queries into four categories: Know – the searcher wants to find information. Do – the searcher wants to perform an action, like making a purchase. Website – the searcher wants to navigate to a specific website that they have in mind. Visit-in-person – the searcher wants to find the physical location of a business or type of business. Each keyword will fall into one of those intent categories, and if you’re page doesn’t satisfy the intent it won’t rank. Thankfully, the intent behind most keywords is easy to identify with a bit of common sense. The query, ‘buy cheap shoes,’ is clearly a Do query, whereas ‘what are the best cheap shoes’ is a Know query. Generally, product and services pages work best to satisfy Do queries, while you’ll want blog posts and guides to satisfy Know queries. Website and Visit queries are harder to optimise for, but it helps to have all of your business information clearly and consistently presented across your site and to have a full Google My Business listing. Technical excellence Good content won’t help it if can’t be found. Ensuring that your website is technically excellent means ensuring that it can be crawled and indexed by search engines and that it will deliver on many of the ranking factors that Google weighs up when deciding which pages to rank above others. Indexability and site structure Your primary technical concern should be the indexability of your site. In other words, can crawl engines identify all the pages that you want them to rank? Google and other search engines send out bots known as spiders that ‘crawl’ websites – following links to discover pages and add them to their indexes. If a page is marked as ‘noindex’ it won’t be indexed, and if a link is marked as ‘nofollow’ they won’t use it to get to its destination page. For your website to be fully indexed, it needs to be as easy as possible for spiders to access all the pages you want them to see. You can achieve this through a good site structure, in which your homepage links to your main category and service pages, which in turn link to subcategory, sub-service and product pages. It’s important not to have too many levels of links for spiders to follow and for the most important pages to be clearly signalled by being the target of more links than other pages. If you were to draw it out, your site structure should ideally look like a pyramid three or four levels deep. Broken links It’s crucial that you avoid having links on your site that point to a broken page (normally a page that returns a 404 error message). If you find a 404 page on your site, you should remove the links that points to it or change them so that it points to a current page. Broken links tend to crop up more if the site has recently undergone changes in its structure, so be sure to give it a thorough check if you’ve made any significant page alterations recently. Fixing broken links is important for SEO as it makes your site much easier for search engines to crawl. Think of every broken link as a dead end street – a search engine can’t use it to find the rest of the site. To give your key pages the best chance of indexation, your site needs to be as easy and smooth to crawl as possible. Site speed The speed of your site is an important SEO ranking factor, but it will also give your users a better experience. Free online tools from Pingdom and Google will grade the speed of your site and give you some pointers, but unless you have a fairly broad set of web development skills it would be better to outsource any improvements rather than attempting them yourself. Site speed is also critical for mobile site optimisation, which is more important than ever now that Google has introduced mobile-first indexing. This means that Google will judge the content and quality of a site’s mobile version as a first port of call, rather than the desktop version. Mobile optimisation is particularly important if you know that a large percentage of your customers use mobile devices to access your site. If this is something that you feel is important to your business, make sure that you raise it as a priority with your developers. Relevant link building Content and technical SEO both fall under the umbrella of on-page SEO, but they need to be supported by off-page SEO or, to reduce it to its primary concern, links. Introducing PageRank When Google was launched in 1996 there was one thing that really set it apart from other search engines: PageRank. This was a score of 1-100 given to every site in its index based on the number and quality of links pointing to them from other sites. PageRank is a way of assessing the quality and trustworthiness of any given site. Every link pointing to a site is like a vote of confidence, but not all links are equal. Links from other authoritative sites, like the BBC, the Guardian or Vogue, are generally worth more than links from less authoritative sites. Obtaining high quality links Links have a direct impact on the ranking of your site, but obtaining high quality links isn’t easy. The ideal scenario is to have great sites linking to yours naturally through awareness of your product and brand, but not every business can be fortunate enough to garner that kind of attention. To be successful, most businesses need to be proactive. The first step is to identify the sites you want links from. Every business wants to be featured on the BBC, but there will be plenty of other sites related to your industry and target market. As Google has evolved, it considers the relevance of a link over and above the linking site’s baseline authority. Industry magazines or news sites covering your sector can be great link sources. With a list in mind, you’ll then want to get in touch with these publications to offer them something of value, whether that’s an insightful comment on industry developments, an interview with a key figure in your business or an interesting data set that you’ve pulled together. Sites will only feature you and link to your site if you’re offering something of value to their readers. Our beginner’s guide to digital PR will give you much more information on this topic, so if you’re interested we recommend checking that out next. Skills needed for a career in SEO SEO is a varied discipline in which all kinds of people with all kinds of skills can thrive. It is common to find people with web development skills working side by side with people who have backgrounds in writing, management, traditional marketing and more. However, while practical skills can vary enormously, there are a few qualities that will be helpful for anyone starting out in SEO. Strategic thinking – SEO involves balancing both short term and long term gains. You’ll need to be able to formulate strategies that will give you success in the short term and be sustainable for the long term. Adaptability – SEO is a broad discipline, and your work could look very different day to day. You need to be prepared to shift gears and give full attention to whatever your current task is. Communication – whether you work in-house for one business or you work for multiple clients in an agency, it’s essential to be able to report on what you’re doing and why to key stakeholders who won’t always be interested in the finer details. Creativity – content creation, link building and even technical improvements all require creativity. SEO is a young industry in which innovation is key; to succeed you need to be able to think up and execute fresh ideas. Willingness to learn – as search engines evolve, so must SEO. There are always new things to learn, and the more open you are to improving your knowledge both individually and in group contexts, the better you’ll be at your job. Could your business benefit from SEO support? We’ve created this beginners guide to help you get started with your own SEO strategies, but we’re also well aware that it’s a lot to take in all at once. Successful SEO strategies require a long term investment of time and effort, which can go to waste if you don’t see the results you were hoping for. Talk to Impression’s SEO team about how we can help you in short term projects or longer term arrangements by calling 01158 242 212 or emailing us at [email protected]. The beginner’s guide to SEO was last modified: April 29th, 2019 by Ben GarryThe post The beginner’s guide to SEO appeared first on Impression.
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A Sure-Fire Way To Lose An Online Business and Reputation
New Post has been published on http://blog.hodlthrive.com/?p=271
A Sure-Fire Way To Lose An Online Business and Reputation
A Sure-Fire Way To Lose An Online Business and Reputation
Broken links, lost domains need to be well managed to prevent hacking, trojan horses and viruses being distributed to your visitors and members.
Broken Links are Bad for Business. What is a Broken Link?
Broken links are links that don’t work. Some of the reasons why links don’t work include:
A website is no longer available
A webpage was moved without a redirect being added
The URL structure of a website was changed
Linking to a third party page, and not knowing when they change the URL or move the page
Whatever the cause, broken links are frustrating errors that need to be addressed immediately. If you click a broken link, you’ll see a 404-page error or similar message explaining the webpage is not available.
Broken Links Negatively Affect SEO
Search engines see links as a vote for a website’s quality. Links to your website and links within your website can affect where your website ranks in search results. Google frowns upon dead links. Because of this, it’s best practice to either remove or update broken links.
Cleaning up broken links can add context to your website, improve user experience, and make content within your website easier for visitors and search engines to discover. On the other hand, websites with too many broken links can be a signal of low quality to search engines.
The natural tendency for links to eventually break is called "link rot", and it’s a widespread issue. It has been found in past studies that you can expect to lose about a quarter of the links on your website every seven years. One of the main reasons link rot exists is because websites become unavailable when they are abandoned or when interests change. Both websites and active links aren’t active forever, so regularly fixing broken links is a good practice, especially since links within your website can affect how high your website ranks in search results.
Lost Domains are very often Hijacked
Domain Hijacking is a form of theft where the attacker takes access of a domain name without the consent of the original registrant. Hijacking can happen due to security flaws on your end or the end of your domain/hosting company.
How is it done
These days businesses are coming online, and their web properties are a major asset to companies. One reason that can cause your domain name to be hijacked could be your negligence towards security. When you register a new domain; the provider gives you access to the domain’s Control Panel. This panel lets you change your domain’s settings that point to the original server. You will have provided an email address to gain administrative access. If the hacker can access this administrative email account, he can also have control over the domain’s control panel and eventually all the settings.
Another reason is that your domain registration expired, and auto-renewal is disabled. Someone may register your domain in the meantime and you will be left with nothing. You cannot take any actions on the hijacker as his/her actions are completely legal. So to avoid this from happening, you have to make sure you’ve enabled auto-renewal on your domain names and register domains for longer durations.
What are hijacked domains used for?
Malicious use
Usually, the hijacked domains become inaccessible, and if the website was a source of income, you’ve started losing your money as well as your online identity. The hijacker might replace your website with another similar looking website and misuse it for Phishing or other malicious activity. This might fool your users and lead them to enter their sensitive credentials on a fake website.
Domain Transfer
The hacker may transfer the domain’s ownership to some other name. In this case, it is very difficult in fact almost impossible to get your domain back. The hacker may impersonate you and request the domain provider to transfer the domain to some other account or entirely different domain provider. This is a very difficult scenario as you may need legal help here. Also, if you are not able to convince the domain provider about your situation, the company may decline to cooperate.
Recovering a stolen domain name is not always an easy job, and it is therefore imperative that you maintain adequate website security. You need to be protected from any form of website hijacking and theft. There’ve been many cases where the website owners were forced to change their domain names as they were left out with no other option and legal help was way too expensive. So, to avoid any such circumstances, you should keep your Control Panel & email account password secured and enable Domain Privacy Protection.
Using your website resources for financial gains
Cybercrime is big! Many times, hackers will try to use your site to direct visitors to:
Some other website that will pay commission to them
Look-alike websites that will steal your personal and financial information
All they need to do is to insert a link that you won’t know is present on your website. When search engines like Google crawl your site, it will index the malicious link and present it on the results page. If somebody uses that link, they will be directed to some other websites and hackers can make money out of that redirection.
The look-alike, spoof websites are more common as they benefit hackers more by providing them with your information. Once your information – such as email ID or credit card information is with them, they’ll use it for personal gains.
How to prevent hacking
There will always be attempts to compromise your site. But if you are prepared, you can prevent hacking by a good percentage. Think of the following as precautions that will help you:
Use a good web firewall to prevent and shut down the website as soon as an offensive is launched. And make sure that it is configured correctly.
Since the most common method of hackers is to use your own scripts against you, keep only necessary scripts.
Update your blogging software & plugins.
Plugins related to WordPress etc. are often updated, but website owners do not update the ones on their sites as they are unaware or scared to go for the update. They fear the website may be affected as a result. If you are using WordPress or Joomla, you should update the plugins regularly and if anything goes wrong – such as text alignment or something – contact a web designer to get it fixed.
What is a Trojan or Trojan Horse?
A Trojan is also known as Trojan horse. It is a type of malicious software developed by hackers to disguise as legitimate software to gain access to target users' systems. Users are typically tricked by some attractive social media adds who then directed to malicious website thereby loading and executing Trojans on their systems.
Cyber-criminals use Trojans to spy on the victim user, gain illegal access to the system to extract sensitive data.
These actions can include:
Deletes Data
Copies data
Modifies Data
Blocks Data
Disrupts the performance of the target computers or networks
Conclusion
If you own any type of website, social network, blogging site or marketing platform, you need to be on top of your game when it comes to maintaining security. It’s ferocious out there so there’s no room for complacency or ignorance. Even if you don’t own a platform but are working from it, check that the owner has fully complied with these extremely important housekeeping rules for your safety and the safety of your followers. Failing to do so will see its inevitable demise of both your business and reputation.
Deb Williams
Markethive Entrepreneur
I am a Writer for the Market Network and Crypto/Blockchain Industry. Also a strong advocate for technology, progress, and freedom of speech. I embrace "Change" with a passion and my purpose in life is to help people understand, accept and move forward with enthusiasm to achieve their goals.
Deb Williams (hodlthrive)
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How the Internet Works
The internet. It just works. Understanding exactly how is a bit more complicated than many pieces of engineering. The more you examine the different aspects and parts that make it up, the more you see complexity concealed under the surface.
Visiting this website, for instance: it feels like a trivial thing to do, but there are many different parts making that happen, from the parts that actually transport the bits of data across the physical infrastructure, to the pieces that serve it all to you on a secure connection (ensuring that what I've written hasn't been altered by a third-party).
I've just finished Launch School's LS170 module which takes you a decent way down in the weeds to explain exactly how all of these pieces fit together to make up 'the internet'. So today I thought I'd retransmit some of that as a way of cementing it in my own mind.
At a very abstract level, the internet can be thought of as a network of networks. A network itself is a set of two or more computers which are able to communicate between each other. This could be the computers attached to a home network, or the computers that connect through a central server to a particular Internet Service Provider or ISP.
The internet makes use of a series of 'protocols', shared rules and understandings which have been developed or accreted over time. These protocols allow a computer on the other side of the planet to communicate in a mutually comprehensible manner. (If these shared sets of rules didn't exist, communicating with strangers or sending messages from one server to another would be a lot more difficult).
So once we have this top-down understanding of the internet as a bunch of networks that interact with each other, what, then, is the process by which a web browser in the United Kingdom communicates with a web server in China? Or in other words, if I want to access a website hosted on a Chinese webserver, how does that series of communication steps work to make that happen?
At this point, it's useful to make use of another abstraction: communication across the internet happens across a series of layers. There are several different models for these various layers. Two of the more common models — the OSI model and the TCP/IP model — are represented below:
At the top level — "Application" — you have your website or whatever the user comes into contact with that is being served up to your web browser, let's say. All the layers below that are progressively more and more specialised, which is another way of saying that they become progressively less comprehensible if you were to eavesdrop on the data as it were passing over the wire or through the fibre optic cable.
Let's move through the big pieces of how information is communicated, then, starting at the bottom. (I'll mostly follow the TCP/IP model since it's a bit less granular and allows me to split things up in a way that make sense). This chart will help keep all the pieces in your mind:
Note that each layer has something known as a 'protocol data unit' or PDU. A PDU is usually made up of a combination of a header, payload or chunk of data and an optional footer or trailer. The header and footer contain metadata which allows for the appropriate transmission / decoding etc of the data payload.
The PDU of one layer is used by the layer below or above it to make up its own separate PDU. See the following diagram as an illustration:
Physical Layer
Before we get into the realm of protocols, it's worth remembering and reminding ourselves that there is a physical layer on which all the subsequent layers rely. There are some constraints relating to the speed or latency with which data can be transmitted over a network which relate to fixed laws of physics. The most notable of those constraints is the fact of the speed of light.
Link Layer — Ethernet
Ethernet is the protocol that enables communication between devices on a single network. (These devices are also known as 'nodes'). The link layer is the interface between the physical network (i.e. the cables and routers) and the more logical layers above it.
The protocols for this layer are mostly concerned with identifying devices on the network, and moving the data among those devices. On this layer, devices are identified by something called a MAC (Media Access Control) address, which is a permanent address burned into every device at the time of manufacturing.
The PDU of the Ethernet layer is known as a 'frame'. Each frame contains a header (made up of a source address and a destination address), a payload of data, and a footer.
Internet Layer — The Internet Protocol (IPv4 or IPv6)
Moving up a layer, part of the Ethernet frame is what becomes the PDU for the internet or network layer, i.e. a packet.
This internet layer uses something known as the internet protocol which facilitates communication between hosts (i.e. different computers) on different networks. The two main versions of this protocol are known as IPv4 and IPv6. They handle routing of data via IP addressing, and the encapsulation of data into packets.
IPv4 was the de facto standard for addresses on the internet until relatively recently. There are around 4.3 billion possible addresses using this protocol, but we are close to having used up all those addresses now. IPv6 was created for this reason and it allows (through the use of 128-bit addresses) for a massive 340 undecillion (billion billion billion billion) different addresses.
Adoption of IPv6 is increasing, but still slow.
There is a complex system of how data makes its way from one end node on the network, through several other networks, and then on to the destination node. When the data is first transmitted, a full plan of how to reach that destination is not formulated before starting the journey. Rather, the journey is constructed ad hoc as it progresses.
Transport Layer — TCP/UDP
There are a number of different problems that the transport layer exists to solve. Primarily, we want to make sure our data is passed reliably and speedily from one node to another through the network.
TCP and UDP are two protocols which are good at different kinds of communication. If the reliability of data transmission is important to us and we need to make sure that every piece of information is transmitted, then TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) is a good choice. If we don't care about every single piece of information — in the case of streaming a video call, perhaps, or watching a film on Netflix — but rather about the speed and the ability to continuously keep that data stream going, then UDP (User Datagram Protocol) is a better choice.
There are differences between the protocols beyond simply their functionality. We can distinguish between so-called 'connection-oriented' and 'connectionless' protocols. For connection-oriented protocols, a dedicated connection is created for each process or strand of communication. The receiving node or computer listens with its undivided attention. With a connectionless protocol, a single port listens to all incoming communication and has do disambiguate between all the incoming conversations.
TCP is a connection-oriented protocol. It first sends a three-way handshake to establish the connection, then sends the data, and sends a four-way handshake to end the connection. The overhead of having to make these handshakes at the beginning and at the end, it's a fairly costly process in terms of performance, but in many parts of internet communication we really do need all the pieces of information. Just think about an email, for example: it wouldn't be acceptable to receive only 70% of the words, would it?
UDP is a connectionless protocol. It is in some ways a simpler protocol compared to TCP, and this simplicity gives it speed and flexibility; you don't need to make a handshake to start transmitting data. On the negative side, though, it doesn't guarantee message delivery, or provide any kind of congestion avoidance or flow control to stop your receiver from being overwhelmed by the data that's being transmitted.
Application Layer — HTTP
HTTP is the primary communication protocol used on the internet. At the application layer, HTTP provides communication of information to applications. This protocol focuses on the structure of the data rather than just how to deliver it. HTTP has its own syntax rules, where you enclose elements in tags using the < data-preserve-html-node="true" and > symbols.
Communication using HTTP takes the form of response and request pairs. A client will make a 'request' and it'll receive (barring some communication barrier) a 'response'. HTTP is known as a 'stateless' protocol in that each request and response is completely independent of the previous one. Web applications have many tricks up their sleeve to make it seem like the web is stateful, but actually the underlying infrastructure is stateless.
When you make an HTTP request, you must supply a path (e.g. the location of the thing or resource you want to request / access) and a request method. Two of the most common request methods are GET and POST, for requesting and amending things from/on the server respectively. You can also send optional request 'headers' which are bits of meta-data which allow for more complicated requests.
The server is obliged to send a HTTP status code in reply. This code tells you whether the request was completed as expected, or if there were any errors along the way. You'll likely have come across a so-called '404' page. This is referring to the 404 status code indicating that a resource or page wasn't found on the server. If the request was successful, then the response may have a payload or body of data (perhaps a chunk of HTML website text, or an image) alongside some other response headers.
Note that all this information is sent as unencrypted plain text. When you're browsing a vanilla http:// website, all the data sent back and forth is just plain text such that anyone (or any government) can read it. This wasn't such a big issue in the early days of the internet, perhaps, but quite soon it became more of a problem, especially when it came to buying things online, or communicating securely. This is where TLS comes in.
TLS or Transport Layer Security is sometimes also known as SSL. It provides a way to exchange messages securely over an unsecured channel. We can conceptually think of it as occupying the space between the TCP and HTTP protocols (at the session layer of the OSI framework above). TLS offers:
encryption (encoding a message so only authorised people can decode it)
authentication (verifying the identity of a message sender)
integrity (checking whether a message has been interfered with)
Not all three are necessarily needed or used at any one time. We're currently on version 1.3 of TLS.
Whew! That was a lot. There are some really good videos which make the topic slightly less dry. Each of these separate sections are extremely complex, but having a broad overview is useful to be able to disambiguate what's going on when you use the internet.
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7 SEO Fails Seen in the Wild (And How You Can Avoid Them)
7 SEO Fails Seen in the Wild (And How You Can Avoid Them) was originally published on BruceClay.com, home of expert search engine optimization tips.
We often get questions from people wondering why their site isn’t ranking, or why it isn’t indexed by the search engines.
Recently, I’ve come across several sites with major errors that could be easily fixed, if only the owners knew to look. While some SEO mistakes are quite complex, here are a few of the often overlooked “head slamming” errors.
So check out these SEO blunders — and how you can avoid making them yourself.
SEO Fail #1: Robots.txt Problems
The robots.txt file has a lot of power. It instructs search engine bots what to exclude from their indexes.
In the past, I’ve seen sites forget to remove one single line of code from that file after a site redesign, and sink their entire site in the search results.
So when a flower site highlighted a problem, I started with one of the first checks I always do on a site — look at the robots.txt file.
I wanted to know whether the site’s robots.txt was blocking the search engines from indexing their content. But instead of the expected text file, I saw a page offering to deliver flowers to Robots.Txt.
The site had no robots.txt, which is the first thing a bot looks for when crawling a site. That was their first mistake. But to take that file as a destination … really?
SEO Fail #2: Autogeneration Gone Wild
Secondly, the site was automatically generating nonsense content. It would probably deliver to Santa Claus or whatever text I put in the URL.
I ran a Check Server Page tool to see what status the autogenerated page was showing. If it was a 404 (not found), then bots would ignore the page as they should. However, the page’s server header gave a 200 (OK) status. As a result, the fake pages were giving the search engines a green light to be indexed.
Search engines want to see unique and meaningful content per page. So indexing these non-pages could hurt their SEO.
SEO Fail #3: Canonical Errors
Next, I checked to see what the search engines thought of this site. Could they crawl and index the pages?
Looking at the source code of various pages, I noticed another major error.
Every single page had a canonical link element pointing back to the homepage:
<link rel=”canonical” href=”https://www.domain.com/” />
In other words, search engines were being told that every page was actually a copy of the homepage. Based on this tag, the bots should ignore the rest of the pages on that domain.
Fortunately, Google is smart enough to figure out when these tags are likely used in error. So it was still indexing some of the site’s pages. But that universal canonical request was not helping the site’s SEO.
How to Avoid These SEO Fails For the flower site’s multiple mistakes, here are the fixes:
Have a valid robots.txt file to tell search engines how to crawl and index the site. Even if it’s a blank file, it should exist at the root of your domain.
Generate a proper canonical link element for each page. And don’t point away from a page you want indexed.
Display a custom 404 page when a page URL doesn’t exist. Make sure it returns a 404 server code to give the search engines a clear message.
Be careful with autogenerated pages. Avoid producing nonsense or duplicate pages for search engines and users.
Even if you’re not experiencing a site problem, these are good points to review periodically, just to be on the safe side.
Oh, and never put a canonical tag on your 404 page, especially pointing to your homepage … just don’t.
SEO Fail #4: Overnight Rankings Freefall
Sometimes a simple change can be a costly mistake. This story comes from an experience with one of our SEO clients.
When the .org extension of their domain name became available, they scooped it up. So far, so good. But their next move led to disaster.
They immediately set up a 301 redirect pointing the newly acquired .org to their main .com website. Their reasoning made sense — to capture wayward visitors who might type in the wrong extension.
But the next day, they called us, frantic. Their site traffic was nonexistent. They had no idea why.
A few quick checks revealed that their search rankings had disappeared from Google overnight. It didn’t take too much Q&A to figure out what had happened.
They put the redirect in place without considering the risk. We did some digging and discovered that the .org had a sordid past.
The previous owner of the .org site had used it for spam. With the redirect, Google was assigning all of that poison to the company’s main site! It took us only two days to restore the site’s standing in Google.
How to Avoid This SEO Fail Always research the link profile and history of any domain name you register.
A qualified SEO consultant can do this. There are also tools you can run to see what skeletons may be lying in the site’s closet.
Whenever I pick up a new domain, I like to let it lie dormant for six months to a year at least before trying to make anything of it. I want the search engines to clearly differentiate my site’s new incarnation from its past life. It’s an extra precaution to protect your investment.
SEO Fail #5: Pages That Won’t Go Away
Sometimes sites can have a different problem — too many pages in the search index.
Search engines sometimes retain pages that are no longer valid. If people land on error pages when they come from the search results, it’s a bad user experience.
Some site owners, out of frustration, list the individual URLs in the robots.txt file. They’re hoping that Google will take the hint and stop indexing them.
But this approach fails! If Google respects the robots.txt, it won’t crawl those pages. So Google will never see the 404 status and won’t find out that the pages are invalid.
How to Avoid This SEO Mistake The first part of the fix is to not disallow these URLs in robots.txt. You WANT the bots to crawl around and know what URLs should be dropped from the search index.
After that, set up a 301 redirect on the old URL. Send the visitor (and search engines) to the closest replacement page on the site. This takes care of your visitors whether they come from search or from a direct link.
SEO Fail #6: Missed Link Equity
I followed a link from a university website and was greeted with a 404 (not found) error.
This is not uncommon, except that the link was to /home.html — the site’s former homepage URL.
At some point, they must have changed their website architecture and deleted the old-style /home.html, losing the redirect in the shuffle.
Ironically, their 404 page says you can start over from the homepage, which is what I was trying to reach in the first place.
It’s a pretty safe bet that this site would love to have a nice link from a respected university going to their homepage. And accomplishing this is entirely within their control. They don’t even have to contact the linking site.
How to Fix This Fail To fix this link, they just need to put a 301 redirect pointing /home.html to the current homepage. (See our article on how to set up a 301 redirect for instructions.)
For extra credit, go to Google Search Console and review the Index Coverage Status Report. Look at all of the pages that are reported as returning a 404 error, and work on fixing as many errors here as possible.
SEO Fail #7: The Copy/Paste Fail
The site redesign launches, the canonical tags are in place, and the new Google Tag Manager is installed. Yet there are still ranking problems. In fact, one new landing page isn’t showing any visitors in Google Analytics.
The development team responds that they’ve done everything by the book and have followed the examples to the letter.
They are exactly right. They followed the examples — including leaving in the example code! After copying and pasting, the developers forgot to enter their own target site information.
Here are three examples our analysts have run across in website code:
<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://example.com/”>
‘analyticsAccountNumber’: ‘UA-123456-1’
_gaq.push([‘_setAccount’, ‘UA-000000-1’]);
How to Avoid This SEO Fail When things don’t work right, look beyond just “is this element in the source code?” It may be that the proper validation codes, account numbers and URLs were never specified in your HTML code.
Mistakes happen. People are only human. I hope that these examples will help you avoid similar SEO blunders of your own.
But some SEO issues are more complex than you think. If you have indexing problems, then we are here to help. Call us or fill out our request form and we’ll get in touch.
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7 SEO Fails Seen in the Wild (And How You Can Avoid Them)
7 SEO Fails Seen in the Wild (And How You Can Avoid Them) was originally published on BruceClay.com, home of expert search engine optimization tips.
We often get questions from people wondering why their site isn’t ranking, or why it isn’t indexed by the search engines.
Recently, I’ve come across several sites with major errors that could be easily fixed, if only the owners knew to look. While some SEO mistakes are quite complex, here are a few of the often overlooked “head slamming” errors.
So check out these SEO blunders — and how you can avoid making them yourself.
SEO Fail #1: Robots.txt Problems
The robots.txt file has a lot of power. It instructs search engine bots what to exclude from their indexes.
In the past, I’ve seen sites forget to remove one single line of code from that file after a site redesign, and sink their entire site in the search results.
So when a flower site highlighted a problem, I started with one of the first checks I always do on a site — look at the robots.txt file.
I wanted to know whether the site’s robots.txt was blocking the search engines from indexing their content. But instead of the expected text file, I saw a page offering to deliver flowers to Robots.Txt.
The site had no robots.txt, which is the first thing a bot looks for when crawling a site. That was their first mistake. But to take that file as a destination … really?
SEO Fail #2: Autogeneration Gone Wild
Secondly, the site was automatically generating nonsense content. It would probably deliver to Santa Claus or whatever text I put in the URL.
I ran a Check Server Page tool to see what status the autogenerated page was showing. If it was a 404 (not found), then bots would ignore the page as they should. However, the page’s server header gave a 200 (OK) status. As a result, the fake pages were giving the search engines a green light to be indexed.
Search engines want to see unique and meaningful content per page. So indexing these non-pages could hurt their SEO.
SEO Fail #3: Canonical Errors
Next, I checked to see what the search engines thought of this site. Could they crawl and index the pages?
Looking at the source code of various pages, I noticed another major error.
Every single page had a canonical link element pointing back to the homepage:
<link rel=”canonical” href=”https://www.domain.com/” />
In other words, search engines were being told that every page was actually a copy of the homepage. Based on this tag, the bots should ignore the rest of the pages on that domain.
Fortunately, Google is smart enough to figure out when these tags are likely used in error. So it was still indexing some of the site’s pages. But that universal canonical request was not helping the site’s SEO.
How to Avoid These SEO Fails For the flower site’s multiple mistakes, here are the fixes:
Have a valid robots.txt file to tell search engines how to crawl and index the site. Even if it’s a blank file, it should exist at the root of your domain.
Generate a proper canonical link element for each page. And don’t point away from a page you want indexed.
Display a custom 404 page when a page URL doesn’t exist. Make sure it returns a 404 server code to give the search engines a clear message.
Be careful with autogenerated pages. Avoid producing nonsense or duplicate pages for search engines and users.
Even if you’re not experiencing a site problem, these are good points to review periodically, just to be on the safe side.
Oh, and never put a canonical tag on your 404 page, especially pointing to your homepage … just don’t.
SEO Fail #4: Overnight Rankings Freefall
Sometimes a simple change can be a costly mistake. This story comes from an experience with one of our SEO clients.
When the .org extension of their domain name became available, they scooped it up. So far, so good. But their next move led to disaster.
They immediately set up a 301 redirect pointing the newly acquired .org to their main .com website. Their reasoning made sense — to capture wayward visitors who might type in the wrong extension.
But the next day, they called us, frantic. Their site traffic was nonexistent. They had no idea why.
A few quick checks revealed that their search rankings had disappeared from Google overnight. It didn’t take too much Q&A to figure out what had happened.
They put the redirect in place without considering the risk. We did some digging and discovered that the .org had a sordid past.
The previous owner of the .org site had used it for spam. With the redirect, Google was assigning all of that poison to the company’s main site! It took us only two days to restore the site’s standing in Google.
How to Avoid This SEO Fail Always research the link profile and history of any domain name you register.
A qualified SEO consultant can do this. There are also tools you can run to see what skeletons may be lying in the site’s closet.
Whenever I pick up a new domain, I like to let it lie dormant for six months to a year at least before trying to make anything of it. I want the search engines to clearly differentiate my site’s new incarnation from its past life. It’s an extra precaution to protect your investment.
SEO Fail #5: Pages That Won’t Go Away
Sometimes sites can have a different problem — too many pages in the search index.
Search engines sometimes retain pages that are no longer valid. If people land on error pages when they come from the search results, it’s a bad user experience.
Some site owners, out of frustration, list the individual URLs in the robots.txt file. They’re hoping that Google will take the hint and stop indexing them.
But this approach fails! If Google respects the robots.txt, it won’t crawl those pages. So Google will never see the 404 status and won’t find out that the pages are invalid.
How to Avoid This SEO Mistake The first part of the fix is to not disallow these URLs in robots.txt. You WANT the bots to crawl around and know what URLs should be dropped from the search index.
After that, set up a 301 redirect on the old URL. Send the visitor (and search engines) to the closest replacement page on the site. This takes care of your visitors whether they come from search or from a direct link.
SEO Fail #6: Missed Link Equity
I followed a link from a university website and was greeted with a 404 (not found) error.
This is not uncommon, except that the link was to /home.html — the site’s former homepage URL.
At some point, they must have changed their website architecture and deleted the old-style /home.html, losing the redirect in the shuffle.
Ironically, their 404 page says you can start over from the homepage, which is what I was trying to reach in the first place.
It’s a pretty safe bet that this site would love to have a nice link from a respected university going to their homepage. And accomplishing this is entirely within their control. They don’t even have to contact the linking site.
How to Fix This Fail To fix this link, they just need to put a 301 redirect pointing /home.html to the current homepage. (See our article on how to set up a 301 redirect for instructions.)
For extra credit, go to Google Search Console and review the Index Coverage Status Report. Look at all of the pages that are reported as returning a 404 error, and work on fixing as many errors here as possible.
SEO Fail #7: The Copy/Paste Fail
The site redesign launches, the canonical tags are in place, and the new Google Tag Manager is installed. Yet there are still ranking problems. In fact, one new landing page isn’t showing any visitors in Google Analytics.
The development team responds that they’ve done everything by the book and have followed the examples to the letter.
They are exactly right. They followed the examples — including leaving in the example code! After copying and pasting, the developers forgot to enter their own target site information.
Here are three examples our analysts have run across in website code:
<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://example.com/”>
‘analyticsAccountNumber’: ‘UA-123456-1’
_gaq.push([‘_setAccount’, ‘UA-000000-1’]);
How to Avoid This SEO Fail When things don’t work right, look beyond just “is this element in the source code?” It may be that the proper validation codes, account numbers and URLs were never specified in your HTML code.
Mistakes happen. People are only human. I hope that these examples will help you avoid similar SEO blunders of your own.
But some SEO issues are more complex than you think. If you have indexing problems, then we are here to help. Call us or fill out our request form and we’ll get in touch.
Like this post? Please subscribe to our blog to have new posts delivered to your inbox.
https://ift.tt/2Tvm7iF
0 notes
Text
7 SEO Fails Seen in the Wild (And How You Can Avoid Them)
7 SEO Fails Seen in the Wild (And How You Can Avoid Them) was originally published on BruceClay.com, home of expert search engine optimization tips.
We often get questions from people wondering why their site isn’t ranking, or why it isn’t indexed by the search engines.
Recently, I’ve come across several sites with major errors that could be easily fixed, if only the owners knew to look. While some SEO mistakes are quite complex, here are a few of the often overlooked “head slamming” errors.
So check out these SEO blunders — and how you can avoid making them yourself.
SEO Fail #1: Robots.txt Problems
The robots.txt file has a lot of power. It instructs search engine bots what to exclude from their indexes.
In the past, I’ve seen sites forget to remove one single line of code from that file after a site redesign, and sink their entire site in the search results.
So when a flower site highlighted a problem, I started with one of the first checks I always do on a site — look at the robots.txt file.
I wanted to know whether the site’s robots.txt was blocking the search engines from indexing their content. But instead of the expected text file, I saw a page offering to deliver flowers to Robots.Txt.
The site had no robots.txt, which is the first thing a bot looks for when crawling a site. That was their first mistake. But to take that file as a destination … really?
SEO Fail #2: Autogeneration Gone Wild
Secondly, the site was automatically generating nonsense content. It would probably deliver to Santa Claus or whatever text I put in the URL.
I ran a Check Server Page tool to see what status the autogenerated page was showing. If it was a 404 (not found), then bots would ignore the page as they should. However, the page’s server header gave a 200 (OK) status. As a result, the fake pages were giving the search engines a green light to be indexed.
Search engines want to see unique and meaningful content per page. So indexing these non-pages could hurt their SEO.
SEO Fail #3: Canonical Errors
Next, I checked to see what the search engines thought of this site. Could they crawl and index the pages?
Looking at the source code of various pages, I noticed another major error.
Every single page had a canonical link element pointing back to the homepage:
<link rel=”canonical” href=”https://www.domain.com/” />
In other words, search engines were being told that every page was actually a copy of the homepage. Based on this tag, the bots should ignore the rest of the pages on that domain.
Fortunately, Google is smart enough to figure out when these tags are likely used in error. So it was still indexing some of the site’s pages. But that universal canonical request was not helping the site’s SEO.
How to Avoid These SEO Fails For the flower site’s multiple mistakes, here are the fixes:
Have a valid robots.txt file to tell search engines how to crawl and index the site. Even if it’s a blank file, it should exist at the root of your domain.
Generate a proper canonical link element for each page. And don’t point away from a page you want indexed.
Display a custom 404 page when a page URL doesn’t exist. Make sure it returns a 404 server code to give the search engines a clear message.
Be careful with autogenerated pages. Avoid producing nonsense or duplicate pages for search engines and users.
Even if you’re not experiencing a site problem, these are good points to review periodically, just to be on the safe side.
Oh, and never put a canonical tag on your 404 page, especially pointing to your homepage … just don’t.
SEO Fail #4: Overnight Rankings Freefall
Sometimes a simple change can be a costly mistake. This story comes from an experience with one of our SEO clients.
When the .org extension of their domain name became available, they scooped it up. So far, so good. But their next move led to disaster.
They immediately set up a 301 redirect pointing the newly acquired .org to their main .com website. Their reasoning made sense — to capture wayward visitors who might type in the wrong extension.
But the next day, they called us, frantic. Their site traffic was nonexistent. They had no idea why.
A few quick checks revealed that their search rankings had disappeared from Google overnight. It didn’t take too much Q&A to figure out what had happened.
They put the redirect in place without considering the risk. We did some digging and discovered that the .org had a sordid past.
The previous owner of the .org site had used it for spam. With the redirect, Google was assigning all of that poison to the company’s main site! It took us only two days to restore the site’s standing in Google.
How to Avoid This SEO Fail Always research the link profile and history of any domain name you register.
A qualified SEO consultant can do this. There are also tools you can run to see what skeletons may be lying in the site’s closet.
Whenever I pick up a new domain, I like to let it lie dormant for six months to a year at least before trying to make anything of it. I want the search engines to clearly differentiate my site’s new incarnation from its past life. It’s an extra precaution to protect your investment.
SEO Fail #5: Pages That Won’t Go Away
Sometimes sites can have a different problem — too many pages in the search index.
Search engines sometimes retain pages that are no longer valid. If people land on error pages when they come from the search results, it’s a bad user experience.
Some site owners, out of frustration, list the individual URLs in the robots.txt file. They’re hoping that Google will take the hint and stop indexing them.
But this approach fails! If Google respects the robots.txt, it won’t crawl those pages. So Google will never see the 404 status and won’t find out that the pages are invalid.
How to Avoid This SEO Mistake The first part of the fix is to not disallow these URLs in robots.txt. You WANT the bots to crawl around and know what URLs should be dropped from the search index.
After that, set up a 301 redirect on the old URL. Send the visitor (and search engines) to the closest replacement page on the site. This takes care of your visitors whether they come from search or from a direct link.
SEO Fail #6: Missed Link Equity
I followed a link from a university website and was greeted with a 404 (not found) error.
This is not uncommon, except that the link was to /home.html — the site’s former homepage URL.
At some point, they must have changed their website architecture and deleted the old-style /home.html, losing the redirect in the shuffle.
Ironically, their 404 page says you can start over from the homepage, which is what I was trying to reach in the first place.
It’s a pretty safe bet that this site would love to have a nice link from a respected university going to their homepage. And accomplishing this is entirely within their control. They don’t even have to contact the linking site.
How to Fix This Fail To fix this link, they just need to put a 301 redirect pointing /home.html to the current homepage. (See our article on how to set up a 301 redirect for instructions.)
For extra credit, go to Google Search Console and review the Index Coverage Status Report. Look at all of the pages that are reported as returning a 404 error, and work on fixing as many errors here as possible.
SEO Fail #7: The Copy/Paste Fail
The site redesign launches, the canonical tags are in place, and the new Google Tag Manager is installed. Yet there are still ranking problems. In fact, one new landing page isn’t showing any visitors in Google Analytics.
The development team responds that they’ve done everything by the book and have followed the examples to the letter.
They are exactly right. They followed the examples — including leaving in the example code! After copying and pasting, the developers forgot to enter their own target site information.
Here are three examples our analysts have run across in website code:
<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://example.com/”>
‘analyticsAccountNumber’: ‘UA-123456-1’
_gaq.push([‘_setAccount’, ‘UA-000000-1’]);
How to Avoid This SEO Fail When things don’t work right, look beyond just “is this element in the source code?” It may be that the proper validation codes, account numbers and URLs were never specified in your HTML code.
Mistakes happen. People are only human. I hope that these examples will help you avoid similar SEO blunders of your own.
But some SEO issues are more complex than you think. If you have indexing problems, then we are here to help. Call us or fill out our request form and we’ll get in touch.
Like this post? Please subscribe to our blog to have new posts delivered to your inbox.
https://ift.tt/2Tvm7iF
0 notes
Text
7 SEO Fails Seen in the Wild (And How You Can Avoid Them)
7 SEO Fails Seen in the Wild (And How You Can Avoid Them) was originally published on BruceClay.com, home of expert search engine optimization tips.
We often get questions from people wondering why their site isn’t ranking, or why it isn’t indexed by the search engines.
Recently, I’ve come across several sites with major errors that could be easily fixed, if only the owners knew to look. While some SEO mistakes are quite complex, here are a few of the often overlooked “head slamming” errors.
So check out these SEO blunders — and how you can avoid making them yourself.
SEO Fail #1: Robots.txt Problems
The robots.txt file has a lot of power. It instructs search engine bots what to exclude from their indexes.
In the past, I’ve seen sites forget to remove one single line of code from that file after a site redesign, and sink their entire site in the search results.
So when a flower site highlighted a problem, I started with one of the first checks I always do on a site — look at the robots.txt file.
I wanted to know whether the site’s robots.txt was blocking the search engines from indexing their content. But instead of the expected text file, I saw a page offering to deliver flowers to Robots.Txt.
The site had no robots.txt, which is the first thing a bot looks for when crawling a site. That was their first mistake. But to take that file as a destination … really?
SEO Fail #2: Autogeneration Gone Wild
Secondly, the site was automatically generating nonsense content. It would probably deliver to Santa Claus or whatever text I put in the URL.
I ran a Check Server Page tool to see what status the autogenerated page was showing. If it was a 404 (not found), then bots would ignore the page as they should. However, the page’s server header gave a 200 (OK) status. As a result, the fake pages were giving the search engines a green light to be indexed.
Search engines want to see unique and meaningful content per page. So indexing these non-pages could hurt their SEO.
SEO Fail #3: Canonical Errors
Next, I checked to see what the search engines thought of this site. Could they crawl and index the pages?
Looking at the source code of various pages, I noticed another major error.
Every single page had a canonical link element pointing back to the homepage:
<link rel=”canonical” href=”https://www.domain.com/” />
In other words, search engines were being told that every page was actually a copy of the homepage. Based on this tag, the bots should ignore the rest of the pages on that domain.
Fortunately, Google is smart enough to figure out when these tags are likely used in error. So it was still indexing some of the site’s pages. But that universal canonical request was not helping the site’s SEO.
How to Avoid These SEO Fails For the flower site’s multiple mistakes, here are the fixes:
Have a valid robots.txt file to tell search engines how to crawl and index the site. Even if it’s a blank file, it should exist at the root of your domain.
Generate a proper canonical link element for each page. And don’t point away from a page you want indexed.
Display a custom 404 page when a page URL doesn’t exist. Make sure it returns a 404 server code to give the search engines a clear message.
Be careful with autogenerated pages. Avoid producing nonsense or duplicate pages for search engines and users.
Even if you’re not experiencing a site problem, these are good points to review periodically, just to be on the safe side.
Oh, and never put a canonical tag on your 404 page, especially pointing to your homepage … just don’t.
SEO Fail #4: Overnight Rankings Freefall
Sometimes a simple change can be a costly mistake. This story comes from an experience with one of our SEO clients.
When the .org extension of their domain name became available, they scooped it up. So far, so good. But their next move led to disaster.
They immediately set up a 301 redirect pointing the newly acquired .org to their main .com website. Their reasoning made sense — to capture wayward visitors who might type in the wrong extension.
But the next day, they called us, frantic. Their site traffic was nonexistent. They had no idea why.
A few quick checks revealed that their search rankings had disappeared from Google overnight. It didn’t take too much Q&A to figure out what had happened.
They put the redirect in place without considering the risk. We did some digging and discovered that the .org had a sordid past.
The previous owner of the .org site had used it for spam. With the redirect, Google was assigning all of that poison to the company’s main site! It took us only two days to restore the site’s standing in Google.
How to Avoid This SEO Fail Always research the link profile and history of any domain name you register.
A qualified SEO consultant can do this. There are also tools you can run to see what skeletons may be lying in the site’s closet.
Whenever I pick up a new domain, I like to let it lie dormant for six months to a year at least before trying to make anything of it. I want the search engines to clearly differentiate my site’s new incarnation from its past life. It’s an extra precaution to protect your investment.
SEO Fail #5: Pages That Won’t Go Away
Sometimes sites can have a different problem — too many pages in the search index.
Search engines sometimes retain pages that are no longer valid. If people land on error pages when they come from the search results, it’s a bad user experience.
Some site owners, out of frustration, list the individual URLs in the robots.txt file. They’re hoping that Google will take the hint and stop indexing them.
But this approach fails! If Google respects the robots.txt, it won’t crawl those pages. So Google will never see the 404 status and won’t find out that the pages are invalid.
How to Avoid This SEO Mistake The first part of the fix is to not disallow these URLs in robots.txt. You WANT the bots to crawl around and know what URLs should be dropped from the search index.
After that, set up a 301 redirect on the old URL. Send the visitor (and search engines) to the closest replacement page on the site. This takes care of your visitors whether they come from search or from a direct link.
SEO Fail #6: Missed Link Equity
I followed a link from a university website and was greeted with a 404 (not found) error.
This is not uncommon, except that the link was to /home.html — the site’s former homepage URL.
At some point, they must have changed their website architecture and deleted the old-style /home.html, losing the redirect in the shuffle.
Ironically, their 404 page says you can start over from the homepage, which is what I was trying to reach in the first place.
It’s a pretty safe bet that this site would love to have a nice link from a respected university going to their homepage. And accomplishing this is entirely within their control. They don’t even have to contact the linking site.
How to Fix This Fail To fix this link, they just need to put a 301 redirect pointing /home.html to the current homepage. (See our article on how to set up a 301 redirect for instructions.)
For extra credit, go to Google Search Console and review the Index Coverage Status Report. Look at all of the pages that are reported as returning a 404 error, and work on fixing as many errors here as possible.
SEO Fail #7: The Copy/Paste Fail
The site redesign launches, the canonical tags are in place, and the new Google Tag Manager is installed. Yet there are still ranking problems. In fact, one new landing page isn’t showing any visitors in Google Analytics.
The development team responds that they’ve done everything by the book and have followed the examples to the letter.
They are exactly right. They followed the examples — including leaving in the example code! After copying and pasting, the developers forgot to enter their own target site information.
Here are three examples our analysts have run across in website code:
<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://example.com/”>
‘analyticsAccountNumber’: ‘UA-123456-1’
_gaq.push([‘_setAccount’, ‘UA-000000-1’]);
How to Avoid This SEO Fail When things don’t work right, look beyond just “is this element in the source code?” It may be that the proper validation codes, account numbers and URLs were never specified in your HTML code.
Mistakes happen. People are only human. I hope that these examples will help you avoid similar SEO blunders of your own.
But some SEO issues are more complex than you think. If you have indexing problems, then we are here to help. Call us or fill out our request form and we’ll get in touch.
Like this post? Please subscribe to our blog to have new posts delivered to your inbox.
https://ift.tt/2Tvm7iF
0 notes