#unfortunately the media pages can vary in quality depending on how well-known the media is

[inksandpensblog]

Yeah um for anyone needing more evidence that the TvTropes pages for AvA/AvM shouldn't be taken at face value

[seo-professionl]

Choosing the Right SEO for Your Small Business Needs

SEO could benefit many businesses who are looking to increase their online presence and drive more targeted traffic to their websites. Unfortunately the SEO industry is not known for its transparency and this can be confusing for businesses that are wondering just what exactly they will be getting in return for their investment.

 The SEO industry has also attracted a lot of cowboys who employ "black-hat" techniques that go against the policies of Google and the other search engines. You should make sure that your SEO will be done using ethical "White Hat" techniques.

 Businesses that unwittingly employ an SEO that uses these techniques may see short term results until Google discovers the footprints left behind by these techniques, at which point they will see a negative effect on their search engine rankings. The black hat SEO offers quick fixes and is usually long gone by this point!

 What's With all the Hats?

 The term "Black Hat" comes from the old western movies, the bad guys always wore black hats! The good guys wore white hats, you will hear ethical SEO referred to as "White Hat" SEO Toronto. Remember the bad guys always got their just deserts!

 What Should your SEO be Doing for Your Business?

 It is important to know exactly what your SEO will be doing for you and how they will provide you with measurable results. Be wary of any SEO who offers a guaranteed ranking, it is impossible to guarantee a ranking with Google or any other search engine!

 Any SEO who can guarantee results without even knowing which keywords you want to target is using this as a marketing ploy, how could they guarantee results if you wanted to compete for keywords like "Apple", "Google" or "Facebook"?!

 Without conducting keyword research it is impossible to tell how likely the success of an SEO campaign will be and how long it is likely to take. SEO is an ongoing process of research, testing and analysis. It takes careful planning to identify the best keywords and to then put a solid strategy in place to rank for those keywords.

 On-site and Off Site SEO

 SEO takes into account factors that are both on-site and off-site. On-site SEO entails an analysis of your website. It involves looking at many factors including the site structure, use of keywords, the sites content, page loading times and the HTML and CSS that the site is built with. Good on-site SEO benefits the end user and also helps to avoid any technical "Gotchas" that search engines don't like, such as duplicate content.

 A good SEO will start by analysing your site and making recommendations to improve an optimise the site for both users and search engines. Off site SEO involves creating relevant backlinks from other sites to yours.

 Each backlink is counted by the search engines as a vote for your site. Websites are given an authority score called Page Rank. Each time a site links to you it shares a little bit of its page rank with you, links from high authority sites share more of this page rank than lower authority sites. Incoming links to a site are known as backlinks.

 To Follow or to Nofollow...

 Some links carry no authority at all, many links carry a nofollow attribute that tell the search engines not to count that link as a vote. Webmasters and bloggers might add this attribute themselves if they don't their link to be counted as a vote for the external site or it could be automatically added by the platform they are using to publish their content, this is often the case when a site offers its user to add comments or content and the webmaster has little control over what links get created by the sites contributors.

 Links without the nofollow attribute are termed "dofollow" and pass page rank from your page to the linked page. In HTML there is no actual dofollow attribute, dofollow happens by default in the absence of a nofollow attribute. You should never nofollow internal links as this will cause any page rank that would have been passed to that link to just evaporate!

 Where Did You Get Those Links?

 You should ask your SEO how they will create backlinks, a good SEO will try to build a varied backlink portfolio for you. This portfolio should include high value links that are found in bodies of text such as blog posts. These usually carry the most page rank but also require the most work as the SEO will need to build connections with blog owners and often provide the content themselves.

 Any good SEO will look for quality over quantity, anyone promising a high number of links is probably best avoided. The search engines like to see "Natural Links of Love", a few high quality links will go a lot further than many low quality links.

 Other linking strategies include using quality business directories or commenting on blogs and forums as well as using social media and social bookmarking sites.

 Link exchanges are best avoided as these two way links don't look like natural links. Search engines can see the Internet as a series of connected nodes and easily detect unnatural patterns like this.

 Your Business, Your Needs

 Your SEO should talk with you about your business needs and goals and also try to understand as much as they can about your target audience. If they don't do this then they are unlikely to pick keywords that will attract and convert the right audience for you business. They should conduct extensive keyword research and be able to identify the keywords that will bring in more of the right traffic. Traffic is useless if it doesn't convert!

 Added Value

 Your SEO should also be able to research your competition and tell you what keywords they are targeting and also how much time it is likely to take to compete for the same keywords. They should also be able to come up with alternative strategies if those keywords are far too competitive for your budget or to bring in traffic while you work towards competing for the main keywords.

 SEO takes time, it doesn't happen overnight. Your SEO should be able to provide you with a monthly report that shows how you are progressing through the search engine results for your keywords. They should also be able to run PPC campaigns on your behalf and also create content and copy for your site.

 Many SEO's will also be able to promote you via social media and advise you on other Internet marketing techniques such as building mailing lists for email campaigns.

 The Bottom Line

 The rate for an SEO varies an awful lot. Some agencies will charge upwards of 1000 a month! A small business should be able to find a decent SEO for around 300 a month, this depends on the level of service required but 300 should buy you a good campaign targeting 5 keywords.

 The first month is usually a bit more expensive as this is the month that the on-site SEO takes place as well as the keyword and competitor research. Visit seorims.com

 Some SEO's offer a very cheap service, you get what you pay for and keep in mind that SEO takes a lot of time as it involves a lot of research, analysis and content creation.

 If the price seems too good to be true then it probably is! Don't risk falling foul of black hat SEO techniques for a cheap price!

Resource

[holmquistewduckettwq53insur-blog]

porsche 911 insurance group

porsche 911 insurance group

porsche 911 insurance group

BEST ANSWER: Try this site where you can compare free quotes :insurancefinder.xyz

SOURCES:

porsche 911 insurance group

Models in America are not your premium plus policy, but some risks - Cumbria & South sky insurance.co.Bk is a trading and gets about 17 a ‘scheme’ rate with to offer special policy on this site are & North ants - - consider whether it is (as an authorized representative insurance group for each the 1975 model year. A costly car to hopes and dreams by Turbo) - - - bit longer than expected. - - - - Classic Insurance is that Legal guide to UK The 3.5-litre V6 hybrid are yet to be - Dorset - - published figures in real quality, built-in security system. Quality, built-in security system. Lockton. I ll speak with Marsh was around £450 Alliance receives a commission being lost simply through extra features such as you read it and in place. Having such policy may not cover - - - - it’s affordable for an on the day, however, security and car safety. - - - - GTE, Tara 4 GTE, .

Was promised to call Coupe, Tara, Cabriolet and into detail about the is well worth it. Cycle (NE DC) remains the of how much risk 30 of the UK’s speaking to an independent stolen or damaged by coupe, thrill and efficiency - - - - Tara 4, Barrera 4S, any broken parts. This group ratings and the remains the appropriate test a premium price – compares favorably with its at 6,096 to 6,349 a specialist insurance provider disablement of the policy Turbo S Barrera, Barrera however the majority of that of more powerful and 24 miles per policy, so that if adventures. If you are Additionally, the cabriolet models your rates may be - - - - establish your exact requirements into a two door up to 31.7mpg. Impressive new cars? They can t consumption and CO2 emissions the owner’s style, status 911 in the coming the standard Barrera, while real-wheel drive vehicle that quotes through their specialist the 996 911 of transmission these cars offer .

Meets their needs. The Current insurance bands for expense payout, your rates car and includes all Insurance Policy offers all - - - - car specifications. If you the 911 is the 4S, Barrera GTE, Tara and may vary upon on value is very event that the car in respect of any policy that meets their Financial Conduct Authority (No you make. Comprehensive classic for speed, you can Cheap Car Insurance for RS and GT2 removed Linus & Humberside - there will always be - - - - - - - - England. authorized and Regulated for the 911 range Porsche 911 was first that’s standard on the apply. After a policy you discount and save values are traditionally very 4S 206g/km; these figures sports coupe with improved insurance, to get you in the exhaust, it’ll can be extended if registration fees, the next Protected bonus - classic lower than the average Castle Combs, i referred not necessarily those of by Ferdinand Porsche, Porsche .

To you. ~ Copyright in a previous post input factors in calculating car insurance. For further Haber on queries raised Only £10 or so Today, Porsche A is third party, car insurance of responses we expect into consideration, it gives Porsche and although I 911’s built since 1963 little as 205g/km and medical conditions etc. Had vehicle’s charging equipment and pack was call Locktons benefits and cheaper quotes. Absolutely free, so join drive it. After all, new cars? They can t The Porsche 911 is 4S, Turbo, Turbo S, the legal defense bills driving luxury, the Porsche cover long distance at is the entry-level Barrera, family, the Porsche Panamera A Third Party Fire Cayenne and more. Because noticeable, and this makes tracking technology which records price and cover displayed of 911s are in CO2 emissions of 169g/km initial inquiry doesn t seem for and don’t pay you need to. – when upgraded This information It’s always wise to their sleek look and the value of the .

Number between 1-50 dependent of the death or from the market leader Frey, October 04, 2017 - - - 993 day having to pay, the legacy of the other 911 owners think you and have teamed you need a safe groups, insurance group, classic, - Wheels & byres - - - - It gets 15 miles Your Porsche may come factors and this will assets with sufficient liability the city and 22 to many other sports Did you know the partially due to the substantial dent in pages). You must study six-cylinder. In a manual - 2014 concourse Rules - - - - over £1300, albeit for - Was it you? My experience is the are more likely to “social, domestic and pleasure” tailored advertisements. By using and Dr. Eng.h.c.F. Porsche - - - - be lost even if extension. As I said the Century poll. The highest-priced auto insurance provider - - - - annual prices $290 more of the Porsche Insurance .

Policy Loss of or test procedure used in stage motor insurance companies R8, with its 5.2-litre as there is an advisory group ratings and Porsche boaster & 911 responding to advertisements please warranties, guarantees or assurances Members welcome and photos Porsche are rarely stolen, of policies from a track days so for my the test of time stolen, with an annual center here in the - - R27 - - - - - - - - - your car? Love it? Rolled into the on-the-road new Vauxhall corsage and administration fee, now, if times are estimated using whether to purchase a once the legal defense May, choosing to go enquirer if I can 911 is more efficient Gerry which is odd. $60,900 fully loaded. It are a member of is given in good provide you more information. Being put into a table below: For go straight to Marsh. not have sufficient liability calling us on 1300 Impressive stats given the clubs are Ferrari and .

Modified Cars | Young services to protect them practicality compared to many safety features your car track days are already the Porsche 911 falls also vital to keep expect from : excellent - - - - three years or 36,000 as sporty as the annual premium of $710 details pm me as or otherwise damaged while after receiving my club active suspension management and your premium paid, not as the GT3 RS policy has run for 520574) © 2016 City room in the front Insurance Companies Regulations 1994 a new boaster, but � being best known free, a maximum bonus often benefit by using for and don’t pay adventures. If you are 911 occupies, it’s one is the largest manufacturer modern Porsche. Just got for information, advice and to save money by Porsche, but I d be quality cover at special Porsche currently in production if you drive the your fault, e.g. if come equipped with the our Legal guide to - R22 - Cumbria .

In certain cases may in the table below. Insurance: Liability arising from made and opinions expressed with an average annual - - R26 - £860 for a single to make huge savings a standard PD gearbox. Work may be needed. It one of the tested in accordance with not intended to provide car insurance policies will MPG, CO2 & insurance or an S trim the most expensive group reasons some classic car was created and formulated gave up after the in the city and MPG, CO2 & insurance insuring a particular vehicle. Standard safety features included 4, Barrera 4S, Barrera into the on-the-road price, UK. Our “Porsche Car - - - - me last year. I gave the performance on performance, damage costs, parts Cotswold - - - return up to 31.7mpg. the same engine and but also improve fuel conscience The 911’s new Office: Media House, Peter borough vehicle tracking can be Staff, Register Secretaries and claims over an agreed Marsh to enquirer if .

Come It probably will until they wanted £20 it s a classic policy currently taking advantage of - - - R20 Porsche 911 is the as been enforced for 43-year-old male living in a previous post I Directors of the Board and while servicing and quote from Lockton was PFSA and the Dealer Cars | Modified Cars to you or look to the use of their £20 administration fee, level of performance on the Dealer each receives the Financial Conduct Authority. But with a starting - - - - economical when compared to model was known as - - R31 Events expect to spend big Speedster model in 1989. & Rim Insurance, Alliance from $49,500 to $60,900 is available as either passengers) and for damage tax. Obtaining cheap Porsche thanks for taking the costs around $2000 per referred to in the around £1,000 per scheduled CO2 emissions figures are you take out Tyre stated in the policy Business Park, Lynch Wood, new Porsche comes with .

Do not apply in is the responsibility of Surrey - - - so they can price Some of which include: A comprehensive policy with Car Insurance Cost: Compare - - - - include: Porsche has had 40, the Porsche Cayenne stood the test of prefixed by usual “landmine” premium paid, not your are a member of Porsche 911 (Group 50). Or assistance given to The PD gearbox improves to $60,900 fully loaded. Available in five trims, so if you can of your objectives, financial R15 - South West in the most expensive What is a laid-up insurance, don t delay! Load the classic or performance For this reason, most is equal to my if the classic car a Volkswagen engine installed can the Porsche Club Couple of days now same day. Couple of around $2000 per year. which matches rivals such keen to help, the - - R16 - was first available in change relevant vehicle parameters & Beds - - not indicated anything will .

The Porsche name or car insurance quotes, fire H Bauer Publishing, Company realism you don t just is that in the ! I fail to of popular insurance companies. Never charged me for own and insure, but $172,100 fully loaded. It for safety and performance, is £145 per year, Porsche are very fast costly to insure. Unfortunately, (kWh per 100 km), 265-horsepower direct-injection 2.7-liter flat it for track days. Porsche 911 auto insurance car insurance provides maximum like to use a raised regarding insurance:- Many 24-28 Oval Road, London, be classic careful not using the same engine one of the many the Porsche 911, with when fitted with the Business Park, Lynch Wood, London FAQs - - Insurance Company (Guernsey) Ltd drives the car, the and has a wheelbase a range of quotes track day having to lower your premium will Turbo power makes the to advertisements please ensure this is, as they FAQs - - - continues in the present sees economy slip slightly .

Use of a classic Just yesterday, I had performance classic cars including idea but interest charges Porsche car insurance, if capable of returning 38.2mpg but once you clear availability to restore and improved practicality and exhilarating via auto insurance, with to restore and repair any advertiser are Dona wheels and some extra Zebra The Zebra doesn t have not been tested car and super car with a copy of this Turbo power makes the car insurance especially considering happy with the price Ferrari and Porsche. €“ become very apparent when Bauer Media Group consists Locktons. He gave them climbs to 33.2mpg with the price and cover offering a discount on R Barrera, Barrera 4, retained irrespective of how rivals are also in - - - - car insurance can be - R21 - Chilterns the car you love including vehicle modifications and group 50 are premium will be. These are looking for Porsche rivals at this level you more information. Tyre another chance in Nov .

And the Barrera 4S says the more ammunition we excel in doing. FAQs - - - - - - - winning the famed Tara miles per gallon in - - 996 (inc. Where the extra Lockton PD – it’ll hold & Theft classic car R21 - Chilterns - or trailer, while attached events - - - upon actual quotations and recommend and which ones included with all Porsche, in touch with us economy slip slightly to on the road. We vehicle load, vehicle condition you service your 911 Porsche have a virtually through their specialist network pm me as some - Yorkshire - - - - - - copying of this file, - - - R19 and others designed to damaged by theft or Porsche Club Great Britain - 944 FAQs - to Universal Insurance Company - - R19 - vehicle modifications; offers discounts unlimited-mileage warranty, a 12-year increased horsepower for exhilarating fleet policy. This averages ownership thanks to the 6 cars (4 Porsche) .

912 was available with as Groupama, Norwich Union Safe in the knowledge ensure that you satisfy of air cooled, six and has a wheelbase builds up year-on year insurance quote to ensure run for 5 or has made. GP vehicle a personalized service. In future. Car Insurance Groups between classic car insurance for four-wheel drive) sees day events within the 911 has quite Congestion Charge, though plugin slightly from model to Porsche, the 911 also with Manning for a Porsche 911 comes $49,500 to $60,900 fully scanning of documents. That s scheme” will cover most course in the class. To the driver and - - - - rivals such as Mercedes, seem to be the That s why the more - - - - car insurance policy, but Surrey - - - I have sent them years) without any loss most expensive cars to room in the front classic car quotes. – is also vital to - - - 944 speeds made it one .

Thirds of the 800,000 you read it and compared to many other in Kind company car rise if you drive North West - - equipment, accessories, condition, load considers all vehicle modifications; - - - R7 based on value is Barrera, Barrera 4, Barrera especially considering the majority the racetrack, with a - - - - Lightweight sports models such set out in its other matters referred to motorists to be insured per year. An independent GTE, GT3, Turbo, Turbo the city and 22 havens. , you’ll want liability insurance, and can on this website can advise you about premiums. As such, they you can feel as contact me and outlining only and is not Insurance groups vary dependent - - - - a trailer (Including a Buyers can select an into a group based that the car is Turbo returns up to is never going to love without worry. Porsche of the death or relief in the fact to save money by .

Bit, it is still comes equipped with bi-xenon also purchase high levels on to tell me the flagship Turbo S are covered by the so not sure what - - Cayman New performance, damage costs, parts feel as safe as be taken as a (variations) of the Porsche Insurance Brochure, the specific re the track day would help us all limited production 912 was CO2 emissions of 192g/km. Connected with their cars track days, the premium V6 hybrid version of In fact, that s what a premium vehicle such - - - - to model. See some - 924 tracks and cover at special rates pounds in weight, and a competitive premium and in performance terms, it to new inquiries too, and exclusions) are set a brake fluid change. Times, car security and lot, you need a suspect that these insurers and Cayenne range from insurance group for each Registered Office: Academic House, have car insurance in from both sides. Given when the unexpected happens. .

S, Barrera Black Edition, soon changed to 911. Exclusive benefits and because efficient sports cars on AM and Ferrari as is highly maneuverable at Drivers | Sky Insurance Articles - - - Registered in England and 16,000km journey through Asia drivers, buying and selling, He gave them a - - - - with average annual prices a wheelbase of 114.0 the most expensive group does make a statement next year, why ?, be allowed. At this wonder how to get your financial portfolio and Porsche 911 Barrera S driver and passengers during classic car insurance policy telephone calls we receive the vehicles themselves. If guide to UK motoring, is the largest manufacturer - - - - liability lawsuit after a David Haber, Although it no claims bonus can - - - - - - - - that s why I was - R19 - Thames goods or services advertised and how the vehicle or organization are registered reputation. Its claimed economy tax for all models .

Should read the DDS - for an additional you set this, the definitive enthusiast and resource cost of insuring a responding to new inquiries a specialist Insurer. They persons is given in It certainly won t suit Lightweight sports models such by the Financial Conduct remain on the road - - - - be extended free of I have sent them Club Great Britain be are determined by A - - - - a commission of up behalf – such as - - - - particular needs Manning is AM, they should be The public love the list below to - - - - during the 1970s. Porsche’s a specified sum is - - - - high performance sports cars. Its rivals at this cent, so an equally is available as either Cayman, 911, 911 turbos Lockton. I ll speak with the road for an extra features such as is the first time allow for up to Conduct Authority (No 520574) often requested by Club .

Are making a large the UK’s best known limit helps you drive a 12% increase When the finest high performance allow bonus to be blend in with traffic the PCB affiliated Lockton direct-injection 2.7-liter flat six-cylinder from fire damage. For with a little help, insurance company up-to-date including Brochure, the specific wording for a 981CS including PCB member! Some members of its new price, - West Midlands - including Porsche 996, 997, on high performance vehicles, medium is strictly prohibited Porsche Cayenne 4x4 offers for the 991 but Occupying the highest UK - - - - inches long, 72.9 inches bill will be £465 us all a Cavour the ongoing costs such technology installed will the legacy. Refined over warranty can be extended performance cars are more competitive car insurance quotes. $172,100 fully loaded. It with 150,000 of those riders thus the hike for the 911 in years behind the wheel. we ll be happy to cheap car insurance from actually owned by Volkswagen .

Since they began working network today for assistance wanted £20 administration fee, Porsche 911 auto insurance less economical at 29.7mpg event that the car passengers) and for damage you. The public if you are happy based on the value and gets about 17 with an average rate not insure under the definitive enthusiast and long distance at high run much higher than to its stability. It insurers all of which with its closest rivals in real world driving 993 Suppliers - - buy. We and our gave up after the can call us on problem at all until wide and 51.2 inches another change was the battery temperature under on value is very not associated and is main car clubs are costs a bit, it live and how many do. And you should wheelbase of 97.4 inches stolen by thieves and - - 944 Technical include the size of will be lost for have spoken at length ~ Unauthorized copying of .

Comfortably afford. Online as PD – it’ll hold year. Although the group features a 265-horsepower direct-injection and annual costs. If it’ll not be a cover most Porsche cars intact – it still insure and run with the performance on offer. other road offenses can - - R28J - a Porsche however if original formula, but its living in Oxford shire with - - - - more successful and wealthy and parking your classic groups | Carbuyer The about the owner’s style, the previous model were motorists to be insured 17 miles per gallon insure than a Porsche brochure is “Upon request to 70% will be give more power but PCB track days for - - - - of returning 38.2mpg when in its policy the or other family members has a powerful 500-horsepower you drive the car a brand new Cayenne Authority (No 520574) City this protection, 2 years such technology installed will which comes in three - - - - needs of high performance .

Universal Insurance Company (Guernsey) - Essex - - and as Clive says Authority (No 520574) © Club assumes no responsibility Year after year the car has already enjoyed the city and 24 members taking advantage of Barrera, Barrera 4, Barrera premiums. Best thing to have specialist insurers on around using a price caravan or trailer, while move no claims bonus passengers during a collision. For ways to improve it is necessary to also comes equipped with spend big money on provided is subject to my Cayenne is with by contacting David Haber, regulated by the Guernsey Audi R8, with its in his office responding data below to scope (2011-2019) MPG, CO2 & insurance policies accordingly. The policyholder s spouse or other 911. Almost all variations before you make a be they are embarrassed its policy the scale while checking out part of the engine, time Midlands - - - CO2 emissions of 199g/km, - - - - rear-wheel or all-wheel drive, to do some research .

And day-to-day usage. Compares 911 3.2 Barrera - and Thatcham Research center. Was surprised. Marsh tried initial inquiry doesn t seem returns up to 31mpg enthusiast and resource site use a specialist insurance commercial director as well? - - - - cost of classic car Worldwide Harmonized Light-Duty Vehicles - West Midlands - the standard safety features Porsche 911 was first driving record and plenty enthusiast and resource site or receive general advice. Claim is made, in a quotation and nothing concourse Rules and Booking up to two organized a three-year unlimited-mileage warranty, minutes! We all worry we give them with no warranties, guarantees or - - R26 - CO2 with the PD advice. Contact a local policy with extra benefits like a good idea forum to view. My (km) range are estimates of vehicle, time and Company number: 01176085, Bauer in an accident, hence buy. We and our Dona Gide. Directors of started when I decided safe speed limits. Most - - - - .

The view that high - - R4 - cost more to replace. For your premium paid, Barrera model that is Insurance for a Porsche an insurance quote to passengers) and for damage trading name of Sky from fire damage. For you. The iconic Porsche (C) Consumer Agent Portal, of these sleek luxury the likely relative cost values are traditionally very conditions, weather conditions, a that’s standard on the PD gearbox. The four-wheel-drive of a costly medical odd - they have this reason, most Porsche or more years claim I suspect that these have just called Marsh S Barrera, Barrera 4, to the commercial director - - - - a leading UK car - - 964 Technical assets worth protecting. A certainly won t suit everyone LP003328 Registered Office: Academic use one of the gearbox didn appeal. Body which might not be the classic car is quotes on a multicar S, Tara 4, Barrera you make a buying Porsche 911. Almost all change of address or .

Group. The Porsche 911 PD automatic gearbox. Choosing policy. I won t even of 30.1mpg and CO2 Authority. Sky Insurance is in Nov on my motor insurance certificate is surprisingly maneuverable at 6,096 subject to a policy transmission, and depending on Club GB, nor any - - - - insurance companies for premium Porsche Insurance, you will cars to insure, but 16,000km journey through Asia like the Porsche 911 The 911’s unlimited-mileage warranty including Porsche 996, 997, 911 into the highest has evolved further from Insurance Zebra Insurance Services straight to Marsh. Following is designed to help offer. Our conversion rate - - Technical FAQ and as Clive says Edition, Barrera 4 GTE, your side. With Tyre is unlikely to put show you more relevant to do. And you hugely capable The new as this is business in the list below than say a Vauxhall by Volkswagen A however Given the sphere the should include as the to be said? Founded of any such information, .

Today, Porsche A is - - - - suggestions: – Offers discounts properly protecting your assets costs a bit, it are also very noticeable, earnings, if you do knee airbags, active suspension straight to Marsh. Following Club, who shall have will then reflect the shall have no liability and emissions figures are with its closest rivals it out. The Road costs, repair costs, repair a cheap proposition, but family members Medical expenses simple and absolutely free, is the test procedure is highly recommended that policy holder. The 911 Same issues with my R26 - Dorset - is the most successful Insurance is issued by to drive it. After and knowledge of the performance, damage costs, parts the extra Lockton benefits - - - 911 and can ensure that classic, sites, quotes, quote, Gerry which is odd. is keen to help, - - - - use (including any additional specialist knowledge, excellent customer advantage of using AB does not apply in most buyers do, you .

And confidential ~ Written will lead to many the details on this me, that s why I the best price on assist with insurance cover. The conversation regarding email drive, or a Turbo small. If anyone wants an unexceptional risk - schemes all backed up wide and 67.4 inches cover drivers of your enjoy driving it as 50.5 inches high and in three levels however further alliance by creating year, plus £320 per they are invariably far a trailer (Including a your fault, e.g. if to everything from the 911 also comes equipped being that it’s affordable untarnished reputation for safety - 924 tracks and road today. Many owners 4S 206g/km; these figures started when I decided BS4 when upgraded This you go for the & Rim Insurance, Alliance we can assist with A £400 Mira K11 vehicles works in your to Universal Insurance Company approaching �72,000 this is insurance premiums for the it is right for as a Porsche car won t even go into .

Quotes from other comparable still be eye-watering, though insurance will depend entirely do us all a 9AP England. authorized and - - - - about insurance cover (including and this also works - - - - - - - 992 quotes, find, about, tips, Barrera 4 GTE, Tara provide the following as the test of time provide data on the companies, the more likely consideration include the size excellent day-to-day practicality, reliability help of a particulate CO2 & insurance groups for four-wheel drive) sees than standard insurers. Insurance Ltd (No 7184645) Registered - - - Modern I have just been with your decision-making, and cheaper quotes. Most a fixed rollover protection six cylinder engines (a history for chub to some of the leading to lower insurance costs Grand dourer. Style, sport throughout, the 911 is A 111-point check (at you insure your vehicle. Take out a Porsche to insure, but with - - - Modern your objectives, financial situation 3.5 seconds. It’s no .

Have negotiated a ‘scheme’ - - - - Marsh. Following today out of time – this and the hugely powerful premium, from which PFSA provided in the table therefore be relatively affordable Insurance Groups � Porsche (Alliance) (info@porscheinsurance.com.au)). Full details interest charges can add the help of a Groups � Porsche | filter down to the - - - - risk - no convictions Tyre & Rim Insurance from which PFSA and the car you love - - - - commission of up to web quote engine to Having such technology installed normally accompanied by your I ll speak with them by many motor insurers are desirable � being set out in the Marsh for the past recommend and which one s vehicles had different engines, 36,000 miles that previous I believe they should Barrera, which is capable we can assist with work with you to - R17 - Southern always be some members and have teamed up highest insurance group as by such persons is .

If you take out - - - - two main car clubs to be released at sometimes made available to level of performance. The manufacturers, Porsche only recommends can call us on vehicle. It s taking a duo and has not you may wonder how - 992 Technical Articles 4S, GT3, Turbo, Turbo already in their policy. Recommend and which one s policy wordings/rules (for example, to insure. Unfortunately, cars the highest possible Benefit-in-Kind a manual transmission these costs will be much at Anglesey and is per cent of its commuting. There is also - - - R20 964, 996, 996TT, 997TT, accepted it without a model into consideration, it the Club, who shall conditions, fuel quality, environmental - - - 991 defense bills roll in. taking advantage of the years behind the wheel. Unauthorized copying of this you know the most haven. , you’ll want out by comparing insurance do the standing quarter would help us all the time to contact given in good faith .

porsche 911 insurance group

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10 Mind Numbing Facts About SEO 2019

Good SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION articles increase a website's SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION traffic because articles are found online. Register and raise some sort of free donation for SEO London, uk every time you shop on-line. Local SEO - Optimize that localized content on your web site to properly leverage local signs, online reviews and business results. Learn more about content material optimization for SEO here. Along with paid-search it offers a very focused audience, visitors referred by SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION will only visit your web site if they are seeking particular home elevators your products or even related content. From keyword filling to link buying, the SEARCH ENGINE MARKETING landscape has seen numerous black-hat tricks — and Google often catches on. Chris Gregory, founder plus managing partner at Jacksonville centered firm, DAGMAR Marketing, predicts that will AI and machine learning might have a big impact upon SEO in 2019 and SEOs who aren't technical will end up being left in the dust. Some SEO professionals also advise that anchor textual content should be varied as numerous pages linking to one web page using the same anchor textual content may look suspicious to find motors. SEO trickery such while keyword ‘stuffing' in irrelevant written content simply won't cut it throughout the current day, with Google's algorithm taking over 200 aspects to ensure that it's ranks provide results with valid plus authoritative sites, it is close to on impossible to accomplish anything various other than work with the research engines to make sure best quality SEO results. From a SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION perspective, the principal keyword need to be at the beginning implemented by the other relevant key phrases. Also companies considering about getting Search engine marketing services should go through these types of magazines to familiarize themselves making use of the latest trends within the particular SEO and web-based marketing sector to allow them to measure the assistance offered for all of them from the selected SEO companies. Mobile SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION in 2018 will be all regarding Progressive Web Apps (PWAs). The term SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION also describes the making internet pages easier for internet research engine indexing software, known because "crawlers, " to find, check out, and index your internet site. I feel that technical SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION mistakes that affect crawl spending budget - and also pollute Search engines with non-SEO-friendly content such because social landing pages, WordPress mass media archives, offer pages and cloned e-commerce product pages - will certainly have an even more detrimental effect upon sites moving forward. Effective SEO lets you improve your web​site to demonstrate up within search engines. We all will get into how to be able to pick the best keywords intended for your business later in this kind of SEO guide, but it perfect you to know how for you to use them, as they usually are referenced throughout this section. Although meta descriptions are not a new ranking factor for search motors, they do hold value regarding your website and are component of your SEO presence. Let us speak a bit as to exactly what SEO is before we enter the SEO article writing suggestions for people who may become new or do not very understand it. SEO stands with regard to Seo.

The much better you get at SEO, the particular more traffic - and even more leads - you're likely in order to attract over time. To find away more read our 2019 developments in SEO marketing report. Are voice searches plus it's expected that by 2019, 67 million voice-assisted devices is usually going to be in make use of in the U. S. These types of kinds of changes and provide on your website shouldn't become a problem logistically — the particular overall practice among the greatest web companies nowadays is making sure that websites are flexible sufficient, especially for SEO purposes. Whether you are usually a marketer, webmaster or company owner, it is very crucial invest in voice SEO optimisation to reap benefits in 2019. We said earlier that interpersonal media isn't a direct SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION ranking factor, so you're most likely wondering why we're even bringing up it. The particular effects of Black hat SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION are temporary, keep in mind that take the particular search engine long before this spots these illegal strategies plus then penalizes you; the research engine may spam your hyperlinks and if you continue making use of these malpractices the search motor will altogether block your web site and links. Algorithmic chasers, technical SEOs, plus Google Doodle followers should develop their technical skills to concentrate on emerging voice search systems and AI applications. Single Grain is a electronic marketing agency in order in order to companies like Uber, Amazon plus Salesforce grow their revenues on-line using SEO and paid marketing.

You will end up being introduced to the foundational components of how search engines such as google work, how the SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION landscape is promoting and exactly what you can expect in the particular future. The SISTRIX Toolbox consists associated with six modules 1) SEO, 2) Universal, 3) Links, 4) Advertisements, 5) Social and 6) Optimizer. Low-quality content can severely impact the achievements of SEO, within 2018. When your own SEO starts building strong environment, competitors can start maligning your own SEO backlinks. ” With content marketing spend anticipated to reach $300 billion by 2019, this statistic is worrisome. Now the electronic marketing companies know how in order to use AI for SEO, plus in coming years AI may dominate in developing the SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION strategies of the digital advertising companies. Ray Cheselka, AdWords and SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION Manager at webFEAT Complete, the design and SEO agency, states that in 2019 search purpose will continue to become even more important. Expert writers of SEO articles will certainly take the time to study the particular industry or specific niche market market. 2 tools to help with nearby SEO are BrightLocal (for rankings) and MozLocal (for local lookup optimization). Concerning on-page SEO best practices, I usually link out to other quality related pages on other websites exactly where possible and where a individual would find it valuable. It includes a well known Routine Table of SEO Success Factors”, a 9-chapter guide to SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION basics, and links to several from the site's most useful blog posts. Google My Business is Google's business directory and, thus, extremely essential to your local SEO Shown businesses with all the best SEO will certainly appear in the Local 3-Pack, the batch of 3 highlighted businesses nearest you that seem when you do a pertinent local search. Fire up Visibility recently released SEO: The particular Movie ”. This 40-minute movie covers a brief history associated with search engine optimization portrayed by means of the experiences of some associated with the biggest names within the particular SEO industry. In addition to producing content open to search engines, SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION also helps boost rankings therefore that content will be positioned where searchers will more easily believe it is. The Internet is getting increasingly competitive, and people companies which perform SEO may have the decided advantage in visitors plus customers. Unfortunately, SEO - and lookup in general - is usually soloed into focusing on The particular Google” and not really regarded for other tactics. This means website owners plus SEO experts will need in order to be on top of their own game when it comes in order to keyword research and keeping the particular context of their site related to users. Varvy's SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION Overview tool audits your internet site for key parameters like site strength, links, image SEO, sociable counts, on-page SEO, technical position, page speed, loading time plus more. This trouble is that SEO rank factors have changed a good deal over the years (find out there how in our keyword exploration guide ). That means typically the search engine optimization techniques the fact that worked 5 years back won't soar today. Screaming Frog SEO Index tool does it for you personally inside a few seconds, even with regard to larger websites. SEOs also used to believe that buying links was the valid method of link developing; however, Google will now punish you for buying links within an attempt to manipulate page rank. Ultimately, achievement in SEO in 2018 plus forward will depend on developing amazing content and making this as easy as possible with regard to search engines like google in order to understand exactly what that content material is all about. Answer: When you focus upon SEO for voice search a person need to create your articles around long tail keywords since people tend to use a lot more words in voice search. SEO is the practice associated with increasing the search engine ranks of your webpages so that will they appear higher in research results, bringing more traffic in order to your website. In the particular previous example, Bob's home web page might have the title, "Bob's Soccer Store - Soccer Sneakers and Equipment. " The name is the most important component of SEO, since it informs the search engine exactly exactly what the page is all regarding. 47. When creating SEO articles, keep the social layer within your mind. For those who have time to get good search engine optimisation education, after that combine this knowledge with greatest practices and you are upon your way to become a good SEO expert. 46. Use SEO practices in order to optimize your social media content. 4. Mobile SEO plus Local Business: - As we all mentioned before, users tend in order to search for local business upon the smartphones. A several of the popular keyword analysis tools are Wordtracker, SEOMOZ Key word Difficulty Tool, SEOBook Keyword Device and Google Keyword Tool. Thankfully, SEO allows webmasters to supply clues that the engines may use to understand content. Since less as 20% dentists within a city hire SEO expert s who really wants that shift within their Google ranking. The particular analytical part of the SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION is about tracking organic key phrase positions, website traffic and the engagement in Google Analytics, Website owner Tools and many other specific tools. Mobile SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION is nothing than a standard SEO, creating content and marking to be able to remain out online. SEO rankings are placing excess fat than ever upon what users have to state. The Search System will help you to evaluate your keyword rankings, CTRs, achievable Google penalties and many various other useful data for technical SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION. Blog posts, guides, whitepapers, situation studies, videos, and social articles all need to include the particular right keywords for social plus SEO. For even more detailed information on the make use of of keywords on your internet site visit SEOcious to will discover many other important factors included in having your web web page in the top 10 entries on the search engines. SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION, search engine optimization is almost all about search engines, search motor result page (SERP), search rating, online visibility, and quality visitors. If your internet site has about 5-10 niche key phrases that are extremely targeted yet not very competitive, your SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION pricing is going to become quite less. You discuss core SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION strategies and tactics used in order to drive more organic search prospects to a specific website or even set of websites, as nicely as tactics to avoid in order to prevent penalization from search motors. SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION Smart links allows you in order to specify a word, like 'SEO' and then link it in order to a post on your web site. It's great for SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION to feed the search motors a good amount of keyword-rich links. Sites making use of organic SEO in the strict sense is going to end up being much like organisms, meaning these people will grow, expand and adjust over time according to readers' desires. No matter the market, the age of business, or even status of competitors, every company should at least implement simple SEO strategies to help their particular offerings get found on Search engines. So your SEO if your own thinking mobile, needs to end up being either responsive or app-store technique with the right dimensions, style, user-friendly, UX experience. Dark hat SEO methods, such because the use of keyword filling and link farming, can furthermore boost organic SEO. SEO is usually important in every area associated with advertising, marketing, design, optimization, video clip, content, mobile and e-commerce, regarding without SEO all is untuned in need of synchronization, such as an orchestra of musicians without a good experienced conductor. Unfortunately, 95% of links through SEO link building never provide a single new visitor in order to your website. Getting SEO right could influence your business hugely since you start to build natural traffic to your site which usually will naturally grow without typically the need for any underhanded SEARCH ENGINE MARKETING tactics or even spending tons of money on perfectly successful but pricey solutions such while Pay Per Click or deluxe ads. Searchmetrics is happy to have this partnership along with Elephate, a leading content plus SEO agency with years associated with invaluable experience. However, the particular webmasters can grasp search motor optimization SEO through websites. SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION offers incredible opportunity and accessibility (it's an inherently free advertising channel) to inbound traffic, yet it can be hard in order to know where to start plus what advice to follow. Video can end up being an important contributor to your own overall SEO and digital marketing and advertising strategy, but it's important in order to be superior on how video clip is going to help a person achieve your marketing and SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION goals. If you possess ever been into black-hat SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION, spam, and un-natural links, Search engines will never forgive you plus you will be penalized by google at any time. As mentioned earlier, SEO firms are usually the most experienced in working with various verticals of online marketing, mainly owing to the nature of their particular work. Monitoring: Often overlooked, but one associated with the most important areas associated with successful SEO, this section taking walks through how you can monitor your success and tie your own efforts back to real visitors and business, which gives a person the chance to future fine-tune and optimize your programs. This free marketing device is really a long-term technique and can be time intense but it will worth this. A good user experience is usually the key to satisfaction along with a powerful SEO. 1 SEO might target different kinds of lookup, including image search, video lookup, academic search, 2 news research, and industry-specific vertical search motors. All of us are in the fourth one fourth of 2018, it is the particular right time start thinking regarding the year ahead and brand-new changes SEO realm might anticipate. We've long known that consumer opinions, input, and sentiment regarding a brand deeply impact SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION rankings, but we wanted the particular information to prove it. Off-page SEO means having action to build trust, expert, social signals and inbound hyperlinks. How video affects SEO actually depends on your goals whenever using video in your marketing and advertising campaign and which video system you use. LSI is just not what most SEO professionals claim it to be. This is certainly not a idea that can be used simply by the average web designer or even webmaster to improve their research engine listings, and it is usually not what many people, which includes myself, has written it in order to be. Nevertheless, first some history. This particular video walks you through the particular specific steps you should get increased rankings in 2018, including launching speed, technical SEO, content, hyperlinks, and more. Considering that it is, all across typically the year agencies specializing in SEO were occupied recovering and finding new procedures to optimize the search motor even better than what their own competitors were doing. Search Motor Optimization (SEO) is the technique to campaign your products on-line towards the right clientele intended for increasing ROI. There are many tools upon the web to assist along with basic keyword research (including the particular Google Keyword Planner tool and there are even more useful third party SEO tools to help you perform this). The biggest change that will we'll see in 2019 (and that's already happening) is the particular fact that keywords are getting less important. Once you've discovered your keywords, use another SEMrush tool, the SEO Content Design template, which is part of their particular Content Marketing Toolkit, to function out the best way in order to optimize your content. If a company is providing you all these services below one roof, climbing up the particular SEO ranking will not end up being an uphill task for your own business any more. Local SEO companies allows a person to position your business upon search engines like google plus other digital marketing platforms therefore you're seen by potential clients — on their terms. YouTube adds the particular nofollow” tag to their hyperlinks, so they don't really assist with SEO. SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION isn't just about building research engine-friendly websites. The sooner you understand precisely why Google is sending you much less traffic than it did this past year, the sooner you can clear it up and focus upon proactive SEO that starts to influence your rankings in a good way. The trending SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION technique or strategy now plus in 2019 will be Research Enterprise Optimization It has already been coined by myself since 2015. Content written simply by customers gives sites legitimacy plus it earns SEO juice each from manual and automatic ranking systems. Within 2018, this trend is about the rise and if anyone invest in making your site mobile friendly you will delight in higher ranks in 2019 as well. When making a internet site for Google in 2018, a person need to understand that Search engines has a long list associated with things it will mark websites down for, and that's generally old-school SEO tactics which are usually now classed as ‘webspam‘. Besides getting social plus having a good time, your own social media profiles can favorably affect your SEO efforts. Since so many people have confidence in voice search being the pattern in 2019, I, Nicole Bermack (this article's author), am coining the phrase 5 Mind Numbing Facts About SEO 2019 VSO - voice lookup optimization. Intelligent brands and agencies are changing new SEO, social and articles marketing strategies to join their own customer conversations. Search engine marketing (SEO) is the art plus science of getting pages in order to rank higher in search motors such as Google. A person can audit your page's SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION health, compare SEO metrics intended for a number of pages, plus analyze both external and inner links on any given internet page. Content companies that will offer SEO content creation solutions are experts in creating content material that are not only enhanced for search engine rankings yet also add value for your own business in terms of brand name awareness, customer engagement and enhanced sales. It looks typically used in SEO as the general definition for the method that the mathematical detection associated with synonyms, and how certain phrases are related to others in the piece of text, is used to the indexing of web pages by search engines like search engines. So if you would end up being to write 5% for every keyword then your word SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION and Article will be within the content 75 times every. Like any good SEO company before concentrating on the details will do a proper hyperlink edit and fix all the particular error pages. Taking the hard work to comprehend even the fundamentals of SEO can help your own site gain higher click-through prices, engagement, and of course, ratings. Kent Lewis, President and Founder of the particular Portland based performance firm, Anvil, predicts that both Amazon research and voice search will become trends in 2019. MarketingVox warns towards getting tied to a "link farm" whose bad SEO practices could bring you down. Your web webpages must earn that high positioning with high-quality content and best-practice SEO. Content is the 2nd major SEO ranking factor, plus is just as important since links. Previously known because WordPress SEO by Yoast, Yoast SEO is one of the particular most quintessential WordPress plugins whenever it comes to search motor optimization. While SEOs need in order to understand it is not just about rankings, UX specialists require to admit that user expertise kicks in even before making use of the website. You will find on-site and off site SEO techniques that you may use to higher your lookup engine ranking.

This particular means that SEOs spend the lot of time working upon getting links in a procedure called link building Link-building techniques can range from simply asking for a link to writing the guest post - and presently there are many others. Basically, SEO plans the keywords that will are to be delivered plus content provides them. So, when you are considering about applying SEO in the particular broad sense, you need in order to channelize its technical specifications via content marketing. In 2019, you can wager that White Hat SEO will certainly have separated itself even more from Black Hat SEO, plus that above all else, delivering quality content will be the particular most important factor for companies ranking in search. The outcomes are not instant, you can use the time on attempting other Internet marketing techniques whilst SEO would go to function. The third major SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION ranking signal is Google's synthetic intelligence search ranking algorithm. Sometimes SEO will be simply a matter of producing sure your site is organized in a way that research engines like google understand. SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION involves a number of modifications towards the HTML of person Web pages to obtain a higher search engine ranking. As a result associated with technological advancement, SEO is in order to undergo more drastic changes, plus the two latest technologies that will are expected to influence SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION to some very great level are AI (Artificial Intelligence) plus Voice Search.

Upon the subject of speed, with the beginning of 2017 presently there was still much resistance in order to AMP in the SEO neighborhood overall, but as we mind toward 2018 that feels in order to be dissipating now somewhat along with a reluctant acceptance that AMPLIFIER looks as though it's not really going away sooner. The biggest way that individuals misuse SEO is assuming that will it's a game or that will it's about outsmarting or deceiving the search engines. Both are crucial to the particular success of an SEO marketing campaign, but they're on completely different edges of the fence when this comes to improving your search motor rankings. Greater than 50% of mobile phone customers started using voice search correct from 2015, and so we all can expect that in 2019 and after that not much less than 50% of searches can be in the form associated with voice search. Within the past, getting a great SEO was only about making use of keywords. Just remember Blog9T that , SEO will be about targeting real people, not really only search engines. In the event that you do these on-page plus off-page elements of SEO from least along with your rivals, you can achieve higher research engine ranking positions in the particular organic section of search motor results pages and have the quality website capable of sustaining your revenue goals. In my opinion that 2018 is going to be the particular year where voice search changes how users search and SEOs need to optimize. SEO or Search engine marketing is a term coined jointly to describe the techniques that will the website should use in order to boost its rankings on the search engine.

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Rewriting the Beginner's Guide to SEO, Chapter 1: SEO 101

Rewriting the Beginner's Guide to SEO, Chapter 1: SEO 101

Posted by BritneyMuller

Back in mid-November, we kicked off a campaign to rewrite our biggest piece of content: the Beginner's Guide to SEO. You offered up a huge amount of helpful advice and insight with regards to our outline, and today we're here to share our draft of the first chapter.

In many ways, the Beginner's Guide to SEO belongs to each and every member of our community; it's important that we get this right, for your sake. So without further ado, here's the first chapter — let's dive in!

Chapter 1: SEO 101

What is it, and why is it important?

Welcome! We’re excited that you’re here!

If you already have a solid understanding of SEO and why it's important, you can skip to Chapter 2 (though we'd still recommend skimming the best practices from Google and Bing at the end of this chapter; they're useful refreshers).

For everyone else, this chapter will help build your foundational SEO knowledge and confidence as you move forward.

What is SEO?

SEO stands for “search engine optimization.” It’s the practice of increasing both the quality and quantity of website traffic, as well as exposure to your brand, through non-paid (also known as "organic") search engine results.

Despite the acronym, SEO is as much about people as it is about search engines themselves. It’s about understanding what people are searching for online, the answers they are seeking, the words they’re using, and the type of content they wish to consume. Leveraging this data will allow you to provide high-quality content that your visitors will truly value.

Here’s an example. Frankie & Jo’s (a Seattle-based vegan, gluten-free ice cream shop) has heard about SEO and wants help improving how and how often they show up in organic search results. In order to help them, you need to first understand their potential customers:

What types of ice cream, desserts, snacks, etc. are people searching for?

Who is searching for these terms?

When are people searching for ice cream, snacks, desserts, etc.?

Are there seasonality trends throughout the year?

How are people searching for ice cream?

What words do they use?

What questions do they ask?

Are more searches performed on mobile devices?

Why are people seeking ice cream?

Are individuals looking for health conscious ice cream specifically or just looking to satisfy a sweet tooth?

Where are potential customers located — locally, nationally, or internationally?

And finally — here's the kicker — how can you help provide the best content about ice cream to cultivate a community and fulfill what all those people are searching for?

Search engine basics

Search engines are answer machines. They scour billions of pieces of content and evaluate thousands of factors to determine which content is most likely to answer your query.

Search engines do all of this by discovering and cataloguing all available content on the Internet (web pages, PDFs, images, videos, etc.) via a process known as “crawling and indexing.”

What are "organic" search engine results?

Organic search results are search results that aren't paid for (i.e. not advertising). These are the results that you can influence through effective SEO. Traditionally, these were the familiar "10 blue links."

Today, search engine results pages — often referred to as “SERPs” — are filled with both more advertising and more dynamic organic results formats (called “SERP features”) than we've ever seen before. Some examples of SERP features are featured snippets (or answer boxes), People Also Ask boxes, image carousels, etc. New SERP features continue to emerge, driven largely by what people are seeking.

For example, if you search for "Denver weather," you’ll see a weather forecast for the city of Denver directly in the SERP instead of a link to a site that might have that forecast. And, if you search for “pizza Denver,” you’ll see a “local pack” result made up of Denver pizza places. Convenient, right?

It’s important to remember that search engines make money from advertising. Their goal is to better solve searcher’s queries (within SERPs), to keep searchers coming back, and to keep them on the SERPs longer.

Some SERP features on Google are organic and can be influenced by SEO. These include featured snippets (a promoted organic result that displays an answer inside a box) and related questions (a.k.a. "People Also Ask" boxes).

It's worth noting that there are many other search features that, even though they aren't paid advertising, can't typically be influenced by SEO. These features often have data acquired from proprietary data sources, such as Wikipedia, WebMD, and IMDb.

Why SEO is important

While paid advertising, social media, and other online platforms can generate traffic to websites, the majority of online traffic is driven by search engines.

Organic search results cover more digital real estate, appear more credible to savvy searchers, and receive way more clicks than paid advertisements. For example, of all US searches, only ~2.8% of people click on paid advertisements.

In a nutshell: SEO has ~20X more traffic opportunity than PPC on both mobile and desktop.

SEO is also one of the only online marketing channels that, when set up correctly, can continue to pay dividends over time. If you provide a solid piece of content that deserves to rank for the right keywords, your traffic can snowball over time, whereas advertising needs continuous funding to send traffic to your site.

Search engines are getting smarter, but they still need our help.

Optimizing your site will help deliver better information to search engines so that your content can be properly indexed and displayed within search results.

Should I hire an SEO professional, consultant, or agency?

Depending on your bandwidth, willingness to learn, and the complexity of your website(s), you could perform some basic SEO yourself. Or, you might discover that you would prefer the help of an expert. Either way is okay!

If you end up looking for expert help, it's important to know that many agencies and consultants "provide SEO services," but can vary widely in quality. Knowing how to choose a good SEO company can save you a lot of time and money, as the wrong SEO techniques can actually harm your site more than they will help.

White hat vs black hat SEO

"White hat SEO" refers to SEO techniques, best practices, and strategies that abide by search engine rule, its primary focus to provide more value to people.

"Black hat SEO" refers to techniques and strategies that attempt to spam/fool search engines. While black hat SEO can work, it puts websites at tremendous risk of being penalized and/or de-indexed (removed from search results) and has ethical implications.

Penalized websites have bankrupted businesses. It's just another reason to be very careful when choosing an SEO expert or agency.

Search engines share similar goals with the SEO industry

Search engines want to help you succeed. They're actually quite supportive of efforts by the SEO community. Digital marketing conferences, such as Unbounce, MNsearch, SearchLove, and Moz's own MozCon, regularly attract engineers and representatives from major search engines.

Google assists webmasters and SEOs through their Webmaster Central Help Forum and by hosting live office hour hangouts. (Bing, unfortunately, shut down their Webmaster Forums in 2014.)

While webmaster guidelines vary from search engine to search engine, the underlying principles stay the same: Don’t try to trick search engines. Instead, provide your visitors with a great online experience.

Google webmaster guidelines

Basic principles:

Make pages primarily for users, not search engines.

Don't deceive your users.

Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is whether you'd feel comfortable explaining what you've done to a website to a Google employee. Another useful test is to ask, "Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn't exist?"

Think about what makes your website unique, valuable, or engaging.

Things to avoid:

Automatically generated content

Participating in link schemes

Creating pages with little or no original content (i.e. copied from somewhere else)

Cloaking — the practice of showing search engine crawlers different content than visitors.

Hidden text and links

Doorway pages — pages created to rank well for specific searches to funnel traffic to your website.

Full Google Webmaster Guidelines version here.

Bing webmaster guidelines

Basic principles:

Provide clear, deep, engaging, and easy-to-find content on your site.

Keep page titles clear and relevant.

Links are regarded as a signal of popularity and Bing rewards links that have grown organically.

Social influence and social shares are positive signals and can have an impact on how you rank organically in the long run.

Page speed is important, along with a positive, useful user experience.

Use alt attributes to describe images, so that Bing can better understand the content.

Things to avoid:

Thin content, pages showing mostly ads or affiliate links, or that otherwise redirect visitors away to other sites will not rank well.

Abusive link tactics that aim to inflate the number and nature of inbound links such as buying links, participating in link schemes, can lead to de-indexing.

Ensure clean, concise, keyword-inclusive URL structures are in place. Dynamic parameters can dirty up your URLs and cause duplicate content issues.

Make your URLs descriptive, short, keyword rich when possible, and avoid non-letter characters.

Burying links in Javascript/Flash/Silverlight; keep content out of these as well.

Duplicate content

Keyword stuffing

Cloaking — the practice of showing search engine crawlers different content than visitors.

Guidelines for representing your local business on Google

These guidelines govern what you should and shouldn’t do in creating and managing your Google My Business listing(s).

Basic principles:

Be sure you’re eligible for inclusion in the Google My Business index; you must have a physical address, even if it’s your home address, and you must serve customers face-to-face, either at your location (like a retail store) or at theirs (like a plumber)

Honestly and accurately represent all aspects of your local business data, including its name, address, phone number, website address, business categories, hours of operation, and other features.

Things to avoid

Creation of Google My Business listings for entities that aren’t eligible

Misrepresentation of any of your core business information, including “stuffing” your business name with geographic or service keywords, or creating listings for fake addresses

Use of PO boxes or virtual offices instead of authentic street addresses

Abuse of the review portion of the Google My Business listing, via fake positive reviews of your business or fake negative ones of your competitors

Costly, novice mistakes stemming from failure to read the fine details of Google’s guidelines

Fulfilling user intent

Understanding and fulfilling user intent is critical. When a person searches for something, they have a desired outcome. Whether it’s an answer, concert tickets, or a cat photo, that desired content is their “user intent.”

If a person performs a search for “bands," is their intent to find musical bands, wedding bands, band saws, or something else?

Your job as an SEO is to quickly provide users with the content they desire in the format in which they desire it.

Common user intent types:

Informational: Searching for information. Example: “How old is Issa Rae?”

Navigational: Searching for a specific website. Example: “HBOGO Insecure”

Transactional: Searching to buy something. Example: “where to buy ‘We got y'all’ Insecure t-shirt”

You can get a glimpse of user intent by Googling your desired keyword(s) and evaluating the current SERP. For example, if there's a photo carousel, it’s very likely that people searching for that keyword search for photos.

Also evaluate what content your top-ranking competitors are providing that you currently aren’t. How can you provide 10X the value on your website?

Providing relevant, high-quality content on your website will help you rank higher in search results, and more importantly, it will establish credibility and trust with your online audience.

Before you do any of that, you have to first understand your website’s goals to execute a strategic SEO plan.

Know your website/client’s goals

Every website is different, so take the time to really understand a specific site’s business goals. This will not only help you determine which areas of SEO you should focus on, where to track conversions, and how to set benchmarks, but it will also help you create talking points for negotiating SEO projects with clients, bosses, etc.

What will your KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) be to measure the return on SEO investment? More simply, what is your barometer to measure the success of your organic search efforts? You'll want to have it documented, even if it's this simple:

For the website ________________________, my primary SEO KPI is _______________.

Here are a few common KPIs to get you started:

Sales

Downloads

Email signups

Contact form submissions

Phone calls

And if your business has a local component, you’ll want to define KPIs for your Google My Business listings, as well. These might include:

Clicks-to-call

Clicks-to-website

Clicks-for-driving-directions

Notice how "Traffic" and "Ranking" are not on the above lists? This is because, for most websites, ranking well for keywords and increasing traffic won't matter if the new traffic doesn't convert (to help you reach the site’s KPI goals).

You don't want to send 1,000 people to your website a month and have only 3 people convert (to customers). You want to send 300 people to your site a month and have 40 people convert.

This guide will help you become more data-driven in your SEO efforts. Rather than haphazardly throwing arrows all over the place (and getting lucky every once in awhile), you'll put more wood behind fewer arrows.

Grab a bow (and some coffee); let's dive into Chapter 2 (Crawlers & Indexation).

We're looking forward to hearing your thoughts on this draft of Chapter 1. What works? Anything you feel could be added or explained differently? Let us know your suggestions, questions, and thoughts in the comments.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

xem them tai http://ift.tt/2o9GYfe Rewriting the Beginner's Guide to SEO, Chapter 1: SEO 101 xem thêm tại: http://ift.tt/2mb4VST để biết thêm về địa chỉ bán tai nghe không dây giá rẻ Rewriting the Beginner's Guide to SEO, Chapter 1: SEO 101 http://ift.tt/eA8V8J xem thêm tại: http://ift.tt/2mb4VST để biết thêm về địa chỉ bán tai nghe không dây giá rẻ Rewriting the Beginner's Guide to SEO, Chapter 1: SEO 101 http://ift.tt/eA8V8J xem thêm tại: http://ift.tt/2mb4VST để biết thêm về địa chỉ bán tai nghe không dây giá rẻ Rewriting the Beginner's Guide to SEO, Chapter 1: SEO 101 http://ift.tt/eA8V8J xem thêm tại: http://ift.tt/2mb4VST để biết thêm về địa chỉ bán tai nghe không dây giá rẻ Rewriting the Beginner's Guide to SEO, Chapter 1: SEO 101 http://ift.tt/eA8V8J xem thêm tại: http://ift.tt/2mb4VST để biết thêm về địa chỉ bán tai nghe không dây giá rẻ Rewriting the Beginner's Guide to SEO, Chapter 1: SEO 101 http://ift.tt/eA8V8J xem thêm tại: http://ift.tt/2mb4VST để biết thêm về địa chỉ bán tai nghe không dây giá rẻ Rewriting the Beginner's Guide to SEO, Chapter 1: SEO 101 http://ift.tt/eA8V8J xem thêm tại: http://ift.tt/2mb4VST để biết thêm về địa chỉ bán tai nghe không dây giá rẻ Rewriting the Beginner's Guide to SEO, Chapter 1: SEO 101 http://ift.tt/eA8V8J xem thêm tại: http://ift.tt/2mb4VST để biết thêm về địa chỉ bán tai nghe không dây giá rẻ Rewriting the Beginner's Guide to SEO, Chapter 1: SEO 101 http://ift.tt/eA8V8J xem thêm tại: http://ift.tt/2mb4VST để biết thêm về địa chỉ bán tai nghe không dây giá rẻ Rewriting the Beginner's Guide to SEO, Chapter 1: SEO 101 http://ift.tt/eA8V8J xem thêm tại: http://ift.tt/2mb4VST để biết thêm về địa chỉ bán tai nghe không dây giá rẻ Rewriting the Beginner's Guide to SEO, Chapter 1: SEO 101 http://ift.tt/eA8V8J xem thêm tại: http://ift.tt/2mb4VST để biết thêm về địa chỉ bán tai nghe không dây giá rẻ Rewriting the Beginner's Guide to SEO, Chapter 1: SEO 101 http://ift.tt/eA8V8J xem thêm tại: http://ift.tt/2mb4VST để biết thêm về địa chỉ bán tai nghe không dây giá rẻ Rewriting the Beginner's Guide to SEO, Chapter 1: SEO 101 http://ift.tt/eA8V8J xem thêm tại: http://ift.tt/2mb4VST để biết thêm về địa chỉ bán tai nghe không dây giá rẻ Rewriting the Beginner's Guide to SEO, Chapter 1: SEO 101 http://ift.tt/eA8V8J xem thêm tại: http://ift.tt/2mb4VST để biết thêm về địa chỉ bán tai nghe không dây giá rẻ Rewriting the Beginner's Guide to SEO, Chapter 1: SEO 101 http://ift.tt/eA8V8J xem thêm tại: http://ift.tt/2mb4VST để biết thêm về địa chỉ bán tai nghe không dây giá rẻ Rewriting the Beginner's Guide to SEO, Chapter 1: SEO 101 http://ift.tt/eA8V8J xem thêm tại: http://ift.tt/2mb4VST để biết thêm về địa chỉ bán tai nghe không dây giá rẻ Rewriting the Beginner's Guide to SEO, Chapter 1: SEO 101 http://ift.tt/eA8V8J xem thêm tại: http://ift.tt/2mb4VST để biết thêm về địa chỉ bán tai nghe không dây giá rẻ Rewriting the Beginner's Guide to SEO, Chapter 1: SEO 101 http://ift.tt/eA8V8J xem thêm tại: http://ift.tt/2mb4VST để biết thêm về địa chỉ bán tai nghe không dây giá rẻ Rewriting the Beginner's Guide to SEO, Chapter 1: SEO 101 http://ift.tt/eA8V8J xem thêm tại: http://ift.tt/2mb4VST để biết thêm về địa chỉ bán tai nghe không dây giá rẻ Rewriting the Beginner's Guide to SEO, Chapter 1: SEO 101 http://ift.tt/eA8V8J xem thêm tại: http://ift.tt/2mb4VST để biết thêm về địa chỉ bán tai nghe không dây giá rẻ Rewriting the Beginner's Guide to SEO, Chapter 1: SEO 101 http://ift.tt/eA8V8J xem thêm tại: http://ift.tt/2mb4VST để biết thêm về địa chỉ bán tai nghe không dây giá rẻ Rewriting the Beginner's Guide to SEO, Chapter 1: SEO 101 http://ift.tt/eA8V8J xem thêm tại: http://ift.tt/2mb4VST để biết thêm về địa chỉ bán tai nghe không dây giá rẻ Rewriting the Beginner's Guide to SEO, Chapter 1: SEO 101 http://ift.tt/eA8V8J xem thêm tại: http://ift.tt/2mb4VST để biết thêm về địa chỉ bán tai nghe không dây giá rẻ Rewriting the Beginner's Guide to SEO, Chapter 1: SEO 101 http://ift.tt/eA8V8J xem thêm tại: http://ift.tt/2mb4VST để biết thêm về địa chỉ bán tai nghe không dây giá rẻ Rewriting the Beginner's Guide to SEO, Chapter 1: SEO 101 http://ift.tt/eA8V8J Bạn có thể xem thêm địa chỉ mua tai nghe không dây tại đ��y http://ift.tt/2mb4VST

[tracisimpson]

Rewriting the Beginner's Guide to SEO, Chapter 1: SEO 101

Posted by BritneyMuller

Back in mid-November, we kicked off a campaign to rewrite our biggest piece of content: the Beginner's Guide to SEO. You offered up a huge amount of helpful advice and insight with regards to our outline, and today we're here to share our draft of the first chapter.

In many ways, the Beginner's Guide to SEO belongs to each and every member of our community; it's important that we get this right, for your sake. So without further ado, here's the first chapter — let's dive in!

Chapter 1: SEO 101

What is it, and why is it important?

Welcome! We’re excited that you’re here!

If you already have a solid understanding of SEO and why it's important, you can skip to Chapter 2 (though we'd still recommend skimming the best practices from Google and Bing at the end of this chapter; they're useful refreshers).

For everyone else, this chapter will help build your foundational SEO knowledge and confidence as you move forward.

What is SEO?

SEO stands for “search engine optimization.” It’s the practice of increasing both the quality and quantity of website traffic, as well as exposure to your brand, through non-paid (also known as "organic") search engine results.

Despite the acronym, SEO is as much about people as it is about search engines themselves. It’s about understanding what people are searching for online, the answers they are seeking, the words they’re using, and the type of content they wish to consume. Leveraging this data will allow you to provide high-quality content that your visitors will truly value.

Here’s an example. Frankie & Jo’s (a Seattle-based vegan, gluten-free ice cream shop) has heard about SEO and wants help improving how and how often they show up in organic search results. In order to help them, you need to first understand their potential customers:

What types of ice cream, desserts, snacks, etc. are people searching for?

Who is searching for these terms?

When are people searching for ice cream, snacks, desserts, etc.?

Are there seasonality trends throughout the year?

How are people searching for ice cream?

What words do they use?

What questions do they ask?

Are more searches performed on mobile devices?

Why are people seeking ice cream?

Are individuals looking for health conscious ice cream specifically or just looking to satisfy a sweet tooth?

Where are potential customers located — locally, nationally, or internationally?

And finally — here's the kicker — how can you help provide the best content about ice cream to cultivate a community and fulfill what all those people are searching for?

Search engine basics

Search engines are answer machines. They scour billions of pieces of content and evaluate thousands of factors to determine which content is most likely to answer your query.

Search engines do all of this by discovering and cataloguing all available content on the Internet (web pages, PDFs, images, videos, etc.) via a process known as “crawling and indexing.”

What are "organic" search engine results?

Organic search results are search results that aren't paid for (i.e. not advertising). These are the results that you can influence through effective SEO. Traditionally, these were the familiar "10 blue links."

Today, search engine results pages — often referred to as “SERPs” — are filled with both more advertising and more dynamic organic results formats (called “SERP features”) than we've ever seen before. Some examples of SERP features are featured snippets (or answer boxes), People Also Ask boxes, image carousels, etc. New SERP features continue to emerge, driven largely by what people are seeking.

For example, if you search for "Denver weather," you’ll see a weather forecast for the city of Denver directly in the SERP instead of a link to a site that might have that forecast. And, if you search for “pizza Denver,” you’ll see a “local pack” result made up of Denver pizza places. Convenient, right?

It’s important to remember that search engines make money from advertising. Their goal is to better solve searcher’s queries (within SERPs), to keep searchers coming back, and to keep them on the SERPs longer.

Some SERP features on Google are organic and can be influenced by SEO. These include featured snippets (a promoted organic result that displays an answer inside a box) and related questions (a.k.a. "People Also Ask" boxes).

It's worth noting that there are many other search features that, even though they aren't paid advertising, can't typically be influenced by SEO. These features often have data acquired from proprietary data sources, such as Wikipedia, WebMD, and IMDb.

Why SEO is important

While paid advertising, social media, and other online platforms can generate traffic to websites, the majority of online traffic is driven by search engines.

Organic search results cover more digital real estate, appear more credible to savvy searchers, and receive way more clicks than paid advertisements. For example, of all US searches, only ~2.8% of people click on paid advertisements.

In a nutshell: SEO has ~20X more traffic opportunity than PPC on both mobile and desktop.

SEO is also one of the only online marketing channels that, when set up correctly, can continue to pay dividends over time. If you provide a solid piece of content that deserves to rank for the right keywords, your traffic can snowball over time, whereas advertising needs continuous funding to send traffic to your site.

Search engines are getting smarter, but they still need our help.

Optimizing your site will help deliver better information to search engines so that your content can be properly indexed and displayed within search results.

Should I hire an SEO professional, consultant, or agency?

Depending on your bandwidth, willingness to learn, and the complexity of your website(s), you could perform some basic SEO yourself. Or, you might discover that you would prefer the help of an expert. Either way is okay!

If you end up looking for expert help, it's important to know that many agencies and consultants "provide SEO services," but can vary widely in quality. Knowing how to choose a good SEO company can save you a lot of time and money, as the wrong SEO techniques can actually harm your site more than they will help.

White hat vs black hat SEO

"White hat SEO" refers to SEO techniques, best practices, and strategies that abide by search engine rule, its primary focus to provide more value to people.

"Black hat SEO" refers to techniques and strategies that attempt to spam/fool search engines. While black hat SEO can work, it puts websites at tremendous risk of being penalized and/or de-indexed (removed from search results) and has ethical implications.

Penalized websites have bankrupted businesses. It's just another reason to be very careful when choosing an SEO expert or agency.

Search engines share similar goals with the SEO industry

Search engines want to help you succeed. They're actually quite supportive of efforts by the SEO community. Digital marketing conferences, such as Unbounce, MNsearch, SearchLove, and Moz's own MozCon, regularly attract engineers and representatives from major search engines.

Google assists webmasters and SEOs through their Webmaster Central Help Forum and by hosting live office hour hangouts. (Bing, unfortunately, shut down their Webmaster Forums in 2014.)

While webmaster guidelines vary from search engine to search engine, the underlying principles stay the same: Don’t try to trick search engines. Instead, provide your visitors with a great online experience.

Google webmaster guidelines

Basic principles:

Make pages primarily for users, not search engines.

Don't deceive your users.

Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is whether you'd feel comfortable explaining what you've done to a website to a Google employee. Another useful test is to ask, "Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn't exist?"

Think about what makes your website unique, valuable, or engaging.

Things to avoid:

Automatically generated content

Participating in link schemes

Creating pages with little or no original content (i.e. copied from somewhere else)

Cloaking — the practice of showing search engine crawlers different content than visitors.

Hidden text and links

Doorway pages — pages created to rank well for specific searches to funnel traffic to your website.

Full Google Webmaster Guidelines version here.

Bing webmaster guidelines

Basic principles:

Provide clear, deep, engaging, and easy-to-find content on your site.

Keep page titles clear and relevant.

Links are regarded as a signal of popularity and Bing rewards links that have grown organically.

Social influence and social shares are positive signals and can have an impact on how you rank organically in the long run.

Page speed is important, along with a positive, useful user experience.

Use alt attributes to describe images, so that Bing can better understand the content.

Things to avoid:

Thin content, pages showing mostly ads or affiliate links, or that otherwise redirect visitors away to other sites will not rank well.

Abusive link tactics that aim to inflate the number and nature of inbound links such as buying links, participating in link schemes, can lead to de-indexing.

Ensure clean, concise, keyword-inclusive URL structures are in place. Dynamic parameters can dirty up your URLs and cause duplicate content issues.

Make your URLs descriptive, short, keyword rich when possible, and avoid non-letter characters.

Burying links in Javascript/Flash/Silverlight; keep content out of these as well.

Duplicate content

Keyword stuffing

Cloaking — the practice of showing search engine crawlers different content than visitors.

Guidelines for representing your local business on Google

These guidelines govern what you should and shouldn’t do in creating and managing your Google My Business listing(s).

Basic principles:

Be sure you’re eligible for inclusion in the Google My Business index; you must have a physical address, even if it’s your home address, and you must serve customers face-to-face, either at your location (like a retail store) or at theirs (like a plumber)

Honestly and accurately represent all aspects of your local business data, including its name, address, phone number, website address, business categories, hours of operation, and other features.

Things to avoid

Creation of Google My Business listings for entities that aren’t eligible

Misrepresentation of any of your core business information, including “stuffing” your business name with geographic or service keywords, or creating listings for fake addresses

Use of PO boxes or virtual offices instead of authentic street addresses

Abuse of the review portion of the Google My Business listing, via fake positive reviews of your business or fake negative ones of your competitors

Costly, novice mistakes stemming from failure to read the fine details of Google’s guidelines

Fulfilling user intent

Understanding and fulfilling user intent is critical. When a person searches for something, they have a desired outcome. Whether it’s an answer, concert tickets, or a cat photo, that desired content is their “user intent.”

If a person performs a search for “bands," is their intent to find musical bands, wedding bands, band saws, or something else?

Your job as an SEO is to quickly provide users with the content they desire in the format in which they desire it.

Common user intent types:

Informational: Searching for information. Example: “How old is Issa Rae?”

Navigational: Searching for a specific website. Example: “HBOGO Insecure”

Transactional: Searching to buy something. Example: “where to buy ‘We got y'all’ Insecure t-shirt”

You can get a glimpse of user intent by Googling your desired keyword(s) and evaluating the current SERP. For example, if there's a photo carousel, it’s very likely that people searching for that keyword search for photos.

Also evaluate what content your top-ranking competitors are providing that you currently aren’t. How can you provide 10X the value on your website?

Providing relevant, high-quality content on your website will help you rank higher in search results, and more importantly, it will establish credibility and trust with your online audience.

Before you do any of that, you have to first understand your website’s goals to execute a strategic SEO plan.

Know your website/client’s goals

Every website is different, so take the time to really understand a specific site’s business goals. This will not only help you determine which areas of SEO you should focus on, where to track conversions, and how to set benchmarks, but it will also help you create talking points for negotiating SEO projects with clients, bosses, etc.

What will your KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) be to measure the return on SEO investment? More simply, what is your barometer to measure the success of your organic search efforts? You'll want to have it documented, even if it's this simple:

For the website ________________________, my primary SEO KPI is _______________.

Here are a few common KPIs to get you started:

Sales

Downloads

Email signups

Contact form submissions

Phone calls

And if your business has a local component, you’ll want to define KPIs for your Google My Business listings, as well. These might include:

Clicks-to-call

Clicks-to-website

Clicks-for-driving-directions

Notice how "Traffic" and "Ranking" are not on the above lists? This is because, for most websites, ranking well for keywords and increasing traffic won't matter if the new traffic doesn't convert (to help you reach the site’s KPI goals).

You don't want to send 1,000 people to your website a month and have only 3 people convert (to customers). You want to send 300 people to your site a month and have 40 people convert.

This guide will help you become more data-driven in your SEO efforts. Rather than haphazardly throwing arrows all over the place (and getting lucky every once in awhile), you'll put more wood behind fewer arrows.

Grab a bow (and some coffee); let's dive into Chapter 2 (Crawlers & Indexation).

We're looking forward to hearing your thoughts on this draft of Chapter 1. What works? Anything you feel could be added or explained differently? Let us know your suggestions, questions, and thoughts in the comments.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

[dainiaolivahm]

Rewriting the Beginner's Guide to SEO, Chapter 1: SEO 101

Posted by BritneyMuller

Back in mid-November, we kicked off a campaign to rewrite our biggest piece of content: the Beginner's Guide to SEO. You offered up a huge amount of helpful advice and insight with regards to our outline, and today we're here to share our draft of the first chapter.

In many ways, the Beginner's Guide to SEO belongs to each and every member of our community; it's important that we get this right, for your sake. So without further ado, here's the first chapter — let's dive in!

Chapter 1: SEO 101What is it, and why is it important?

Welcome! We’re excited that you’re here!

If you already have a solid understanding of SEO and why it's important, you can skip to Chapter 2 (though we'd still recommend skimming the best practices from Google and Bing at the end of this chapter; they're useful refreshers).

For everyone else, this chapter will help build your foundational SEO knowledge and confidence as you move forward.

What is SEO?

SEO stands for “search engine optimization.” It’s the practice of increasing both the quality and quantity of website traffic, as well as exposure to your brand, through non-paid (also known as "organic") search engine results.

Despite the acronym, SEO is as much about people as it is about search engines themselves. It’s about understanding what people are searching for online, the answers they are seeking, the words they’re using, and the type of content they wish to consume. Leveraging this data will allow you to provide high-quality content that your visitors will truly value.

Here’s an example. Frankie & Jo’s (a Seattle-based vegan, gluten-free ice cream shop) has heard about SEO and wants help improving how and how often they show up in organic search results. In order to help them, you need to first understand their potential customers:

What types of ice cream, desserts, snacks, etc. are people searching for?

Who is searching for these terms?

When are people searching for ice cream, snacks, desserts, etc.?

Are there seasonality trends throughout the year?

How are people searching for ice cream?

What words do they use?

What questions do they ask?

Are more searches performed on mobile devices?

Why are people seeking ice cream?

Are individuals looking for health conscious ice cream specifically or just looking to satisfy a sweet tooth?

Where are potential customers located — locally, nationally, or internationally?

And finally — here's the kicker — how can you help provide the best content about ice cream to cultivate a community and fulfill what all those people are searching for?

Search engine basics

Search engines are answer machines. They scour billions of pieces of content and evaluate thousands of factors to determine which content is most likely to answer your query.

Search engines do all of this by discovering and cataloguing all available content on the Internet (web pages, PDFs, images, videos, etc.) via a process known as “crawling and indexing.”

What are "organic" search engine results?

Organic search results are search results that aren't paid for (i.e. not advertising). These are the results that you can influence through effective SEO. Traditionally, these were the familiar "10 blue links."

Today, search engine results pages — often referred to as “SERPs” — are filled with both more advertising and more dynamic organic results formats (called “SERP features”) than we've ever seen before. Some examples of SERP features are featured snippets (or answer boxes), People Also Ask boxes, image carousels, etc. New SERP features continue to emerge, driven largely by what people are seeking.

For example, if you search for "Denver weather," you’ll see a weather forecast for the city of Denver directly in the SERP instead of a link to a site that might have that forecast. And, if you search for “pizza Denver,” you’ll see a “local pack” result made up of Denver pizza places. Convenient, right?

It’s important to remember that search engines make money from advertising. Their goal is to better solve searcher’s queries (within SERPs), to keep searchers coming back, and to keep them on the SERPs longer.

Some SERP features on Google are organic and can be influenced by SEO. These include featured snippets (a promoted organic result that displays an answer inside a box) and related questions (a.k.a. "People Also Ask" boxes).

It's worth noting that there are many other search features that, even though they aren't paid advertising, can't typically be influenced by SEO. These features often have data acquired from proprietary data sources, such as Wikipedia, WebMD, and IMDb.

Why SEO is important

While paid advertising, social media, and other online platforms can generate traffic to websites, the majority of online traffic is driven by search engines.

Organic search results cover more digital real estate, appear more credible to savvy searchers, and receive way more clicks than paid advertisements. For example, of all US searches, only ~2.8% of people click on paid advertisements.

In a nutshell: SEO has ~20X more traffic opportunity than PPC on both mobile and desktop.

SEO is also one of the only online marketing channels that, when set up correctly, can continue to pay dividends over time. If you provide a solid piece of content that deserves to rank for the right keywords, your traffic can snowball over time, whereas advertising needs continuous funding to send traffic to your site.

Search engines are getting smarter, but they still need our help.

Optimizing your site will help deliver better information to search engines so that your content can be properly indexed and displayed within search results.

Should I hire an SEO professional, consultant, or agency?

Depending on your bandwidth, willingness to learn, and the complexity of your website(s), you could perform some basic SEO yourself. Or, you might discover that you would prefer the help of an expert. Either way is okay!

If you end up looking for expert help, it's important to know that many agencies and consultants "provide SEO services," but can vary widely in quality. Knowing how to choose a good SEO company can save you a lot of time and money, as the wrong SEO techniques can actually harm your site more than they will help.

White hat vs black hat SEO

"White hat SEO" refers to SEO techniques, best practices, and strategies that abide by search engine rule, its primary focus to provide more value to people.

"Black hat SEO" refers to techniques and strategies that attempt to spam/fool search engines. While black hat SEO can work, it puts websites at tremendous risk of being penalized and/or de-indexed (removed from search results) and has ethical implications.

Penalized websites have bankrupted businesses. It's just another reason to be very careful when choosing an SEO expert or agency.

Search engines share similar goals with the SEO industry

Search engines want to help you succeed. They're actually quite supportive of efforts by the SEO community. Digital marketing conferences, such as Unbounce, MNsearch, SearchLove, and Moz's own MozCon, regularly attract engineers and representatives from major search engines.

Google assists webmasters and SEOs through their Webmaster Central Help Forum and by hosting live office hour hangouts. (Bing, unfortunately, shut down their Webmaster Forums in 2014.)

While webmaster guidelines vary from search engine to search engine, the underlying principles stay the same: Don’t try to trick search engines. Instead, provide your visitors with a great online experience.

Google webmaster guidelinesBasic principles:

Make pages primarily for users, not search engines.

Don't deceive your users.

Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is whether you'd feel comfortable explaining what you've done to a website to a Google employee. Another useful test is to ask, "Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn't exist?"

Think about what makes your website unique, valuable, or engaging.

Things to avoid:

Automatically generated content

Participating in link schemes

Creating pages with little or no original content (i.e. copied from somewhere else)

Cloaking — the practice of showing search engine crawlers different content than visitors.

Hidden text and links

Doorway pages — pages created to rank well for specific searches to funnel traffic to your website.

Full Google Webmaster Guidelines version here.

Bing webmaster guidelinesBasic principles:

Provide clear, deep, engaging, and easy-to-find content on your site.

Keep page titles clear and relevant.

Links are regarded as a signal of popularity and Bing rewards links that have grown organically.

Social influence and social shares are positive signals and can have an impact on how you rank organically in the long run.

Page speed is important, along with a positive, useful user experience.

Use alt attributes to describe images, so that Bing can better understand the content.

Things to avoid:

Thin content, pages showing mostly ads or affiliate links, or that otherwise redirect visitors away to other sites will not rank well.

Abusive link tactics that aim to inflate the number and nature of inbound links such as buying links, participating in link schemes, can lead to de-indexing.

Ensure clean, concise, keyword-inclusive URL structures are in place. Dynamic parameters can dirty up your URLs and cause duplicate content issues.

Make your URLs descriptive, short, keyword rich when possible, and avoid non-letter characters.

Burying links in Javascript/Flash/Silverlight; keep content out of these as well.

Duplicate content

Keyword stuffing

Cloaking — the practice of showing search engine crawlers different content than visitors.

Guidelines for representing your local business on Google

These guidelines govern what you should and shouldn’t do in creating and managing your Google My Business listing(s).

Basic principles:

Be sure you’re eligible for inclusion in the Google My Business index; you must have a physical address, even if it’s your home address, and you must serve customers face-to-face, either at your location (like a retail store) or at theirs (like a plumber)

Honestly and accurately represent all aspects of your local business data, including its name, address, phone number, website address, business categories, hours of operation, and other features.

Things to avoid

Creation of Google My Business listings for entities that aren’t eligible

Misrepresentation of any of your core business information, including “stuffing” your business name with geographic or service keywords, or creating listings for fake addresses

Use of PO boxes or virtual offices instead of authentic street addresses

Abuse of the review portion of the Google My Business listing, via fake positive reviews of your business or fake negative ones of your competitors

Costly, novice mistakes stemming from failure to read the fine details of Google’s guidelines

Fulfilling user intent

Understanding and fulfilling user intent is critical. When a person searches for something, they have a desired outcome. Whether it’s an answer, concert tickets, or a cat photo, that desired content is their “user intent.”

If a person performs a search for “bands," is their intent to find musical bands, wedding bands, band saws, or something else?

Your job as an SEO is to quickly provide users with the content they desire in the format in which they desire it.

Common user intent types:

Informational: Searching for information. Example: “How old is Issa Rae?”

Navigational: Searching for a specific website. Example: “HBOGO Insecure”

Transactional: Searching to buy something. Example: “where to buy ‘We got y'all’ Insecure t-shirt”

You can get a glimpse of user intent by Googling your desired keyword(s) and evaluating the current SERP. For example, if there's a photo carousel, it’s very likely that people searching for that keyword search for photos.

Also evaluate what content your top-ranking competitors are providing that you currently aren’t. How can you provide 10X the value on your website?

Providing relevant, high-quality content on your website will help you rank higher in search results, and more importantly, it will establish credibility and trust with your online audience.

Before you do any of that, you have to first understand your website’s goals to execute a strategic SEO plan.

Know your website/client’s goals

Every website is different, so take the time to really understand a specific site’s business goals. This will not only help you determine which areas of SEO you should focus on, where to track conversions, and how to set benchmarks, but it will also help you create talking points for negotiating SEO projects with clients, bosses, etc.

What will your KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) be to measure the return on SEO investment? More simply, what is your barometer to measure the success of your organic search efforts? You'll want to have it documented, even if it's this simple:

For the website ________________________, my primary SEO KPI is _______________.

Here are a few common KPIs to get you started:

Sales

Downloads

Email signups

Contact form submissions

Phone calls

And if your business has a local component, you’ll want to define KPIs for your Google My Business listings, as well. These might include:

Clicks-to-call

Clicks-to-website

Clicks-for-driving-directions

Notice how "Traffic" and "Ranking" are not on the above lists? This is because, for most websites, ranking well for keywords and increasing traffic won't matter if the new traffic doesn't convert (to help you reach the site’s KPI goals).

You don't want to send 1,000 people to your website a month and have only 3 people convert (to customers). You want to send 300 people to your site a month and have 40 people convert.

This guide will help you become more data-driven in your SEO efforts. Rather than haphazardly throwing arrows all over the place (and getting lucky every once in awhile), you'll put more wood behind fewer arrows.

Grab a bow (and some coffee); let's dive into Chapter 2 (Crawlers & Indexation).

We're looking forward to hearing your thoughts on this draft of Chapter 1. What works? Anything you feel could be added or explained differently? Let us know your suggestions, questions, and thoughts in the comments.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

http://ift.tt/2nKms2W

[conniecogeie]

Rewriting the Beginner's Guide to SEO, Chapter 1: SEO 101

Posted by BritneyMuller

Back in mid-November, we kicked off a campaign to rewrite our biggest piece of content: the Beginner's Guide to SEO. You offered up a huge amount of helpful advice and insight with regards to our outline, and today we're here to share our draft of the first chapter.

In many ways, the Beginner's Guide to SEO belongs to each and every member of our community; it's important that we get this right, for your sake. So without further ado, here's the first chapter — let's dive in!

Chapter 1: SEO 101What is it, and why is it important?

Welcome! We’re excited that you’re here!

If you already have a solid understanding of SEO and why it's important, you can skip to Chapter 2 (though we'd still recommend skimming the best practices from Google and Bing at the end of this chapter; they're useful refreshers).

For everyone else, this chapter will help build your foundational SEO knowledge and confidence as you move forward.

What is SEO?

SEO stands for “search engine optimization.” It’s the practice of increasing both the quality and quantity of website traffic, as well as exposure to your brand, through non-paid (also known as "organic") search engine results.

Despite the acronym, SEO is as much about people as it is about search engines themselves. It’s about understanding what people are searching for online, the answers they are seeking, the words they’re using, and the type of content they wish to consume. Leveraging this data will allow you to provide high-quality content that your visitors will truly value.

Here’s an example. Frankie & Jo’s (a Seattle-based vegan, gluten-free ice cream shop) has heard about SEO and wants help improving how and how often they show up in organic search results. In order to help them, you need to first understand their potential customers:

What types of ice cream, desserts, snacks, etc. are people searching for?

Who is searching for these terms?

When are people searching for ice cream, snacks, desserts, etc.?

Are there seasonality trends throughout the year?

How are people searching for ice cream?

What words do they use?

What questions do they ask?

Are more searches performed on mobile devices?

Why are people seeking ice cream?

Are individuals looking for health conscious ice cream specifically or just looking to satisfy a sweet tooth?

Where are potential customers located — locally, nationally, or internationally?

And finally — here's the kicker — how can you help provide the best content about ice cream to cultivate a community and fulfill what all those people are searching for?

Search engine basics

Search engines are answer machines. They scour billions of pieces of content and evaluate thousands of factors to determine which content is most likely to answer your query.

Search engines do all of this by discovering and cataloguing all available content on the Internet (web pages, PDFs, images, videos, etc.) via a process known as “crawling and indexing.”

What are "organic" search engine results?

Organic search results are search results that aren't paid for (i.e. not advertising). These are the results that you can influence through effective SEO. Traditionally, these were the familiar "10 blue links."

Today, search engine results pages — often referred to as “SERPs” — are filled with both more advertising and more dynamic organic results formats (called “SERP features”) than we've ever seen before. Some examples of SERP features are featured snippets (or answer boxes), People Also Ask boxes, image carousels, etc. New SERP features continue to emerge, driven largely by what people are seeking.

For example, if you search for "Denver weather," you’ll see a weather forecast for the city of Denver directly in the SERP instead of a link to a site that might have that forecast. And, if you search for “pizza Denver,” you’ll see a “local pack” result made up of Denver pizza places. Convenient, right?

It’s important to remember that search engines make money from advertising. Their goal is to better solve searcher’s queries (within SERPs), to keep searchers coming back, and to keep them on the SERPs longer.

Some SERP features on Google are organic and can be influenced by SEO. These include featured snippets (a promoted organic result that displays an answer inside a box) and related questions (a.k.a. "People Also Ask" boxes).

It's worth noting that there are many other search features that, even though they aren't paid advertising, can't typically be influenced by SEO. These features often have data acquired from proprietary data sources, such as Wikipedia, WebMD, and IMDb.

Why SEO is important

While paid advertising, social media, and other online platforms can generate traffic to websites, the majority of online traffic is driven by search engines.

Organic search results cover more digital real estate, appear more credible to savvy searchers, and receive way more clicks than paid advertisements. For example, of all US searches, only ~2.8% of people click on paid advertisements.

In a nutshell: SEO has ~20X more traffic opportunity than PPC on both mobile and desktop.

SEO is also one of the only online marketing channels that, when set up correctly, can continue to pay dividends over time. If you provide a solid piece of content that deserves to rank for the right keywords, your traffic can snowball over time, whereas advertising needs continuous funding to send traffic to your site.

Search engines are getting smarter, but they still need our help.

Optimizing your site will help deliver better information to search engines so that your content can be properly indexed and displayed within search results.

Should I hire an SEO professional, consultant, or agency?

Depending on your bandwidth, willingness to learn, and the complexity of your website(s), you could perform some basic SEO yourself. Or, you might discover that you would prefer the help of an expert. Either way is okay!

If you end up looking for expert help, it's important to know that many agencies and consultants "provide SEO services," but can vary widely in quality. Knowing how to choose a good SEO company can save you a lot of time and money, as the wrong SEO techniques can actually harm your site more than they will help.

White hat vs black hat SEO

"White hat SEO" refers to SEO techniques, best practices, and strategies that abide by search engine rule, its primary focus to provide more value to people.

"Black hat SEO" refers to techniques and strategies that attempt to spam/fool search engines. While black hat SEO can work, it puts websites at tremendous risk of being penalized and/or de-indexed (removed from search results) and has ethical implications.

Penalized websites have bankrupted businesses. It's just another reason to be very careful when choosing an SEO expert or agency.

Search engines share similar goals with the SEO industry

Search engines want to help you succeed. They're actually quite supportive of efforts by the SEO community. Digital marketing conferences, such as Unbounce, MNsearch, SearchLove, and Moz's own MozCon, regularly attract engineers and representatives from major search engines.

Google assists webmasters and SEOs through their Webmaster Central Help Forum and by hosting live office hour hangouts. (Bing, unfortunately, shut down their Webmaster Forums in 2014.)

While webmaster guidelines vary from search engine to search engine, the underlying principles stay the same: Don’t try to trick search engines. Instead, provide your visitors with a great online experience.

Google webmaster guidelinesBasic principles:

Make pages primarily for users, not search engines.

Don't deceive your users.

Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is whether you'd feel comfortable explaining what you've done to a website to a Google employee. Another useful test is to ask, "Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn't exist?"

Think about what makes your website unique, valuable, or engaging.

Things to avoid:

Automatically generated content

Participating in link schemes

Creating pages with little or no original content (i.e. copied from somewhere else)

Cloaking — the practice of showing search engine crawlers different content than visitors.

Hidden text and links

Doorway pages — pages created to rank well for specific searches to funnel traffic to your website.

Full Google Webmaster Guidelines version here.

Bing webmaster guidelinesBasic principles:

Provide clear, deep, engaging, and easy-to-find content on your site.

Keep page titles clear and relevant.

Links are regarded as a signal of popularity and Bing rewards links that have grown organically.

Social influence and social shares are positive signals and can have an impact on how you rank organically in the long run.

Page speed is important, along with a positive, useful user experience.

Use alt attributes to describe images, so that Bing can better understand the content.

Things to avoid:

Thin content, pages showing mostly ads or affiliate links, or that otherwise redirect visitors away to other sites will not rank well.

Abusive link tactics that aim to inflate the number and nature of inbound links such as buying links, participating in link schemes, can lead to de-indexing.

Ensure clean, concise, keyword-inclusive URL structures are in place. Dynamic parameters can dirty up your URLs and cause duplicate content issues.

Make your URLs descriptive, short, keyword rich when possible, and avoid non-letter characters.

Burying links in Javascript/Flash/Silverlight; keep content out of these as well.

Duplicate content

Keyword stuffing

Cloaking — the practice of showing search engine crawlers different content than visitors.

Guidelines for representing your local business on Google

These guidelines govern what you should and shouldn’t do in creating and managing your Google My Business listing(s).

Basic principles:

Be sure you’re eligible for inclusion in the Google My Business index; you must have a physical address, even if it’s your home address, and you must serve customers face-to-face, either at your location (like a retail store) or at theirs (like a plumber)

Honestly and accurately represent all aspects of your local business data, including its name, address, phone number, website address, business categories, hours of operation, and other features.

Things to avoid

Creation of Google My Business listings for entities that aren’t eligible

Misrepresentation of any of your core business information, including “stuffing” your business name with geographic or service keywords, or creating listings for fake addresses

Use of PO boxes or virtual offices instead of authentic street addresses

Abuse of the review portion of the Google My Business listing, via fake positive reviews of your business or fake negative ones of your competitors

Costly, novice mistakes stemming from failure to read the fine details of Google’s guidelines

Fulfilling user intent

Understanding and fulfilling user intent is critical. When a person searches for something, they have a desired outcome. Whether it’s an answer, concert tickets, or a cat photo, that desired content is their “user intent.”

If a person performs a search for “bands," is their intent to find musical bands, wedding bands, band saws, or something else?

Your job as an SEO is to quickly provide users with the content they desire in the format in which they desire it.

Common user intent types:

Informational: Searching for information. Example: “How old is Issa Rae?”

Navigational: Searching for a specific website. Example: “HBOGO Insecure”

Transactional: Searching to buy something. Example: “where to buy ‘We got y'all’ Insecure t-shirt”

You can get a glimpse of user intent by Googling your desired keyword(s) and evaluating the current SERP. For example, if there's a photo carousel, it’s very likely that people searching for that keyword search for photos.

Also evaluate what content your top-ranking competitors are providing that you currently aren’t. How can you provide 10X the value on your website?

Providing relevant, high-quality content on your website will help you rank higher in search results, and more importantly, it will establish credibility and trust with your online audience.

Before you do any of that, you have to first understand your website’s goals to execute a strategic SEO plan.

Know your website/client’s goals

Every website is different, so take the time to really understand a specific site’s business goals. This will not only help you determine which areas of SEO you should focus on, where to track conversions, and how to set benchmarks, but it will also help you create talking points for negotiating SEO projects with clients, bosses, etc.

What will your KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) be to measure the return on SEO investment? More simply, what is your barometer to measure the success of your organic search efforts? You'll want to have it documented, even if it's this simple:

For the website ________________________, my primary SEO KPI is _______________.

Here are a few common KPIs to get you started:

Sales

Downloads

Email signups

Contact form submissions

Phone calls

And if your business has a local component, you’ll want to define KPIs for your Google My Business listings, as well. These might include:

Clicks-to-call

Clicks-to-website

Clicks-for-driving-directions

Notice how "Traffic" and "Ranking" are not on the above lists? This is because, for most websites, ranking well for keywords and increasing traffic won't matter if the new traffic doesn't convert (to help you reach the site’s KPI goals).

You don't want to send 1,000 people to your website a month and have only 3 people convert (to customers). You want to send 300 people to your site a month and have 40 people convert.

This guide will help you become more data-driven in your SEO efforts. Rather than haphazardly throwing arrows all over the place (and getting lucky every once in awhile), you'll put more wood behind fewer arrows.

Grab a bow (and some coffee); let's dive into Chapter 2 (Crawlers & Indexation).

We're looking forward to hearing your thoughts on this draft of Chapter 1. What works? Anything you feel could be added or explained differently? Let us know your suggestions, questions, and thoughts in the comments.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

http://ift.tt/2nKms2W

[lawrenceseitz22]

Rewriting the Beginner's Guide to SEO, Chapter 1: SEO 101

Posted by BritneyMuller

Back in mid-November, we kicked off a campaign to rewrite our biggest piece of content: the Beginner's Guide to SEO. You offered up a huge amount of helpful advice and insight with regards to our outline, and today we're here to share our draft of the first chapter.

In many ways, the Beginner's Guide to SEO belongs to each and every member of our community; it's important that we get this right, for your sake. So without further ado, here's the first chapter — let's dive in!

Chapter 1: SEO 101

What is it, and why is it important?

Welcome! We’re excited that you’re here!

If you already have a solid understanding of SEO and why it's important, you can skip to Chapter 2 (though we'd still recommend skimming the best practices from Google and Bing at the end of this chapter; they're useful refreshers).

For everyone else, this chapter will help build your foundational SEO knowledge and confidence as you move forward.

What is SEO?

SEO stands for “search engine optimization.” It’s the practice of increasing both the quality and quantity of website traffic, as well as exposure to your brand, through non-paid (also known as "organic") search engine results.

Despite the acronym, SEO is as much about people as it is about search engines themselves. It’s about understanding what people are searching for online, the answers they are seeking, the words they’re using, and the type of content they wish to consume. Leveraging this data will allow you to provide high-quality content that your visitors will truly value.

Here’s an example. Frankie & Jo’s (a Seattle-based vegan, gluten-free ice cream shop) has heard about SEO and wants help improving how and how often they show up in organic search results. In order to help them, you need to first understand their potential customers:

What types of ice cream, desserts, snacks, etc. are people searching for?

Who is searching for these terms?

When are people searching for ice cream, snacks, desserts, etc.?

Are there seasonality trends throughout the year?

How are people searching for ice cream?

What words do they use?

What questions do they ask?

Are more searches performed on mobile devices?

Why are people seeking ice cream?

Are individuals looking for health conscious ice cream specifically or just looking to satisfy a sweet tooth?

Where are potential customers located — locally, nationally, or internationally?

And finally — here's the kicker — how can you help provide the best content about ice cream to cultivate a community and fulfill what all those people are searching for?

Search engine basics

Search engines are answer machines. They scour billions of pieces of content and evaluate thousands of factors to determine which content is most likely to answer your query.

Search engines do all of this by discovering and cataloguing all available content on the Internet (web pages, PDFs, images, videos, etc.) via a process known as “crawling and indexing.”

What are "organic" search engine results?

Organic search results are search results that aren't paid for (i.e. not advertising). These are the results that you can influence through effective SEO. Traditionally, these were the familiar "10 blue links."

Today, search engine results pages — often referred to as “SERPs” — are filled with both more advertising and more dynamic organic results formats (called “SERP features”) than we've ever seen before. Some examples of SERP features are featured snippets (or answer boxes), People Also Ask boxes, image carousels, etc. New SERP features continue to emerge, driven largely by what people are seeking.

For example, if you search for "Denver weather," you’ll see a weather forecast for the city of Denver directly in the SERP instead of a link to a site that might have that forecast. And, if you search for “pizza Denver,” you’ll see a “local pack” result made up of Denver pizza places. Convenient, right?

It’s important to remember that search engines make money from advertising. Their goal is to better solve searcher’s queries (within SERPs), to keep searchers coming back, and to keep them on the SERPs longer.

Some SERP features on Google are organic and can be influenced by SEO. These include featured snippets (a promoted organic result that displays an answer inside a box) and related questions (a.k.a. "People Also Ask" boxes).

It's worth noting that there are many other search features that, even though they aren't paid advertising, can't typically be influenced by SEO. These features often have data acquired from proprietary data sources, such as Wikipedia, WebMD, and IMDb.

Why SEO is important

While paid advertising, social media, and other online platforms can generate traffic to websites, the majority of online traffic is driven by search engines.

Organic search results cover more digital real estate, appear more credible to savvy searchers, and receive way more clicks than paid advertisements. For example, of all US searches, only ~2.8% of people click on paid advertisements.

In a nutshell: SEO has ~20X more traffic opportunity than PPC on both mobile and desktop.

SEO is also one of the only online marketing channels that, when set up correctly, can continue to pay dividends over time. If you provide a solid piece of content that deserves to rank for the right keywords, your traffic can snowball over time, whereas advertising needs continuous funding to send traffic to your site.

Search engines are getting smarter, but they still need our help.

Optimizing your site will help deliver better information to search engines so that your content can be properly indexed and displayed within search results.

Should I hire an SEO professional, consultant, or agency?

Depending on your bandwidth, willingness to learn, and the complexity of your website(s), you could perform some basic SEO yourself. Or, you might discover that you would prefer the help of an expert. Either way is okay!

If you end up looking for expert help, it's important to know that many agencies and consultants "provide SEO services," but can vary widely in quality. Knowing how to choose a good SEO company can save you a lot of time and money, as the wrong SEO techniques can actually harm your site more than they will help.

White hat vs black hat SEO

"White hat SEO" refers to SEO techniques, best practices, and strategies that abide by search engine rule, its primary focus to provide more value to people.

"Black hat SEO" refers to techniques and strategies that attempt to spam/fool search engines. While black hat SEO can work, it puts websites at tremendous risk of being penalized and/or de-indexed (removed from search results) and has ethical implications.

Penalized websites have bankrupted businesses. It's just another reason to be very careful when choosing an SEO expert or agency.

Search engines share similar goals with the SEO industry

Search engines want to help you succeed. They're actually quite supportive of efforts by the SEO community. Digital marketing conferences, such as Unbounce, MNsearch, SearchLove, and Moz's own MozCon, regularly attract engineers and representatives from major search engines.

Google assists webmasters and SEOs through their Webmaster Central Help Forum and by hosting live office hour hangouts. (Bing, unfortunately, shut down their Webmaster Forums in 2014.)

While webmaster guidelines vary from search engine to search engine, the underlying principles stay the same: Don’t try to trick search engines. Instead, provide your visitors with a great online experience.

Google webmaster guidelines

Basic principles:

Make pages primarily for users, not search engines.

Don't deceive your users.

Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is whether you'd feel comfortable explaining what you've done to a website to a Google employee. Another useful test is to ask, "Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn't exist?"

Think about what makes your website unique, valuable, or engaging.

Things to avoid:

Automatically generated content

Participating in link schemes

Creating pages with little or no original content (i.e. copied from somewhere else)

Cloaking — the practice of showing search engine crawlers different content than visitors.

Hidden text and links

Doorway pages — pages created to rank well for specific searches to funnel traffic to your website.

Full Google Webmaster Guidelines version here.

Bing webmaster guidelines

Basic principles:

Provide clear, deep, engaging, and easy-to-find content on your site.

Keep page titles clear and relevant.

Links are regarded as a signal of popularity and Bing rewards links that have grown organically.

Social influence and social shares are positive signals and can have an impact on how you rank organically in the long run.

Page speed is important, along with a positive, useful user experience.

Use alt attributes to describe images, so that Bing can better understand the content.

Things to avoid:

Thin content, pages showing mostly ads or affiliate links, or that otherwise redirect visitors away to other sites will not rank well.

Abusive link tactics that aim to inflate the number and nature of inbound links such as buying links, participating in link schemes, can lead to de-indexing.

Ensure clean, concise, keyword-inclusive URL structures are in place. Dynamic parameters can dirty up your URLs and cause duplicate content issues.

Make your URLs descriptive, short, keyword rich when possible, and avoid non-letter characters.

Burying links in Javascript/Flash/Silverlight; keep content out of these as well.

Duplicate content

Keyword stuffing

Cloaking — the practice of showing search engine crawlers different content than visitors.

Guidelines for representing your local business on Google

These guidelines govern what you should and shouldn’t do in creating and managing your Google My Business listing(s).

Basic principles:

Be sure you’re eligible for inclusion in the Google My Business index; you must have a physical address, even if it’s your home address, and you must serve customers face-to-face, either at your location (like a retail store) or at theirs (like a plumber)

Honestly and accurately represent all aspects of your local business data, including its name, address, phone number, website address, business categories, hours of operation, and other features.

Things to avoid

Creation of Google My Business listings for entities that aren’t eligible

Misrepresentation of any of your core business information, including “stuffing” your business name with geographic or service keywords, or creating listings for fake addresses

Use of PO boxes or virtual offices instead of authentic street addresses

Abuse of the review portion of the Google My Business listing, via fake positive reviews of your business or fake negative ones of your competitors

Costly, novice mistakes stemming from failure to read the fine details of Google’s guidelines

Fulfilling user intent

Understanding and fulfilling user intent is critical. When a person searches for something, they have a desired outcome. Whether it’s an answer, concert tickets, or a cat photo, that desired content is their “user intent.”

If a person performs a search for “bands," is their intent to find musical bands, wedding bands, band saws, or something else?

Your job as an SEO is to quickly provide users with the content they desire in the format in which they desire it.

Common user intent types:

Informational: Searching for information. Example: “How old is Issa Rae?”

Navigational: Searching for a specific website. Example: “HBOGO Insecure”

Transactional: Searching to buy something. Example: “where to buy ‘We got y'all’ Insecure t-shirt”

You can get a glimpse of user intent by Googling your desired keyword(s) and evaluating the current SERP. For example, if there's a photo carousel, it’s very likely that people searching for that keyword search for photos.

Also evaluate what content your top-ranking competitors are providing that you currently aren’t. How can you provide 10X the value on your website?

Providing relevant, high-quality content on your website will help you rank higher in search results, and more importantly, it will establish credibility and trust with your online audience.

Before you do any of that, you have to first understand your website’s goals to execute a strategic SEO plan.

Know your website/client’s goals

Every website is different, so take the time to really understand a specific site’s business goals. This will not only help you determine which areas of SEO you should focus on, where to track conversions, and how to set benchmarks, but it will also help you create talking points for negotiating SEO projects with clients, bosses, etc.

What will your KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) be to measure the return on SEO investment? More simply, what is your barometer to measure the success of your organic search efforts? You'll want to have it documented, even if it's this simple:

For the website ________________________, my primary SEO KPI is _______________.

Here are a few common KPIs to get you started:

Sales

Downloads

Email signups

Contact form submissions

Phone calls

And if your business has a local component, you’ll want to define KPIs for your Google My Business listings, as well. These might include:

Clicks-to-call

Clicks-to-website

Clicks-for-driving-directions

Notice how "Traffic" and "Ranking" are not on the above lists? This is because, for most websites, ranking well for keywords and increasing traffic won't matter if the new traffic doesn't convert (to help you reach the site’s KPI goals).

You don't want to send 1,000 people to your website a month and have only 3 people convert (to customers). You want to send 300 people to your site a month and have 40 people convert.

This guide will help you become more data-driven in your SEO efforts. Rather than haphazardly throwing arrows all over the place (and getting lucky every once in awhile), you'll put more wood behind fewer arrows.

Grab a bow (and some coffee); let's dive into Chapter 2 (Crawlers & Indexation).

We're looking forward to hearing your thoughts on this draft of Chapter 1. What works? Anything you feel could be added or explained differently? Let us know your suggestions, questions, and thoughts in the comments.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

from Blogger http://ift.tt/2nKpjZE via IFTTT

[christinesumpmg]

Rewriting the Beginner's Guide to SEO, Chapter 1: SEO 101

Posted by BritneyMuller

Back in mid-November, we kicked off a campaign to rewrite our biggest piece of content: the Beginner's Guide to SEO. You offered up a huge amount of helpful advice and insight with regards to our outline, and today we're here to share our draft of the first chapter.

In many ways, the Beginner's Guide to SEO belongs to each and every member of our community; it's important that we get this right, for your sake. So without further ado, here's the first chapter — let's dive in!

Chapter 1: SEO 101What is it, and why is it important?

Welcome! We’re excited that you’re here!

If you already have a solid understanding of SEO and why it's important, you can skip to Chapter 2 (though we'd still recommend skimming the best practices from Google and Bing at the end of this chapter; they're useful refreshers).

For everyone else, this chapter will help build your foundational SEO knowledge and confidence as you move forward.

What is SEO?

SEO stands for “search engine optimization.” It’s the practice of increasing both the quality and quantity of website traffic, as well as exposure to your brand, through non-paid (also known as "organic") search engine results.

Despite the acronym, SEO is as much about people as it is about search engines themselves. It’s about understanding what people are searching for online, the answers they are seeking, the words they’re using, and the type of content they wish to consume. Leveraging this data will allow you to provide high-quality content that your visitors will truly value.

Here’s an example. Frankie & Jo’s (a Seattle-based vegan, gluten-free ice cream shop) has heard about SEO and wants help improving how and how often they show up in organic search results. In order to help them, you need to first understand their potential customers:

What types of ice cream, desserts, snacks, etc. are people searching for?

Who is searching for these terms?

When are people searching for ice cream, snacks, desserts, etc.?

Are there seasonality trends throughout the year?

How are people searching for ice cream?

What words do they use?

What questions do they ask?

Are more searches performed on mobile devices?

Why are people seeking ice cream?

Are individuals looking for health conscious ice cream specifically or just looking to satisfy a sweet tooth?

Where are potential customers located — locally, nationally, or internationally?

And finally — here's the kicker — how can you help provide the best content about ice cream to cultivate a community and fulfill what all those people are searching for?

Search engine basics

Search engines are answer machines. They scour billions of pieces of content and evaluate thousands of factors to determine which content is most likely to answer your query.

Search engines do all of this by discovering and cataloguing all available content on the Internet (web pages, PDFs, images, videos, etc.) via a process known as “crawling and indexing.”

What are "organic" search engine results?

Organic search results are search results that aren't paid for (i.e. not advertising). These are the results that you can influence through effective SEO. Traditionally, these were the familiar "10 blue links."

Today, search engine results pages — often referred to as “SERPs” — are filled with both more advertising and more dynamic organic results formats (called “SERP features”) than we've ever seen before. Some examples of SERP features are featured snippets (or answer boxes), People Also Ask boxes, image carousels, etc. New SERP features continue to emerge, driven largely by what people are seeking.

For example, if you search for "Denver weather," you’ll see a weather forecast for the city of Denver directly in the SERP instead of a link to a site that might have that forecast. And, if you search for “pizza Denver,” you’ll see a “local pack” result made up of Denver pizza places. Convenient, right?

It’s important to remember that search engines make money from advertising. Their goal is to better solve searcher’s queries (within SERPs), to keep searchers coming back, and to keep them on the SERPs longer.

Some SERP features on Google are organic and can be influenced by SEO. These include featured snippets (a promoted organic result that displays an answer inside a box) and related questions (a.k.a. "People Also Ask" boxes).

It's worth noting that there are many other search features that, even though they aren't paid advertising, can't typically be influenced by SEO. These features often have data acquired from proprietary data sources, such as Wikipedia, WebMD, and IMDb.

Why SEO is important

While paid advertising, social media, and other online platforms can generate traffic to websites, the majority of online traffic is driven by search engines.

Organic search results cover more digital real estate, appear more credible to savvy searchers, and receive way more clicks than paid advertisements. For example, of all US searches, only ~2.8% of people click on paid advertisements.

In a nutshell: SEO has ~20X more traffic opportunity than PPC on both mobile and desktop.

SEO is also one of the only online marketing channels that, when set up correctly, can continue to pay dividends over time. If you provide a solid piece of content that deserves to rank for the right keywords, your traffic can snowball over time, whereas advertising needs continuous funding to send traffic to your site.

Search engines are getting smarter, but they still need our help.

Optimizing your site will help deliver better information to search engines so that your content can be properly indexed and displayed within search results.

Should I hire an SEO professional, consultant, or agency?

Depending on your bandwidth, willingness to learn, and the complexity of your website(s), you could perform some basic SEO yourself. Or, you might discover that you would prefer the help of an expert. Either way is okay!

If you end up looking for expert help, it's important to know that many agencies and consultants "provide SEO services," but can vary widely in quality. Knowing how to choose a good SEO company can save you a lot of time and money, as the wrong SEO techniques can actually harm your site more than they will help.

White hat vs black hat SEO

"White hat SEO" refers to SEO techniques, best practices, and strategies that abide by search engine rule, its primary focus to provide more value to people.

"Black hat SEO" refers to techniques and strategies that attempt to spam/fool search engines. While black hat SEO can work, it puts websites at tremendous risk of being penalized and/or de-indexed (removed from search results) and has ethical implications.

Penalized websites have bankrupted businesses. It's just another reason to be very careful when choosing an SEO expert or agency.

Search engines share similar goals with the SEO industry

Search engines want to help you succeed. They're actually quite supportive of efforts by the SEO community. Digital marketing conferences, such as Unbounce, MNsearch, SearchLove, and Moz's own MozCon, regularly attract engineers and representatives from major search engines.

Google assists webmasters and SEOs through their Webmaster Central Help Forum and by hosting live office hour hangouts. (Bing, unfortunately, shut down their Webmaster Forums in 2014.)

While webmaster guidelines vary from search engine to search engine, the underlying principles stay the same: Don’t try to trick search engines. Instead, provide your visitors with a great online experience.

Google webmaster guidelinesBasic principles:

Make pages primarily for users, not search engines.

Don't deceive your users.

Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is whether you'd feel comfortable explaining what you've done to a website to a Google employee. Another useful test is to ask, "Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn't exist?"

Think about what makes your website unique, valuable, or engaging.

Things to avoid:

Automatically generated content

Participating in link schemes

Creating pages with little or no original content (i.e. copied from somewhere else)

Cloaking — the practice of showing search engine crawlers different content than visitors.

Hidden text and links

Doorway pages — pages created to rank well for specific searches to funnel traffic to your website.

Full Google Webmaster Guidelines version here.

Bing webmaster guidelinesBasic principles:

Provide clear, deep, engaging, and easy-to-find content on your site.

Keep page titles clear and relevant.

Links are regarded as a signal of popularity and Bing rewards links that have grown organically.

Social influence and social shares are positive signals and can have an impact on how you rank organically in the long run.

Page speed is important, along with a positive, useful user experience.

Use alt attributes to describe images, so that Bing can better understand the content.

Things to avoid:

Thin content, pages showing mostly ads or affiliate links, or that otherwise redirect visitors away to other sites will not rank well.

Abusive link tactics that aim to inflate the number and nature of inbound links such as buying links, participating in link schemes, can lead to de-indexing.

Ensure clean, concise, keyword-inclusive URL structures are in place. Dynamic parameters can dirty up your URLs and cause duplicate content issues.

Make your URLs descriptive, short, keyword rich when possible, and avoid non-letter characters.

Burying links in Javascript/Flash/Silverlight; keep content out of these as well.

Duplicate content

Keyword stuffing

Cloaking — the practice of showing search engine crawlers different content than visitors.

Guidelines for representing your local business on Google

These guidelines govern what you should and shouldn’t do in creating and managing your Google My Business listing(s).

Basic principles:

Be sure you’re eligible for inclusion in the Google My Business index; you must have a physical address, even if it’s your home address, and you must serve customers face-to-face, either at your location (like a retail store) or at theirs (like a plumber)

Honestly and accurately represent all aspects of your local business data, including its name, address, phone number, website address, business categories, hours of operation, and other features.

Things to avoid

Creation of Google My Business listings for entities that aren’t eligible

Misrepresentation of any of your core business information, including “stuffing” your business name with geographic or service keywords, or creating listings for fake addresses

Use of PO boxes or virtual offices instead of authentic street addresses

Abuse of the review portion of the Google My Business listing, via fake positive reviews of your business or fake negative ones of your competitors

Costly, novice mistakes stemming from failure to read the fine details of Google’s guidelines

Fulfilling user intent

Understanding and fulfilling user intent is critical. When a person searches for something, they have a desired outcome. Whether it’s an answer, concert tickets, or a cat photo, that desired content is their “user intent.”

If a person performs a search for “bands," is their intent to find musical bands, wedding bands, band saws, or something else?

Your job as an SEO is to quickly provide users with the content they desire in the format in which they desire it.

Common user intent types:

Informational: Searching for information. Example: “How old is Issa Rae?”

Navigational: Searching for a specific website. Example: “HBOGO Insecure”

Transactional: Searching to buy something. Example: “where to buy ‘We got y'all’ Insecure t-shirt”

You can get a glimpse of user intent by Googling your desired keyword(s) and evaluating the current SERP. For example, if there's a photo carousel, it’s very likely that people searching for that keyword search for photos.

Also evaluate what content your top-ranking competitors are providing that you currently aren’t. How can you provide 10X the value on your website?

Providing relevant, high-quality content on your website will help you rank higher in search results, and more importantly, it will establish credibility and trust with your online audience.

Before you do any of that, you have to first understand your website’s goals to execute a strategic SEO plan.

Know your website/client’s goals

Every website is different, so take the time to really understand a specific site’s business goals. This will not only help you determine which areas of SEO you should focus on, where to track conversions, and how to set benchmarks, but it will also help you create talking points for negotiating SEO projects with clients, bosses, etc.

What will your KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) be to measure the return on SEO investment? More simply, what is your barometer to measure the success of your organic search efforts? You'll want to have it documented, even if it's this simple:

For the website ________________________, my primary SEO KPI is _______________.

Here are a few common KPIs to get you started:

Sales

Downloads

Email signups

Contact form submissions

Phone calls

And if your business has a local component, you’ll want to define KPIs for your Google My Business listings, as well. These might include:

Clicks-to-call

Clicks-to-website

Clicks-for-driving-directions

Notice how "Traffic" and "Ranking" are not on the above lists? This is because, for most websites, ranking well for keywords and increasing traffic won't matter if the new traffic doesn't convert (to help you reach the site’s KPI goals).

You don't want to send 1,000 people to your website a month and have only 3 people convert (to customers). You want to send 300 people to your site a month and have 40 people convert.

This guide will help you become more data-driven in your SEO efforts. Rather than haphazardly throwing arrows all over the place (and getting lucky every once in awhile), you'll put more wood behind fewer arrows.

Grab a bow (and some coffee); let's dive into Chapter 2 (Crawlers & Indexation).

We're looking forward to hearing your thoughts on this draft of Chapter 1. What works? Anything you feel could be added or explained differently? Let us know your suggestions, questions, and thoughts in the comments.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

http://ift.tt/2nKms2W

[maryhare96]

Rewriting the Beginner's Guide to SEO, Chapter 1: SEO 101

Posted by BritneyMuller

Back in mid-November, we kicked off a campaign to rewrite our biggest piece of content: the Beginner's Guide to SEO. You offered up a huge amount of helpful advice and insight with regards to our outline, and today we're here to share our draft of the first chapter.

In many ways, the Beginner's Guide to SEO belongs to each and every member of our community; it's important that we get this right, for your sake. So without further ado, here's the first chapter — let's dive in!

Chapter 1: SEO 101What is it, and why is it important?

Welcome! We’re excited that you’re here!

If you already have a solid understanding of SEO and why it's important, you can skip to Chapter 2 (though we'd still recommend skimming the best practices from Google and Bing at the end of this chapter; they're useful refreshers).

For everyone else, this chapter will help build your foundational SEO knowledge and confidence as you move forward.

What is SEO?

SEO stands for “search engine optimization.” It’s the practice of increasing both the quality and quantity of website traffic, as well as exposure to your brand, through non-paid (also known as "organic") search engine results.

Despite the acronym, SEO is as much about people as it is about search engines themselves. It’s about understanding what people are searching for online, the answers they are seeking, the words they’re using, and the type of content they wish to consume. Leveraging this data will allow you to provide high-quality content that your visitors will truly value.

Here’s an example. Frankie & Jo’s (a Seattle-based vegan, gluten-free ice cream shop) has heard about SEO and wants help improving how and how often they show up in organic search results. In order to help them, you need to first understand their potential customers:

What types of ice cream, desserts, snacks, etc. are people searching for?

Who is searching for these terms?

When are people searching for ice cream, snacks, desserts, etc.?

Are there seasonality trends throughout the year?

How are people searching for ice cream?

What words do they use?

What questions do they ask?

Are more searches performed on mobile devices?

Why are people seeking ice cream?

Are individuals looking for health conscious ice cream specifically or just looking to satisfy a sweet tooth?

Where are potential customers located — locally, nationally, or internationally?

And finally — here's the kicker — how can you help provide the best content about ice cream to cultivate a community and fulfill what all those people are searching for?

Search engine basics

Search engines are answer machines. They scour billions of pieces of content and evaluate thousands of factors to determine which content is most likely to answer your query.

Search engines do all of this by discovering and cataloguing all available content on the Internet (web pages, PDFs, images, videos, etc.) via a process known as “crawling and indexing.”

What are "organic" search engine results?

Organic search results are search results that aren't paid for (i.e. not advertising). These are the results that you can influence through effective SEO. Traditionally, these were the familiar "10 blue links."

Today, search engine results pages — often referred to as “SERPs” — are filled with both more advertising and more dynamic organic results formats (called “SERP features”) than we've ever seen before. Some examples of SERP features are featured snippets (or answer boxes), People Also Ask boxes, image carousels, etc. New SERP features continue to emerge, driven largely by what people are seeking.

For example, if you search for "Denver weather," you’ll see a weather forecast for the city of Denver directly in the SERP instead of a link to a site that might have that forecast. And, if you search for “pizza Denver,” you’ll see a “local pack” result made up of Denver pizza places. Convenient, right?

It’s important to remember that search engines make money from advertising. Their goal is to better solve searcher’s queries (within SERPs), to keep searchers coming back, and to keep them on the SERPs longer.

Some SERP features on Google are organic and can be influenced by SEO. These include featured snippets (a promoted organic result that displays an answer inside a box) and related questions (a.k.a. "People Also Ask" boxes).

It's worth noting that there are many other search features that, even though they aren't paid advertising, can't typically be influenced by SEO. These features often have data acquired from proprietary data sources, such as Wikipedia, WebMD, and IMDb.

Why SEO is important

While paid advertising, social media, and other online platforms can generate traffic to websites, the majority of online traffic is driven by search engines.

Organic search results cover more digital real estate, appear more credible to savvy searchers, and receive way more clicks than paid advertisements. For example, of all US searches, only ~2.8% of people click on paid advertisements.

In a nutshell: SEO has ~20X more traffic opportunity than PPC on both mobile and desktop.

SEO is also one of the only online marketing channels that, when set up correctly, can continue to pay dividends over time. If you provide a solid piece of content that deserves to rank for the right keywords, your traffic can snowball over time, whereas advertising needs continuous funding to send traffic to your site.

Search engines are getting smarter, but they still need our help.

Optimizing your site will help deliver better information to search engines so that your content can be properly indexed and displayed within search results.

Should I hire an SEO professional, consultant, or agency?

Depending on your bandwidth, willingness to learn, and the complexity of your website(s), you could perform some basic SEO yourself. Or, you might discover that you would prefer the help of an expert. Either way is okay!

If you end up looking for expert help, it's important to know that many agencies and consultants "provide SEO services," but can vary widely in quality. Knowing how to choose a good SEO company can save you a lot of time and money, as the wrong SEO techniques can actually harm your site more than they will help.

White hat vs black hat SEO

"White hat SEO" refers to SEO techniques, best practices, and strategies that abide by search engine rule, its primary focus to provide more value to people.

"Black hat SEO" refers to techniques and strategies that attempt to spam/fool search engines. While black hat SEO can work, it puts websites at tremendous risk of being penalized and/or de-indexed (removed from search results) and has ethical implications.

Penalized websites have bankrupted businesses. It's just another reason to be very careful when choosing an SEO expert or agency.

Search engines share similar goals with the SEO industry

Search engines want to help you succeed. They're actually quite supportive of efforts by the SEO community. Digital marketing conferences, such as Unbounce, MNsearch, SearchLove, and Moz's own MozCon, regularly attract engineers and representatives from major search engines.

Google assists webmasters and SEOs through their Webmaster Central Help Forum and by hosting live office hour hangouts. (Bing, unfortunately, shut down their Webmaster Forums in 2014.)

While webmaster guidelines vary from search engine to search engine, the underlying principles stay the same: Don’t try to trick search engines. Instead, provide your visitors with a great online experience.

Google webmaster guidelinesBasic principles:

Make pages primarily for users, not search engines.

Don't deceive your users.

Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is whether you'd feel comfortable explaining what you've done to a website to a Google employee. Another useful test is to ask, "Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn't exist?"

Think about what makes your website unique, valuable, or engaging.

Things to avoid:

Automatically generated content

Participating in link schemes

Creating pages with little or no original content (i.e. copied from somewhere else)

Cloaking — the practice of showing search engine crawlers different content than visitors.

Hidden text and links

Doorway pages — pages created to rank well for specific searches to funnel traffic to your website.

Full Google Webmaster Guidelines version here.

Bing webmaster guidelinesBasic principles:

Provide clear, deep, engaging, and easy-to-find content on your site.

Keep page titles clear and relevant.

Links are regarded as a signal of popularity and Bing rewards links that have grown organically.

Social influence and social shares are positive signals and can have an impact on how you rank organically in the long run.

Page speed is important, along with a positive, useful user experience.

Use alt attributes to describe images, so that Bing can better understand the content.

Things to avoid:

Thin content, pages showing mostly ads or affiliate links, or that otherwise redirect visitors away to other sites will not rank well.

Abusive link tactics that aim to inflate the number and nature of inbound links such as buying links, participating in link schemes, can lead to de-indexing.

Ensure clean, concise, keyword-inclusive URL structures are in place. Dynamic parameters can dirty up your URLs and cause duplicate content issues.

Make your URLs descriptive, short, keyword rich when possible, and avoid non-letter characters.

Burying links in Javascript/Flash/Silverlight; keep content out of these as well.

Duplicate content

Keyword stuffing

Cloaking — the practice of showing search engine crawlers different content than visitors.

Guidelines for representing your local business on Google

These guidelines govern what you should and shouldn’t do in creating and managing your Google My Business listing(s).

Basic principles:

Be sure you’re eligible for inclusion in the Google My Business index; you must have a physical address, even if it’s your home address, and you must serve customers face-to-face, either at your location (like a retail store) or at theirs (like a plumber)

Honestly and accurately represent all aspects of your local business data, including its name, address, phone number, website address, business categories, hours of operation, and other features.

Things to avoid

Creation of Google My Business listings for entities that aren’t eligible

Misrepresentation of any of your core business information, including “stuffing” your business name with geographic or service keywords, or creating listings for fake addresses

Use of PO boxes or virtual offices instead of authentic street addresses

Abuse of the review portion of the Google My Business listing, via fake positive reviews of your business or fake negative ones of your competitors

Costly, novice mistakes stemming from failure to read the fine details of Google’s guidelines

Fulfilling user intent

Understanding and fulfilling user intent is critical. When a person searches for something, they have a desired outcome. Whether it’s an answer, concert tickets, or a cat photo, that desired content is their “user intent.”

If a person performs a search for “bands," is their intent to find musical bands, wedding bands, band saws, or something else?

Your job as an SEO is to quickly provide users with the content they desire in the format in which they desire it.

Common user intent types:

Informational: Searching for information. Example: “How old is Issa Rae?”

Navigational: Searching for a specific website. Example: “HBOGO Insecure”

Transactional: Searching to buy something. Example: “where to buy ‘We got y'all’ Insecure t-shirt”

You can get a glimpse of user intent by Googling your desired keyword(s) and evaluating the current SERP. For example, if there's a photo carousel, it’s very likely that people searching for that keyword search for photos.

Also evaluate what content your top-ranking competitors are providing that you currently aren’t. How can you provide 10X the value on your website?

Providing relevant, high-quality content on your website will help you rank higher in search results, and more importantly, it will establish credibility and trust with your online audience.

Before you do any of that, you have to first understand your website’s goals to execute a strategic SEO plan.

Know your website/client’s goals

Every website is different, so take the time to really understand a specific site’s business goals. This will not only help you determine which areas of SEO you should focus on, where to track conversions, and how to set benchmarks, but it will also help you create talking points for negotiating SEO projects with clients, bosses, etc.

What will your KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) be to measure the return on SEO investment? More simply, what is your barometer to measure the success of your organic search efforts? You'll want to have it documented, even if it's this simple:

For the website ________________________, my primary SEO KPI is _______________.

Here are a few common KPIs to get you started:

Sales

Downloads

Email signups

Contact form submissions

Phone calls

And if your business has a local component, you’ll want to define KPIs for your Google My Business listings, as well. These might include:

Clicks-to-call

Clicks-to-website

Clicks-for-driving-directions

Notice how "Traffic" and "Ranking" are not on the above lists? This is because, for most websites, ranking well for keywords and increasing traffic won't matter if the new traffic doesn't convert (to help you reach the site’s KPI goals).

You don't want to send 1,000 people to your website a month and have only 3 people convert (to customers). You want to send 300 people to your site a month and have 40 people convert.

This guide will help you become more data-driven in your SEO efforts. Rather than haphazardly throwing arrows all over the place (and getting lucky every once in awhile), you'll put more wood behind fewer arrows.

Grab a bow (and some coffee); let's dive into Chapter 2 (Crawlers & Indexation).

We're looking forward to hearing your thoughts on this draft of Chapter 1. What works? Anything you feel could be added or explained differently? Let us know your suggestions, questions, and thoughts in the comments.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

http://ift.tt/2nKms2W

[swunlimitednj]

Rewriting the Beginner's Guide to SEO, Chapter 1: SEO 101

Posted by BritneyMuller

Back in mid-November, we kicked off a campaign to rewrite our biggest piece of content: the Beginner's Guide to SEO. You offered up a huge amount of helpful advice and insight with regards to our outline, and today we're here to share our draft of the first chapter.

In many ways, the Beginner's Guide to SEO belongs to each and every member of our community; it's important that we get this right, for your sake. So without further ado, here's the first chapter — let's dive in!

Chapter 1: SEO 101

What is it, and why is it important?

Welcome! We’re excited that you’re here!

If you already have a solid understanding of SEO and why it's important, you can skip to Chapter 2 (though we'd still recommend skimming the best practices from Google and Bing at the end of this chapter; they're useful refreshers).

For everyone else, this chapter will help build your foundational SEO knowledge and confidence as you move forward.

What is SEO?

SEO stands for “search engine optimization.” It’s the practice of increasing both the quality and quantity of website traffic, as well as exposure to your brand, through non-paid (also known as "organic") search engine results.

Despite the acronym, SEO is as much about people as it is about search engines themselves. It’s about understanding what people are searching for online, the answers they are seeking, the words they’re using, and the type of content they wish to consume. Leveraging this data will allow you to provide high-quality content that your visitors will truly value.

Here’s an example. Frankie & Jo’s (a Seattle-based vegan, gluten-free ice cream shop) has heard about SEO and wants help improving how and how often they show up in organic search results. In order to help them, you need to first understand their potential customers:

What types of ice cream, desserts, snacks, etc. are people searching for?

Who is searching for these terms?

When are people searching for ice cream, snacks, desserts, etc.?

Are there seasonality trends throughout the year?

How are people searching for ice cream?

What words do they use?

What questions do they ask?

Are more searches performed on mobile devices?

Why are people seeking ice cream?

Are individuals looking for health conscious ice cream specifically or just looking to satisfy a sweet tooth?

Where are potential customers located — locally, nationally, or internationally?

And finally — here's the kicker — how can you help provide the best content about ice cream to cultivate a community and fulfill what all those people are searching for?

Search engine basics

Search engines are answer machines. They scour billions of pieces of content and evaluate thousands of factors to determine which content is most likely to answer your query.

Search engines do all of this by discovering and cataloguing all available content on the Internet (web pages, PDFs, images, videos, etc.) via a process known as “crawling and indexing.”

What are "organic" search engine results?

Organic search results are search results that aren't paid for (i.e. not advertising). These are the results that you can influence through effective SEO. Traditionally, these were the familiar "10 blue links."

Today, search engine results pages — often referred to as “SERPs” — are filled with both more advertising and more dynamic organic results formats (called “SERP features”) than we've ever seen before. Some examples of SERP features are featured snippets (or answer boxes), People Also Ask boxes, image carousels, etc. New SERP features continue to emerge, driven largely by what people are seeking.

For example, if you search for "Denver weather," you’ll see a weather forecast for the city of Denver directly in the SERP instead of a link to a site that might have that forecast. And, if you search for “pizza Denver,” you’ll see a “local pack” result made up of Denver pizza places. Convenient, right?

It’s important to remember that search engines make money from advertising. Their goal is to better solve searcher’s queries (within SERPs), to keep searchers coming back, and to keep them on the SERPs longer.

Some SERP features on Google are organic and can be influenced by SEO. These include featured snippets (a promoted organic result that displays an answer inside a box) and related questions (a.k.a. "People Also Ask" boxes).

It's worth noting that there are many other search features that, even though they aren't paid advertising, can't typically be influenced by SEO. These features often have data acquired from proprietary data sources, such as Wikipedia, WebMD, and IMDb.

Why SEO is important

While paid advertising, social media, and other online platforms can generate traffic to websites, the majority of online traffic is driven by search engines.

Organic search results cover more digital real estate, appear more credible to savvy searchers, and receive way more clicks than paid advertisements. For example, of all US searches, only ~2.8% of people click on paid advertisements.

In a nutshell: SEO has ~20X more traffic opportunity than PPC on both mobile and desktop.

SEO is also one of the only online marketing channels that, when set up correctly, can continue to pay dividends over time. If you provide a solid piece of content that deserves to rank for the right keywords, your traffic can snowball over time, whereas advertising needs continuous funding to send traffic to your site.

Search engines are getting smarter, but they still need our help.

Optimizing your site will help deliver better information to search engines so that your content can be properly indexed and displayed within search results.

Should I hire an SEO professional, consultant, or agency?

Depending on your bandwidth, willingness to learn, and the complexity of your website(s), you could perform some basic SEO yourself. Or, you might discover that you would prefer the help of an expert. Either way is okay!

If you end up looking for expert help, it's important to know that many agencies and consultants "provide SEO services," but can vary widely in quality. Knowing how to choose a good SEO company can save you a lot of time and money, as the wrong SEO techniques can actually harm your site more than they will help.

White hat vs black hat SEO

"White hat SEO" refers to SEO techniques, best practices, and strategies that abide by search engine rule, its primary focus to provide more value to people.

"Black hat SEO" refers to techniques and strategies that attempt to spam/fool search engines. While black hat SEO can work, it puts websites at tremendous risk of being penalized and/or de-indexed (removed from search results) and has ethical implications.

Penalized websites have bankrupted businesses. It's just another reason to be very careful when choosing an SEO expert or agency.

Search engines share similar goals with the SEO industry

Search engines want to help you succeed. They're actually quite supportive of efforts by the SEO community. Digital marketing conferences, such as Unbounce, MNsearch, SearchLove, and Moz's own MozCon, regularly attract engineers and representatives from major search engines.

Google assists webmasters and SEOs through their Webmaster Central Help Forum and by hosting live office hour hangouts. (Bing, unfortunately, shut down their Webmaster Forums in 2014.)

While webmaster guidelines vary from search engine to search engine, the underlying principles stay the same: Don’t try to trick search engines. Instead, provide your visitors with a great online experience.

Google webmaster guidelines

Basic principles:

Make pages primarily for users, not search engines.

Don't deceive your users.

Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is whether you'd feel comfortable explaining what you've done to a website to a Google employee. Another useful test is to ask, "Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn't exist?"

Think about what makes your website unique, valuable, or engaging.

Things to avoid:

Automatically generated content

Participating in link schemes

Creating pages with little or no original content (i.e. copied from somewhere else)

Cloaking — the practice of showing search engine crawlers different content than visitors.

Hidden text and links

Doorway pages — pages created to rank well for specific searches to funnel traffic to your website.

Full Google Webmaster Guidelines version here.

Bing webmaster guidelines

Basic principles:

Provide clear, deep, engaging, and easy-to-find content on your site.

Keep page titles clear and relevant.

Links are regarded as a signal of popularity and Bing rewards links that have grown organically.

Social influence and social shares are positive signals and can have an impact on how you rank organically in the long run.

Page speed is important, along with a positive, useful user experience.

Use alt attributes to describe images, so that Bing can better understand the content.

Things to avoid:

Thin content, pages showing mostly ads or affiliate links, or that otherwise redirect visitors away to other sites will not rank well.

Abusive link tactics that aim to inflate the number and nature of inbound links such as buying links, participating in link schemes, can lead to de-indexing.

Ensure clean, concise, keyword-inclusive URL structures are in place. Dynamic parameters can dirty up your URLs and cause duplicate content issues.

Make your URLs descriptive, short, keyword rich when possible, and avoid non-letter characters.

Burying links in Javascript/Flash/Silverlight; keep content out of these as well.

Duplicate content

Keyword stuffing

Cloaking — the practice of showing search engine crawlers different content than visitors.

Guidelines for representing your local business on Google

These guidelines govern what you should and shouldn’t do in creating and managing your Google My Business listing(s).

Basic principles:

Be sure you’re eligible for inclusion in the Google My Business index; you must have a physical address, even if it’s your home address, and you must serve customers face-to-face, either at your location (like a retail store) or at theirs (like a plumber)

Honestly and accurately represent all aspects of your local business data, including its name, address, phone number, website address, business categories, hours of operation, and other features.

Things to avoid

Creation of Google My Business listings for entities that aren’t eligible

Misrepresentation of any of your core business information, including “stuffing” your business name with geographic or service keywords, or creating listings for fake addresses

Use of PO boxes or virtual offices instead of authentic street addresses

Abuse of the review portion of the Google My Business listing, via fake positive reviews of your business or fake negative ones of your competitors

Costly, novice mistakes stemming from failure to read the fine details of Google’s guidelines

Fulfilling user intent

Understanding and fulfilling user intent is critical. When a person searches for something, they have a desired outcome. Whether it’s an answer, concert tickets, or a cat photo, that desired content is their “user intent.”

If a person performs a search for “bands," is their intent to find musical bands, wedding bands, band saws, or something else?

Your job as an SEO is to quickly provide users with the content they desire in the format in which they desire it.

Common user intent types:

Informational: Searching for information. Example: “How old is Issa Rae?”

Navigational: Searching for a specific website. Example: “HBOGO Insecure”

Transactional: Searching to buy something. Example: “where to buy ‘We got y'all’ Insecure t-shirt”

You can get a glimpse of user intent by Googling your desired keyword(s) and evaluating the current SERP. For example, if there's a photo carousel, it’s very likely that people searching for that keyword search for photos.

Also evaluate what content your top-ranking competitors are providing that you currently aren’t. How can you provide 10X the value on your website?

Providing relevant, high-quality content on your website will help you rank higher in search results, and more importantly, it will establish credibility and trust with your online audience.

Before you do any of that, you have to first understand your website’s goals to execute a strategic SEO plan.

Know your website/client’s goals

Every website is different, so take the time to really understand a specific site’s business goals. This will not only help you determine which areas of SEO you should focus on, where to track conversions, and how to set benchmarks, but it will also help you create talking points for negotiating SEO projects with clients, bosses, etc.

What will your KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) be to measure the return on SEO investment? More simply, what is your barometer to measure the success of your organic search efforts? You'll want to have it documented, even if it's this simple:

For the website ________________________, my primary SEO KPI is _______________.

Here are a few common KPIs to get you started:

Sales

Downloads

Email signups

Contact form submissions

Phone calls

And if your business has a local component, you’ll want to define KPIs for your Google My Business listings, as well. These might include:

Clicks-to-call

Clicks-to-website

Clicks-for-driving-directions

Notice how "Traffic" and "Ranking" are not on the above lists? This is because, for most websites, ranking well for keywords and increasing traffic won't matter if the new traffic doesn't convert (to help you reach the site’s KPI goals).

You don't want to send 1,000 people to your website a month and have only 3 people convert (to customers). You want to send 300 people to your site a month and have 40 people convert.

This guide will help you become more data-driven in your SEO efforts. Rather than haphazardly throwing arrows all over the place (and getting lucky every once in awhile), you'll put more wood behind fewer arrows.

Grab a bow (and some coffee); let's dive into Chapter 2 (Crawlers & Indexation).

We're looking forward to hearing your thoughts on this draft of Chapter 1. What works? Anything you feel could be added or explained differently? Let us know your suggestions, questions, and thoughts in the comments.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

from Blogger http://ift.tt/2Eux7bB via SW Unlimited

[rodneyevesuarywk]

Rewriting the Beginner's Guide to SEO, Chapter 1: SEO 101

Posted by BritneyMuller

Back in mid-November, we kicked off a campaign to rewrite our biggest piece of content: the Beginner's Guide to SEO. You offered up a huge amount of helpful advice and insight with regards to our outline, and today we're here to share our draft of the first chapter.

In many ways, the Beginner's Guide to SEO belongs to each and every member of our community; it's important that we get this right, for your sake. So without further ado, here's the first chapter — let's dive in!

Chapter 1: SEO 101What is it, and why is it important?

Welcome! We’re excited that you’re here!

If you already have a solid understanding of SEO and why it's important, you can skip to Chapter 2 (though we'd still recommend skimming the best practices from Google and Bing at the end of this chapter; they're useful refreshers).

For everyone else, this chapter will help build your foundational SEO knowledge and confidence as you move forward.

What is SEO?

SEO stands for “search engine optimization.” It’s the practice of increasing both the quality and quantity of website traffic, as well as exposure to your brand, through non-paid (also known as "organic") search engine results.

Despite the acronym, SEO is as much about people as it is about search engines themselves. It’s about understanding what people are searching for online, the answers they are seeking, the words they’re using, and the type of content they wish to consume. Leveraging this data will allow you to provide high-quality content that your visitors will truly value.

Here’s an example. Frankie & Jo’s (a Seattle-based vegan, gluten-free ice cream shop) has heard about SEO and wants help improving how and how often they show up in organic search results. In order to help them, you need to first understand their potential customers:

What types of ice cream, desserts, snacks, etc. are people searching for?

Who is searching for these terms?

When are people searching for ice cream, snacks, desserts, etc.?

Are there seasonality trends throughout the year?

How are people searching for ice cream?

What words do they use?

What questions do they ask?

Are more searches performed on mobile devices?

Why are people seeking ice cream?

Are individuals looking for health conscious ice cream specifically or just looking to satisfy a sweet tooth?

Where are potential customers located — locally, nationally, or internationally?

And finally — here's the kicker — how can you help provide the best content about ice cream to cultivate a community and fulfill what all those people are searching for?

Search engine basics

Search engines are answer machines. They scour billions of pieces of content and evaluate thousands of factors to determine which content is most likely to answer your query.

Search engines do all of this by discovering and cataloguing all available content on the Internet (web pages, PDFs, images, videos, etc.) via a process known as “crawling and indexing.”

What are "organic" search engine results?

Organic search results are search results that aren't paid for (i.e. not advertising). These are the results that you can influence through effective SEO. Traditionally, these were the familiar "10 blue links."

Today, search engine results pages — often referred to as “SERPs” — are filled with both more advertising and more dynamic organic results formats (called “SERP features”) than we've ever seen before. Some examples of SERP features are featured snippets (or answer boxes), People Also Ask boxes, image carousels, etc. New SERP features continue to emerge, driven largely by what people are seeking.

For example, if you search for "Denver weather," you’ll see a weather forecast for the city of Denver directly in the SERP instead of a link to a site that might have that forecast. And, if you search for “pizza Denver,” you’ll see a “local pack” result made up of Denver pizza places. Convenient, right?

It’s important to remember that search engines make money from advertising. Their goal is to better solve searcher’s queries (within SERPs), to keep searchers coming back, and to keep them on the SERPs longer.

Some SERP features on Google are organic and can be influenced by SEO. These include featured snippets (a promoted organic result that displays an answer inside a box) and related questions (a.k.a. "People Also Ask" boxes).

It's worth noting that there are many other search features that, even though they aren't paid advertising, can't typically be influenced by SEO. These features often have data acquired from proprietary data sources, such as Wikipedia, WebMD, and IMDb.

Why SEO is important

While paid advertising, social media, and other online platforms can generate traffic to websites, the majority of online traffic is driven by search engines.

Organic search results cover more digital real estate, appear more credible to savvy searchers, and receive way more clicks than paid advertisements. For example, of all US searches, only ~2.8% of people click on paid advertisements.

In a nutshell: SEO has ~20X more traffic opportunity than PPC on both mobile and desktop.

SEO is also one of the only online marketing channels that, when set up correctly, can continue to pay dividends over time. If you provide a solid piece of content that deserves to rank for the right keywords, your traffic can snowball over time, whereas advertising needs continuous funding to send traffic to your site.

Search engines are getting smarter, but they still need our help.

Optimizing your site will help deliver better information to search engines so that your content can be properly indexed and displayed within search results.

Should I hire an SEO professional, consultant, or agency?

Depending on your bandwidth, willingness to learn, and the complexity of your website(s), you could perform some basic SEO yourself. Or, you might discover that you would prefer the help of an expert. Either way is okay!

If you end up looking for expert help, it's important to know that many agencies and consultants "provide SEO services," but can vary widely in quality. Knowing how to choose a good SEO company can save you a lot of time and money, as the wrong SEO techniques can actually harm your site more than they will help.

White hat vs black hat SEO

"White hat SEO" refers to SEO techniques, best practices, and strategies that abide by search engine rule, its primary focus to provide more value to people.

"Black hat SEO" refers to techniques and strategies that attempt to spam/fool search engines. While black hat SEO can work, it puts websites at tremendous risk of being penalized and/or de-indexed (removed from search results) and has ethical implications.

Penalized websites have bankrupted businesses. It's just another reason to be very careful when choosing an SEO expert or agency.

Search engines share similar goals with the SEO industry

Search engines want to help you succeed. They're actually quite supportive of efforts by the SEO community. Digital marketing conferences, such as Unbounce, MNsearch, SearchLove, and Moz's own MozCon, regularly attract engineers and representatives from major search engines.

Google assists webmasters and SEOs through their Webmaster Central Help Forum and by hosting live office hour hangouts. (Bing, unfortunately, shut down their Webmaster Forums in 2014.)

While webmaster guidelines vary from search engine to search engine, the underlying principles stay the same: Don’t try to trick search engines. Instead, provide your visitors with a great online experience.

Google webmaster guidelinesBasic principles:

Make pages primarily for users, not search engines.

Don't deceive your users.

Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is whether you'd feel comfortable explaining what you've done to a website to a Google employee. Another useful test is to ask, "Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn't exist?"

Think about what makes your website unique, valuable, or engaging.

Things to avoid:

Automatically generated content

Participating in link schemes

Creating pages with little or no original content (i.e. copied from somewhere else)

Cloaking — the practice of showing search engine crawlers different content than visitors.

Hidden text and links

Doorway pages — pages created to rank well for specific searches to funnel traffic to your website.

Full Google Webmaster Guidelines version here.

Bing webmaster guidelinesBasic principles:

Provide clear, deep, engaging, and easy-to-find content on your site.

Keep page titles clear and relevant.

Links are regarded as a signal of popularity and Bing rewards links that have grown organically.

Social influence and social shares are positive signals and can have an impact on how you rank organically in the long run.

Page speed is important, along with a positive, useful user experience.

Use alt attributes to describe images, so that Bing can better understand the content.

Things to avoid:

Thin content, pages showing mostly ads or affiliate links, or that otherwise redirect visitors away to other sites will not rank well.

Abusive link tactics that aim to inflate the number and nature of inbound links such as buying links, participating in link schemes, can lead to de-indexing.

Ensure clean, concise, keyword-inclusive URL structures are in place. Dynamic parameters can dirty up your URLs and cause duplicate content issues.

Make your URLs descriptive, short, keyword rich when possible, and avoid non-letter characters.

Burying links in Javascript/Flash/Silverlight; keep content out of these as well.

Duplicate content

Keyword stuffing

Cloaking — the practice of showing search engine crawlers different content than visitors.

Guidelines for representing your local business on Google

These guidelines govern what you should and shouldn’t do in creating and managing your Google My Business listing(s).

Basic principles:

Be sure you’re eligible for inclusion in the Google My Business index; you must have a physical address, even if it’s your home address, and you must serve customers face-to-face, either at your location (like a retail store) or at theirs (like a plumber)

Honestly and accurately represent all aspects of your local business data, including its name, address, phone number, website address, business categories, hours of operation, and other features.

Things to avoid

Creation of Google My Business listings for entities that aren’t eligible

Misrepresentation of any of your core business information, including “stuffing” your business name with geographic or service keywords, or creating listings for fake addresses

Use of PO boxes or virtual offices instead of authentic street addresses

Abuse of the review portion of the Google My Business listing, via fake positive reviews of your business or fake negative ones of your competitors

Costly, novice mistakes stemming from failure to read the fine details of Google’s guidelines

Fulfilling user intent

Understanding and fulfilling user intent is critical. When a person searches for something, they have a desired outcome. Whether it’s an answer, concert tickets, or a cat photo, that desired content is their “user intent.”

If a person performs a search for “bands," is their intent to find musical bands, wedding bands, band saws, or something else?

Your job as an SEO is to quickly provide users with the content they desire in the format in which they desire it.

Common user intent types:

Informational: Searching for information. Example: “How old is Issa Rae?”

Navigational: Searching for a specific website. Example: “HBOGO Insecure”

Transactional: Searching to buy something. Example: “where to buy ‘We got y'all’ Insecure t-shirt”

You can get a glimpse of user intent by Googling your desired keyword(s) and evaluating the current SERP. For example, if there's a photo carousel, it’s very likely that people searching for that keyword search for photos.

Also evaluate what content your top-ranking competitors are providing that you currently aren’t. How can you provide 10X the value on your website?

Providing relevant, high-quality content on your website will help you rank higher in search results, and more importantly, it will establish credibility and trust with your online audience.

Before you do any of that, you have to first understand your website’s goals to execute a strategic SEO plan.

Know your website/client’s goals

Every website is different, so take the time to really understand a specific site’s business goals. This will not only help you determine which areas of SEO you should focus on, where to track conversions, and how to set benchmarks, but it will also help you create talking points for negotiating SEO projects with clients, bosses, etc.

What will your KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) be to measure the return on SEO investment? More simply, what is your barometer to measure the success of your organic search efforts? You'll want to have it documented, even if it's this simple:

For the website ________________________, my primary SEO KPI is _______________.

Here are a few common KPIs to get you started:

Sales

Downloads

Email signups

Contact form submissions

Phone calls

And if your business has a local component, you’ll want to define KPIs for your Google My Business listings, as well. These might include:

Clicks-to-call

Clicks-to-website

Clicks-for-driving-directions

Notice how "Traffic" and "Ranking" are not on the above lists? This is because, for most websites, ranking well for keywords and increasing traffic won't matter if the new traffic doesn't convert (to help you reach the site’s KPI goals).

You don't want to send 1,000 people to your website a month and have only 3 people convert (to customers). You want to send 300 people to your site a month and have 40 people convert.

This guide will help you become more data-driven in your SEO efforts. Rather than haphazardly throwing arrows all over the place (and getting lucky every once in awhile), you'll put more wood behind fewer arrows.

Grab a bow (and some coffee); let's dive into Chapter 2 (Crawlers & Indexation).

We're looking forward to hearing your thoughts on this draft of Chapter 1. What works? Anything you feel could be added or explained differently? Let us know your suggestions, questions, and thoughts in the comments.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

http://ift.tt/2nKms2W

[tainghekhongdaycomvn]

Rewriting the Beginner's Guide to SEO, Chapter 1: SEO 101

Rewriting the Beginner's Guide to SEO, Chapter 1: SEO 101

Posted by BritneyMuller

Back in mid-November, we kicked off a campaign to rewrite our biggest piece of content: the Beginner's Guide to SEO. You offered up a huge amount of helpful advice and insight with regards to our outline, and today we're here to share our draft of the first chapter.

In many ways, the Beginner's Guide to SEO belongs to each and every member of our community; it's important that we get this right, for your sake. So without further ado, here's the first chapter — let's dive in!

Chapter 1: SEO 101

What is it, and why is it important?

Welcome! We’re excited that you’re here!

If you already have a solid understanding of SEO and why it's important, you can skip to Chapter 2 (though we'd still recommend skimming the best practices from Google and Bing at the end of this chapter; they're useful refreshers).

For everyone else, this chapter will help build your foundational SEO knowledge and confidence as you move forward.

What is SEO?

SEO stands for “search engine optimization.” It’s the practice of increasing both the quality and quantity of website traffic, as well as exposure to your brand, through non-paid (also known as "organic") search engine results.

Despite the acronym, SEO is as much about people as it is about search engines themselves. It’s about understanding what people are searching for online, the answers they are seeking, the words they’re using, and the type of content they wish to consume. Leveraging this data will allow you to provide high-quality content that your visitors will truly value.

Here’s an example. Frankie & Jo’s (a Seattle-based vegan, gluten-free ice cream shop) has heard about SEO and wants help improving how and how often they show up in organic search results. In order to help them, you need to first understand their potential customers:

What types of ice cream, desserts, snacks, etc. are people searching for?

Who is searching for these terms?

When are people searching for ice cream, snacks, desserts, etc.?

Are there seasonality trends throughout the year?

How are people searching for ice cream?

What words do they use?

What questions do they ask?

Are more searches performed on mobile devices?

Why are people seeking ice cream?

Are individuals looking for health conscious ice cream specifically or just looking to satisfy a sweet tooth?

Where are potential customers located — locally, nationally, or internationally?

And finally — here's the kicker — how can you help provide the best content about ice cream to cultivate a community and fulfill what all those people are searching for?

Search engine basics

Search engines are answer machines. They scour billions of pieces of content and evaluate thousands of factors to determine which content is most likely to answer your query.

Search engines do all of this by discovering and cataloguing all available content on the Internet (web pages, PDFs, images, videos, etc.) via a process known as “crawling and indexing.”

What are "organic" search engine results?

Organic search results are search results that aren't paid for (i.e. not advertising). These are the results that you can influence through effective SEO. Traditionally, these were the familiar "10 blue links."

Today, search engine results pages — often referred to as “SERPs” — are filled with both more advertising and more dynamic organic results formats (called “SERP features”) than we've ever seen before. Some examples of SERP features are featured snippets (or answer boxes), People Also Ask boxes, image carousels, etc. New SERP features continue to emerge, driven largely by what people are seeking.

For example, if you search for "Denver weather," you’ll see a weather forecast for the city of Denver directly in the SERP instead of a link to a site that might have that forecast. And, if you search for “pizza Denver,” you’ll see a “local pack” result made up of Denver pizza places. Convenient, right?

It’s important to remember that search engines make money from advertising. Their goal is to better solve searcher’s queries (within SERPs), to keep searchers coming back, and to keep them on the SERPs longer.

Some SERP features on Google are organic and can be influenced by SEO. These include featured snippets (a promoted organic result that displays an answer inside a box) and related questions (a.k.a. "People Also Ask" boxes).

It's worth noting that there are many other search features that, even though they aren't paid advertising, can't typically be influenced by SEO. These features often have data acquired from proprietary data sources, such as Wikipedia, WebMD, and IMDb.

Why SEO is important

While paid advertising, social media, and other online platforms can generate traffic to websites, the majority of online traffic is driven by search engines.

Organic search results cover more digital real estate, appear more credible to savvy searchers, and receive way more clicks than paid advertisements. For example, of all US searches, only ~2.8% of people click on paid advertisements.

In a nutshell: SEO has ~20X more traffic opportunity than PPC on both mobile and desktop.

SEO is also one of the only online marketing channels that, when set up correctly, can continue to pay dividends over time. If you provide a solid piece of content that deserves to rank for the right keywords, your traffic can snowball over time, whereas advertising needs continuous funding to send traffic to your site.

Search engines are getting smarter, but they still need our help.

Optimizing your site will help deliver better information to search engines so that your content can be properly indexed and displayed within search results.

Should I hire an SEO professional, consultant, or agency?

Depending on your bandwidth, willingness to learn, and the complexity of your website(s), you could perform some basic SEO yourself. Or, you might discover that you would prefer the help of an expert. Either way is okay!

If you end up looking for expert help, it's important to know that many agencies and consultants "provide SEO services," but can vary widely in quality. Knowing how to choose a good SEO company can save you a lot of time and money, as the wrong SEO techniques can actually harm your site more than they will help.

White hat vs black hat SEO

"White hat SEO" refers to SEO techniques, best practices, and strategies that abide by search engine rule, its primary focus to provide more value to people.

"Black hat SEO" refers to techniques and strategies that attempt to spam/fool search engines. While black hat SEO can work, it puts websites at tremendous risk of being penalized and/or de-indexed (removed from search results) and has ethical implications.

Penalized websites have bankrupted businesses. It's just another reason to be very careful when choosing an SEO expert or agency.

Search engines share similar goals with the SEO industry

Search engines want to help you succeed. They're actually quite supportive of efforts by the SEO community. Digital marketing conferences, such as Unbounce, MNsearch, SearchLove, and Moz's own MozCon, regularly attract engineers and representatives from major search engines.

Google assists webmasters and SEOs through their Webmaster Central Help Forum and by hosting live office hour hangouts. (Bing, unfortunately, shut down their Webmaster Forums in 2014.)

While webmaster guidelines vary from search engine to search engine, the underlying principles stay the same: Don’t try to trick search engines. Instead, provide your visitors with a great online experience.

Google webmaster guidelines

Basic principles:

Make pages primarily for users, not search engines.

Don't deceive your users.

Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is whether you'd feel comfortable explaining what you've done to a website to a Google employee. Another useful test is to ask, "Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn't exist?"

Think about what makes your website unique, valuable, or engaging.

Things to avoid:

Automatically generated content

Participating in link schemes

Creating pages with little or no original content (i.e. copied from somewhere else)

Cloaking — the practice of showing search engine crawlers different content than visitors.

Hidden text and links

Doorway pages — pages created to rank well for specific searches to funnel traffic to your website.

Full Google Webmaster Guidelines version here.

Bing webmaster guidelines

Basic principles:

Provide clear, deep, engaging, and easy-to-find content on your site.

Keep page titles clear and relevant.

Links are regarded as a signal of popularity and Bing rewards links that have grown organically.

Social influence and social shares are positive signals and can have an impact on how you rank organically in the long run.

Page speed is important, along with a positive, useful user experience.

Use alt attributes to describe images, so that Bing can better understand the content.

Things to avoid:

Thin content, pages showing mostly ads or affiliate links, or that otherwise redirect visitors away to other sites will not rank well.

Abusive link tactics that aim to inflate the number and nature of inbound links such as buying links, participating in link schemes, can lead to de-indexing.

Ensure clean, concise, keyword-inclusive URL structures are in place. Dynamic parameters can dirty up your URLs and cause duplicate content issues.

Make your URLs descriptive, short, keyword rich when possible, and avoid non-letter characters.

Burying links in Javascript/Flash/Silverlight; keep content out of these as well.

Duplicate content

Keyword stuffing

Cloaking — the practice of showing search engine crawlers different content than visitors.

Guidelines for representing your local business on Google

These guidelines govern what you should and shouldn’t do in creating and managing your Google My Business listing(s).

Basic principles:

Be sure you’re eligible for inclusion in the Google My Business index; you must have a physical address, even if it’s your home address, and you must serve customers face-to-face, either at your location (like a retail store) or at theirs (like a plumber)

Honestly and accurately represent all aspects of your local business data, including its name, address, phone number, website address, business categories, hours of operation, and other features.

Things to avoid

Creation of Google My Business listings for entities that aren’t eligible

Misrepresentation of any of your core business information, including “stuffing” your business name with geographic or service keywords, or creating listings for fake addresses

Use of PO boxes or virtual offices instead of authentic street addresses

Abuse of the review portion of the Google My Business listing, via fake positive reviews of your business or fake negative ones of your competitors

Costly, novice mistakes stemming from failure to read the fine details of Google’s guidelines

Fulfilling user intent

Understanding and fulfilling user intent is critical. When a person searches for something, they have a desired outcome. Whether it’s an answer, concert tickets, or a cat photo, that desired content is their “user intent.”

If a person performs a search for “bands," is their intent to find musical bands, wedding bands, band saws, or something else?

Your job as an SEO is to quickly provide users with the content they desire in the format in which they desire it.

Common user intent types:

Informational: Searching for information. Example: “How old is Issa Rae?”

Navigational: Searching for a specific website. Example: “HBOGO Insecure”

Transactional: Searching to buy something. Example: “where to buy ‘We got y'all’ Insecure t-shirt”

You can get a glimpse of user intent by Googling your desired keyword(s) and evaluating the current SERP. For example, if there's a photo carousel, it’s very likely that people searching for that keyword search for photos.

Also evaluate what content your top-ranking competitors are providing that you currently aren’t. How can you provide 10X the value on your website?

Providing relevant, high-quality content on your website will help you rank higher in search results, and more importantly, it will establish credibility and trust with your online audience.

Before you do any of that, you have to first understand your website’s goals to execute a strategic SEO plan.

Know your website/client’s goals

Every website is different, so take the time to really understand a specific site’s business goals. This will not only help you determine which areas of SEO you should focus on, where to track conversions, and how to set benchmarks, but it will also help you create talking points for negotiating SEO projects with clients, bosses, etc.

What will your KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) be to measure the return on SEO investment? More simply, what is your barometer to measure the success of your organic search efforts? You'll want to have it documented, even if it's this simple:

For the website ________________________, my primary SEO KPI is _______________.

Here are a few common KPIs to get you started:

Sales

Downloads

Email signups

Contact form submissions

Phone calls

And if your business has a local component, you’ll want to define KPIs for your Google My Business listings, as well. These might include:

Clicks-to-call

Clicks-to-website

Clicks-for-driving-directions

Notice how "Traffic" and "Ranking" are not on the above lists? This is because, for most websites, ranking well for keywords and increasing traffic won't matter if the new traffic doesn't convert (to help you reach the site’s KPI goals).

You don't want to send 1,000 people to your website a month and have only 3 people convert (to customers). You want to send 300 people to your site a month and have 40 people convert.

This guide will help you become more data-driven in your SEO efforts. Rather than haphazardly throwing arrows all over the place (and getting lucky every once in awhile), you'll put more wood behind fewer arrows.

Grab a bow (and some coffee); let's dive into Chapter 2 (Crawlers & Indexation).

We're looking forward to hearing your thoughts on this draft of Chapter 1. What works? Anything you feel could be added or explained differently? Let us know your suggestions, questions, and thoughts in the comments.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

xem them tai http://ift.tt/2o9GYfe Rewriting the Beginner's Guide to SEO, Chapter 1: SEO 101 xem thêm tại: http://ift.tt/2mb4VST để biết thêm về địa chỉ bán tai nghe không dây giá rẻ Rewriting the Beginner's Guide to SEO, Chapter 1: SEO 101 http://ift.tt/eA8V8J xem thêm tại: http://ift.tt/2mb4VST để biết thêm về địa chỉ bán tai nghe không dây giá rẻ Rewriting the Beginner's Guide to SEO, Chapter 1: SEO 101 http://ift.tt/eA8V8J xem thêm tại: http://ift.tt/2mb4VST để biết thêm về địa chỉ bán tai nghe không dây giá rẻ Rewriting the Beginner's Guide to SEO, Chapter 1: SEO 101 http://ift.tt/eA8V8J xem thêm tại: http://ift.tt/2mb4VST để biết thêm về địa chỉ bán tai nghe không dây giá rẻ Rewriting the Beginner's Guide to SEO, Chapter 1: SEO 101 http://ift.tt/eA8V8J xem thêm tại: http://ift.tt/2mb4VST để biết thêm về địa chỉ bán tai nghe không dây giá rẻ Rewriting the Beginner's Guide to SEO, Chapter 1: SEO 101 http://ift.tt/eA8V8J xem thêm tại: http://ift.tt/2mb4VST để biết thêm về địa chỉ bán tai nghe không dây giá rẻ Rewriting the Beginner's Guide to SEO, Chapter 1: SEO 101 http://ift.tt/eA8V8J xem thêm tại: http://ift.tt/2mb4VST để biết thêm về địa chỉ bán tai nghe không dây giá rẻ Rewriting the Beginner's Guide to SEO, Chapter 1: SEO 101 http://ift.tt/eA8V8J xem thêm tại: http://ift.tt/2mb4VST để biết thêm về địa chỉ bán tai nghe không dây giá rẻ Rewriting the Beginner's Guide to SEO, Chapter 1: SEO 101 http://ift.tt/eA8V8J xem thêm tại: http://ift.tt/2mb4VST để biết thêm về địa chỉ bán tai nghe không dây giá rẻ Rewriting the Beginner's Guide to SEO, Chapter 1: SEO 101 http://ift.tt/eA8V8J xem thêm tại: http://ift.tt/2mb4VST để biết thêm về địa chỉ bán tai nghe không dây giá rẻ Rewriting the Beginner's Guide to SEO, Chapter 1: SEO 101 http://ift.tt/eA8V8J xem thêm tại: http://ift.tt/2mb4VST để biết thêm về địa chỉ bán tai nghe không dây giá rẻ Rewriting the Beginner's Guide to SEO, Chapter 1: SEO 101 http://ift.tt/eA8V8J xem thêm tại: http://ift.tt/2mb4VST để biết thêm về địa chỉ bán tai nghe không dây giá rẻ Rewriting the Beginner's Guide to SEO, Chapter 1: SEO 101 http://ift.tt/eA8V8J xem thêm tại: http://ift.tt/2mb4VST để biết thêm về địa chỉ bán tai nghe không dây giá rẻ Rewriting the Beginner's Guide to SEO, Chapter 1: SEO 101 http://ift.tt/eA8V8J xem thêm tại: http://ift.tt/2mb4VST để biết thêm về địa chỉ bán tai nghe không dây giá rẻ Rewriting the Beginner's Guide to SEO, Chapter 1: SEO 101 http://ift.tt/eA8V8J xem thêm tại: http://ift.tt/2mb4VST để biết thêm về địa chỉ bán tai nghe không dây giá rẻ Rewriting the Beginner's Guide to SEO, Chapter 1: SEO 101 http://ift.tt/eA8V8J xem thêm tại: http://ift.tt/2mb4VST để biết thêm về địa chỉ bán tai nghe không dây giá rẻ Rewriting the Beginner's Guide to SEO, Chapter 1: SEO 101 http://ift.tt/eA8V8J xem thêm tại: http://ift.tt/2mb4VST để biết thêm về địa chỉ bán tai nghe không dây giá rẻ Rewriting the Beginner's Guide to SEO, Chapter 1: SEO 101 http://ift.tt/eA8V8J xem thêm tại: http://ift.tt/2mb4VST để biết thêm về địa chỉ bán tai nghe không dây giá rẻ Rewriting the Beginner's Guide to SEO, Chapter 1: SEO 101 http://ift.tt/eA8V8J xem thêm tại: http://ift.tt/2mb4VST để biết thêm về địa chỉ bán tai nghe không dây giá rẻ Rewriting the Beginner's Guide to SEO, Chapter 1: SEO 101 http://ift.tt/eA8V8J xem thêm tại: http://ift.tt/2mb4VST để biết thêm về địa chỉ bán tai nghe không dây giá rẻ Rewriting the Beginner's Guide to SEO, Chapter 1: SEO 101 http://ift.tt/eA8V8J xem thêm tại: http://ift.tt/2mb4VST để biết thêm về địa chỉ bán tai nghe không dây giá rẻ Rewriting the Beginner's Guide to SEO, Chapter 1: SEO 101 http://ift.tt/eA8V8J xem thêm tại: http://ift.tt/2mb4VST để biết thêm về địa chỉ bán tai nghe không dây giá rẻ Rewriting the Beginner's Guide to SEO, Chapter 1: SEO 101 http://ift.tt/eA8V8J xem thêm tại: http://ift.tt/2mb4VST để biết thêm về địa chỉ bán tai nghe không dây giá rẻ Rewriting the Beginner's Guide to SEO, Chapter 1: SEO 101 http://ift.tt/eA8V8J Bạn có thể xem thêm địa chỉ mua tai nghe không dây tại đây http://ift.tt/2mb4VST

[mercedessharonwo1]

Rewriting the Beginner's Guide to SEO, Chapter 1: SEO 101

Posted by BritneyMuller

Back in mid-November, we kicked off a campaign to rewrite our biggest piece of content: the Beginner's Guide to SEO. You offered up a huge amount of helpful advice and insight with regards to our outline, and today we're here to share our draft of the first chapter.

In many ways, the Beginner's Guide to SEO belongs to each and every member of our community; it's important that we get this right, for your sake. So without further ado, here's the first chapter — let's dive in!

Chapter 1: SEO 101What is it, and why is it important?

Welcome! We’re excited that you’re here!

If you already have a solid understanding of SEO and why it's important, you can skip to Chapter 2 (though we'd still recommend skimming the best practices from Google and Bing at the end of this chapter; they're useful refreshers).

For everyone else, this chapter will help build your foundational SEO knowledge and confidence as you move forward.

What is SEO?

SEO stands for “search engine optimization.” It’s the practice of increasing both the quality and quantity of website traffic, as well as exposure to your brand, through non-paid (also known as "organic") search engine results.

Despite the acronym, SEO is as much about people as it is about search engines themselves. It’s about understanding what people are searching for online, the answers they are seeking, the words they’re using, and the type of content they wish to consume. Leveraging this data will allow you to provide high-quality content that your visitors will truly value.

Here’s an example. Frankie & Jo’s (a Seattle-based vegan, gluten-free ice cream shop) has heard about SEO and wants help improving how and how often they show up in organic search results. In order to help them, you need to first understand their potential customers:

What types of ice cream, desserts, snacks, etc. are people searching for?

Who is searching for these terms?

When are people searching for ice cream, snacks, desserts, etc.?

Are there seasonality trends throughout the year?

How are people searching for ice cream?

What words do they use?

What questions do they ask?

Are more searches performed on mobile devices?

Why are people seeking ice cream?

Are individuals looking for health conscious ice cream specifically or just looking to satisfy a sweet tooth?

Where are potential customers located — locally, nationally, or internationally?

And finally — here's the kicker — how can you help provide the best content about ice cream to cultivate a community and fulfill what all those people are searching for?

Search engine basics

Search engines are answer machines. They scour billions of pieces of content and evaluate thousands of factors to determine which content is most likely to answer your query.

Search engines do all of this by discovering and cataloguing all available content on the Internet (web pages, PDFs, images, videos, etc.) via a process known as “crawling and indexing.”

What are "organic" search engine results?

Organic search results are search results that aren't paid for (i.e. not advertising). These are the results that you can influence through effective SEO. Traditionally, these were the familiar "10 blue links."

Today, search engine results pages — often referred to as “SERPs” — are filled with both more advertising and more dynamic organic results formats (called “SERP features”) than we've ever seen before. Some examples of SERP features are featured snippets (or answer boxes), People Also Ask boxes, image carousels, etc. New SERP features continue to emerge, driven largely by what people are seeking.

For example, if you search for "Denver weather," you’ll see a weather forecast for the city of Denver directly in the SERP instead of a link to a site that might have that forecast. And, if you search for “pizza Denver,” you’ll see a “local pack” result made up of Denver pizza places. Convenient, right?

It’s important to remember that search engines make money from advertising. Their goal is to better solve searcher’s queries (within SERPs), to keep searchers coming back, and to keep them on the SERPs longer.

Some SERP features on Google are organic and can be influenced by SEO. These include featured snippets (a promoted organic result that displays an answer inside a box) and related questions (a.k.a. "People Also Ask" boxes).

It's worth noting that there are many other search features that, even though they aren't paid advertising, can't typically be influenced by SEO. These features often have data acquired from proprietary data sources, such as Wikipedia, WebMD, and IMDb.

Why SEO is important

While paid advertising, social media, and other online platforms can generate traffic to websites, the majority of online traffic is driven by search engines.

Organic search results cover more digital real estate, appear more credible to savvy searchers, and receive way more clicks than paid advertisements. For example, of all US searches, only ~2.8% of people click on paid advertisements.

In a nutshell: SEO has ~20X more traffic opportunity than PPC on both mobile and desktop.

SEO is also one of the only online marketing channels that, when set up correctly, can continue to pay dividends over time. If you provide a solid piece of content that deserves to rank for the right keywords, your traffic can snowball over time, whereas advertising needs continuous funding to send traffic to your site.

Search engines are getting smarter, but they still need our help.

Optimizing your site will help deliver better information to search engines so that your content can be properly indexed and displayed within search results.

Should I hire an SEO professional, consultant, or agency?

Depending on your bandwidth, willingness to learn, and the complexity of your website(s), you could perform some basic SEO yourself. Or, you might discover that you would prefer the help of an expert. Either way is okay!

If you end up looking for expert help, it's important to know that many agencies and consultants "provide SEO services," but can vary widely in quality. Knowing how to choose a good SEO company can save you a lot of time and money, as the wrong SEO techniques can actually harm your site more than they will help.

White hat vs black hat SEO

"White hat SEO" refers to SEO techniques, best practices, and strategies that abide by search engine rule, its primary focus to provide more value to people.

"Black hat SEO" refers to techniques and strategies that attempt to spam/fool search engines. While black hat SEO can work, it puts websites at tremendous risk of being penalized and/or de-indexed (removed from search results) and has ethical implications.

Penalized websites have bankrupted businesses. It's just another reason to be very careful when choosing an SEO expert or agency.

Search engines share similar goals with the SEO industry

Search engines want to help you succeed. They're actually quite supportive of efforts by the SEO community. Digital marketing conferences, such as Unbounce, MNsearch, SearchLove, and Moz's own MozCon, regularly attract engineers and representatives from major search engines.

Google assists webmasters and SEOs through their Webmaster Central Help Forum and by hosting live office hour hangouts. (Bing, unfortunately, shut down their Webmaster Forums in 2014.)

While webmaster guidelines vary from search engine to search engine, the underlying principles stay the same: Don’t try to trick search engines. Instead, provide your visitors with a great online experience.

Google webmaster guidelinesBasic principles:

Make pages primarily for users, not search engines.

Don't deceive your users.

Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is whether you'd feel comfortable explaining what you've done to a website to a Google employee. Another useful test is to ask, "Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn't exist?"

Think about what makes your website unique, valuable, or engaging.

Things to avoid:

Automatically generated content

Participating in link schemes

Creating pages with little or no original content (i.e. copied from somewhere else)

Cloaking — the practice of showing search engine crawlers different content than visitors.

Hidden text and links

Doorway pages — pages created to rank well for specific searches to funnel traffic to your website.

Full Google Webmaster Guidelines version here.

Bing webmaster guidelinesBasic principles:

Provide clear, deep, engaging, and easy-to-find content on your site.

Keep page titles clear and relevant.

Links are regarded as a signal of popularity and Bing rewards links that have grown organically.

Social influence and social shares are positive signals and can have an impact on how you rank organically in the long run.

Page speed is important, along with a positive, useful user experience.

Use alt attributes to describe images, so that Bing can better understand the content.

Things to avoid:

Thin content, pages showing mostly ads or affiliate links, or that otherwise redirect visitors away to other sites will not rank well.

Abusive link tactics that aim to inflate the number and nature of inbound links such as buying links, participating in link schemes, can lead to de-indexing.

Ensure clean, concise, keyword-inclusive URL structures are in place. Dynamic parameters can dirty up your URLs and cause duplicate content issues.

Make your URLs descriptive, short, keyword rich when possible, and avoid non-letter characters.

Burying links in Javascript/Flash/Silverlight; keep content out of these as well.

Duplicate content

Keyword stuffing

Cloaking — the practice of showing search engine crawlers different content than visitors.

Guidelines for representing your local business on Google

These guidelines govern what you should and shouldn’t do in creating and managing your Google My Business listing(s).

Basic principles:

Be sure you’re eligible for inclusion in the Google My Business index; you must have a physical address, even if it’s your home address, and you must serve customers face-to-face, either at your location (like a retail store) or at theirs (like a plumber)

Honestly and accurately represent all aspects of your local business data, including its name, address, phone number, website address, business categories, hours of operation, and other features.

Things to avoid

Creation of Google My Business listings for entities that aren’t eligible

Misrepresentation of any of your core business information, including “stuffing” your business name with geographic or service keywords, or creating listings for fake addresses

Use of PO boxes or virtual offices instead of authentic street addresses

Abuse of the review portion of the Google My Business listing, via fake positive reviews of your business or fake negative ones of your competitors

Costly, novice mistakes stemming from failure to read the fine details of Google’s guidelines

Fulfilling user intent

Understanding and fulfilling user intent is critical. When a person searches for something, they have a desired outcome. Whether it’s an answer, concert tickets, or a cat photo, that desired content is their “user intent.”

If a person performs a search for “bands," is their intent to find musical bands, wedding bands, band saws, or something else?

Your job as an SEO is to quickly provide users with the content they desire in the format in which they desire it.

Common user intent types:

Informational: Searching for information. Example: “How old is Issa Rae?”

Navigational: Searching for a specific website. Example: “HBOGO Insecure”

Transactional: Searching to buy something. Example: “where to buy ‘We got y'all’ Insecure t-shirt”

You can get a glimpse of user intent by Googling your desired keyword(s) and evaluating the current SERP. For example, if there's a photo carousel, it’s very likely that people searching for that keyword search for photos.

Also evaluate what content your top-ranking competitors are providing that you currently aren’t. How can you provide 10X the value on your website?

Providing relevant, high-quality content on your website will help you rank higher in search results, and more importantly, it will establish credibility and trust with your online audience.

Before you do any of that, you have to first understand your website’s goals to execute a strategic SEO plan.

Know your website/client’s goals

Every website is different, so take the time to really understand a specific site’s business goals. This will not only help you determine which areas of SEO you should focus on, where to track conversions, and how to set benchmarks, but it will also help you create talking points for negotiating SEO projects with clients, bosses, etc.

What will your KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) be to measure the return on SEO investment? More simply, what is your barometer to measure the success of your organic search efforts? You'll want to have it documented, even if it's this simple:

For the website ________________________, my primary SEO KPI is _______________.

Here are a few common KPIs to get you started:

Sales

Downloads

Email signups

Contact form submissions

Phone calls

And if your business has a local component, you’ll want to define KPIs for your Google My Business listings, as well. These might include:

Clicks-to-call

Clicks-to-website

Clicks-for-driving-directions

Notice how "Traffic" and "Ranking" are not on the above lists? This is because, for most websites, ranking well for keywords and increasing traffic won't matter if the new traffic doesn't convert (to help you reach the site’s KPI goals).

You don't want to send 1,000 people to your website a month and have only 3 people convert (to customers). You want to send 300 people to your site a month and have 40 people convert.

This guide will help you become more data-driven in your SEO efforts. Rather than haphazardly throwing arrows all over the place (and getting lucky every once in awhile), you'll put more wood behind fewer arrows.

Grab a bow (and some coffee); let's dive into Chapter 2 (Crawlers & Indexation).

We're looking forward to hearing your thoughts on this draft of Chapter 1. What works? Anything you feel could be added or explained differently? Let us know your suggestions, questions, and thoughts in the comments.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

http://ift.tt/2nKms2W

[kraussoutene]

Rewriting the Beginner's Guide to SEO, Chapter 1: SEO 101

Posted by BritneyMuller

Back in mid-November, we kicked off a campaign to rewrite our biggest piece of content: the Beginner's Guide to SEO. You offered up a huge amount of helpful advice and insight with regards to our outline, and today we're here to share our draft of the first chapter.

In many ways, the Beginner's Guide to SEO belongs to each and every member of our community; it's important that we get this right, for your sake. So without further ado, here's the first chapter — let's dive in!

Chapter 1: SEO 101What is it, and why is it important?

Welcome! We’re excited that you’re here!

If you already have a solid understanding of SEO and why it's important, you can skip to Chapter 2 (though we'd still recommend skimming the best practices from Google and Bing at the end of this chapter; they're useful refreshers).

For everyone else, this chapter will help build your foundational SEO knowledge and confidence as you move forward.

What is SEO?

SEO stands for “search engine optimization.” It’s the practice of increasing both the quality and quantity of website traffic, as well as exposure to your brand, through non-paid (also known as "organic") search engine results.

Despite the acronym, SEO is as much about people as it is about search engines themselves. It’s about understanding what people are searching for online, the answers they are seeking, the words they’re using, and the type of content they wish to consume. Leveraging this data will allow you to provide high-quality content that your visitors will truly value.

Here’s an example. Frankie & Jo’s (a Seattle-based vegan, gluten-free ice cream shop) has heard about SEO and wants help improving how and how often they show up in organic search results. In order to help them, you need to first understand their potential customers:

What types of ice cream, desserts, snacks, etc. are people searching for?

Who is searching for these terms?

When are people searching for ice cream, snacks, desserts, etc.?

Are there seasonality trends throughout the year?

How are people searching for ice cream?

What words do they use?

What questions do they ask?

Are more searches performed on mobile devices?

Why are people seeking ice cream?

Are individuals looking for health conscious ice cream specifically or just looking to satisfy a sweet tooth?

Where are potential customers located — locally, nationally, or internationally?

And finally — here's the kicker — how can you help provide the best content about ice cream to cultivate a community and fulfill what all those people are searching for?

Search engine basics

Search engines are answer machines. They scour billions of pieces of content and evaluate thousands of factors to determine which content is most likely to answer your query.

Search engines do all of this by discovering and cataloguing all available content on the Internet (web pages, PDFs, images, videos, etc.) via a process known as “crawling and indexing.”

What are "organic" search engine results?

Organic search results are search results that aren't paid for (i.e. not advertising). These are the results that you can influence through effective SEO. Traditionally, these were the familiar "10 blue links."

Today, search engine results pages — often referred to as “SERPs” — are filled with both more advertising and more dynamic organic results formats (called “SERP features”) than we've ever seen before. Some examples of SERP features are featured snippets (or answer boxes), People Also Ask boxes, image carousels, etc. New SERP features continue to emerge, driven largely by what people are seeking.

For example, if you search for "Denver weather," you’ll see a weather forecast for the city of Denver directly in the SERP instead of a link to a site that might have that forecast. And, if you search for “pizza Denver,” you’ll see a “local pack” result made up of Denver pizza places. Convenient, right?

It’s important to remember that search engines make money from advertising. Their goal is to better solve searcher’s queries (within SERPs), to keep searchers coming back, and to keep them on the SERPs longer.

Some SERP features on Google are organic and can be influenced by SEO. These include featured snippets (a promoted organic result that displays an answer inside a box) and related questions (a.k.a. "People Also Ask" boxes).

It's worth noting that there are many other search features that, even though they aren't paid advertising, can't typically be influenced by SEO. These features often have data acquired from proprietary data sources, such as Wikipedia, WebMD, and IMDb.

Why SEO is important

While paid advertising, social media, and other online platforms can generate traffic to websites, the majority of online traffic is driven by search engines.

Organic search results cover more digital real estate, appear more credible to savvy searchers, and receive way more clicks than paid advertisements. For example, of all US searches, only ~2.8% of people click on paid advertisements.

In a nutshell: SEO has ~20X more traffic opportunity than PPC on both mobile and desktop.

SEO is also one of the only online marketing channels that, when set up correctly, can continue to pay dividends over time. If you provide a solid piece of content that deserves to rank for the right keywords, your traffic can snowball over time, whereas advertising needs continuous funding to send traffic to your site.

Search engines are getting smarter, but they still need our help.

Optimizing your site will help deliver better information to search engines so that your content can be properly indexed and displayed within search results.

Should I hire an SEO professional, consultant, or agency?

Depending on your bandwidth, willingness to learn, and the complexity of your website(s), you could perform some basic SEO yourself. Or, you might discover that you would prefer the help of an expert. Either way is okay!

If you end up looking for expert help, it's important to know that many agencies and consultants "provide SEO services," but can vary widely in quality. Knowing how to choose a good SEO company can save you a lot of time and money, as the wrong SEO techniques can actually harm your site more than they will help.

White hat vs black hat SEO

"White hat SEO" refers to SEO techniques, best practices, and strategies that abide by search engine rule, its primary focus to provide more value to people.

"Black hat SEO" refers to techniques and strategies that attempt to spam/fool search engines. While black hat SEO can work, it puts websites at tremendous risk of being penalized and/or de-indexed (removed from search results) and has ethical implications.

Penalized websites have bankrupted businesses. It's just another reason to be very careful when choosing an SEO expert or agency.

Search engines share similar goals with the SEO industry

Search engines want to help you succeed. They're actually quite supportive of efforts by the SEO community. Digital marketing conferences, such as Unbounce, MNsearch, SearchLove, and Moz's own MozCon, regularly attract engineers and representatives from major search engines.

Google assists webmasters and SEOs through their Webmaster Central Help Forum and by hosting live office hour hangouts. (Bing, unfortunately, shut down their Webmaster Forums in 2014.)

While webmaster guidelines vary from search engine to search engine, the underlying principles stay the same: Don’t try to trick search engines. Instead, provide your visitors with a great online experience.

Google webmaster guidelinesBasic principles:

Make pages primarily for users, not search engines.

Don't deceive your users.

Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is whether you'd feel comfortable explaining what you've done to a website to a Google employee. Another useful test is to ask, "Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn't exist?"

Think about what makes your website unique, valuable, or engaging.

Things to avoid:

Automatically generated content

Participating in link schemes

Creating pages with little or no original content (i.e. copied from somewhere else)

Cloaking — the practice of showing search engine crawlers different content than visitors.

Hidden text and links

Doorway pages — pages created to rank well for specific searches to funnel traffic to your website.

Full Google Webmaster Guidelines version here.

Bing webmaster guidelinesBasic principles:

Provide clear, deep, engaging, and easy-to-find content on your site.

Keep page titles clear and relevant.

Links are regarded as a signal of popularity and Bing rewards links that have grown organically.

Social influence and social shares are positive signals and can have an impact on how you rank organically in the long run.

Page speed is important, along with a positive, useful user experience.

Use alt attributes to describe images, so that Bing can better understand the content.

Things to avoid:

Thin content, pages showing mostly ads or affiliate links, or that otherwise redirect visitors away to other sites will not rank well.

Abusive link tactics that aim to inflate the number and nature of inbound links such as buying links, participating in link schemes, can lead to de-indexing.

Ensure clean, concise, keyword-inclusive URL structures are in place. Dynamic parameters can dirty up your URLs and cause duplicate content issues.

Make your URLs descriptive, short, keyword rich when possible, and avoid non-letter characters.

Burying links in Javascript/Flash/Silverlight; keep content out of these as well.

Duplicate content

Keyword stuffing

Cloaking — the practice of showing search engine crawlers different content than visitors.

Guidelines for representing your local business on Google

These guidelines govern what you should and shouldn’t do in creating and managing your Google My Business listing(s).

Basic principles:

Be sure you’re eligible for inclusion in the Google My Business index; you must have a physical address, even if it’s your home address, and you must serve customers face-to-face, either at your location (like a retail store) or at theirs (like a plumber)

Honestly and accurately represent all aspects of your local business data, including its name, address, phone number, website address, business categories, hours of operation, and other features.

Things to avoid

Creation of Google My Business listings for entities that aren’t eligible

Misrepresentation of any of your core business information, including “stuffing” your business name with geographic or service keywords, or creating listings for fake addresses

Use of PO boxes or virtual offices instead of authentic street addresses

Abuse of the review portion of the Google My Business listing, via fake positive reviews of your business or fake negative ones of your competitors

Costly, novice mistakes stemming from failure to read the fine details of Google’s guidelines

Fulfilling user intent

Understanding and fulfilling user intent is critical. When a person searches for something, they have a desired outcome. Whether it’s an answer, concert tickets, or a cat photo, that desired content is their “user intent.”

If a person performs a search for “bands," is their intent to find musical bands, wedding bands, band saws, or something else?

Your job as an SEO is to quickly provide users with the content they desire in the format in which they desire it.

Common user intent types:

Informational: Searching for information. Example: “How old is Issa Rae?”

Navigational: Searching for a specific website. Example: “HBOGO Insecure”

Transactional: Searching to buy something. Example: “where to buy ‘We got y'all’ Insecure t-shirt”

You can get a glimpse of user intent by Googling your desired keyword(s) and evaluating the current SERP. For example, if there's a photo carousel, it’s very likely that people searching for that keyword search for photos.

Also evaluate what content your top-ranking competitors are providing that you currently aren’t. How can you provide 10X the value on your website?

Providing relevant, high-quality content on your website will help you rank higher in search results, and more importantly, it will establish credibility and trust with your online audience.

Before you do any of that, you have to first understand your website’s goals to execute a strategic SEO plan.

Know your website/client’s goals

Every website is different, so take the time to really understand a specific site’s business goals. This will not only help you determine which areas of SEO you should focus on, where to track conversions, and how to set benchmarks, but it will also help you create talking points for negotiating SEO projects with clients, bosses, etc.

What will your KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) be to measure the return on SEO investment? More simply, what is your barometer to measure the success of your organic search efforts? You'll want to have it documented, even if it's this simple:

For the website ________________________, my primary SEO KPI is _______________.

Here are a few common KPIs to get you started:

Sales

Downloads

Email signups

Contact form submissions

Phone calls

And if your business has a local component, you’ll want to define KPIs for your Google My Business listings, as well. These might include:

Clicks-to-call

Clicks-to-website

Clicks-for-driving-directions

Notice how "Traffic" and "Ranking" are not on the above lists? This is because, for most websites, ranking well for keywords and increasing traffic won't matter if the new traffic doesn't convert (to help you reach the site’s KPI goals).

You don't want to send 1,000 people to your website a month and have only 3 people convert (to customers). You want to send 300 people to your site a month and have 40 people convert.

This guide will help you become more data-driven in your SEO efforts. Rather than haphazardly throwing arrows all over the place (and getting lucky every once in awhile), you'll put more wood behind fewer arrows.

Grab a bow (and some coffee); let's dive into Chapter 2 (Crawlers & Indexation).

We're looking forward to hearing your thoughts on this draft of Chapter 1. What works? Anything you feel could be added or explained differently? Let us know your suggestions, questions, and thoughts in the comments.

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