Frankel Interactive

Google’s Featured Snippet and How it Benefits You

Adam Frankel — 2016-07-29

Google tries to understand a searcher’s intent when displaying results for his/her query. Google has been doing this for a while now and experts believe it can revolutionize searching.

Once, searching was fully syntax-driven. But Google’s been gradually reducing the importance of syntax and increasing the importance of semantics. Featured snippet is a step taken by Google to this direction.

What is featured snippet?

It’s difficult not to notice featured snippets because they occupy almost 10% of Search Engine Results Page content. See the Mozcast Feature Graph below:

Source

After you type a query in the search-box and press “Enter”, Google may show you a paragraph with detailed information about the topic of search or an ordered list. That’s a featured snippet.

A featured snippet appears above the organic results in the SERP. Google shows the page URL underneath the information.

Featured snippet increases CTR

Those eyeing at a high CTR have two options;

Running a paid campaign
Getting a top rank in Google

The former may be easy but burns a hole in the wallet. The latter is time-consuming and very complex. The SERP features only ten websites and millions of sites fight with each other for securing a place among the ten.

Featured snippet is an alternative to ranking. A page can appear in the SERP without getting a top rank in Google. That being said, its odds of being used for featured snippet increases when another page from the same site ranks in Google for the same query.

See the screenshot below:

The keyword was “how to add texturing.” The red and blue URLs are from two different pages, but from the same site. The page with the blue URL ranked top, thereby prompting Google to use the page with red URL for featured snippet.

The CTR gets a boost if two pages appear in the SERP. Technically, it gets almost doubled. Case studies show that featured snippet can increase the CTR to more than 500%. Columnist Ben Goodsell wrote that his client’s site saw a whopping 516% increase in CTR after its pages were used for featured snippets by Google.

It’s a bit erratic

For rich snippets, there are quite a few structured data markup tags. You can add #itemprop, #itemscope, json-ld to existing HTML tags to signal to Google that the content can be used for rich snippet.

But when it comes to featured snippet, Google categorically said that there’s no marking system at place. Google statement on this reads:

“Google programmatically determines that a page contains a likely answer to the user's question, and displays the result as a featured snippet.”

Only Google can decide whether or not a page has the potential for being used for a snippet. Aside from that, two different results may generate for the same search query, without and without interrogative expressions.

See the screenshot below:

The search query was “composite index.” There’s no featured snippet among the results. Now see the interrogative variation of the same query below:

The search query was “what is composite index” and Google displayed a featured snippet.

There’s no way for us to know how Google’s algorithms work. But we can follow the steps below to increase our chances of getting featured snippets.

Follow the Q&A pattern

The search queries are questions and featured snippets are the answers - at least, Google treats them this way. So while drafting the site content, anticipate the possible questions related to the topic you are covering and make sure the content answers those questions.

This will drastically improve your chances of gaining a featured snippet. The answer should be direct and concise without any ambiguity, and it should have additional information that offers value to the searcher. A study on featured snippet scanned through over 100000 examples and found that content with said attributes is likely to be used for featured snippets.

Adwords and Google suggestion

The Q&A strategy described above works, but anticipating the questions is challenging. To overcome this challenge, leverage Google’s suggestion feature along with AdWords.

They give you keyword ideas, which you can use as proxy for questions and draft the content as answer to those questions. This strategy works better if you think of long-tail versions of the keywords. For example, you are writing on chimney cleaning and your keyword is “soot removal.” The long-tail version of this keyword can be “how to remove soot from chimney flue.”

Note, the variation is not only long-tail but has “how-to” in it, which makes it look like a question. A searcher may not use this specific keyword but something that’s similar to it.

Prioritize voice search

Google is aiming to make semantic searching a reality. Voice-activated search is a step taken to this direction. Handheld devices have personal digital assistants. Windows phones have Cortana, iPhone has Siri, Android phones have an army of them including Iris, Vlingo, Skyvi, etc. Whether built-in or third-party, these apps allow for voice search.

Voice search queries can be supplementary to each other. For example, the query “is Donald Trump a billionaire” is not connected to “can he drive growth” in non-voice search. But voice search connects them.

How do voice search and featured snippet add up? The idea of featured snippet is based on semantic resemblance between the search query and the results. It can be useful in bagging mobile traffic. It’s available on mobile where many people voice search and the digital assistants recognize that consecutive queries are actually connected.

This increases the odds getting featured snippet for additional search queries, which is tough on the desktop platform. As an inbound marketer, all you need to do is create the content as the answer to not just one search query, but various other related queries. That’s possible when the content is detailed, elaborate and sneaks into each crack and crevice in the topic being covered.

Conclusion

If a page comes in Google’s ranking, then the chances increase for other pages on the site to be used for featured snippets. Hence, even though featured snippet provides an alternate route to a high CTR, getting one is compatible with the ranking goals.

Image Courtesy: pixabay.com

Useful Tips for Digital Marketers to Make Better Use of Google Maps

Adam Frankel — 2016-06-08

Running an online business gives you the ability to consider Google Maps listing unnecessary. But businesses operating from a fixed location lack this benefit. Google Maps listing is indispensable for them.

It endows them with better visibility against local search queries. Studies indicate more than 80% of searchers who use local keywords visit the physical outlets to buy staff. The map listing is a form of optimization as it beckons Google to look at the onsite content as local content.

The setup process

You can set up Google Maps listing for your business in two ways; go to Google My Business, sign in with your Gmail account and add your business by accurately providing the business name, address and phone number (NAP), selecting a suitable category and verifying and confirming that it’s your business.

There’s another way; Google keeps a list of established businesses in its directory. If your business is one, you could find it by searching with its name and address. Once you find it, claim it. After the verification, Google will map NAP and other information about your business with the Google+ page that you’d set up.

Identifying the consumers

The setup process is easy but identifying the consumers is not. Problem is you cannot skip it as Google Maps marketing is counter-productive for your business unless you first identify your consumers.

In my opinion, local stores can have two types of consumers - people who live in the vicinity of the store and people who are accidentally near to the store, trying to find a local business through a mobile search.

Unexpected leverage

What’s great about Google Maps marketing is you have a fewways to leverage it. One of them is your store’s location, another is the reviews you are getting across the search directories. Yet another way to leverage it is through keyword usage.

Surprised to hear keyword usage?

You have reason to feel surprised because keyword optimization is normally done only for the sake of it, as it simply isn’t a really relevant and weighted SEO tactic on your site. But as I said, the apparently-unimportant keyword optimization is uber-important when it comes to Google Maps marketing. It is a leverage and in a sense, unexpected.

Keyword optimization is anything but a routine activity for a local business that expects to rank top on Google’s map results. The introduction area of Google My Business has a text editor where you can add a brief description of your business and pitch the UVP. This is where you can use the relevant keywords. Rest assured, there’ll be a payoff.

Image optimization

There’s no dearth of businesses that don’t bother adding images in their Google My Business listing. That’s a grave mistake. Adding photographs may not give you any direct benefit, but it makes the listing appear more attractive.

There are three rules of thumb when it comes to adding images. Here they are:

Never add stock images, always add original images.
Add more than one image
The images should be taken by a professional photographer

Adding images alone is not enough, you need to optimize the images by adding meta-data. The relevant meta-tags related to your store’s address are latitude, longitude and location abbreviation.

Reviews and personalization

Personalization is a priority for local businesses because their customers expect it. In 2015, eMarketer reported local businesses beat their big rivals in areas like personalization and overall consumer experience.

When it comes to Google Maps marketing, personalization comes from customer reviews. More often than not, local business owners solicit favorable reviews from customers. Sometimes (rarely) customers voluntarily write a positive review of a business. They do that because they get personalized treatment/unexpected waiver from a store, which encourages them to review it positively.

The Google Maps Infocard features customer reviews, which add personalization. Studies indicate 88% customers feel online reviews are as important as personal recommendations, which means by getting positive reviews, local businesses can throw out a personalized vibe.

When requesting customers write a positive review, a local business owner should specify that he wants the review on the Google My Business listing page. Having favorable reviews enables you to brag about your store across location-based online communities and social channels. It’s an effective marketing technique and many local stores have been doing it.

The location

This might seem trivial, but it’s not. In the beginning of this article, I mentioned physical location is important for businesses that operate from fixed locations. I also mentioned that locational proximity matters for customers who buy from those businesses.

The conclusion that we can safely deduce from the two premises is a prime location can get you more customers than an offbeat location, which customers would virtually have to explore like the medieval conquistadors. In many instances, if you are not centrally located to your audience, it doesn’t matter how aggressive you are with your marketing.

See the image below:

Almost all hotels have “centrally located” in their meta-titles. It’s something that can and should be used for promotion. I’d even advise you to cut down on your online marketing budget and invest the money to find a central location for your business. Doing that enables you to add a UVP (Unique value proposition) to your campaign.

Don’t waste your time

For Google Maps marketing, you need to follow tips from experts. However, be careful of self-professed experts and their faux-advice. Don’t waste your time doing any of the following two, even if someone insists you to:

Local landing pages: Don’t bother. Those pages are for companies that operate from multiple locations.
Alt tags: Not relevant for Google Maps. Alt tags allow Google to index an image so that it is later displayed to those who search with the keyword on Google Images. Local searchers won’t use Image search.

Doing either of these translates to wasting both time and money. The worst part is you won’t get anything substantial in return. So don’t bother.

Offline networking

For any local business, this old-school technique is still extremely important. Your customers are people around you. So invest time to create a network with them. This will help you to get more footfalls at your store and get better reviews. Both are signals that Google may pick and assign you a high rank its map result.

Image Courtesy: www.nexus-lab.com

Some Thoughts on Local Search and Landing Pages

Adam Frankel — 2016-05-05

In most cases, a product or a service search on Google ends up as a local search. Even if you don’t specify your location, Google will still show you local results. Your IP address tells Google where you are from - which country, which state and which city.

A win-win situation

Google Keyword tool allows advertisers to target specific locations. The tool acknowledges that people tend put the least amount of effort when they search something online. If they are searching for house painting services, they assume the search engine would show them results from their locality.

This is a win-win situation for advertisers as well as searchers. A searcher doesn’t have to type in his location everytime he searches something on Google.

How this benefits advertisers? They don’t have to depend on whether or not a searcher specifies his location, even though 1 out 3 searches are location-specific. Even if the searcher doesn’t specify it, their ads will still be displayed to him.

This is a win-win situation for advertisers as well as searchers. A searcher doesn’t have to type in his location everytime he searches something on Google.

Local landing pages

How local landing pages are relevant when Google automatically interprets product/service searches as local searches and display local businesses on the SERP and also on the paid result spot?

Has this question popped up in your mind? This is an important question. In fact, you can make an educated guess from it and raise a more serious question.

You may ask what’s the need for local SEO when Google will eventually feature local businesses against queries related to products and services.

The competition

The reason local SEO is still relevant is the competition. There are tons of businesses falling under each product or service category, out of all - only ten will occupy Google’s first page.

Which ten?

That nobody knows, and that’s why there’s a competition, that’s the reason there’s a need for local SEO and more importantly, local landing pages.

Local businesses

A local business doesn’t need local landing pages but a global brand does. It doesn’t take too much grey-matter to understand why. A local business operates out of a specific location, and it doesn’t need to highlight its presence in any other location because it’s not present anywhere else.

Let’s say you have an auto-recycling store in Miami, Florida. The store is listed with all the Yellowpages. For your business to be featured on the SERP, any one of the following two would have to happen:

A user from Miami, Florida searching for an auto-recycling store.
Anyone searching with a key-phrase that either has the word Miami or Florida in it.

Your business will not be featured on the SERP if the searcher specifies another location in the keyword or if he’s not from Tennessee. Hence, a local business doesn’t need a separate landing page.

Global brands are not SABs (single-location service area businesses). They have multiple locations across several nations, or across different states in one particular nation. Those brands need local landing pages for reasons below:

Unless there’s a unique page for a particular location (city/state), organic ranking against relevant search queries is incredibly difficult.
If a brand has physical outlets across various cities, then it should have an equal number of landing pages, each of them featuring the phone number and street address of the respective outlet.

In layman’s terms, in the absence of local landing pages, global brands can never have local customers.

Local landing page optimization

Some analysts hold that global brands can’t harness Yellowpages and local directories because they have more than one local landing pages and local business listings ask for homepage URL.

True, but the best part about local landing page optimization is the brand enjoys more control over the optimization process. This is because the brand can

> Localize the meta properties of each individual local landing page.

> Put localized content and avoid content marketing mistakes.

> Add location specific consumer reviews.

All these are in a brand’s control, no directory decides how he’s going to optimize the content on the page.

Let’s dive this discussion with more details:

#Meta property localization: The targeted meta properties are URL, title tag, meta description and schema markup. All these meta data should contain the name of the location along with the product/service name and and the business name.

#Localized content: This one’s easy. Optimize the content of each local landing page by mentioning the name of the respective region and adding region-specific references. But don’t overdo it, otherwise the content would be spammy.

#Consumer reviews: Consumer reviews are for building trust. For each landing page representing a particular region, the review should come from the customers who belong to that region. Make sure the reviews are favorable and endorse your product or your service.

Are they doorways?

Doorways are created for the sole purpose of capturing leads. In one of my previous articles, I explained what type of pages are likely to be considered as doorways. Going by that analysis, whether a local landing page is a doorway or not depends on whether it was created only for the purpose of capturing leads.

In order for not to be declared as a doorway, a local landing page must have the following aspects to it:

No content duplication: At times, two local landing pages have same content, all different keywords and different address details. This is a big NO (In caps).
Useful content: The content should be useful. It should provide enough information (And useful information) for the people from the targeted location. In other words, the pages shouldn’t be created to draw traffic.
Semantic variations: Instead of using the same old keywords, use their semantic variation without changing the location.

If the above requirements are met, then Google probably won’t consider those pages as doorways.

Conclusion

Google doesn’t have any official stand on local landing pages. Hence, we have to figure out the best practices ourselves. Optimizing pages for local search is necessary, but we should follow the safe practices to avoid any penalty.

Image Courtesy: pixabay.com

How These 4 SEO Trends Can Benefit Brands in 2016

Adam Frankel — 2016-03-10

SEO practices are never static, they are always changing. The ones that are trending today will be gone tomorrow, and new trends will arrive.

What changes are we supposed to see in 2016? Let’s find out

Value-oriented content

Content marketing is now the bottomline of SEO. Anyone, who’s connected to the SEO circuit knows this. But content marketing is a loose term, how do you know what type of content is marketable?

If this question is bothering you, here’s the answer:

A marketable content is a blog or an article with value. Such contents offer information, anticipate questions from readers, answer those questions so their confusions are resolved and most importantly, give them a clear roadmap of what actions they need to take.

When you write value-oriented content, it gets shared across social channels, giving exposure to your site as well as to you. Such contents trigger curation. Does that give you any SEO benefit?

It does. Studies indicate more than 80% of search results have Google Map, news, customer reviews and videos as their sources. Content aggregation helps Google and other search engines to pick from a pool of references and value-driven content fosters the aggregation process.

Keyword efficiency metrics

Some believe keywords are dead. Others believe they are alive and kicking. Both are correct, but partially. Keywords are no longer viewed the way they used to be viewed during the heydays of two-way link building. In other words, keywords are not to be used as anchor texts anymore.

Today, SEOs are curious to know a keyword’s ROI. Wondering how it can be measured? The conversion rate tells us about the efficiency of a keyword. Imagine you have keyword A and keyword B for a campaign. Both keywords have just about the same search volume, but 20% of the traffic brought by keyword A converts to sales whereas 5% of the traffic brought by keyword B brings sales. Keyword A and is a better performer in terms of conversion rate.

It has been found that specific keywords account for better conversion rate compared to generic keywords. “Seafood restaurants” may get more search volume than “cheap seafood restaurants in Norman, Oklahoma,” but the latter is long tail and more specific. We can assume people searching with the latter live in Norman, Oklahoma and they want to visit a nearby seafood restaurant which offers quality food at a pocket-friendly price.

Voice search

As more people are accessing the online world through smart devices, the importance of voice search is on a rise. Voice searching is possible through personal digital assistants - the likes of Siri, Cortana and Google Now are making the searching process humanlike. SEOs need to understand where they fit in this.

Luckily for them, the fundamentals of voice search are not so different than the traditional desktop-based search. Users enunciate search queries instead of typing them in the search box and the digital assistant lays down a bunch of results. That apart, it gather information about you from your search query.

On a superficial level, however, there are differences. Siri evidenced on couple of occasions that its sense of humor is not dry. The humor that it has displayed was put together by responses from intelligent and humorous individuals. To optimize a site for voice search, marketers need to follow the latest mobile SEO guidelines and improve the site for all handheld devices.

Local search

It’s nothing new. Local SEO has been around for long. In 2016, however, its importance may increase like never before courtesy to previous year’s Mobilegeddon update and geo-specific keywords.

Local businesses are either searched and found by consumers with the help of apps or when users search with location-specific key-phrases. Optimizing a site for location specific keywords is easy because a comparatively low volume of competition. Studies have revealed that almost 50% of mobile visitors get lead from local searches, and over 60% find location information in advertisement.

As for mobile apps, marketing around them is a bit difficult because the top ones get all the traffic. That said, the advantage of geo-specific apps is that they target a very small number of audiences and reaching out to them is quite easy. Mobile users tap on the app icon on the screen instead of using the search engine, which means promotional marketing can be useful for popularizing a mobile app.

The competition

Every SEO vendor is promoting himself, making the SEO landscape intensely competitive. To stay ahead of others in this rat race, you need to conceptualize and apply the trends described above. Or else, 2016 will remain a year when you failed and others succeeded.

Image Courtesy: pixabay.com

Steer Clear of Silly SEO Mistakes

Adam Frankel — 2016-01-21

Search engine optimization is vital when online visibility comes under concern. It was recently reported that Google logs as much as 300 million searches on a given day. Owing to the huge popularity of search engines, businesses are implementing SEO strategies that give a boost to their position in the SERPs.

Planning to implement SEO strategies to ensure your business performs well enough online? You need to be aware of some of the most common and silly SEO mistakes that are committed. And ensure you don’t fall prey to such pitfalls.

Here is a sneak peek at some of the most common and silly SEO mistakes.

Link Equity Mismanagement

Links are often regarded as the ‘right leg of SEO’. Left leg is certainly onsite SEO. You need to understand that domain credibility with the search engines relies upon your link profile. Let’s have a look at some of the most common mistakes made.

The very first mistake that occurs is letting the pages with link equity die off. Maybe while redesigning your website, you have decided on consolidating the pages. But instead of redirecting them, you have simply let it sit in the 404 error code abyss. This does not allow the users or the search engines to pass from linking site to that of yours.

You may had made it a point to redirect the pages, but did it through a temporary redirect. In this case also, you do not get the maximum amount of link equity.

You can check out on Open Site Explorer’s Top Pages section. This will show the pages with inbound links directing to them. You can tell whether the linked pages show a 302 or a 404 status.

Dubious Duplicate Content

Duplicate content is defined as “substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely match other content or are appreciably similar”. There are chiefly three different variations of duplicate content that you need to watch out for:

Copied content
Duplicate URL
Home page variations

There may also be instances when you unknowingly feature the same content in different URLs. Duplication can be found with parameter usage as well.

Why should you eradicate this duplicity?

Because it’s actually a sign of sloppiness to the search engines. Moreover, you may also be accruing links to two different URLs of the same content, thereby splitting link equity.

To get a feel of the things that are in the search results, review the organic landing pages.

Little Communication with the Engines

The webmasters want the search engines to see content. But don’t do anything to educate on the site elements. There are chiefly two significant elements here.

Sitemap for the search engines
Help to understand and focus on the site content

Within Bing Webmaster Tools and Google Webmaster Tools, you can tell the engines more about your website.

This includes the following:

Ability to know whether the schema markup is error free and valid.
Option to include Data Highlighter information for informing Google more on events, products, etc.
Sitemaps that help to understand the number of pages indexed
Indication of targeted country of focus
Ability to demote site links in the search results.

Ensure that you create and validate profiles for your website in the Bing Webmaster Tools and Google Webmaster Tools. Submit sitemaps to the search engines and start communicating with them, so that they know what to crawl and understand how much of the site content is indexed.

Negligence of Title Element

Though there are hundreds of factors going into the Google or Bing ranking algorithm, the title element is quite a significant part of SEO. One of the most explicit issues seen here is the lack of keyword focus. Remember that this area should never be stuffed with keywords, but should simply represent what the page is all about. With the aid of in-depth keyword research, you will get to know the terms that you should target. But for the time being, create synergy between the title elements and the theme of the page.

In several cases, the title element focus is adjusted for pages like homepage, products page, or the services page. The internal pages are often overlooked.

You can use a tool here that will scrape the site pages and offer a quick view of title elements across the website.

SEO is a continual process of taking advantage of content and the keyword opportunities, making an adjustment to algorithmic trends, and ensuring that your website is easy to crawl and indexed. However, regardless of whether you are just starting off or presently absorbed in SEO effort, it pays to ensure that you are not making silly mistakes capacitated to hinder bliss of organic search.

Image Courtesy: searchengineland.com

5 Key Factors that Might be Affecting Your Site’s Ranking

Adam Frankel — 2015-12-17

Why are your efforts to rank your site high and get more visitors not paying off? Must be because something is wrong. You need to figure out what was wrong. Here’s a rundown of the factors that impede a site from ranking high and getting decent traffic.

Audience demographics

Thanks to state-of-the-art web analytic tools, you can get ample demographic details of your target audience. The competitive edge doesn’t lie in there - it lies in making the best use of the details.

How’s that possible?

Don’t consider the details in isolation, look at the synergy. Demographic details in isolation can be misleading. For example, online advertising influences 18-25 year olds most. Since people from this age-group can’t spend too much, you might decide not to approach them to buy your expensive products.

Your analysis of the demographic details isn’t wrong, but it’s incomplete because you didn’t consider your product. If you sell eye-catching jewellery or designer accessories, the female members of the said demographic group might break their piggy-banks to purchase them.

Indexing issues

Many indexing issues are easy to avoid. You just need to follow the guidelines, laid down by the Google Search Console. Let’s consider the recent guideline, which almost necessitates webmasters to unblock all JavaScript and CSS files in the robot.txt file because Google’s spiders cannot access them.

Google’s insistence is a part of the search giant’s all-out-war against spammy sites. Previously, webmasters used to misguide the crawlers by informing them the content on the site is above the fold, when in reality, it’s below the fold. There could be several other reasons behind Google not indexing a site. Neil Patel discussed many of them a year ago, and his discussion is still quite relevant.

A site hosted on Wordpress has greater chances of being deindexed. That’s because installing an SEO plugin might block all files in the /wp-admin/folder including JS and CSS ones.

Responsive web design

Mobile search is on Google’s radar for obvious reasons. If you want optimized results from your mobile search interface, then responsive web design is a must for you.

Responsive web design brings the desktop version close to the handheld version. Users don’t come across any disparity in content or navigation items between a desktop site and a mobile site. The platform might change, but the user-experience would remain intact.

Don’t get stuck with the basics of RWD though because its fluidic aspect requires evolution to accommodate the touch-based (contrary to hovering) and tap-based (contrary to clicking) inputs, which are intuitive. Keep experimenting with RWD and see the results.

Font selection

You might wonder why font selection is so important. It’s not important in terms of technicalities but in terms of lead generation and sales conversion because an attractive layout with the right fonts can help the site get an increased number of clicks and visits.

Which font should you select? Well, there are plenty of fonts to choose from and new fonts are arriving everyday. I don’t want to solicit any particular font, be it free or paid. What I can tell you is the font should be in tune with the latest minimalist design trends. The very first advantage of selecting a minimalist font is your site appears uncluttered to visitors.

Sites with minimalist fonts have a simplistic interface. They don’t have flashy images and multimedia content on them, which allows them to load faster.

Doorway page update

Google has released this update in April of this year. In the update, Google categorically explained how doorway pages can maximize a site’s search footprint. A doorway page is no different than other pages of the site - only it’s better optimized for the search engine against a few keywords.

Google is okay with sites having doorway pages, but not okay with sites, whose doorway pages are thin in content, and stuffed with keywords. When the update was released, Brian White of Google wrote “Sites with large and well-established doorway campaigns might see a broad impact from this change.”

Make sure your doorway pages have sufficient readable content on them and the keyword insertion is perfectly natural.

Follow the tips

Assuming you are not following the tips described above, I strongly recommend you to consider following them because they might be preventing your site from climbing up the ranking ladder.

Image Courtesy: sosialmedia.az

How can You Build Quality Backlinks without Getting Penalized?

Adam Frankel — 2015-12-16

Do you think all links are created equal?

The fact of the matter is, they are not.

Link building was simple before. You'd write a few articles, publish them on an article submission website and then earn a link back to your website.

This technique no longer works today. The right inbound links can grow your ranking, brand, and revenue, but the wrong ones can get your website penalized. Google takes it very seriously now.

To remain safe, many people simple stopped trying to acquiring links at all. The thought behind that being people have been struggled with knowing what sites would be considered OK to have links on. If doing business online, this is probably the worst mistake. It’s time to learn ways to build links naturally.

Backlinks will always be a vital Google ranking factor, but effective link building is chiefly about popularity and trust. Domain trust or authority represents as much as 23.87% of the ranking algorithm of Google.

The link profile has been one of the core pillars of ranking throughout the history of Google search. With time, the meaning, as well as the value of the profile, has changed a lot only complicating things.

Let’s have a look at some link building strategies.

Know What Google Wants

As soon as it comes to marketing and search engine optimization, Google dictates the pace. It’s vital to understand the mission of Google. This goes a long way to shape your link building strategy.

So what's Google's mission?

“To organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”

To try and build links without getting penalized, you need to understand that mission. To attempt building backlinks with no plan or consideration of Google's requirements will result poor results and ultimately being penalized by the search giant.

Here are a few points to consider before you start building links.

Is my content perfectly organized?
Am I providing useful details to the websites that will link to mine?

Getting the navigation right is the very first step when it comes to organizing content. This helps people and the search engines to find information that is relevant and useful. The next step is to build a solid foundation.

Use Guest Posts

Yes, guest posts are still relevant. You need to use the right strategies to accrue maximum benefit. Some guest post links perform better than others. The typical guest post bio links are at the bottom of the page. Though this is fine, this is not very effective. If it’s a typical link at the end of the blog, most readers do not even see it. If it’s there in the ‘bio box’, Google can devalue it. Though this will drive traffic and give SEO value, this is certainly not as much as you ought to get.

Good guest posts are done on authoritative websites and that automatically makes it a trusted page. Some blog owners are quite paranoid about linking back to your website, but most are fine with it, provided it adds value. Your goal should be to write a guest post that is useful and relevant and if you can provide additional information that is on your website, place a link.

The content that you can link to includes:

Ultimate guides
List of resources
Studies or data
Infographics

The stronger your guest post is, the greater are your benefits.

Do not just rely on publishing your guest posts. You need to promote them as well. Share your posts on the social media platforms not just once but multiple times. Make sure to use different titles while you post them.

Do Something Advantageous for your Community

As a marketer, it’s easy to be selfish and ask, “What’s in it for me?”, but doing something for community can benefit you both. It can be something altruistic like setting up a scholarship. The content generated on other sites pertaining to it, which generate high-quality backlinks. Or it can be something lighthearted like a promotional giveaway or content. People simply love free stuff. You can give away products or subscriptions to individuals who give you their email addresses or share the contest. With bigger prizes, it will go viral and ensure you better results.

If you want to build safe links, you either need a great product or great content. A significant part of your investment will go into product development or content development. As soon as you have that, you can use the above-discussed strategies to give a boost to your search ranking and website traffic.

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How to Maximize Reach Using the Knowledge Graph of Google?

Adam Frankel — 2015-11-23

Since 2012, we have grown to love as well as be afraid of the Google Knowledge Graph. A system of sophisticatedly indexed and carefully displayed result for common search queries, we love it since it provides fast answers to simple queries. We are afraid of it as it can undermine all the benefits of SEO. It’s in Google’s best interest to keep users on search results. The ability to produce relevant results and attention to user requirement and desires creates a difference between Google and other search engines.

Google redesigns the world of search with the Knowledge Graph technology; with the aid of it, Google not just understands the users but attempts to anticipate their uses as well. The Knowledge Graph has made discoverability easier.

What is the Knowledge Graph?

The Knowledge Graph is described as an artificial intelligence system. Like other systems of Google, it is made to evolve and get better with time. When it was introduced, it appeared like a small box at the side of the main results.

It has substantially changed since then and is now more formidable, intuitive and useful. Google is setting the course for a bigger and better version of the information system and this can prove a viable threat to SEO.

How the Knowledge Graph Casts an Impact on SEO?

Knowledge Graph appears to be a user-friendly feature for the users; it helps people find information easily. The Knowledge Graph allows the users to get all the necessary details without opening the website. In this case, they will never be exposed to the call to action buttons and thus the opportunity to convert a user into a buyer will come down substantially.

On the Knowledge Graph panel, the competitors are also shown. Will you be happy if your competitors are shown on the same page and some of your targeted customers prefer their page to yours? The website in question will suffer a reduction in clicks. This may affect the overall ranking of the website.

Do you need to change your approach to SEO now? How will a website address this issue while remaining competitive? You can observe the oldest trick. Create content for humans rather than the search engines.

How can You Optimize the Knowledge Graph?

A combination of Organization markup structured data of Schema.org and maintaining official Google+ profile can optimize brand’s Knowledge Graph.

Logo

There are two ways to optimize logo. Specify the image that you want to show in the Knowledge Graph. Influence where the links take the searchers as soon as they click on it on the Knowledge Graph.

Identify the official logo making use of Schema.org’s Organization markup in the homepage of the official website. You can ask your developer to check out on the official logo guidelines.

Company Contact Numbers

At times, the consumers need to know the important contact numbers. Placing contact details in the Schema.org Organization markup permits showing the phone numbers easily without frustrating the customers. You can specify a number of contact numbers. Your panel will be longer with more numbers.

Social Profile Links

Google supports 7 different social profiles in the profiles section though it displays only 5 of them. Mention 5 profiles you put most effort in apart from Google+. Google will infer same information from social sites you link to in the footer and the header.

The best way to ascertain that Google is aware of the social profiles belonging to your brand and is included in the search results is by declaring them using structured data.

Google+ Recent Posts

After using structured data for establishing the official Google+ account, the posts that you submit on Google+ will be shown in the Knowledge Graph of your brand. You need to show them as it exposes the latest social posts to everyone searching for your brand rather than only people using Google+ on that day. It also allows the searchers to follow you from the Knowledge Graph itself.

The SERP layout changes in the course of last few years aren’t just a vanity, but a step to provide better answers or results through more comprehensive and relevant data. Instead of remaining stuck with the basic text links and a few site links, now you have an option to catch the eye of searchers, influencing how and where they interact. View Knowledge Graph not as a threat but an opportunity.

3 Most Common SEO Mistakes to Avoid in Ecommerce Website Marketing

Adam Frankel — 2015-11-10

Planning a website for your retail business? For any retail business, the website needs to be an ecommerce one. You can place a large number of items on the ecommerce site. It will drive the sales of the products to a great extent. But you need to keep an important thing in mind. There are a large number of ecommerce websites on the internet. And many of them surely offer the same things that you do. So, the competition is high. But you need to ensure that the visitors select your website for purchasing stuff. Moreover, you also need to increase traffic to your ecommerce website for that.

How can you do that?

To ensure that maximum number of visitors are purchasing from your website, it is important that your ecommerce website acquires more number of visitors than the others. And for this, the site needs to appear at the top of the search results for certain relevant keywords.

But it won’t happen out of nowhere. You need to work on that.

You have to make the ecommerce website search engine optimized to bring it to the top of the keyword search results.

You can try to optimize your ecommerce website for search engines. But make sure you do not commit a few common mistakes.

Here are some of the pitfalls that you need to be wary of while performing the search engine optimization for your website.

No Image of the Product on the Website

You have an ecommerce website, which do not have any image.

So, you just can’t expect the website to perform properly. It is definitely going to fail. It is true that a large number of people these days prefer to purchase products online. But this statistics is also not going to help your cause if you do not have any image of the products on your ecommerce website. Remember, even if they are not able to touch it, they would like to have a look at the image of the product before purchasing it. And with time, the traffic is going to dwindle. Moreover, you won’t have any traffic from image search as well. So, not including a product photograph is sure to impact the performance of the website negatively in terms of search engine optimization.

Lack of Proper Product Descriptions

You might have added a large number of products. There are some amazing images of the products on the website as well. So, you expect that the customers are going to purchase from your website. But that's not happening.

What is the reason behind it?

Just check one thing: have you added enough product descriptions?

It is almost imperative for any ecommerce website to have product description. And it needs to have every specification about the product. Only then you can expect to attract the attention of the customers. But make sure you are not copying the product descriptions from other websites, as it might have a negative impact in terms of SEO on your website.

Absence of Product Reviews

If you want to sell your products through your ecommerce website, just the descriptions won’t do. it is essential to have a few reviews on the site. And you need to ensure that the reviews are primarily positive. If there is any negative review about your products, you need to deal with that prudently to minimize its impact on your business.

Reviews can help your site in a number of ways.

They increase the credibility of your website among the target audience.
They provide your website with unique, user-generated content. This has high value in terms of SEO for your website.
They ensure that your products will be shown in the search engine results for keywords that include 'review' in addition to the product names.

Absence of these product reviews can impact your ecommerce website in a negative manner in terms of search engine optimization. So, try to garner a few proper product reviews to increase your business to a great extent through your ecommerce website.

Creating an ecommerce website can be one of the best ways to expand your retail business. It can be your platform to reach out to millions of people with your product. But ensure that you are not committing any of these ecommerce SEO mistakes to get the best results.

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Considering the OS Platforms is Important for Mobile SEO Campaigns

Adam Frankel — 2015-10-29

Mobile SEO demands internet marketers to use a lot of grey matters and strategize the best practices. The number of users, who access the internet from desktop devices is shrinking in the speed of light, and that has virtually been forcing marketers to optimize websites for mobile devices.

So far, the approach of online marketers to mobile SEO has been a passe. Unless they make their approach more innovative, it’d be difficult for them to get a first-mover advantage in a soon-to-be competitive scenario. Needless to say, they need to ideate and come up with something new.

To leverage them, we’ll propose a new approach to promoting a site for hand-held devices. For an internet marketer, the priority areas for mobile SEO are the following;

A responsive website
Dynamic serving activation
Using a mobile URL

Although these are safe and useful practices for mobile SEO, you will never get any competitive edge. For that, you need to consider the different mobile operating systems and their interfaces. This suggestion might appear a no-brainer because responsive design techniques are already in place, ensuring a site would be loaded in the same way and with all its features, when accessed from different devices.

The crux is, merely ensuring that a site will be loaded with all types of devices, is not enough. In fact, that’s only for starters, the next step is to market the site, and for that, the technical specifications for each mobile operating systems need to be taken in stride.

Android devices

Android is the product of Google, which means Android users have a relatively easier time using Google apps. Besides, Google’s products easily sync between Android devices. Although it doesn’t offer marketers any extra advantage, it definitely persuades them to strategize differently.

Android app store has a better collection of apps than iOS app store, owing to the fact that Android apps are completely free of cost. This leverages marketers as they could focus on app marketing and while doing so, keep the cost under bracket.

The latest Android version is 5.0 Lollipop, which has been announced very recently and which is yet to release. The two most impressive aspects of it are an array of new APIs and the OS being aware of what’s transpiring around it. Google has been giving serious thoughts to voice activated semantic web, and with 5.0, it will reportedly head off to that direction.

Another useful feature of Android 5.0 is it allows users to block certain apps. This, undoubtedly, is useful to users, but not to a marketer because the apps developed to promote the targeted site, could be blocked. To prevent this from happening, the marketer needs to make sure the app/site has scores of entertaining features.

In short, There are several ways a marketer can cash in on the upcoming Android version. He can add new features to a site, which can only be activated through voice.

iOS framework

Lately, Apple is bringing plenty of changes on its mobile OS platform. iOS 7 wasn’t as complicated as is iOS 8. Unlike Android, Apple always picks from where it has ended before. Prior to the release of iOS 8, there was speculation in the air that a revolutionary Health application will be introduced on iOS 8. What was introduced by Apple in reality, was a centralized system to integrate all health apps.

Apple is not very far from releasing its iWatch. The newest iOS 8.2 developer preview update has a new setting in the Bluetooth menu that enables users share their devices with Apple iWatch.

All these are important takeaways for mobile app marketers. They could harness the new features for the purpose of marketing. For example, they could launch an application that’ll have two sets of features; one for the iWatch and another for iPhone. That’s just an example, the bottom-line is iOS is a feature rich OS with a dedicated base of users. So in order to promote a website or a service, a marketer need to dig deep into the ecosystem and familiarize himself with all its details.

In fact, it applies to all Smartphone OS platforms. To promote a site or an app exclusively for hand-held devices, it's essential to consider the features of the device's operating system.

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