The Secret Recipe to a Highly Successful SEO Campaign

Do you have an online business or are you planning on starting one? Do you want to improve your website’s search engine results ranking? Can’t afford to pay someone to optimize your website for you? Why not do it yourself? 

But let’s face it, search engine optimization can be daunting. You need to familiarize yourself with web design, as well as, content writing. Even the most experienced SEO consultants can sometimes find it mind-boggling and at times find the task tedious. SEO is constantly changing and evolving so there’s no perfect recipe. What’s good now may no longer be useful a few months later. Also, it’s better to focus on organic SEO instead of inorganic SEO which yields instant but short-term results.

To get you started, you first need to have a truly good product or service. If you’re not selling anything and your website focuses more on sharing information, it needs to have high quality content. If you can’t be proud of it, don’t expect others to like it. 

Speaking of high quality content, there are a lot of ways you can ensure this. First, highlight what makes your product a good one. What are its features and benefits? How is it used? What is it for? It will be a good idea to come up with a guide about your product, too. Add in some pictures or images with the instructions. Finally, it will help draw more people to your site if you have research to back up your product. For example, if you are selling products from various essential oils, you may also want to post articles supporting the benefits of those essential oils. You also need to have the willingness to learn. There are online tutorials that can help you for free or if you have some cash to spare, you can also sign up for formal training or attend various seminars. Following respected blogs or websites that are trusted for knowing all the latest updates and tricks can help enhance your knowledge as well.

It also makes sense to know about the industry you are in. Keep up with your competition and always watch out for the latest trends, breakthroughs and discoveries; whatever industry you are in, be it cosmetics, healthcare, or entertainment.

Next, you need to have a basic understanding of how keywords work. You know those terms you enter in the search engine when you’re looking for something? These helps search engines narrow down their search to bring the user the most relevant results. This is why those keywords are important. They tell search engines and its users what your website has to offer. You should be aware of which ones you’re targeting, be it short terms or long tail keywords.

A good social signal is a must as well. Enter social media marketing. This is a no-brainer seeing how social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram are so popular. It’s also one of the easiest ways of letting people know about your product and services.

You also need to learn how to collaborate and how to get backlinks. These will not only get you more traffic but it will help you tell search engines that your site is trustworthy as well. The more respected and popular the site your link is in, the stronger the boost you get.

Maintain your reputation by always keeping your site fresh and updated. Let your customers know that you care by always replying to their questions both in your website and in social media. This is one more reason why you should have a useful product or service.

Finally, you need the patience to learn and the perseverance to see your website through. It is not going to happen overnight and you will have to put in a lot of time and hard work before you see the fruits of your labor. If you have these qualities, then that’s already half the battle.

Top Magical Things Google Search Engine Can Do

It’s quite amazing how the internet is able to surprise us with the little tricks it pulls on us, and Google is no different. I have to admit I have used Google for more than just looking up the best recipe for dinner. Google has helped me bring out the more outspoken part of me through Twitter or YouTube, direct me to the nearest pizza place, and basically organized my life. It has been my savior for all the crazy stupid questions that popped in my head but was too afraid to ask out loud. But aside from being beyond helpful, Google has a wacky side too. And I learned this through some social media marketing stuff on Facebook.

While I was scrolling down my news feed one day, I came across a friend’s post that talked about the amazing stuff that the Google search engine could do. Curious, I decided to Google the tricks and try them out. First, I asked Google to do a barrel roll AND IT DID! If you type “books/songs/movies by author/artist/actor”, it’ll give you a list of all the works of the person you searched. You can even listen to music through the search results! Found a photo but don’t know who owns it? Upload it through Google and it’ll help you find out where it came from. It’ll even help you narrow down search results based on size, color, and type of photo you’re looking for. If you want to travel back in time to the year 1998, just type “Google in 1998” and enjoy the flashback.

Let’s say you want to know which team is leading in today’s NBA game. Just type in your team and Google will give you the scores. How about filtering your search results from pesky articles? Just place the minus sign (-) after your keyword and type the related topics you want to avoid, like Kanye West-Kim Kardashian. And if you’re in the mood to play games, Just type “Zerg Rush” on the search engine and you can start playing Starcraft. Type “Atari Breakout” and enjoy a colorful Easter egg hunt while searching for what you want. If you want Google to answer a math problem or do conversion, just type it and Google will do the rest. 

Star Trek fans are also going crazy because you can set the language settings to Klignon, or basically any language you prefer. If someone asks you what time it is, Google can not only give you an answer to that but it can also tell you what time it is anywhere in the world. I was once looking for a bookstore and Google Maps became my new best friend. If you’re looking for a certain file type just enter “filetype:pdf” followed by the keyword and it’ll narrow down your searches to pdf files. It’s also useful for .docx, .pptx, and .xlxs files. I also heard that you could actually play Pacman on the Google logo! Try typing the word “recursion” and figure out what you’re missing. I must say, I was confused for a few moments until I put two and two together.

So there was a TON of stuff that I was missing out on before I found Google, and after I ran through all the extra things it can do I would definitely bow down to them for creating such a fun and stimulating way for users to learn new things. I guess they’ll never stop growing, never stop innovating; and I really hope they won’t because I would be (literally) lost without the magic of Google.

Sheena Mathieson, understands the essence of making excellent content that suits the needs of every business especially when it comes online marketing. She can spice up your marketing campaign with the content she makes and then incorporate Buy Real Marketing services.

10 Off Page SEO Techniques To Get More Organic Traffic

SEO means search engine optimization that indicates a web process to lift the page ranking and increase site visibility in top search engines. Usually SEO is classified into two general types; off page and on page techniques. Off Page SEO can be more fruitful and beneficial for a website or blog. For the promotion of a site or blog it is compulsory to increase the organic or real traffic rather than fake and software generated visitors to a targeted website. In the following there are top 10 techniques associated with Off Page SEO that may play a vital role to drive rich and organic traffic to the sites or blogs quickly.

1- Social Network Marketing:

Social networks are the biggest platform where billions of users and visitors stay online 24/7. They actually do a number of activities to get amused, entertained and promote their business through digital and online marketing. You should prepare the best and informative posts relevant to interest of the people and share on your timeline and groups with site URL. This will drive more people to your targeted website and in this way you will get regular real traffic.

2- Blog Commenting:

Although this is a generic way to produce more visitors for a site or bog, but still it works well and up to requirements. However, today it is considered that blog commenting has been banned by Google and some other leading search engines. But, in fact this is a fake statement or consideration. Webmasters and marketers must do only theme based blog commenting and on high quality sites and forums.

3- Guest Posting:

You can write an article or post about the website or brand you are promoting and then publish it to some very high quality websites and blogs that are extremely visited by users a day. In this way; you will redirect the organic traffic from a host website to your own site or blog.

4- Blogging on Web Directories:

High quality web directories have greater value for the websites and blogs which are recently launched. Actually, when you share your blog or site to some top web directories, then you will get persistent traffic of the visitors from the best locations of the world depending upon quality of your posts and shared blogs.

5- Forum Posting:

This one is a very specific SEO tool which is being excessively used by the webmasters and professional marketers. Usually, the blogs or sites are shared to some top forums where excessive amount of users is available. It is a valuable way to produce organic traffic faster.

6- Use of Article Directories:

When you produce some high quality articles and blogs posts, then you should post this stuff on leading article directories. This is an excellent way to get real traffic for sites and blogs within less timeframe.

7- Video Marketing:

Several video networks including YouTube also offer webmasters to create their own channels to upload their personal and edited videos. This is another effective way to produce regular web traffic for a site.

8- Answer & Question:
On various websites and blogs you can post interesting questions and answers about various niches or topics of the world. The users always prove their knowledge and IQ level to answer such questions. You should share the web links and URL of your site with the questions that will attract more visitors.

9- Relevant and Theme Based SEO:

Point or targeted SEO with theme and relevancy based can generate maximum organic traffic for a site or blog within less duration.

10- Photo Sharing with Links:

Photo sharing with links of the sites or blogs on various top websites and social networks can produce real traffic. The SEO experts always do many types of activities on social media networks to generate organic traffic regularly for sites and blogs.

Parallax Web Design vs. SEO: What You Need To Know

 

As search engine marketers, we know that the best time for us to be involved with a web design or redesign project is right at the beginning, so that SEO can be ‘baked in’ to the process right from the start. However, sometimes a website will be built and SEO will be a later consideration (usually if it’s because it doesn’t rank)! A few times recently, people have come to me with a website designed in the parallax format and asked me if I can do anything to help with its SEO – which is a heck of a problem, because while parallax websites often look pretty darn slick, they come with some major technical SEO issues.

In this post I’ll talk about the perils of parallax web design: its effect on SEO, why it’s SEO-unfriendly, and if there are any workarounds to see if you can have your parallax cake and eat it too.
  
What is Parallax Web Design? 

But first, an explanation… Chances are that you’ll be familiar with the style of parallax websites, even if you don’t know them by name.

Parallax websites rely heavily on a scrolling effect on one page, rather than the website’s content being spread across multiple pages like on traditional websites. So on the homepage of a parallax site, if you click on ‘About’ in the top menu navigation for example, instead of being taken to domain.com/about (i.e. a different page), the URL changes to domain.com#about and you will be automatically scrolled down to the ‘About’ section on the same page.

…But is it Really “Parallax?”

 

Well… Some folks argue that the name isn’t true to parallax. This post by Rob Palmer explains why, giving examples of ‘parallax’ websites that are and aren’t actually following true parallax style. But given the fact that so many people already refer to them this way, I’ll stick with it for the sake of consistency – even if it’s wrong.

Why Parallax is Bad for SEO

 

While parallax web design looks great, it can be a major hindrance to SEO – so much so that I often recommend people against it entirely.

The reason for its SEO unfriendliness is due to the fact that it side-steps the need for additional pages, relying on fewer, ‘longer’ pages to try and rank for more keyword areas and topics. To give you an example, here is an imagined URL structure for an imaginary website – that sells and repair widgets – if it opts for parallax:

• com
• com#buy-widgets
• com#widget-repair
• com#contact

But here is what the URL structure would look like if it were broken down into individual pages:

• com
• com/buy-widgets
• com/widget-repair
• com/contact

In the first example, search engines would index the homepage but not the latter three URLs, as search engines index whole pages, not individual fragment identifiers (the hashes in the URL that act as a shortcut to a part of the page) separately.

In the second example, search engines would be able to index all four pages separately. This gives added visibility in search engines and improves the chances of the content on the separate pages – for Buy Widgets, Widget Repair and Contact – to rank higher in search engines.

This is important because if the website wanted to rank for the keyword “widget repair” for example, there is a much higher chance of this happening if the URL is domain.com/widget-repair (i.e. an individual page) rather than domain.com#widget-repair (and therefore a part of the homepage: domain.com).

A dedicated Widget Repair page can properly focus on that keyword – e.g. the phrase “widget repair” can appear in its page title, its metadata, its H1 tag and other heading tags, its page copy (at a higher density), etc. Meanwhile, the parallax version (domain.com#widget-repair and therefore domain.com) would have more difficulty ranking for that keyword as its page title and overall page content would be more general, with the phrase “widget repair” possibly only appearing in one small section of the whole page.

But What if SEO Isn’t the Be-all-and-end-all?

 

Be that as it may, the argument for parallax web design can really only be made on a case-by-case basis. It’s easy for us as SEOs to think that parallax websites are the devil’s work simply because they’re SEO-unfriendly. But after all, there’s more to life (and online marketing) than SEO.

For example, in an industry where SEO isn’t too important (e.g. maybe it’s a product or service on sale that doesn’t get searched for that often and gets found via other channels, e.g. social media) but the potential client/customer is someone who would be impressed by the slickness of a parallax website, then there might be more of an argument to retain parallax web design. Ironically, in this case, it might be that although fewer people will find it through search engines, those who do find it – via other channels – may convert better.

Additionally, it also depends on the competitiveness of a particular sector from an SEO point of view. For example, if you offer something extremely niche with very few competitors, you may be able to rank well in search engines even if you proceed with parallax as your website’s design. However if it is a competitive sector as far as search engines are concerned then proceeding with the parallax design may hinder your SEO efforts in the long run, and therefore it’s probably best avoided.

Regardless, to be on the safe side, and given SEO’s importance in the grand scheme of things, I’m sure that in 99 cases out of 100, the way to go is non-parallax.

You might be able to have both, though…

Can You Enjoy the Benefits of Both SEO and Parallax?

 

There is a potential ‘workaround’ solution, whereby you make the parallax design more SEO-friendly – effectively utilizing both elements – but it has its own considerations and flaws.

You could keep the homepage as an ‘index’ page for each section and keep them in the style of parallax design, while each section has its own dedicated page (for SEO purposes) as well. For example, for Widget Repair, clicking on the Widget Repair link on the homepage would jump down to the Widget Repair section of the homepage (i.e. domain.com#widget-repair), which could act as an introduction to the service (i.e. containing a short intro paragraph), concluding with a ‘Find out more’ link that links through to a dedicated page all about the Widget Repair service (i.e. domain.com/widget-repair – a page that explains the service in more detail, e.g. a few hundred words). This could be replicated across every section of the website.

However if you opt for this solution, there are a few other considerations to be aware of:

• Parts of the site would be parallax while other parts (e.g. individual pages) would not be. This could cause confusion for visitors if they are navigating between different sections – and especially if they first visit a non-parallax page/section of the website before moving onto a parallax section. This could potentially put off visitors and potential clients/customers, therefore negatively affecting the website’s conversion rate. 

• It may also affect how to decide how the top menu works going forward, i.e. whether clicking on a section takes the user to the parallax section on the homepage (e.g. domain.com#widget-repair) or straight to the non-parallax page (e.g. domain.com/widget-repair). 

• I would also recommend taking the time to make sure that the ‘intro’ content on the main (parallax) pages is unique to the more in-depth content on the dedicated (non-parallax) pages, otherwise the website may be punished by search engines for containing too much duplicate content. For example, for Widget Repair, I would recommend that the intro paragraph on the homepage is different to the content on the dedicated Widget Repair page, and not simply a copy-and-paste job of the same text on both pages. I’m sure that if you’re going to the effort of expanding the content on each dedicated page then this shouldn’t be a problem, as the dedicated page would probably need a few hundred extra words added it to anyway in order to beef it out a bit, but it is still important to mention.

What are your thoughts on parallax web design? Leave your thoughts in the comments below!