Showing posts with label How To. Show all posts
Showing posts with label How To. Show all posts

Guide to eCommerce Product Listing SEO

The Complete Guide to eCommerce Product Listing SEO

Getting your product listings to the top in ecommerce marketplace search results (on Amazon, eBay or Other eCommerce Marketplace) is one of the major differences between success and failure – between making money or not.

Whether you’re a seller, online marketer or just web merchandiser, understanding how to optimize product listing, is crucial to your long term online business success.

Imagine, You have a store on eBay or  Amazon filled with great product but not getting enough sell from it. 

Do you know why?

When a buyer is searching for your products on Google or in the the marketplace, the site unable to locate your products. Because your product listing is not optimized for it as it should be.

So, How to optimize then listing then?

Well, The simple answer is, You have to integrate SEO technique when you create new product listing or update existing listing.

Search Engine Optimization aka SEO is the art and science of optimize website for higher organic ranking, same method can be applied to rank your product listing in the eCommerce marketplace like Amazon, eBay, Etsy, etc.

Before we dig more about how to optimize eCommerce listing, lets talk about how these marketplace search works?

When someone search enything in an ecommerce marketplace, the marketplace search engine want to show best possible result to the user as search engine like Google & Bing Do.

These marketplace search engine gather data regarding user search, product listing, engagement, reviews and user personal purchasing behavior; the came with best products user can buy.


Product Title

One of the most important components of eBay SEO is the use of keywords. “Key” words are those words that shoppers use when searching for products.

One of the very best ways to find those specific keywords and keyword phrases is by using the eBay keyword research tool – Terapeak. You can also research SEO keywords using the eBay search field. Based on the keywords or phrases you type in the field, eBay will suggest more words culled from actual searches.

Title tags are often used on search engine results pages (SERPs) to display preview snippets for a given page, and are important for eCommerce SEO. The title element of a web page is meant to be an accurate and concise description of a product's.

This is not as thorough a method as using Terapeak but it does help. There are several other tools I use as well – Google Keyword Planner and when performing keyword research for larger sellers I use a few paid SEO tools.

Be sure to write your titles for buyers. Just shoving a whole bunch of keywords into a listing title in the hopes of showing up higher in the eBay search engine can result in a lower click-through rate. Buyers need to see a flow of words that make sense to them – very much like a complete sentence. When humans see a bunch of disjointed words, our brains literally stop. Then it has to start again to recognize the next word. Then stop, then start, again and again. They are less likely to click on your title if the title immediately above or below has a “smooth” set of words that is easily understood. That said, it’s helpful if you get proficient at finding the SEO keywords and using them effectively in your titles.

Product Description

When I perform an eBay Store Audit, this is almost always one of the biggest areas the merchant is deficient in. Please, please, please fill in your item descriptions! You don’t have to write the great American novel but by having a well-thought-out description you achieve the following:

The description is a character snippet, a tag in HTML, that summarizes a product's. Search engines show the description in search results mostly when the searched for phrase is contained in the description. Optimizing the description is a very important aspect of SEO.

Higher SEO scores – use keywords in the description and HTags Increased sell-through score by providing complete and valuable info for buyers Customer loyalty and trust – buyers know a seller who gives good info is one who has their best interest at heart.

Category Selection

I make a really big deal out of categories when I teach.

Why? Because eBay has graciously done a great deal of SEO work for us all! When we choose categories and sub-categories for our listings, the names of the categories are very well researched and uber targeted keyword phrases!

Be sure to use all relevant categories for your listings. Do not “category stuff”. Meaning, don’t put your items in categories where it don’t make sense for them to be. This lowers your customer engagement, click-through, sell-through, and quality listing scores. Bottom line? You disappear from the search results.

Offer Free Shipping

Free shipping is hassle free shipping for the buyer. eBay loves this. Cassini loves this. Buyers love this. I’ve never understood why shoppers perceive “free shipping” as a “deal”. It just makes no sense.

Surely they must know shipping costs have been blended into the price of the item. And yet, they flock to “free shipping deals”. So, just do it. Adjust your prices as you can and offer the dreaded “free shipping”.

Add High Quality Photos

Since the sell-through rate is part of the algorithm that determines where your listings show up in the eBay search engine rankings and photos are a BIG part of making a sale – it’s time to get good at eBay photography. Large, crisp, well-lit images instill buyer confidence and increase the odds of making a sale. High-resolution is the name of the game! And eBay gives sellers the opportunity to put in 12 images – for FREE! Take advantage of that gift!

Believe me, Cassini knows the quality of your images based on pixels, compression, etc. And, since Google has gotten creepy good at “reading” images, I presume eBay has similar abilities. Adding multiple, good quality photos to your listings is a show of good faith. It shows customers and Cassini alike that you are invested in making sure all details are disclosed. Plus, you’ll have far less returns and this helps keep your seller trust score high!

Offer Hassle-Free Returns

This is kind of like the “grin and bear it” idea from the Feedback & Seller Trust section. Nobody likes to accept returns but, in all fairness to buyers, not all sellers are honest. My theory has always been that if you are an eBay seller who knows what they are doing and if you are thorough and honest in your listings, then your return rate will be almost zero.

If this sounds like you, then I highly suggest taking returns and offering to take returns on a “no questions asked” basis. You might have to smile through gritted teeth every now and again, but those transactions should be few and far between. 

Customer Inquiry Response Time

Some initials statistic gathered by industry leader suggest that "Shop Managed To Respond Same Business Day Tend to Rank Higher".

Besides “same business day” responses to customer questions being great for increasing sales, I believe response time is part of the Cassini algorithm.

My opinion is that the search engine see’s it as part of customer engagement so do your best to respond on the same business day. If you simply can’t respond on the same day, make sure your turn around time for answers in definitely within 24 hours.

Choose a Responsive Templates

Responsive eBay templates size up and down according to the size of the browser and are, by default, mobile themes. Since over 50% of Internet shoppers use their phones to browse and buy, a well crafted mobile/responsive template can help build your brand, increase customer engagement, and give you a higher conversion rate.

It is all about list your product with appropriate information and how much value you can offer to the buyer as a seller. Previously, it was very easy to manipulate search engine by flooding listings, but this is no longer the case.

How to Protect Your Website from User Generated Spam - Google Webmaster Blog

As a website owner, you might have come across some auto-generated content in comments sections or forum threads. When such content is created on your pages, not only does it disrupt those visiting your site, but it also shows some content that you may not want to be associated with your site to Google and other search engines.

In this blog post, we will give you tips to help you deal with this type of spam in your site and forum.

Some spammers abuse sites owned by others by posting deceiving content and links, in an attempt to get more traffic to their sites.

Comments and forum threads can be a really good source of information and an efficient way of engaging a site's users in discussions. This valuable content should not be buried by auto-generated keywords and links placed there by spammers.

There are many ways of securing your site’s forums and comment threads and making them unattractive to spammers:

Keep your forum software updated and patched
Take the time to keep your software up-to-date and pay special attention to important security updates. Spammers take advantage of security issues in older versions of blogs, bulletin boards, and other content management systems.

Add a CAPTCHA
CAPTCHAs require users to confirm that they are not robots in order to prove they're a human being and not an automated script. One way to do this is to use a service like reCAPTCHA, Securimage and Jcaptcha .

Block suspicious behavior
Many forums allow you to set time limits between posts, and you can often find plugins to look for excessive traffic from individual IP addresses or proxies and other activity more common to bots than human beings. For example, phpBB, Simple Machines, myBB, and many other forum platforms enable such configurations.

Check your forum’s top posters on a daily basis
If a user joined recently and has an excessive amount of posts, then you probably should review their profile and make sure that their posts and threads are not spammy.

Consider disabling some types of comments
For example, It’s a good practice to close some very old forum threads that are unlikely to get legitimate replies.

If you plan on not monitoring your forum going forward and users are no longer interacting with it, turning off posting completely may prevent spammers from abusing it.

Make good use of moderation capabilities
Consider enabling features in moderation that require users to have a certain reputation before links can be posted or where comments with links require moderation. If possible, change your settings so that you disallow anonymous posting and make posts from new users require approval before they're publicly visible.

Moderators, together with your friends/colleagues and some other trusted users can help you review and approve posts while spreading the workload. Keep an eye on your forum's new users by looking on their posts and activities on your forum.

Consider blacklisting obviously spammy terms
Block obviously inappropriate comments with a blacklist of spammy terms (e.g. Illegal streaming or pharma related terms) . Add inappropriate and off-topic terms that are only used by spammers, learn from the spam posts that you often see on your forum or other forums. Built-in features or plugins can delete or mark comments as spam for you.

Use the "nofollow" attribute for links in the comment field
This will deter spammers from targeting your site. By default, many blogging sites (such as Blogger) automatically add this attribute to any posted comments.

Use automated systems to defend your site
Comprehensive systems like Akismet, which has plugins for many blogs and forum systems are easy to install and do most of the work for you.

Source

How To Increase Organic Traffic From Google To Your Blog

search engines traffic statistic
Traffic is one of the most common issue every internet marketer and website owner concern about. If you are an website owner then you definitely want people easily find your website or blog on google rather than your competitors. And when they find and land on your website, depending on the traffic source we called it Direct, Organic, Paid and Referral Traffic.

What is Organic Traffic?

"Organic traffic" is traffic that comes to your blog as a result of search engine natural/free/unpaid search results. When a search engine like google returns its search results, it usually gives us two type results: organic and paid.

What is Organic Traffic

Organic search results are the webpage listings that most closely match the user’s search query based on relevance, also called “natural” search results. Paid results are basically advertisements — the Web site owners have paid to have their Website display for certain keywords, so these listings show up when someone runs a search query containing those keywords.

So when anyone click your webpage link from the search engine “natural” listings and reach your website, your website get a organic traffic.

How to Increase Organic Traffic From Google?

So, you want to get more organic traffic from google to your blog?

all you have to do is make sure your blog is displayed in google organic search results. Everyone wants to achieve higher google organic rankings, That’s because google organic search traffic is a proven.

The only trouble is, SEO keeps evolving, and no-one wants a penalty because of practicing the tricky methods. Google has been rolling out updates, ranging from Panda to Penguin to Google EMDs (exact match domain names) and just recently, the (PBN) Private Blog Network deindexing updates to prevent search spam.

So what I'll do to increase my blog google organic ranking?

I'm not going to suggest you to hire SEO Professionals, instead I would suggest you to do it yourself. Whether you’re an internet newbie or expert, the following actionable tips will increase your blog google organic ranking:

Focus on 'long tail' keywords

Long tail keywords are phrases which can be very specific to your business. For example, if you blog about office cleaning and janitorial service in Toronto, trying to target ‘cleaning Toronto’ will have high competition levels from other blog and achieving a high google organic rank for this keyword will be difficult.

Instead, aim for long tail keywords which relate to a specific product or service, e.g ‘office cleaning service in Toronto’. This is more likely to target searchers who are using specific search terms to find the exact service they need. These specific, or niche, long tail keywords tend to have low competition levels and are therefore easier for your blog to gain high google organic ranking.

Consistent and Fresh Content

If you’ve decided you want to dedicate time to your blog, then it’s vital to make sure you are able to do this consistently. If you have written 5 blogs then don’t publish these all at once; instead, stagger them regularly across several weeks. Google rewards content which is fresh and provides useful information for users. Plus, regular blogs/articles positions you as a credible resource and enhances the authority of your website.

Create Valuable Content

Content, is ultimately what every user is searching for – in some form or another. It may be articles, video, wikis, blogs, or other social media, but it is all content, and the Useful and informative of it you have, the bigger your slice of the Google pie will be. If you have More valuable and useful content than other sites for a given search keyword, which site do you think Google is going to send its organic traffic to if its desire is to give the user the best results and experience possible? to your website.

Google is always going to remain committed to providing the best experience that it possibly can for users, and if your content is deemed as ‘low quality’ by Google, then its ranking will drop as they will see it as being of no use to their search engine users.

The key to creating a great website is to create the best possible experience for your audience with original and high quality content. If people find your site useful and unique, they may come back again or link to your content on their own websites. This can help attract more people to your site over time.

Ethical Link Building

There has been a lot of chatter about link building following Google’s crackdown on the spammy links which previously dominated SEO. Keep in mind when you build links for your blog:

  • Avoid spamming 
  • Aim to provide value to users of the sites you want a link from 
  • Provide links to content relevant to the site you want a link from 
  • Prevent stuffing the anchor text with lots of keywords 
  • Avoiding being too promotional on Social platforms 
  • Aim to contribute


There are many ways of finding ethical link sources around the web, here are a few different types of websites that could provide a link opportunity:

  • General directories 
  • Local business directories
  • Bookmarking websites
  • Social websites
  • Reach out to related bloggers to write about your blog
  • Participating on related community
  • Answer question on Q&A sites like quora
  • Write Guest Posts

You can also assist in effective link building without the help of any other sites, simply by building internal links within your own website. If you are creating content about a specific aspect of your business, then link to the related page(s) within your site. This shows Google that what you are talking about is relevant and can encourage visitors further into your site.

Pay Respect to Google Webmaster Guideline

Some people think that they are clever enough to outsmart Google. But they’re not. Though underhand tactics can gain momentum for a site, this is always for the short term. Google inevitably finds out, punishes your site and you end up in a far worse position than you were in initially. Dedicating time and planning to a well thought out SEO Strategy will see your blog reap the rewards in the long term.

Optimize for your Blog Reader not for Search Engine

To do everything you possibly can to improve your website’s SEO, optimisation needs to be a priority when you create, edit or update any of your content. This starts by writing meta tags for each page of your site which gives search engines a clear description of the content on each page. The most important meta tags are meta titles and meta descriptions.

Optimize your blog post title
The title provides a short description for each page which tells the search engine about the content of the page – this should contain keywords as near as possible to the start of the descriptions.

Optimize your blog post description
Descriptions are for search engines too, but they also provide info to users about the content within each page. This is your chance to entice search engine users to click through and browse the services or products that you have to offer.

Try to Lower your Blog Bounce rate

As usability is at the heart of Google’s SEO practices, their algorithms monitor how long users stay on a site – widely known as a website’s ‘bounce rate’. A high bounce rate indicates that the page didn’t contain content that was relevant to the user, or that the page offered a poor user experience. You should continue to strive to keep your website's bounce rate as low as possible by identifying factors which could be causing your users to leave your site.

Make the most of Google's Keyword Planner

Google’s Keyword Planner provides a fantastic starting point for businesses that want to find out which keywords they should try to rank well for. Google’s Keyword Planner was originally created for their AdWords users, but you can still use it without paying to advertise.

Simply type in some key phrases that you think your customers will use to try to find you. Google’s Keyword Planner will deliver a list which details the number of monthly searches for these terms, as well as the competition level for each. This helps businesses to identify the most beneficial keywords to target throughout their content.

Find and Get involved in related online community

Providing useful content to your online customers cements your authority within your company’s niche. Invite your online audience to ask questions and provide feedback to gauge opinions about the products that you deliver. Not only does this give you an insight into what your potential customers think and what they want, it also gives your website authority within Google rankings as you are providing what users are looking for – useful content.

Get Social

Social signals are already impacting Google Organic Rankings and many industry experts believe that will only increase. In a study conducted by Searchmetrics, seven social media activities ranked in the top eight factors that contributed towards SEO – particularly Google Plus.

Constantly Test & Optimize

You’re not quite done yet! The web is a living medium, and it’s never too late to better optimize your blog and content. There is always room for improvement, so don't be afraid to test and make changes in your blog. You would be surprised at how the smallest change can often result in the biggest change.

That's a pretty good start covers tactics that can help you increase your blog google organic ranking and traffic. Hope you find this post helpful.

How To Perform an Perfect SEO Audit of Your Website

SEO Audit

Doing an Perfect SEO Audit is a tremendous task. You need to approach this from different angles, have a defined structure of what you wish to accomplish and you have to use the right tools to get the job done perfectly.

Can I do it too? Of course. Just follow the steps below:

Step 1: Perform a Crawl on the website

In this step you'll crawl your website for find out technical problems your website might encounter.

I recommend using Screaming Frog's SEO Spider to perform this crawl (it's free for the first 500 URIs and £99/year after that).

Alternatively, you can use Xenu's Link Sleuth; but keep in mind that this tool was designed to crawl a site to find broken links. It displays a site's page titles and meta descriptions, but it was not created to perform the level of analysis we're going to discuss.



Screaming Frog SEO Spider is a free small desktop program (PC or Mac) which crawls websites' links, images, CSS, script and apps from an SEO perspective. It goes through every single one of your pages and looks for the following:

  • Link Errors – Client errors such as broken links & server errors (No responses, 4XX, 5XX).
  • Redirects – Any Permanent or temporary redirects (301, 302).
  • External Links – all of the sites you link out to and their status codes.
  • Protocol – Whether the URLs are secure (HTTPS) or insecure (HTTP).
  • URL Issues – Non ASCII characters, dynamic URLs, uppercase characters, URLs that are too long, and underscores.
  • Duplicate Pages – Hash value / MD5checksums algorithmic check for exact duplicate pages.
  • Page Title Tag – Missing, duplicate, over 65 characters, short, pixel width truncation, same as h1, or multiple title tags.
  • Meta Description Tag – Missing, duplicate, over 156 characters, short, pixel width truncation or multiple meta description tags.
  • Meta Keywords Tag – the same stuff as title and meta description tags. Mainly for reference, as they are not used by search engine like Google, Bing or Yahoo.
  • Headings Tags – the types of headings you use (h1, h2, h3) as well as keyword usage, duplicates, over 70 characters, and any missing heading tags.
  • Meta Robots – what you are allowing to be indexed or not indexed as well as if you use it (Index, noindex, follow, nofollow, noarchive, nosnippet, noodp, noydir etc.).
  • Rel Canonical – in case you are pointing search engines to a different URL (Canonical link element & canonical HTTP headers.).
  • File Size – Size of URLs & images (the smaller your file sizes, the faster your load time).
  • Page Depth Level – Page Depth Levels search engines have to crawl to find all of your content.
  • Internal links – what pages you are linking to within your own website.
  • Anchor Text – All link text you are using for hyperlink. Alt text from images with links.
  • Follow & Nofollow – which of your links are being followed or not (At page and link level).
  • Images – All URIs with the image link & all images from a given page. Images over 100kb, missing alt text, alt text over 100 characters.
  • Search Engine Crawler Setting – this feature will allow you to choose your favorite search engine crawler (e.g., Googlebot, Bingbot, etc.). this helps you see what particular search engine crawler see.

Once you crawl your whole website with Screaming Frog, which shouldn’t take more than a few minutes, you can then export all of that data into Excel spreadsheet to help you better analyze the data.

Step 2: Webmaster Tools Configuration

Once the first step is completed, The crawl report gives us a ton of information, but to take this SEO audit to the next level, we need to see the website from inside search engine. Unfortunately, search engines don't like to give unrestricted access to their servers so we'll just have to settle for the next best thing: webmaster tools it is.



Most of the major search engines like Google and Bing offer a set of diagnostic tools for webmasters, but for our purposes, we'll focus on Google and Bing Webmaster Tools. If your website isn’t registered with Google Webmaster Tools and Bing Webmaster Tools yet, make sure you do so now.


Through these, you can see your website’s health, any crawl errors Google and Bing is experiencing, how fast your site is loading, and almost anything you can dream of. If you want to learn about all of the features in Webmaster Tools, check out below Guides.


Step 3: Keywords Research

With the help with Screaming Frog crawling (Look to your Step 1 Data) title tag, meta description, and meta keywords data, you can get a good understanding of what your website is trying to accomplish or rank for. If you combine that data with your Google Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics keyword data, you can see what a website is getting traffic for.

Google Webmaster Tools Keywords Report

Google Analytics Keywords Report

If you then take the keywords out of those two tools and enter them into Google’s Keyword Planner, it will give you group of keyword ideas:

Google’s Keyword Planner Suggestion Tool



The interesting fact about Google’s Keyword Planner is that it will tell you how competitive a keyword is and it will also tell you Avg. Monthly Searches within your selected country/locality each month.

This Keywords Group will help you get a better understanding of the potential keywords you should target, but currently aren’t. When looking at the Google’s Keyword Planner, keep in mind the following:

  • Focus on Local Searches.
  • Don’t Target Competitive keywords.

Step 4: SEO Friendly URLs

If you look at your Screaming Frog crawl report, you will see a list of all of your URLs. The way the URLs should analyze is:

  • Static URLs – your website URLs should be static. Dynamic URLs usually contain random characters like: $, =, +, &. Static URLs typically contain numbers, letters and dashes which might get a slight advantage in terms of clickthrough rate.
  • URL Length – try to keep URLs under 100 characters.
  • User Friendly URLs – ideally your URLs should be easy to remember. Cut away dashes and slashes when you don’t need them.

If you have URLs that don’t fit these criteria, you could create new URLs. When creating new ones, make sure you 301 redirect your old URLs to the new ones. That way you don’t lose the links that may be pointing to the old URLs.

Step 5: Title Tags

A page's title is its single most identifying characteristic. It's what appears first in the search engine results, and it's often the first thing people notice in social media. Thus, it's extremely important to evaluate the titles on your site.

Here are the rough guidelines you should use for your title tags:

  • Keep title tag short (less than 70 characters) and test how it looks like in the search engine result page.
  • Make sure that title tag is interesting and that it matches the visitor’s search intent.
  • Include your highest-value keywords in the beginning.
  • Add your brand name at the end of it when possible.
  • Make sure you don’t duplicate titles across the pages of your site.

Step 6: Meta Descriptions

The Meta Description tag does not affect keyword rankings so do not try to stuff keywords in it. Instead, use it to describe the page content succinctly and accurately. Make it actionable and encourage users to click on your link and you will see a huge impact on the click-through rate.

Step 7: Meta Keywords

Most search engines ignore this tag so you have no benefits from using it. The only thing you can accomplish by adding your keywords to this tag is to allow your competitors a sneak peek over your targeted terms.

Step 8: Headings

Although heading are not as important as page titles from an SEO point of view, the headings (H1, H2, H3, etc.) still weigh enough and you should make sure they are not missing and are used correctly on each page. More than that, headings have a great impact over how content is perceived by the reader, improving the user experience and conversion on the page.

With typical HTML standards, h1 tags are usually the largest on the page. For this reason it is important for you to use headings with large fonts within each page.

  • Every page should have an H1 tag, as search engines look to the H1 to help determine the topic of a page. It should be the first thing in the body text of the page and should appear prominently.
  • H1 tags should never contain images or logos, only text. The keyword of a page needs to be used in the H1 tag and in at least half of the total heading tags on a page, if more than one heading tag is present.
  • From a usability perspective, paragraphs should never be longer than 5 lines of text, and it is wise to break up a page every 2-3 paragraphs with a sub-heading in the form of an H tag (H2 or H3) or an image. Testing has shown that when users are faced with a large block of unbroken text, most either skim over the text or skip it altogether, so content needs to be divided into usable chunks.

Step 9: Site Content

You might heard the saying “Content is King”. Your pages need to have enough fresh content to rank well in the search engines. Having less than 300 words on a page (not counting the HTML tags) is considered sub-optimal. What’s interesting is that pages with more than 2,400 words usually receive better rankings in the search engines.

One of the major issues that could affect your rankings in the search engines is duplicate content. Regardless if you have only one product or thousands of products on your site, it is important to make the content unique and target different keywords on each page.

In the past, duplicate content could only harm that content itself, by being filtered out by the search engine or sent to the supplemental index instead. Ever since the Panda update was released though, a duplicate content problem may impact your entire site, not just the pages that are duplicated. You can have good pages on your site (that are not duplicated) lose their rankings or even fall out of the index altogether.

To find out if you have content that exists in a similar form on another page or website you can use the Copyscape tool.

Step 10: Image Text and alt Texts

A picture is worth a thousand words but unfortunately only humans can see it. To make sure the search engines also understand what your pictures are about, you should include the important keywords that describe each of them in two places: in the file name and in the alt attribute.

For a comprehensive resource on optimizing images, read Rick DeJarnette's Ultimate Guide for Web Images and SEO.

Step 11: Internal and External linking

Internal Links

Internal links are links from one page of your site to a different page on your site. Although commonly used in main navigation, when done right, they should improve both rankings and usability.

Both Webmaster Tools and Screaming Frog Tool will give you data on internal links. The more you link within your own site, when relevant, the easier it will be for search engines to crawl your whole site.

Each page of your site has the potential, through its content, to link to other pages from your site. To use this potential, you should insert contextual links to other pages from your site that you would like to rank better. Just make sure you use the keywords that you would like the target pages to rank for when you link to them.

And remember that your visitors are more likely to click on a link in the text of a page, because it feels more natural.

External link

When you link from a page of your site to another page on a different site, you send a powerful vote, endorsing the target’s page quality. Therefore it is important to make sure your site links only to high quality authority sites, otherwise your site’s trustworthiness might be affected.

In case you must link to sites that you don’t trust, make sure you use the nofollow attribute.

Step 12: Robots.txt and Meta Robots Tags

In this step the most important thing to begin with is to make sure that your content is accessible to the all search engines. One mistake here and the search engines won’t be able to crawl your site, which means you will get no rankings at all (you're doomed) . With that in mind, let's make sure your site's pages are accessible.

Robots.txt

The robots.txt file is used to restrict search engine crawlers from accessing sections of your website. Although the file is very useful, it's also an easy way to inadvertently block crawlers.

As an extreme example, the following robots.txt entry restricts all crawlers from accessing any part of your site:


Manually check the robots.txt file, and make sure it's not restricting access to important sections of your site. You can also use your Google Webmaster Tools account to identify URLs that are being blocked by the file.

Meta Robots Tags

The meta robots tags is used to tell search engine crawlers if they are allowed to index a specific page and follow its links.

When analyzing your site's accessibility, you want to identify pages that are inadvertently blocking crawlers. Here is an example of a robots meta tag that prevents crawlers from indexing a page and following its links:



Step 13: URL Canonicalization

URL Canonicalization, is one of the basic principles of SEO and it’s essential to creating an optimized website.

One of the common mistakes that most website owners do is splitting the link authority of their website because they are not redirecting the non-www section of their website correctly.

Example:

http://yourdomain.com/

should 301 redirect to:

http://www.yourdomain.com/

If you don’t do this, you are essentially telling the search engines to keep two copies of your site in the index and split the link authority between them.

How can you make sure you don’t have this problem? It’s easy to find out. Just search in Google for:

site:yourdomain.com -www

If your search does not match any documents, then you should be fine. Otherwise use the htaccess redirect tool from the Tools section below.

Step 14: Broken links

Because the Google and other search engines crawl the web link-to-link, broken links can cause SEO problems for your site. When Google is crawling your website and hits a broken link, the crawler immediately leaves your website. If Google encounters too many broken links on your website, it may consider that site has a poor user experience, which can cause a reduced crawl rate/depth and both indexing and ranking problems.

Unfortunately, broken links can also happen due to someone outside of your website linking in incorrectly. While these types of broken links can’t be avoided (or you don't control over), they can be easily fixed with a 301 redirect.

To avoid both user and search engine problems, you should routinely check Google and Bing Webmaster Tools for crawl errors and run a tool like Link Checker on your site to make sure there are no crawlable broken links.

If broken links are found, you need to implement a 301 redirect per the guidelines in the URL Redirect section.

WordPress user can use to monitor and make 301 redirects by plugin like Broken Link Checker.
You can also use your Google Webmaster Tools account to check for broken links that Google has found on your site.

Step 15: Page Load Speed

Website Visitors have a very little attention span, and if your site takes too long to load, they will leave. Similarly, search engine crawlers have a limited amount of time that they can devote to each site on the Internet. Consequently, sites that load quickly are crawled more thoroughly and more consistently than slower ones.



You can measure your site's Load Speed with a number of different tools. Google Page Speed and YSlow check a given page using various best practices and then provide helpful suggestions (e.g., enable compression, leverage a content distribution network for heavily used resources, User Experience, etc.).

Pingdom Full Page Test and GTmetrix presents an itemized list of the objects loaded by a page, their sizes, and their load times. Here's an excerpt from Pingdom's results for w3storm.com:


These tools help you identify pages that are serving as bottlenecks for your website. Then, you can itemize suggestions for optimizing those bottlenecks and improving your website's performance.

You might also see benefits by using a content delivery network (CDN) for your images like cloudflare or maxcdn.

Wordpress user can try cacheing plugin like WP Super Cache, W3 Total Cache, etc that can help with page load speed issues, and a simple CDN can be set-up via Amazon AWS for very little money.

Step 16: Inbound links

Backlinks, also known as inbound links, incoming links, inlinks, and inward links, are incoming links to a website or web page. In basic link terminology, a backlink is any link received by a web node (web page, directory, website, or top level domain) from another web node.

The most powerful inbound links that you can get from another website are those that are within the text of a page and that are surrounded by content that is relevant to both your site and the link anchor text.

When it comes to the number of incoming links, the more the better. But it is more important to get these links from different websites (unique root domains). This means that having 1 link from 10 unique websites is a lot better than having 10 links from 1 website.

To find out the number of inbound links to your site and the anchor text distribution you can use Open Site Explorer, Ahrefs, SEO PowerSuite or Majestic SEO. All these tools provide link metrics and detailed information that can help you audit your link profile. Through Open Site Explorer you can get a great overview of your inbound links just like following image:



Just keep in mind that these tools use their own link graph, i.e. they crawl the Internet independently and create their own index. This means that they can only tell you what’s in their own index, and not what’s in the Google’s or Bing’s index database.

Step 17: Social Media Audit

Social media is one of the most effective methods to influence and engage with your customers. Your ability to engage socially and become popular on social platforms will also have a great impact on your site’s ability to achieve higher search engine organic rankings.



Both Google and Bing have clearly stated that they take social signals into account when ranking websites. In other words, social media does affects SEO.

If you want to do better on the social web, consider the following 4 tips:

  • Set up your profile and optimize for human interaction and to make sure that your logo and about/bio information are there so that your visitors recognize you.
  • Make it easy for people to share your content socially by integrating sharing features throughout your website, blog posts, etc.
  • Create content that is worthy of sharing and then reach out to people in that space via social channels to ask for feedback about said content.
  • Have a social media posting policy that your entire staff follows to maintain branding, tone and messaging consistency across all platforms.

To find out how many shares and likes a page has you can use Free Social Media Analytics Tools like BufferFollowerwonkGoogle AnalyticsSumAllKlout, or your individual social channel analytics.

Finally, you need to pay close attention to the response you get from your social audience. What is the level of engagement you achieved? Was it just a “Like” or did it go further to sharing or leaving positive comments? The higher the engagement, the more likely it is to have a major impact over the growth of your social circles.

Step 18: Competitive Analysis

If one of your main goals is to achieve high rankings for your website in the search engines, then you need to first find out who are the other websites that already rank for the keywords you are targeting: your competitor.

Analyzing your competitors will help you get a better understanding of their strength and whether you have a real chance of outranking them. Making a good decision when you enter a niche will save you many months or even years of work spent on trying to catch up with a competition that is too strong. You would be better off finding a local or smaller niche and tackle that instead for a start.

Usually the first thing you should look at when you analyze your competitors is their overall strength. SEMrushQuick Sprout Website Analyzer, and Moz Open Site Explorer are the best competitive audit tools I've used so far.

As you can see from the above picture, I have put moz, semrush, quicksprout, ahref and majestic seo in Moz's Open Site Explorer for compare their metrics and yes Moz win once again.

After you've analyzed your site and your competitors websites, Now that you’ve done an Perfect SEO Audit of Your Website. This will allow you to have a Complete SEO Audit Report that looks pretty.

You can either plug the data into the audit template, Google Document, or using Microsoft Word. Once you do so, you will see an area for you to add a subjective score of how you did overall per category, 1 being the lowest and 10 being the highest.

Additional Resources
Just in case this article weren't enough to feed your SEO audit hunger, here are a few more SEO audit resources you can go after:

Technical Site Audit Checklist - Geoff Kenyon provides an excellent checklist of items to investigate during an SEO audit. If you check off each of these items, you're well on your way to completing an excellent audit.

How to Perform Your First SEO Audit - Learn the steps to perform your first SEO audit with a step-by-step template.

Find Your Site's Biggest Technical Flaws in 60 Minutes - Continuing with the time-sensitive theme, this post by Dave Sottimano shows you just how many SEO-related problems you can identify in an hour.

How To Do Your Own 5-Minute SEO Audit - Here is how you can do your own 5-minute SEO audits. Don't worry if this takes you 10 or 15 minutes.

What Do You Think?
I would love to hear what you are doing differently when you audit a website. So why not comment below with your own audit method? It will help everyone make their own website audits better.

How to Make Your Blog as Local as Your Business

Let’s face it, local SEO’s and business owners have given up on content and settled for SEO.
Now, I’m not saying that SEO is bad or that no local business can write. But what I am saying is that the industry has prioritized the SEO/ranking value of content over the audience value of our content.
The moment SEO becomes more important than our audience, we have a marketing problem.
Let’s take off our 1,500 word minimum with 2% keyword density blinders and ask ourselves a few simple questions:
  • Would I actually read this whole post? If you can’t read the whole article there’s no chance your audience will.
  • Would I send a new potential customer a link to my blog? If not, then potential customers visiting your website probably shouldn’t see it either.
  • Do my blog posts receive engagement: comments or shares? I’m not talking about fake Gucci handbag comments, but instead, real comments or Facebook shares.
While this is a tough standard, if we don’t have something to aim for what is the point? As a local business or a online marketer working with local SMB’s, the goal for content should be to engage with your audience. Often times, the easiest way to do this is to be local. If your audience is local and you want to gain content traction, be local.

Step 1: Reallocate Your Time

Typically, we allocate the following percentages of time for our blog:
  • 5% of our time preparing
  • 90% of our time writing
  • 5% of our time promoting
For your local blog to perform well, I am suggesting a reallocation of time:
  • 20% preparation
  • 50% writing
  • 30% promotion
If an article was written, but no one reads it was it really written?
Frankly, we often mistakenly think search engines will find our content and then our audience will. This is backwards thinking. Instead, we need to identify the interests of our local audience, craft an exceptional piece of content, and promote the heck out of it.

Step 2. Take a Tour of the Neighborhood

What makes the city or county you do business in unique? What local things or attractions exist that someone from out of town wouldn’t know about?
Tweet this: The goal isn’t to be everybody’s cup of tea, the goal is to be your local audience’s.
Take a tour of the neighborhood and ask yourself, what does my audience care about? What would they share?
The content goal for a local business should be for your business to be the first thing people in your area associate with the service or product you provide.
Think of content as an awareness factor. What is the best way to make my local audience aware of my service or product? The answer: relevance.
We have found that with simply $20 you can promote your content to your local audience and drive hundreds of relevant visits to your website for less than $0.50 cents a click. Outside of relevant, localized content, there are few avenues to drive such traffic.
Tweet this: Set Up remarketing to market to the new audience you are attracting.

Step 3. Choosing and Promoting Your Content

We have taken a tour of the neighborhood and now have a pretty good idea of what makes our area unique. Next, we must decide how often to write and on what.
If we are going to add a little local flavor to our blog it’s important to understand what makes our audience tick. We often simply just write about what we do, but that is rarely the best way to engage with your audience.
The other option we often take is writing for thought leadership. While also fine, most local businesses will not increase sales by writing a post on how they have created a revolutionary new way to repair your fridge.
The core reason why these two approaches and many others fail, is because they are not relevant to your audience and cannot be easily promoted via interest targeting.
A general rule of thumb is that quantity is not as important as quality. Do not try to produce more content than you can produce well.
We want to impact our audience and thus influence our local rankings…not the other way around.
When selecting a topic to write on, back your way into it. Our favorite tool for content promotion and amplification is Facebook ads. So often, we choose our topics based on what interests us instead of what interests our audience. Let’s choose what to write based on who and what we can target.
So, before your write that next post head over to the “boost post” option from a previous post, and look at your audience options.
facebook edit audience
Ask yourself, what targeting options are available and how can I make sure that my topic fits with my targeting?
Once you have chosen your topic, finding a title worthy of promotion of tough. Luckily, the team over at Portent have created an awesome tool to help you with choosing that next title. Check it out!
If you are having a tough time getting the local juices flowing here are some potential topics:
  • 5 Places in ___ that you never knew existed
  • Highest rated taco joints in ____
  • 10 ways you can tell you’re from ___
What do these topics have to do with your local business to consumer service business? Everything. Your local audience doesn’t care about your post on: “How to Do something in 5 Easy Steps.”
Instead, they care, share, and read about content that is relevant to them. Do you think they will call the plumber or hvac contractors who made them laugh or wrote something engaging about their area? Or do you think they will call the hvac contractors or plumber who they never heard of because their content wasn’t relevant enough to earn a click?
Be ruthless. Make your blog as local and relevant to your audience as possible. If a piece of content cannot be promoted to your local audience don’t write it. If you can’t think of five of your customers that would read it all the way through or share it, don’t write it.
Take a stand for the power of exceptional local content and make your blog as local as your business.

How To Increase Traffic Using Pinterest

If 69% of online consumers are going to Pinterest with intent to purchase items, why not take advantage, and help improve your sales and web traffic with Pinterest? Speaking of visitors, most Pinners, 80% of Pinners, are accessing Pinterest on their phone, which means they’re then being directed to your website mobily (cough *mobilegeddon* cough).
With so many ways to improve traffic and rankings, and now mobile rankings, Pinterest presents a unique opportunity to achieve these goals and become one of the largest traffic drivers in the social realm. Follow these tips to help improve your company Pinterest page, presence, and website traffic.

1. Start With The Basics – Optimizing Your Pinterest Profile

A company Pinterest profile should define who the company is: their goals, passions, and interests. This makes Pinterest one of the best social networks to define a brand, offering consumers an inside look using brand boards and unique pins.
Each board can represent a different service offered, as well as interests the company shares. For example, does your team make a daily trip to the coffeeshop around the corner? Then add a coffee board to row 3 or 4 of your Pinterest profile with snapshots of the crew, as well as popular coffee pins. Anywhere from 12-20 boards are appropriate for a company Pinterest profile. Develop catchy titles, with keywords, for each board and properly source each pin with a connecting URL to the website or blog.
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The Pinterest profile description at the top needs to include exactly what a company does, with few keywords. I tend to use the same biography in all of my social profiles to keep consistency and branding throughout. Pinterest is no different. If you’re including brand keywords in the Twitter description, share the same description on Pinterest. Just because you have extra characters, doesn’t mean you have to fill them with keyword stuffing. Make the description natural, yet attractive, giving Pinners a real reason to follow.

2. Verify Your Website, Verify Your Credibility

Pinterest is getting better and better in preventing spammy Pinners from reaching users. One of their methods to the spam-stopping-madness is by offering a “verify your website” button. If you know how to navigate your website’s backend, verifying your website is a synch. Pinterest offers an easy to follow instruction guide for installing a meta tag or uploading an HTML Pinterest file to verify. If a Pinterest profile is verified, it’s more likely to be showed to more Pinners, helping to increase page popularity and click-through.

3. Rich Pins Can Make You Rich

Rich Pins are designed to make the pinning experience more enjoyable for consumers, and more efficient for companies. Instead of trying to stuff every detail about a product in the description, Rich Pins allow proper separation of product detail from a fun, catchy description. It’s a balance between the headline and body text for Pins.
rich-pins-500x481
In a study by Shopify, adding prices to pins averaged 1.5 likes, against pins that didn’t have a price at 1.1 likes. Appreciate that 0.4 difference, because as Pinterest pointed out last holiday season, over two million peopleadd a Product Pin to their boards daily. That’s a lot of opportunity, and potential for increasing traffic from a Rich Pin to it’s product page.
Don’t have products to sell? Don’t worry! Pinterest has multiple Rich Pin offers:

4. Backlink Your Pins For Increased Traffic

This is a big one, and quite possibly the best way to increase traffic from Pinterest. Keep in mind, there’s a right way to do this and a very wrong Spammy Mc. Spammer type of way to backlink your pins.
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On your own pins, not pins off of the popular page, add a relevant url from your website or blog as the pin’s “source”. Include that image on the actual page or have a relevant image that relates to the pin’s description. If you tell me I can learn how to knit in 5 simple steps, don’t send me to a construction company in New York. I’m a San Diegan, we’re very different.

5. Did Someone Say Link Building?

Bloggers and Pinners are bestfriends. Together, they shape cuticles, casseroles, and take cute cat photos. Thousands of bloggers have caught on to the many opportunities Pinterest offers as a traffic source and creates pin-worthy images to attach to posts. With that many bloggers regularly using Pinterest and having Pin It buttons on their website, it’s easy to find different guest posting opportunities through Pinterest’s Guided Search.
In the search bar at the top of Pinterest, type in a relevant topic to your industry (ie: social media). Add a couple of keywords provided by the Guided Search option and let the hundreds of relevant pins and Pinners appear before your eyes. Pins with caption overlays, like descriptions offering, “5 steps to anything”, are most likely going to be bloggers. Click through the pins and follow Pinners to start exploring the many bloggers behind Pinterest, just waiting for your un-automated guest post email. Despite the argued debate, the guest posts and relationships with relevant bloggers can help improve your overall rankings and “site juice”. Just don’t be a Spammy Mc. Spammer!
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6. Make Life Easy for Pinners – Install a Pin it Button on Your Website

Make it easy for users to share content directly from your website and add it to their favorite boards with Pin It buttons. The Pin It button can help get more referral traffic to a site when people click on Pins. People save images from a website to Pinterest, allowing more people to discover and repin them. In fact, the average Pin gets 11 repins.
Screen Shot 2015-05-06 at 7.57.15 PM                                  Screen Shot 2015-05-06 at 7.57.05 PM
Each Pinable image on a website needs to have an optimized description and title to further help with rankings. Pinterest will grab the image description and attach it to the pin automatically when a user pins it from a site. Increase ranking chances by providing a keyword-rich description a user is attracted to. You don’t want the Pinner changing your perfectly optimized description to, “I love it!” As much as we love it too, that kind of caption doesn’t do anything for rankings. Provide the Pinner with a relatable caption they’ll want to keep, referencing the company and proper keywords.

7. Attract Who You’re Attracted To

Wedding dress designers could care less about a construction company’s Pinterest page, and even less to join a “Construction Hats” board. Relevancy, as with anything online, is vital to growing engagement and traffic. Search for Pinners that are in your industry, as well as related industries to follow. Take it a step further and interact with the demographic by commenting on their new pins, asking to be a part of their group boards, and hearting your favorite pins they’ve shared. New Pinners will be more likely to visit your company profile, and eventually your website, if they can relate to the business in some way.
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8. Pin Blog Images

Blog images make great pins and repins to help increase traffic with. Using photo editing tools, like Picmonkeyor Canva, create different collages, add text overlays, increase the image contrast and quality so it’s unique for Pinterest. Get creative with your Pinterest pins and follow image trends on the popular page to see what’s getting repinned the most. Unsure of what works best on Pinterest? Curalate conducted a Pinterest image study and found the following information about pins on Pinterest:
  • “Images that contain less than 30 percent background (e.g. whitespace) are repinned the most.”
  • “The most repinned images have multiple colors: Images with multiple dominant colors have 3.25 times more repins per image than images with a single dominant color.”
  • “Very light and very dark images are not repinned as often. In fact, the repinning rate for images of medium lightness is 20 times higher than for images that are mostly black, and eight times higher than images that are mostly white.”
  • “Brand images without faces receive 23 percent more repins. Less than 1/5 of images on Pinterest today have the presence of faces.”
Pinterest-faces
Image Source: Curalate

9. Promote a Contest With Pins

Pinning images with contest details on Pinterest, while hosting the contest on your website, can help increase traffic from Pinterest to a site. For the “source” of each pin, include the contest page URL so Pinners are redirected to the correct page and are more likely to enter and repin. Uploading pins or pinning directly from a contest page will also encourage traffic from users who normally wouldn’t have visited the page in the first place, especially if repinning is an extra entry into the contest.
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Have you noticed a lot of your traffic coming from Pinterest? Share your tips in the comments below!