SEO Competitive Analysis

One of the most important activities for any SEO process is the initial competitive analysis. This process should correctly identify your SEO targets and provide fundamental input to establish your overall strategy.

Depending on the type, industry, and scope of the SEO process, this analysis can become quite complex, as there are many factors to take into consideration—more now than ever before.

In order to facilitate this process (and make it easy to replicate, control, and document), I've created a step-by-step workflow with the different activities and factors to take into consideration, including identifying SEO competitors, gathering the potential keywords to target, assessing their level of difficulty, and selecting them based on defined criteria:

The four analysis phases

As you can see, the SEO analysis workflow is divided into four phases:

1. Identify your potential SEO competitors:

This initial phase is especially helpful if you're starting with an SEO process for a new client or industry that you don't know anything about, and you need to start from scratch to identify all of the potentially relevant competitors.

It's important to note that these are not necessarily limited to companies or websites that offer the same type of content, services, or products that you do, but can be any website that competes with you in the search results for your target keywords.

2. Validate your SEO competitors:

Once you have the potential competitors that you have gathered from different relevant sources it's time to validate them, by analyzing and filtering which of those are really already ranking, and to which degree, for the same keywords that you're targeting.

Additionally, at this stage, you'll also expand your list of potential target keywords by performing keyword research. This should use sources beyond the ones that you had already identified coming from your competitors and your current organic search data—sources for which your competitors or yourself are still not ranking, that might represent new opportunities.

3. Compare with your SEO competitors:

Now that you have your SEO competitors and potential target keywords, you can gather, list, and compare your site to your competitors, using all of the relevant data to select and prioritize those keywords. This will likely include keyword relevance, current rankings, search volume, ranked pages, as well as domains' link popularity, content optimization, and page results characteristics, among others.

4. Select your target keywords:

It's finally time to analyze the previously gathered data for your own site and your competitors, using the specified criteria to select the best keyword to target for your own situation in the short-, mid-, and long-term during your SEO process: Those with the highest relevance, search volume, and profitability. The best starting point is in rankings where you are competitive from a popularity and content standpoint.

Tools & data sources

The data sources and tools—besides the traditional ones from search engines, like their keyword or webmaster tools—that can help you to implement the process (some of them mentioned in the workflow) are:

• To identify competitors: Alexa Top Sites, SimilarWeb Websites Ranking & Sites Profile.
• To identify keywords: SEMRush for keyword data, SuggestMrx (you can also use Ubersuggest or SEO chat Suggestion Keyword Finder) to gather Google suggestions for your keywords.
• To identify rankings: Authority labs, Positionly, Advanced Web Ranking, among others.
• To identify popularity: The Moz SEO Toolbar SERP overlay view, OpenSiteExplorer, CognitiveSEO Backlink Explorer and MajesticSEO for link related data and easy to develop popularity analysis.

• To identify page optimization: Moz On-Page Grader, SEOchat's Page Comparison tool, and Web page SEO analysis tool for a quick on-page content optimization analysis.
• To semi-automatize the process: There are tools that have already automatized some of the phases of the process that can help you to advance faster: Moz Keyword Difficulty and SERPs analysis tool, SERPIQ, SEMRush Keyword Difficulty Tool.

Hopefully, with these resources, you'll be able to develop more and better SEO competitive analysis!

How to Use a SWOT Analysis in your SEO Keyword Research

If you've ever taken a business class, you're probably familiar with the SWOT analysis.

What Is a SWOT Analysis?

Simply put, the SWOT Analysis is a decision-making tool used to evaluate a venture in which you input all the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats you can think of into a matrix, which (in theory) makes it easier for you to identify all of the negative and positive factors that could affect the project's outcome, planning and strategy.

Keep in mind that a SWOT analysis is only helpful with goals that are attainable. It's not a replacement for a brainstorming session. A SWOT analysis deals solely in verifiable facts that can lead to a realistic goal.

Here is a sample template for a SWOT Matrix:

SWOT analyses are often helpful solely for the visual impact that they can have.

For example, if the Threat and Weakness quadrants wind up with a number of entries far in excess of the sections for Strength and Opportunity, that could be a strong indicator of challenges that need further discussion before moving forward with your decision.

Conversely, if your matrix is overwhelmed by entries in the Strength and Opportunity fields, you could be looking at a winner.

As you can see from the above diagram, the SWOT also helps you categorize challenges into both External and Internal Origins as well as which data is labeled either Harmful or Helpful to the outcome.

"Strengths and weaknesses are often internal to your organization, while opportunities and threats generally relate to external factors."

So, What the Heck Does That Have To Do with Keyword Research?

Here's the thing: Keywords can also fall into those categories.

I'm going to show you how you can perform a competitive analysis using SEMrush to sort keywords into a SWOT Matrix, from which you can prioritize your SEO plans.

In my limited spare time I volunteer as a lacrosse coach for a local high school program, so I'm always looking for deals on marked-down equipment. I'm on LacrosseMonkey.com a lot. They have great sales on closeout items. I'm going to use them as my example.

Let's start with strengths.

Strengths – What's working now?

The Strengths are the easiest to identify. Which keywords are working best for your domain?

This is easily achievable using the Organic Positions report.

We input the domain and get a list of keyword data.

HOW DOES INTEGRATED MARKETING FIT IN TO THE BIGGER PICTURE?

Integrated marketing, multi-channel marketing, and omnichannel marketing are a testament to the evolution of marketing in a robust and diverse digital landscape. When differentiating the three, it can help to think of them in these terms:

• The focus of multi-channel marketing is reaching the largest number of customers in your target audience.
• The focus of omnichannel marketing is reaching the largest number of customers in your target audience while streamlining your messages to them across all channels.
• The focus of integrated digital marketing is reaching the largest number of customers in your target audience and streamlining your messages to them across all channels in a way that makes the most sense for them—through data measurement and analysis.

A Real Life Example:

So how does it fit into the bigger picture, with a specific industry? When it comes to choosing digital marketing channels and disruptive digital trends in the travel industry, for example, direct response is the main focus, as is programmatic advertising.

Smartphones and wearables unlock location-specific info in real-time, user reviews and recommendations become invaluable, and social media profiles increasingly serve as a connection to airlines and hotel operators—opening doors to a wide array of exclusive perks and benefits.

INTEGRATED DIGITAL MARKETING IN 3 STEPS

Three steps to building an effective, integrated digital marketing campaign include:

1. Identifying which channels convert. By utilizing technology, your team can identify where and how different channels affect one another to better understand which channels are driving performance and business.

2. Getting to know your target audience. By analyzing first- and third-party data regarding customer behavior, you can predictively determine which digital content will perform best and strategize accordingly.

3. Aligning your digital marketing strategies. For your integrated digital marketing strategy to be successful, you must ensure that your digital talent and internal departments are structured to work in unison. Not only will this foster cross-channel collaboration, it will also drive impact across numerous marketing functions.

IMPLEMENTING AN INTEGRATED DIGITAL MARKETING STRATEGY

The campaign management and relationship marketing solutions developed by Selligent help CMOs and marketing directors better understand their target audiences without putting additional strain on their internal marketing resources. Our track record of helping big brands speaks for itself.

Selligent Features:

• Rapid onboarding and implementation
• Sophisticated marketing tools built around the complex customer journeys of today
• Data-driven dynamic personalization
• Scalable automation across all channels
• An intuitive interface designed to meet the unique pain points of marketers

WHAT IS INTEGRATED DIGITAL MARKETING?

Integrated digital marketing is, as it sounds, the integration of multiple marketing strategies to form a cohesive online approach for your business. Here’s what it typically entails:

• web development and design
• search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM)
• content marketing
• social media marketing
• local listings management
• paid advertising (or pay-per-click advertising) campaigns.

The idea behind integrated digital marketing is that, while each individual strategy doesn’t have a huge impact on its own, when used in conjunction, you can create a more influential online presence.

And it’s not just some passing fad. It’s pretty much the status quo when it comes to tackling the digital realm. Of course, there are still one-off campaigns out there, but most agencies are moving toward integrated solutions, as a well-rounded marketing strategy provides better visibility and ROI for businesses online.

Integrated digital marketing requires that CMOs streamline marketing efforts across various channels in real-time to improve the customer experience and drive ROI. The main goal (and biggest challenge) of integrated marketing is to not only create a presence for your customer's brand but to position the brand in such a way that it becomes a presence in and of itself. 

What is the Robots.txt file and how can it be used to pass on instructions to search engine robots?| Digital Marketing Expert| SEO Expert| +91-8968680619

Business owners have turned to websites to promote their companies, showcase their products, and get noticed by their target audience. After all, consumers are now trooping to search engines to look for their desired products and services before paying for them.

Because of this rise in interest over online search, people are now scrambling to have their websites appear at the top of search results. This is the reason why search engine optimization (SEO) has become an essential keyword for anyone who wants to connect their business to the Internet.

Before online users can find your website in search results, search engines need to index your content first. If you happen to have sensitive data on your site that you would not wish others to see, you must do something to show only what you want others to see from your website.

Not all search bots are able to read meta tags, and so this is where the robots.txt file comes into play. This simple text file contains instructions to search robots about a website. It is a way of communicating to web crawlers and other web robots about what content is allowed for public access and what parts are protected.

In using robots.txt, webmasters should be able to answer the following questions:

Is there a need for a robots.txt file on the website?
If there is an existing robots.txt file, is it affecting the site SEO or search ranking?
Is the file blocking content or information that should not be blocked?
To answer these questions, let us delve into what its purpose is, and how we can optimize its use.

Importance of robots.txt

Here are some of the reasons why robots.txt could be critical and essential to your website:

There are files in your website that you want to be hidden or blocked from search engines.
Special instructions are needed when you are using advertisements.
You want your website to follow Google guidelines in order to boost SEO.
Just to be clear, some website owners may not feel the need to have a robots.txt file because they do not have sensitive data that needs to be hidden from public view. These all-access sites allow Googlebot to have full view of the whole website from the inside out. If you don’t have a robots.txt file, this all-access pass is the default mode for search engine spiders.

Why do you need to learn about robots.txt?

If you’re scratching your head and wondering what the fuss is with robots.txt, here are some points behind the importance of understanding this important file:

It controls how search engines can see and interact with webpages.
They are fundamental parts of how search engines work.
Improper usage of robots.txt may hurt your website’s search ranking.
Using robots.txt is part of the Google Guidelines.

How does robots.txt work?

Imagine a search bot trying to access a website. Before it can do that, it first checks for the existence of a robots.txt file if it is allowed to access it. If a message appears as “Disallow”, it means that the search bot is not allowed to visit any page of the website.

There are three basic conditions that robots need to follow:

Full Allow: the robot is allowed to crawl through all content in the website.

Full Disallow: no content is allowed for crawling.

Conditional Allow: directives are given to the robots.txt to determine specific content to be crawled.

Here are some of the most common commands inside a typical robots.txt file:

Allow Full Access

 User-agent: *
 Disallow:

Block All Access

User-agent: *

Disallow: /

Block One Folder

User-agent: *

Disallow: /folder/

Block One File

User-agent: *

Disallow: /file.html

Although robots.txt file has instructions on which part of the site is allowed to be seen, website owners should keep sensitive data/information in another machine than letting it stay on the same server or folder as the main website.

The main website directory is where the robots.txt should be located so that search engines may be able to find it. This is usually located beside the welcome page or root folder of the site.

Search bots usually do not go through folders and subfolders on the site to look for the robots.txt file, and so it should always be placed in the main directory. If the bots do not find it there, they will assume that the site does not have robots.txt, leading them to start indexing all content that they can find.

Robots.txt File Errors

Some common problems may arise when there are typographical errors in the robots.txt file that you created. Search engines would not recognize the correct instructions and may result to contradicting directives.

However, there are tools that can be used to detect typos or missing colons and slashes. Using a validator or online robots.txt checker can help rectify the mistake.

Let us look at this example:

User-agent: *

Disallow: /temp/

This is incorrect because a dash between “User” and “agent” was not placed.

It is time-consuming to manually write all the files. In instances where a complex robots.txt file is used, there are tools that can help generate the file for the website owner. There are also tools that can help you to select the files that should be excluded.

How To Know If Your Robots.txt file is Blocking Important Contents

Google’s guidelines for robots.txt specifications will help you to know if you re blocking certain pages that search engines need to understand. If you are given permission, you can use Google search to test your existing robots.txt file.

Robots.txt Instructions Explained

Here is a rundown of the essential contents of a typical robots.txt and what each element means.

User-agent

This refers to the robot or search engine bot that is allowed to index the site.

Examples:

User-agent: *

This allows any search engine to visit the whole site.

User-agent: Googlebot

Only Googlebot can use the directives in the file.

Disallow

This is used to let the robot know that there are some limitations in accessing the content of the website.

User-agent: *

Disallow: /images

The first line means that all search engines are allowed to access the website. However, the second line restricts access to the search bots to the images folder.

Googlebot

This refers to the Google web crawling bot that updates pages for addition to the Google index.

Allow

This means that the website is allowing all search engines to visit or index the site.

Example:

User-Agent: *

In other instances where you would want to limit the access of robots into your website, you may use this instruction:

User-agent: *

Disallow: /images

However, if you wish to allow a specific image to be indexed, this should be the correct instruction:

User-agent:*

Disallow: /images

Allow: /images/myfamily.jpg

Conclusion

Always remember that when using the robots.txt file, it should be properly encoded to avoid confusing directives. An incorrect robots.txt file may harm your search ranking.

How Keyword Density, Frequency, Prominence and Proximity Affects Search Engine Rankings

Keyword Density

Keyword density refers to the ratio (percentage) of keywords contained within the total number of indexable words within a web page.

The preferred keyword density ratio varies from search engine to search engine. In general, I recommend using a keyword density ratio in the range of 2-8%.

You may like to use this real-time keyword analysis tool to help you optimize a web page's keyword density ratio.

Keyword Frequency

Keyword frequency refers to the number of times a keyword or keyword phrase appears on a web page.

The theory is that the more times a keyword or keyword phrase appears on a web page, the more relevance a search engine is likely to give the page for a search with those keywords.

In general, I recommend that you ensure that the most important keyword or keyword phrase is the most frequently use keywords in a web page.

But be careful not to abuse the system by repeating the same keyword or keyword phrases over and over again.

Keyword Prominence

Keyword prominence refers to how prominent keywords are on a web page.

The general recommendation is to place important keywords at, or near, the start of a web page, sentence, TITLE or META tag.

Keyword Proximity

Keyword proximity refers to the closeness between two or more keywords. In general, the closer the keywords are, the better.

For example:

How Keyword Density Affects Search Engine Rankings

How Keyword Density Affects Rankings In Search Engine
Using the example above, if someone searched for "search engine rankings," a web page containing the first sentence is more likely to rank higher than the second.

What are keywords and why are they important?

Do you know what keywords your website is currently ranking for online? Keywords are very important for every business website as they drive targeted web traffic to your business for free. When done well, using the right keywords can skyrocket your business to sales success online.
Before we get into the details of what you need to do to rank effectively for certain keywords, some of you might be wondering, “what is a keyword?”

Keywords are the words and phrases that Internet users type into the search box of a search engine, such as Google, to find what websites that match what are looking for.
Some keywords get hundreds of thousands of unique searches a day while others get a couple of hundred. At the same time, some high trafficked keywords are very competitive online because many businesses are trying to get referrals and traffic from users when they search for those keywords while others are not.

In choosing a keyword for your business, it is very important to put some time and thought into researching keywords. There are some good free tools online such as the Google Keyword Research tool and Wordtracker that can help get you started in researching keywords relevant to your business. These tools can be very useful for getting insights about how many users are searching for a given keyword and how much competition there is for the keyword online. This can also give you a realistic sense of what keywords you should be using on your website and how effective they will be in marketing your site online.

Once you have researched keywords for your business, you can develop a  simple plan of action for implementing those keywords on your site. Our search optimization tools in our Yola Gold package are really helpful for advice on adding keywords to all the important and hidden areas of your website. For the sake of this article, let’s say you have a website about organic chocolate and based on your keyword research, you came up with the following keywords to target:

• Chocolate truffles
• Organic chocolate
• Organic dark chocolate
• Health benefits of chocolate

It would then make sense to create pages on your website targeting those keywords by providing relevant information to online searchers about what they are looking for. We have created some in depth information about how to develop content targeted at specific keywords to improve how you optimize your site for search engines online through our Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tutorial or our guest blog post: How to Drive Profitable Traffic to Your Website with Long Tail SEO.

Some businesses choose to include keywords relevant to their business site domain name. This strategy works as well as long as it is inline with the brand identity you have for your website. One thing to avoid though is excessively using hyphens in your domain name such as www.travel-south-america-easy-free.com as it makes your business appear unprofessional and might even make users avoid your website when it is listed online. If you don’t have a domain, this article can help you understand how to choose your domain and business name.

Putting some thought into target keywords for your website is an investment worth making. With the free tools and resources available online, it will be easy for you to get started on thinking about ways to use targeted keywords to get qualified leads to your website’s pages.

Blog Commenting – A Practical Guide for Bloggers

Blog commenting is one of the easiest ways to get backlinks to a new or old website. In fact, an effective blog commenting strategy will make sure your backlink graph remains constant or go up with time.

Though, when we talk about making most out of your blog commenting strategy, we here talking about few things:

Creating connection
Creating backlinks
Driving Traffic

We have already covered that in the past, and if you have missed, you can quickly go through the importance of blog commenting. Today, we will look into blog commenting strategy from creating backlinks. And yes, there is a big difference between commenting on every blog and blog commenting on keeping SEO in mind. The idea here is to generate more backlinks to improve page rank, improve domain authority and MozRank.

Getting started with Blog commenting Strategy:

In this strategy, we will learn how to quickly find do-follow and right blogs to comment on. I will mostly advocate WordPress blogs because WordPress default commenting system makes it easier to comment on. I’ll also suggest you get easy comment addon and also a gravatar for your comment Email address.

Finding best blogs to comment on:

First, let me ask you, which one is the right blog to comment on? Let me wrap that in short. The blog should have these characteristics.

• Should be active, authority blog.
• Should be reputed one.
• Should be a hub for serious webmasters in your niche.
• Should have a good Page Rank.
• Do-follow? Excellent! No-follow, it still holds value. Do comment on it.
• Keyword Luv Enabled
• Comment Luv Enabled
• Top commentator Dofollow widget
• Recent comments widget

Keep this checklist in mind whenever you are on a mission – Blog Commenting. You can always use Google to search blogs to comment on. Here’s how to do that. Simply use some of these phrases to find the best out of the web.

• “high PR blogs to comment on.”
• “high PR do-follow for blog commenting.”
• “high PR blogs using CommentLuv/KeywordLuv plugin”.

Useful Web services for Blog commenting :

Ahh! If you are looking for those services which sell blog commenting services, then you are at wrong place. One reason, why I don’t recommend these services (unless you need rapid link building in a short span) because those comments life is not long and mostly they use services like scrapebox and some list to comment on. Instead, we should focus more on serious blogs, which is not going to die over time and we can expect good traffic too over time. Anyways, let’s focus on the main strategy and finding best comment-enabled blogs to grab backlinks.

Here one free service which I highly recommend is DropMyLink. This is very useful web-service for people like you & me, who needs to build targeted backlinks in minimal time.

DropMyLink – DropMyLink is the best blog commenting service, using which users can easily find the right blog to comment on, be it a .edu blog, .gov blog, CommentLuv plugin enabled blog and more. Just type in your Keyword and select the blog type you want to search, rest DropMyLink will work like Google to represent the best results for you to enjoy Blog Commenting.
DropMyLink

Along with the above web services, install this useful tool to analyze the blog power.

SEO Quake – Available for Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Safari, Opera, this is the tool required to keep a close watch on the blog’s progress, it’s backlinks, how well the blog is doing in searches and more.
How To Search Do-Follow Blogs To Comment On?

SEO quake toolEither use DropMyLink to search do-follow blogs to comment on or install SEO Quake and configure it to highlight the no-follow links. Once installed, it will highlight the no-follow links for you. If it’s not highlighted, then this is a blog which deserves your time and a good comment. But do not forget to go through the above-said blogs to comment on checklist too.

Now, these are some tools which simplify the process of finding the right blog. A bit of advice, don’t be greedy, do not get cling to do-follow blogs only, an excess of everything is harmful. Do consider to comment on some no-follow blogs too. Work proportionately, say, 2 do-follow blogs for every five no-follow blogs.

Also read: Using SeoQuake to find best link building opportunity
Now the blog search is complete. Time to analyze the blog. Time to search the right post to READ and comment. Here’s how to do that.

Also check: Do-follow forum list
How To Find The Right Post To Comment On

If you are on a do-follow blog, please correct me if I’m wrong, that you are here for some high PR do-follow backlinks. Isn’t it? Please proceed, here’s how.

Look for  Popular Post Widget or Most Commented Post Widget. Choose one of the blog posts from the widgets, make sure the Page Rank of the chosen blog post is high. Choose the blog post to comment on, accordingly. Generally, there you’ll find the right high PR blog post to comment on. It’s not the Page Rank of that blog homepage that’s working out for you. It’s the independent Page Rank of that particular blog post which will help you to fetch the back-link to your blog.
Though you can comment on these posts too get back-links, if and only if, your sole purpose is to get back-links. But, it’s also recommendable to comment on fresh blog posts too, for a healthy discussion and a huge rush of web traffic, but to do that, you should know How to be the First to Post a Comment on a Blog-Post. Well back to the point.

If none of the widgets are present, look for the Blog Archive. Now, greasy elbows are all that you need to search down the right blog post to comment on. Let’s say the overall blog Page Rank is 7. Then there must be some blog post having a Page Rank one less than the overall Page Rank of that blog. Means, search for a blog post having at least Page rank 6 and proceed to read and comment.
What, the Blog Archive is missing too! Keep on navigating blog post, till you find the right blog post to comment on. Keep in mind the above-said points to search the right blog post, the high PR do-follow one. Same tricks can also be applied to search no-follow blogs to comment on, too.

Now, you are almost about to un-ravel the buried treasure. But please, before proceeding, I would like you to maintain a decorum while commenting on the blog post. It’s not about you, you are here to represent your blog in front of some serious webmasters, where a few bad words are enough to burn your repute down. Always remember, Publilius Syrus said, Speech is the mirror of the soul; as a man speaks, so he is. So, please have a quick look at Blog commenting etiquette and pen down your best impression to the blog webmaster and to the other readers/webmasters/bloggers there in the blogging community. And yeah, still chances are there, that all your efforts will go in vain if bloggers came to know that you’ve commented like these, learn how you should comment on other blogs.

Now you are all set to fetch quality web traffic, high PR Back-links and a killer reputation in a blogging community. So this was a quick and short practical guide to Blog Commenting. Got something worth debating, let's discuss via comments.

What is keyword stuffing and why to avoid it

Definition: Keyword stuffing is the "black hat" search engine optimization strategy of directly or deceptively including a target keyword numerous times on a page. Though keyword stuffing was effective for many e-commerce businesses in the early days of SEO, it is now likely to incur harsh Google penalties and is not viewed as an effective method to improve search rankings.

A brief history of keyword stuffing

Keyword stuffing was a common strategy back in the 1990s and the early 2000s when Google and other search engines relied heavily on exact keyword matches. Several keyword stuffing techniques included:

• Block paragraphs that were essentially lists of different search terms. These blocks of text would usually be neither coherent nor readable and have no use other than to load up as many search terms on one page as possible to increase the number of page hits.
• Incessantly repeating keywords several times in a piece of writing, despite its unnatural and non-user-friendly experience.
• "Hiding" keywords by matching the font color to the background design.

Keyword stuffing fell out of favor once Google updated its search algorithm to combat and penalize this practice. Google makes approximately 500-600 changes to its algorithm every year, many of which combat similar "black hat" techniques that seek to game search results.

The dangers of keyword stuffing

Being bumped down in Google's search rankings means potential customers are less likely to stumble on to your business. In a world where 14 percent of people use the internet every day to find a local business, this is a significant loss.

There are other perils to keyword stuffing than just being ignored by Google, however. For one, it will increase the bounce rate for your business' websites, losing you further possible customers. If users see your page simply spamming keywords with little regard for creating engaging, informative and readable content, they're less likely to stick around.

Finally, if you're aiming to drive engagement with customers and internet users, keyword stuffing hurts your chances. Not only are generic keyword lists the opposite of unique, engaging content, they will also hurt your business' credibility in the eyes of your clientele, making it appear to be little better than a run-of-the-mill email spammer in the Internet food chain.

Potential keyword strategies

A common myth is that keyword density is the major determinant of a webpage's Google search ranking. In other words, there is a magic number for what percentage of a page's total word count should be made up of keywords. This isn't the case, however.

In reality, the best strategy is simply to ask yourself if the use and placement of a keyword read naturally. You should also make sure the keyword is usable. Attach a useful, relevant link to the word or term that will serve the reader well, and you're likely to climb higher in the search rankings.

Keyword stuffing is a strategy that shouldn't be used by any modern business looking to improve their search ranking. Rather, businesses should focus on using keywords in a smarter, more focused way that helps them craft engaging content that will inspire readers and customers.

BigCommerce is the leading e-commerce platform for growing and mid-market retailers.

SEO Tips & Tricks for Bloggers

Keyword Research
Keyword research is probably the most essential step in writing a search engine friendly piece of content. How does one go about keyword research? The first and most important step in the process is to understand the sort of posts written around the topic you have chosen. Then, look at the sort of keywords that are utilized in those posts and accordingly create keywords for your post.

You can use keyword research tools like Google Keyword Planner, SEMrush and other such tools to do your keyword research and understand the competition for the keywords using which you plan to optimize the blog post. A keyword research tool is one of the most essential items in your kitty of blogger SEO tricks.

Keyword Based Content Optimization
Once you have a list of keywords related to the blog post you are drafting, the actual work of implementing it in the content begins. The key to using the right keywords would be to incorporate the primary as well as the secondary keywords in as natural a manner as possible. It takes a little effort to make the keyword optimized content appear natural, but over a period of time, you will be able to go with the flow. It almost becomes automated.

Keyword Stuffing
While writing blog posts, it is important to ensure you do not stuff the content with keywords. This leads to what is commonly known in the SEO world as keyword stuffing. This practice leads to bombarding your readers with a lot of jargon which might or might not be understandable by them. It will also lead to a drop in engagement, for your readers will not be able to connect with your content as well as effectively engage with it. The other downside to keyword stuffing is in terms of SEO. Search engines will penalize your keyword stuffed content. With this, you will have basically killed all your previous SEO efforts on your blog. This is a huge problem to tackle at the macro and micro levels.

Therefore, it is important to ensure an optimal keyword density. Anywhere between 1-3 percent inclusive of the primary keywords and the semantic keywords should be a decent keyword density to have in blog posts across industries.

You can use the formula mentioned below to calculate the keyword density (in percentage) for every piece of content you write. This is one of the essential SEO tips & tricks for bloggers.

Keyword Density = [(Number of Keywords)]/(Total Number of Words)]*100

Long Tail Keywords
Using long tail keywords in your blog content is another point on the list of SEO tips & tricks for bloggers. Long tail keywords are more specific search queries and naturally will be able to help your post rank higher on search engines. When you are working on keyword research and later, incorporating the keywords in your post, ensure you use more of long tail keywords. The idea behind using long tail keywords is to tap into the readers’ thinking patterns (this is not always going to be easy, but not harmful anyway) and create long tail keywords based on such ideas.

Meta Tags Optimization


Meta tags include the Title Tag, the Meta Description, and the Meta Keywords. Optimizing your post for the aforementioned meta tags will take you a long way in ensuring your blog post has a higher chance of appearing on search engines when people key in search queries around the topic your post is based on.

Apart from meta tags, there is something known as the H-tags. Have you ever read a piece of content with certain words/phrases in bold; more like headings? Yes, they are the H-tags. Adding the H tags which are H1, H2, H3, H4, H5, and H6 to various portions of the post will help search engines crawl your blog post better and more easily. It is subtly telling search engines that those words and phrases marked using the H-tags are important and need to be paid attention. Hence, when you include keywords or variations of your keywords in these H-tags, you’re alerting search engines and therefore they will crawl these posts with H-tags optimized content.

URL Structure
The URL structure for your website/blog should be relevant to the post you are writing as well as easy to remember. While there are conflicting opinions on whether a keyword should be included in the URL or not, if the keyword naturally makes to be present in the URL, there is no harm in including it. All the same, keyword or not, ensure the URL of the web page is understandable. This is one of the most helpful SEO tips for bloggers.

Image Optimization
When your internet is a little on the slower side and you’re waiting for an image to load, you might have noticed a little text that comes in the place of the image. It is important to optimize this text for search engines. This makes it easier for images connected with your blog to appear on search engines when search queries related to your blog category are entered. The image’s alt tag helps people place your image in the context of the post or even their search query. Image optimization is an aspect not many realize is a part of SEO. However, it is essential for you to optimize your blog images so they have higher chances of appearing on search engines.

Internal Linking
Linking within your website or blog is an important step in ensuring readers spend more time on your website. Also, the internal linking process helps your readers get more information in a single place about a particular topic of interest. Once they realize your blog has a lot to offer related to their area of interest, there is a higher likelihood of them visiting and revisiting your blog. This could also mean they refer your blog or website to their contacts who might be looking for similar information.

Internal linking also ensures your readers do not stray away from your blog/website.

Mobile Friendly Layout

Mobile drives more visitors to blogs than any other device. According to a research, around 80 percent of internet users own a smartphone. This is why you should first and foremost make sure your blog has a theme which is mobile friendly. If you have a website of which one section is a blog, then, it is important for your website theme to be a mobile friendly theme. No one really wants to zoom in and zoom out multiple times to read one piece of content. And if you are someone who blogs regularly, you wouldn’t want your readers and subscribers losing interest because your website/blog is not mobile friendly, isn’t it? So, take ACTION NOW!

Social Share Buttons

Social share buttons help you help your readers share your posts on their social media profiles easily. For this, you need to install the plugin which will enable the social share buttons. You are free to choose the social media platforms whose social share buttons you wish to enable on the page. Ensure you put out quality content so your readers automatically feel the need to share your content pieces.

The above-mentioned points are simple, easy to follow SEO tips & tricks for bloggers. If followed, these will yield long-term benefits for you, as a blogger. Implement the aforesaid SEO tips & tricks to improve your blog or website’s ranking on search engines simultaneously driving more traffic to your blog/website. 

YouTube video optimization tips | Digital Marketing Expert

Tip #1: Don’t be lazy.

Create magnetic content on YouTube and then optimize your videos directly on YouTube. That includes uploading your videos, describing them, interacting with your viewers and sharing them. As YouTube is a social beast that drives a tremendous amount of ranking, make sure you have resources that can reply to viewer comments and requests. You won’t be successful unless you dedicate some time to building your presence.

Tip #2: Optimize your video titles.

Titles are very important as they show in the player and in the search engine results pages. Only 50 characters show up in universal search so include a targeted keyword phrase at the start. At the same time, make sure that your titles are compelling to encourage clicks. Since YouTube says that it’s ok to duplicate a keyword phrase, if it doesn’t look too spammy and your title is still engaging, do it. You’ll want to think about re-optimizing over time to consider including other keywords as well.

Tip #3: Maximize descriptive text areas.

Use descriptions liberally, putting relevant, targeted keywords first. Include URLs starting with HTTP:// to your channel, playlist, or site in your video descriptions. It can be helpful to use a URL shortener such as bit.ly to include tracking code and customized keywords. If you have a long-form video, add links within the video to your description. Vary the video descriptions on your website and those on YouTube to avoid issues with duplicate content.
As far as tags go, add as many as you can without duplication or including irrelevant phrases. Consider related keywords; for example, if you were doing a video about an attorney then it would be appropriate to include ‘legal’, ‘lawyer’ and ‘judge’. As with titles, include your most important keywords first.

Tip #4: Get friendly with annotations.

When YouTube launched their Creator Playbook last year, they revealed that their search algorithm favors videos that drive traffic to other videos through annotations. Annotations can be used to link to other videos, related videos, your playlist and your channel – and those annotations are going to help your rankings. You can also use annotations to encourage interaction, issue calls to action and posts messages.

Tip #5: Create playlists.

Playlists get indexed separately from individual videos so they give you the opportunity to appear in YouTube search results multiple times (e.g. you could get a result for one of your videos and a result for a playlist with lots of your videos at the same time). They’re easy to do so there’s no reason not to do them.

Tip #6: Make sharing a snip.

Shares are a ranking factor so encourage embedding and allow commenting and rating.

Tip #7: Dress it up.

Customize your YouTube channel through settings, themes, colors, and modules.  Also, be sure to include a background image.

Tip #8: Drive conversions.

Push YouTube viewers to convert through in-video calls-to-action featuring teasers or promo codes, product page links in your descriptions and annotations.

Tip #9: Be unique.

Consider creating unique content specifically for YouTube (e.g. teasers or bloopers) as online retailer Vat19.com does, or creating unique channels on YouTube. Zappos, for example, has Zappos, Zappos Style, Inside Zappos and the Zappos Insights channels.

SEO Quake Tool | Free SEO Plugin

SEO Quake tool is a Free Plugin available for your browser. It provides Organic Research Data at one click. 

Now, it compatible with Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, and Opera. Along with Organic research data, SEO Quake provides other useful tools including an :

1. SEO Audit
2. Keyword Density
3. Internal/External Link Analysis and 
4. Social Metrics.

Many people find the information regarding competitors by analyzing of SERPs and want to know who is lying in Ranking where. you also analyze the particular  Keyword Search Data and According to that landing page shown as.
                                            Here is where SEO Quake plugin Comes in! This is free plugin allows you to see metrics for domains and landing pages including Google index, Alexa Rank, SEMRush Ranking Data, Facebook Likes and much more. SEO Quake gives you quick and easy access to analytic data on any webpage. By using  SEO Bar, You can navigate to any landing page and receive analytic data specific to that landing page specific to that landing page at the click of a button.

SEO terms include:

1. SEO Bar: The Bar that appears for each landing page. It will provide the parameter for whatever page you are currently analyzing.

2. SEO Overlay: The tools that appear on Search Engine (including ba near each result, sort controls, language setting and all other buttons). This will be the bar that will provide the parameter for each SERP Result.

3. Panel: This will show as a Pop Up after clicking the SEO Quake button in your browser's toolbar. This will display the information regarding the page you are now currently visiting.

4. SEO Parameter: The metrics provided by SEO Quake. Each parameter is possible metric. SEO Quake is able to provide you with data for. Some of the page data and metrics it shows:
a) Google Index b) SEMRush Rank c) Alexa Rank d) Web Archive age and more.

5. Page SEO Audit: Have you ever wanted to find out exactly what is wrong with your website content? Maybe you see your webpage looks okay. but what about, what is going in the background? SEO Quake can help you with finding this information as well! Start by going to any given landing page. When you find the page then you analyze it, by click the SEO Quake icon and Choose "Diagnosis " tab with the pop-up. Then open up a new tab with a "Diagnosis" of a page you were on.

 

The diagnosis will be broken into three section:-

a) Page Analysisb) Mobile Compliancec) Site compliance

6. Keyword Density: Page diagnosis report also works with "Keyword Density" report. "Density Tab", will display all the keywords mentioned on the given landing page. It will be sorted by  "Repeats" in descending order, the most mentioned keyword listed in "Keyword" tab within this chart. The "Found In" column will display where the keyword is found in the landing pages. The "Density" column display how much of the total words does the individual keyword represent. The "Prominence" column will list the importance of individual keyword on the given landing page.

7. Internal and External Links: This report will list all of the links present on the given landing page. This will list each link, the anchor text associated with the link as well as parameters for these links. You can see "Refresh" button, on click it, you can receive the metrics under each parameter. You can see "Requests all Parameters" button which is displayed in the top left of this report. If you see any link is repeated in this, then you can hide it by click on "Add/Hide Parameters"  button which is listed in top left along the option to Save As CSV.

Grey Hat SEO Techniques: Should You Use Them?

In my last post, we discussed white hat SEO and why it’s the best way to approach driving traffic to a site and obtaining a good ranking in the SERPs. We touched briefly on a black hat and why it’s a dangerous practice which is likely to get a site plummeting down the ranks, but what about grey hat SEO?

What is Grey Hat SEO?

It is what its name suggests. It’s somewhere in the middle of white and black and if used by a professional, can still be effective. However, it’s safe to say that taking a grey hat approach is playing with fire if you’re not 100% sure of what you’re doing and since we’re predominantly content-led now, it’s not something I would recommend.

The grey hat consists of techniques such as:

• 
  
• Cloaking
• Purchasing old domains
• Duplicate content
• Link buying
• Social media automation and purchasing followers

Let’s look at each of these in turn.

Cloaking

Cloaking is a practice that shows the user a different result than it does the search engine. For Google, it’s considered to be a high-risk practice that is in violation of its rules. Personally, I would put cloaking in the black hat category and many would agree, but the jury’s still out in certain parts of the SEO community where it actually falls.

As you can see from the Matt Cutt’s video, cloaking is not something that he or Google bots approve of. Cloaking can be achieved by altering meta information so that it doesn’t reflect the content and tampering with the IP address of a site.
Doorway pages can also be considered a form of cloaking and are large sets of pages which are each optimised for a keyword or phrase in order to direct the user to one site. Again, they are designed to manipulate bots and trick users into visiting a site they didn’t intend to. These can also be multiple pages on the same site that have keywords such as locations so that the site can take advantage of as many keywords as possible.

Old Domains

The web is a font of old domains that have been abandoned and those that the owners don’t use much and these are often used as a way to create backlinks in order to improve rankings. Generally, these tend to be authoritative domains so that the link appears to be of a good quality.

Duplicate Content

Content, content. It’s the kingpin of the internet and all SEO efforts. We mentioned text spinners before and whilst a small proportion of these can be effective, it’s still a very dodgy idea to use them. To illustrate, I’m going to take some of the text from this article and put it into a free, online text spinner to show you the results.

In my last post, we talked over white cap SEO and why its the most ideal approach to approach driving movement to a site and acquiring a great standing in the SERPs. We touched quickly on dark cap and why its an unsafe practice which is prone to get a site falling down the ranks, however, shouldn’t we think about ash cap SEO?

As you can see, I’ve taken the first paragraph and put it into a spinner and it really doesn’t do the job, does it? In fact, it’s laughable. It’s also something that Google algorithms would recognize and push down the rankings due to grammatical errors.

Now, whilst this is a free spinner, you can get paid ones that do a slightly better job, but you’re better off investing in a professional content writer if you haven’t the time or skill to do it yourself.
In the interests of science, I signed up for a paid text spinner, which gives you the option of rewording yourself.

For a package that costs $47pm, I’d rather rewrite it myself, if I were that way inclined, as it’s hardly difficult. However, you can proceed to the next step which allows you to let the software do the work for you and here are the results:

In my last post, we discussed white hat Search Engine Optimization and why it’s the most effective method to move toward driving website traffic to a website and acquiring a great rank in the SERPs. We touched briefly on a black hat and why it’s a hazardous practice which is likely to obtain a website dropping down the ranks, but just what concerning grey hat Search Engine Optimization?
Whilst it’s better quality than the free spinner, it still has its problems and is something that I wouldn’t be happy appearing on my site. The paid version allows you to check that the content is unique via a Copyscape API, but that won’t overcome the grammatical errors that Google will pick up.
I haven’t included any links to these spinners, they are easy enough to find if you feel the need to use them.

Purchasing Links

One word of advice: don’t. If you get found out, you will get a penalty, it’s as simple as that and all of the investment you have put into your site will be worth zero. However, you can list your site on relevant industry directories as this is approved of.
There have been a lot of scare stories relating to guest posting and if this constitutes buying links, but if no cash is exchanged, then this is irrelevant. However, links can be exchanged for sponsorship of events (for example) and this is OK too.

Social Media Automation and Buying Followers

By social automation, I’m not talking about using tools such as HootSuite or Buffer to schedule posts. These are legitimate tools that help to save time when you’re managing multiple accounts.
However, you can get other tools that auto-follow and unfollow 1000s of social media users without you lifting a finger for as little as a fiver for 5000. This is one of the few here that can be called strictly grey hat as it’s not made it to Google’s blacklist yet, possibly as social signals are only just becoming important to search engines.

Buying followers may seem like a great idea to make it look like you’re in with them in the crowd, but all it actually means is no engagement and the risk of infecting any true followers with malware in some instances. There are no positives to it and it’s easy to tell those that have, as they have a Twitter following filled with faceless profiles. Organically obtaining a following isn’t necessarily an overnight affair, but it’s worth it in the end.

What does all this mean?

Some SEO companies use grey hat tactics, but the best ones don’t. The short-term advantage, much like the black hat (and many of these tactics overlap into the black hat) don’t make for a long-term business. Whilst grey hat might gain you some traffic initially, it won’t last, especially if you get caught out.

In essence, with modern content marketing and SEO, white hat wins out. The web is highly competitive, we all know that and so in order to ‘beat the system’, the best way is to work with it and invest in the future of your site.

Like anything in life, taking shortcuts to get you where you want to be right now is often the path to failure. Great SEO, good content and a well-planned out business, that’s what will give your site the competitive edge in the end.

And, if possible, a large budget!