September 2014

28 SepSEO

A Beginner’s Guide to Google Schema Markup

Schema markup is one of the recent SEO evolutions introduced in 2011, which acts as a new, powerful medium of optimization. Despite this, it remains one of the least used SEO forms. It is a new branch reflecting Google’s support for structured data markup, a mechanism that helps expressing a relation between things in a machine-readable format.

Since some years, Google has supported three standards for structured markup namely, RDFa, microformats, and microdata. However, schema markup focuses only on microdata standard for keeping the implementation simpler as well as boost uniformity across search engines by achieving a balance between the simplicity of microformats and extensibility of RDFa.

Including schema microdata in digital pages is a hot topic in the SEO world, as it is a ranking factor recognized by Google. Although structured markup formats are popular since several years, very few sites tend to use schema microdata, and surprisingly, even fewer individuals truly know about what it is or what its importance is.

As per a recent study posted on Searchmetrics, less than 1% of domains include schema markup. Nevertheless, over 33% of Google search results show rich snippets that refer to add pieces of information to stand out a result on the search engine result pages (SERPs) and increase the chances of click-through rates and consequently ranking.

This itself says how essential it has become to include schema markup in your SEO strategy portfolio. Therefore, this guide is dedicated to all those who wish to include the schema in their Web pages.

Overview of Schema, Schema markup, and Schema.org

Fundamentally, schema refers to a kind of microdata that allows a search engine to parse and decode the information on pages more easily as well as effectively. This helps them in offering relevant results to the visitors as per the search queries.

A schema markup is the novel best friend of an Internet marketer, as it is a distinct set of HTML tags (metadata) to be added to HTML pages for assisting the search engines in having a deeper insight of what that specific page is about. As a result, it easier for visitors to get exactly what they are searching online and consequently enjoy a better search experience.

While a majority of HTML tags conveys search engines what the site says, schema markup informs what your site means. This point of distinction aids the search engines in delivering search results of better quality.

Schema.org is the centralized hub for the Schema project on the Web, as collaboration amongst Google, Yahoo, Bing, and Yandex (Russian search engine trying our search without links) to standardize the mechanism of structured markup. The outcome is an agreed set of code markers conveying the key search engines, how to deal with the data on sites.

Schema.org is not a markup protocol or language, but a collection of schemas or Microdata markup vocabulary detailed and organized on the site. It is a standard vocabulary for search engines to deal with data for ranking. In simple words, Schema.org is an initiative to make structured markup simpler for search crawlers and site owners.

Technically, a schema is a type of rich HTML snippet for adding additional detail to the text below the URL shown on SERPs. Rich snippets help you in informing search engines directly about who you are, what you are offering, and any other information you are providing. They are like a signpost that eliminates any confusion. For example, a schema tells search engines that the given content on ‘Titanic’ is related to the ship that sank in early 20^th century rather than the Oscar nominated film.

Therefore, schema is also the preferred method of markup for most search engines. A schema markup offers all types of options to make the listing of a site look flashy as well as relevant on an SERP. It refers to a code (semantic vocabulary) on your site to assist search engines in returning more relevant and informative results.

For example, implementing a proper schema markup for a page optimized for ‘vegetarian thukpa recipe’ can show an image, calorie count, starred rating, cooking time, and other bits of such interesting information under its URL on an SERP. This simply allows the click rate to increase. Here, the right schema markup tells the search engine that the keyword is not just a set of random words, but a cooking recipe that the Web page offers. Therefore, it can be concluded that a schema markup uses a distinct semantic vocabulary in the format of microdata.

When a site has schema markup, the users can observe on the SERPs what a site is all about, what is does, where it is, what its rating is, what is the cost of an item, and more. Therefore, from another viewpoint, schema markup is for users, which webmasters implement as a ‘virtual business card’. This is a user-focused progress that fulfills the goal of giving the most relevant information to the users.

Google names schema markup as the ‘preferred’ method to arrange (structure) the content in case you wish to show a rich snippet in an SERP. Well, the good news is that you are not required to learn new coding skills, as knowledge of HTML is sufficient. The only difference is inserting pieces of schema.org vocabulary to microdata existing in the HTML form.

Working of Schema Microdata

Just like other markups, schema microdata is directly applied to page content for exactly defining what it means and how a search engine should treat it. A webmaster needs to add schema elements and attributes directly to the HTML code of a page for offering additional information to search crawlers. Let us take an example of a rich snippet of a schema markup.

In the above example, the emphasis is on the content about Alfonso Cuaron’s 2013 movie, ‘Gravity’. By adding the itemscope attribute, you are conveying that the code below the <div> tag is about a particular item named gravity. If you ignore the itemtype attribute, the code then does not specify what kind of item it is. Therefore, itemtype attribute specifies that the item is a movie whose definition exists in schema.org type hierarchy. Kindly note that item type is specified as a URL. It specifies that the information within the <div> block is about a movie.

It is interesting to note that <h1>Gravity</h1> informs the browser to display Gravity in the format of Heading 1. However, the tag itself does not provide any information about the meaning of the string. This makes it tough for search engines to display content that is relevant to a user, intelligently. However, the itemscope and itemtype attributes remove this difficulty. Let us look at one more example:

In the above example, the schema markup says to search engine that an event (itemtype is an event) will be taking place on a particular day (StartDate and datetime). This makes it simpler for the search engines to display relevant results to the seekers without any kind of ambiguity. Dates and times are actually tough to interpret precisely by search engines due to differences in formats. However, such a schema markup simplifies this interpretation.

By defining item types and item prop (properties), search engines receive structured information for delivering results that are most relevant. Without such semantics, the crawlers have to interpret the date on the site on their own, which means the listing made by them might not be the site’s best representation.

The Significance of Using Schema Markup

It is imperative to include a schema markup if you wish the listing of your site to stand out from the rest. Chances are high that you might have set up Google authorship that may have improved your rankings or at least make a visual appeal. To this, if you simply add some more interesting details for the users, the rate of appeal would surely increase.

Including schema markup is not only for SEO purpose but also for benefiting the searcher. With more relevant and useful details shown on SERPs, they are in a better position to go with a more informed choice. The ultimate picture is to make the World Wide Web a better place offering most reliable as well as relevant results on results pages.

Considering the fact that less than 1% of Web pages are using such rich snippets and that more than 30% of results contain schema-derived markups, there is a big and empty playing field for you enter and experience the benefits quickly. Moreover, pages with schema.org schema rank better than the pages without it. While markups as per structured data are rarely in use by webmasters, they are massively displayed in Google SERPs. This itself points to the growing significance of schema markups.

The Benefits of Using Schema Markup

Although schema.org semantics do not improve the ranking directly, pages implementing the schema markup have more chance of gaining greater visibility, which in turn, can increase the traffic and consequently ranking. This is something that Google says and focuses all the time. In addition to a prominent position, this new form of optimization offers benefits to searchers, search crawlers, as well as webmasters.

For the Searchers

Find quickly what they are looking for precisely as the rich snippet offers information in a summarized form (rating, price, description, and so on).
Click the right URL based on the information seen and mapping it with what is needed
More relevant results for the query

For the Crawlers

Easier, more accurate, and intelligent interpretation of data on site in an organized way
Smartly display of rich snippets on SERPs
More relevant detection of pages as per the user’s query
Increased efficacy

For the Webmasters

Make the Web a more useful world of information
Increased Click Through Rates (CTRs) by 15-50%
Time-saving due to a joint effort of schema.org being associated with Google, Yahoo, and Bing, which eliminates the need to add different markup codes for each search engine
More chance to appear higher in search with the usage of more schema types
Major opportunity due to less than 1% of sites using schema currently
Reduced bounce rate
More effective email marketing as well as local SEO
No clash with the usage of social media tags
Easy conversion of a site not developed in HTML5

Top 5 Motivations to Use Schema Markup in Your Web Pages

Even after reading the above discussion, you might have a doubt as to whether should you use schema markup for your pages. In that case, here are the three facts that can motivate you to use it right away!Matt Cutts, who has shut down countless sites utilizing dubious SEO strategies, has been recommending using schema markup for Web pages since a few years. Because he is controlling the largest search engine on the planet, his words have weight to influence your mind for taking the right decision.

As per a webmaster help video in 2012, Cutts said that implementing schema.org does not necessarily give the output of ranking higher, but if you typed ‘lasagne’ and clicked ‘recipes’ in the left hand side, this is where schema.org might help, as you are more likely to show up in that.

Rich Snippets Deliver Higher CTRs

Using schema.org confers visible benefits, one of which is improved listing on SERPs. While generally items such as titles and page snippets are included, a targeted schema markup allows including customer rankings, photos, date/time, and more. The latter is not only more appealing aesthetically, but also more effective.

According to Search Engine Land, rich snippet listings that show more details than standard listings can increase the CTRs by 30%. This means 30% more traffic, which is truly significant for any company to reach the next level while increasing search engine visibility.

Apart from making it easier for the crawlers to chunk and organize your site’s content, schema microdata defines as well as display rich snippets of your information on SERPs. Contrary to a widespread misconception, Google uses schema markup to show up information snippets. If the snippets are clear and concise, they can generate higher click through rates because the visitors can easily as well as quickly determine whether the site’s content is what they are searching.

Schema-implemented Pages Averagely Rank 4 Positions Higher on Google

Although very few Webmasters have implemented schema markup, they are being rewarded at present! Their sites now rank four positions higher on Google, which means a fourth ranking page is now ranking first. The study explains further that Google shows results for pages with Schema markup for more than 36% of keyword queries, whereas those without markups are shown less frequently.

Continued Support to Existing Rich Snippets Markups

In case you have some kind of markup existing on your pages done with the help of RDFa or microformats, Schema.org will support it. This means you do not have to start from scratch and remove the existing markup, which saves a lot of time and energy in implementing this new schema markup. However, utmost care should be taken that the formats should not be mixed together on the same page, as doing so can confuse the crawlers.

Proactive Testing

Just as testing your Web page, it is useful to test the view of markup. If successful, it simply tells that the crawler is able to parse the data precisely. You can do so by using the rich snippets testing tool. While this tool shows the parsed marked up information, its preview still does not show the text for schema.org markup, a functionality that will be added soon.

The bottom line is that experts of the top search engines recommend schema, which means implementing it is surely not going to hurt in any way, but rather increases your chances of higher click-through rates and consequently higher rank.

Applications for Which You Should Use Schema.org

The new schema markup improves the visibility of your site for almost all content types. There is a markup for movies, events, products, articles, restaurants, book reviews, local businesses, TV episodes and ratings, blogs, authorships, and software applications. Countless markup types, ranging right from toy stores to IT apps exist. Therefore, you can associate almost any type of data on your Web page with ‘itemscope’ and ‘itemtype’ attributes. Several ways exist for implementing schema markup in Web pages, which include:

Videos: Matt Cutts has revealed that Google recommends using rich snippets on a distinct video landing page even the video is embedded.
Testimonials: This is another worthy application of schema markup, which can show review description and rating of the item being reviewed. Most consumers rely on online reviews, which makes it sensible to markup testimonials on SERPs.
Brand Identity: This includes Name, Address, and Phone (NAP) that reveals your business’ contact as well as geographic information precisely. You can use local schema categories in the footer or page saying ‘Contact Us’.
Events: This one announces the happening events whose details on SERPs is truly handy for the visitors.

When Google introduced schema.org, several webmasters were disappointed to know that type of information supported by other structured formats is incompatible with this new microdata. The good news is that this problem is now solved, as the schema supports several data types featured in other structured formats. For highlighting the aforementioned information, Google supports the following types of data (schemas) officially:

Reviews: For showing reviewer, average rating, total number of reviews, description, and so on
Products: For showing availability, price range, image, description, brand, seller, and so on
Products: For showing time, video thumbnail image, and so on
Products: For showing the date, place, time, and so on
Products: For showing payment method, delivery method, place, availability of items for which an offer such as coupon or discount is on offer, and so on
Products: For showing location, organization, position, and so on
Products: For showing local business’ address, phone, geo-location, logo, and so on

Products: For showing calories, cooking time, ingredients, and so on
Products: For showing title, child, and URL
Products: For showing song, album name, duration, and so on

Do you think the above schema vocabulary is insufficient? If yes, you might have a question as to whether you can add your own types to the schema vocabulary or not. The answer to this is neither ‘yes’ no ‘no’. Schema’s type hierarchy has several commonly used item types, each with relevant subtypes. However, the level of these subtypes can differ. At times, you might prefer adding a custom itemtype, which is possible by using extensions.

For declaring your own item type, you only need to add a slash as a suffix of a present item type and mention the new term. For example, you can write as ‘Person/Doctor/Dentist’, wherein Person is the present itemtype, while the Doctor and Dentist are the custom types. You can find information about naming conventions and customizing the properties and enumerated items on Products.

Mechanism to Markup Pages with Schema Microdata

Literally sitting and adding markup code in the HTML of each of several pages can be painful, especially if the number is in the hundreds or more. Manual addition means lots of more work for bigger sites than the ones that are smaller. For simplifying work for bigger sites, it is best to use plugins that are on offer by WordPress or you can consider using the following Google tools:

Products: This is a real time saver because it automates the task of marking up your page details in a user-friendly manner. It helps in decoding what the schema requires to be added to a page. Just select a data type and enter your page’s URL for marking it up.
Products This is like a testing tool that diagnoses any code errors or issues after implementation. You are only required to enter a URL and instantly get direction on the required changes for yielding the correct code. Use this tool only after you are done with including all markup tags.

For a first timer, a question might arise that is it essential to include every property or attribute of marking on every page or not. Well, it is not mandatory to do so, but the more properties you tend to apply schema microdata to, the more transparent the content’s nature and purpose will be to the crawlers.

Moreover, do keep in mind that you need to apply markup to a few properties prior to Google generates rich snippets by referring your microdata. With the help of the testing tool mentioned above, it is easy to check the kind of information to be extracted from the specified markup.

Integration with Social Media Tags

Social giants such as Facebook and Twitter have come up with their own rich data types for markup. Facebook has released Products formed on the foundation of RDFa due to which most tagging goes under <meta>. As a result, the tags remain invisible to humans. Twitter has come up with Products. Well, no official declaration from any of the two giants exists about their support for new schema microdata. However, webmasters are successfully using these protocols and Schema.org together on one page.

A few marketers wrongly think that including these two are enough to ensure that the given content is highly shareable. However, you can use schema microdata along with social media tags to offer even more details about content on a page to search engines. Consider including markup next to Open Graph tags, which deliver not only optimized but also shareable content.

Tips on Using Schema Markup

Consider the following tips to dive even deeper into the world of schema microdata and obtain richer results. All you need is to follow the tips proactively.

Explore schema.org in detail to know about the data types and properties supported and the extent of customization possible.
Find all schema types that are useful for your Web pages.
Identify the types that are most commonly implemented in similar Web pages as those of yours. Doing such comparison can also help in choosing the most useful markup types. Schema.org contains most common markup types. In short, because of an assortment of markup types, you need to explore the Products.
The more you mark up your pages, the better will be the results. When you start comprehending the diverse collection of itemtypes, it is easy to conclude how much is there on the page for marking up. However, this does not mean that you need to markup all content. The key here is to mark up the content that is visible to humans who visit the page, not hidden content in the div tag and other hidden HTML elements.
Avoid overusing the markup in a misleading or inconsistent manner, which can certainly force Google to impose a penalty that will trigger a negative effect on the ranking as well as the reputation of your site on the World Wide Web. Therefore, be ethical and play fair.
There is no need to mark up every property.
Do not redo the existing content in the new format of schema.org, as Google continues to support snippets for the prevalent content. Moreover, schema.org supports all types of information that even microformats and RDFa support. Nevertheless, consider switching to the novel markup format for gaining more benefits in the long run.
In case the site has content that scehma.org does not support currently, consider using a less specific markup type or utilize Products as a powerful customization tool to create a new type.
Do set up a Google+ business page for boosting business or brand exposure as well as fetch better reviews. Although this is not directly related with the schema microdata, it can get you more reviews as well as schema information. This is because this social media platform has integrated with Google Places for having a well managed page.
Do implement Google Authorship.
Always test your schema markups. If you are satisfied with the results, it simply means that search engines can easily crawl it the next time and interpret the data more effectively. This simply means increased chances of being more visible on SERPs.

Conclusion

Despite the significance and SEO benefits of schema markup, its acceptance has been low, perhaps due to the lack of technical expertise or even awareness. This has actually created an amazing opportunity for Webmasters and businesses, particularly those in IT and marketing, who are working together for achieving a single goal. While marketers might comprehend the importance of structured data markup, webmasters need to implement it with the help of more advanced HTML knowledge.

In other words, millions of sites are missing a lot by not being a part of this big SEO potential. By using schema markup, you will have a leg up automatically on the big ladder of competition. Including schema microdata in HTML surely increases visibility, but in no way it is a quick or a bad SEO strategy to get a higher rank.

Rather, it is a best practice to make it simpler for you to be recognized by search engines for a set of keywords for which your pages can prominently appear on SERPs. Schema markup is an SEO innovation that is perhaps going to last for a long time. Therefore, it is the right time to learn and implement the most suitable microdata for boosting your search results. However, you need to do in the right way to be ahead of the curve. I hope this exclusive guide helps in using the schema markup for achieving the SEO benefits in an easier and quicker way.

22 SepSocial Media

Advanced Social Media Strategies for Offline Businesses

In our contemporary world of today, most entrepreneurs use social media to enhance their businesses in several ways. This is because of the several benefits such businesses will derive from social media platforms. However, let us define the key phrases in our title.

Social media:

This is an online platform for social interactions among friends and contacts that afford you the opportunities to create and share information and ideas in virtual communities. From this definition, we can deduce that the social media platform has a pool full of people or contacts; has a pool full of information or ideas and opportunities to create and share with others whatever is of interest that you wish to share.

Offline business:

This refers to businesses that are done in the physical, where buyers and sellers meet one on one to interact and agree on terms for the transaction. Offline businesses require physical infrastructures like offices, factories, electronic and print media for the advert, and a lot of human resources for efficient service delivery. In the offline business platform, customers see whatever they want to buy physically; advertisements are done on Televisions, Radios, Magazines, and Newspapers and on Bill Boards; payments are made either with cheques or in cash, and sellers and customers meet physical, discuss and agree on terms of the transaction.

At this junction, it is important to highlight some of the benefits your business can enjoy from social media platforms. These will help you know the best strategies for your business as an entrepreneur. Social media afford you the opportunity to introduce your new products and brand to targeted contacts who in turn can become your potential customers. Whichever social media platforms you belong to, you can build and grow your contacts base to become your targeted clients or customers.

You can advertise existing products and services on some social media platforms. This could be either in your timeline or fan page etc. Some social media have spaces for paid advertisements with a wider audience than your contacts, fan page members, or group members. Thus, you can take advantage of this to promote your offline business. Building your brand or business image and keeping it fresh in the minds of people is very important in enhancing your business. Social media are sites that millions of people visit daily. You can therefore seize the opportunities to build and constantly keep your brand image in the minds of millions of people when you constantly post and advertise on social media.

Cracking Social Media Platform

Social media is a real-time interaction platform. This means you can always interact with your clients or customers at regular intervals. This will help your brand or business have a human face and you will readily know the opinions and views of your clients. People want to be able to ask questions, express their minds and get quick responses, social media gives you this chance to interact with your potential customers. Several social media have platforms for groups of like minds. People or businesses that are in the same fields or offer the same services can meet and share interests, ideas, challenges, etc. The interactions between group members help them to know each other and find ways of promoting their businesses. Social media help in positioning the entrepreneur as an expert consultant. People who need the services can easily contact you for offline transactions. Thus helping you build a loyal brand or business customer base.

So much for the benefits, let us shift our attention to the strategies for enhancing your offline business with social media. You must understand that social media is far more than content and conversations. It is a platform where you have thousands of contacts, fans or followers ready to be converted to clients or customers. There are several methods one can use to convert social media contacts to customers and derive great benefits for your offline business.

Three Myths About Social Media Strategies

The first strategy is to have a special offer for your online contacts who visit your business place personally. The offer should be posted online with a code to identify them when they appear physically. The special offer must be very attractive and could be in form of a discount, reward, or something that is worth an online contact coming physically to patronize your business.

Also, you can always post in your social media blog descriptive articles, images, comments, and content that draw attention to you or your business. This will make your contacts, fans, and followers want to meet you or visit your office physically. If it is permitted you can post your URL so that people can easily reach you. You can search on social media for contacts and group members in your immediate environment or locality, those who can easily come over to your shop, factory, or office. The strategy is to target these contacts and convert them to become your customers. If your business is nationwide or international you can develop a method targeting your fan base and refer them to your offices and outlets across the country or internationally.

Another very effective method is to extract the emails of members of your targeted groups of contact and send them direct or individual emails inviting them to visit your offline business office. An enticing offer will do the trick to pull them to become your customers. You can also mail them your newsletter, promotion offers, new arrivals or products, etc.

It is also very good to advertise your offline business on any of the social media paid-page. Here you can reach a wider audience that can become potential customers. In the advert, you can give a description of your services or products and how you can be contacted. The advert will have images that can attract potential customers to your offline business.

You must develop a good interactive pattern with your social media contacts. This will build confidence in them and they will be willing to contact you personally to patronize your offline business. Effective interactions with your online contacts will also make them refer other customers to you. On the other hand, poor interaction can have a negative effect as well. Incorporate your offline business website with some major social media. This will increase the number of people who visit your website and invariably have contact with you or your offline business.

Make sure the press releases, catalogues of your new products, and promotions of your offline business are posted on your website and also shared with your social media contacts base. Thus, they will always have new and fresh information about your business. Of course, this will pull them to want to do business with you physically. Develop yourself to become an expert consultant to your social media contacts in your niche. Be ready to play the role of “customer service” to your potential customers. Answer their questions and queries quickly; provide advice and support services; inform them of new products or services and if possible ensure that they are able to call you directly. By so doing you can direct them to your offline business place.

Conclusion:

I encourage you to either join or affiliate your offline business with as many social media as possible. This will increase your contact base and create more sources of interactions like blogs, forums, and timelines between you and your targeted audience or potential customers. The numbers of social media are increased by the day but here are some that you can easily join and utilize to your advantage. Facebook, Pinterest, Linked In, Twitter, Instagram, Google+, Yookos, YouTube, and Tumblr.

17 SepSEO

Powerful Local SEO Strategies for Accelerating Your Local Brand Awareness in 2014

It was almost a decade ago when local search gain momentum on the World Wide Web with customers searching for places and ways to reach those places. However, today more than 750 million GPS-enabled phones are aiding customers to explore places locally. As per the latest statistics, over 85% of users search locally on their smartphones through Web browsers and apps such as Facebook and Google Maps. This inspires Rob Reed to say that local search is a mobile experience at a social level.

In 2012, it was found that over 60% local searches triggered successful purchases. As compared to other digital marketing initiatives, local Search Engine Optimization (SEO) ensures a high investment return. According to a survey in 2013 by Marketing Sherpa, around 54% marketers under survey agreed that local SEO positively influenced their brand.

Search Engines and Local SEO: What’s the Current Impact

With the introduction of Google’s Hummingbird update in 2013, search engines have become more intelligent in returning relevant and localized results for people’s searches. Adding the updates of Panda and Penguin, local SEO has actually become a challenging necessity for businesses. This has triggered the need of targeting location-based keywords without schlepping Google with plenty of inapt local search terms.

However, forecasting local SEO trends is a bit difficult because local SEO is actually not a fad or phenomenon. In fact, it is a never-fading asset that allows optimizing the search experience for users residing in any part of the globe. It is a basic mindset that cannot be implemented later. However, the difficulty does not remain when you choose to have a Google-friendly strategy.

Getting Ready to Prepare a Local SEO Strategy: Gaining the Vision

Due to the Google Pigeon update, global brands are forced to reconsider their global SEO strategies that now need to be competitive even among the local businesses in the nations targeted. Whether you are a small or big business brand, local SEO is bound to increase your customer base, boost brand awareness, and expand your business growth as well as success.

So, is it possible for a global brand to compete locally? Yes, it is! Even a small business can compete with global brands. In both the situations, only a good local SEO strategy is going to work. For the strategy to work, one needs to have a comprehensive vision. Just as in case of content marketing, the key here is to think like a customer who is always interested in getting the desired information through the replies for different questions.

When you put yourself in the position of your customer, you can easily identify the dos and don’ts in each of the technical and non-technical aspects of local SEO. The common and bigger picture goes like this: Assuming you have your upfront stores in different countries, you need to create individual Web pages for each of them and optimize them to target local customer base first.

Before Creating Local SEO Strategies

Before we check the strategies, here are some factors to consider for preparing the most effective local SEO plan!

Local Laws and Ordinances: These might not apply to all businesses, but for some they act as the primary set of considerations. For example, if your business is swimming pool or home repair company, it is obvious that your customers need to follow the zoning and setback laws. Remember, each nation has its own regulations due to which the customers are more likely to search with phrases such as ‘home repair laws in Chicago’ or ‘swimming pool company in Chicago’.
On-site, Off-site, Social/Mobile, and Review: Once you know about the local laws and ordinances, you can easily determine its impact on the keywords and other SEO elements present on the pages, off the pages, on social networks, and on review sites.

Effective Strategies for Different Business Types

If You Are a Global Brand Having Local Branches or Separate Franchises Run by Locally Registered Firms: Consider developing a separate Google+ page for each and creating local listings on major sites permitting customer reviews, such as Facebook and Yelp. It is suggested decentralizing a sole G+ page into individual branches. Many few search engines prefer brands that have verified their site, running on local IPs, with the search engine.
If You Are a Brand Allowing Sales through Partners or Distributors: Consider motivating them to build awareness of your brand locally. Although the officially registered business directories allow personalized names, your goal should be to gain local back links whose anchor text contains a brand name, for instance, the links can refer to a partner.
If You Are a Global Brand Having Centralized Approach Without a Local Presence Anywhere: Consider purchasing local domains and localize the site. An ideal way to improve local backlinks without hurting the famed global presence is to subscribe to local domains called ccTLDs. These domains help developing brand awareness among local communities effortlessly. You can even establish your location-based target in Webmaster Tools. Do also include the target country in your site and localize content forms such as metric units and currencies.
If You Are a Global Brand with Some Local Popularity but Without Local Branches: Consider having your name, address, and phone (NAP) in your site or subdirectories on a consistent basis. Your brand might be popular through showrooms, training centres, or warehouses. As a result, gaining a phone number should not be difficult. Utilize schema.org to mark NAP so that it can be easily seen in the result pages of search engines (SERPs). This is because business functioning locally to some extent is preferred by search engines that can increase the rankings.
If You Are a Globally Reputed Yet a Local Brand: Consider having a single-domain, multilingual site in case you are running a university, tourist agency, or family-operated business. Never buy local domains such as ccTLDs or rely upon local SEO providers in different nations for the half link building task. Doing so can bring your reputation down, which has been earned by growing your brand locally. Rather, utilize your local domain power to create a single site, but offering subdirectories (<sitename.de>/Spanish) for different languages for reaching out to customers.

Local SEO Strategies 2014 for All Businesses

You may have optimized your site for local SEO whose rules still are effective, but some newer strategies are likely to be more effective in 2014 regardless of the business type. Let us check them out!

Keyword Strategy: Make it Local and Long Tail

Local SEO might not be vital for e-commerce webmasters but finally, Internet-marketing professionals consider localizing their sites. This is because local SEO can bridge the difference between the happening 500 clicks per week and the desired goal of 2,000. One of the ways to achieve this bridge is to include the geographic location in the keyword.

While localizing your site, it is essential to revamp your keyword strategy to change keywords into more meaningful phrases for attracting local customers. As per Moz.com, webmasters should act wisely to include the city and state name in which the corporate operations take place, within meta title and description, page title tag, H1 headings, URLs, page content, and in alt tags. These elements exist for each page, which should include the local keywords including the city and state name. However, do not stuff too much on page content such that Google is forced to penalize you.

After the Hummingbird update, keywords in the question form deliver better and more relevant search results than robot-friendly equivalents that do not have question format. For example, ‘Which is the best pizzeria in Belgium’ delivers better results than ‘Pizzeria in Belgium’.

Before a few years from now, both these keywords would show similar results. However, if you see today, most of the result pages shown in both differ drastically. This is because Google now comprehends the user motive in a better way. Therefore, consider long tail keywords throughout the content of your site and linked sites for targeting the second class of search users.

However, keep in mind that using these keywords does not mean ranking on the first page of results by Google Map for that keyword. For this to happen, you need to take of more things that are discussed ahead.

Organic SEO Strategy: Directly Influencing Your Local Search Results

According to Mike Blumenthals (Blumenthal.com) and Adam Steele (Lean Marketing), the individual site’s organic SEO rank highly influences the local results. Both performed some local searches to prove this relation between local and organic SEO. It directly says that ranking well for local SEO requires ranking well for organic SEO.

This itself means to continue working on organic SEO efforts, which include optimizing meta title and meta description, images, page speed, URLs with customization, strategic link building, social media, and conversion, and content marketing.

Social Media Strategy: Tapping the Power of Google+, Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter, and Google Maps

Are you ignoring social media for localizing your brand awareness? If yes, then it is high time to stop it! This is because such a platform is the biggest off-site SEO opportunity to spread the awareness of your brand.

Nowadays, not all searches occur in the browser, as several customers use apps to perform a local search. Do you know that the Facebook app is highly used after Google Maps for local search?

Consider learning and implementing new ways of exploring social media sites as a means to expand your business, even locally. While doing so, consider some vital SEO points. First, whatever you do, keep it fresh. Stay active on Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest to posting new but quality content, which shows search engines and visitors that your brand is flourishing. Search engines favor such fresh updates for a higher rank.

Second, consider increasing the number of likes/shares/retweets by publishing interesting posts. The more their number, the more is the interest of the customers in your content and the more favor you receive from search engines. However, avoid congesting with worthless information, which neither the visitors nor the customers like.

Third, engage with your visitors frequently by responding to them irrespective of the social platform. This shows that you care for your business as well as an online community, which is a plus point for better SEO results.

Lastly, give priority to Google+, as Google is still the giant player when it comes to site ranking. Do create a Google+ account for your brand as well as yourself, add to your circles, share relevant content on your corporate and personal pages, and follow people. For local SEO, consider the following two strategies in addition:

Place Pins in Pinterest: This is actually the latest feature of Pinterest, which is of great interest to local businesses, especially those in the service sectors. As a user, you can pin new destinations present on your boards or search novel locations on the FourSquare’s map. In case of a good fan following for your products/services offered to local visitors, pinners can see your service and NAP information along with images of your products and services directly shown on the map.
Optimize Google+ Local Page and Google Maps: Both these media are a core factor for local SEO ranking. The integration of Google maps in your site and business previews from Google+ Local are strongly associated to local SEO. While optimizing maps and G+ Local pages, you need to ensure that you provide precise NAP information that needs to match with the one existing on your site. Similarly, try to increase the number of reviews on Google+ page, links from popular and quality sites that speak about your business or site or NAP details, local citations from local listing or review sites, and third party reviews gained on sites other than Google+. In case of maps, ensure correct proximity shown for a city recognized by Google.

Local Citation Strategy: Increasingly Important and Essential One

Although nothing new needs to be done if you are already having proper and adequate local citations (business listings), it is vital to know that this strategy is acquiring more importance than before. After Hummingbird era, getting local citations from reputable and authorized directories apart from locally relevant sites is more important for a higher ranking on local searches in Google.

To know how well your site is listed on locally relevant sites across the Web, visit Get Listed that shows whether you are listed in the precise category with Google Places. Track all these business listings through an Excel worksheet that can be your template to save as well as update local listings with right NAP information.

In case you need to create citations, consider publishing a citation each on Google Places, Foursquare, and Yelp.com. Currently, these are the most reliable and highly targeted business directories. Moreover, they are important for obtaining local but competitive keywords. As per the Search Engine Journal, professionals can wisely submit citations to other directories like industry-specific sites (Avvo), data aggregators (LocalEze), and region-specific sites such as Ontario.com/attractions. In short, consider increasing the number of valid citations by retaining NAP details consistently.

Ensure that fully informed and consistent NAP across all listings. It might be possible for your business to be already listed by someone somewhere. In such a situation, just claim the listing (known as citation). To do so, you need to look first to see whether another business of the same name exists at the same location. For this, use Yext or Localeze tool to spot local listing online, use Google MapMaker to look for phone number to check for duplicate listings and removing them, and look for different names of your business.

Claiming means to accept and verify that you are the proprietor of the revealed business by phone or email. Yext and Localeze tools can help you accelerate this process by creating citations or making them more consistent for ensuring precise local information of your brand or company.

Strategy to Have More Online Reviews: Highly Effective

As per a study published on Search Engine Land, the search engine giant Google considers online reviews as a key factor for ranking a site. As a fact, your reviews are for users of this giant player who view your brand on a search engine result page. Reviews perhaps allow the consumers to decide whether your site’s link should be clicked or not. They facilitate to take this decision quite quickly.

Therefore, you should try to increase the number of positive reviews online. Luckily, several ways exist to improve the reviews of your company along with the numbers. Because you wish to avoid any fake reviews or offer some presents to those leaving good reviews, you will have to follow natural ways of obtaining reviews, which is what Google likes.

One of the ways to get true reviews is to put a button on your home page for an easy start, prompt visitors to write a review after buying a product or hiring a service or after visiting a specific landing page, or talk with customers in stores for leaving a review.

Mobile SEO Strategy: Just Cannot Be Ignored

With more than 85% users of Internet accessing sites through smartphones, it is obvious that an effective mobile SEO strategy is essential for successful local SEO. As per a recent survey, near 40% of mobile searches are targeted locally, which encourages every business to go locally mobile.

While local SEO is yet to get influenced by mobile SEO, it surely governs mobile SEO. This is because not all small and big businesses have successfully optimized their sites for mobile usage. This also means that the rankings of these sites accessed on the desktop cannot be affected as per their corresponding mobile performance. However, a possibility is there in the near future that the search engines will rank sites with their mobile-friendly versions, considering the tremendously increasing users of smartphones and tablets.

The other scene is that if you rank high for your local SEO, chances are high for you to rank great for mobile SEO. In such a situation, in case a mobile user visits your site, it is essential to offer them a matchless mobile experience in the absence of which your local rankings for responsive design will fall. Here are some statistics that prove why mobile SEO is essential for local SEO.

First, 90% of American adults have a cell phone and 58% of them own smartphones as per PewResearch. The same institution has also found that around 63% use the phone for accessing the sites. According to Google, 40% of mobile searches are made for local places, resources, products, or services. Even Econsultancy states that 75% of mobile searches are done for follow up actions that encompass tasks like social media sharing, store visit, research, and even a phone call.

These statistics themselves speak about the importance of having a mobile-friendly site or responsive design. In case you do not have a mobile site, it is wise to start looking for responsive web design tools and tutorials. Remember, quality search engines like Google invest no extra time in changing or updating algorithms for boosting the quality of local search engine result pages. Well, although this is beneficial in the long run, it imposes a challenge in the short run, particularly for the mid- and small-sized local businesses that really do not have a good budget for hiring local SEO experts to keep up with the latest and changing trends.

Despite the challenge and absence of local SEO experts, small business can really overcome all difficulty on their own. This is possible by only knowing what you need to do and why you need to do, which helps in prioritizing the local SEO strategies accordingly. Quick adoption of popular or standardized practices, avidly reading case studies, and readiness for experimenting personally is critical to survive in this mission of Internet marketing.

In short, the time is near when you will race with bigger brands on search that is local and highly specific. Therefore, optimizing all your Web pages for local SEO is truly inevitable.

16 SepMagentoMagento SEOSEO

Magento SEO 101 – A Definitive Guide To Master Your CMS

When you think of eCommerce Management Platforms, there are quite a few names that will cross your mind like Big Commerce, Woocommerce, Shopify and Magento. It doesn’t matter if you are already an eCommerce Store Owner or an aspiring webmaster thinking of starting an eCommerce store or planning to upgrade an existing one. A good platform can make the management easier by covering all your requirements ranging from inventory management, product updates, catalogs, user accounts, wish lists, comparison windows, check-outs, etc. in one panel.
In this guide, I am specifically going to address the Magento platform because I feel that it is one of the best CMS available today. Magento is used by most global brands like Nike, Rovio, Paul Smith, etc, and the only setback it has is that it cannot be customized without extensive knowledge. Let’s take a step towards Magento success. I will try to update this guide as and when Magento platform receives an update in the future.

Take a look at the Table of Contents below.

1. What is Magento SEO and Why Indulge?

Magento is an open source, robust, and scalable eCommerce platform best suited for those businesses, which have a web-store. If you are an eCommerce storeowner, then you should definitely read this guide and if you are an aspiring eCommerce web-store owner, then you should read this guide again.

Magento is extremely stable today (far more than what it used to be back in 2010), and its latest version is very SEO friendly and can easily be customized by Search Engine Experts. If your online web store is lying un-optimized, then you are not only killing the potential of your website but also wasting a lot of energy, time and resources. Reconsider your decisions today.

Some Webmasters tell me – We have the Magento SEO Plugin. It is easy to use, then why bother investing in Magento SEO?

Yes! The Magento SEO Plug-in is a great choice, and I always encourage using it, but you should u understand that there is a fine line between bravery and stupidity. Magento is a “MASSIVE” platform and the SEO plugin does give some handy optimization techniques like editing the Title tag, Meta Tag and Anchor text, but it is not magic. The intricacies of SEOing a Magento Platform go far beyond the reach of a pre-designed program. Thus you need to have someone experienced work on the Platform to maximize its full potential

I hope that by the end of my post you will be able to make up your mind about taking a step further towards your Magento eCommerce Success. Moving on, here are some common Magento SEO mistakes that are easily avoidable.

2. Common Magento Loopholes That Are Stepping Stones For Every Webmaster

Let us look at some of the most common inherent Magento mistakes from the development phase, which are always overlooked. These make the most difference in carving your ‘stairway to heaven’ in your eCommerce escapade.

#Mistake No 1

Leaving the Homepage Title as Home

Most Homepage(s) are CMS Pages. It would be in your best interest to give it a personalized title like – Prime One Global Online Store – Prime One Global.com.

#Mistake No 2

Leaving the Default Description un-optimized

Always leave the default description field blank, or Magento has the tendency of duplicating it for search engines to such an extent that it looks more like spam.

Go to – System -> Configuration -> General -> Design -> HTML Head -> Default Description and “leave it blank.”

#Mistake No 3

Forgetting to use rel=canonical

Again, a simple command if not used can make your Magento web-store look like a spam farm with multiple duplicate content issues. Always use “rel=canonical” for both products and categories.

#Mistake No 4

Forgetting to change meta robots to index, follow – after migrating to live website

After migrating to live website, lot of developers forget to change meta robots from noindex, nofollow to index, follow.

Go to – System -> Configuration -> General -> Design -> HTML Head -> Default robots “index, follow”

#Mistake No 5

Sticking with Default Layered Navigation

Layered Navigation is a nightmare for SEO. I will let you in on the details in another section. (check Section 4)

#Mistake No 6

Ignoring or Forgetting the XML Sitemap

Before submitting your website to Google, it would be a good idea to check the XML Sitemap. Most developers create a sample Sitemap and leave it at that, which is always a no-winner.

CALL TO ACTION – Make sure you avoid these mistakes and let me know if I missed out something in the comments section below.

3.1 The Art of Optimizing Magento

Take a look at the definitive Art of doing Magento SEO, known only by a few, but brandished by all. I will show you some basic measures that are followed by most Magento SEOs.

3.1.1 Fundaments of Optimization

Enable Server Rewrites – Go to – System -> Configuration -> Web -> SEO -> Enable Server Rewrite

Under the URL Options section, you will find another handy edit,

Store Code To URLs – Always set it as “No” or your URLs will look like a mess with unnecessary characters.

Www or non-www – Under Secure and Unsecure, there is an option to select a preferred domain, select a particular URL type either www.mystore.com or mystore.com

3.1.2 Setting-up Headers

Search Engines appreciate those websites, which have their chief keywords near the page start. For this purpose, leaving your Header in default condition “Magento Commerce” is never a good route to take.

Go to – System -> Configuration -> Design -> HTML Head

NOTE: This title will only be visible on most basic-pages of your website.

Remember to leave your Default Description and Default Keywords field blank for reasons discussed in the Mistakes to avoid section.

3.1.3 Content Management System Pages

Keeping the above-mentioned trick(s) in mind, it is time to move onto the crux of Magento Platform. After you have put up some content on some of your CMS pages, choose a Search Engine Friendly URL and Descriptive Page Title for each page. Change the description of your most important pages in the Meta Data section, always write something, which is meaningful and will attract customers to your page.

In case you decide to leave the description field blank, then the Search Engines will find a keyword that is being searched for by users and show them an excerpt from around your keyword in the page.

3.1.4 Managing Categories

When making categories for your products and/or services in Magento, it is important to remember that this platform has the tendency of creating duplicate pages for product/services that fall under multiple categories.

This is turn is not a very welcoming signal for Search Engine crawlers, as they may end up taking those duplicate pages as spam content and flag your website.

To ensure that this does not happen, Go to – System -> Configuration -> Catalog -> SEO -> Choose “No” for Use Category path for product URLs.

After you have done the above, it is time to Manage Categories:

Go to System -> Configuration -> Catalog -> Manage Categories and make the necessary edits.

Meta Description – Do not underestimate the importance of a good, keyword rich and attractive Meta Description.
Page Title – It is in your best efforts to leave this space blank. This will display the category name along with parent categories (if any).
URL Key – Try to keep your URL, as keyword rich as possible. Do not give special characters or number or stop words in your URL.

3.1.5 Managing Products

It is almost the same as managing the Categories. However, a handy tip to enhance the SEO of your Magento platform would be to optimize the images properly.

Choose clear Images that are attractive for your products
Remember to name the image files with proper keywords and avoid special characters and numbers
Set label for each image under “Images” tab – this Label will be used as Alt tag and Title for your images.

3.2 Optimizing Magento Theme

3.2.1 Free Theme vs. Paid Theme

I go by the rule of the thumb, which states that nothing good in life comes free of cost. I personally do not like using anything free, just because it is unreliable, and a developer who would spend the proper time and patience in customizing a paid theme would never do the same if the theme was free.

CALL TO ACTION – Select a Premium Theme for Your eCommerce Store or get one designed by a professional.

3.2.2 Customizing Headings

The default logo should always be in Heading 1 on the front page. All the subsequent pages, the main idea should be to put in as many keywords in the Titles as possible so I normally choose Heading 3.

Do not over use headings. Remove all unnecessary heading from your pages to throw light on the main content of the page. Also, remove all headers in the Side columns and replace them with a bold <strong> font if required.

In category page, <h1>Category Name</h1> and <h3>Product Name</h3>

In product page <h1>Product Name</h1>

3.2.3 Clean Your Code

Remember to remove all those unnecessary JavaScript and CSS that you might have in your themes. They do not help in SEO of your Magento platform in any manner and removing them ensures a faster load and that users can get to your website quickly.

3.2.4 Speed Optimization

Here are a few things that you can keep in mind, which would greatly enhance the customizability of your Magento Platform.

Enable Caching – This feature greatly enhances the page load speed for the users.

Go to System -> Cache Management -> Enable Cache Management

Always choose a good host, which is compatible for Magento Hosting.

Ensure that you limit the number of external files to as less as possible because every time a user visits your website you make them download external files. It is in your best interest to combine as many internal files as possible.

3.3 Duplicate Content and Advanced Optimization

After you have completed the basic optimization techniques, you might be faced with the problem of duplicate content, which is extremely common in Magento Platform.

I am going to show you how to let the duplicate content stay and still manage to get the right page indexed and the rest ignored by spiders. Read on to find out.

3.3.1 No Follow Redundant Links

It is important to nofollow all unnecessary links like basic-pages, add to wish list, checkout, login.

Also, remember to nofollow RSS feeds, add to wish list, and compare products, layered navigation in your theme files.

3.3.2 Canonical URLs

Canonical as the name suggests is the preferred URL for a product that you want the search engines to index. This removes the hassle of having to deal with duplicate product URLs in Magento platform.

4. Dealing With Layered Navigation in Magento SEO

Layered Navigation, as I quoted earlier is the nightmare of all SEO. In layman’s terminology, whenever a new filter is applied to a product, Magento creates a new page (a replica) of the original page depicting the recent changes. To add to the mess, if a website has (n) number of products, it becomes increasingly difficult to deal with layered navigation manually, which leaves the website prone to Google’s Panda-monium, if left unattended.

Here are some of my ways of dealing with Layered Navigation in Magento:

4.1 Canonical Tag

Just like I mentioned in the section above, canonical tags are the preferred choice. This will show Google your preferred URLs for indexing purposes. I always tag this method along with the other methods due to its easy implementation.

4.2 Parameter Handling In Google Webmaster Tool

The Parameter Handling resource in GWT has created a lot of buzz amongst the SEO lately. It should be noted that the tool is efficient, and it gives varied results like the Canonical Tag. Use the Parameter Handling resource carefully, as in the end you are telling Google how to react to your pages through this tool.

This technique should be combined with one of the below techniques.

4.3 Meta or X Robots

This option is mostly preferred by SEOs for dealing with layered navigation. You can apply the Meta or x robots rules (noindex, follow), as it is efficient and easy to implement and does not consume much time.

4.4 AJAX Navigation

AJAX navigation is the best and most time/resource intensive process for optimizing your Magento webstore. The benefit of AJAX Navigation is that it applies the filters to the products without creating any duplicate entries.

5. The Advantages of Magento SEO

5.1 Search Engine Friendly URLs

Magento has become one of the most flourishing eCommerce platforms mainly because of its Search Engine Friendly URLs. When Magento had first released, the URLs were broken and it was difficult for Search Engines to decipher them. However, present day the URLs in Magento are very customizable and store owners can create their own custom URLs, which are keyword rich and easy to read.

5.2 Google Sitemap

Magento platform allows for faster indexing of Sitemaps in Google, which helps target customers reach the desired products faster. This is extremely beneficial of eCommerce Store Owners.

5.3 Most Viewed Products

This one is a sheer winner; it is your window to consumer magnetism right at the backend of your Magento platform. With this tool, you can see your most viewed products from the back panel. By getting a deeper insight on which products are most viewed, you can boost those pages by coupling with other marketing techniques or by using Google Adword.

5.4 Top 5 Incoming Search Terms

Wouldn’t it be a time saver if you knew exactly which keywords to optimize in your content development campaigns? The Top 5 Search Terms feature of Magneto does just that. It helps webmasters and SEOs optimize traffic by knowing the most popular incoming Search Terms to your Magento eCommerce Store.

5.5 Undoubtedly The Best CMS Around

You can make the most of the CMS section by uploading your SEO content here. This is the place where you can write product reviews, about the company or anything that will attract the customers to your store. Optimized with good keywords, this is a powerful place for making the most out of the Magento Platform and getting the conversions rolling.

6. Make Your Custom Robots.txt File

One of the most common mistake of Magento Store owners and developers is they forget the importance of creating a custom Robots.txt file when optimizing their Magento Platform.

Some webmasters even think that taking any generic robotx.txt file and placing it in their store is going to get the job done. I would like to stress on how important having a proper robots.txt file is. It is crucial to understand that every store is different; it has a different structure and requires a robotx.txt file of its own. A Robots.txt file of another flourishing eCommerce store is not going to work for your store, in every case you will need to make some important tweaks to better fit the URL structure of your eCommerce store and its priorities.

Always make sure that your robots.txt file is properly working through the Google Webmaster Tool before hitting the live button. A wrong robots.txt may lead to the downfall of your website.

7. Measuring Your Magento Success

7.1 Check your popularity

What you do, how much you invest, how hard you work is all in vain, if you are not popular at the end of the day. In the online world, where one organization wants to crush the other in the battle for supremacy, it is essential to establish an authority by the strategies and tactics that you deploy through your SEO. If you become famous, you have won the major part of the battle. One of the ways of finding your popularity is by checking the number of people who link to you. The more the number, the famous you are.

It is a give and take policy – no one will do anything for you free until there is a benefit in it for them. What I mean to say is, no one is going to link to your website until they get something back in return. A great way of promoting your products and getting backlinks to your websites is through Affiliates. If you can offer webmasters a modest commission on every sale they crack for you through their website, they are going to take interest in what your store has on offer for your target customers. There are countless number of backlink building strategies out there, you just have to reach out and employ a few of them in your website and your eCommerce platform will be flourishing in no time.

7.2 Google Analytics for the win

The internet is filled with countless ways for letting webmasters analyze and monitor their ROI. Make best use of Google Analytics to check the number of visitors to your website, where they are coming from, which website is sending in the most referrals and what are your most ranking keywords.

Also, try removing the keywords with your brand or product names and check the highest rankings for your most generic keywords. If you want eCommerce success, then you should already be ranking for your brand keywords. If you filter out your brand traffic from organic search and check your actual revenue for generic keywords; this is the real ROI of your Magento SEO campaign.

Magento is a powerful platform – extract the most out of it by combining it with great SEO.

CONCLUSION STRATEGY

That is it for my detailed insight on Magento SEO. Finally, I would like to state that it is crucial for all webmasters to understand the potential of a great SEO campaign and how it can positively impact their business.

For me, it has always been about staying focused and reaching your goals one at a time. Most webmasters think the web is like a huge piggy bank; they just want to scoop in and extract as much money as they can out of it. I say that their wishful thinking is not bad, but being online is more about establishing a meaningful relationship and forming connections. If you can learn to give value to your customers instead of bombarding them with mindless advertisements and sales proposals, you can be a winner.

Just work on the visibility of your Magento website, the significance of its existence and its popularity by forming connections. If you are focused in your objectives, you will see an exponential increase in the number of traffic to your website. Magento SEO will make you established and develop a brand presence that is unmatchable by any competitor.

06 SepWordPress Search Optimization

WordPress SEO: Detecting And Fixing The Problems Through Smart Strategies

According to a recent analysis of CMS involving over a million sites having a high Alexa rank, WordPress takes up around 60% market share followed by Joomla and Drupal. This itself says that the WordPress Content Management System (CMS) is widely in use by millions for creating as well as managing blogs and sites. Well, this raises the most inquisitive question in mind: What makes WordPress so popular? Well, there are two reasons for it: Legendarily user-friendly and SEO-friendly, which motivate professional developers to use and recommend WordPress.

Peeping into its SEO Potential

Benefits Guaranteed to be Enjoyed

The secret behind being touted as the most recommended blogging platform is the ability of WordPress to act as a great SEO tool for web marketers. It is outstandingly versatile when it is the matter of integrating best optimization practices.

In 2009, Matt Cutts, who is the head of Internet spam at Google honored WordPress as the ideal blogging platform for SEO at the WordCamp conference. According to Matt, WordPress integrates around 80 to 90% of the SEO mechanics even by taking the help of a few famous SEO plugins. This itself speaks a lot about SEO capabilities of WordPress.

All known search engines easily notice domains operating WordPress perhaps due to the manner in which it is coded by adhering to the guidelines of search engines as accepted by Google. This greatly lessens the work of SEO professionals who now only have to submit the script with a domain name and title. The script utilizes these details to obtain SEO tags sensed by the search engines. This indicates that the professionals can readily fill the Web pages or blogs with keyword rich content and other elements of optimization. Such a mechanism guarantees salient benefits as follows:

Independent and Efficient Content, Design, and SEO Management: Separation of content from presentation and SEO elements is the foundation of Web design principles, which WordPress ensures. This allows the SEO professionals to twist the SEO-critical components without disturbing the content or design and vice-versa. As a result, it becomes effectual to keep pace with the ever-changing SEO algorithms.

Clean Coding and Diverse Functionalities: Leaving behind free themes, the CMS ensures clean code, which means no site penalization. Further, several available plug-ins enhance site or blog functionality without extra coding. Right from developing XML sitemaps to optimizing tags (meta), plug-ins integrate best SEO practices in a flawless and modular way.

Open Source Access: WordPress is an open-source CMS that means free download and setup of the site or blog on your own server. It also means thousands of programmers are still working on it to render it more efficient, which means constant updates to improve in line with the changing SEO algorithms. This makes a lot of difference!

High Level of Customization: One of the admirable powers of WordPress is to customize the URL appearance. SEO can insert all relevant keywords in the path, which makes it simpler for search engines to sense these phrases and rank the pages.
Quick Loading: Despite being database driven, WordPress efficiently queries databases, which means least impact on bandwidth. Further, developers can implement database optimization practices to alleviate loading time even further. This is highly important as quick loading pages secure higher ranking.

Built-in Really Simple Syndication (RSS) Feeds: This is a vital SEO benefit, as it allows the content to reach a feed directory and sending a link back to your site. The post is associated with other directories where visitors subscribe to your feed for getting notifications on posting new content.

Looking at the Other Side of the Coin

From the aforementioned benefits and capabilities, there is no doubt that WordPress is becoming even more popular not only amongst the SEO experts but also amongst the SEO beginners. The CMS is simple yet highly effective in terms of grabbing the desired page rank, which sets it apart from the other options or counterparts. Above all, you really need no computer genius to run and manage your site through WordPress.

However, you need to ensure that you stick to the SEO standards as set by the changing algorithms to grab as well as retain the desired ranking position. This is best done by sticking to best practices and latest plug-ins or features. Well, there is a catch here! Knowing about these solutions is a job half done, as the remaining half involves implementing them seamlessly.

Somehow or the other, the gap between knowledge and implementation results in many problems while optimizing WordPress pages. Sometimes, it is also the lack of knowledge that can create SEO problems. However, what you perceive is the symptom, as the problem is always underlying your strategic efforts. For example, you may notice that the page rank is not improving despite all WordPress SEO efforts. However, this is the symptom indicating an underlying problem.

In short, when you see anything undesirable or any observations unfulfilling the goal, your mind suddenly triggers the following three questions:

How do I track the problem through this symptom?
How do I now ensure that my rank continues to stay stable for the given set of primary keywords, despite the prevalent symptom?
How can I now climb the ladder of page rank for improved visibility despite the problem?

Keeping these questions in mind, let us explore the common problems that tend to affect your WordPress SEO negatively. After all, no SEO professional would like to have these problems in their WordPress blogs or sites, as it is matter of online reputation and brand awareness!

Problem 1: Unclear and Non-unique Titles and Page Description

Main Symptom: Your links in results pages are not clicked.Therefore, it makes sense to write catchy, but unique titles for your pages. After all, you need to convince a searcher to click on your link from the search results page. Just consider yourself as a searcher and you will know the importance of the page title in making the visitor click!

Tags : Not having exceptional H1 or metal labels on each page is a significant issue. As per the latest search engine optimization rules, each page of the site, including the landing page, must have its own set of meta and H labels, which involves title, subtitles, and keywords. It is wise to stick to 5 to 7 words for the H1 or title, of which 2 to 3 words should be keywords so that the visitors can search your page quickly.

Remember : WordPress themes do not use the title tag properly or even may not use it at all. Therefore, you should add it with the apt page title before the content begins. Moreover, keep in mind that in a few themes, the main title is ‘H1’ and ‘H2’ is the post title. Write a title that is unique as well as clear, but also successfully conveys to the searcher about the information you are offering. If this much is conveyed, the seeker is bound to click.

Call to Action : You can even use an SEO plug-in such as WordPress SEO by Yoast or All in One SEO that allows you to write unique titles. For a unique and catchy title, condense your story to its root by asking three questions: What is the story’s main point, how it will benefit the reader, and what would I put in the search box if I were to look for such a story.

Problem 2: Improper Basic SEO

Main Symptoms: Your site or blog is not getting satisfactory SEO results in the beginning itself. Indexing is not happening at all. Google is unable to recognize all pages of your site or blog.

Basic SEO includes writing and optimizing unique title tags for both pages and posts along with meta tags, including keywords in the right density per total number of words, having meaningful URLs, optimizing images, and generating an XML sitemap. If there is any inaccuracy, ignorance, or lack of optimization in these aspects, your blog or site is bound to face undesirable consequences.

When a visitor searches in Google for a site, a small snippet of content appears below the page link. You can control this content by customizing the page’s meta description tags namely, Title and Desc. Similarly, you need to add keywords to your page and post title tags to convey what your site or page is all about to the search engines.

It is vital to know that Google no longer crawls the keywords tag anymore because it now has better ways of rankings and checking relevance. However, this is not applicable to other search engines. Therefore, it is best to insert the keywords. It is recommended to do so by activating ‘dynamic’ keywords by using the All in One SEO plug-in.

In case of descriptions, no standard way exists to automate it. In fact, the best ones are hand written. For better configuration for each post, you can consider using the Headspace plugin. It enables auto-filling meta-description of a post as per the category description. This is handy in case you post a lot.

Unless you are deep into branding, it is wise to optimize your site for one keyword that can fetch search traffic. Several blogs end up obtaining maximum links to their homepage. Therefore, it is better to try and leverage these links by grabbing rankings for a relevant phrase that is fairly competitive with a decent search volume. Find for such a relevant phrase in the Google Keyword Planner tool.

Once you determine the keywords through the Google Ad Words Planner, you will have to use them such that your content and tags are optimized. Within the content, you need to consider keyword density, number of times a keyword is used in your text with respect to the page’s total word count. Ideally, there is no standard keyword density although most people believe it to be 1% in 500 words.

However, it is best to follow this guideline: Main or primary keyword in your H1 or title tag and in H2 tag, and in the first and last paragraphs. The remaining keywords should at least be present once over the entire text. However, use the keywords naturally; do not force your sentences to turn meaningless, just because you need to keep a keyword there. Moreover, Google is not going to reward you much after the first three instances, and that stuffing more is only going to bring down the ranking position.

Apart from the content, the main keyword for each page should also be present in the page’s title tag, the post’s title, meta keyword list, and in meta title. The main keyword of the entire site should be present in the title tag of your homepage, the site’s heading, logo, and as the anchor text in links from external sources such as other blogs or sites.

Call to Action: Include meta descriptions and titles having the main keyword that should also be in the page title, post title, sub titles, links, and in the content of the page. Include the rest of the keywords once in content and in the meta tag.

Next, you need to optimize your WordPress URLs that are simply meaningless, by default. Post titles look domainl.com/?p=35, where 35 is posted, but search engines are impressed only if this URL appears as domain.com/SEO-in-wordpress/. This is because the categorized or customized URL informs the visitors what the page is about before it is clicked. The id-based URL is another reason why the user might not click it on the result page, because it is not clear to him or her, what the page is all about.

To change this URL structure, go to Settings à Permalinks. Permalinks refer to your URLs of your posts. It is best to use /post-name or /category/post-name. If you wish to use the first option, kindly change the Common Settings to /%postname%/. However, if you wish to include the category, select Custom Structure and enter the permalink as /%category%/%postname%/. Now, WordPress will take care of redirects.

The last thing to do about permalinks for improving SEO is to eliminate stop words such as ‘and’, ‘a’, and ‘the’. In case you are using latest WordPress SEO plugin, these words are removed automatically once the post is saved. This means you will not get ugly long URLs. However, this is not something you need after posts are live and are clicked. In case you now change the permalink, ensure proper redirection of the post. Usually, WordPress should redirect to the new URL but if it fails, manual intervention is indispensable.

Call to Action: Give meaning permalinks to pages and remove stop words.

Often overlooked is the optimization of images, which is done by writing good alt tags and giving meaningful names to files. These two acts can get extra traffic from the diverse image search engines. They are also a great aid to physically impaired readers who visit your site with a screen reader.

Call to Action: Write alt tags for images and save them with meaningful file names.

Last but not the least; ensure that you have an XML sitemap, as it is the easiest way for the search engines to know about content on your site. Having a sitemap is like telling them yourself. A sitemap as a special file allows search engines to index all pages in your site as well as get notified when new content is added to the site or content has been changed. While Google is in favor of XML sitemaps, Bing and human users prefer HTML sitemaps. You can use both by publishing an HTML sitemap on the blog and XML sitemap in your root directory for improved SEO.

Call to Action: Generate both sitemaps by using plugins and keep the XML one in the root directory. Further, submit XML sitemap to the Webmaster tools of Google.

As per the latest updates, keyword density is not highly important with the increasing use of Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) relevance, although optimization is essential through keywords for best results. When it is the matter of keyword density and semantic relevance, the difference in terms of page and post matters, as the latter allows comments whose vocabulary and semantics are very rarely optimized. This means that for ranking vital piece of content easily, it is best to publish it on a page than through a post, as the page vocabulary and semantics are controllable. Moreover, by default, pages gain more priority than post in the core of WordPress.

Call to Action: Consider making more pages than posts.

Problem 3: Content Duplication

Main Symptom: Site or blog is penalized and gets a lower rank.

Believe it or not; duplicate content is amongst the biggest obstacles to top page ranking. Therefore, it is the first thing that needs to be removed while optimizing the blog or site. If not removed, then the page is likely to incur site wide penalty, because of the introduction of Panda algorithm. Listed below are the different symptoms of duplication along with their strategic solutions.

Thin Content: Refers to less distinct or unique text on a page. In short, the page lacks original text or image. Therefore, you need at least 300+ words (not a standard) of unique content on any Web page, as anything lower than this limit increases the chance to be marked as highly similar to other pages, initiating the duplicate content filter. However, you might have a few videos and infographics from other portals. In case of video posts, consider adding a transcription or some paragraphs briefing the content.

Call to Action: Write 300+ words of content on each page are original and creative.

Boilerplate Content: Refers to content replicating across several pages. The best example of such content would be eCommerce sites and its product pages conveying shipping details and returns policies in tabbed panes. In this case, you will require including unique content in the product description or review to prevent penalties for duplication.

Call to Action: Further, you will also have to shift that content to separate pages and include a link to find that information. Even a pop up window will solve the problem if you do not wish to have separate pages, but reduce the volume by using bullet points.

Junk Pages: You might think that they are absent, but it might not be so. For example, you might have a different URL on each product page for accepting a feedback: domain.com/product1/fdb and domain.com/product2/fdb. Here, the feedback form is the same, but URL generated is different on each page. This means 500 feedback pages for 500 products, which is nothing but duplication. To solve this, add the noindex tag under the <head> tag to tell search engines that it should not index this page (<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex, follow”>). Follow conveys despite no indexing, the search engine can still follow the page and index any links contained in it.

Incorrectly Configured Sorting URLs: Most sites have an option to sort the products by color, popularity, and Although this is a cool functionality, it can lead to duplicate content if not rightly configured. For example, each parameter can trigger a different page for indexing, for instance, category?orderby=color and category?orderby=price. The solution is to use a specific meta tag for setting the canonical url as <link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.domain.com/category”/> under the <head> tag of each page. Doing so tells the search engine that it should not index this page version and that /category is the canonical version.

Call to Action: Do not allow indexing for pages that do not offer any value in the search results.

Multiple Taxonomies: Taxonomy refers to the manner in which your content is categorized by parameters such as tag and date. This again can lead to duplicate content. You can solve this problem in two ways. First, utilize one type of taxonomy for sorting and do not be concerned about the date archives or tags. Second, choose a main taxonomy and apply noindex to the rest. This is preferable as you can give your visitors the option to navigate in different ways.

Call to Action: Choose a single taxonomy and do not allow the rest to get indexed.

WWW and non-WWW URLs: It is fine to use www.domain.com or domain.com, as ‘www’ is not mandatory. However, using both the options results in double URLs in search results, as search engine treats domain.com as a different URL to www.domain.com. Therefore, you need to go Webmaster Tools and convey your preferred domain to the search engine.

Call to Action: On the main Webmaster Tools page, click the top right cogwheel à Site Settings. Now, select the right option in the preferred domain section.

Conclusion

The above call-to-actions are bound to improve your content as well as SEO outcome. If implemented, it can give your blog or site the best possible chance to be Google-friendly in a seamless manner.

05 SepMultilingual SEO

Everything You Need To Know About Multilingual SEO

Promoting a website and taking a part in the world of SEO and SEM can prove to be a rewarding and lucrative business. Online ventures have made millionaires out of countless individuals, and there are still many more aspiring entrepreneurs and webmasters seeking to tap into the exponentially growing supply of customers available online. Unfortunately SEO has never been an easy concept to understand and implement. SEO, even at its most basic and fundamental level, can be a difficult thing to master, and constant search engine updates only add to its complexity. Here we’re going to talk about one of the more complex facets of SEO and explain, in a no nonsense way that even novices can understand, everything you need to know about multilingual SEO.

What is Multilingual SEO and Why Bother?

In a nutshell, multilingual SEO is the search engine optimization for websites in multiple languages. The name is self-explanatory, but the concepts that it encompasses, and the strategies that are implemented, are far from simple. So if it’s so difficult to learn and implement, why bother?

Unlimited growth potential

If you think about it, the entire objective of an online venture, at its core, is to bring in money by selling a product or service. This product can be phones sold directly to individuals, ad space on a general interest blog that generates a profit, or it could even be just a business website selling the ideas and boosting the sales for a business that has a physical location. Now, as of 2013, there were over seven billion individual internet users in the world and a staggering six thousand nine hundred languages in existence today. This means that when you limit yourself to just one language, just one location, just one type of user, you’re negating out billions of potential visitors.

Broadening the horizons of a business can dramatically increase its potential, boost its customer base, and result in staggering conversions and a great success. Today’s largest businesses and corporations serve customers on a worldwide basis, and when you begin setting the template up for your own business or website, you ensure that you have unlimited potential for growth!

Target Low Competition Areas

Right now, a lot of the English speaking market is flooded with a horde of people with a wide range of skill levels. Clawing your way up the ranks in search engines can lead to extensive money wasted and time spent chasing those few and far between unsaturated niches. Fortunately, for those willing to step outside their comfort zone, the online world offers a much broader range of potential customers and many areas where competition is low simply because of the language or cultural barriers!

Common Multilingual SEO Mistakes

Taking the first steps into multilingual SEO can be an incredibly intimidating process especially since it is a notoriously tricky and difficult thing to master. Fortunately, there have been plenty of multinational companies and websites who have risked the waters of multilingual SEO previously and made many errors. Learning from their mistakes can help prevent huge setbacks for any business or company looking to expand to a global market. Common mistakes include:

Lumping multilingual and multiregional in the same pot

Many people unfortunately consider multilingual and multiregional SEO as one and the same, but this is definitely not the case. Before beginning any SEO on the selected website, you need to accurately understand the differences between multilingual and multiregional so that you can correctly implement the proper strategies. While some of the strategies are the same, there are key differences that can dramatically impact performance.

Multilingual – a multilingual website is one that offers the content in more than just one language. Most Canadian businesses will feature their content in either English or French since several of the territories have French as their primary language. Additionally, a website about the Portugal national football team may feature its content in both English and Spanish since soccer/football fans of this team will be from different regions speaking different languages.
Multiregional – a multiregional website will specifically target users in different countries. For example, a company selling cell phones will target the USA and, for example, the UK quite differently. The USA uses CDMA and GSM versions of cell phones, and their primary service providers (like Verizon) will only work on CDMA so a multiregional website will feature CDMA and GSM smartphones for those in the United States while another visitor from the United Kingdom will be directed to a different section featuring only GSM smartphones compatible with their service providers.

No indexing the translated pages

In normal search engine optimization, you learn from the start that duplicate content results in massive penalties from search engines and, in many cases, can even lead to being sandboxed. This is a common understanding that SEO practitioners carry with them for many years, and it is the root cause for why many unfortunately hinder their own progress when they advance into multilingual SEO.

When content on a website is available in multiple languages, Google itself confirmed that there was no reason to prevent the robots from crawling the translated page. If you end up noindexing the page, then any multilingual SEO you’ve done on the page is negated entirely. Simply make sure that you utilize rel alternate to correctly change the URL to an appropriately translated URL containing the translated content.

Optimizing only for the Big 3

In most English speaking countries, primarily United States, Australia, Canada, and United Kingdom, there are three main search engines used: Google, Bing, and Yahoo. These search engines all generally follow the same rules and most SEO savvy individuals understand how to properly optimize for them to ensure high search engine rankings. When you’re working on a global scale, however, it is absolutely critical that you realize that other countries and cultures use alternative search engines.

China’s primary search engine is called Baidu and with China being one of the fastest growing economies in the world, many businesses are beginning to expand and attempt to establish a presence to increase sales. Unfortunately, Baidu is vastly different than Google in how it ranks importance of certain aspects of a website. Features such as alt tags, heading tags, number of inbound links, and site speed are all crucial aspects that are analyzed when determining the search results. Google, on the other hand, places more importance on the quality of the links, the page title, and the anchor text in a page.

With the subtle differences between what search engines rank in order of importance on a site, it can be increasingly difficult for any business to make it to the top pages for selected keywords on other search engines. This is why researching what the primary search engines for your specified country or region can dramatically improve traffic and conversions.

Failure to understand local buyers

One of the key points of SEO and SEM is to know who your targeted audience is, where they are present online, and how to successfully market them. Unfortunately, most people who branch out into multilingual SEO seem to use the same type of perspective that they used in the United States on other countries. The inability to understand the mentality of the local culture results in crucial conversions lost.

Take Japan, for example. The Japanese culture is vastly different than that of the UK, US, or even Australia for that matter. Additionally, its heritage and distinctive cultural ways have also permeated into the business world, resulting in one of the hardest markets to get into. Because of this, many companies hire Japanese liaisons that work and reside in Japan, know the culture, and are able to connect with the people resulting in a much higher success rate with far more conversions.

Russia, on the other hand, prefers to pay for any deliveries in cash rather than use online payments with debit cards and PayPal. Knowing this small but key cultural fact when expanding into the Russian culture will allow businesses and websites to change their sales processes to accommodate the buyer.

Implementing Multilingual SEO

Begin With Your Domain and URL Structure

One of the biggest challenges you may face when implementing multilingual SEO is often the first one: do I have local domains or do I alter my URL structure for the different language? Before making the decision it is crucial to consider the primary differences discussed earlier between multilingual and multiregional. You can have a multilingual website but it cannot be in multiple regions; however, you can have a multiregional website available in multiple languages. Once you make the decision for local domains or changing your URL structure, it is going to be incredibly difficult to switch.

Local Domain – this should be done if you are looking to target users in different regions. Having a local domain for each language helps ensure that the website is indexed by those local search engines and that it will begin to show up in the results. Let’s keep with our original two examples for multilingual and multiregional. If you’re going to target potential buyers for your cell phone in China and the United Kingdom for example, you should consider having phone.cn and phone.co.uk. These two local domains will help improve rapport with the local buyers and improve conversions as well.

Structured URL – structuring your URL to accommodate translated pages should be done for those who do not wish to target separate regions, but only different languages. This is far easier to manage, costs significantly less, and can be easily done. For a Canadian business, they can have two pages promoting their specific products – one in French and one in English. For example: business.ca/en/product is for the website in English whereas business.ca/fr/product for the product page in French.

Reduce Your Bounce Rates with IP Detection

One of the biggest reasons why there are frequently high bounce rates in multilingual websites is that the visitor was served the information in the wrong language. Think of it this way, you simply want to know more about a particular type of cell phone. You go to your search engine, type it in, and click on the top result. Unfortunately you are immediately facing a website in a completely foreign language. Instead of hunting around for any indication of a translated page (something webmasters usually mark with country flags), you just leave and find a website that is more user friendly. How can you blame visitors? It falls onto the website developer to provide information in a user friendly way so that’s why user IP detection has become such an influential tool in multilingual SEO.

How to redirect users based on IP?

If you’re hosting a simple website then you likely already have some sort of redirect implemented in your mobile theme. Mobile themes detect the type of device that is attempting to access the information and subsequently provides the proper type of formatting based on whether it’s a tablet, smartphone, or computer/laptop. IP detection and redirecting is somewhat different because it redirects based on the IP. The IP will show the location of the user and they can then be redirected using either HTTP redirection or JavaScript redirection.

HTTP – this is a faster alternative and is commonly used because of it. A user attempting to access the website will be redirected based on their HTTP request headers to the appropriate URLs for their language.
JavaScript – sometimes an HTTP redirect can be difficult to do and this is where people use JavaScript as an alternative. There are many different ways to use JavaScript and redirect users based on their IP, but it is traditionally slower than HTTP redirection and also requires more resources in total.

Speed is a priority

Ensuring that your users receive their information in a fast and efficient way will dramatically impact your site’s ranking on almost every search engine (not just the big three). Unfortunately many people run into massive problems with for a myriad of reasons.

User redirection – as explained earlier, user redirection is crucial to reduce bounce rates and provide your visitors with the information they need in an effective and convenient way. Unfortunately, redirecting users slows down the loading process and this is something that is not missed by search engine crawlers. Ensuring that the redirection process is fast with HTTP redirection is key, but also make sure that the appropriate canonical URLs are utilized to distinguish from the original page and the translated version.
Data location – to reduce loading times on your website, you need to ensure that your websites data is as close to your users as possible. This can be done one of two ways:

Server location – the proximity of the server to the user does play a massive role in site speed. The closer the server is to the user, the faster the data will arrive to their computer and the sooner they can get on with buying your products/services. Subsequently, the further away a server it is, the more time it wil take for the data to arrive and the higher chance you will have of the visitor leaving your site before it finishes its loading time. Having a high quality server in the country where your target audience is essential and will greatly increase site speed and performance.

CDN – for websites that have visitors from multiple countries, multiple servers may not be an option due to expenses. In this case, a CDN can be the perfect solution. A CDN, or content delivery network, takes cached elements of your website that generally never change and stores them in servers around the world. When a user then visits your website, the CDN will find the server closest to the user’s location based on their IP address and deliver them the cached files. This dramatically reduces the load on servers and also ensures visitors get their data much faster than normal.

Link Structure Improves Performance

A good link structure on a monolingual website is difficult enough to achieve, however when you’re using two languages, it becomes a critical aspect that needs to be done carefully. The link structure of a multilingual website will have two main

Internal link structure

Your internal link structure needs to be very meticulous because it can be incredibly easy to link to the wrong page (the one that’s not translated), or to provide a dead link by accident when you change how your canonical structure is done. You need to make sure that if you are referencing a product or page in a different language that you choose the right link to use.

Additionally, providing clear links to alter the language of the site, breadcrumbs so navigation is easy, and at least a link in each post to ensure continuity and flow will dramatically improve the internal linking structure. When you have a great internal linking structure your site’s SEO performance is greatly increased and you will also see visitors staying on your site much longer than they would without.

Inbound/Outbound Link structure

If you are looking to target users in specific languages and ensure that your translated page has a high ranking, it is important to realize that you need to ensure that your inbound and outbound links go to sources in that secondary language. This will make sure that the rankings for your site on other search engines, even the Google in other countries, will be significantly higher for your selected keywords.

To get high quality inbound links look at your usual key places and more:

Forums
Directories
Press releases
Guest blogs
Social media (low quality, but effective in bulk)

SMM Boosts Awareness and Traffic

As you probably know social media for any website, whether it’s just launched, or it is simply expanding to a new market, will play a large role in its traffic, brand awareness, and interaction with potential customers. When website first appears into a new market it must immediately begin connecting with the locals, and interacting with them. These interactions and the sheer presence of the business or site on social media locations will help dramatically increase brand awareness and solidify its presence.

Additionally, being present on social media sites and posting regularly ensures that the amount of content available for liking, sharing, and tweeting is significantly increased. Each time something is shared on a social media site, it creates a direct backlink that not only allows the website to reach new social groups it was not previously able to, but each link also helps bolster the websites ranking on search engines!

Conclusion:

There is no doubt that normal SEO strategies alone are often difficult to master; however the more advanced user will find that multilingual SEO will provide a challenging and rewarding option that allows for exponential growth and opportunities. Reaching out to website visitors and potential customers in their own language can remove previous barriers and greatly increase conversions, so understanding what multilingual SEO is and how to properly implement it is essential.

Many people dive headfirst into multilingual SEO and make common mistakes such as not indexing their translated pages or optimizing only for the main three search engines. Fortunately, now that you’ve read this comprehensive guide you’ll hopefully understand how to avoid most of the frequent mistakes that are easily made. It’s often hard to believe the amount of setbacks that you can avoid by simply taking the time to look through the mistakes of others and now you can begin properly implementing the correct multilingual SEO strategies discussed here such as using IP detection to reduce bounce rates, boosting site speed with a CDN, and also ensuring that your link structure for your multilingual site is set correctly!

Overall, multilingual SEO is difficult and time consuming, yet highly rewarding. It comes with time and patience. For those who are willing to put in the work that goes into developing a highly successful multilingual website, the rewards will definitely be worth it!

If this guide has helped you, or if you have any questions, please let us know! Additionally, for any advanced users who are already working on multilingual sites, feel free to share any information that may have been missed in this guide!

A Beginner’s Guide to Google Schema Markup

A Beginner’s Guide to Google Schema Markup

Overview of Schema, Schema markup, and Schema.org

Working of Schema Microdata

The Significance of Using Schema Markup

The Benefits of Using Schema Markup

Top 5 Motivations to Use Schema Markup in Your Web Pages

Applications for Which You Should Use Schema.org

Mechanism to Markup Pages with Schema Microdata

Integration with Social Media Tags

Tips on Using Schema Markup

Conclusion

Advanced Social Media Strategies for Offline Businesses

Social media:

Offline business:

Cracking Social Media Platform

Three Myths About Social Media Strategies

Conclusion:

Powerful Local SEO Strategies for Accelerating Your Local Brand Awareness in 2014

Search Engines and Local SEO: What’s the Current Impact

Getting Ready to Prepare a Local SEO Strategy: Gaining the Vision

Before Creating Local SEO Strategies

Effective Strategies for Different Business Types

Local SEO Strategies 2014 for All Businesses

Magento SEO 101 – A Definitive Guide To Master Your CMS

Magento SEO 101 – A Definitive Guide To Master Your CMS

Contents:

1. What is Magento SEO and Why Indulge?

2. Common Magento Loopholes That Are Stepping Stones For Every Webmaster

#Mistake No 1

#Mistake No 2

#Mistake No 3

#Mistake No 4

#Mistake No 5

#Mistake No 6

3.1 The Art of Optimizing Magento

3.1.1 Fundaments of Optimization

3.1.2 Setting-up Headers

3.1.3 Content Management System Pages

3.1.4 Managing Categories

3.1.5 Managing Products

3.2 Optimizing Magento Theme

3.2.1 Free Theme vs. Paid Theme

3.2.2 Customizing Headings

3.2.3 Clean Your Code

3.2.4 Speed Optimization

3.3 Duplicate Content and Advanced Optimization

3.3.1 No Follow Redundant Links

3.3.2 Canonical URLs

4. Dealing With Layered Navigation in Magento SEO

4.1 Canonical Tag

4.2 Parameter Handling In Google Webmaster Tool

4.3 Meta or X Robots

4.4 AJAX Navigation

5. The Advantages of Magento SEO

5.1 Search Engine Friendly URLs

5.2 Google Sitemap

5.3 Most Viewed Products

5.4 Top 5 Incoming Search Terms

5.5 Undoubtedly The Best CMS Around

6. Make Your Custom Robots.txt File

7. Measuring Your Magento Success

7.1 Check your popularity

7.2 Google Analytics for the win

CONCLUSION STRATEGY

WordPress SEO: Detecting And Fixing The Problems Through Smart Strategies

Peeping into its SEO Potential

Benefits Guaranteed to be Enjoyed

Looking at the Other Side of the Coin

Problem 1: Unclear and Non-unique Titles and Page Description

Problem 2: Improper Basic SEO

Problem 3: Content Duplication

Conclusion

Everything You Need To Know About Multilingual SEO

What is Multilingual SEO and Why Bother?

Common Multilingual SEO Mistakes

Lumping multilingual and multiregional in the same pot

No indexing the translated pages

Optimizing only for the Big 3

Failure to understand local buyers