When it comes to doing SEO for your WordPress website, On-page SEO is the first and foremost thing that should come to your mind. However, we have already been talking about On-page SEO since the beginning of the web? So why am I beating around the bush right now? I am not here to show you how to do the basics of On-page optimization. But, this time I will dive into the depth and show you some “micro-optimization techniques” that will take your website usability to the next level.

We are going to look at something that has been a part of the On-Page strategy for a long-long time. However, it has been much overlooked. This blog post will be covering the art of doing Silo Optimization or ‘Siloing’ a.k.a ‘Theming’ on your WordPress Website.

 

What is Siloing?

 

Siloing is an On-Page optimization technique, which is used to group relevant pages together.  It can either be done manually or structurally through link connections. This in turn will allow you to manage things like, an editorial calendar, or establish a website’s keyword-based theme along with providing an amazing User Experience(UX) for the visitors.

 

Synopsis of Video:

“In this video, Google’s Former Head of Spam, Matt Cutts, is giving a few tips on Siloing or Themed Architecture. Having a Website Silo Architecture is the main way of plotting a themed framework. Even Matt claims that Siloing, if implemented properly will help a web-master rank for far more keywords with only a few inbound links, as opposed to websites that have a poor structure.”

 

What are the different types of Siloing?

There are two types of Siloing (theming) you can do to your website:

Physical

And,

Virtual

Physical Siloing: It is the documentation of your website structure, which helps in managing the editorial calendar. In this documentation, all the URL addresses of a website along with their individual page details are mentioned. Each of the pages contains sub-pages that directly reflect its URL structure. Let’s take a look at the URL example of primeone.global,

The above URL address reveals that the page focuses on the main page ‘services’ and its sub-page ‘Enterprise SEO.’ Just like this, every site has different sub-pages, which are placed under a single category page. Like in the case of the above link, you can find ‘Enterprise-Seo’ nested within the ‘Service’ page of the company website. The structure of the URL covers various topics under your site directory. Moving onto Virtual Siloing…

Virtual Siloing: Virtual siloing denotes the linking structure of a site. It mainly separates irrelevant pages, forms a group of relevant pages, and reinforces the initial landing pages of each silo.

Note: Physical siloing concentrates more on theme-related pages whereas virtual siloing is all about hypertext links between theme-related pages.

A virtual silo is stronger than a physical one because search engine robots crawl silently to the links. To exploit this, you should connect the theme-relevant topic to a section of your site by linking to the pages that are associated with that subject.

A site’s ranking will be greatly impacted, based on the internal linking structure with the popular landing pages on the website along with the subpages for each SEO silo.

Inlay man’s terminology, a SILO document is a worksheet that lets you record information about your website at the page level. Let’s take an example of a silo structure from a recipe website.

As you can see from the image below, only four columns are sufficient for any silo document. (Statutory Warning: Don’t scroll down on an Empty Stomach)

Location – As you can see from the image above the number system under the ‘Locations’ tab is linking all the subpages to the main category. This clearly represents the website’s easy navigation system. Pages 2.1, 2.2, 2.3, 2.4 etc. are all nested under the 2.0 (Category Page). I hope you get the basic idea.

Keyword – Most of your web pages will have at least one bullseye keyword that will mainly target the SEO of the site. You should plant this “bullseye’ keyword in the file name, title tag, meta description, and alt tag of the relevant page(s). Just like this all your content must be optimized for a variety of keywords in a natural way.

Page type – The types of pages will differ from site to site. If you have a business website, you are likely to have a product service category, customer support category, Company catalog, product documentation category and so and so.

Page Name – A page name denotes the topic of the content on that particular page. You can use the main keyword of that page as its page name in the Content Management System, in our case, it will be WordPress.

Thus, the above image gives you the easiest way to plan and connect with the targeted SEO keywords at a page level, without destroying the simplicity of your website. Often, multiple team members are working on a single website like web designers, content writers, PR teams, coders, and many others. The silo document forms the basis of communication between all these individuals.

Pro tip: You can use Google Docs to manage your silo document. The unique benefit of doing this is that you can share your file(s) with your fellow members without complicating the process of transferring data and making multiple versions.

Here are some more SEO columns that you can add to your worksheet to increase accessibility:

• File Name
• Title Tag
• Meta Description

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Introduction to Cross-Linking

The internet is a giant web of interconnectivity where all the websites are somehow connected to each other through links. Cross-linking refers to the method of linking between two or more websites that may or may not have the same owner. Cross-linking allows webmasters to link to similar content on other websites from their website to satisfy their user’s searches or provide more food for thought on content that they find amusing. At times, cross-linking is also used by websites to give a reference, credit, or proof.

In most cases, every subpage of a website will cross-link itself to the top landing page(s). Consider, the silo example (refer to the recipe website silo document image) for cross-linking, which looks like this,

• Category pages 1.0, 2.0, 3.0 are placed under 0 (Homepage) target keyword as the main text for that specific page(s).
• Going down the hierarchy, you can see 1.1, 1.2, …. 1.10 cross-linked to 1.0
• And the same goes for all the other categories and subpages.

Get the idea?

Note: Content management systems (CMS) like WordPress and shopping cart platforms easily organize your site according to your website silo documentation through the use of tags, product description pages, category pages, and more.

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Importance of Keyword Architecture in Siloing

Short, Long, and LSI keywords play a significant role in making your website visible in search engines. It is essential for your website to have organized, supportive content, to back up those keywords. Search engines inspect your site structure to understand what your website is all about. This eventually brings in visitors to your site. However, having a Silo Strategy in place, will not only be good for SERP visibility but will also impact how visitors use your website.

How Siloing Affects Website Rank in SERPs?

From our deduction so far, it is safe to say that Siloing is a great SEO practice. It allows your site to rank in SERPs by improving the significance of your site pages for the desired search keywords. It also handles your content in an organized manner and reveals what the website is all about, not only to humans, but also to search engine robots. Siloing further helps establish your site as an authoritative source for a topic(s) of your choice.

Search engines have always given priority to the website(s) focusing on high-ranking Keywords that provide relevant subject matter along with an error-free framework to match the user’s query. However, this does not imply that you should fill your website with content focusing only on popular search phrases, which don’t bear any resemblance to your niche. Google prefers websites that provide great user experience and quality content rather than those websites that mindlessly stuff content and over-optimize keywords. So, do keep this fact in mind.

One clear ranking signal for Google is the Average time on the Website. When users choose to spend more time on your website, that means that you are providing them with a smooth surfing experience and great content. This in turn tells Google that your website is worthy of higher rankings. Average time on a website plays a crucial role, especially in Mobile SERPs, where users tend to have an even shorter attention span than desktops and tablets.

How Does Siloing Improve Your User Experience?

There is just one golden rule to score well in SERPs, and that is to provide meaningful content to users and value their time. Our only purpose should be, to please human visitors instead of robot search engines. That’s how it works!

So, before jumping straight into the technical things, ask yourself this question, “will this SEO strategy be good enough for my human users?”. If you hear your inner voice saying ‘yes,’ then you are good to go.

Silo organizes your website data in a systematic manner that can retain itself, even after going through changes, which are equally suitable for both human users and search engines.

Nothing upsets the site visitors, more than a poor navigation system. Imagine, how essential, it is to silo and cross-link your website when you are shopping at an e-commerce store. For example, take a look at this image of Amazon.com, which shows results for sports t-shirts under the category of both men’s and women’s clothing, which is ideal for site visitors.

Here, the word ‘sports t-shirts’ is linked to both ‘men’ and ‘women’ apparel page categories. As you can see from the image above, the optimized Silo framework on the website is allowing the users to choose the right category without getting lost.

How To Use Silo Document As An Editorial Calendar?

Silo has the feature to manage all your SEO tactics in a visually representable manner. You can simply add two to three relevant columns and turn your Silo document into an SEO management sheet along with a fantastic editorial calendar. Add ‘writer’ and ‘published’ columns to the silo and keep a track record of your valuable editorial data.

The more you discover the artistry of a silo the more it will fascinate you and take your page optimization to another level!

Here are different ways you can use your silo document:

• Determine gaps in the content strategy
• Track conversion rate
• Track notes for internal or external web designers
• Organize a plan for a site relocation
• Identify and eliminate outdated web pages
• Update old blog pages and remarket them

How to Silo Your Website

You can silo your website by using these four steps:

1. Determine the theme that will best compliment your website: Figure out your website content strategy. What type of content do you want to have and what is the website all about (or What would you add in the future)? Stick to the overall game plan and select a theme that suits your industry.
2. Strategize your silo: Pay close attention to choosing a theme for your WordPress website and structure all the main categories and subcategories according to virtual and physical siloing.
3. Plot your link architecture: I suggest you do it on a piece of paper first. Analyze your internal link architecture starting from your nav menu, and connect your sub-pages systematically. Doing this will strengthen your theme’s framework, thereby helping people smoothly navigate through your website without getting lost.

Note: You need at least five related content pages to set up a silo theme model.

4. Frame your silo: Focus on the content quality and include relevant keywords wherever possible. Strengthen your top landing silo page with main focus keywords and links from your sub-pages according to the hierarchical framework.

CONCLUSION

Siloing is all about creating an organized and intuitive website architecture that satisfies search engine spiders and simplifies website navigation for us humans.

Hopefully, this article gives you a good grasp of the silo model and WordPress Micro-optimization. If you have any problems getting started with Siloing, then you can leave a comment here, or you can create a new discussion in the Engage Forum.

Ever since the last Major Penguin Rollout in December 2014, the incoming requests for “How to Remove Bad Backlinks” and “How to fight manual penalty” have been on a very steep rise.

The internet was shaken once again this year on January 8, 2016, when all the main Rank Tracking Tools reported massive movements in SERP Rankings. At first, we had taken this as the Penguin 3.1 rollout, but Google later confirmed it as “Core Algorithm Update.”

As reported by SeRoundTable, Google stated that this was not a Penguin update, but no details were provided by the Search Giant to prove otherwise.

Needless to say, being in the Prime One Global Manual Penalty Recovery Team, I face dozens of requests on end from clients who are either facing Negative SEO Attacks or frustrated newcomers who are reaping the fruits of cheap SEO tactics that they indulged in the past.

In contrast to this, you can very well imagine what is the state of my inbox. It is flooded with emails that go something like this:

• How to remove bad backlinks?
• How to remove a link from a Pornographic Website?
• How to remove backlinks from a site?
• How to remove spam backlinks?
• How to find bad backlinks from Negative SEO?
• Can you send me a Link Removal Request Email Template?
• How can I remove a website from Webmaster Tools?
• How do I check for bad backlinks?
• How do I identify bad backlinks?
• And the list is endless…

Yes, I agree that my Inbox looks like a graveyard. And this is the main reason that pushed me to blog about this topic, so I can just help everyone out.

In the last two years, I have worked on fixing a lot of damage on the web. Not only have I recovered my own websites from Penguin or Manual Penalty, but I have helped over 72 Clients (pardon me if I missed someone out… eheh) in fixing and removing their bad backlinks.

So, without further ado, I would like to move directly onto the ‘Situation’ here. But, one request before reading further. I would like you to be patient with the process as it is time-consuming. It can take somewhere from months to a full year to see a recovery.

I understand that having to watch all your traffic and sales disappear overnight is a nightmare for any Internet Entrepreneur, but I assure you, that if you keep your patience, we will get through this and in a matter of months, you might actually get your website back on the track.

Just follow the process I have outlined in this Guide and trust me, there is hope for recovery. You will soon be on the route to lifting your penalty and recovering your SERP traffic.

How Important Is Link Removal?

Does Google Disavow Really Work?

Since you are already reading this guide, then I will take for granted that you have either reached me from your Inbox, or you have managed to come across this Google Link Removal or Disavow Guide through some search Engine.

Before I dive directly into how we can be “En-route to Google Penalty Recovery,” I would like to take some time out to talk about the importance of removing bad backlinks.

There was a time when Matt Cutts said:

Google is all about great content and backlinks did not impact Google Rankings. However, SEOs soon discovered that backlinks were the secret sauce to take a website to the top of Search Results for any keyword. Soon, automated link building applications like SeNUke and Xrumer and what not came into being and just destroyed the natural and beautiful process.

People stopped paying for content and started investing more money in building automated backlinks and overnight a website would be on the top of the Ranking Charts. This disturbance of equilibrium in the internet ecosystem caused a massive headache for Google since the quality of their search results was in danger. And, thus began the game of Disavowing Unnatural Backlinks, when webmasters started receiving “Unnatural Link Warnings” from Google Webmasters Tools.

Since then, Google has constantly been penalizing low profile websites and websites with unnatural backlinks, and as time passes, its algorithms are just becoming better and better at uncovering Underground Link Networks, SAPE Networks (Russian Link Farms), Private Blog Networks and other sorts of low profile or spammy link farms.

DIY Bad link Removal Service – The Disavow Gameplan

If you think that you have been hit by a manual penalty, then I am listing down a series of steps that will make you an Expert Bad link Removal Agent. There are five main steps that you need to take to fix a backlink profile:

• Recognize the Google Penalty
• Discover the bad backlinks
• Remove the bad backlinks 
• Perform link Disavow Requests
• File A Reconsideration Request to Google

In the wake of the Penguin, I saw a lot of nervous webmasters who filed a complete backlink disavow request to Google, because they were unsure of what to leave and what to retain. I understand that it is all right to be nervous, but taking such steps is not going to mend the cause. Losing all your backlink profiles will put you in a much worse condition than you would be, if you carefully follow this guide and inspect your backlinks yourself or leave the job to the pros.

Step Number 1 – Recognizing The Google Penalty (Manual / Algorithmic)

There are two forms of Penalty. One is Manual Penalty and the Other is Algorithmic Penalty. So, before you even start removing your links, you need to understand, which kind of a penalty has hit your website.

1. Manual Penalty

A manual penalty means that your website was reviewed by a Google Employee, and a manual infringement has been put in place. If you have received an email from Google Webmasters Tools (see the image below for an example), there is a high chance that you are struck by a Manual Penalty.

1. Algorithmic Penalty

If you think you have not been hit by a Manual Penalty, then you can consider doing a check with the Penguin Tool from Reconsideration.org. It is a free tool that will help you log in with your Google Analytics Account and overlay the Algorithm Updates from Google on top of your Organic Traffic over time.

This tool will also help you spot keyword-specific penalties that have only been imposed on certain over-optimized or spammed keywords.

NOTE: When you use this tool, be sure to check that only organic data source is selected in your Google Analytics Account and other Traffic from Referral Networks and Social Media are not affecting your results.

Step Number 2 – Discovering All Your Backlinks (Creating A Backlink Profile)

 To create a complete backlink profile for a Website, it is important to collect all possible backlinks from major backlink aggregators and crawlers. Start out with importing your backlinks from Google Webmasters Tools first and create an excel sheet to keep a tab on all the links that you will be eventually collecting

Getting links from Webmasters Tools:

• Go to google.com/webmasters/
• Select the Website for which you want the backlink profile
• On the left pane, you will see a Link Called “Search Traffic” click on that
• Then select the “Links to your website.”
• Under “Who Links the Most” click “More.”

You will get a complete list of Backlinks from websites that link out to you the most. Select all of them and copy them into a Tab in Excel. Call that Tab (Webmasters Tools)

Now collect Backlinks from all other Backlink Crawlers like:

1. Ahrefs
2. OpenSiteExplorer
3. MajesticSEO
4. SEMRush

Some of these solutions have a freemium option that allows you a certain number of backlinks for free. The others require a paid subscription. You can get many sellers on Fiverr that offer Backlink Profiling with the following Software, just make sure to select a vendor with a good reputation and history. Ideally, you can even get in touch with me, and I will help you create a backlink profile for your website.

Once you get all the Backlinks. Place them on individual tabs in the Excel document like I have done below.

Now once you have all the links, combine them together in a single tab Called All Backlinks. I will tell you why.

Before you have collected all the backlinks and proceed to manual inspection, you need to remove all the duplicate links that have been found by the software. So once you have copied all the connections in the All Links Tab. Select the entire link column and then Click on Data > Remove Duplicates.

Tadaaaaa! Now you have your complete backlink profile.

Save the Excel Sheet and move on to the next step.

Step Number 3 – Manually Scrutinizing Your Backlink Profile (Not as Painful as it Sounds)

Once you have summed up all the backlinks and removed the duplicates, here comes the tricky part. Don’t panic now. There is no need to panic as I am going to put together all possible ways you can understand which link is right for you and which link is bad. Alright? So, take a deep breath, and let’s get moving.

When you want to consider the authenticity of a link, these are all the things you need to check:

1. Is the website de-indexed from Google? (Perform a site:websitename.com and see if it returns any results)
2. Links from Directories
3. Links from Spammy or Poor Quality Websites
4. Links from Paid or Sponsored Posts (Paid Guest Post Websites)
5. Site-wide Links in Widgets or Footer or Header
6. Forum Backlinks
7. Blog Comment Spam Links
8. Sites that come with the same C-class IP. Use this C-class IP Checker
9. Linking pages have too many do-follow outbound links (Links without the rel=nofollow tag)

To understand more in-depth, we will use some of the same tools that we previously used to find your backlinks.

Start with MajesticSEO:

1. Check for Site-wide links quickly with this tool
2. Over Optimized Anchor Text links, or links pointing out from the same keywords too many times.
3. Are there lots of 301 Redirects pointing to your website?

Follow-up with Ahrefs:

1. A total number of links and types of links pointing from a domain. (Inspect the domain to see if it is a low-quality domain or if it has hyphens in its name or is it keyword-stuffed)
2. Is there an unusual amount of Unique Referring Domains?
3. Is there little or no anchor text diversity in the domains?
4. Were all links acquired over a short period and then stopped? Have some of the links vanished?

Don’t Jump to Conclusions Just Yet

Ask yourself these final questions before you profile a link as a bad link and proceed to removal or disavowing it.

1. Does the website have the user in mind?
2. Is the link coming from an associate brand or partner firm?
3. Does the link have the potential to pass as a referral link?
4. Is the website spammy in appearance? How is the user experience of the website?

Once you have carefully followed these steps for a single link, you can profile it as a good link and paste it into a new tab called Good Links, or in the bad tab called Bad Links. Follow the same process for all the links in your All Backlinks Tab.

Yes! You need to do that for all the links. No matter if you just have 100 Links or over 10000 Links, you need to follow this process.

Thankfully, Bruce Clay has put together a very neat infographic on the entire Link Evaluation Process.

Once you have gone through the entire list and are 100% sure about your bad backlinks, you can move on to the Link Removal Process or Link Disavow Process. I will give you a clear outline of how you can handle the process of removing bad links like an expert.

Regrettably, Google wants the webmasters to try hard really. And when I say really, I mean really-really-really work hard and put a lot of effort into the process. It would be a wise decision to document all your moves and show it to Google. This will make them understand that you want to regain your website rankings and that you are an ethical person.

Step Number 4 – Creating A Proper Documentation (Showing Google Your Hard Work)

No matter how much effort you have already done in deciphering the backlinks, all be in vain if you do not follow this step thoroughly. It is critical for the future health of your website that you document your entire process and present it to Google as Proof that you have done whatever you could or spent a lot of time to repair the damage caused to your website by those bad links.

Create A New Spread Sheet and Copy all the Bad Backlinks into it. Then make a Performa, like the one I have mentioned below in the spreadsheet. This Performa will help you keep track of your email outreach since you will be sending out tons and tons of emails very soon.

• Link From: URL Linking to your Website
• Link To: Your Website URL in Question
• Email Address of Site Owner: Address of the site Owners
• First Link Removal Request: First Email request date
• Second Link Removal Request: Second Email Request Date
• Third Link Removal Request: Third Email Request Date
• Any particular notes that you want to leave (For example – Website owner asking for payment or something)

Save Time by Writing a Customized Email Template:

Since you will be sending out a lot of emails, it would be a good idea to create a customized email template that you can use for all the outreach. When writing the email, it is critical that you maintain a very polite tone and that you do not try to bribe or show your anger to the webmaster. According to human psychology, being polite has the most success rate if you want someone to do something for you. Here are some points you should consider when writing your customized email template:

• State that you are the owner of the website and show proof of ownership of the website. Then tell them politely that you are trying to recover from a link.
• List the URL of your website in question and mention the Link from the URL along with the Anchor Text.
• Politely ask the webmaster to remove the link from their website as it might be hurting your rankings.
• Try to Personalize the Email Subject Link with their name and include as many details as possible to ensure that they open your email and take action.

Or, just customize this Link Removal Request Email Template?

Hey {Insert Name of Site Owner}

I am {insert your name here}, the owner of {insert your website URL here} and I wanted to reach out to you regarding a link(s) that is pointing to my website from your website. I would like to bring it to your notice that my website has recently been penalized by Google and to get the infraction removed, I need your cooperation with the removal of a link from your website that is pointing to my site.

Here is the link along with the anchor text:

1. List all the links along with anchor text here.

If you can kindly remove that for me, I would greatly appreciate it. As you already know that Google will not reconsider my website if I have not made an effort for removing the links myself and that is the prime reason I am reaching out to you. I will be documenting all my efforts and trying to remove all the links manually by reaching out to individual website owners.

I do not intend to in any way demean you or your website. I am just trying to be careful as it is my business website. I will not use the Disavow tool unless I absolutely have to use it, so I am expecting to receive your full cooperation in this matter. I hope you understand my problem. If you could send me an intimation after the link has been removed from your website, I would greatly appreciate it.

Thanking You,

Your’s Faithfully,

{Insert Your Name Here}

{For www.yourwebsite.com}

Various Tricks to Find Contact Information of Domain Owners

Now that your email template is ready, it is time to quickly list down all the contact information under respective links in the Excel Sheet that you created at the beginning of this step.

Take note that you may not find the email addresses of all website owners and some websites might just have a contact form. The contact form followed by a Social Medial Outreach to the websites should be your last resort and in such a case you should provide a link to the Contact Form page or the Social Media URL instead of the Email Address.

Here are the primary ways you can get contact information for a particular website:

1. Check the Contact US page of the respective websites or even the About us page. Sometimes the Contact Information is also provided in the Header or Footer Widgets of the websites.

2. Perform a Who.is lookup to try to find out the name and email of the domain owner. This technique might not work if the owner has set the Who. details to private. In such a case, resort to other methods.

3. Use Spyonweb.com – Even though this tool might not get you the contact information of a website. But it will help you find similar owner websites by tracking the IP Address, Analytics, or Adsense Codes placed on the websites. This way you can find a related website owned by the same person and retrieve his contact information.

4. Lastly, resort to using the Contact Form or Social Media Profiles of the respective websites. It would be a plus if you can provide a screenshot of the same.

Step Number 5 – Performing The Email Outreach (Taking Action On Your Research)

Now you have the email template ready along with all the possible ways to contact the domain owners. It is time to send out personalized emails to all the domain owners to help you recover your Google Penalty.

As you send out emails and fill up contact forms, remember to document all the things that you are doing in the spreadsheet you created in Step number 4. Write down the dates when you send out the emails.

Here is a fantastic app that will help you streamline the follow-up process – Boomerang. This application will remind you about all the emails that have not received a reply back, and you can set up alerts for a week or ten days. This will help you keep track of all the webmasters who have not responded to your email so that you can contact them again after at least a week of sending out the first email. Again, remember to document the date of the follow-up emails in the spreadsheet.

It is not important to get a 100% Success rate with all our email outreach endeavors. But, what is important is to show Google that you tried hard. Leave the rest to them. Just follow karma.

Now, for the outcome of your Link Removal Email Outreach

There can be four possible outcomes to every email you send out:

1. They cooperate with you and remove the link
2. They removed the link but did not respond to your email
3. They responded by asking for money or favor in exchange for link removal
4. They took no action at all

Don’t worry about the webmasters who either did not respond to your email or blackmailed you for money. Just ignore them. Remember, documentation and filing notes in the Excel sheet is the key.

Make sure your documentation is picture perfect and that you have input the dates correctly in the respective cells along with important notes for uncooperative websites and helpful websites.

In the case of a manual penalty from Google, you will need to take more physical action to heal the damage caused to your website. A manual penalty is a sign of participation in unethical tactics for link building like comment spam, paid links or other unnatural link building strategies. Before you submit your Google Reconsideration Request, you should have made a considerable effort to remove the backlinks yourself and have a disavow.txt file ready.

Step Number 6 – Performing Link Disavow (Requesting Google to Overlook Backlinks)

When the Google Disavow Tool was first introduced in 2012, SEOs and Webmasters thought it was a boon to the Internet Community. Well, it still is, but the tool opened up a lot of doubts about, which links should be disavowed and which links should be counted.

If you think about it logically. Google is directly using the Google Webmaster’s Disavow Tool for Link Removal by crowdsourcing their spam monitoring efforts. Take into account that this step should only be performed as the last resort. That is, after all your manual link removal attempts have failed, and you are able to provide documentation for the same.

Google also warns users that this is a very advanced and risky tool if they do not know what you are doing.

Here is a direct message from the Google Webmaster Tools Disavow Links – “If you’ve done as much work as you can to remove spammy or low-quality links from the web, and are unable to make further progress on getting the links taken down, you can disavow the remaining links. In other words, you can ask Google not to take certain links into account when assessing your site.”-

I will remind you again that make sure you have done all you could and tried as hard as possible to remove as many backlinks manually as possible before doing this step. If you have taken the help of a Google Penalty Recovery Company or you have done all the steps mentioned in this guide, you are ready to begin the disavow process.

Follow these steps to the teeth if you want to create a complete disavow.txt file for Google.

This step can be broken into two parts.

1. Make a list of all possible backlinks to your website (which I am assuming you have already done if you are on this step)
2. Make a list of sites that did not cooperate with you or asked for money, or you got no response from them.

A sample Disavow.txt file will look like this:

NOTE: The Pound Symbol (#) is used to denote a comment or a note about the websites that are listed below it

#List of Websites that cooperated with me and removed all the bad links

nameofwebsite1.com

nameofwebsite2.com

…

#List of Websites that did not respond to my query

didnotrespond1.com

didnotrespond2.com

…

#List of Websites that asked for money in return for link removal

websiteaskedmoney1.com

websiteaskedmoney2.com

…

#List of URLs that certain webmasters missed who cooperated with me

missedurl1.com

missedurl2.com

…

#End of Disavow File

Handy Tip: If you want to disavow all the links from a particular domain, you can just give the line “domain: nameofdomain.com”

Handy Tip 2: Always disavow on the domain level for websites that have too many low-quality links pointing to your website. If you disavow individual URLs, you run a high risk of skipping some URLs that have your bad backlinks.

Handy Tip 3: Make sure you remove all websites with special characters that are not either alphabet, numbers or hyphens in them from the disavow tool.

Handy Tip 4: Also ensure that you do not give www. or http:// or https:// along with the domain names in the disavow file to avoid any errors during upload.

How to Upload the Disavow File in Google to Remove Bad Backlinks:   

1. Go to the Disavow Tools
2. Select the website in question from the drop-down list.
3. Click the Disavow Links Button
4. Upload your Disavow.txt file

Uploading a new Disavow.txt file will override your past file in Google Webmasters Tools. Also, be patient after you have updated the file. If you have received a manual penalty, you can usually see improvements in your website rankings in a few months. However, if you have been hit by a Penguin Algorithm, then you must wait till the next Penguin rollout to let Google Crawl the backlinks of your website again. The process can sometimes take months, so do not check with backlink software and wait patiently for Google to do its job.

Step Number 7 – To File or Not to File a Reconsideration Request (Beg for Mercy)

Everyone does not need to submit a reconsideration request. If you have been hit by an algorithmic penalty, then you do not need to file a reconsideration request. However, in case of manual action, when you receive an email as the one stated below:

Then you need to submit a reconsideration request. Few things to notice when you receive an email from Google Webmasters Tools Team:

1. A yellow caution sign means you are in trouble
2. A drastic drop in your website rankings
3. There are too many low-quality backlinks pointing to your website

Filing A Proper Reconsideration Request to Google

You will have to prove to Google that you have given your 110% to clean up your backlink profile and get as many of the backlinks manually removed as possible. I will remind you again that Google is not looking for a 100% success rate with all your manual outreach for backlink removal, it is looking for the right mindset and effort.

The most important part of filing a reconsideration is to have proof that you took action. Just by saying that you contacted 1000 webmasters, you will not be able to get your website under the radar. You will have to present to a Google Employee in a believable manner that you took action and contacted the owners not once, but thrice before you decided to file a disavow.

Even though Google has not given out many hints on what to include when submitting a reconsideration request, here is a short video of Matt Cutts giving a short pitch on what an ideal reconsideration request should be like. Take a look.

A Synopsis of the Video:

The main aim of your reconsideration request should be to convey to Google that you are sorry about the past state of your website and have read and understood the Google Quality Guidelines. You should tell them about whatever mistakes you did, whichever site owners you tried to contact and failed and what are you presently doing to improve the reputation of your website.

Here are some of the things suggested by the former head of Google Spam on what to include in a Reconsideration Request:

1. Details of contacted websites along with a copy of emails as proof.
2. Details of any hidden link network that were used by the website
3. Details of any SEO Companies that did the SEO of the website
4. Changes that were made to the website to ensure its quality was at par
5. As many details as possible can be included in a reconsideration request
6. Upload and share the document through Google Docs as most often, Google Employees do not like to click on Unknown links

Here is a Sample Google Reconsideration Email Template:

Dear Google Webspam Team,

This is a kind note in order to inform you that our website {insert URL here} was hit by a manual penalty. We are very apologetic for the inconvenience caused due to this. Furthermore, we would like to thank you for reviewing and pointing out that our website was not at par with the Google Quality Guidelines, as we were totally unaware of the fact that our SEO company was not using the right tactics.

When we received the warning from Google, we immediately contacted our SEO company {Insert name here} and asked them to provide us a detailed list of all the tasks they were performing for our website.

Upon receipt of the list of tasks, we came to know that they were indulging in wrong SEO Practices like buying paid links and blog spam commenting, and more. We have stopped hiring them now and asked them to undo the actions that they took.

We have been working ethically according to all the guidelines to remove manually all the bad backlinks that are pointing to our website. Over the last three months, we have tried getting in touch with all the webmasters who own the sites our links were found on. Attached herewith is a Google Document File that details all the steps we took during our Link Removal Outreach.

Some of the webmasters cooperated with us to remove the backlinks, while others have either remained unresponsive or have asked for money in return for link removal. We have filed a disavow.txt file to disavow all the links that we were unable to remove with our manual outreach.

We would like to assure you that we have given our 100% to ensure that we are at par with all the Google Webmaster Guidelines. We would also like to assure you that we would be careful in our future marketing efforts. We have created a new in-house team to ensure such a thing does not happen in the future.

Please do look into the following document and do the needful as we are sorry for the misdeed.

Thanking You,

Regards,

Piyush Agarwala

After you submit the reconsideration request, you need to be patient as it takes quite some time before they review and respond to your email. If your website did not get a manual penalty, then you will receive an automated email stating no spam was found on your website. If you were under a manual penalty, then the response might come somewhere between three to six weeks.

Conclusion

Rest assured that if you followed all the steps thoroughly, you would be able to see your website again in Google SERPs in a matter of a few months or after the next Penguin Update Rolls out depending on your situation.

One thing that I would like to remind you again is that you need to be really patient. The entire process can actually take months to complete, which is why we always suggest taking the help of Professional Link Removal services to aid you.

I understand that it is a very difficult process to endure this slow poison and see your sales and traffic diminish slowly. If you have done everything as we have outlined so far, you will be on the road to recovery.

I think I have substantially covered the entire topic, and you shouldn’t have any questions after this. However, I am willing to help you guys get through this tough time, so just leave your questions in the comments section below if you have any.

I wish you good luck with your website and hope that you can recover from your penalty at the earliest. God bless!

How to Increase Website Traffic Effectively

10 Simple Free Traffic Tips You Can Use Now!

So you have your business website all geared up – a fancy web design, social media profiles, YouTube channels, crisp content on all your blogs and landing pages – what happens next? How do you plan to spread the word about your awesomeness without overspending your budget? Should you invest money into Facebook Advertisements, Paid Banners, PPC Campaigns, Sponsoring Events or other media channels just yet?

The biggest problem most entrepreneurs and start-up businesses face is “How to Generate Traffic to their Business.” Most businesses spend a lot of money into multiple advertisement channels or run quite a few paid banner ads on giant websites, thinking that it is going to bring in a lot of customers, which is a major misconception.

Now I do not want to say that this approach is entirely wrong or something. But it all boils down to the conversion ratio of these companies as compared to the amount being spent on marketing. I have specially coined a name for this kind of marketing approach taken by many companies. I call it the ‘Scatter Gun’ Marketing plan. Please don’t do it. As a Digital Marketer, I have come across many companies that are spending way more than required, to crunch small figures at the end of the month.

I have also come across some start-up companies that have awesome products/services, but can barely acquire enough money to invest in marketing their products. Honestly, it pains my heart when I see companies (w/ scattergun approach) wasting their marketing budget in the wrong channels.

MY ADVICE TO STARTUP’s and BUDDING COMPANIES

If you are freshly baked, then you should give your products some time to sink in. Do not plan overly expensive marketing activities that you can otherwise do without. Always try to use free channels of promotion, or tweak your existing media channels or existing business materials (which require minimal expenses from your end), to promote your business and increase website traffic.

GO AHEAD. TWEET THIS MESSAGE!

Irrespective of your budget for Online Marketing, Always use #FreeMarketing Techniques To #DriveTraffic before diving in Paid Adverts.

— Prime One Global Internet (@extreme_seo_net) July 16, 2015

WHAT DO I HAVE IN STORE FOR YOU?

To make the entire process of traffic generation and business exposure less expensive, I have summed up these 10 Actionable Tips To Increase Website Traffic. Most of these are free to implement, and some do not require you to spend a single dime more than what you are already spending.

WHAT MAKES THESE TIPS SO POWERFUL?

• Don’t require you to spend money, so you can start seeing better returns with zero investment,
• No technical SEO knowledge required, so you can do these without hiring experts,
• Don’t need to make professional looking videos, so you can get away with your newbie skills,
• Don’t need to spend countless hours in front of computer, so you can invest your time and energy in running your business,
• Don’t need to brainstorm new techniques for increasing website traffic, so you can rinse and repeat the ones that work best for you,
• Some of these techniques just need to be setup one time, so you do not need to reapply them in the future, ever!

So, let’s kill the hype and show you what I have in store…

1. CREATE LOCAL CONTESTS THAT BOOST YOUR REVENUE WITH MINIMAL EXPENSES

 

Yes! You read it right, the first time. I know this sort of strategy sounds old and offbeat, but marketing your business through local contests is said to drive 400% more ROI than other forms of marketing.

Take a look at some at this Local Marketing Campaign run by a company. You can read the entire case study on this website.

HubSpot reports some interesting statistics related to Local Contests through this very old Infographic –

1. New Campaigns are said to acquire a 34% audience increase than the older channels,
2. 1/3^rd of local contest entrants subscribe to email updates from companies, which fuels their lead generation capacity,
3. Mobile contests are prone to driving 8 times more traffic to your business,
4. The best duration for local contests on average is 25-60 days. Anything more than that can kill the momentum.

Now, you must be thinking that running a contest means incurring a lot of expenses and giving away costly products! However, that is not true at all.

If you have Physical goods, you can give away sample products as a prize to a few lucky winners, or you can give away your online services if your business offers digital services.

Not only will this kind of technique bring increase website traffic, but will also get you more credibility and goodwill. As a bonus, you could even get real customer testimonials, which you can put up on your website and even use for future promotions. Sound legit?

(Disclaimer: I am not affiliated or connected to KickOffLabs and neither do I endorse their services. I have never used their services).

KEY TAKEAWAY – The use of social media and online contests is one of the best strategies used by companies to boost their online audience reach. Use it wisely, and do not think about making massive investments. Run small campaigns at a time.

2. DONT FUSS ABOUT GOOGLE, WHEN YOU HAVE YOUTUBE

With a striking Three Billion Searches daily, this video sharing website is the 2^nd most powerful search engine in the world, after Google. What’s best is ranking and increasing website traffic from this channel is very easy.

WHY IS YOUTUBE SO AWESOME?

Let’s keep aside the traffic that this channel receives daily, and talk about the potential of this channel in general.

1. YouTube Videos get indexed on Google faster
2. You can search for videos within the channel
3. Share videos to all popular Social Channels
4. With a few clicks it is possible to embed videos in blog posts and websites

So, what are you thinking? If you have not entered this channel as a business, then you should go ahead and do it right away.

Lifehacker lists the most useful resources for creating YouTube videos for budding Video Producers and companies.

WHAT SHOULD YOU DO?

Search on YouTube for your business or category and try to understand what people are doing and how people are doing it. Don’t copy and paste everything. Pick up bits and pieces from different videos and make your videos even more comprehensive and information-rich.

WHAT IS REQUIRED?

You will need a computer with a webcam at the least for making YouTube videos. The rest of the resources are free of cost. You don’t need any marketing budget for this strategy to work.

WHAT MORE CAN YOU EXPECT TO ACHIEVE OUT OF YOUTUBE?

I use this method a lot, however, dirty it might sound, and it’s still a free way of generating more traffic by leveraging your competitor’s traffic.

Firstly, try and make a list of all your competitors’ videos on YouTube. Now, you can do it yourself or have one of your existing staff do this work. Either way it works fine.

Create better content in terms of Blog Posts or Videos than your competitors. So for example, if they have “3 Super Simple Makeovers for Monday Brunch” you should aim to create a video that has “5 Super Simple Makeover Techniques for Monday Brunch.”

After your content is created and uploaded, you are ready to deploy this super simple traffic leaching technique by using their comments section.

This technique works best for Videos that are more than 10 minutes in length. Make it a point to watch their entire video first and give a detailed review about what they have shared in the comments section at the bottom of the page.

When you submit the reviews, subtly leave a link to “your better version” of the content. The better version can be a blog post or a video. Then ask all your in-house staff or colleagues to up-vote the comment, which will act as a catalyst.

People will appreciate the time you took to watch the video and provide a summary. Your comment will start receiving natural up votes as well, and this will make it stay on top for a very long time.

You have no idea, how much traffic this technique can generate for your business. It’s a free method and an awesome one at that. But, please do not spam the comment section of other videos with links to your website.

This will not only ruin the reputation of your business but also lower the credibility of your work.

EXTRA TIP – Use URL shortening service like Bit.ly or Goo.gl to analyze the amount of traffic your website is receiving from those comments.

KEY TAKEAWAY –YouTube makes it easy to increase website traffic. Do not ignore the channel and if you are not a tech savvy person and the idea of making simple videos from free and easy to learn software spoofs you, then you can either hire a staff or let an existing member of your team learn and handle this activity.

3. Use Hashtags Wisely To Drive a Lot of Like-minded People to Your Website

HashTags were first introduced by Twitter in 2006 and since then have been gradually adopted by all other social channels like Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Google+ and other networks.

If you are not aware of what Hashtags are, then here is the Definition –

“(On social media sites such as Twitter) a word or phrase preceded by a hash or pound sign (#) and used to identify messages on a particular topic.”

For Example – #DigitalMarketing

Many companies and marketers have already adopted Hashtags into their social media and marketing campaigns, but still there remains a vast majority of businesses and individuals that either underestimate their power or do not know how to use hashtags correctly to generate traffic.

HOW TO USE HASHTAGS EFFECTIVELY?

1. Choose the right keywords – Proper keyword selection is not only important for Search Engine Optimization, but it also affects how your audience will interact with your business. If you are confused about how to start a Hashtag selection, you could try using this incredible Hashtag search engine – Hashatit.com

1. Launch The HashTag – Share a unique photo and message around your niche, followed by a link to your website blog or page that is relevant to the tag. Do this on all your social channels.

1. Provide Value and Engage With Audience – Make sure that the content you are trying to market is top notch. This is the cheese that will lure the mice into your den. Engage with your audience by tagging them in your posts and asking questions, raising conversations around your hashtag, etc.

1. Always Mention Relevant People – Always invite interesting and influential people into your conversation to make it more heated. TIP – Raise a controversial topic, ask a few people by using the @mention and watch how your social traffic starts flooding.

1. Use Free Analytics Tools To Track Your HashTags – I have not used many to be honest, but I surely love Topsy and Talkwalker. At Talkwalker, you can measure the impact of your hashtags by looking at a diverse range of metrics like engagement, general buzz, potential reach, sentiment, etc.

1. Feature Links To Your Website and InnerPages – And when you are using Hashtags, do not forget to highlight your websites and inner pages because your ultimate aim is increase website traffic, and about the rest, #KeepItSimpleStupid

QUICKSPROUT’s AWESOME INFOGRAPHICS ON HOW TO USE HASHTAGS –

Click on the Image to see the full post @ Quicksprout. 

KEY TAKEAWAY – Learn to use HashTags effectively. Educate your employees to use them and always try to create new or find existing and relevant HashTags for better content outreach.

4. Embedded Tweets Facilitate Instant Sharing Of Your Content

Google has recently tied with Twitter. Reference: Independent.co.uk

Do you understand what this means?

Your Tweets are now going to show up in Google search directly. Talk about a better approach to content outreach. If you are not already on Twitter, then it’s never too late to jump into the boat.

HOW CAN YOU MAKE THE BEST OF THIS SITUATION?

Use relevant #keyword and place shortened URL links to relevant pages on your website about that #keyword. Also, start embedding Tweets in your blog posts and pages to facilitate instant re-tweeting and content promotion.

Tweet Insight – According to a small survey we conducted at our office (We have around 67 In-house Staff), we found out that 95% of our employees and their connections were more prone to re-tweeting embedded tweets in posts, rather than tweet the message themselves.

Advantages of Embedded Tweets

1. Take any tweet and embed it into your website, widgets, and posts
2. Embedded tweets are interactive, thereby facilitating instant action
3. Easily enable your readers to follow-up after your CTAs
4. Over time, Google might include Embedded Tweets as a ranking signal
5. Can easily Insert Twitter searches into your Blog Timeline as well
6. Can be used to share Spontaneous customer testimonials
7. Can be used to promote Events or brand messages
8. And I am sure there are other advantages as well…

Check the original source @ Unbounce

How to Embed Tweets into Your Website?

Step 1: Find the tweet you want to embed on your site.

Step 2: Hover over the tweet and click on the (More) Link. There will be an option for Embedding Tweet, Click on it.

Step 3: Copy the code that appears on the page. This code has to be pasted in the relevant section of your website where you want to embed the Tweet.

Step 4: Once you have pasted the Embed code on your site, you are done.

Alternate Method for WordPress

You can alternatively embed the tweet with a Shortcode. Simply copy the following shortcode into your post or text widget and remember to check the URL correctly before posting. It’s really straightforward.

SHORTCODE TO DISPLAY TWEET

[Tweet https://ReplaceThisWithTweetURL]

This feature may not work for the old versions of WordPress, so make sure that you have the updated version installed on your website.

KEY TAKEAWAY – Start embedding tweets into your Blog Posts and Landing pages. Embedded customer testimonial tweets on landing pages are proven to improve conversions. Embedded Tweets might also be included in Google’s massive arsenal of ranking signals in near future.

5. Insert Trackable Link into Website Content to Increase Referral Traffic

 

9 out of 10 Clients of mine reported a significant increase in their website traffic after installing something called TYNT. It is very easy to install, check out all the features and how-to at www.tynt.com

Also, Matthew Woodward published an insane case study on Tynt:

rel=”nofollow”> How to Increase Traffic & Build Links Automatically in 60 Seconds

What Tynt does is installs a trackable link into your website so whenever any content or image is copied and pasted somewhere, and it places a link to the source page. Take a look at the picture below.

If you have got a relatively old website, then you will notice an increase in overall traffic to your site. It will also generate tons of mentions and backlinks that you would never receive otherwise.

KEY TAKEAWAY – Make sure you integrate Tynt into your website. It is free to use and even if your website is brand new, it will come in use over time. It hardly takes less than a minute to setup Tynt and this program handles bringing in hundreds of visitors to the Prime One Global blog every month.

6. Forget Spending Money on Solo Ads, Use Tried and Tested Blog Commenting

Apart from Search Engine Optimization, I invest a lot in buying media for my other businesses for traffic generation. Off late, I took inspiration from Matthew Woodward to try to the old school technique of Blog Commenting and Blogger outreach on a personal level.

What Method Do I Follow?

1. I subscribed to blogs in my Industry
2. I commented on new blog posts when they went live. I was always the first one to comment on them.
3. Shared their content and gave a no hype, crystal clear review
4. I just did things that I do at social events or corporate gatherings.

This kind of outreach apparently takes a lot more time and patience. But, the connections I have developed are priceless and worth every bit of sweat.

Now, I have asked one of my in-house colleagues to focus more on building relationships and commenting on other blogs.

Through this method, I have met a lot of awesome bloggers and businessmen. These people were more than happy to link back to my blogs and share my stuff on their social profiles, which leveraged my business to their circles, and extended circles as well.

What Should You Do?

First thing you need to do is make a separate email for this method. It should be a branded email preferably, but Gmail also works fine.

Get a branded email like [email protected].

Do a Google Search for all your important industry keywords.

Make a list of websites in the first 2 pages for all your important keywords.

By the end of the process, you should have a list of 50-60 unique sites in your industry.

Now, subscribe to each and every website one by one and use the freshly created email address. The reason I suggest you do it with a new email address is because, subscribing to some of these websites might put you into their Auto-responder list. You will be receiving tons of wanted / unwanted emails from them.

Once you subscribe to their blogs, you will receive a message whenever they write new blog posts. Always make it a point to go through their blogs and give your feedback.

Many of these fantastic bloggers and entrepreneurs will be more than interested in knowing about you and your business. Eventually, the blog commenting game will become more of an anticipatable thing.

Whenever there is fresh content on your blog, not only will those people come in to raise discussion, but they will also link to your work and share it on their social channels, without you asking them to do so.

KEY TAKEAWAY – Relationships cannot be automated. Quit automated link building, as they give you meaningless backlinks from deadbeat websites. Most of the quality sites do not auto-approve comments and getting a reference on even one of these websites is much powerful than 100 backlinks from automated software.

7. Don’t Let the Language Barrier Limit Your Business Outreach

No, I am not talking about learning new languages, nor am I talking about hiring linguists or translators to translate your website into different languages.

 

I came to know about this plug-in from Neil Patel, and I admire him for effortlessly finding these awesome techniques that help seal the deal, without carving a hole in your wallet.

This stuff is way easier than you can imagine. All you have to do is install a WordPress plug-in called Transposh and you are set.

Neil Reported a 47% Increase in Search Engine Traffic just after installing the plug-in. We use a more reliable but complicated Multi-lingual architecture on Prime One Global, but that stuff is so complicated that I cannot do it myself. We had our developers sit with a bunch of linguists to convert our website to various languages.

Download the Transposh Plug-in and Install it in your website right now.

What Transposh does is it translates your pages into other languages automatically. It opens a whole new world of traffic since your pages will start ranking for foreign search engine queries.

Note: Even though this plug-in offers support for 92 different languages, I would advise you only to select a few languages at a time to reduce the chances of errors.

Neil’s advice for Transposh – “uncheck the option that reads:

This enables auto-detection of a language used by the user as defined in the ACCEPT_LANGUAGES they send. Doing so will redirect the first page accessed in the session to the same page with the detected language.

The reason you have to uncheck that option is because the plug-in automatically sends people to a translated version when it shouldn’t. It’s not perfect…”

Rinse and repeat the Translation Process by selecting only a few languages at a time. Keep doing it till you have covered all the languages. Do not worry about translating future posts, as the plug-in will do those automatically.

KEY TAKEAWAY – Installing something as simple as a Translation Plug-in called Transposh on your website can quickly increase your website traffic by 50%. If you have not done it already, then you should do it right away.

8. Implement Long Tail Versions of Organic Keywords

This trick will only work for people who already have an established website and are receiving some traffic from the search engine. You can skip this section altogether if you have a new website.

You do not need any marketing know-how, and you do not even need to spend a lot of money for this to work. If you just do as I am saying, I can guarantee that your website’s traffic inflow will increase by at least 30%.

Use Long Tail Keywords

Who doesn’t want to rank for terms like “auto repair services” “home loan” “auto insurance” right? Even though these words are extremely powerful, they are difficult to rank for.

If you use long tail variations of the same keyword, not only will those keywords be easy to target and rank, but you will also get tons of search engine traffic for the same.

Take a look at Prime One Global’s search traffic, and then you will notice that most of the traffic we get is from search engines. And a majority of this traffic comes from long tail keywords, no kidding.

Now, what do you need to do in order to leverage Long Tail SEO?

Firstly, log into Google Webmaster Tools and go to Search Traffic -> Search Queries.

You should now come to a page with a lot of keywords that looks something like this…

Yes, these are the keywords that your visitors are typing into search engines to reach your website. So now you already know, which keywords are going to work for you right?

Now take, for example, we are ranking for the term “Enterprise SEO.” I will go ahead and type this into the Google Search. Then scroll down to the bottom of the page and you should be able to see tons of Long Tail Variations of your keyword through the “Searches related to local SEO.”

There are long tail phrases that Google will see as significant to a term that you are already ranking for. And since you are already ranking for the head keyword, it is going to be way easier for you to rank for these terms.

Just scatter these terms a few times in your primary page for the “lead keyword” and you are good to go. In a few days, you will start receiving more search engine traffic for that page.

I came to know about this strategy from Neil Patel, from Traffic and Conversion Summit 2015’s Wicked Smart Panel. He had shared two more techniques. However, it wouldn’t be fair to share all the exclusive strategies without his consent.

KEY TAKEAWAY – Make a list of the “keywords” for which you are already ranking, get long tail variations of the same through Google Related Searches and then sprinkle those keywords on the respective pages. Watch your search traffic increase in a few weeks.

9. Change Your Email Marketing Strategies

Do you own media? Do you already have a list of subscribers? Are you sending out emails to your followers?

Well, here is something that will not increase your subscriber list, but it will increase your open rates and thereby it will increase the amount of traffic you are receiving from your email campaigns.

You can also buy email marketing lists from www.directmail.com/mailinglists/. Though I have not tried them myself, there are a few people in my circle who have used them and got pretty decent results.

Take a look at these five simple email strategies –

1. Spend Some Money On Your Subject Lines

Why? Because what good is your email if it doesn’t inspire any clicks?

Subject lines are the most famous lines in your entire email. Think of it more like crafting a headline for your blog post or landing page. Standardized subject lines like “Your weekly newsletter” or “How I earned $1000” are not going to work anymore.

Take a look at these 5 ideas that will help you propel your Email Marketing Campaign:

1. Use a question in your subject line to invoke a sense of connection with your subscribers. Emails with questions in their subject are 77% more prone to being opened than ordinary subject lines.
2. Use cliffhangers in your subject lines. People love suspense. If you can use this effectively, then your subscribers will not be able to help but open your emails.

• Lists in the subject lines like, Top 10 Wedding Destinations, Top 5 Pickup Lines, etc., work great as subject lines.

1. If you want to announce something through your email, don’t let the readers open it to get the message, break the ice in the subject line itself.

WORTH READING:

10 Oddball Email Subject Line Formulas That Never Fail, by Perry Belcher

Best Email Subject Lines @ Hubspot and @Wordstream

2. Make Better Use of Your From Name

People are less susceptible to opening your emails if you have a weird ‘From the name’. Emails from unknown businesses and websites are mostly never opened by email readers.

Check the ‘From’ name, and make sure it is the name of a proper person, instead of just your company or website name. Also, make sure that the email address you are using to send these emails is not from a private free email system, it should always be from your branded domain email address.

Instead of [email protected] or [email protected], something like [email protected] will be more personal. People do not like automated emails, so even if you are automating them, always give a personal touch to your emails.

3. Time Makes A Big Difference In Email Marketing

One of the best ways to find the right time to send emails is to divide your subscribers into 3-4 equally sized lists. Then send them the same email at different time intervals.

After you do this a couple of times, you will be able to find out the 2 best time sections in a day to send your emails. Many people think that they should not send the same copy of the email to people twice. But I beg to differ here.

I think it is a good idea to send the same copy of your emails to people 2 times in a day because it is very easy for emails to get overlooked, and sometimes even if people are interested in your emails, they might just be too busy to open and read them.

4. Understand The Requirement Of Your Audience

What might be interesting to you might not be as appealing to your audience as you think. So always think twice before you send stuff to your subscribers. After all, the last thing you would want is to piss them off and make them hit the unsubscribe button.

Always take time to understand the requirement of your audience, before you start imposing your ideas on them. Comprehending the desires of your audience will play a massive role in the open rates of your email campaigns.

One of the best ways to know more about your audience is by doing short surveys. If you are confused about how to write surveys, here is an excellent blog on Hubspot.

5. Follow Your Sign-up Process To The Teeth

We can only talk about enough open rates when people start subscribing to your email list. Have you taken the time to find out how efficient your sign-up process is? Well, if you haven’t then you should do it right away.

When reviewing your sign-up process, you should always check the kind of promises you are making and ask yourself whether those are rational things that you would be able to deliver to your audience on a consistent basis.

Don’t promise something that is not true, because that will result in a lot of un-subscriptions and spam reports, which could limit you from otherwise reaching the audience that might be interested in what you have to share. Seems legit?

KEY TAKEAWAY – Maximize the potential of your email campaigns by capitalizing on things like better subject lines, personalized ‘From’ name, understanding the audience’s requirements by conducting surveys or asking them personally, and understanding the right time to send your emails.

10. Leverage Your Business Offline for Success Online

The current state of online marketing feels a bit broken. There are those old-style media guys who work with offline media channels like Radio, TV and Newspapers. Then there are those Search Engine and Social Media specialists and website techies who manage to improve the digital-sphere of a business alone.

The issues that most businesses face in their online marketing phase is that they create an invisible barrier in their mind, which tells them that online marketing has to be done online. But my question is, why don’t you ‘market’ your online business offline as well?

How is that possible?

Well, for most businesses that have physical products of services, it is quite easy to leverage the traffic to their online business through whatever reach they already have in the offline world.

For example: If you have products, then you can print 20% discount coupons on your products, which can be only redeemed through your website. You can offer a lucrative giveaway for simple answers that can only be replied to @ a particular URL.

Make sure you print your WEBSITE ADDRESS AND SOCIAL MEDIA URLS in bold in all your products, magazines, newspaper and other promotional material.

Use both sides of your business cards. On one side, you give the address, email, website URL, and other details and on the other side, give a special offer that incites people to subscribe to your blog to get updates.

The biggest advantage of this technique is that you do not need to spend a single penny other than what you are already spending to grow your audience and get more traffic to your website.

KEY TAKEAWAY – Use existing promotional materials in whatever form you have to get more traffic to your website by making use of whatever media outlets you are investing in now. Tweak them and incite people to visit your site.

 WRAPPING IT UP

So there you have it – Top 10 Actionable Tips to increase website traffic instantly. It doesn’t matter what business you are running, whether it is totally based on physical products or services or just rendering digital products or services. These tricks can work for any trade.

In order to be successful at driving traffic to your website, you need to have a concrete set of plans so let me tell you what you should do next.

1. Pick the easiest methods from the list like the Language Translation and YouTube Methods and apply them to your business. Do not procrastinate. Just get down to work or you will lose your focus.

2. Share this post amongst your family, friends and colleagues so that everyone can benefit from these free tips. Most of the strategies that we have talked out in this post do not need any major investments. So anyone can do it.

3. Once you execute some of the strategies that I have talked about in this thread, try to measure the outcome from the same and share your progress through the comments section below.

4. If you get stuck during the execution or need help with any of these tips, feel free to leave your comments below.

Traffic generation is a mind numbing topic and it can be a fairly expensive endeavor as well. There is not a single soul on the planet, who can claim to be the master of all traffic generation channels, it’s nearly impossible.

Instead of aiming to complete all the methods in this post, you should aim at completing one and mastering it and then moving onto the other methods.

Good Luck executing and have a good day!

Mondays have an extremely sad correlation with the life of us SEOs. Not because they are simply ‘Mondays,’ but because they denote the start of a new week. The onset of new Action Plans like the legendary plans for Work, the seven-day Social Action Plans for clients and blablah blah and yeah! Action plan for the family too. It’s more like a script that we live by today (a protocol that cannot stop and cannot be overridden) – and even with all this routine and discipline in our lives, every weekends with a fear of a Google Apocalypse or maybe some screw ups here and some accomplishments there (talk about being modest).

Now why am I talking about Monday? Because it was Monday (4^th May) last week, that I got the idea for this blog post. I had just woken up from sleep, and I opened my email (out of routine), trying to see what was in store for the week ahead. There were 27 unread emails, of which most of them had such peculiar Subjects.

Screencap Courtesy: To 4 of my awesome clients who gave me permission to share this screen without finding it offensive.

Every day there is a rise of a new fraternity on the Internet, which claims that SEO is dead, Every single day there are new “Guru” SEO firms claiming even faster rankings than pre-penguin times and EVERY SINGLE DAY there are new ‘Professional Copywriters’ who claim to do something called ‘SEO Writing.’ (What is that again?)

With all this useless hype and bullcrap sprayed on the webwork, it’s hard to understand the right from wrong. Especially in the case of webmasters (like my clients’ above) who have been victims in the past of self-proclaimed ‘SEO Gurus.’ That is when I came to a conclusion – “The fault is not in the system we live by, but in the mentality of the people that keep their hopes on it.”

I have yet to come across a webmaster that would channel dark magic (read black hat techniques) on his websites and throw a party when his website got penalty driven.  But every week there are a few people who come to me in search for immediate results. What sort of immediate results?

1. Can you rank my newly furnished website in a month?
2. Can you do SEO writing for my blog and increase my traffic?
3. Local restaurants wanting to increase their footfall.

And other such questions. I am not saying that SEO is impossible or something, but what I want to say is SEO has to be understood. It might be that you have been under the wings of wrong SEO Firms, which gives you false positive ideologies like the ones I mentioned above.

Or

You might have bought a book on SEO from a very legit author 3 years back, which was trending back then and may have cost you a thousand dollars, but in truth – that book holds no significant value today. You can sell it for scrap much like your yearly newspaper deposits. The rules of the game has changed yet again, and we must adapt and welcome them, instead of being stuck with prehistoric notions that get us nothing but misfortune.

Take a look at this small experiment that I did:

I used Moz-SEO Bar Plugin for Firefox – It’s pretty neat.

Take a look at what I searched for and the results. Do you find any correlation between the search results to the common SEO assumptions that are prevalent?

1. Rankings are directly proportional to Authority – Now I won’t say that is completely untrue, but these statements are only as true as this screenshot. Clickminded is ranking above SEW and Hobo-web in spite of having a lower authority than them. Also, Moz is in the 11^th position for this keyword in spite of having DA – 92 / PA – 77.
2. More Content Than Competitors Equals Better Rankings – Again this is not true at all. Especially in this case you will notice that the 1^st and 2^nd Websites have comparatively lot less content than the 3^rd and 4^th Also in terms of Content and Authority, SEW and Hobo should have a better chance for top place rankings according to the books, not to forget MOZ which has exceptional authority and content, but in the 11^th position. 

3. SEO Content is important to Rank In SERPs – We are not living in 2013, and there is nothing called SEO Content writing in 2015. It is a thing of the past where keyword density played a crucial role in ranking for keywords. Back in 2010, the more the keywords on your page, the better were your chances to rank, but that’s now how things work nowadays. Google has this amazing system in place that scans a document for word references, synonyms, related terms and other important factors to decipher whether an article is relevant to a particular keyword or not. How do I reach this conclusion? – My search query is ‘SEO Guide in 2015,’ but you can see Rank 1 and Rank 2 don’t even have the word Guide in the Titles, however Rank 3 does have and neither of these websites have used “SEO Guide in 2015” anywhere in their 2000+ words body.

Why do you think all this doesn’t match with the current assumptions related to the SEOsphere and all the bull crap coating on it? Simple, because there are no rules in SEO.

Welcome to “We are a Professional SEO Firm” BS!

I will have 10 Seo firms pitch to you and 8 out of 10 times this is how the firms will pitch to you –

Hello and Welcome to XYZ Company. We are a Professional SEO Firm based in …… blah blah blah.

But, it is easy to fall for the big claims of the former SEO types and mistake them for professionals.

One of the best way to test the caliber of an SEO firm is by looking at their past case studies. I know case studies can sometimes be conjured to entice clients, but it will give you a fair idea of their understanding of the SEO field. ANOTHER important thing to look for when talking to a potential SEO firm is to look for guarantees. Throw in questions like –

“Can you guarantee my 1^st-page rankings within a month?”

“What kind of Guarantee do you give?”

If these SEOs know what they are doing and understand this field, there is no way they can give you a biased guarantee – that too without conducting a thorough SEO audit of your website.

They might guarantee you organic and strong rank improvements for life, but to say that they can take you to the top of the pole and stick you to the moon – Now that’s where the alarm bells in your head should start ringing.

Things to Ask Yourself Before You Hire Your Next SEO

1. Is the company willing to school you and involve you in their SEO process? If you show interest in learning what is happening behind the scenes are they eagerly accepting your inquiries or dodging it with SC-fi statements that make little or no sense to you?
2. Will they conduct a thorough SEO Audit of your website before running your online marketing campaign? Will they provide you with an SEO report before they start the work? Avoid companies that jump directly into link-building even without auditing your current link profile and Website on-page structure.
3. Do they promise high rankings and rank retention for a long period? Avoid such ‘Idiots’ at all costs.
4. Do they understand that your sole purpose for ranking is to drive more business to your website? They can rank you for meaningless keywords that make no sense to your business or such keywords which hardly get searched for.
5. What will you get after they have run your campaign? Will they give you a detailed report of their work along with action plans for your company to carry on the task after they have handed over the profile? If they aren’t giving you detailed reports and action plans, they are as clueless as you are about SEO.
6. Are they bent on signing you into a long term contract? While this is not a clear signal and can sometimes trigger false positive thoughts, but you should look out for all the above traits first. Companies that want to sign long term contracts like six months or 1-year contracts are not completely wrong, but there are two sides to a coin always.
7. Don’t look for short term or speedy rankings. Think like this – there are other companies in your industry. And imagine if all are paying different SEO companies to rank for the same keywords as you. Short term rankings will only give you a short-lived sense of pride while ranking in the long term in the right way will give your business the stronghold it needs to be established online.
8. Don’t opt for Link sellers or SEOs, while claim to have their own high-value domains – these are BIG FAT RED SIGNALS you should stay away from.
9. There is nothing called SEO Writing, at least it does not exist in 2015 and will never come in fashion in future. Today, Google Guidelines have become more ‘quality-content’ centric. So no more keyword stuffing and keyword density checking – all this doesn’t exist anymore. If they are offering you SEO Writing Services for your blog – this is a clear signal of their inability to follow current trends.
10. There are no hidden secrets in SERPs, and there are no magic recipes. Yes there are powerful backlinks and weak or spammy backlinks, but if a company tells you that:

“We have insiders at Google and can rake you to the top like putting up a star on the Christmas tree” – then by all means turn around and (you know what to do).

“We have some secret strategies that are guaranteed to boost your sales and rankings.” No no no, if they had all that – then they wouldn’t be talking to you in the first place.

So What Should You Do?

‘Hire us! Because we are a professional SEO firm. (Shameless self-promotion spotted).

Noo!!?! Do what you think is best for your business and choose the SEO company that you think solves all your queries before starting your project.

I hope this post was helpful in some way or the other, and I also hope that other amateur SEO firms learn a lesson from this as well. I had no intentions of blowing your mind up or making you think wrong of the current SEO firm.

All the information in this thread is not pointed at anyone and is purely for educational purpose. Additionally it would be a wise decision to understand the basic tricks of the trade so that you can be aware of certain things that are important for being a part of the SEO game in 2015.

SEO is adaptive, and it will change tomorrow. Sometimes to such an extent that what you read today may be completely irrelevant tomorrow so be focused and be aware of the Google Quality Guidelines.

Here is some more food for your brain to chew on:

1.    Mobilegeddon – The Webmasters Guide To Survival On The Internet

2.    How Regular Link Removal Is Better Than Investing 1000$ On SEO

3.    8 Point Checklist For SEO in 2015 – Revisiting The 2014 Updates

Connect with us on Facebook! or leave us a feedback in the comments section below.

The Webmasters Guide To Survival On The Internet Post #Mobilegeddon Era (21st April 2015)

 

———————————————————————STOP PROCRASTINATING!—————————-——————————————

If you are reading this blog right now, then chances are that you have a website(s) or you are responsible for the online presence of your company/client’s websites. Back in February, Google announced an upcoming update that will take the Internet by storm. This update will target websites that are not fit for mobile viewing – So if your website is not mobile-friendly (now is the time to take action). Here is all the information and resources that you might need to make your website “Google Quality Compliant,” when the clock ticks into 21^st April 2015. Make it or you will break it! No puns intended.

 Contents:

1. What is Mobilegeddon?

2. Scope of the Update

3. Why did Google Take This Move? (Trend Analysis)

4. Estimating Your Present Mobile Traffic with GA

5. How to Avoid Getting Bitten By Google Mice?

6. Detailed Checklist of Things to do

7. Print-ready Checklist

8. Comprehensive List of Resources for Mobile-fixing

9. Verdict

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#1 What Is Mobilegeddon?

The trend of mobile surfing has seen such an upward slope since the past few years that come 2016 – 60% of people who will surf the internet, will do so from their mobile phones and other portable devices. If you are not aware of what I am talking about, then you can check your Google Analytics to see how much mobile traffic your website is experiencing. Even without looking at it, I can state that any website today will at least be getting 30% of its user base from people surfing through portable devices. And it is safe to conclude that if your website is not user-friendly, you may be losing out on tons of cashing opportunities.

Mobilegeddon – is an informal term coined by SearchEngineLand in March 2015, to spread awareness about the impending Google epidemic that’s going to hit the web in April. Through this update, Google is going to give more importance to websites that are mobile-friendly, which means better rankings for responsive and user-friendly websites.

NO-MATTER HOW CLEAN YOUR BACKLINK PROFILE IS AND NO MATTER WHAT THE QUALITY OF THE CONTENT ON YOUR WEBSITE – IF YOU HAVE NOT TAKEN ANY MEASURES TO MAKE YOUR WEBSITE MOBILE-FRIENDLY – THIS ONE IS GOING TO HURT YOUR BUSINESS, IN ONE WAY OR ANOTHER.

On 21^st April, Google will unleash the Algorithm which is going to scan each and every website on the web, and drop those websites from mobile SERPs if they are not “mobile-friendly.”

So what does mobile friendly actually mean?

In technical terms, “mobile friendly” demand websites to size their content to the viewport of a user and encompasses everything even remotely related to responsive designing. Speaking in layman’s terms – it basically means that if a user has to scale your website down to viewable size on mobile-devices (apparently because the desktop version of your website is opening on their mobile). Then your website is not “mobile friendly” or “mobile ready.”

Keeping up so far? Don’t be morose if you are not prepared for it. There are still a few days to go and you can work a solution these days!

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#2 Scope of Mobilegeddon

This update is going to be Larger than PANDA!

THIS UPDATE IS GOING TO BE LARGER THAN PENGUIN!

ZinebAitBahajji – a renowned member of Google’s Webmaster Trends Team quoted at SMX Munich that this upcoming mobile-friendly update from Google is going to impact the search engine ranking of even more websites than what the Penguin and Panda have done in the past.

Let me give you a clear view of this scene – if you are still confused.

[blockquote photo=”” author=”” company=”(Panda 4.0) SearchEngineJournal 21^st May 2014″ link=”http://www.searchenginejournal.com/hit-hardest-panda-4-0-answer-may-surprise/106461/” target=”_blank”]The past 24 hours have been a wild time for those who either work in, or follow the field of SEO. Google confirmed the rollout of two major updates, one of which was Panda 4.0, an update projected to impact roughly 7.5% of english search queries.[/blockquote]

[blockquote photo=”” author=”” company=”(Penguin 3.0) SearchEngineLand 11^th Dec 2014″ link=”http://searchengineland.com/google-algorithm-changes-210285″ target=”_blank”]“I believe that the indisputable truth about Google’s updates belongs to Google only, and for all that we know, Penguin 3.0 impacted less than 1% of the English language queries. However, as with anything related to SEO, we can only take what we have and work ourselves out of the dark.” [/blockquote]

–

As you may be aware off, Google has its very inconspicuous ways of shedding light on its upcoming Algorithms. But, from whatever information it has given out on the Webmaster’s blog, the Internet is brimming with speculations as to how the update will impact websites and what measures can be taken to avoid it.

We are still unclear about what other factors would Google be looking out for during this update, and it is impossible to claim how drastically these factors will be able to change the website’s search visibility. From what Zineb commented at SMX, we can safely conclude that most of the non-optimized websites will be taking a blow from the ‘Google Mice’ a.k.a Armageddon … oops Mobilegeddon.

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#3 Why Did Google Make This Move? Trend Analysis. 

Statistics show that more than 60% of the searches performed on Google are now executed on mobile devices – so this only helps emphasize Google’s motive to take advantage of this traffic to ensure the best user experience for web surfers.

Let me explain the scenario better with the help of a few graphs. (Courtesy to ComScore.com for aggregating this data based on U.S. Demographics). This information is priceless.

In addition to the upcoming algo, Google has already started rolling out some ranking changes that are based on information collected from indexed applications of Signed-in users. Though this appears to be a small change, it will have a large impact on the way search results are displayed on Google. Businesses that are really catering well to their mobile users will have the best benefits from Google this time.

ICE BREAKER

There was a short Q&A round with Gary Illyes (Google Webmaster), in which he revealed quite some information to break the ice, on what we can expect from Mobilegeddon.

1. Responsive websites will not experience any major benefits in ranking.
2. Googlebot must be able to crawl CSS and Java in order to pass the upcoming mobile-friendly test.
3. Tablets and larger devices will not be affected by this update. Only mobiles and feature phones will.
4. Google is presently working on making a dedicated mobile index – Crazy isn’t it?

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#4 How to estimate your present mobile traffic? Google Analytics.

In order to understand how much traffic you could possibly lose from Mobilegeddon, it is important to understand how much organic mobile traffic are you actually getting?

If you do not know how to check your present Mobile traffic from Google, it’s fairly simple. All you have to do is log into your Google Analytics account:

1. Click on Reporting on the Top Bar.
2. Select Mobile under Audience in the Sidebar.
3. Click on Overview.

Tada, you have all the mobile traffic information that you could possibly want.

So, once you are inside your Google Analytics, you can scrutinize the number of visitors that you are getting from mobile phones every month. Observe the image below, the upward shift in organic mobile visits is a clear signal of the increased use of mobile phones for surfing the web.

—

I am dealing with hundreds of websites every month, and 90% of this kind of upward slope is common for all these websites. This trend is so obvious, that I call in on some of my careless and lazy clients to observe their mobile trends and act accordingly in order to stay ahead of the competition all the time.

Why should you only optimize for mobile because of the oncoming Google update? Isn’t the whole idea already beneficial without having to take #mobilegeddon as a catalyst to fuel your interest?

So by studying the number of visitors your website is experiencing day after day, month after month – you can clearly estimate the number of visitors you may end up losing if your website is not effectively and timely optimized.

Here is a neat Case Study – Search Engine Land conducted on Moz.com to explain the process of estimating Mobile Traffic for a website that you do not own.

Say hello to “Mobile-friendly” Tags

If you haven’t noticed this before, take out your smartphones and type any keyword into Google. You will notice that most of the first page entries have a “Mobile-Friendly” tag attached to them.

Just for the fun of it, I performed a quick search on Google with my Mi4 (Awesome Phone – !@$%Missing affiliate link). The keyword I selected is “Music Quotes” and here is a partial print-screen of the results.

Now you may notice that the first 2 results have a Mobile-friendly Tag, but the 3^rd and 4^th results don’t have a “Mobile-friendly tag.” Come 21^st April, 2015 – I can say that these websites are going to be in trouble because they have not been optimized for mobile usability. (You can also keep it as a test and check on these websites when the day comes)

Write down the keyword – “music quotes”

Website No1 in trouble – quotegarden.com

Website No2 in trouble – musicmasterclass.com

Or do this experiment with a number of websites selecting a keyword from your industry.

Now, I am not saying that the first 2 websites are completely safe and prepared to face the upcoming update. But they may as well be in trouble for their other pages – You never know.

What you can do is, perform a few Google searches which your website is already ranking for and check if your website is getting the “Mobile Friendly Tag.”

Don’t just check your homepage, search “keywords” that display your Inner pages in the SERPs and see if you are still getting the “Mobile Friendly Tag.”

Perform the same check for your competitors and see if their pages are getting the “Mobile Friendly Tag.”

If they are and you are not, then you better buckle up your seat belts as they will get a massive advantage over you after 21^st April, which they will enjoy for quite a long period of time. And if it’s the case vice versa, then Congratulations! You are prepared for the post #mobilemadness days.

Don’t just stop after you see the “Mobile Friendly Tag” for your website in the Google SERPs.  This detailed guide will give you a clear view edge over your competition for many more days to come. There is lots of work to be done and there are only a few days – so keep reading!

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#5 How Can You Avoid Getting Bitten By Google Mice This Time?

Before we jump into the Checklist of how to make your website mobile friendly, it is wise to brush along the sides of the subject (just the way Google like’s it).

1. Allow Googlebot to access the JavaScript, CSS and Images files of your website.
2. Don’t use any kind of unplayable content – Especially Flash.
3. Avoid Faulty Re-directs. This can happen when you inappropriately redirect your desktop URLs to Mobile URLs.
4. Don’t harass users by blocking them from viewing content with too many intrusive download links and messages or advertisements.
5. Avoid cross-linking blunders. This can happen if you have multiple versions of the website and you redirect users to the wrong mirror page.
6. Enhance your mobile site speed with Google PageSpeed Insights.

 This is just the way Google likes it. Now head over to my all encompassing Checklist of To-Do things to dodge the April 21^st Update and prepare your online business for the future.

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 #6 Checklist for Mobile Friendly Website (~Avoid Google Nerf)

With Mobilegeddon on the loop, and not many days for it set the Internet crazy – Here is my detailed checklist of things that you must take into consideration if you are a website owner or are responsible for the good health of your organization’s website.

Look at the image above, this is a screenshot from the Google Analytics of Prime One Global. You can clearly see that we receive a steady inflow of footfalls through organic mobile search. Now, if we were to ignore this figure and not bother about mobile optimization before the 21^st of April – you could call us sheer foolish (but, thankfully it is not the case as we are already up and ready, and we help others optimize their websites too).

You can be a designer, developer or another SEO company, or even someone managing a website, and this detailed checklist will help you with making your website mobile friendly. So even if you are in the website development phase or are planning to design one in the future – you can use this checklist to make your website Mobilegeddon safe.

1. GOOGLE QUALITY COMPLIANCE CHECK

With all the #mobilemadness #mobilegeddon hype on the web, it is easy to get swayed and puzzled about what you should do to make your mobile, website friendly, err… website – mobile friendly before the 21^st of April. Before you even jump into the nitty-gritty of mobile optimization it would be wise to check if your website is already “As mobile friendly as Google wants it to be.”

Check the individual pages of your website with Google’s Mobile Friendly Test Tool, which will help you with detailed information regarding optimizing your website. And if most of the pages of your website are passing the test without a twitch, you can be rest assured that nothing too dramatic is going to happen to your online presence after the onset of 21^st April 2015.

With this said and done, you can also read what the search giant has to say about mobile optimization in their Webmaster’s blog. There is another useful read which Google published back in November last year about helping users find Mobile friendly websites.

2. Determining your INVESTMENTS AND RETURNS

If you are reading this checklist, then most probably you did not pass the Google Mobile Friendly Test or you are just hunting for more information. Planning to optimize your website for mobile can call in for an enormous investment, especially because the algorithm in question is going to do a full-site scan and not just a site-wide scan. Even if you are ready to go all-in on mobile optimization it is crucial to determine the amount of investment you need to make – both in terms of money and resources. Don’t rush to a conclusion – Plan your moves and execute them one by one, to reap the best benefits in the long run.

It’s important to understand how much organic traffic you are presently experiencing from search engines. If you haven’t done this yet, now would be the ideal time to log into your Google Analytics (I hope you have integrated your website(s) with GA) and determine whether there has been an upward shift in the amount of traffic you have been receiving in the past few months. If you notice that your business is receiving less than 10% traffic through mobile devices, it could mean one of the following things:

1. Your website has poor SEO, which is resulting in poor organic traffic.

or

     2. Your website has poor Mobile Optimization and that is why it’s receiving less traffic.

or

     3. your business model doesn’t call for mobile viewers (9  out of 10 times this will not be the case)

Now if you are already experiencing very little traffic from mobile, I would suggest taking the slower route for this process as you may have more time than you really think.

But.

Let’s say, 30-50% of your organic traffic is from mobile phones, it calls for a faster and effective mobile strategy implementation.

How do you determine what amount of money and resources to invest?

The safest bet would be to allocate the same amount of money and resources that are available to you, to equal the share of mobile to desktop traffic that your website has been experiencing over the past few months.

3. BUILDING A MOBILE APP TO ENHANCE USER EXPERIENCE

Even though Google introduced the App indexing feature to display applications in search results back in October 2013, it’s still a powerful way of enhancing the overall user experience of your brand.

It is not rocket science, we know that Google is driving these updates with a strict motive to give users the best search experience possible – Thus, if your business model can support an App for the users, it would be one of the best times to plan this out.

You may be wondering how on earth will you plan and execute an App development campaign before the 21^st of April. Well, you don’t need to hurry about this; you can take your time and scale this into one of your marketing projects for the future.

Obviously, everything boils down to your capacity to invest/allocate (money and resources) at the moment, but again – you can keep this in mind for the future.

4. RESPONSIVE / DYNAMIC / PARALLEL

There are rumors that Google loves Responsive designs more than Dynamic URL Segmentation or Parallel URLs, but this is completely untrue. I have run quite a few tests in the past weeks, especially after Google’s  Feb 4^th Update, and I can assure you that if your website is mobile-friendly there is nothing to worry about.

If you are unaware of which configuration option you should select for your website, then here is a description for a clear view:

1. Responsive Design: This configuration serves the same content to desktop, mobile, and tablets by using CSS3 elements. So, the contents of your website will automatically resize for perfect display according to the device it is being viewed on. This configuration is the best because there is no duplication of content and there is no need to handle multiple mirrors of the same content. You just have to manage one single website. The only disadvantage of this configuration is that you cannot segregate Mobile only content nor have different content for different platforms.
2. Dynamic / Adaptive Design: This option is almost the same as responsive design as you will be working on a single URL but, different HTML and CSS codes will be presented to users depending on the device they are viewing your website from. The only con of this configuration is that you will have to re-write the code of your website every time a new mobile device is released.
3. Parallel URL Websites: Even though this is one of the most strenuous of all the options available, it still has its perks for those websites which need to laser focus on the mobile experience of their visitors. Opting for a Parallel URL website is like having a separate subdomain for example (m.yourwebsite.com or mobile.yourwebsite.com). Its cons include having to manage the mirror image of your website and dealing with duplicate content etc. Every time your website is updated, the changes have to be reflected in the other domain as well.

5. USING USER INTENT FOR ENHANCED VISIBILITY

It is not an unknown fact that most of the searches that are performed on the move are done via mobile phones and other hybrid devices. According to research, more than 80% of the searches performed on mobile are with local intent.

This means that people are most often looking for local addresses, telephone numbers, stock availability, and other business-related information via mobile phone. With this in mind, ask yourself the following questions:

1. Do customers come to my shop or office?
2. Do I have a helpline to deal with customer inquiries?
3. Do I sell goods and services that have the tendency to out-stock?

The answer to all these questions will mostly be a yes, and thus it may be a crucial business booster if you can place your Contact and Stock Information like (Map, Address, Contact Numbers, Email Id, etc) before the other information on your website, it will greatly boost conversions of your mobile site.

6. CREATE A MOCKUP FOR YOUR MOBILE WEBSITE

Before you jumpstart your mobile optimizing or website development journey, it is crucial to have a simple mockup of what you would like your website to look like in the end. You can use different mockup creation tools like Adobe In-design, Photoshop, etc., but just don’t trade the comfort of your users for elements that make your website too heavy to load or don’t appear properly on all devices.

Also take into consideration that some of the aspects of your desktop website will be difficult to convert to a mobile version, for example, the navigation menus or mouse hover menu reveals. These features never adapt to mobile websites, so you must look for better alternatives. Now let’s take a detailed look at the creation of your mobile website wire-frame.

i. Development: Remember to put the meta viewport tag on top of all your pages. If you took time out with the Google Mobile-Friendly Test Tool, then you must have already fixed this up.

ii. Readable Fonts: Is your content legible for mobile viewing? If viewers have to constantly pinch the screen to change the size of your font, this does come as an obstruction in fluid visibility. Google recommends 16 CSS pixels and a line height of 1.2em.

iii. Distance Between Touch Elements: Ensure that all touch elements of your website have a considerable gap between them, or users may end up clicking the wrong button. This is the primary cause of increased bounce rates, low sales, and possible frustration or agitation among mobile surfers. Make sure that your Call-to-action button is clearly visible and accessible on all devices. You can also check if Google has picked any element of your website for being inaccessible in the Mobile Usability section of GWT.

7. AVOID HORIZONTAL SCROLLING IN MOBILE SITE

Even though this one is obvious, it wouldn’t hurt to have it in the checklist. Mobile surfers are used to vertical scrolling to view hidden aspects of a website, but if users have to scroll horizontally to read between the different sections of your website, then it may cause problems in user experience as they will mostly have to pinch the screen to resize it for a complete view.

This problem is also easily traceable through the Google Webmasters Tool.

NOTE: You can avoid getting this error in GWT by using relative width and position values in the CSS and also making sure your images are scaled properly.

8. OPTIMIZE FOR FASTER PAGE LOADING ON MOBILE

Again, this is a no-brainer.  The user’s type of device and data connectivity also plays an important part in the mobile surfing experience. Even though the world is blessed with 4G connectivity, more than 60% of people who are surfing the internet, do so through 3G connections. You wouldn’t want to properly optimize your website in all aspects and then lose out on precious leads or sales because your website was not able to load completely on slower devices, would you? There are variable controls that can be tweaked to achieve the best results but the first thing you should do is to head over to Google Page Speed Insights Tool to see what Google says about your website load time.

NOTE: You can do things like compressing images, minifying codes, and leveraging browser codes to enhance the load speed of your website(s).

9. AVOID FLASH AND DON’T BLOCK CSS, JAVASCRIPT, AND IMAGES FROM GOOGLEBOT

If you are using any flash elements on your website, now would be the time to get them removed. HTML5 is one of the best alternatives to flash elements on a website. We say that flash is not good for the mobile experience because Flash is not readily available on all mobile devices. Due to this, it may cause an erroneous mobile viewing experience for your users.

And the first thing that Googlebot will check when it crawls your website is for blocked CSS, JavaScript, or images. If it finds that any of these elements are blocked from crawling, then it will mark your website as “not-mobile-friendly.”

10. DISPLAY RELEVANT KEYPAD FOR FORM FIELDS

This is one of the most overlooked factors when it comes to mobile optimization and I have personally seen a 30% growth in opt-ins and leads from mobile visitors, when websites optimized their forms do display the right keypads. Check out your existing forms and see what the users will have to fill in separate fields. Check if the respective fields are displaying a relevant keypad. Having a ‘number keypad’ displayed in the contact number field and an ‘email-keypad’ displayed in the email form field will greatly enhance the mobile experience or your viewers and is worth tweaking.

11. CONTACT NUMBERS TO OPEN IN DIALER APP

My dad is not aware of how to copy and paste things on mobile phones and so are the majority of the people in this world. You must take this into consideration when optimizing your website for mobile because having to copy the number and paste it in the dialer or even write it down on a piece of paper makes the whole process cumbersome and messy. Sometimes, it may even result in people leaving your website without contacting you. Ensuring that clicking on your contact number opens the dialer app will get you those visitors who might be stuck on the fence just because they are unable to call you without leaving the screen or memorizing your number just to forget the last few digits when they are frantically typing into the dialer pad. Think about it.

12. HAVE YOUR WEBSITE TESTED INHOUSE OR HIRE PEOPLE

During the development phase of your website, it might be a good idea to constantly see how well it is performing on variable devices. This can be done through various emulators available online or you can manually do it on various devices (Borrow from your colleagues or family members).

Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome, both have this nice ‘Inspect Element’ feature that lets you view your devices as seen by other devices – This is a very handy feature that I sometimes overuse.

Alternatively, you can also hire a bunch of testers or even organize an in-house event where the members are asked to surf your website in various mobile devices and give their inputs after 10-15 minutes of wading through your pages.

After the demo run, you can the testers to pen their individual feedback and collate them later on to pick up bits and pieces that need enhancing. Sometimes, it is just better to have someone else analyze your website because they will only think from a user’s perspective and tell you very obvious things that you may overlook, just because your brain is clustered with lots of plans and ideas.

Ending Note 

This is my all-encompassing checklist of website mobile optimization. I have helped a lot of my clients cope up with their mobile optimization needs, so if you need any help you can always ask for assistance on the Facebook Page or even in the comment section below. If you have any questions or want me to add something to this checklist, again, the comment section is a few blocks away.

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 #7 Print Ready Extreme Checklist for Mobilegeddon

Here is the download link to the print-ready version of this checklist for your convenience. Don’t forget to pin this checklist if you found it useful.

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#8 List Of Useful Links And Resources Related To Mobilegeddon!

1. Google Algorithm Database – List of all Algorithms updated will date.
2. Google App Indexing Service – Want to get your app featured in SERPS? This is the door.
3. Google Mobile Friendly Website Guidelines – Self Explanatory
4. Google Mobile Friendly Test Tool – Check if your individual pages are mobile friendly.
5. Google Mobile Usability Report – Get instant reports on mobile usability issues.
6. Google Webmaster’s Help Forum – Ask Google for help!

Here is a list of Big G’s Guidelines for optimizing various leading CMS or similar platforms:

1. WordPress
2. Joomla!
3. Drupal
4. Blogger
5. vBulletin
6. Tumblr
7. DataLife Engine
8. Magento
9. Prestashop
10. Bitrix
11. Google Sites

Here is a list of guides that can be used to change your not-so-responsive website into a “Responsive website.”

1. Design a Skeleton Website
2. Bootstrap Website Downloads : CSS/Java/Fonts + Source Code Rails/Compass/Sass
3. Responsive Grid System Website Toolkit
4. Advanced Responsive Website Designing Tutorial – Advanced HTML and CSS.

Extra Resources:

1. List of different options for mobile navigation menus.
2. Mashable’s list of top online wireframing tools.

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In the end, it depends on what your website is focused on and what business models you are following. There are a few things however that need no excuse not to be followed and doing the basic mobile optimization checks is one of them – After all, who doesn’t like an extra influx of visitors from mobile phones.

Unless you are from the underworld, in which case you will be using the .htaccess file – a few people will get what I mean and #5MinutesOfSilence for the people who don’t. Haha.

My apologies for such a lengthy post, but again I love to keep all the information in a single file so that you don’t have to run around from blog to blog, hunting for more information. If you like what I write or if you have any suggestions or need help regarding Mobile Website Optimization, you can also shoot a comment below or contact me at our official Facebook page and I will get back to you at the earliest. Hope you found this Guide helpful. Have a Good day! 

Most important SEO Checklist – SEO in 2015

So 2014 has been an incredibly powerful year bringing loads of changes in the SEO-verse. First, it was the Panda that reigned terror on websites with thin content, and then came the Authorship Drop followed by the mighty Pigeon that was focused on websites trying to rank locally. Soon after the Pigeon drop, Google unleashed the HTTPS signal which gave a slight boost to websites that had an SSL certificate and as if ranking on the SERPs was not hard enough, finally came the Penguin, which completely smashed illegitimate link building tactics. Don’t worry if you have missed any of these updates in 2014 as I will be giving a brief about them in some time.

Through these years of battling cyber-conspiracies of unethical SEO tactics and fraudulent schemes, Google has been pretty stern in manipulating its algorithms constantly so as to give fair-play an edge over the already overloaded blackhat tactics. The question that was asked in 2012 and also in 2013 and 2014 remains the same – “Is Google bent on killing the SEO?”, “Is SEO dead in 2015?”, “Will SEO agencies die down eventually?”

My answer to all these questions is a “No, NO, NO!”

In 2013 as well as 2014, Google has taken some really tough steps to fight spam, which has completely altered the landscape on which professional SEO’s built their strategies. Time has come to bid adieu to thousands of blackhat SEO agencies and agents who have caused quite a lot of damage already to websites that really deserved to rank. Let’s hope for a brighter 2015 and YES! SEO will never die. The people who manipulate SEO will gradually get eliminated. 

As the year’s pass, the need for being online has never been stronger and even though the Internet landscape is gradually shifting and becoming far too competitive than it was yesterday, it is never too late to join the battle.

“BILLIONS OF CONSUMERS. WITH A UNANIMOUS MOTIVE. ON A SINGLE PLATFORM.”

And you give me one reason why your brand doesn’t need to be here?

SEO is not about buying backlinks (the more the better), in fact, it never was. SEO is about a strategist mind that works around the clock to decipher Google’s next moves and respond to them with utmost precision. So as you have already anticipated, the game will go on but the rules are a bit different this time.

Related Articles:

Beware Online Pirates, Google’s New Pirate Update Is Infallible

Google Penguin 3.0 Algorithm – A Massive Blow To Manipulative Tactics

Google Page Rank Is No More! Which Metric Is Next In Google’s Vision?

Google’s Latest HTTPs as Ranking Factor – A Marketing Ploy or Tech Revolution?

Google Pigeon Algorithm – Most Significant Changes To Ranking Signal

A Beginner’s Guide to Google Schema Markup

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ALL OF 2014 MOVES INTO 2015 – REMEMBER, PRECISION IS THE KEY

Looking at the Google trends of the past few years – The search giant always launches a few tweaks in algorithms every once in a while, but the basic essence always remains the same. And every time around, the tweaks that are made, just make the previous strategies a bit more focused.

Brands that are aware of this constantly changing ball game keep a steady eye on their link profiles and Trust-Flow and Citation Flow and always disavow links that appear to add no legitimate weight to the authority of their website. This should also be your focus in 2015.

So, if you are thinking of making an action plan for your 2015 SEO, you better be well versed with all the changes Google made in 2014. A proper understanding of all the Algos is required so let’s do a quick recap of them in chronological order.

Starting from Earliest to Latest Algorithmic Updates

## Google EMD Update.

Also known as Google Exact Match Domain Update. Though this update was released in 2012 and did not get a buff in 2014, it is still very relevant and is a must-watch for in 2015. This update was focused on preventing low-quality websites which had exact search terms in their domain names and also very poor content. If this update happens, websites that have improved their content and also worked on their architecture will receive a buff in their rankings, and websites that fail to abide by the guidelines will be penalized as usual.

##Page Layout No.3 – February 6, 2014.

Google released their Page Layout update for the third time. This update is also known as the “Top Heavy” Update which focuses on penalizing websites that have too many advertisements above the fold. These websites are normally made as advertisement traps so that visitors end up clicking on one of the advertisements which generate revenue for the websites.

## Panda 4.0 No. 26 – May 19, 2014.

This is one of Google’s most lethal weapons for cutting down low-quality content websites from the SERP’s. Google frequently updates and releases a sibling of this powerful algorithm which has put millions of websites around the Internet out of the Search Engine Result scope.

## Authorship Photo Drop – June 28, 2014.

John Mueller announced on June 25^th that Google will be dropping all Authorship photos from the Search Engines which were connected to the Google Plus profiles. Though Google has unlinked the Authorship Markup it is giving a lot of importance to Google+ mentions and links, so consider keeping your Google+ Profile regularly updated.

## Pigeon Algorithm – July 24, 2014.

This algorithm release shook the landscape for all websites which were trying to rank hard for Local search. Google commented that the Pigeon update played a key role in binding the local algorithm with the core algorithm.

## HTTPS/SSL Update – August 6, 2014.

After a long time, Google came out of the closet and said that they would be giving a slight ranking boost to secured websites which had SSL certificates. They also stressed the point that though the boost would be small to start with, they would scale it up to a stronger ranking signal if the changes were positive. Consider getting your website SSL certified in 2015.

## Panda 4.1 No. 27 – September 23, 2014.

Another slow panda rollout just 4 months after the last rollout. Due to the slow nature of this rollout, the exact start date for the algorithm change is unclear but it did have an impact on 3-5% of the search queries.

## Penguin 3.0 – October 17, 2014.

That previous Penguin 2.1 update was released more than a year back, so Penguin 3.0 was the much-anticipated algorithm refresh from Google in a long time. This update was spread out in weeks and had been a very slow rollout. It aimed at penalizing websites with unethical or manipulative link building tactics.

## Pirate 2.0 – October 21, 2014.

This was another attempt from search giant Google to fight software and digital piracy. It had been more than two years since Google launched the DMCA/Pirate Update and it was a much needed release that caused dramatic ranking drops for a small group of piracy-related websites and torrent projects.

Keeping the Jargon Aside, Let’s Look At Simple Things That You Can Do Now To Make A Difference in 2015

Google is constantly fidgeting with its Algorithms as you can see. Sometimes it rolls out updates of the same Algorithms in an interval of few months. Don’t be fooled by the hype – the more Google updates its search engine software the more holistic the field of SEO is becoming. Even if you inculcate these tiny practices, they are going to make a big difference in your search rankings in 2015.

1. Content is Be All and End All. 

Did you notice that Google rolled out two versions of the Panda algorithm in 2014? That also in an interval of 4 months. This is a clear signal that Google is laying complete emphasis on filtering spammy and low quality content from high-quality and graduate-level content. Google search algorithms strive hard to differentiate the bad and irrelevant content and deliver only the most appropriate results to the searcher. So double-check the content you put up on your website.

2. Social Engagement In The Key. 

Do you even need an explanation for this? We know how stringent the rule book is becoming. As Google strives to deliver the most authoritative and relevant information to humans, it is much likely that it will soon start giving even more weight to Social reach and Social Media Interactions like Likes, Shares, Tweets, Pins, etc. If you have not stepped into the Social Media Platforms yet, then by all means make it a point to do so in 2015 – It’s never too late.

3. Casual Search Queries 

Though we did not see the Humming Bird update in 2014, in 2013 it brought in quite a lot of changes to the way Google interpreted search queries. The most notable change was the way Search Engines started interpreting casual search queries. Search engines started laying more emphasis on the way the queries were entered by not just focusing on the main keywords but the meaning of the whole phrase.

So as a webmaster, you should not focus blindly on generating backlinks. Instead, focus on obtaining backlinks from sources that have high authority and are already trustworthy in the eyes of Google. Also, ensure that the anchor texts that link back to your website are more casual and natural instead of just keyword focused. Double check the content in your website and ensure that the content is meaningful and has a shareable nature. 

4. Deviating from Traditional Links to Brands References

I don’t want you to think that Inbound Links are worthless in 2015. They are still the most powerful signals that Google will take into consideration to rank a website, but as I have already mentioned before – the tricks of this trade are going to change a lot.

It is a no brainer that the big fishes in the market have enough money to spend on getting “High Quality”, authoritative backlinks to their website, and judging by the way Google released the Penguin 3.0 update in 2014,  it is safe to conclude that Google will also start taking into consideration the amount of “Brand Mentions / References” across the web of your brand without any linkbacks. This keeping a balance between Brand Mentions and Inbound Links will be the key to ranking in 2015.

The ideal strategy here would be to make sure all your backlinks appear to be as natural as possible and have a variety of Anchor texts. If you have been building links from a list of Keywords as anchor texts via insignificant websites, Google will recognize the correlation between the same and may penalize your website. So unless you want to wait another year or till the next Penguin update, it would be wise to do a thorough backlink analysis of your website and disavow all the low quality backlinks. By all means, take the help of a professional SEO to do so.

5. Responsive Design And User Interaction 

According to statistics, 3 out of every 10 people in the world own a smartphone, Phablet, or a Tablet – Give me one reason why you should not care to make your website responsive in 2015 if you have not done it already.

40% of the searches conducted online are done through smartphones and tablets and with the increased presence of such devices in our lives this ratio has been on an upward curve. Focus on making your website structured for proper visibility on devices of different sizes. With increased user interaction of your website, the bounce rate of your website will decrease, which is a good signal for search engine bots that ultimately rank your website.

8 Point SEO Checklist For 2015

As we discussed earlier, 2014 has been a very dramatic year in terms of Algorithmic changes. Google unleashed the Penguin, Panda, and Pigeon Updates along with myriad other small and very significant changes to the ranking signal like HTTPs protocol and Conversational Search Queries. Due to these updates and changes the entire SEO landscape has changed.

I have prepared a checklist of things that you must watch out for along with negative practices which you should avoid at all costs to dodge the Google hammer in 2015 and also be in the Search Engine Trust list.

1# Search Engine Visibility 

Alike every single year, this metrics will remain the same only a bit amplified than before. Before you get into the High Quality Content, Social Media Integration, and other such routines, it is important that you make your website discoverable.

What You Should Do?

Have clean website architecture and ensure that all important pages (main categories) are reachable from your Homepage. Also, make sure that you use a logical structure for your websites where your inner pages are carefully tucked under the right categories. Make good use of Breadcrumbs and also Paginate those pages of your website which are too long to scroll.

NOTE: Your Websites URL should reflect your Websites Architecture.

Example of Good Website Architecture:

www.domain.com/main-category1/subcategory/product001

www.domain.com/main-category2/product002

What You Should Not Do?

If the important pages of your website are not visible from the Homepage that is a very bad signal. Not only will this increase the bounce rate of your website, but it will also render the visitors incapable of finding the things they are looking for.

NOTE: Always have a Search Box at the top of your Website.

Don’t unnecessarily cram a lot of subpages into one category, while leaving the others with very thin content. Break your information down into smaller subcategories if needed. Another malpractice that I see a lot of newbies making is that they try to link all the inner pages of their website from the Homepage itself. This is a clear signal of information overload and the visitors will get too confused.

Remember this human tendency – If a man is given too many choices, he opts for no choice at all.

2# XML Sitemaps and RSS Feeds Are Must 

To ensure faster and proper indexing, you must befriend XML Sitemaps and RSS Feeds. If you are unaware of what XML Sitemaps or RSS Feeds are, I have defined them below.

XML Sitemaps: These act like the sitemaps of your website, which direct the search engine spiders in the proper direction to ensure that all the pages of your websites are properly indexed.

RSS Feeds: RSS Feeds, also known as Atom Feeds are also a great way of informing search engines about the fresh content at your website. RSS Feeds are most often used by content curators and Journalists or Blog Followers who want to keep track of regular updates on a website.

What You Should Do? 

Always ensure that you have submitted your XML sitemap to Google Webmasters Tool and that all the URL’s contained in the Sitemap is canonical in nature.

Only use XML Sitemaps if you have reached the current limit of your Sitemap that is 50000 URLs. Having a single Sitemap is more than enough for small to medium websites. If you use RSS Feeds, then make sure that they only include your website’s fresh content, which will help search engines and users find only the latest updates from your end.

What You Should Not Do? 

Don’t let your RSS or Atom Feeds contain all the content from your website. This will make your fresh content difficult to find for those who want to keep track. Also, ensure that your RSS feed does not contain URLs or Links which are not allowed to be indexed by search engines through your website robots.txt. Don’t try to fool search engines by just updating the modification time of your pages. If they are not updated, let them be like that till you have time to update them.

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3# Make friends with Google Panda 

You have already been acquainted with Google’s favorite pet to fight non-authentic, low-quality content. You know what to do.

SEO in 2015 – What You Should Do? 

Today Google takes more into consideration than just the fact that the articles you put up on your website are Authentic and pass Copyscape. You must ensure that all the content on your website has graduate-level English and should be as engaging as possible.

NOTE: Make it a point to block all your website’s Legal Documents from being indexed in the Search Engines.

What You Should Not Do? 

Don’t scrape and post content from all over the Internet. Don’t be a part of plagiarism campaigns and don’t just pick content from another website, re-write and publish on your website. Try to have unique content with your own opinion that gives a certain value in return for a user’s time spent on your website.

Ensure that pages on your website don’t have exact or similar content. It is fine to give reference to other pages on your website, but meaninglessly adding subpages just to increase the weight of your website is a total no-brainer.

4# Avoid Being Under The Penguin Radar 

This is an absolute must. If you do all steps correctly and just avoid this nasty little beast then you are done for – at least one year (until and unless you are pretty lucky). Google’s Penguin Filter aims at blowing those websites out of the Search Engine Results Scope if they are found involved in any manipulative link building tactics. So keeping a natural and clean backlink profile is a must in 2015. If you don’t know what it feels like to suffer the blow of Penguin, consider Googling this phrase – “My website has been penalized by Penguin.” And see the reaction of webmasters who were too lazy to consider doing a backlink profile check.

What You Should Do? 

Do a thorough backlink audit of your website and disavow all the spammy and unnaturally acquired backlinks.

NOTE: Sometimes competitor firms do spammy link-building practices on your website just to have it go down the search results in the next algorithmic update. It is vital to do a check of your backlink profile no matter how sure you are that it is clean. 

You should always work to acquire good quality editorial backlinks from trusted sources. It is also a good signal to Google if you acquire backlinks at a steady pace. Also, maintain diversity in your anchor texts.

What You Should Not Do?

Never opt for link-building schemes or be a part of reciprocal linking networks. When you do a backlink audit, also disavow all backlinks that appear to be from irrelevant sources. Don’t overdo your anchor texts with brand name or primary keywords.

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5# Schema Markup Has Gained Relevance In 2014 

Schema Markup is a tag that is used by search engines to differentiate entities like (People, Products, Reviews, and Events, etc.) Although Google did not make it clear in any way that it would be giving significance to Schema Markup but in 2014 we saw a lot of websites inculcating the same.

What You Should Do? 

Take a look at the available Schemas and pick the ones that best fit your webpage. If you are not that good in coding, you can take of Google Structured Data Markup Tool to Schema Markup your webpages. To test the same you can use the Structured Data Testing Tool that Google has made available to webmasters.

What You Should Not Do? 

Don’t ever trick search engines through Schema by tagging your data as something which it is not. If you do this, the search bots will find it and penalize your websites. Stay away from anything that deceives the Search Engine Crawlers and the Visitors.

6# Avoid Buying Social Signals And Earn Them In An Organic Way 

Off late you must have noticed that search engines favor websites that have a strong social presence. Even though Google has not confirmed the effect of Social Media on Search Results, but it clearly said that Google treats all Social Media posts that are open to indexing just like it does any other web page or website. So you get the hint.

NOTE: Your Google+ Posts can make it to the Search Results of your G+ Connections and their connections so this can be used to get in a lot of organic traffic. 

What You Should Do? 

By all means, you should look at attracting social signals by posting meaningful and viral content. Don’t buy social signals from unlawful SEO firms and other agents as they will in most cases do you more harm than good.

Inculcate Social Media Sharing buttons on your website so that it is easy for people to share your posts.

What You Should Not Do? 

Don’t waste your time and money by purchasing like and shares or any other type of social signals. Both Search Engines and Social Networks are able to trace accounts that are created for the sole purpose of trading likes and that may result in your social media accounts getting banned altogether. 

7# Consider Getting An SSL Certificate

What You Should Do?

HTTPS protocol / SSL Certificates are the small padlock icon before a website name. This small padlock icon is a symbol of trust and security. It is crucial for websites to obtain an SSL certificate if they involve the transfer for Personally Identifiable Information of the users.

However, it is important that you take the help of a professional when transitioning from HTTP to HTTPS – if you do it incorrectly then it may harm your present standing in the search engines.

NOTE: Google made it clear that SSL Certificates give a slight ranking boost to websites, so only consider getting one if your website involves the transfer or sensitive information as SSL Certificates are pretty expensive. 

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8# Improve Website Load Speed and User Experience 

Going by the trend of the past few years, Google has started giving weight to quite a few UX-related metrics like Page speed, Responsive Designs, and HTTPs Protocol. Thus, it becomes even more important to keep our focus on enhancing user experience and being at par with Google site speed metrics.

What You Should Do?

Make use of Google Pagespeed Insights to find the current load time of your websites and become aware of any fixes that you could do to decrease the load time of your websites.

Also, if you are optimizing your website for other search engines like Bing, Yahoo! And Yandex – These search engines have made it pretty clear that they give weight to metrics like user engagement and click-through rates in ranking websites. Even though Google continues to keep mum about the same, working on enhancing these features of your website will give you great benefits like increased conversions of your website visitors and more likes, shares, and brand mentions across the internet.

What You Should Not Do?

Don’t have a cluttered website with a very heavy (too many images, media, or advertisements) homepage. Having a minimalistic reach to your website will let it load faster thereby enabling a smooth user experience and faster load time.

FINAL VERDICT – CLOSING CALLS

Even though there are more than 200 ranking signals, most of them are too small to be significant and some of them are such that you have no control over them. If you just focus on doing the things that I have mentioned in this Checklist, you will see a significant rise in rankings in 2015 or even be able to retain your present rankings when there is an upgrade of the current Google algorithms.

Just focus all your effort on completing part of this checklist, one by one and not all at the same time as you will fail. Remember, SEO is an overtime process. It doesn’t happen in one night and nobody, not even the big players reached the search engines in a short time. So just keep your focus on doing the right things like proper website architecture, enhanced user experience, schema markup, graduate-level content, clean backlink profile, etc and you will start to notice that your online presence has become more dominant.

Best Web Analytics Tools Review

 

Imagine a train running on a rail track without showing any indicators such as fuel used, distance covered, and engine temperature. Similarly, visualize an airplane in the sky moving towards the east without showing the engine’s temperature, speed, working status of the engines, and remaining fuel amount on the control board in the pilot’s cockpit. In both the situations, the driver or pilot does not know what is actually happening or how the train or plane is actually working.

Do you think such a lack of awareness can make the driver or pilot reach up to the intended destination safely and efficiently? Practically, the answer is ‘No’. Well, such an incidence can also happen with your online business site in case you do not know what is exactly happening on it once it goes online. To know what is happening at your site is nothing but analyzing it.

Questions That Inspire You to Analyze

Let us consider a real-life scenario of your business wherein you are a cloth boutique firm and I am an individual looking for some official as well as casual stuff from brands only, due to bad experience of using unbranded shirts and pants in the past. Now, I only need to look at branded items and I reach on your site through my friend’s recommendation.

Like me, there will be many more people out there who will be interested in your online store. So, how do ensure your brand awareness and popularity online? Well, this is ensured only if you find answers to the following queries, and improve them for brand popularity in case they are dissatisfactory:

• What is the site’s rank on the search engines result pages?
• How many visitors are landing at your site each day?
• How many new visitors are finding your site each day?
• Which pages are the visitors hitting the most?
• Which pages are encouraging purchase?
• Which products do the visitors love more?
• Is the Web site design effecting in keeping visitors for long on a page?
• From how many different sources does the traffic (visitors) come from?

Well, these queries are like indicators that show you what is happening on your site. They measure the performance of your site in the most relevant niche and give you a report of how successful or improvable the performance is! If you are not keen on doing this yourself, services like the Commence sales tracking and reporting services are available for hire. It’s best to leave it to the experts if you are not inclined yourself and there’s no shame in that.

Think a Minute

Do you think without the above answers, your online site can ever fulfill your business goals? If you do not track or monitor, it is like leaving the train (site) at its own speed (capabilities), which can get de-railed any time (lost online visibility or rank). After all, you should know where you are standing (site rank) to move further to the target!

Easiest Method that Encourage You to Analyze

Well, this is none other than the Web analytics tools! You can obtain quick answers to all the above questions by using a Web analytics tool. With a simple yet powerful design for notifying you about the site’s performance, these tools aid in tracking different statistics. Through these statistics, you can see the number of people viewing each page, sources from where they came from, and the number of site features that are most popular.

The Web analytic tools track key metrics of your site to measure traffic and Click-Through Rates (CTRs) for new page or content as well as comprehend your visitors’ requirements and behavior. These measurements tell you whether your site needs improvement or not!

Quick Aid

If the absence of above statistics keeps you awake even at night, you are truly eligible for getting a Web analytics tool.

Before I take you on a quick tour of some most important tools in the World of Web Analytics 2.0, let us find out the metrics that you got to measure with them.

Metrics (Data Indicators) That You Should Analyze

Think a Minute:

Do you think it makes sense to look for a tool when there is no idea of what information needs to be tracked? Well, the information that should be tracked can vary from simple visitors count to complex analysis of visitors’ behavior. Therefore, the question can arise as to which vital metrics should be paid attention to while analyzing the site through a tool. Here is a simple breakup of vital metrics:

Category 1: Primarily, you will have to know how many people are visiting your site. While this one seems easy to find, it is actually not. Metrics answering this query include:

• Unique Visitors: Shows the total number of visitors on the site during a set period. It does not include repeated visitors. This statistic reveals how effective your marketing efforts are in reaching a wider audience.
• Repeat Visitors: Shows the number of visitors coming back to your website multiple times. It indicates how big is your loyal fan base!

• Visits: Shows the number of visitors to a specific page or site. The trend in the number of visits over time shows you insight into your brand’s popularity. When you compare with the number of visits to each page, it shows which parts of your site are useful.
• Page Views: Shows the number of times a visitor views a specific page. Increased page views simply denote that your site is becoming more engaging.

Category 2: You will now be interested in who these visitors are and what they are doing on your site when they visit. This helps in knowing which site pages or features attract them the most and which ones go unattended. Metrics in this category include:

• Visitor Information: Includes region or country, Web browser in use, and more details about the visitors.
• Registered Users: This shows what each logged-in user did on your site in case your portal requires visitors to log in. This facilitates a more detailed understanding of what diverse visitors are doing on your portal.
• Bounce Rate: This shows the percentage of visits during which a visitor left your portal after looking at just one page. This statistic reflects visit quality. For instance, a high bounce rate for a blog is not a point of worrying because reading one article and leaving the site is sensible. However, for an eCommerce site, it is a point of worry because it indicates that the entrance pages are either non-attractive or irrelevant to the visitors.
• Click Path: This shows how the visitors navigate across your site. Also known as click tracks, these visual representations show the visitors’ journeys. For example, a click path can reveal that 10% of home page visitors prefer clicking the Resources link, while 50% clicks on Current Offers, 25% go on the About Us page, and 20% leave the site.
• Conversion: Tracks the number of people responding to your CTAs (Call to Actions) or doing what you want them to do. For example, it can show the number of users who clicked on a Newsletter link to subscribe to it or on Free Offer on the home page and went ahead to grab it. This metric is somewhat complex as it needs to be set in a tool but is truly a valuable one.
• Top Entry and Exit Pages: Shows the pages through which most visitors tend to enter and leave the site. It is unwise to assume that the home page is always the entry page.
• Site Search: Shows what people search on the site in case the analytic tool supports it. The metric helps you comprehend what visitors want from your site.

Category 3: Next, you would surely like to know from where the visitors are coming to your site. Knowing this information can help in better comprehending the types of sources that move people to your site. Metrics include:

• Organic Traffic Sources: Show the percentage of people who come to your site by clicking its organic listings on the search engine results page. If the percentage is below 40%, it simply means to revamp your content.
• Search Keyword: Shows the words or phrases that the visitors typed in the search box of search engines such as Google to reach to your site. This helps in determining the effectiveness, competitiveness, and success of keywords. It is wise monitoring your keywords for ensuring that you reach out to your target audience.
• Inbound Links: Shows the number of links to your site coming from other sites. Many tools also show which of these links get people to your site. This metric provides an insight as to how effective is your link building strategy and what types of sites consider your content useful. The rule is that the higher the other site’s domain authority, the more valuable is the link.

While the aforementioned metrics should be adequate to get started, many robust analytics tools come with even more sophisticated metrics and analysis features. In fact, many people earn their livelihood by analyzing these statistics, who are typically professionals hired for a profound analysis for big sites.

When considering the diverse analytical tools for your business, the assortment of options can lead to confusion, as you might not know how to use them. This is why it is recommended hiring a professional to dig the virtual space of your site and generate all vital reports.

I just cannot go ahead without stating about a golden rule existing in this regard. It is known as the 90/10 rule, which means if you are spending $100 on analytics for making new decisions for your site, it makes sense to invest $10 on the analytical tools and $90 on analysts with great expertise. Without a proper understanding of the details given by the tools, the reports remain as raw data (no processing), which is of no use for your business.

Bryan Eisenberg, who is the marketing consultant affirms that investing in tools and people who require the former to be successful is the key. However, what matters is the people comprehending that data. According to Avinash Kaushik who is the author of Web Analytics: An Hour a Day, “The quest for a tool that can answer all your questions will ensure that your business will get scrapped and that your career (Web Chief Marketing Officer and Analysts) will be short-lived.” Therefore, he suggested focusing on ‘multiplicity’, the use of multiple tools for different purposes.

In addition, it is worth keeping in mind that neither all tools have the same number of metrics nor do they work in the same way. Because of the high level of complexity involved in the world of analytics due to unique site’s characteristics and visitors’ varying background of preferences, each tool is designed to deal with the metrics in a different way. This is perhaps why Mr. Kaushik focuses on using multiple tools. Using multiple tools simply deepens your level of insight into the site’s success rate as well as a customer base.

Identifying the web actions as those of a ‘unique visitor’ is complex as well as subjective. Therefore, several tools tend to compute these statistics differently. For example, a few tools consider traffic as per a log of the pages on offer by the Web server, while some depends on the reports provided by cookies (information packs sent by the browser of each user). Therefore, while using different tools, it is common to have different values for the same metrics.

For big businesses, tools that are more robust can really be useful, although at a handsome cost, but for small and mid-sized businesses, cheaper and even free tools are available for getting the desired control over the site statistics. Obviously, you will not use all the available tools all the time but employing a few is simply the need of the hour as well as a vital part of your overall web strategy.

Think a Minute

It is now clear no single tool can be the best for analyzing the site. Then, how do you determine the most suitable suite of tools for analytics?

Recall Web Analytics 2.0

According to Mr. Kaushik, Web Analytics 2.0 is defined as the analysis of quantitative and qualitative data from the site and competition for driving a constant improvement of the online experience of customers and prospects, translating to your set outcomes (online and offline).

Rather than only a data analysis process, Web analytics 2.0 is an ongoing process of three-tiered data analysis and delivery service for all types of businesses. First is the data itself, as it reveals the clicks, page views, traffic, and more for both the site and direct competition. Second comes what is done with that data, or how you process the gathered information from Web Analytics and apply it to both existing and new customers for ensuring a meaningful and better experience.

The last tier involves how the aforementioned actions are aligned with the most vital business objectives (both online and offline), such as sales, social presence, customer engagements. In short, herein, the data itself facilitates watching how your site is performing.

Based on these tiers, Mr. Kaushik has also come up with an acceptable order of key components of Web Analytics, which are:

1. Clickstream: Measures ‘What’
2. Multiple Outcome Analysis: Measures ‘How Much’
3. Experimentation and Testing: Measures ‘Why’
4. Voice of Customer: Measures ‘Why’ just as the third component
5. Competitive Intelligence: Measures ‘What Else’
6. Insights: Gives ‘Gold!’

Making your site reach the desired performance levels is simply not easy. It takes persistent tracking as well as frequent measurement of diverse metrics for optimizing usage. This is exactly where the concept of Analytics is implemented by using tools belonging to its different component levels. This is how you ‘multiplicity’ is used – employing the most suitable tool at each component stage. Let us now look at the most reliable and efficient Web Analytics tools available per component.

Clickstream Analysis Tools

Clickstream measures data for each page visited, including details such as how the visitor came on that page (keywords, social media support taken, and ads), how long the visitor was on that page or site, and what the visitor did (purchased, subscribed to an offer).

Google Analytics (Free, Ideal for all Businesses)

This one is among the most robust, simpler, and profound analyzers in the market and creates detailed statistics about visitors. You can find out the sources that bring your visitors to your site, their actions on the site, and their frequency of coming back. You can even find their demographics such as geographical location and interests, number of daily visits, number of currently active visitors, and daily revenue generated by the site. Because it is integrated with Adwords that is largest paid search platform online, Internet marketers can ideally monitor the landing page activity and employ the necessary improvements.

For small business owners, it is perhaps the only comprehensive as well as easiest tool to rely upon.

Pros: Ease to set up and use, support for mobile sites, goal tracking, custom data gathering and reports, fast report generation, PDF reports download, quick sharing of dashboard, good help to get started, multiple dashboards support, world-class analytical tools

Cons: No brand-matching customization (limited fonts and layouts), less metrics (widgets) per dashboard, requires constant training, limited goals, Premium version costlier although advanced

Piwik (Free for Hosting on Your Web Server)

Go for this one in case you a technically oriented person and loves adventures. Piwik is an open-source tool executing on MYSQL and PHP. It is perhaps the leading open source tool providing valuable insights into the market campaigns, visitors, and more for optimizing the existing strategy for ensuring the best online experience of your visitors. The tool is designed as an open source alternative to Google Analytics.

For those who do not like sharing all data with Google, Piwik is an ideal substitute.

Pros: Privacy as data on your server is not shared, customizable interface, real time reports, security ensured by blocking URLs and traffic, tracking ability for multiple sites, several data export formats supported, Android and iOS app, no limit on data storage like Google Analytics, all Google Analytics features included, exhaustive help files

Cons: A bit of time-consuming installation process

Woopra (Free For Up to 30,000 Actions per Month after which it is Chargeable (Many Packs)

Woopra is another top-notch tool providing real time tracking of multiple sites for improving customer engagement. It wins over Google Analytics only in terms of update in which the latter takes more time. The desktop tool shows live visitor stats, including location, pages on which they are on, and pages or sections that they have been visited.

I recommend the tool especially for e-commerce site owners who get a chance to chat live with their visitors.

Pros: Well-organized interface, real time viewing, possible customer insights revealed, mobile app supported, notifications for important customer activities, customization of customer data, behavioral profiles for each customer by watching what they did on the website.

Cons: Confusing for beginners due to much data on the dashboard.

You can extend your control and above tools’ power by using Google or Bing Webmaster Tools. These tools help obtaining SEO details and major diagnostic data about your site. It is also recommended using Feedburner for tracking the activity of Clickstream occurring within the RSS feed.

Multiple Outcome Analysis

The outcome analysis is likely to happen within the tools mentioned above and below this section. For instance, you shall be configuring goals and ecommerce tracking in Piwik or Google Analytics. Similarly, campaign’s profit and margin are computable in Microsoft Excel through a relevant database query. Therefore, no specific suggestion of tools for this component.

Experimentation and Testing Tools

These tools aim at improving user experience and increasing the chances for having conversions (leads). At this stage, you should consider conducting different tests such as clickmaps, heatmaps, multivariate (MVT) testing, A/B testing (multiple versions of a site executing simultaneously), geotargeting, and so on. Because there are many tools, I will be covering them briefly.

• Google Website Optimizer (Free): It is a powerful A/B and Multivariate (MVT) testing solution that rotates varying content segments to see which sections get the most clicks. You can choose different page sections for testing such as images and headline.

• Optimizely: It is for those who wish to test very fast, especially A/B testing. It is a new but simply tool offering powerful results for improving the site performance without having any kind of technical knowledge.

• Crazy Egg: This tool employs the Heatmap technology to offer a visual picture of what visitors are doing on pages, where they are moving their mouse, where they are scrolling, and where they click. Such tracking allows observing the most attractive sections of pages and improving the ignored sections for optimizing user interaction. You can also split the data to see how visitors from a single traffic source behaved in comparison with those from other sources.

• MouseFlow: This tool records what the visitors do on your site, right from moving a mouse to filling a text box. It helps in tracking the visitors’ behavior and comfort level through heat maps as well. Mouseflow combines Crazy Egg and UserTesting features.

• UserTesting: This one employs a distinct way to test your site: get real time feedback from visitors in the chosen demographic. You pay for participants chosen to answer your questionnaire regarding your site. A video with the user and her or his activity is recorded and you get the feedback in an hour, stating the user’s actual thoughts. The tool is costly, but worth for real time instant feedback.

Voice of Customer Tools

Clickstream data provides insights into what the visitors did on the site, but it does not say why they left the site without staying there for long. Well, this needs visitor research that can be done by the below described tools.

• Kissinsights (Kissmetrics – Free to Paid): It helps in real-time customer acquisition and retention by revealing information on user habits and engagement before and after they use your It is easy to install and use, as it asks all queries to customers via a simple dashboard for getting customized feedback in the form of short comments. Its data funnel points to the weakest point/step blocking conversions, while the revenue tracking features show what customers do after purchases. In short, you get all data required for increasing conversion rates.

• 4Q (iPerceptions – Free): This is a pure online survey tool allowing you to comprehend the ‘Why’ aspect of visitors. Surveys facilitate gaining vital insights from the customer real experiences. It answers questions such as how satisfied are the customers, what they do at the site, are they doing what they need to do, and so on.

• Qualaroo: This is also a real-time survey tool for getting feedback from the users currently on the site. However, it stands apart because it allows you to use any combination of variables. For example, it helps asking shopping experience when the visitor fills the shopping cart and usage experience while leaving the site. You can get both entry and exit reviews. Consider this tool for sites with a high turnover of visitors and site owners who need to know ‘why’.

• Clicktale (Free to Paid): This one is most prominent in the customer experience analytics, which aims to optimize usability as well as maximize conversion rates. The most useful features are session playback and visitor recordings, which enable watching everything any visitor does on the site. You get to see the recordings of each action of a visitor, right from the first to the last click. The tool also comes with scroll maps, heatmaps, and visual conversion funnels for gaining more useful details about visitors and their habits. However, it is a costly choice.

Competitive Intelligence

Existing since the invent of business, competitive intelligence includes knowing what the competitors are doing, which can be then done better and faster. Such data enable you to recognize what is known and what is unknown as well as analyze ecosystem trends, failures, weaknesses, opportunities, and rising customer preferences. This details help in planning better marketing programs.

• Google Trends & Google Insights (Free): Both tools for search are now merged into a single tool. The Trends tool offers worldwide visitor data for sites deployed anywhere in the world and makes it easy to comprehend traffic and search keywords. The Insights tool simply points out to the global database of customer intentions; you can know what your customers are thinking and feeling. You can use this tool for analyzing industries, emerging trends, share of search, and offline marketing strategies as well.

• Google AdWords Keyword Tool (Free): Consider this tool for refining your SEO strategy as per the most searched keywords, download specific user-typed queries, and gaining insights into specific brands under analysis.

• Facebook Insights (Free): Track the popularity on Facebook by tracking follower counts, post comments, and likes through this tool based on users and interactions. It helps in improving customer engagement on the biggest social media platform.

• Twitalyzer (Free): This one offers detailed dashboard with several metrics for measuring Twitter influence and engagement on your brand identity. You can track your account’s impact on followers, retweet level, and level of conversation engagement. It is easiest one to use for your Twitter account.

• Klout: Consider this one for having the cleanest metrics for measuring performance on Facebook and Twitter.

Conclusion

With Web Analytics tools, the modern responsibility of improvement has been given to us. With so many tools available, it is not difficult to improve your online visibility as well as performance. However, the need is to choose a few of the above tools to collect all the data and process it for taking the right decision. Although Google Analytics is still the most famous tool out there, it is better to use it in combination with other tools to push your site to its maximum potential.

In case of no tight budget and customization as a top priority, it is recommended to select the paid tools that offer all the features and metrics for improving the site’ performance and expand the online customer base.

Driving Organic Traffic and Increasing Conversions

“The longer you make the mouse wait for the cheese, the lesser are the chances of it camping at your den. It has been running around all day searching for nourishment’s and if you just give it some food with ease, it is going to come back tomorrow and maybe tell others about your generosity as well.”

This same law applies to humans as well. Humans have had an unending quest for knowledge from the beginning of civilization and it is in our nature to reach out and find shelter at those places which make sustenance simple. With that being said, the ideal organic traffic driving strategies would normally incorporate elements like – Value, Keyword Research, Earning Backlinks and Niche Hotness Quotient!

Let’s take an example of a ‘model persona’ of your business. Say you are a Cosmetic Firm and I am a person suffering from proactive hair fall due to bad products that I used in the past. I need to save myself from the horror of pattern baldness and how would you help me?

From my perspective –

“I may just be another potential customer for your business who has approached your website to seek information. I am standing just behind the fence, asking to be convinced, looking for solutions to my problems, trying to find examples of your past expertise.

The sooner you are able to give me the information (cheese), that I am here for – the more valuable your website is going to be for me. If you beat around the bush and make me work the last brain cell, I am going to get frustrated soon and scurry off to another website that clearly expresses the solutions to my awful problem.

There are a few things to consider here, since the situation is completely hypothetical:

How did I reach your website in the first place?

 

1. You did proper keyword research around your business which deals in organic cosmetics that are helpful for skin and hair. So when I entered the phrase “hair fall treatment” in Google, I was able to find a direct link to your domain as a page on your website is ranking for the word “hair fall treatment.”

OR

2. I got your reference from a friend or an acquaintance in Social Media who had endless praises for the effectiveness of your products. Still to be extra sure, I dropped by to check the value in your website.

OR

3. I came across an offline or online very captivating advertisement of your brand that had a strong message for people to avoid chemical cosmetics and their harmful effects. Since, the campaign was somewhere related to my sentiments; I instantly connected to your brand and thought it would be wise to check your website.

OR

4. I was reading an interesting blog post around my problems and all of a sudden, there was a link (backlink) suggesting your website for organic hair and skin care treatments.

OR

5. There are many other possibilities and I don’t want this post to become a “Definitive Guide on How I Reached Your Website 101.” So you get my idea right?

NOW, I am already at your website – “I am standing behind the fence. A bit dicey about your products, since I have been overly exploited by – Get Your Hair Back in a Week Schemes. How do I convince myself or how do you convince me that I won’t be cheated again?

By delivering valuable content of course.

Let’s take a look at the key ingredients of a valuable content:

1. Content that you think will be worth my time. (Remember I am representing a ‘Model Persona’ of your business). Keyword research is important, but content that is filled with keywords only to rank your website is not going to drive any conversions for your business.

Remember, driving organic traffic is not about driving 1 Million people to your business, but it is about driving quality traffic to your website and converting them into followers of your brand ideology.

2. Content that you think will be worth putting up on your website. There is no point in writing a crystal clear and precise copy for Vacuum Cleaners on a cosmetic website, is there? So, make every piece of content that you post on your website, shine around your niche. Don’t just write for your company, write for your ‘category’ and write around customer problems and give them information that they should feel like bookmarking, or sharing with others.

There is no magic trick to this. It requires a lot of research and understanding of the potential requirements of your customers and delivering it to them.

 

3. Update or post fresh content on regular intervals. I come across with many bloggers in the IM-world who whine about less traffic in their blogs in spite of writing valuable content. But I know from the instant that there is something terribly wrong in their approach and they are not able to fix all the pieces in the puzzle, thus missing out on organic traffic.

After digging in, I find that the last time they posted on their blog was 2 weeks ago and the last time they updated any of their previous articles was ‘NEVER.’

 

This is not rocket science or any voodoo magic we are doing here. There are millions of bloggers who are ten times more hardworking and committed than you. If you want that piece of the pie, you gotta work for it, or hire people to do it for you. But you cannot avoid it.

4. People want fresh content, give it to them. It is always a good idea to revive your old content from time to time and give it a new look and publish it on your blog. But it is always better to give your audience fresh content that is unique or a latest trend in the news around your niche. Mostly all newspapers will have a separate column for your niche – Keep a watch for anything interesting and valuable and share your message around the same topic in your website or blog.

I see a lot of people just picking up and re-styling content from other websites. The only one time I will consider that stuff valuable is if I see that you have taken the pain to dig in deeper and compile a lot of solutions from various sources. That works a charm at times, but I still recommend writing unique and new content. This makes the content all the more valuable.

5. Include case studies, examples, past accomplishments where ever possible. But do not, cover the cheese and hard coat it with your medals. I was reading a very popular blog recently and they had done a case study on some of the most visited blog posts in leading blogs of 2014.

It was clear from the case study itself that, out of the 5 blogs they surveyed, all of them had an average of Three Top Posts that received organic traffic even after 7 months of publishing. And as you guessed it right – These three blogs had unique case studies on the A/B testing, Problem Solutions, Results of their Past Campaigns etc. You get the idea right?

I cannot stress the importance of including a case study enough. All I can say is adding a legitimate and real life case study to your website is going to triple its value from the buyer’s perspective. And websites that offer their past case studies to their audience have 26% higher chances of converting than websites without it.

 

SO, do not waste my time with publicity, fluff and big-fancy words that ooze of excellent copywriting skills – JUST GIVE ME THE CHESSE!

SHOW ME CLEARLY HOW I AS A CUSTOMER WILL BENEFIT FROM YOUR BRAND OR SERVICE BY ACCEPTING YOUR OFFER. GIVE ME A GOOD REASON TO SAY YES!

Somewhere in our subconscious mind, we all know the key to driving organic traffic but we suffer from some problems too many. If you ever come across people like the ones I mention below, tell them to take action or delete the word organic traffic or conversion from their dictionaries.

1. Paralysis by analysis – “I am the kind of person who spends too much time on the internet trying to reach perfection, but when it comes to taking actions I am just too confused because I read too much I think.”

2. Virtue in Ignorance – “I know it all – Keyword Research, Valuable Content (mindless content jargon). I am just too lazy to move my !%$ and I would just continue doing whatever I am.

DRUM ROLL Please for this fantastic creature. He knows what to do, but would choose to ignore everything. Can anyone remind me why we are here again?

3. Clueless Homosapien – “I have no clue what I am doing and I just lack the necessary knowhow, can someone please guide me?”

Ask these people to look up Google for their solutions. Google probably has answers to everything, unless you are not looking for How to make an Atom Bomb (or something closely related to the destruction of the world), of course. Maybe, they have it and they just don’t share it for everyone’s welfare. Who knows?

4. My hands are tied – “I have read all about driving organic traffic and writing valuable content that gets shared but I seem to have a hole in my pocket or my brain.”

There are lots of people who either lack the necessary knowhow or do not have the funds that go into research and development to create the ideal atmosphere for driving organic traffic. All I have to say is, hard luck surviving the Internet to these people. There is no point in being a part of this rat race if you do not have even one of these key characteristics.

Everyone keeps saying do this and do that but in the end it is all too confusing. If you were a newbie, my suggestion would be to take parts of my advice and act on it, instead of trying to enact the whole thing at once. If you are a seasoned pro, you are already spinning the money and maybe you could just brush up your skills through this post. Do remember to share your views in the end or spread it to people who may need this small piece of motivation.

With everything said and done, the only reason that keeps you reading this ruthless jargon on proactive organic reach and how to become a Google guru is engaging content and the only way this content reaches you or you reach the content is ‘virality.’

Moving on, let us keep aside everything I mentioned until now and concentrate on – “HOW TO REACH THE TRAFFIC THAT’S LOOKING FOR MY BUSINESS?”

Apart from the value your content provides (which I am assuming it does), there are three more ‘elements,’ to your content that need to be asynchronous in order to drive more traffic to your online delegation:

1. Proper Keyword Research – I will go into this in a while.
2. Lots of Backlinks – These are the best and ratio-wise the most converting ways of reaching out to the people who are looking for you. The more blogs and websites and users on the internet that are talking about your business. The more you are disposed to reaching your business milestones and converting visitors who reach your website.
3. Hotness quotient! – The hotness quotient of your niche or category of your business (whichever way you say it) plays an important role in the amount of organic traffic that comes to your business.

For example: If your business revolves around skin care and beauty treatments – This is an evergreen niche and you can expect to receive huge amounts of organic traffic all throughout the year.

BUT

If your business is based on seasonal deals then you may not get as much traffic as you would get during or before a holiday season.

You get the point right? Read on and I will clear any doubts you have about this. And I alone do ‘not vouch for this – you can check out various other sources on the internet and experts who have the same opinion as I do. For example – Hubspot.com, QuickSprout.com, Inc.com and SocialTriggers.com

Now, getting back to square one – Let’s take a look at how to analyze your content strategy and tweak it to create valuable content that kills your competitors –

Like I mentioned before, I will repeat myself sorry – Valuable Content will get more likes, the more people who like your content, the more they will share it. The more shares your content will get, the more references on the Internet will vouch for your products or services and All this compiled together will create an IMBALANCED BACKLINK WHEEL – that should have your competitors regret your existence.

If you read a lot of Internet Marketing blogs, you must have already come across the saying “You are crazy if your business don’t own a blog space to your website!” In addition, I will second this opinion. How do you aim to drive traffic to your website with only static pages and no dynamic content?

This is my way of planning a content strategy for my blog. (Shameless Self Promotion Here)

1. DOING THE KEYWORD RESEARCH – According to statistics, reaching the first page on Google does make businesses successful, but you will be surprised to know that actually the first link in the SERPs is able to steal more than 49% of the search traffic and the rest 9 links get only a single digit percent of the remaining traffic. Needless to say that even a small percentage of Global Traffic is actually a huge amount of the cake that you could keep on your plate.

This is only possible through extensive keyword research. I will not tell you how to conduct an in-depth keyword research here but you could always take help from the experts in the Engage community.

Keyword research forms the basic framework of any online establishment. The sooner you understand the importance of this the better it will be for your business.

What really makes it such a critical aspect to consider is that both Search Engines and Users depend on it.

Choosing the right keywords is an art and once you have your website optimized for a particular keyword. You can be sure to reach out to that audience who is searching for “your keywords” in the search engines. This will enable your brand to be present at the right place and the right time, which is the essence of driving organic traffic to your website.

2. WRITING CONTENT FOR THE LONG TERM STRATEGY – Instead of trying to write content that will rank for probably a day or two – try to focus your mind and effort on content that is going to be hot, forever and ever.

This is what I meant by Hotness Quotient of your niche.  By writing content that will only be searched for periodically, you will limit yourself to visitors only at those times of the year when there is a demand for it.

There will also be a chance of not ranking for it at all, as the more active blogs and websites which are already ranking high and giving HOT Content to the readers will cover that topic at the right time.

Anything that is Evergreen and may never get old, in terms of SEO and Value to the reader is known as evergreen content.

For example – If you make a website around an event that will be hosted in 2014. You may be receiving stable traffic this year, but unless and until there is a follow up of that event the next year, you can very well except zero to negligible traffic. You cannot expect people to vouch for or like content that is old. Can you? 

BUT 

If you had a website covering symptoms of Pregnancy, Precautions, Medications, Accessories, Diets etc (basically everything around the niche – It is an evergreen niche and traffic source for such niches will never die at any time of the year.

Let’s take a look at some more examples of Evergreen Niches:

• Relationships and Depression
• Love
• Parenting
• Pet Care
• Finance
• Etc..

AND

Look at these examples of Niches that are not evergreen:

• Articles relating to current fashion trends
• Current Pop Culture
• News Articles
• Etc..

3. SHARING YOUR CONTENT AND EARNING BACKLINKS – If you are aware of the prevalent SEO practices, you will already know that manual link building is a gradually dying trend. Not only is it painstakingly complicated and time consuming, but it is also losing its luster as content strategies become more progressive.

 

IF YOU HAVE DONE THE KEYWORD RESREACHING AND WRITTEN A VALUABLE PIECE OF CONTENT, GENERATING BACKLINKS FOR IT IS NOT GOING TO BE MUCH OF A PROBLEM. JUST FOLLOW MY LEAD here,

 

• Power of SOCIAL MEDIA – If you have a good social media presence, you can always share your content with your fans and following and they in return will share and like your content, if there is value in it for them. Some might even share your posts with others out of sheer goodwill. That’s how easy it is to get backlinks pointing to your website, if you have a compact community of your own.
• Clean Website Interface – Your website interface plays a crucial role in deterring or encouraging people to share the content that you have published. According to statistics (just take my word for it), majority of the content that goes viral on social media is from websites that offer clean and clutter free interface.

 

If you offer an enhanced user experience at your website, a visitor will more likely feel comfortable in sharing your ‘helpful’ and ‘valuable’ content with others.NOT only this, but it also has a very positive impact in diminishing the bounce rate of your website. Lesser the bounce rate, higher the chances of traffic converting into your brand followers or users.

 

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FINAL WORDS

To sum it up, the key to driving organic traffic is Valuable Content, powered by effective keyword research, social sharing and earning backlinks along with writing on topics around your niche or category that is evergreen and  always looked for.Don’t forget to share your views below and if you liked this read, then go ahead and click the Social Media Buttons Below – they do magic. 😉 

Google Pirate update Rolled out

Pirates have existed for triggering copyright infringement in every possible manner on the vast Caribbean of the World Wide Web. This has always forced the different industries online, especially the entertainment industry since a past few years, to ask Google for coming up with its anti-piracy policy or tool. Well, as expected, these requests have fallen on the carefully listening ears due to which the search engine giant has managed to respond by implementing different anti-piracy measures safely.

Google has kept making changes in its search engine algorithms to demote the most wicked pirate sites. One of the most renowned changes is an improved effort to make such sites less visible in search results, directly indicating that they will not appear in the initial search pages. Since 2012, Google has been running a down ranking system but is reported to lack effectiveness as per the copyright industry groups such as RIAA and MPAA.

Just last week, the giant has announced of the improved version that aims to address this comment/issue. With the updated version of ‘How Google Fights Piracy’ report that was originally introduced in 2013 for defending the claims by film and music copyright holders, Google seems to give an overview of all the efforts for fighting piracy as well as reveal the importance of responsibility of copyright holders for making the content available. The 26-page report delineates the following anti-piracy principles of Google:

• Defense against abuse
• Generation of better and more legitimate alternatives to keep piracy at bay
• Provision of transparency
• Funds monitoring, as Google believes that the most effective way to fight against online pirates is to reduce their money supply while prohibiting rogue sites from its ad and payment services
• Guarantee of effectiveness, efficiency, and scalability

Introduction to Google Pirate Update

Established in August 2012, the Pirate Update refers to a filter designed to disallow sites with several copyright infringement filings through the Google’s Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) system to rank well in the search engine results. Because this filter is regularly updated, the formerly influenced sites can manage to escape in case they have rectified the mistakes or made improvements. Well, at the same time, the filter is also capable of sensing new sites that managed to escape before as well as releasing ‘falsely caught sites’.

The update is just as other updates such as Penguin and allows processing all sites to catch any site appearing to be in violation. Once caught, the site is then stuck with a downgrade until they tend to get fewer or no complaints to get back into the race. However, since its day of introduction, the filter has never been rerun, which means a real pirate site along with new violators during this two years, which  need to be punished, might have managed to escape. This has perhaps made Google to finally update its Pirate Filter after two years!

Sensing Pirates

A smart way exists for Google to guess whether copyright infringement is happening, which is of using the DMCA ‘takedown’ requests. Due to these requests, the pirated content can be removed from Google. It is just a matter of filing a request and that pirate site can be easily thrown out from search results. Although this is not an evidence of copyright infringement, it acts as an allegation that can be challenged. Keeping this in mind, Google assesses each request and removes the content only after it deems valid.

It would not be wrong to say that filing such a request was a painful task, because each request only addressed one Web page. This was true in case the target Web site is big. However, today, the anti-pirate game’s target has changed from page-by-page to site-by-site basis. A guide to most likely to be affected sites is available on online transparency report showing the rank of sites according to the total number of takedowns obtained.

Therefore, if your site has received too many DMCA ‘takedown’ requests, it is high time to look out. This is because a new penalty is out to lower its rank in Google’s search results. Further, it is applied in conjunction with other penalties or updates such as Penguin and Panda.

Valid Requests: How Much Valid They Can Be?

However, what if someone files a request or complaint that seems to be true even if it is not? Yes, chances are high of such an incidence to occur. A request filed needs to be ‘valid’. The definition of ‘valid’ is simply that a filing with right paperwork has not received a counter-comment.

It is a fact that only copyright holders can determine whether something is authorized and only a court can confirm whether a copyright was infringed or not. The search engine giant itself cannot find whether a specific page violates the copyright policy or not.

Well, while the new filter continues to influence the ranking order in search results, Google shall not remove any page from the results until it receives a justifiable copyright removal notice from the owner of the rights. Further, it will continue to offer counter-notice tools for reinstating the content that is believed to be wrongly removed.

According to a digital rights group called The EFF, it is particularly worried about the false positives problem. For instance, it is common to spot the government wrongly flagged sites that genuinely can post the supposedly infringing material under suspicion. The EFF, therefore, asserts that without knowing on how Google’s is planning to combat with piracy, it is not wise to assume its successful prevention of such similar mistakes.

It is also often argued that the takedown requests are only accusations of infringement of copyright. Neither Google nor court confirms about the validity of accusations although copyright owners might be hold accountable for bad-faith accusations. Downgrading search results only means telling the visitor that these are the most irrelevant sites to check out, which simply ends up giving more control to the copyright owners based on accusations alone.

A blog post by Public Knowledge that is an online rights group has raised fair concerns with reassurances. It believes that the filter is a winner in case the new policy helps in spotting legitimate sources, averts penalizing the lawful sites, and defends the legal interests of copyright holders. However, a new system such as this one has risks as well as accidental consequences, apart from the danger of being misused. Public Knowledge knows that Google is aware of this side of the coin but it is waiting to see how it will tackle such problems and whether it will go on to give top priority to the interests of users or not.

The Upcoming Update 2014

 

Keeping the above facts and controversies in mind, Google has planned to make it next update such that the pirate sites become harder to find, instead of dropping the sites from the search result pages. These sites will have lower visibility for common terms in use, such as a song or movie name.

The new tweak will ensure that a few most ‘notorious’ pirate sites are less likely to appear on result pages when searchers use keywords related to films, music, and other copyrighted content. However, the fact remains that those who know to search smartly and rightly will be able to see the pirate sites, at least their pages that have not been caught or removed through DMCA filings. Nevertheless, the update is likely to come with improvements and new efforts as follows:

• Ad Formats: Katherine Oyama, Google’s senior copyright counsel, revealed about testing new ad formats showing links to authorized digital video and music services when search is made for keywords including ‘free’, ‘watch’, and ‘download’ and discarding terms from its auto complete facility in case the return results consists of several DMCA demoted sites. This will surely help in finding the legitimate media sources. The legal sites are likely to flow on top of the page. Apart from testing new formats of ads in search results, Google is also testing other ways of exposing legitimate sources of media, especially through the right panel on the search results page. Right now, these results are shown only in the United States but this will be expanded internationally.
• Better DMCA Demotion Signal: Google has refined the signal to affect the visible rankings of a few most notorious sites coming up early on result pages for a targeted keyword. This will help down rank the truly violating sites.
• Utilizing Autocomplete: The new update also aims to removing more terms from the well-known feature of autocomplete, which will done strictly on the basis of DMCA removal notices. Google has actually started demoting autocomplete predictions that fetch URLs on result page, which demoted by the DMCA.

This update is perhaps an essential move to allow the entertainment giants to get the most out of the Internet. With this update, no brand in the industry would continue to blame Google instead of its outdated distribution models. In fact, the MPAA has already admired this move of Google.

According to a post at The Guardian, Michael O’Leary who is the senior executive vice-president at the Motion Picture Association of America praised the entertainment industry. He is quite optimistic about the fact that this update will guide visitors to the several legitimate ways for accessing media online without stealing the hard work of innovative people.

Even RIAA has praised this update and believes it to better prioritize licensed music. It believes the update to be a potentially significant change that can prove to be truly meaningful to the creators by ranking the copyright violating sites lower in results than before. Well, this in turn, should ensure better rankings for licensed media services that not only deliver the best music but also pay to the creative artists. RIAA has affirmed the update to be a vital move in the right direction, something that all media players have been willing to see.

It can be concluded that most entertainment brands consider this update as a rational step, which treats copyright in a consistent manner. Certainly, Google has triggered an innovative willingness to treasure the rights of creators, considering that the digital marketplace on the Web for licensed digital services is far better than it was before few years.

The Reason behind Two Years Delay in Updating the Pirate Filter

While the algorithm updates are there since quite a time, piracy check has been a recent introduction. The reason for this is perhaps the recently recognized need of partnerships by this content distribution company.

It, therefore, has finally concluded to tackle the upsetting situation of pirate sites showing up higher in the result pages. However, one needs to think that why only Google is enforced for such anti-pirate policy while this happens even at Bing, about which anyone is hardly concerned.

Breaking the silence, Google has asserted that the anti-piracy change is happening now because it has all the required data that was lacking before. Because it introduced copyright removals in 2012, it has received much data about online content infringement by the copyright owners.

Today, Google is obtaining and processing more notices of copyright removal on daily basis than in 2009. It will now take this data for ranking pages in search rankings. According to the updated ‘The How Google Fights Piracy’ report, Google obtained more than 224 million DMCA requests in 2013 for search results. This means that the average time consumed for tackling these requests is below six hours. Google also revealed that it removed 222M, which indicates 1% rejection due to lack of additional information, false infringement, or inability to find the page.

At present, by gaining praises from the entertainment industry and digital rights groups, Google is also deepening its partnership with them. Recently, it has collaborated with Paramount Pictures for advertising their new movie ‘Interstellar’ through a highly interactive site. While strengthening the relationships, Google continues to strive hard for overcoming piracy across diverse services.