Tuesday, December 17, 2019

200+ hours of volunteering in 2019

We are proud to provide a company volunteering program and even prouder to announce that our team contributed more than 200 hours of their time giving back this year. We work with Benefacto which is an excellent platform for employees to access a wide range of options and find something that resonates with them as […]

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Friday, December 13, 2019

5 Core Content Types You Need To Support Your Marketing

Fill your editorial calendar with 5 core content types to help visitors. Also meets content marketing goals with least resource use. With examples & tactics.

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Monday, December 9, 2019

PR & SEO is better together: five steps to maximising returns

SEOs have been using PR tactics to gain links for years, but now more than ever link building is becoming increasingly reliant on both areas working in tandem to gain the most it can from both sides. While the two may seem wildly different in approach, both marketing pillars essentially have building trust at their […]

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Wednesday, December 4, 2019

Seismic Shift Marketing: What You Need To Do Now

Seismic Shift Marketing

Seismic Shift MarketingWonder what Seismic Shift Marketing is and how it will impact your business? Get the Seismic Marketing Shift definition, data and tips to succeed.

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Announcing Builtvisible’s MBO – Everything you need to know

Where we’ve come from If you followed our 10th anniversary celebrations earlier this year and read ‘It’s been 10 years… Builtvisible is celebrating our 10-year anniversary’ you’ll know our story – a blog turned agency, started by Richard Baxter and grown in all senses, organically! 4 years ago our Managing Director, Geoff Griffiths, took the […]

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SEO Writing for Copywriters → The Ultimate Guide

SEO writing has become an adventure, a complicated math problem we are all trying to calculate for finding the secret to get results faster. The number of search engine factors have advanced, the Google algorithm updates has increased, the number of businesses that use SEO have increased, the number of SEO agencies have increased and more and more people have become aware of its importance. That’s how the market got pretty cluttered and the competition very high. And we know how important it is for you to stand up in the crowd.

 

There are some things that are still available in terms of SEO, and also lots of new ones. We’ve put together a guide to find out how to write for SEO in 2020 and beyond. This way,  you can make sure you remain at the top of the pile.

 

How_to_Write_for_SEO_-_The_Step_by_Step_Guide

 

  1. What Is SEO Writing?
  2. Why Is Writing for SEO Important?
  3. Basics of SEO Writing
    1. What Is an SEO Copywriter?
    2. What Skills Should a Content Writer Have?
    3. How Does Content Performance Impact SEO and Rankings?
  4. How to Write for SEO? [TL;DR – Best Tips]
  5. Guidelines for SEO Copywriters 
    1. Keyword Research for Content & SEO Writers
      1. Understand the Search Intent of Your Visitors
      2. What Type of Content Do People Search in Google?
      3. Find (Evergreen) Content Topics That Pass the Test of Time
      4. Double-Check for Duplicate Content on Your Site
    2. Make a Summary List with All the Information Gathered
    3. Craft a Content Template Having User Experience in Mind
    4. Include Tags in Title and Body
    5. Write In-Depth and Relevant Pieces of Content
    6. Animate Your Text by Adding Images, Audio, Video Content
    7. Make Use of the Power of Internal Linking
    8. Make Your Content Mobile Friendly
    9. Create Google Friendly URLs
    10. Spread the Word
  6. How Important Is It to Update Content on My Website?
  7. Should I Delete Underperforming Content from My Site?

 

We’ve put or hands to work to let you know everything there’s to know about SEO copywriting, from Q to M (keyboard letters arrangement). Leaving the copywriter jokes aside, let’s focus on the how to write for SEO, the basics, and finally the steps to get the Wonderland of first positions on Google. 

 

1. What Is SEO Writing?

 

Writing for SEO refers to a technique that pleases not only the reader but the search engines as well. The standard type of copywriting relies on storytelling, on descriptive information, on niched content based on the knowledge of the audience. It is also known as copywriting with SEO in mind.

 

SEO writing is a process of writing that helps websites rank higher in search engines. By combining copywriter’s creativity with processes website content can stand out quicker in the major search engines.

 

Writing for SEO is a pretty straightforward process. It requires content strategy, well-researched data and discipline. You’ll have to perform keyword research to understand the intent of your audience searches and find out what type of content your audience consumes, spy your audience and find the competitive advantage – the content gap. 

 

SEO copywriting combines three important elements. Similar to the successful trio – the three wise monkeys 🙈🙉🙊 – it creates a synergy between:

  • Information Gap
  • Audience
  • Google (or other search engines)

 

There are also other approaches on this matter, like Kim, the Marketing Director of Alexa, has another approach to the essence of SEO copywriting:

 

SEO copywriting is probably more of an art than a science. 
KIM KOSAKA KIM KOSAKA
Marketing Director of Alexa
 

2. Why Is Writing for SEO Important?

 

Writing for SEO is important because it’s a one of the best ways you can make sure your content will reach your readers. Search engine optimization is the ticket to the Wonderland of first places in Google. Otherwise we would write in vain. People wouldn’t find your content, and it wouldn’t serve anybody, nor the users, nor the search engines (which is the way users get to your content). 

So, wouldn’t you want to take part in this beautiful adventure and get there? 

 

 

Creating SEO friendly content is important to help your audience, build organic traffic to your website and keep your loyal clients. SEO keeps the business running. While other ways of distributing content and paid ads bring you clients as long as you keep investing money, SEO is used for long-time strategies that maintain your website visible in search and needs less financial investment. To reach top positions and remain there, you’ll have to do more than writing content.

 

Your content needs to:

  • be optimized;
  • contain the natural language of your visitors;
  • understand their pain points and offer solutions, answer their questions.

 

On the last matter, Google offers directions for every query you search and shows possible questions that people also ask. 

 

People also ask section on Google

 

To implement a long term strategy for SEO content, you’ll have to understand its basics. 

 

3. Basics of SEO Writing

 

If you got until this point, you need to understand that we won’t provide secret tactics, shortcut tips that will bring you instant top positions, huge volume of organic traffic or thousands of links. Instead, we provide a well-documented strategy that has worked for us and other SEO pros numerous times, but it requires effort. Results are coming, but not effortlessly.

 

To get great results, you need not only knowledge, means, tools but also an SEO copywriter, a person that needs to have the skills to do things right. 

 

3.1 What Is an SEO Copywriter?

 

An SEO copywriter writes content that is optimized for a website to rank on top pages of the search engines. If a copywriter writes copy for the sole purpose of communicating a message, develop an idea, describe a situation or an event, an SEO specialist analyzes, examines and tracks results for a website’s content to boost search engine rankings. His main role is to resolve any issues that might block the website from ranking higher. 

 

The copywriter who writes with SEO in mind combines the jobs of those two players. He uses the means and strategies of the SEO specialist to communicate the way copywriters do and reach lots of readers. 

 

SEO copywriters vs. traditional copywriters write content that also tackles the interest and search intent of a person. This drives more visitors to a page compared to traditional way of writing.

 

An SEO content marketer has the ability to turn a simple article into a piece that is written for the user and it’s beautifully optimized for Google. For that, an SEO copywriter needs to have lots of skills.

 

3.2 What Skills Should a Content Writer Have?

 

Since SEO copywriting combines a more complex strategy, all SEO copywriters should know how to write, have a unique voice and a particular writing style. The SEO content writer needs to understand the audience and spy on the competition. 

 

Becoming an SEO writing expert does require more organizing and management skills because they should know what topics to approach, perform keyword research, competitive analysis, take actions and come up with suggestions. That person should also know what topics were discussed on the blog, come up with re-writing ideas or create fresh content if needed. And that doesn’t stop there. That person should take into consideration all the content on the website – product pages, the homepage, the about page and other category pages. An SEO copywriter should evaluate the whole website. 

 

The content marketers need to come up with ideas and techniques, such as content pruning, content amplification, content syndication, content curation and many more. They can also create hybrid techniques to boost the power of content and make it convertible. 

 

A content writer should develop skills for finding new blog content ideas, listen to the readers, ask questions, accept criticism, answer questions and even come up with ideas to repurpose content. 

 

3.3 How Does Content Performance Impact SEO and Rankings?

 

Based on a research we’ve made on 3,784,369 pieces of content, it turns out that content impacts SEO and rankings. We discovered that a high Content Performance score is correlated with top rankings in Google. Check out the chart below. 

 

Content-Performance-Rankings-cognitiveSEO

 

As you can see, there’s a direct connection between the Content Performance Score and the keyword positions in Google. Pages with a higher score experienced higher search positions. And the importance of a well-optimized piece of content increased. At the moment, it has become one of the most important ranking factors. 

 

As you can see in the print screen below, in 2017 the content had a big impact on top Google positions, but in 2019 it seems that content’s importance is bigger than ever.  

 

Content-Performance-vs-Top-20-Google-Positions

 

cognitiveSEO’s Content optimization tool offers a Content Performance score based on how well optimized a piece of content is for a targeted keyword. The content tool is really simple to use. You’ll have to add the focus keyword or phrase that you are targeting and then add your piece of content. Below you can see a printscreen from the Content Optimizer. On the left side, you have the content and on the right side you have:

 

  • The content performance score which shows you how well a page is optimized from a content point of view, on a scale from 0 to 100. The higher the score, the better optimized the content. 
  • The position on which that content might rank given by the content performance metric. 
  • The type of search intent – there are three types of content: informational, navigational and transactional.
  • The analyzed keywords: displayed in three categories, such as keywords that are already added, keywords you can add once and keywords you should add more than once.
  • A section on people also ask: extracted from Google search results, as we previously discussed. 

 

 

The tool is very helpful in optimizing the content for the search engines but also keeping your focus on what users want to find out by looking into “content ideas via questions people ask”

 

4. How to Write for SEO [TL;DR – Best Tips]

 

Now that you’ve understood what does writing for SEO means, it importance, and the influence of content on rankings, it’s time to move forward to the strategy of writing search engine optimization friendly content. 

 

Below you can find some steps to understand how to write for SEO plus some steps to get you going: 

 

How to write for SEO guideline

 

For better knowledge of the process, observe the following SEO writing tips:

 

  • Elaborate a descriptive terminology and build compelling content by finding topics of interest and the killer questions people ask on specific topics.
  • Don’t try to build content for topics or noisy environments where there is a saturated niche with way too much content.
  • Find content gaps by spying your competition in search on certain topics. See what others are writing and come up with better content.
  • Understand the context of your potential customers’ search and fill in the gaps.
  • Find out the search intent and deliver appropriate content. For a single keyword, there might be lots of topics. Take, for example, the keyword rock – which can be about music, geology, radio station, and more.
  • Try as much as possible to find evergreen content topics.
  • Build various types of content: how-to, video, white papers, lists and more.
  • Don’t stick to old tricks, but rather look for delivering new content, but also update existing articles.
  • Make a structure or summary for your content once you decided upon the topic.
  • Add beautiful visuals to your piece of content.
  • Make sure you do internal link building within the webpages of your site.
  • Check your site for duplicate content and other content related problems and fix the issues with an SEO audit tool.
  • Check user experience and design a fast website, by following Google’s guidelines (using the Google Speed Test Insights and Lighthouse).
  • Create a mobile-friendly website or use CMS (such as WordPress) that are designed by default to be device friendly.

 

If you want to go in-depth you can check this big list of copywriting tips that are designed to boost conversion rates.

Before moving to each step and learning how to put into practice those tips, it’s important to understand the role of your audience.  

 

We’ve said it lots of times before, and we’ll continue to say it as long as everybody understands the importance of its meaning:

Content must be written for the user; you should write content for people.

Contextual content is the latest approach in terms of writing for SEO at the moment. It is one of the important changes that took place in the last period. Lots of SEO experts talk about semantic and context-based results.

 

5. Guidelines for SEO Copywriters

 

Write SEO content

After we’ve got you these preparation steps for gathering all the information and SEO tips that you need to make a great piece, you’ll have to put to work your writing style and skills. Remember the SEO copywriting techniques and write an outstanding article. Here you put your magic into action. The content creation process begins.

 

 

Besides the natural language and creative abilities, some SEO technicalities are almost mandatory for success. Writing SEO friendly blog posts can be difficult and time-consuming. However, it’s time well spent, as SEO helps us rank better in the search engines.

 

Correct grammar, descriptive topic where you reach all the points related, personal opinions, real conclusion and unique content are necessary for creating highly readable web pages.

 

5.1 Keyword Research for Content & SEO Writers

 

The first step in SEO content writing should be keyword research. Deploying the topics of interest and the killer questions, we can elaborate a descriptive terminology and build compelling content. Searching for primary or secondary keywords will help us describe the topic at its best for the users and make it optimized for search. 

 

Finding keywords shouldn’t be hard, yet it’s not a walk in the park either. You need to have a starting point and based on the targeted keyword, you can find many derivatives. Some tools can help you find the best examples and generate organic traffic. The Keyword Tool and Content Optimizer is an awesome helper on this matter. It’s like your best buddy you can call in the middle of the night to get you out of trouble. You can find new topics ideas and related keywords to the one you are targeting, as well as the questions that people are asking related to your topic. 

 

keyword-explorer cognitiveseo

 

We are talking about producing content for SEO, which means valuable, evergreen and quality all-in-one. For that, you need to raise your head up the crowd and don’t get flushed away by all the people that are “writing” and creating worthless content. There are lots of noisy environments with “too much” SEO content.

 

Without a strategy, content is just stuff, and the world has enough stuff.
Arjun Arjun Basu
Award-nominated author

 

You have to become an SEO content writer, not just a simple writer for succeeding at SEO. You need to ask and answer the right questions so that your content helps the users and keeps them on the page.

 

Valuable content is found at the intersection between your customer’s needs and your business expertise.
sonia_sharon Sonja and Sharon
Founders of ValuableContent

 

What is valuable content

Source: www.valuablecontent.co.uk

 

Valuable and quality content breaks the glass and goes beyond the screen. Imagine that your visitors come from all directions and you need to make them feel that they’ve come to the right place. They need trust, so you’ll need to offer the information they need and think: “Wow. This is the place for me. Somebody really understands me.”

 

5.1.1 Understand the Search Intent of Your Visitors

 

To get to the previous situation described above, you’ll have to understand the context of your potential customers’ search and fill in the gaps. It’s mandatory to know your potential customers’ needs and interests to understand the search intent afterward.

 

Google discovered that the conventional keyword search, as we know it, has some limitations and doesn’t offer topical results based on the query search. For a simple keyword, there are lots of related topics and information available online.

 

Google has developed patents to understand context from knowledge bases for more accurate results. It wants to focus more on topic-related results, so the whole process works based on probabilities. For example, when a user performs a search on Google, the search engine uses a system to return landing pages with topics related to the query by looking at the text on that page.

 

Topical search results

 

You may ask how you can take advantage of that and get ideas for contextual keywords. Focus on the user, the user’s search intent and how to steal their heart and convert them.

 

Let’s take an example. You have a pastry in the US and have a new recipe of cronut. For those who don’t know, a cronut is a croissant-doughnut invented by a pastry from New York City. 

 

We used the Keyword Tool and Content Optimizer for this example. We searched for “cronut” and below you can see the results, starting first with the keyword suggestions: 

 

Searching for cronut on Keyword Tool

 

Based on our example, you can see what people from the US searched for on desktop. Most of the keywords are informational, which means most people want to know and understand what cronuts are. If your target audience already knows about them, then choose directly the keywords that are more relevant and descriptive, such as: “easy cronut recipe from scratch”, “how to make cronuts with puff pastry”. Based on these two keywords, you can perform other searches to find more relevant keywords. Filter the results based on relevancy or volume. 

 

Since we’ve talked about context, then it’s essential to collect as many keywords as possible and select a topic in the second step. When we get to the onpage optimization part, you’ll need focus keywords. Don’t end up with just one keyword, look for a second keyword, similar to the first one. 

 

Since you want to tell the world about your new cronut, there are multiple ways to do so. But first, you need to understand the search intent of your visitor. For that, you’ll have to look into Ranking Analysis. For each type of query, you can see one of the following types of search intent: informational, navigational or transactional. Based on your keyword search, you’ll have to write similar content: informational, navigational or transactional. 

It is very important to decide on the keyword before writing the content, to deliver the type of content asked for and needed by the users.

If you go with the navigational type of keyword, then search for the keyword and see the volume and who your competitors are. If you go with the first type of content – informational, then check to see what other people are searching for.

 

user search intent cognitiveseo

 

5.1.2 What Type of Content Do People Search in Google?

 

search-keywords

Before actually starting to so SEO writing, your first step is to understand what type of content users want and Google encourages you to write. SEO and content go hand in hand.Usually, users search for something on search engines because they have a desire, and want to find answers and information.

 

 

Finding the reason behind it requires deeper SEO analysis and Google is using context to show better search intent results. And your job is to create the right type of content for your users and for Google to rank it. 

 

We can agree that on a larger scale, there are three types of content: 

 

  • TOFU content delivers informational content
  • MOFU content delivers transactional content
  • BOFU content delivers navigational content

 

In the screenshot below, you can see what each of these acronyms mean. 

 

content marketing unnel

 

What is top of funnel content (TOFU)?

 

Top of the funnel content is that type of content that offers information and tries to teach the visitors, answers common questions or pain points. At this stage, you don’t try to sell to the visitor because you might risk losing them. At all costs, avoid commercial content for this audience. TOFU content is used mainly for attracting new prospects and build awareness. 

 

What is middle of funnel content (MOFU)?

 

Middle of the funnel content lays between quality content that keeps the users informed and their understanding and need of your services or products. It is a key piece in your content marketing strategy. You can deliver MOFU content through case studies, personalized white paper that includes your business solutions, product reviews and best practices, discounts, webinars, events, surveys and so on. 

 

What is bottom of funnel content (BOFU)?

 

Bottom of the funnel content is at the purchase level, where you have brand loyalty and users see in you their loved brand. It comes after TOFU content and MOFU content as validation for delivering valuable content that responded to your clients’ needs. It is the type of content where you nurture and convert your lead magnets into customers. With the right data, you can increase your conversion rate. BOFU content can have different forms, such as live demos, customer stories and personal reviews from clients, comparison products, new product or features launch and so on.

 

Your audience can be divided into all three stages of the buying funnel: top of funnel (TOFU), middle of funnel (MOFU) and bottom of funnel (BOFU). For each stage, there are specific triggers that pull the visitor down the funnel. And for that, you need to create content that will convert them. 

 

Marketing funnel and SEO

Source: www.aweber.com

 

The perfect content needs to deliver information based on the stage of the content marketing funnel where your audience is. For that, you need to know what type of content works best for all those three stages. 

 

 

5.1.3 Find (Evergreen) Content Topics That Pass the Test of Time

 

The second step in the research phase is finding topics that keep pulling people to your website. Usually, the articles that are evergreen have information that doesn’t alter in time. It is the type of content that solves a problem a lot of people is struggling with.

 

In the example above, I was talking about cronuts. For some, it might be an old story, but for others a new discovery. It is unique comparing to other types of deserts; it has two things into one. That type of product/topic might be what makes it last. When it first appeared in NYE, people stood in line for this hybrid. Nobody knew how it tasted, but everybody was intrigued. So the mystery draws attention and uniqueness keeps it alive. Word of mouth was a good trigger. The lesson here is that you need a topic that will engage the community.

 

You can draw attention to a dull product from a boring niche. You just need a creative idea. 

 

There really is no such thing as a boring subject. Just boring, unimaginative writers.
  BEN HURT
 

 

You can create a recipe with steps and tips because, according to the research, there were lots of people who want to find out how to make a cronut. The basic recipe won’t change, but there will be variations to it. So people will go to basic before trying something new for the first time.

 

There are some other tricks you could use to take advantage of content immortality:

 

  • appeal to the historical evolution of a certain product/topic/service and so on;
  • create how-to guides or helpful documents;
  • make a list of frequently asked questions;
  • share best practices;
  • write strategies;
  • elaborate case studies, studies results and examples;
  • best of niche blogs, influencers, experts – for outreach;
  • explain the history of your business or your success story;
  • create correlations with other industries, find inspiring ideas.

 

I got my inspiration after I read an interesting blog post on the furniture store Furniture of Dalton’s blog, entitled Sofa Story: A Brief History of Ten Iconic Forms. And after reading it, I thought that article might be a very good example of how content evolved. And the Sofa Story can be correlated to content evolution, with a more visual effect.

 

In the early days, sofas were hard, harsh supports made out of stone, wood, steel and lots of other material without any cushion. Over time, they gained popularity, and some types of sofas started to become a little too tawdry, with lots of cushions until they made their way to a more contemporary soft seating in a range of styles.

 

Roman sofa

Roman sofa made of Terracotta (form the second half 4th BC) displayed at Louvre

Grecian couch (from 1825) displayed at High Museum of Art, Atlanta

Grecian couch (from 1825) displayed at High Museum of Art, Atlanta

Modern sofa

Modern sofa you can find in stores nowadays

 

If we were to compare it to content, it pretty easy to see the similarities; content started small, then there was the keyword stuffing era, and afterward, it got more accurate and harmonious.

 

You’ll have to study the competition and see what their focus is, to outrank them. Competition might be very high in some niches. The Keyword Explorer is here to guide you. For a specific query, the ones that we’ve discovered above, we can see the type of query we pursue –  and easily get more insights on the user intent.

 

Cronut recipe - Ranking Analysis

 

In our example, we have an informational query. Looking at the competitors, we can see what SEO pages are ranking. Skimming through the first ten pages, we find lots of cooking blogs, a video tutorial for a magazine (that ranks twice – once with the video from Youtube, and secondly with the article published on-site).

 

In this case, we see what our competitors are and get inspired by them. Since you are a business, you can write your pieces of content using more unconventional methods. Remember how important visuals are in this industry. Numbered, highlighted or bulleted steps make the recipe appear simpler and easier to make.

 

5.1.4 Double-Check for Duplicate Content on Your Site

 

Even though there’s no duplicate content penalty caused by content duplicate issues, it is quite damaging for your site. If Google finds duplicate content, it might not feature your piece of content in the search results. Google throws your content into something often called Google Omitted Results.

 

what are google omitted results 

 

If you SPAM the web all the time, it might even consider not indexing your site anymore. And since nobody would want that, learn how to avoid having duplicate content on your site. 

As a general rule of thumb, Google tries to display only 1 version of the same content.

 

Unfortunately, Google Search Console no longer allows you to see your duplicate content issues. Some time ago, this was possible, but Google “let go” of this old feature.

 

One way to detect duplicate content is to use the cognitiveSEO Site Audit Tool. The tool has a special section for that, where it automatically identifies any duplicate content issues. Therefore, you can quickly take a look at your duplicate pages, duplicate titles, descriptions, etc. More than that, the tool has a section that identifies near-duplicate pages and tells you the level of similarity between them.

 

duplicate content screenshot

 

5.2 Make a Summary List with All the Information Gathered

 

Once you’ve collected your focus keywords and the words and phrases recommended by the tool for your SEO article, you can make a list. A simple document is enough. My method is pretty simple and you can use it in your own writing process.

 

  1. First, I write a topic or title (that will be modified when I finish the article).
  2. Then, I add my focus keywords.
  3. I have a section named ideas or a structure of the article, where I use bullet points for all sorts of information that I want to discuss. Here you can add all the ideas that you have and that you’ve discovered by looking at your competitors because our goal is to create the best piece of content there is out there. Use quotes with the source attached, save URLs, images and more.
  4. Conclusion/final note – left in blank. This will be added only after I finish the article and I can sum up a final idea based on my findings.

 

Now you can start working on crafting the content template for your article. Would you follow a basic look or try to make it more attractive?

 

5.3. Craft a Content Template Having User Experience in Mind

 

visual appearance

Every article that you write needs to have a creative content template, a natural flow. If we go further with our example, the web content needs clean visuals – images, videos, gifs, and a very important step is to create a cover photo that approaches and has the title written on it. It is easier to share it on Facebook, Pinterest and more. If you can, create a longer picture – similar to an infographic picturing the final look of the desert, if we follow our example, and then the ingredients and steps you have to perform.

 

Make it simple and easy to follow. Here’s an example:

 

Cronut sample

 

The way you structure your article is synced with the design of the website. That means the design of your website can make it easier or not to perform some magic tricks with your content. If you’re using an open-source content management system and not a customizable HTML website, such as WordPress, then it is easier to implement a layout.

 

The way information is displayed has high importance. For a recipe, you need to have the first section with ingredients that need to be separated from the main body of the article. And visuals have a higher significance. Below you can see a good example you could inspire from.

 

Receipt layout

Source: lifeloveandsugar.com

 

The trick of this page is that Print button which makes it easier for people to have it in physical format. Somebody really knows the audience and their behavior. When you cook, you make a lot of mess and a printed format of the recipe is a very good way to make the content more useful. Lindsay, the blogger of this website, got an extra point for this little feature because her content breaks the virtual space. UX is well applied to this recipe page.

 

User experience – the holy light that brightens the page and triggers the appreciation of the user. Depending on the type of content, there are some things you shouldn’t miss in order to keep the user and don’t scare them. Beside site speed and optimized images, you should also have sharing buttons (if possible for images have the Pin icon – if visuals have high importance, like in our example for pastries, desserts, and everything related to cooking, in general).

 

Pinterest button

 

Some other elements that you should keep in mind are:

 

  • adaptable screen resolution;
  • simple font with reasonable size and line spacing;
  • separate sections of images and text, not overlapping content without white space;
  • user location integration for local personalization;

 

There’s an explanatory image of what UX means, created by Stephen P. Anderson, an internationally recognized speaker.

 

holistic header

 

UX also means knowing your user and their behavior, so you can anticipate and give more freedom to use and read your content. Just like the example above, the print button is a great integration for recipe pages.

 

5.4 Include Tags in Title and Body 

 

In SEO writing, besides content, the title also matters. And for that, there are lots of studies to back up. 

 

Adding the keyword closer to the beginning of the title will give you high advantages. Firstly, because you can increase your click-through rate, as the user would like to click on titles that contain what they are looking for online.  Secondly, this way you can avoid that the title to be changed by Google and have a different title shown in SERP. Google does this now. Depending on the search made by the user and what is found relevant on your page, the search result for your webpage as you know it can be altered by Google and you can get a different title and meta description. 

 

Google is smart to understand what your page is about, but it is important you give it some hints.

 

If you offer good hints, then it will figure it out easier and reward your webpage with better SEO rankings. 

 

The second thing to mention on this topic is the effect of keywords in the title. In one of our researches, we could see if adding the keyword in the title influence rankings. By evaluating titles analyzed in the research, we used 3 levels of similarity (low, medium and high) to spark some light into the discovery and extract data from the first 20 search engine ranking positions. 

 

The effect of Keywords in titles

 

If we take a look at the chart results, we can’t really talk about a high correlation since the differences are pretty subtle. But we can surely get out some insights. For example, mainly the instances with a high similarity can be found for 1st ranking website. The red line is slightly bigger than the rest of the rankings. Moreover, there’s an overall decreasing trend form the 1st position until the 20th position. Which can mean only one thing:

 

Adding the keyword in the title can make a clear difference between ranking 1st or 2nd.

 

Another good intake is to try optimizing the title for multiple keywords, if possible. But don’t include keywords just for the sake of it. 

 

Since we are talking about writing for SEO, you need to include tags to let search engines know how your piece is structured. Title tag has a high influence on your piece of content because it will be displayed as the big blue link in search engine results:

 

Title tag

 

Title tags and headlines are really important because that’s the first thing the user sees. To create compelling titles, follow headline formulas and check out your competition. If you look at your competition, you can see how you can create better headlines and standout. 

 

You need to have a relevant, engaging and attractive title to make the user click on it and stay on page. Also, don’t make a promise from the title that you can’t fulfill in the body content. There might be cases when Google rewrites your title tag with information from meta description and page content if Google doesn’t like the one you added. Chances are this won’t be as good as the one you’ve created, so you must ensure that your own title tag is completely relevant, descriptive, has the right length and the focus keyword phrases included.

 

There are some copywriting techniques you could follow for generating clickthrough rates:

 

  • Create actionable titles, asking the user’s question: What’s in it for me?
  • Use the brand leverage. For well-known brands, it is in their best interest to use the brand name in the title.
  • Don’t use title case.
  • Create unique title tags.
  • The body tag shouldn’t miss. You need to highlight that part and explain to the search engines where the main part of your content is. Where other tags are incorporated, such as heading tags (H1, H2, H3, ..H6), image alt descriptions. There are some other HTML elements that you should integrate for better optimization: URLs and meta descriptions.
 

5.5 Write In-Depth and Relevant Pieces of Content

 

Now that you know what type of content you should write, it’s time to actually start writing for SEO and most importantly for your users’ needs.

 

Google likes in-depth and relevant content.

 

Content creation is very important, as you already know. The key here is to always add high-quality content on your website. This will improve dwell time by keeping your visitors engaged. 

 

Studies say longer posts are more often associated with better ranks. In one of our researches, it turned out that the top-ranking articles have around 2000 words. 

 

Below you can see the results for the blog posts that have 1001-5000 number of words, amongst other categories. 

 

Number of words in an article

As you can see  the number of ranks decreases when the positions drop. The first 5 positions can be set apart from the rest of the pages. It seems that overall a higher number of words are correlated with higher ranks. That is suggested not only by the chart but also by the Pearson Correlation Coefficient, which indicates a very strong negative correlation (-0.9). The negative correlation means that, in general, longer posts are more often associated with better ranks.

 

 

5.6 Animate Your Text by Adding Images, Audio, Video Content

 

make list

 

Video content can boost your content and increase your conversion rates. If we follow our previous example regarding cronuts, for the query “cronuts with puff pastry,” we have a website that ranks first with the video and then with a webpage where the video was embedded. If you take a look at the print screen below, you can see it ranks in Google both on the first (for video content) and eleventh positions.

 

 

Cronut with puff pastry - video content

 

SEO fact: Videos have a 41% higher click through rate than text. 

 

In this case, the video tutorial can push the webpage higher in search engine rankings. Visual content appeals to emotion, creates intimacy, and engages the visitors. A Blue Corona study states that:

 

80% of consumers believe demonstration videos are helpful when making purchases. 

 

If you decide to add video content to your webpage, my recommendation would be to use Youtube, Dailymotion, Vimeo to upload the video and then embed it into your page. This way, you’ll have it on two supports that can bring twice as many visitors.

 

5.7 Make Use of the Power of Internal Linking

 

Internal links provide extra value for a webpage and it is a powerful SEO copywriting tip. Here are the two main advantages:

 

  • Internal linking helps search engines understand your content.
  • It helps the users stay longer on the website and navigate to the topics of interest.

 

The best way to use internal links is when you are writing about something and want to bring extra explanations, and link to a page where you previously talked about that. For example, now, as I am explaining the internal linking power, I’ve linked to a page where we previously tackled the topic more in-depth.

 

A bad internal linking is a sign of bad architecture and you might risk misleading and confusing the user. Make sure you point to valuable, live and accurate pages and link to the proper anchor texts.

 

The process isn’t so hard. You should know the website pretty well, or at least search to find the proper article. And the more internal links you have, the more value Google will give it. You all know the saying, too much of anything isn’t good for anyone; it applies in this situation as well. Make sure you don’t overuse the method because too many links will drop the value on the page. There’s a limitation of 10-15 links for every 1,000 words written.

 

5.8 Make Your Content Mobile Friendly

 

It wasn’t long ago when Google rolled out the Mobile-first index. At that moment, things took a different turn. Basically, Google might show different search engine results on desktop compared to mobile. Now, Google’s system for crawling, indexing, and ranking for the desktop version of the website is different than Google’s system for those processes on mobile. Websites are bound to make the shift to a more mobile-focused index. 

 

Google mobile-first indexing is about how we gather content, not about how content is ranked. Content gathered by mobile-first indexing has no ranking advantage over mobile content that’s not yet collected this way or desktop content. Moreover, if you only have desktop content, you will continue to be represented in our index.
Google logo Google
 

 

When talking about mobile-friendliness, here are some ways to rank in mobile search results:

 

  • Create a responsive website and dynamic serving website;
  • Serve structured data for the desktop and mobile version;
  • Use the robots.txt testing tool to verify the mobile site;
  • Add your mobile site in Search Console;
  • Verify the crawl rate.

 

Responsive-website

Source: developers.google.com

 

Mobile accounts for half of all global web pages served and we are on an ascending evolution regarding mobile searches. According to Statista, in 2018, 52.2 percent of all website traffic worldwide was generated through mobile phones, up from 50.3 percent in the previous year. Even if the mobile searches have experienced continuous growth, that doesn’t mean the desktop search decreased, but rather more people are using multiples devices to different actions and want to be always informed. 

 

As of February 2017, mobile accounts for 65.1 percent of all web traffic in Asia and for 59.5 percent of all web traffic in Africa. 

 

Share of traffic

 

5.9 Create Google Friendly URLs

 

Some time ago, we performed an in-depth study on 34k Keywords to study the influence of titles and URLs in SERP. When we analyzed the URLs length to see which is the best format correlated with higher rankings, we saw that the more concise the URLs, the greater the chance to have higher rankings. Below you can see the chart with the extracted data:

 

Title and URLs lenght

 

As long as the title length is between 50-60 characters and the URL length is between 90-105, you’re safe. Having a concise URL length carries more benefits than having a long and not so easy to read or remember URL. If the URL and title contain the focus keyword, that is surely an advantage. But we’ll discuss this further on. 

 

Of course, having a concise URL is helpful in all sorts of ways beyond the search results hierarchy. For instance, even if most casual users don’t bother remembering full URLs nowadays, it can still count as an advantage if you make it easy on the brain. Think about EMDs, for instance: instinctively, you are more likely to go with the URL that most resembles your thought process (“I need to find an electrical bicycle…. oh, looks: a site named just that”). The extra effort you can put into it is making sure that not only the homepage, but pretty much any page on your website has its URL fit in a neat number of characters (that, if too large to be easily remembered, can at least be short enough to be easily recognized).

 

5.10 Spread the Word

amplify content

 

Content amplification is a powerful method to reach a wider audience and multiply your links by hundreds. Amplifying your content should be mandatory if you want people to know about it and increase your website traffic.

 

 

After you finish writing your article, the process shouldn’t stop. You have to create awareness around it and push it to other people who might be interested. We are not talking about traditional social media marketing or emailing. That’s not amplification. You can look at the amplification process as a way to strengthen the signals of your post.

 

  • Reach new audiences through native advertising;
  • Use storytelling to receive a social boost;
  • Build a solid community around your brand;
  • Use content syndication on Medium or similar websites to build your blog audience;
  • Collaborate with influencers to earn links;
  • Post on StumbleUpon and absorb targeted traffic;
  • Integrate promotion messages or buttons on your webpage.

 

 

6. How Important Is It to Update Content on My Website?

 

Updating existing content is highly important for Google due to its algorithm updates. 

 

It’s 2019 and Google has a lot of Freshness Updates that focuses on providing the user with “fresher, more recent search results”. Google favors fresh content only for some specific queries that deserve freshness, widely known as QDF. QDF stands for Query Deserves Freshness. If a particular search phrase is a QDF, then Google will show up the most recent results.

 

SEO writing does’t mean just publishing new content, but also updating existing content.  Updating a piece of content and adding new information can expand the number of keywords that page is targeting and thus result in more traffic. If you have a longer piece of content, you can try optimizing for multiple keywords and expand your traffic, your audience. 

 

You should always keep your articles up to date. But not just with the date, with the information, the content itself, quality and relevancy!

 

The age of a web page or domain isn’t the only freshness factor. Search engines can score regularly updated content for freshness differently from content that doesn’t change. In this case, the amount of change on your web page plays a role.
Cyrus Shepard CYRUS SHEPARD
Owner @ Zyppy / @CyrusShepard

 

There are some things that will impact your rankings and they’re closely related to freshness:

  • CTR, which is a ranking factor.
  • Posting new content frequently might help you expand your search visibility by targeting new keywords.
  •  The performance of your site’s domain, which is dictated by the number of unique domains that link to your website and by their quality.
 

7. Should I Delete Underperforming Content from My Site?

 

Mainly, you could delete content that is performing badly. There are lots of reasons why a piece of content doesn’t perform well. Maybe it is low quality or maybe you’ve applied some black hat strategies for it. Maybe you just tackled a topic that is of no interest for the user or, on the contrary, it is a highly competitive niche and you don’t have that 10x content and therefore, you can’t attract the user.

 

On the other side, deleting content might be tricky because you don’t know if you’ll ever need that content again or weather it will be relevant at some point. A better option would be to deindex it by adding a rel=“noindex” to those pages. You removed them from SERP, but you can still see them in the admin page. Deindexing is safer and easier. Or you can “noindex, follow” which will tell the robot to noindex, but the user can still access if they know the link through the follow tag. 

 

Before deciding and taking such a drastic measure, you’ll have to perform a content audit, see how your content ranks, see if the information is still valuable and not outdated. We did a major clean-up on the cognitiveSEO blog by following the next content strategy:

 

  1. We identified low-performance articles by looking mainly at the ranking position, bounce rate, engagement, search traffic.
  2. We decided on the content that needs to be pruned: we had to choose if we leave it as it is, redirect or do a quality review (deindex or delete).
  3. The quality review also included link building for some articles, re-optimization for getting the best content there is for that topic on the web and improving the content performance score.

 

We even talked with lots of SEO experts that experience content pruning and most of them saw a high increase in organic traffic after they cleaned their website. You can check the case studies and our content pruning story here.

 

Below you can see the search visibility for the cognitiveSEO website after the content pruning strategy.  Of course, meanwhile we kept on writing well optimized articles for both users and search engines, therefore there is not a direct correlation between the growth and content pruning, but most likely, it helped. 

 

Search visibility elite strategies

 

There are 3 actions you can take, based on the type of content you have:

 

  • Deindex content that performs poorly and yet serves a purpose to your users. Therefore, it won’t show up in search results, yet users will still be able to access it.
  • Delete content that brings no valuable information to the user and is performing badly.
  • Redirect the URL if you decide to delete specific pages or repurpose them. It is crucial to redirect the traffic and users to relevant and valuable content, so you don’t have broken pages and lose a lot of links. In this manner, you can repurpose the deleted pages.

 

To answer the question: Should I delete underperforming content from my site? A better answer would be: repurpose it instead of deleting it. Repurposing content is a highly appreciated white hat strategy. Adding fresh content to make it the best there is, re-optimizing the content for multiple keywords might help your website’s rankings and increase its value.

 

 

We’ve compressed our guideline by talking about the crucial elements that cannot miss from your SEO writing process in 2020 and beyond. Keep in mind some of the SEO friendly content pillars like contextuality, mobile-friendliness, HTML tags, evergreen roots, user experience principles, video correlation. Writing for search engine optimization purposes can be difficult and can become a hard-handed job. Yet, you can save any limping piece of content you might have with the strategies explained above. Every well-invested action will bring you results so best of luck in writing high-performing pieces of content. 

 

The post SEO Writing for Copywriters → The Ultimate Guide appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.


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Thursday, November 28, 2019

13 SEO Myths That Will Probably Kill Your Ranks in 2020

Faster, easier, higher. That’s what we’re all up to when it comes to ranks and traffic, right? Well, easy wins with little effort are rare in SEO. There are most likely SEO myths that will wipe out your business instead of boosting it.

 

As we are often being asked about many misconceptions from the SEO world, we’ve decided to gather and share with you the most important SEO myths that tend to keep you from improving your ranks and traffic. And of course, clarify them once and for all.

 

13 SEO Myths That Are Probably Killing Your Ranks

 

SEO can make you or break you, depending on how you’re using it. Here’s an idea of what you should stay away off, the SEO myths. Read them, breath them and live without them:

 

  1. Using Tabbed Content Can Penalize Your Site
  2. Syndicate Content Does Hurt Your SEO
  3. It’s Better to Have More Links Than More Content
  4. The Disavow Tool Is Useless After Penguin 4.0
  5. Links in Comments and Forums Will Attract Google Penalties
  6. Social Signals Don’t Impact SEO
  7. All Backlinks Are Created Equally
  8. Keyword Optimization Matters Most in SEO
  9. Artificial Social Shares Will Boost Your Rankings
  10. Keyword Density Should Be at Least 2% to Increase Your Rankings
  11. A High Number of Links Is All You Need to Rank on the Top
  12. You Don’t Need an SEO Specialist, Anyone Can Do It
  13. SEO Is All About Rankings

 

The evolution of SEO is faster than our ability to perceive it. Over the years, it appeared so many speculations regarding SEO that you would think you were at a stock market.

 

The long list of SEO myths continues to be more and more voluminous. Some of these myths appeared from the need of the so-called experts who wanted to find out Google’s next move. It is sad to see these people living and dying by Google’s quotes and PR statements.

 

Let’s move past the “SEO is dead” phrase and start focusing on certain facts pertaining more to bad documentation rather than to real myths. SEO is not dead and we’ll be long gone when and IF that will really happen. It is very much alive and, we might add, omnipresent.

 

SEO is not about shenanigans. SEO is not something you can easily use to bring your newly created website on top of results like some magic fairy dust. Rather, it is a continuously evolving industry. There is no one-time recipe for SEO algorithms that change every day. You have to adjust your strategies accordingly and act naturally. Otherwise, you might look suspicious.

 

We’ve seen a lot of stressed and frustrated people blaming it on tools and agencies when they don’t see the SEO efforts equating to payoffs instantaneously. Even the creation of the world took more than one day. Good results don’t come easily.

Digital marketers understand that SEO is not a magic pill that will skyrocket your rankings in one day.
Vishal Ray Malik Vishal Ray Malik
Founder of ConversionLink / @vishalraymalik
 

1. Using Tabbed Content Can Penalize Your Site

 

Tabbed content started as a solution for keeping your site clean and to the point, without overcrowding the reader. They could show or hide the content by a click. What started as a good thing for the user ended badly for the search engine crawlers.

 

The hidden text using expandable sections was bad for SEO because bots could not read the text and therefore the website couldn’t get indexed or ranked.

 

Google discarded the websites that used the “click-to-expand” type of content because it thought they were hiding it from the user, exactly the opposite of its intention. But as you all know, there might have been a grain of truth in Google’s position towards tabbed content because there are all sorts of people trying to trick Google.

 

John Mueller stated that Google may not rank the page for the tabbed content because it knows users do not see the content by default.

From our point of view, it’s always a tricky problem when we send a user to a page where we know this content is actually hidden. Because the user will see perhaps the content in the snippet, they’ll click through the page, and say, well, I don’t see where this information is on this page. I feel kind of almost misled to click on this to actually get in there.
John Mueller SEO John Mueller
Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google /  @JohnMu

You can listen to his answer in the next video:

 

 

Nonetheless, we must understand that Google penalizes those websites that deceptively use hidden text.

 

Matt Cutts explained in the video below that using JavaScript for collapsing content is an accepted and a common practice by lots of ecommerce websites that want to make their site more welcoming.

 

 

Using JavaScript for tabbed content that includes hidden text is an accepted example within Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.

Not all hidden text is considered deceptive. For example, if your site includes technologies that search engines have difficulty accessing, like JavaScript, images, or Flash files, using descriptive text for these items can improve the accessibility of your site.
Google logo Google’s Webmaster Guidelines
 

Let’s take Wikipedia, for example, the online encyclopedia that uses on-click expandable content on the mobile version.

 

Wikipedia expandable content

 

If you look at the picture above you can see that the collapse sections complement the content. There is a lot of information on the page and you can easily go and read only what you’re interested in, and not the whole article.

 

Using tabbed content is not bad for SEO and Google won’t penalize your site if it is implemented in a non-spammy way. The hidden text or links is considered spammy if it there solely for search engines rather than visitors.

 

2. Syndicate Content Does Hurt Your SEO

 

First, let’s start by saying duplicate content is neither syndicate content nor article spinning.

 

We all know about duplicate content and the long talk over the year, when it has been said that duplicate content will penalize your website. Things have changed and we learnt that the duplicate content penalty was a myth. Matt Cutts and Andrey Lipattsev said repeatedly that duplicate content doesn’t get you penalized, while copied content does.

 

As for article spinning, the penalization is applied. It is a technique used in SEO by rewriting articles and replacing specific words, phrases, sentences trying to provide a different version by each spin.

 

However, syndicated content refers to a situation when a third party publishes an article taken from a source while mentioning it and doesn’t take credit for the article. Syndicated content doesn’t violate Private Label Rights (PLR) either because the original author keeps the ownership of the article and offers a Creative Commons license for reposting.  

 

If all these steps are followed, then syndicate content won’t damage your site or your SEO; it won’t be deemed copied content and get you penalized. So the myth of syndicate content must be broken. Syndication is not a form of plagiarism as long as there is a source cited.

 

The truth is that only copied content and article spinning will penalize your website.

 

Here’s what John Mueller says in Search Console Help, regarding content that is automatically generated, doesn’t comply with the copyright infringement and the Webmaster Guidelines.

Our algorithms prefer unique, compelling and high-quality content. Content that is rewritten, “spun,” automatically translated or otherwise modified in an attempt to make it appear unique would go against our Webmaster Guidelines and can result in action being taken against sites that rely on such content.
John Mueller SEO John mueller
Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google /  @JohnMu

Syndication can really help you if done correctly. If you use it as an amplification technique, you get the chance to rich a broader audience.

 

There are a lot of trustworthy websites that publish syndicate content and have a large number of people that are subscribed to the newsletter and RSS feed through a dedicated service like Feedly.

 

syndication

 

3. It’s Better to Have More Links Than More Content

 

There was a time when it was better to have more links than content to rank higher in Google. Back then, links had more value. Building links on specific anchor texts was essential for SEO industries and to boost your search rankings. And since it began to have such a huge effect on rankings, all kinds of webmasters and SEO pros started to do link building just to create chunks of links, thinking only about quantity and not at all about quality. Google realized that people abused this technique and flooded the SERP with irrelevant and bad sites getting triggered there only by having bad inbound links with no value for the user.

 

The solution Google found was the Webspam Update, named Penguin afterward. This big change happened on April 24, 2012, when Penguin was released for the first time. Back then, it addressed problems such as keyword stuffing and link schemes. Later on, they took the problem into their own hands and penalized sites with unnatural, manipulative inbound link profiles.

 

Both Matt Cutts and Andrey Lipattsev confirmed that content, links and RankBrain are the first 3 rankings factors. All of them are equally important. None of them is more important than the other (according to Google). 

 

But here is just one of the myths you should leave behind: links value more than content. Put your ideas into action and start creating an abundance of new pieces of content or improve the ones you already have. Information is in your pocket.  

 

A natural link profile and good content can bring you high rankings. And the best way to do it comes from the SEO masters and people that went through all Google dances and managed to dance all the way up to the present.

 

Bill Sebald, from Greenlane, managed to improve the rank from #5 to #2 for the period of time they optimized the content with the help of Content Assistant. And he’s not the only one. The knowledge and tools are here; you just have to create the strategy and take some time to do it.

 

Within 24 hours, we saw our rank improve from #5 for the term we were optimizing for to #2. This fluctuated over the next few days but then we settled into the #2 spot and have remained there since. Read the full case study.
Bill Sebald BILL SEBALD
Founder Greenlane / @billsebald
 

4. The Disavow Tool Is Useless After Penguin 4.0

 

To disavow or not to disavow? That is the question.

 

We get tons of emails and questions from people saying they know disavow tools are useless and Google knows which links they built and which they didn’t.

 

Let’s take the example above that can prove our point:

I saw that I have some links marked as unnatural, but I have never built those links. Google says if you never built the link then don’t worry about it. I only built the link to a single post which is 100 photoshop tutorials post so that is why I am shocked to see that all of my links are marked unnatural by your tool.

The 100 photoshop tutorials post is unnatural itself. Google might ignore it, but it might not. Google doesn’t know if you built those links. They are pointing to your site and that’s it. Maybe someone did a negative SEO attack on your website. Google could see that as something you did and penalize you. What Matt Cutts and John Mueller say is different from what the algorithm does.

 

When Google Penguin 4.0 went live, Gary Illyes said:

Traditionally, webspam algorithms demoted whole sites. With this one, we managed to devalue spam instead of demoting AND it’s also more granular AND it’s real time. Once the rollout is complete, I strongly believe many people will be happier, and that makes me happy.
Gary Illyes Gary Illyes
Google spokesperson / @methode

People still asked if the disavow tool was still necessary, along with this update:

Gary Illyes disavow tool

John Mueller disavow tool

 

5. Links in Comments and Forums Will Attract Google Penalties

 

SEO myth busting again; here’s the urban legend that has been brought to life: all community engagement is toxic, such as links in comments and forums.

 

Don’t confuse blog commenting and forums with directories. The latter are more suspicious, but for sure in that case, also, there are white-hat directories. One of the clearest differences to emerge is that a forum is a discussion panel and a directory is an online list or catalog of websites.

 

The mirror has two faces. If we’re to take forums in general and links in comments (even nofollow links) we would say that they have low-quality, because there are a lot of spammers. Along the years, lots of forums were bombarded by constant spam messages from marketers trying to cash in on a captive audience and build lots and lots of spammy links. It was a time when forums were popular, that’s why the bad guys focused their attention on them.

 

Forums have some advantages:

  • Have niched users;
  • They bring topical relevancy;
  • Have loyal users, that help increase website traffic through repeated visits;
  • Easily create a connection and build a relationship because you no longer have to search them and capture their attention;
  • Easier to gain trust.

 

So you can understand why spammers were attracted by building links there through comments. But with time, just like Google, proper forums that delivered relevant information started to have more restrictions on user-generated content (UGC).

The next wave of the Web is going to be user-generated content.
John Doerr John Doerr
General partner KPCB / @johndoerr

You can find lots of trustworthy forums and social communities built on user-generated content that provide valuable information from experts and pros. Reddit, WebmasterWorld, Moz Forum, Quora, Campus Society, Stumble Upon, Tumblr are just a few examples of communities built on user-generated content, each of them focusing on a specific audience.  

 

Did you know that millennials spend 30% of their media consumption time with content that is created by their peers (UGC) and consider it to be more memorable than other media? But that’s not all, user-generated content is trusted more than traditional media (59%) according to a research made by Ipsos MediaCT/Crowdtap.

 

media trusworthiness

 

Millennials are also committed to engaging with social media on a daily basis above all other media types.

 

Let’s debunk this myth together. Community engagement is not toxic if it observes Google’s quality guidelines and comment links from forums and user-generated communities are naturally placed there.

 

6. Social Signals Don’t Impact SEO

 

Come into the mythical place named Narnia, where everything is possible and social activity has no value for SEO. Well, let’s see why it is a myth and which is the truth behind it.

 

I hear lots of people saying things like:

“Is it true that likes on Facebook, Twitter, and so on, do not count towards Google rankings? Well, why bother improving my social activity?”

Or even asking:

What would be the SEO benefit of linking to Instagram/Facebook/Twitter posts?

 

But the real question should be “Is your site providing added-value for your users?” rather than thinking of the “SEO benefits”.

 

Let’s get one thing straight: it is true that a “like” on a social account doesn’t influence Google rankings, but they have a positive influence among shares, engagement. John Mueller states that there is no direct ranking signal in Google’s ranking algorithm. Google treats Facebook and Twitter posts like any other web pages for search, but NOT as a ranking factor. But this doesn’t mean social signal has no value for SEO. It indirectly influences website rankings.  

 

Social signals have a lot of value in this manner. You build your brand and drive traffic to your website, therefore influencing your rank on Google.  

 

Social Signals and SEO

Source: blindfiveyearold.com

 

We conducted a study on this topic and the numbers were clear: a strong presence on social networks is correlated with better rankings. This means that, in general, the higher the ranking of the website, the higher the chances that the average presence on social network is larger.

 

Another interesting discovery was the fact that Facebook post engagement has a strong connection with organic search CTR. Larry Kim saw that Facebook posts with extraordinarily high engagement rates tended to have above expected organic search CTR.

 

relationship between organic rankings & social shares

Source: wordstream.com

 

In the end, it is about how engaging your content is.

 

goosebumps

 

If you have a successful activity on your social accounts and create engagement, you have the possibility to attract a larger audience and send it to your site. On top of that, that audience can share the information and amplify it, organically. Influencers come to your site and in no time you can increase the number of links, which boosts your SEO efforts.

Links are the confound in the correlation between social shares and rankings.
AJ Kohn AJ Kohn
Owner, Blind Five Year Old / @ajkohn

Remember that social engagement sends positive signals to Google. Long story short, social signals have an indirect impact on SEO and a powerful impact on search rankings. The result of the social activity is more valuable than the action per se. That’s the one that counts.

 

7. All Backlinks Are Created Equally

 

Oh boy! Oh boy! They never stop coming. I’ll boil this down to the bare facts.

 

You know and I know that there are bad and good links. Getting at this point, we can see that backlinks are not created equal. But let’s not stop here.

 

Let’s go on with the good links and say that they are created equally. At this point, I have to ask you: is a link on Forbes equal with bananaroots.wordpress. com? The first domain is an American business magazine and the second one is a blog about bananas. Firstly, the two domains are different by the industry, secondly by the domain influence/authority and page influence/authority.

 

There are so many aspects to take into consideration when we talk about backlinks that this could take an entire post and lots of coffee to bare all the SEO myths that are out there and debunk them. But, I’ll save your energy and go with the one that interests us today, at this moment.

 

To figure out this backlink equality issue, let me present you two situations. If you search for “brown recluse” you’ll see search engine results from EmedicineHealth and LiveScience. The first page  has a well-covered topic with lots of on-topic content as you can see in the next screenshot:

 

emedicinehealth

 

The second page was a short article, poorly-covered with a lot of general information about a lot of things.

 

livescience

 

And then we checked the number of links. If we were to compare the two sites, the LiveScience has lots of links, it is a big site.

 

links for 2 different domains 1

 

If I had to choose, a link on EmedicineHealth would be more valuable than LiveScience.

 

Equality is not always the answer. Equity is.

 

Backlinks equality and equity

Source: culturalorganizing.org

 

Link equity (formerly named link juice) is an important part of off-page SEO since it passes value and authority from one page to another.

 

Let’s accept and embrace the fact that backlinks are not created equal and focus on those which are more “juicy” or equitable.

Some links are more equal than others.

 

8. Keyword Optimization Matters Most in SEO

 

Targeted keywords optimization is one step in all the SEO process that happens on-site. The first would have to be keyword research. You can do that through multiple alternatives. Keyword Planner from Google Adwords has been one of the most popular options for a long period of time, but since SEO evolved, lots of agencies have proposed lots of other tools.

 

Some other opportunities that we can find in Google are the autocomplete suggestions we can see when we start typing in the search bar for a specific query (as represented in the next screenshot). Or, review the list of searches related to autocomplete suggestions that we can find at the bottom of the first page.

 

funny google searches autocomplete

 

There is also the Keyword tool and Content Assistant which is a complete option that includes the keyword research, competitor spying for that keyword, keyword and content optimization.

 

All the keyword phrases we use in a content create a vocabulary and therefore give a context to the topic we’ve written about. Due to that, Google uses Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) to understand if your content is related to a search query. In case you need guidance using keywords suggestions that take this algorithm into consideration, Content Assistance can give it to you in seconds. The tool uses the same algorithm for extracting keyword recommendation you could use in your content.

 

But keywords do not represent everything, context does. It just started to have a major impact on search results. And let’s not forget RankBrain, which helps Google process its search results through artificial intelligence. So Google will start to offer more personalized results based on each individual behavior. It goes through billions of pages and selects only the most relevant for particular queries.

 

Nowadays, as we mentioned several times, Google’s trying to optimize the page for the user. So if you’re trying to use specific words over and over again just to optimize for the search engines, it will only weaken your website. In the end, you might get penalized and suffer a great loss.  

 

Taking into consideration the SEO process we talked about, keyword optimization is not the crucial SEO element or the most important one, but it is the first one. It is a dwarf among giants. There are arguably even more relevant aspects. At the moment, we can not point to a specific SEO element that is the most important one, but rather there is a handful of steps and aspects that create a synergy.

 

9. Artificial Social Shares Will Boost Your Rankings

 

We’ll start by saying that artificial or fake social shares are considered to be black hat social media techniques.

 

We talked before about social signals and you know by now that they are emerging as ranking factors as search engines try to understand our social interaction and behavior. In this manner, a page with lots of shares and links has the advantage to rank higher. But just like any abuse of guidelines, these tricks that fool the system are penalized.

 

That being the case, Facebook says that buying fake likes, shares will only hurt you; it might get harder for those who want to advertise, too. Not once did it happen for Facebook to suspend advertising accounts. And it’s not so easy to reactivate such an account.

Pages with artificially inflated like counts are harming themselves, making it harder and more expensive to reach the people they care about most.
facebook Facebook
 

Facebook adds that they value real connection and support strong relationships created through the platform.

We have a strong incentive to aggressively go after the bad actors behind fake likes because businesses and people who use our platform want real connections and results.
facebook Facebook
 

Experts value the power of social signals but only used for the right reasons, not for inflating with artificial shares and likes that pollute the social platform.  

Social media is a set of modern communications channels that can be used to transmit “content” and communications to an audience. As such, it can be used, in this context, to publicize “content” and news so that more people hear about you and then link to you. And those links can help your rankings.
Samuel Scott Samuel Scott
Marketing speaker and tech contrarian / @samueljscott

The bottom line is artificial social shares don’t help in keyword ranking. In the best case scenario, you should call yourself lucky if your account isn’t suspended. Facebook is using AI to penalize spammy websites in its News Feed.

 

10. Keyword Density Should Be at Least 2% to Increase Your Rankings

 

Keywords, in all its forms for SEO, seems to be a hotly contested topic.

 

At this point, I barely have strength left to argue. It starts to get funnier or is it rather me feeling nervous-funny.

Nervous laugh

 

The never-ending talk about keyword density that should be 10%, 4,5% or 7 %. We’re starting to ask ourselves if is so hard to be natural these days?!

unnatural vs natural

It’s ironic, you’re asking “What would the algorithm think about this?” and the algorithm is asking, “What would a real human think about this?”

 

During a Google Webmaster Central office-hours hangout, last year, John Mueller said that the focus should be on the readability and not on the keyword density.

We expect content to be written naturally, so focusing on keyword density is not a good use of your time. Focusing too much on keyword density makes it look like your content is unnatural.
John Mueller SEO John Mueller
Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google /  @JohnMu

Keyword density might lead to keyword stuffing if you try and program everything like it is a machine.

A lot of people think there’s one recipe and you can follow it like baking cookies. And if you follow it to the letter, you’ll rank number one. That’s not the way it works.
Matt Cutts about nofollow links Matt Cutts
Former head of the webspam team at Google / @mattcutts

That’s not how the search engines work. Google will recognize the pattern.

 

The sad part is that we are in 2018 and we’re still hearing questions such as “what is the ideal keyword density percentage to improve rankings in Google in 2018?” (*facepalm* and *heavy breathing*).

 

Then you go back to quality, the naturalness of things. So no, you should not focus on maintaining your keyword density a specific percentage to rank higher. There is no IDEAL % for keyword density. Rather have a vocabulary, semantics, a long copy to avoid keyword stuffing. In the end, be very careful not to have too much of one keyword.

 

11. A High Number of Links Is All You Need to Rank on the Top

 

The myth goes something like this: once you have so many links, you don’t really need anymore. And it should be enough for helping you rank higher. No numbers are thrown out (apparently it might differ from one industry to another), but it is really such a thing of having too many links that it doesn’t matter in terms of ranking if you get more? 

 

In the ante-Penguin Era, a high number of links might be enough for ranking on top if you wanted to believe that.

 

Obviously, there is no such thing as too many links. Maybe for unnatural links, though. Because if you have too many unnatural links you might get penalized. But here we are talking about good links as ranking signals. Smart marketers and webmasters wouldn’t pursue this, because they know (spoiler alert: debunking a myth right now) links is not the only ranking factor and neither is the number of those links. The focus should be on content marketing, social activities, natural links, since we talked so much about them.

 

12. You Don’t Need an SEO Specialist; Anyone Can Do It

 

Whoever said SEO is something any IT guy can do, fooled you.

 

There is, indeed, technical SEO, which as the name says, requires some technical expertise. It is an SEO component, entirely something else. If you hear technical it doesn’t necessarily have to be IT. The job of an SEO expert is different from an IT expert; it requires wider knowledge on content, user behaviour, equity, semantics and context, and a lot more.  

Think of SEO this way: If a customer-focused content marketing program is the sandwich, then SEO is the mayonnaise. It touches nearly everything and enhances the overall flavor of the sandwich, but on its own, it’s not very appetizing.
Lee Odden Lee Odden
CEO at TopRank Marketing / @leeodden

Of course, you need the knowledge of an IT person that can handle some things better than an SEO pro. You can not give or expect from somebody experienced in IT to do the SEO duties and expect best practices and great results. Some things go hand in hand.

 

An IT professional can help you with issues such as website crawling (errors, XML sitemap, URL parameters, indexing errors), redirects, website audit (for internal links), loading page speed, some local SEO issues, and many more.

 

In the end, SEO isn’t something you can handle to an IT person, in case you want to rank and have a site and visitors.

 

 

13. SEO Is All About Rankings

 

Search engine optimization is the process for naturally placing the website in search results by the search engines. If we think from the on-site perspective, then the keywords used in context, the meta descriptions, the images selected for the content, the title are significant among all the on-site SEO elements.

 

Getting this straight, we need to understand that SEO, at this level, must answer to the user need and intent. That is the future: the user-intent-based content. Google’s moving the attention on user intent for more accurate and personalized results.

 

Relevant and well-optimized (not over-optimized) content remains a top ranking factor. Think of that this way: you are on the first page of Google and rank for a keyword you optimized your content for. You want the users to enter your website or not? If the answer is yes and they will do so it means you optimized correctly your content, you have relevant meta description, title, URL. If on the contrary, the user doesn’t enter your website it means it’s not relevant, you optimized the content for the search engines, and that won’t last for long.

My rule of thumb is: build a site for a user, not a spider.
Dave Naylor Dave Naylor
Head of Search Marketing and Speaker at Bronco / @DaveNaylor

Lost are the days when over-optimization was doing all the job for ranking your content higher and higher ‘till it reached the sky, because sky is the limit. But no more!

 

Over-optimization for the sole purpose of ranking isn’t a technique approved by Google according to the Quality Guidelines.

Google only loves you when everyone else loves you first.
Wendy Piersall Wendy Piersall
Blogger & author at wendypiersall.com / @emom

But for some other reason, if you have over-optimized content, you have a chance to clear your past and deoptimize it. At this stage, you have to evaluate your content and see if there is anything you can adjust, redirect or rewrite and re-optimize to fulfill the actual requirements for quality.

 

If you got it until here, I must congratulate you and ask you to debunk another SEO myth, and tell the truth, that SEO is not all about rankings, but rather quality, natural language, context and earning links (named just a few, because we could keep it like this all night).

 

Conclusion

 

13 is an unlucky number, not to mention when it is placed near SEO myths. The internet is full of them, and people follow them blindfoldedly. You decide what is best for your business and what SEO strategies to apply or not. Yet, we wanted to share and debunk with you the most common SEO myths, the ones that we are constantly asked about.   

 

In the online marketing world, there will always be tons of detours, easy fixes, or “a complete guide to SEO and conversion rate optimization” that will increase your search engine rankings on the spot. We’ve tried to cover some of the biggest SEO myths; yet, we know that there other highly debatable topics in the industry worth tackled, like voice search or guest blogging. Whenever we’ll feel the need, we’ll update this list and we hope we’ll get updates from your side as well. 

 

We are always trying to provide you with valuable content and information in the SEO world, with facts that can be applied and aspects you should stay away from and never challenge Google or other search engines. These SEO myths are in the last category and we hope that this article was a helping hand. If you have some other SEO myths you want to share or discuss with us, feel free to write about them at the comments section below. 

 

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