Tuesday, 10 July 2018

Blogspot SEO: Google's 13 Best 2018 Ranking Signals

#1. Ensure your blog is MOBILE friendly. Google started penalising mobile unfriendly sites in 2015 and are likely to crack down even more. Use responsive design.

#2. Spell check posts and always use correct grammar. Well written contents is a ranking consideration. Especially after Googles new Panda update.

#3. Provide contents that is useful to its readers.Useful contents keeps visitors on your blog longer, which improves your Google ranking. Research before publishing.

#4. Create a new post at least twise per week. Regularly updated blogs rank higher than those updated randomly or less frequently. I tested that too, and it worked. 

#5. Properly label your post. Labels adds to keyword density. Widen it with related words.

#6. Format comment section. It should be no followed and moderated to avoid spam comments.It helps too.

#7. Focus on a particular niche. Many bloggers (like me) start with the idea of creating a multinihed blog. That can confuse Google entirely, and decide to ignore you.

#8. Use SEO friendly URLs. Shorter URLs rank better in Google and other engines too.

#9. Optimise the meta description. It gives searchers info they need to determine whether or not to click. Write them wisely. 

#10. Optimise your images. Search engines don’t just look for images, rather they look for alt text. Don’t forget that.

#11. Don’t use too many similar keywords. You may get penalised by Google for “keyword stuffing”.You know what that means. 

#12. Link internally when possible. They help show the validity and relivance of your content.

#13. List your blog on searh engines. I’ve seen many cases like this. So cross check your settings and webmaster tools.

What Is SEO / Search Engine Optimization (SEO) ?

Search engine optimization is the process of improving the visibility of a website on organic ('natural' or un-paid) search engine result pages (SERPs). This is accomplished through implementation of search engine friendly website architecture, optimized internal navigation and link landscape, as well as optimization of the content (comprised, at a minimum, of readability & usability improvements, and grammatical corrections). SEO is as much art as it is science, but at its core it is the discipline of making user-friendly & useful content understandable and easily digestible for search engines.

Wednesday, 25 April 2018

The Story Of The Birth Of Air Pollution The History Of Pollution


For centuries, human beings have contaminated the air, water, land and other elements of the atmosphere that are mandatory for the survival of humans, animals, and plants. Pollution has always been there, only now it has become extreme. The history of pollution in the history of mankind’s greed and irresponsibility.
The 19th century Industrial Revolution and after that, technological advancements are two big sources of pollution. In the mid 20th century, people started feeling changes in the environment for the first time. An environmental movement was started in the 1960s that expressed its concerns regarding pollution of the planet we live in. Because of that movement, we have events such as Earth Day. Two legislative victories, namely the Clean Water Act (1972) and the Clean Air Act (1970) are also outcomes of the same movement.
In as early as the 13th century, Edward I, the then monarch of England threatened the people of London with severe punishment for burning sea-coal as it caused air pollution. But, in the 18th century as well as the initial decades of the 19th century, large-scale use of coal came into vogue. It was the time of the Industrial Revolution. Inhabitants of emerging centers started facing health problems due to soot and smog that made the air polluted. More than 4000 people were killed in the Great Smog of 1952 in London. Acid Rain, which was discovered for the first time in the 18th century, was another major pollution problem. People also started discovering that the nitrogen compounds and sulfur released into the environment had adverse effects on fish, plants, soil, and forests.
At present, the biggest contributor to Air Pollution in America is vehicles. Greenhouses gases are also released as a result of auto emission, which is causing global warming. In the history of pollution of the earth’s air, motor vehicles play a major role.
Like air pollution, water is also contaminated by human beings since the initiation of man’s existence. For centuries, our ancestors have polluted drinking water sources with sewage wastes, which caused diseases like typhoid and cholera.
The Industrial Revolution further increased water pollution as pollutants from factories were directly disposed into rivers. As per a survey report prepared by CNN in 2007, nearly50 million tons of solvents and heavy metals mix with the water bodies every year. UNESCO sadly remarks that 70% of the waste from factories is dumped into lakes and rivers untreated. Greenpeace reports that China’s 70% lakes, as well as rivers, are contaminated with waste from industries. At present, more than 1 billion humans, all over the world, do not have access to drinking water.
Besides air and water pollution, rapid decrease in the number of rainforests, land pollution are also matters of great concern. The history of pollution tells us how we have contaminated nature’s gifts to us due to our meaningless pursuit of wealth and luxury. The present situation is the fruit of our reckless exploitation of the earth’s resources.

Friday, 20 April 2018

News The Divide Between the Higher Education

 Image result for News The Divide Between the Higher Education

As the school year ends, many universities are starting to accept promising applicants to enter their university. Many hopeful applicants are submitting their applications letters before the current school year closes. However, it’s a tight competition amongst these students as many universities are screening their students based on their selective standard.
Selective Admission
In recent reports, prestigious schools are accepting at least ¼ of the total number of their applicants. This means that only about 20% of this population can pursue to enroll in these schools.  Because of this, many students are now sending their application letters earlier. In this way, they can increase their chances of getting into these schools.  This idea made it easier for Ivy League universities to ease rejection on the applicants’ end. They create a waitlist but only accepts a maximum of 100 applications out of the thousands on the waitlist.
Schools that do not qualify for this criteria are willing to accept these students. State Universities and Public Schools usually struggle to fill their required number of freshmen students.
Bridging the Gap
Educational sectors all over the world are trying to find ways on how they can fix these discrepancies. In their attempt, they created the group called the Overlap Group. This group aimed to create several solutions on how to bridge the slow number of incoming applicants in many universities.
They also drafted a proposal on selective admission through a lottery. In this process, schools will create a specific criterion for their admission. From there, qualified students are grouped and drawn by lots until they are able to fill the required number. However, this process can be really problematic, given the situation that a student can apply to more than two universities of his choice.
Moreover, educational sectors also introduced college scholarships to aid students financially. This method seemed to work well at first, but it was stopped because it had created issues within the government sector.
Thus, the matching system was introduced. In this system, the education sector created an algorithm that pairs students depending on their abilities and grade. They rank applicants into specific criteria.  This method seems to be doable, but the number of applicants makes it impossible to accomplish. It will take time before the algorithm can group at least 3 million students in a short time.
As of this time, the educational sectors are using technology to address the issue. They believe that by doing so, they would be able to classify students on their given abilities and inclination. They have a standardized test that each high school student will have to take before their admission to their chosen university. In this way, they would be able to distribute the number of students equally and fairly.
 Final Thoughts
The division of the higher education created a gap between students. The idea of high-quality education was clouded because of each school’s standing in the educational hierarchy. The educational sector aims to break this gap with the use of technology.

Wednesday, 18 April 2018

What To Know About Starting Your Own Small Business


Image result for What To Know About Starting Your Own Small Business
With the current financial status of Briton after the entire Brexit situations, it is no surprise that many companies have taken massive financial losses and even had to ask some of their staff members to take an early retirement from the company.
This has resulted in a large surge of unemployment in the UK and surrounding areas. To combat these many people who were affected by this has started their own companies or they have tried to make a living from doing small jobs around their local neighborhoods.
Some of these new small business have been successful while others haven’t, which is a problem as it affects the local economy just as much as not being employed does, as these small businesses are now beginning to bring the country’s GDP ratings down, as there is no longer a constant growth in services and products which should be produced.
The downfall of the small business
When one takes a look at the small business and who the business directly impacts, there is a massive pitfall to deciding to start your own small business, compared to trying to get a job in a formal job industry or in most cases working for somebody else.
The reason why working for yourself can be a negative aspect is that if or when your business fails you can stand to lose everything, including your personal belongs and your family’s house and home, depending on how you registered your business.
How to prevent your belonging from being taken
When you think of starting your own small business and or company there are a few certain questions which you will have to ask yourself before you make the move to owning your own small business, they are as follows;
  • Do you have the Capital to start your own business?
  • Is there some sort of a backup plan if the business fails?
  • Is your business going to succeed in the current market?
  • Do you have the correct paperwork to set your business up correctly?
If you have a realistic answer to each of these questions, then there should be no issue for you to start your own business.
The first and last of these questions are extremely important when you are ensuring that your business is set up correctly, firstly making sure that you have the correct amount of money to start your own business is extremely import.
What is of greater importance is making sure that the capital for your business is not your pension or family savings, this a mistake which many people who start their own small business always seem to make, never invest your savings or pension into your business, without having a fail-safe if the business does go under and fails.
If you are looking at ways to fund your startup adventure, one of the best ways to do so is by making use of your savings, or even a separate account which you have put money in with the pretense of wanting to start your own company.
The most important thing to do is to never take out loans from loan sharks or other quick sources of money if you have to loan money the best option is to get a loan from your local bank.
The last question which you will have to ask yourself is whether you have the correct paperwork to make sure that your business is set up correctly.
Within the paperwork which you shall come across you will find that there is often an option to ensure your household and the items in your house against theft, fire and or other natural damages.
It is vital that you don’t do this, rather pay the extra insurance for personal insurance and not list everything that you own under your new online business.
Why?
The reason why it is important to not list everything which you own under your work insurance is that if you take out a business loan and your business fails everything which is listed under the business insurance will be subject to seizer.
Conclusion
As I end this off I want to give all business owners a tip; save time by not creating custom documents and instead choosing to use a template service which is designed to help you create those documents.

Friday, 6 April 2018

SEO for Rich Results: How to Find & Fix Structured Data Errors SEO for Rich Results: How to Find & Fix Structured Data Errors


Using structured data on your website is an essential part of SEO.
At its most basic, structured data helps engines understand your content better (a must as semantic web technologies continue to evolve).
Structured data is also your ticket to scoring rich results features in SERPs.
Structured data checks should be a regular part of your SEO routine. This article will teach you how.

1. Use a Structured Data Testing Tool to Find Errors

Structured data tools help ensure that search engines understand your marked-up content. They’re also a great way to double check your pages for valid markup and find errors that are easy to fix.

Structured Data Testing Tool


The tool you’ll want to start with is Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool.
To access this tool, simply log in to your Google Search Console, then click Web Tools > Testing Tools > Structured Data Testing Tool.
From here, you can either enter a URL into the FETCH URL tab or copy and paste some structured data code into the CODE SNIPPET tab.
This tool gives you a list detailing all of the errors, along with detailed information on the structured data Google currently detects on your website.
Because this tool is easy to use and accessible by everyone, we’ll be using the Structured Data Testing Tool for the remainder of this article.

Rich Results Testing Tool


Google has a tool designed to help website owners diagnose structured data: the Rich Results Testing Tool.
All of Google’s rich snippets, rich cards, and enriched results are all known by one umbrella term: “rich results.”
Rich results can include a wide variety of items, including blog posts, videos, courses, local businesses, music, product info, job postings, and more.
Eventually, the Rich Results Testing Tool will be an easy way for you to determine whether your structured data is eligible to be displayed as a rich result.
As of this writing, the Rich Results Testing Tool is still fairly new. Currently, the tool only supports tests for recipes, jobs, movies, and courses, but Google plans to expand these offerings over time.

Third-Party Tools

For most people, the above tools will be all you need to find and fix structured data errors.
However, if you want to dive into the nitty, gritty details of your markup or if you want a robust tool that can do more with your structured data (e.g., convert between formats, extract structured data, etc.) then check out this thorough list by SEO Skeptic.

2. Prioritize Items with the Most Errors

After entering your website into the Structured Data Testing Tool, you’ll see a table that includes multiple data types.
Google pre-sorts these data types according to which items have the most errors.
You’ll want to fix data types with more errors first.
Clicking on each data type reveals a more detailed breakdown of items with errors for that HTML tag.
Your Search Console can display up to 10,000 URLs at a time and will tell you exactly which errors it detects.

3. Fill in Missing Fields

The most common types of errors you’re likely to see are easily fixed:
  • Missing field.
  • Missing ratings.
To solve missing field errors, such as “missing: fn” (full name), and “missing: date published,” click Data Highlighter and fill in the schema in the information to highlight menu.
The schema should correlate to the page’s subject matter, so choose “Articles” for blog posts, “Products” for e-commerce product pages, etc.
If you have multiple pages that all follow the same format click Tag this page and others like it, otherwise click Tag just this page. Click OK.
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Now you’ll see a list of missing fields on the right side of the page. Simply highlight and specify key elements on your page, such as the title, author, and date published.
One recent change to take note of: Google now allows organizations to be declared as the author of an article.

4. Clearly Markup Reviews

Google has specific guidelines when it comes to using structured data for reviews.
Here are a few key requirements to be aware of:
  • You must markup both bestRating and worstRating.
  • Google prefers third-party reviews be assigned to specific products. Don’t include reviews for specific products in item lists or “category pages.”
  • Review markup should be restricted to appropriate pages. For example, product reviews should be limited to product pages, and business reviews should be restricted to “About Us” or “Testimonial” pages. Google no longer shows reviews on homepages.
  • Each review should be unique, and Google won’t display reviews until you have at least five reviews.
  • Reviews should not be paid for, nor should they be written by the site or the person providing the product. This may result in a manual action.
  • Critic reviews must follow strict guidelines that provide an honest, unbiased representation of the customer experience. See Google’s guidelines for more info on critic reviews.

5. Fix Pages with Manual Actions

Having a structured data manual action against your page doesn’t necessarily mean your page won’t appear in Google search results, but it is a serious issue that should be fixed immediately.
Some of the most common causes of structured data manual actions include:
  • Incorrect page markup (e.g., a page using recipe markup doesn’t include a recipe or a page using event markup doesn’t include visible event content).
  • Misleading structured data markup or structured data that is not representative of a page’s content.
  • Marked-up content is hidden from users.
Google issued a warning about sites advertising coupons and vouchers using the event structured data are liable to receive a manual action.
See Google’s guide to Building, Testing, and Releasing Structured Data for more information on common manual actions and their causes.

6. Optimize Using Structured Data Markup Helper

If you want to inject some much-needed markup into other pages on your website and you aren’t sure where to start, look no further than Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper.
This convenient tool will guide you through the entire process of marking up structured data on your website.
To get started, choose the relevant schema, enter a URL, and click Start Tagging.
Next, highlight page elements and assign schema tags. You can even add missing tags if you need to.
When you’re done marking up your page, click Create HTML.
Choose JSON-LD from the drop-down menu (Google is capable of parsing Microdata and RDFa, but they recommend encoding data with JSON-LD) and then copy and paste it into the <head> or <body> tags of your web page.

7. Test & Verify Your Updated Markup

Finally, plug your URL back into the Structured Data Testing Tool to see if your updated markup checks out.
Ideally, you’ll have eliminated all errors from your pages.
Of course, there’s no guarantee that structured data will show up in search results even after you’ve marked up your pages, but you won’t know for sure until Google recrawls your website.

Conclusion

Even if you performed a structured data check not too long ago, it’s worth double-checking now that Google’s switched to mobile-first indexing.
Many sites that previously overlooked structured data on their mobile pages are now at risk of losing rich snippets and SERP visibility.
The solution?
Ensure that structured data exists on both mobile and desktop versions of your website and that mobile pages include URLs updated to the mobile version.
And while it’s technically fine to use markup to communicate more information than Google needs, stripping irrelevant markup from your pages will ensure that mobile load times remain as fast and efficient as possible.

Thursday, 5 April 2018

Bad SEO habits can sink your business. Are you guilty of any of these worst practices?

Every once in a while, it's a good idea to step back and take a fresh, sober look at your habits. After all, the world around you is ever-changing, so why should your habits remain the same? This applies to pretty much everything: life, health, eating, relaxation, relationships, communication ... and work. For digital marketers and SEO specialists, this holds especially true.Seven years have passed since Google rolled out its Panda update, and it has consistently sought to improve the search experience by introducing more algorithm changes. Sticking to the same SEO routines when the nature of search is changing makes no sense. If you have noticed a drop in your rankings lately, it may be time to re-evaluate your SEO habits. Are you guilty of the following five bad habits?

1. Acting like the SEO landscape never changes

Search engine optimization is an ever-evolving sphere. An approach that worked perfectly well several years ago may not only negatively affect your website's rankings today, but also put the resource in danger of Google penalties. And this is clearly not the result you are after.
Being an SEO specialist means staying up to date and in tune with impending changes. This may seems pretty straightforward, yet there is always someone who needs to be reminded. By failing to stay on top of things and update your approach, you are getting nowhere with your current SEO strategy and are possibly falling behind. Hopefully, it's not too late to turn things around.

2. Overlooking a website's technical issues

People develop habits by doing things in a routine way, and habits form without our awareness. As an SEO practitioner, if you never stress about technical issues that crop up or exist permanently on a website, you may be unaware of what exactly is hurting the rankings.
You may be throwing all your efforts into building a strong linking profile or creating the best content possible, but this may not be enough. All your attempts to reach the top will be in vain unless you address technical shortcomings, which are precisely what affects your website's performance in search in the first place.
Pay attention to your website's loading time, redirects, broken links, duplicate content, mobile errors, sitemaps and robots.txt. That is by no means a comprehensive list, but the most common technical issues have a proven association with those factors.

3. Creating content for its own sake

You cannot do SEO without content. However, that does not mean you can do SEO with just any sort of content. So-so content will take your website nowhere and amount to a waste of time. If your website includes a blog, you should make the most of it by providing value to your potential readers. Your goal here is to position yourself as an authority whose thoughts and insights provoke engagement among your website's visitors.
Once you stop underestimating the intelligence of search engines, break the habit of producing subpar content and strive for reader satisfaction, your website will be rewarded with the rankings it deserves.

4. Putting search engines before users

It may seem like a no-brainer that SEO is all about winning the highest SERPs by satisfying search engines and their algorithms, but this often leads to a misguided approach to SEO. Some SEO specialists forget why search engines were designed in the first place – to cater to the needs and interests of searchers in the best possible manner.
Today, search engines no longer strive just to provide the most relevant results, but also to match user intent more accurately. The endgame of SEO has always been about pleasing users, not search engines. To think and act otherwise is bad SEO.

5. Trying to manipulate rankings

Sure, search engines have detected and taken care of most of the black hat SEO techniques, but some specialists still use tricky SEO tactics they think are effective. This is what walking on a razor's edge looks like, because it is only a matter of time before search engines find out they are being tricked and penalize those violators.
Reader-oriented content, keyword intent and genuine backlinks continue to increase in importance. Websites that focus on these elements over manipulative practices are recognized by search engines as respected and trusted resources that have earned their reputations by playing fair.

Modern Jobs: Why a Career in SEO Ranks No. 1 for This SEO Director


career in search engine optimization
If your job doesn’t feel like the right fit, it might be time to look outside the box. In our Modern Jobs series, we’re spotlighting cool new jobs you might not know about.
Google receives over 40,000 search queries every second. Those searches are usually listed in order from most relevant to least.
But how does Google know what results to show you? Well, that’s where search engine optimization (SEO) specialists come in.
SEO specialists or consultants help companies appear in search results. And getting a company’s name higher in searches brings in traffic and potential customers.
The SEO industry has grown more than five times faster than the overall job market.
To learn more about building a career in SEO, I spoke with Sam Kessenich, director of search marketing for RyTech, a digital marketing consulting company.
Here’s what Kessenich had to say about working in SEO, along with his advice for new graduates looking to break into the field.

Building his own website to learn SEO

Kessenich has been working in SEO for four years, but he didn’t know much about the field after graduating college. So he decided to teach himself the skills he needed.
“I majored in economics as well as marketing,” said Kessenich. “From there I moved on to a sales job, which allowed me to use my spare time to learn digital marketing a little more in depth.”
Kessenich took advantage of Google’s free Academy for Ads program to learn about Google AdWords and Analytics. He also created a website in WordPress to practice SEO.
“Once I felt more comfortable, I approached someone I had met through my sales job who ran a digital marketing agency to see if he needed any cheap labor,” said Kessenich. “This was the best career move I’ve made. The experience I gained was the most useful skill I could have asked for.”
Kessenich worked as a freelancer for two years before getting hired full time as an SEO specialist. About a year later, he became a director for RyTech.

When it comes to SEO, every day brings a new challenge

An SEO consultant’s main goal is to help a company’s website appear in search results. SEO consultants take many approaches to achieve this, Kessenich said.
“I would say an SEO consultant’s general job description would be to review a business’ website, as well as that business’ digital competition, and create a strategy to improve where your client’s website shows up in search engines for specific queries,” he explained. “Whether this is through optimizing your current website, developing new content, or building links back to your client’s website, [this] is all part of the strategy the SEO consultant is in charge of.”
Improving a website’s ranking requires different approaches, so no two days are the same.
“There’s no typical day in the SEO field, but normal days can consist of checking analytical trends, brainstorming with our team or with clients on the next marketing campaign, writing content, outreach to journalists, bloggers, [or] influencers in a certain field, technical audits of websites, and interfacing with customers,” said Kessenich.
Some days Kessenich might be creating content for a website, while other days he could be doing technical coding work. He said working in SEO requires flexibility depending on a client’s needs.

Get ready to experiment with various SEO approaches

What Kessenich loves about working in SEO is the creativity it demands.
“My favorite part of this job is brainstorming and implementing new, interesting, and creative marketing ideas,” he said. “If we can’t separate our clients apart from others, we’re not doing our job.”
Kessenich admitted that experimental ideas don’t always take off.
“The part of the job I dread the most is having to rework a campaign,” he said. “It means our initial idea didn’t succeed and we have to tweak certain aspects. We put a lot of time and effort into these campaigns and sometimes get too attached.”
As an SEO specialist, you have to be willing to take innovative approaches that haven’t been tried before. But you also have to be able to roll with the punches if an idea falls flat.

There’s no single path to a career in SEO

Now that Kessenich is in a director position, he’s responsible for hiring an SEO team. But he said you don’t need a background in marketing to make it in this field.
“For an SEO position, there isn’t a typical career trajectory,” he said. “We interview and hire a variety of backgrounds from journalism and English majors to statistics, math, and computer programming majors.”
Part of the reason he looks for candidates with different backgrounds is the diversity of perspectives they can bring to the work.
“Having multiple unique points of view is one of the best assets for any SEO campaign,” said Kessenich.
If you’re interested in working in SEO, follow Kessenich’s lead by taking Google’s free courses to learn the ins and outs of its platforms. You can also take free classes on Udemy or build a website to put what you learn into practice.
Then, use LinkedIn and other job boards to search for full-time SEO gigs or reach out to your network to learn about opportunities. If you’re interested in finding freelance gigs, check out Upwork and Freelancer.

What’s the pay like for an SEO job?

SEO specialists play a big part in helping a company succeed. But do they get paid well?
According to Indeed, the average annual salary for an SEO specialist in the U.S. is almost $63,000. PayScale puts the median salary for an SEO consultant at more than $58,000.
Those in SEO director positions make a median salary of more than $88,000, according to PayScale. Keep in mind, though, that pay can vary across companies and locations.

lthough the SEO field is likely to keep changing, SEO and digital marketing skills are sure to remain relevant for years to come. By putting these skills in your toolbox, you’ll be one step closer to a career in this exciting field.
Do you have a modern job you wish others knew more about? If you’d like to be featured, write to rsafier@studentloanhero.com.

Why PR Is Crucial to SEO & 11 Ways to Get Coverage


Why PR Is Crucial to SEO & 11 Ways to Get Coverage
Most people know that SEO no longer sits on its own in a vacuum. It needs to be worked on as part of a wider marketing approach, with other channels impacting the success you have in search.
This might be PPC, email marketing, social media, or offline advertising and promotion.
But I would argue that bigger than any of these is PR, with the impact that good PR can have on your SEO performance being much more significant than all of the other channels above combined.
But why is PR so much more important than the others?
WHY PR

Links

Links continue to be one of the most important ranking factors in Google and other search engines, and getting good ones is becoming increasingly difficult.
I’ve written about ways to get links before with great content, but PR is another approach that can lead to links on some of the most powerful and influential websites.
If you can even just gain a few bits of coverage on national newspaper sites, large industry magazines or popular regional sites then this can elevate your SEO performance to the next level and give you benefits long into the future.

Brand Recognition

Having a recognizable brand is becoming more and more important in the SERPs and getting featured on powerful third-party sites goes a long way to cementing you as a trusted brand.
For years we have seen Google’s results for competitive phrases increasingly favour big brands, to the detriment of smaller independents, so the only way to recover some of that pie is to establish yourself as more of a brand, too. If you can’t beat ‘em…
If your brand name is getting mentioned in lots of different places, be that social media, news websites or elsewhere on the web, there is no doubt that Google will go a step closer to trusting you and ranking you better.

Reputation Management

Once people have found something they want to buy on the web, they usually want to know if they’re buying from a trusted place. If they aren’t familiar with the one they’ve found, they’ll often do a quick search to find reviews of that place.
And they’ll be met with review sites like TripAdvisor or Consumer Reports.
Hopefully you’re doing a good job and being nice to people, so those places will tell a nice story to potential customers, but people are fickle and even the best companies will have some bad experiences with customers who leave negative reviews.
reputation-management-ratings
However, if you’ve carried out some successful PR activity, the Page 1 results for your brand are much more likely to be the third-party sites where you’ve been mentioned, whether it’s a campaign you ran that got coverage in the national news, or a press release that got featured in an industry publication.
End result? You’re in much more control of your online reputation and convincing that potential customer to buy with you.

Social Proof

Been featured on CNN, the Daily Telegraph, or Lonely Planet? Or anywhere else of that ilk? Shout it from the rooftops!
If your PR has been successful in getting you coverage then get that on your website for all to see. When someone is thinking of buying from you they’re much more likely to pull the trigger if publications they recognize have featured you.
 WHO TO TARGET
Many people make the mistake of diving into PR wanting and expecting coverage in the national news.
That would be lovely, but it isn’t always achievable, and it isn’t always the best thing for you either.
Before you start coming up with ideas for campaigns, writing press releases, or coming up with fancy tag lines, think about who you want to reach.
megaphone
If it’s more fruitful to reach a smaller group of more specific people, then focus your PR efforts in that direction. If it truly is a wider audience of more general consumers then plan to target the nationals and larger more general websites. But until you’ve identified that, hold your horses.
Once you know, do some research into who is writing about that topic in the publication you want to target and analyze their work until you know them inside out.
Only then should you move onto the tactics below, safe in the knowledge that you’re targeting the right person/people and you know the things they love writing about.
WAYS TO GET COVERAGE
There are many different approaches to getting PR coverage. The best one will vary depending on who you’re targeting and what your goals are. You should’ve worked that out by now, so you can cherrypick from the options below depending on what that goal is for you.
The main thing to ask yourself when using any of these tactics is ‘Why this, and why now?’. If you can give the journalist a good answer for both of those with your story, then you’ll be in with a great chance of securing some coverage.

1. Write Press Releases

Let’s get this one out of the way early. A tactic as old as time, the press release has been butchered beyond recognition by the SEO industry.
We’re not talking about writing some keyword orientated drivel with a link at the end and submitting it to PR Web. If you’re doing that, stop it!
You should be writing press releases with interesting, newsworthy material and distributing it to specific people that you’ve found through research who would be interested in it.
If there are targeted newswires in your industry then you could submit it there too, but the focus should always be on creating something interesting and timely.
Do that and you’re in with a shot.

2. Specialist Media Networks

Do some research to see if there are any specialist media networks in your industry.
We work in travel and have TravMedia, which is a great place to connect with journalists and distribute press releases.
It’s also great for getting requests from journalists who are writing about particular topics and need tips, advice or quotes from people in the industry.

3. #journorequest

Twitter is a great place to uncover PR opportunities by following hashtags like #journorequest or #PRRequest which journalists use when they are writing stories.
Partner these up with hashtags in your own industry like #travel and you will get a much better, filtered feed of relevant opportunities.
You can go a step further and use a service like Twilert to email you whenever this combination of hashtags appears so you can make sure you’re always first to bite when a tasty opportunity arises.

4. Campaigns

Just talking about your brand and what you do can only get you so far, so sooner or later you’ll have to start getting creative.
Creating a wider promotional campaign allows you to tap into popular themes in the news that cross over with your brand that give the media a reason to talk about you.
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It also gives you a bigger opportunity to get coverage in lots of places if your idea is good enough and implemented well.
One of my favourite examples of this is a hotel chain in Sweden which was popular for honeymooners, who offered a money back guarantee if residents got divorced within a year of staying with them. So simple, but it gained coverage (and links) in nearly every top-tier publication you can imagine.

5. Partner with a Charity

Without being too cynical, this should be driven by a desire to team up with a good cause and give something back.
However, it is undoubtedly a good angle to make something newsworthy too, and make journalists much more likely to cover your brand if it is doing something nice to help others.
If used in combination with a wider campaign idea, this can be particularly powerful. We did this for a client who run holidays in the Alps, by creating a tour where people could build their own igloo then stay in it, and for everyone that went on the trip we contributed to a sustainable tourism charity. It was covered in top-tier publications like Lonely Planet and many others.

6. Reviews

Another traditional approach to getting coverage is by offering your product or service in return for a review.
You need to be confident enough in what you offer for this to be a success and carry the right message, but it’s rare for journalists to be to scathing when they receive a freebie.
In travel this takes the form of press trips, with hotel stays, transport or full-blown holidays being offered in return for the opportunity to be featured somewhere in a prominent publication.
For you it could be as simple as mailing your product to them and asking them to give it a test run.

7. Use Research or Data

When it comes to offering something new, it doesn’t get much better than your own research or data.
If you’re privy to lots of customer data that you can use to gauge trends in the industry then this is the kind of content journalists love. And if you’re not, carry out some research to prompt those kind of findings.
Beware though, new data is only good if it’s interesting. If your new research shows that people love going on a city break to New York then it’s unlikely to set the world on fire. Data to show people now prefer going to Austin than New York? Now there’s a hook.

8. Get Quoted

Often, journalists will have most of their story covered, but they will just need some insight from someone in the industry to add an extra level of credibility or a different angle.
This will usually come in the form of a quote, and you need to be ready and waiting when the opportunity arises.
Help a Reporter Out (HARO) is a great way to keep your eye out for these opportunities, as is Twitter with the hashtags highlighted above.
If you’re doing this on behalf of a client, or you work in-house but wouldn’t be the actual person offering a quote, then make sure you have a bank of boilerplate quotes you can use from significant figures in the company so you can reply double-quick to journalists. Time is short, and waiting for a client usually results in missed opportunities.

9. Use Photos

Another shortfall in the journalist’s armory is images.
Getting high quality images that don’t just look like stock photography is tricky, and often journalists will reach out asking people if they have images available in return for credit (read ‘link’!).
Prepare an image bank that you can immediately send to journalists for this eventuality. Go a step further and create pages on your website so you rank for phrases that the journalist might search for e.g. ‘free to use photos of spain’.
Want to go all out with this tactic? Then check out this monstrous guide from Jason Thibault.

10. Tell a Customer’s Story

A good story is the key to any PR success, and how better to do this than through the eyes of a customer.
If you just pitch your fantastic company who does a really good job no journalist will listen to you. But tell them the story of how a customer’s life was changed through going on one of your trips and they have gone from failure to success story and you’re more likely to get a response.
Take the journalist (and subsequently the reader) on a journey and you’ll be in with a much better chance of success.

11. Current Events

You’ll often hear journalists asking ‘what’s’ the hook?’ They basically mean why should I write about that now.
It’s your job to give them that reason, and a great one is a link to things that are happening or popular at that moment in time.
Has Justin Bieber just been on holiday to the destination you cover? Is there uproar around plane travel that makes train journeys suddenly more appealing?  Use those hooks to pitch your story.
The examples above are based on being dialed in to the news landscape and what topics are getting coverage, but you can also plan ahead for this kind of thing.
Annual events like Christmas, Valentine’s Day or Easter are always good hooks, whilst local events or popular film releases also offer great opportunities that you can plan for in advance. Pull a calendar together with these dates so you can plan your PR activity around it.
hooks
In addition to the suggestions above, it’s important to acknowledge that having a unique, stand-out service or product will always be the best ‘tactic’ for your PR activity. All of the above will be much easier if you have something interesting to work with, rather than just a copycat of everything else in the market.
It’s also important to emphasise that none of these tactics will serve you well if you can’t quickly and concisely answer why a journalist would cover it, and why they should do so now rather than next month, or last month.
Once you’ve established that, and honed your tactical approach to be as effective as possible, it’s time to pitch it to the journalists you identified right at the start of this process.
HOW TO PITCH
This is an entire topic in itself, so rather than try to do it justice in a few words, I’ll just send you off to some of my favourite resources on the topic that I go back to time and time again:
Follow these tips with a good story under your belt, and you’ll be en route to some fantastic coverage.
SUMMARY
If you aren’t incorporating PR into your SEO strategy then you’re missing a trick and battling with one arm tied behind your back compared to your competitors.
It’s become an integral tool in the armory of any SEO and if you are a smaller, independent company then it is the weapon you can’t afford to overlook in closing the gap between you and big brands much more quickly.
So start planning, find your hook and get ready to hustle!

Wednesday, 28 March 2018

7 Ways a Mobile First Index Impacts SEO

If you don’t like change then the Internet is not for you. Google just changed how they’re indexing sites and announced more changes on the way. I’ve identified seven insights about a mobile first index and how that may influence rankings and SEO.

1. Mobile First Algo is Nuanced

It may be inappropriate to generalize what kind of content is best for a mobile first index. First, consider that every search query is different. Here is a sample of a few kinds of queries:
  • Long tail queries
  • Informational queries (what actor starred in…)
  • Local search queries
  • Transactional queries
  • Research queries
  • How do I queries?
Each one of those search queries can be answered by a different kind of web page, with different content length, with different needs for diagrams, maps, depth, shallowness and so on.
One simply cannot generalize and say that Google prefers short form content because that’s what mobile users prefer. Thinking in terms of what most mobile users might prefer is a great start. But the next step involves thinking about the problem that specific search query is trying to solve and what the best solution for the most users is going to be.
And as you’ll read below, for some queries the most popular answer might vary according to time. Google’s mobile first announcement explicitly stated that for some queries a desktop version might be appropriate.

2. Satisfy The Most Users

Identifying the problem users are trying to solve can lead to multiple answers. If you look at the SERPs you will see there are different kinds of sites. Some might be review sites, some might be informational, some might be educational.
Those differences are indications that there multiple problems users are trying to solve. What’s helpful is that Google is highly likely to order the SERPs according to the most popular user intent, the answer that satisfies the most users.
So if you want to know which kind of answer to give on a page, take a look at the SERPs and let the SERPs guide you. Sometimes this means that most users tend to be on mobile and short form content works best. Sometimes it’s fifty/fifty and most users prefer in depth content or multiple product choices or less product choices.
Don’t be afraid of the mobile index. It’s not changing much. It’s simply adding an additional layer, to understand which kind of content satisfies the typical user (mobile, laptop, desktop, combination) and the user intent. It’s just an extra step to understanding who the most  users are and from there asking how to satisfy them, that’s all.

3. Time Influences Observed User Intent

Every search query demands a specific kind of result because the user intent behind each query is different. Mobile adds an additional layer of intent to search queries. In a Think with Google publication about how people use their devices (PDF), Google stated this
“The proliferation of devices has changed the way people interact with the world around them. With more touchpoints than ever before, it’s critical that marketers have a full understanding of how people use devices so that they can be here and be useful for their customers in the moments that matter.”

Time plays a role in how the user intent changes. The time of day that a query is made can influence what device that user is using, which in turn says something about that users needs in terms of speed, convenience and information needs. Google’s research from the above cited document states this:
“Mobile leads in the morning, but computers become dominant around 8 a.m. when people might start their workday. Mobile takes the lead again in the late afternoon when people might be on the go, and continues to increase into the evening, spiking around primetime viewing hours.”
This is what I mean when I say that Google’s mobile index is introducing a new layer of what it means to be relevant. It’s not about your on page keywords being relevant to what a user is typing. A new consideration is about how your web page is relevant to someone at a certain time of day on a certain device and how you’re going to solve the most popular information need at that time of day.
Google’s March 2018 official mobile first announcement stated it like this:
“We may show content to users that’s not mobile-friendly or that is slow loading if our many other signals determine it is the most relevant content to show.”
What signals is Google looking at? Obviously, the device itself could be a signal. But also, according to Google, time of day might be a signal because not only does device usage fluctuate during the day but the intent does too.

4. Defining Relevance in a Mobile First Index

Google’s focus on the User Intent 100% changes what the phrase “relevant content” means, especially in a mobile first index. People on different devices search for different things. It’s not that the mobile index itself is changing what is going to be ranked. The user intent for search queries is constantly changing, sometimes in response to Google’s ability to better understand what that intent is.
Some of those core algorithm updates could be changes related to how Google understands what satisfies users. You know how SEOs are worrying about click through data? They are missing an important metric. CTR is not the only measurement tool search engines have.
Do you think CTR 100% tells what’s going on in a mobile first index? How can Google understand if a SERP solved a user’s problem if the user does not even click through?
That’s where a metric similar to Viewport Time comes in.  Search engines have been using variations of Viewport Time to understand mobile users. Yet the SEO industry is still wringing it’s hands about CTR. Ever feel like a piece of the ranking puzzle is missing? This is one of those pieces.
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Google’s understanding of what satisfies users is constantly improving. And that impacts the rankings. How we provide the best experience for those queries should change, too.
An important way those solutions have changed involves understanding the demographics of who is using a specific kind of device. What does it mean when someone asks a question on one device versus another device? One answer is that the age group might influence who is asking a certain question on a certain device.
For example, Google shared the following insights about mobile and desktop users (PDF). Searchers in the Beauty and Health niche search for different kinds of things according to device.
Examples of top beauty & health queries on mobile devices are for topics related to tattoos and nail salons. Examples of Beauty & Health desktop queries indicate an older user because they’re searching for stores like Saks and beauty products such anti-aging creams.

It’s naïve to worry about whether you have enough synonyms on your page. That’s not what relevance is about. Relevance is not about keyword synonyms. Relevance is often about problem solving at certain times of day and within specific devices to specific age groups. You can’t solve that by salting your web page with synonyms.

5. Mobile First is not About User Friendliness

An important quality of the mobile first index is convenience when satisfying a user intent. Does the user intent behind the search query demand a quick answer or a shorter answer? Does the web page make it hard to find the answer? Does the page enable comparison between different products?
Now answer those questions by adding the phrase, on mobile, on a tablet, on a desktop and so on.

6. Would a Visitor Understand your Content?

Google can know if a user understands your content. Users vote with their click and viewport time data and quality raters create another layer of data about certain queries. With enough data Google can predict it what a user might find useful. This is where machine learning comes in.
Here’s what Google says about machine learning in the context of User Experience (UX):
Machine learning is the science of making predictions based on patterns and relationships that’ve been automatically discovered in data.
If content that is difficult to read is a turn-off, that may be reflected in what sites are ranked and what sites are not. If the topic is complex and a complex answer solves the problem then that might be judged the best answer.
I know we’re talking about Google but it’s useful to understand the state of the art of search in general.  Microsoft published a fascinating study about teaching a machine  to predict what a will find interesting. The paper is titled, Predicting Interesting Things in Text. This research focused on understanding what made content interesting and what caused users to keep clicking to another page.  In other words, it was about training a machine to understand what satisfies users. Here’s a synopsis:
We propose models of “interestingness”, which aim to predict the level of interest a user has in the various text spans in a document. We obtain naturally occurring interest signals by observing
user browsing behavior in clicks from one page to another. We cast the problem of predicting interestingness as a discriminative learning problem over this data.
We train and test our models on millions of real world transitions between Wikipedia documents as observed from web browser session logs. On the task of predicting which spans are of most interest to users, we show significant improvement over various baselines and highlight the value of our latent semantic model.
In general, I find good results with content that can be appreciated by the widest variety of people. This isn’t strictly a mobile first consideration but it is increasingly important in an Internet where so people of diverse backgrounds are accessing a site with multiple intents multiple kinds of devices. Achieving universal popularity becomes increasingly difficult so it may be advantageous to appeal to the broadest array of people in a mobile first index.

7. Google’s Algo Intent Hasn’t Changed

Looked at a certain way, it could be said that Google’s desire to show users what they want to see has remained consistent. What has changed is the users age, what they desire, when they desire it and what device they desire it on. So the intent of Google’s algorithm likely remains the same.
The mobile first index can be seen as a logical response to how users have changed. It’s backwards to think of it as Google forcing web publishers to adapt to Google. What’s really happening is that web publishers must adapt to how their users have changed. Ultimately that is the best way to think of the mobile first index. Not as a response to what Google wants but to approach the problem as a response to the evolving needs of the user.

Starting From Scratch: The Simple Guide To Social Media And SEO Success

Pexels
Viral marketing and building a social media following are common initiatives among startups and established businesses alike. Every executive and entrepreneur thinks they need to create a viral piece of content and get extremely lucky to win viral publicity. But if that's your strategy, you have little chance of success. Instead, ride an already existing viral wave.
Don't just create content and hope it goes viral. Use content that has proven to be viral and then post it to your website and social media accounts to gain web traffic and followers. For this to work, you need to have established social media profiles. You don't need to have a hundred thousand followers, but you do need real followers who are related to your niche.
1. Create social media accounts.
The first step is having company social media accounts across major social channels that pertain to your target market. These may include LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and Reddit. These social media channels are all high-authority websites that help your company rank high in search engines. The more content you post on social media that receives shares, likes and comments, the higher your company's SEO ranking will climb.

2. Identify your customers.
Your dream customers are already online and are most likely following the top leaders in your niche. Tap into that audience and redirect them to become focused on your offerings. For example, if your niche is B2B sales consulting, figure out where that audience is online now. Make a list of all the B2B sales leaders like Grant Cardone, John Barrows, Jeffrey Gitomer, Jay Abraham and Tony Robbins.
3. Follow your competitors' audience.
Once you have identified who your dream customers are, the next step is to engage them. Follow your indirect and direct competitors' audiences on social media. Spend some time identifying power followers -- followers with their own audiences of over 2000. Apply this strategy across Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn. This works well because if you're in the same niche as the accounts they are currently following, there is a good chance they will want to follow you as well. These power followers tend to look at their audiences carefully as they build their networks. Your goal should be to spend 30 days adding at least 200 people on each social channel until you follow a few thousand people. Once you've done this, you should see at least a couple thousand people on each one of your social media accounts now following you in return.

Hijacking Google search results for fun, not profit: UK SEO uncovers XML sitemap exploit in Google Search Console

SEO wins bug bounty from Vulnerability Reward Program, Google search team confirms the exploit no longer works

In 2017, Google paid nearly $3 million to individuals and researchers as part of their Vulnerability Reward Program (VRP), which encourages the security research community to find and report vulnerabilities in Google products.
This week, Tom Anthony — who heads Product Research & Development at Distilled, an SEO agency — was awarded a bug bounty of $1,337 for discovering an exploit that enabled one site to hijack the search engine results page (SERP) visibility and traffic of another — quickly getting indexed and easily ranking for the victimized site’s competitive keywords.
Detailed in his blog post, Anthony describes how Google’s Search Console (GSC) sitemap submission via ping URL essentially allowed him to submit an XML sitemap for a site he does control, as if it were a sitemap for one he does not. He did this by first finding a target site that allowed open redirects; scraping its contents and creating a duplicate of that site (and its URL structures) on a test server. He then submitted an XML sitemap to Google (hosted on the test server) that included URLs for the targeted domain with hreflang directives pointing to those same URLs, now also present on the test domain.

Hijacking the SERPs

Within 48 hours, the test domain started receiving traffic. Within the week, the test site was ranking for competitive terms on page 1 of the SERPs. Also, GSC showed the two sites as related — listing the targeted site as linking to the test site:
Google Search Console links the two unrelated sites. Source: http://www.tomanthony.co.uk
This presumed relationship also allowed Anthony to submit other XML sitemaps — within the test site’s GSC at this point, not via ping URL — for the targeted site:
Victim site sitemap uploaded directly in GSC – Source: http://www.tomanthony.co.uk

Understanding the scope

Open redirects themselves are not a new or novel problem – and Google has been warning webmasters about shoring up their sites against this attack vector since 2009. What is noteworthy here is that utilizing an open redirect worked to not just submit a rogue sitemap, but to effectively rank a brand-new domain, brand-new site, with zero actual inbound links, and no promotion. And then to get that brand-new site and domain over a million search impressions, 10,000 unique visitors and 40,000 page views (via search traffic only) in three weeks.
The “bug” here is both a problem with sitemap submissions (the subsequent sail-through GSC sitemap submissions are alarming) and a greater problem as to how the algorithm immediately applied all the equity from the one site across to the completely separate and unrelated domain.
Source: http://www.tomanthony.co.uk
I reached out to Google with a series of detailed questions about this exploit, including the search quality team’s involvement in pursuing and implementing a fix, and whether or not they are able to detect and take action on any bad actors that may have already exploited this vulnerability. A Google spokesperson replied:
When we were alerted to the issue, we worked closely across teams to address it. It was not a previously known issue and we don’t believe it had been used.
In response to questions about changes with respect to sitemap submissions, GSC and the transfer of equity affecting results, the spokesperson said:
We continue to recommend that site-owners use sitemaps to let us know about new & updated pages within their website. Additionally, the new Search Console also uses sitemaps as a way of drilling down into specific information within your website in the Index Coverage report. If you’re hosting your sitemaps outside of your website, for proper usage it’s important that you have both sites verified in the same Search Console account.
I discussed this exploit and the research at length with Anthony.

The research process

When asked about his motivations for pursuing this work, he said, “I believe an effective SEO is someone who experiments and tries to understand things behind the scenes. I’ve never done any black-hat SEO, and so set myself the challenge of finding something on that side of things; primarily for the learning experience and as a way to run defense if I ever saw it in the wild.”
He added, “I like doing security research as a hobby on the side, so decided that rather than take the ‘traditional’ black-hat route of manipulating the algorithm’s ranking signals, I’d see if I could instead find an outright bug in it.”
Oftentimes, the driving motivation in pursuing a given method relates to having experienced (or having a client that has experienced) a sudden drop in SERP traffic or rankings. Anthony noted, “At Distilled, like so many SEOs, I’ve worked with sites that have had unexplained drops. Often clients claim ‘negative SEO,’ but usually it is something far more mundane. What is worrying about this specific issue is [that] typical negative SEO attacks are detectable. If I spam you with low-quality links, you can find them, you can confirm they exist. With this issue, it appears an attacker could leverage your equity in Google and you would not know.”
Over the course of four weeks’ evenings and weekends spent delving into it, Anthony discovered that combining different research streams he’d begun proved effective where each separately led to dead ends. “I had ended up with two threads of research — one around open redirects, as they are a crack in how sites work that I felt could be leveraged for SEO — and the other was with XML sitemaps and trying to make Googlebot error out when parsing them (I ran about 20 variations of that, but none worked!). I was so deep into it at this point, and had a revelation when I realized these two streams of research could perhaps be combined.”

Reporting and resolution

Once he realized the impact and harm that could be done to sites, Anthony reported the bug to Google’s security team (See complete timeline in his post). As this method was previously unknown to Google but clearly exploitable, Anthony noted, “It is a terrifying prospect that this could have already been out there and being exploited. However, the nature of the bug would mean it is essentially undetectable. The ‘victim’ may not be affected directly if their equity is used to rank in another country, and then the victims become the legitimate companies who are pushed down the rankings by the attacker. They would have no way to tell how the attacker site was ranking so well.”
As noted above, the Google spokesperson said they do not believe it has been used. Unclear from their response is whether or not they have data available that would enable them to detect pinged sitemaps used in such a way. If further comment or information is given, we’ll update this post.
On the issue of detection specifically, I asked Anthony to speculate on scaling this exploit. “The biggest weakness with my experiment was how closely I mimicked the original site in terms of URL structure and content. I had a bunch of experiments prepped that were designed to measure just how different you could make the attacker site: Do I need the same URL structure as the parent site? How similar must the content be? Can I target other languages in the same country as the victim site? In my case, I think I could have re-run with the same approach but have differentiated the attack site slightly more, and probably [would] have escaped detection,” he said.
He added, “If I had kept it to myself, then I imagine I could have gone for months or years. If you outright scammed people it would be short-lived, but if you used the method to drive affiliate traffic, or even simply to boost your own legitimate business, then little reason you’d ever be caught.”
As the image below demonstrates, the short-lived traffic driven to the test site was potentially far more valuable than the relatively small (by comparison) bounty he was awarded, which makes one wonder if the security team really understood the implications of the exploit.

Anthony’s motivations (and why he did report the vulnerability right away) were rooted in research and helping the search community, however.
“Doing this sort of research is a learning experience, and not about abusing what you find. In the industry, we have our complaints about Google at times, but [to] a consumer, they provide a great service, and I think good SEOs actually help with that — and this is basically an extension of the same idea. The Vulnerability Reward Program they run is a nice incentive to focus research efforts on them rather than elsewhere; it is nice to potentially be awarded a bounty for the time and effort that goes into the research.”