Tag: SEO

SEO: Link Building and Establishing Authority

Carl Setzer
SEO

Authority is a key part of evaluating the quality of a site. And inbound links, aka “backlinks” are key parts of how Search engines develop ascertain that authority.  Additionally, Google has confirmed that links are one of the three main elements for determining a site’s ranking. So, earning quality backlinks is extremely valuable in pushing your site up a search engine results page. Search engines evaluate the quality of the referring site as well. One good referral is worth far more than dozens of weak ones. With that, we want to focus on links from sites that will direct high-quality traffic to our site. I think it’s best to find sites that will send users that are highly interested in whatever your site features. If you focus on providing good and interesting content, you will naturally attract good links.

Below are some key best practices, and a few things to avoid.

Let’s start with a list of tactics to avoid:

  • Purchased links
  • Link exchanges or reciprocal linking
  • Google’s specific guidance is to avoid “excessive” link exchange.
  • Low-quality directory links

To end on a positive note, here are some recommended tactics:

  • Earn your links! Good, useful content that adds value
  • Seek to gain links from pages with high-authority
  • You want to increase your backlinks over time
  • They should come from topically relevant sources
  • Make sure you use natural anchor text
  • Publish a blog
  • Create “resource” pages

Moz Chapter 3 KEYWORD RESEARCH

Carl Setzer
SEO Graphic

Another post based on this past quarter’s research on SEO via Moz

There are many key tools for determining a good keyword strategy. The first, and most important one, is the act of questioning. Starting with core questions is critical to developing the right focus on for the other research tools. Who are our customers? What are their goals? What do they want? How do they search? Once you have answers for these, you can explore several other tools like:

      • Google Keywords Planner
      • Google Trends
      • Moz Keyword Explorer
Google’s tools are perhaps the most important, as the vast majority of US based search is done via Google. Google Keywords gives you the ability to explore which keywords are relevant, which have high competition, and which have low competition. The “finding new keywords” tool looks particularly powerful. Google Trends is another tool that is worthy of adding to your toolbox. With it you can see what the world is searching for, both at the broadest levels as well as refined to the local or even hyper-local. Besides being able to search for specific keywords, you can also looking at macro trends across the internet. Moz, one of the leaders in digital marketing has their own Keyword Research tool. In many respects, it’s more powerful than Google’s. Especially for the Pro version. But even the free version has great details on their research dashboard, including keyword suggestions and SERP analysis.
With this type of work, you can determine the value of any keyword and build strategies around them.

How Search Engines Work: Crawling, Indexing, And Ranking

Carl Setzer
Winter quarter is finished! I just turned in my final project (JavaScript) and my brain is oozing onto the floor. Anyway, this quarter I took Intro To JavaScript, Systems Analysis and one I’m calling a catchall, “Joomla and Introduction To SEO”. Interestingly, this last class featured Amazon Web Services (AWS) heavily, and I’ll write about that, too. So, today I’ll explore more of my thoughts on SEO.
  • Crawling and Indexing:
    • Crawling sites is when a robot, for instance Googlebot, explores a webpage. One of the key problems with crawling and crawlers is simply whether they can find your page. There are some ways to push Google in this regard. One valuable way: you can tell Google how you want the page crawled via the Search Console. A related problem: keeping crawlers from indexing pages you don’t want indexed. Things like special landing pages, promo-code pages, pages for A-B testings and so forth. The tool for this is the robots.txt file which directs the bots on how you want the files analyzed.  Web developers also need to consider the crawl budget, which is the average number of pages the Googlebot will before moving onto another site. It is also important to utilize a clean information architecture and sitemaps.
    • Indexes are where search engines store and process the information found while crawling the internet. Just because a site can be crawled does not mean it will be indexed, or indexed the way you want. Robots can be instructed on this within the meta tags.
  • Matching Queries to Content
    • The goal of the search engine: provide the most relevant results to user queries. Their algorithm uses several things to determine that relevance. One of the main ways is backlinks. These links from other sites assert authority on the subject matter. PageRank is part of the Google core algorithm that analyzes link qualities. More natural backlinks are the most valuable. Other elements that Google considers: page clicks, time on the page, the bounce rate (percentage of user visits where they only viewed one page), and pogo-sticking (where the user goes right back to the Search Engine Results Page after visiting the target site. Additionally, for localized content, Google uses these elements to rank results: relevance, distance, and prominence. Things like Google Reviews and Citations are the biggest influencers of prominence.

What are the seven steps to successful SEO?

Carl Setzer
SEO Graphic
  • “What are the seven steps to successful SEO?”
    • Successful SEO has seven key steps, per MOZ’s “Beginner’s Guide To SEO“. These are valuable ways to help your website be discoverable by new users by ranking high in Search Engine Results Pages.
      • Crawl accessibility so engines can read your website
        • Enabling search engines to find and index my site
      • Compelling content that answers the searchers query
        • The site needs to answer questions in an interesting and engaging way.
      • Keyword optimized to attract searchers & engines
        • Be thoughtful with the composition of the website so that relevant keywords are featured in the articles
      • Great user experience including a fast load speed and compelling UX
        • The site needs to be streamlined so that it loads quickly, yet also has an interesting and engaging design
      • Share-worthy content that earns links, citations, and amplification
        • Content that engages your audience enough that they feel compelled to share it.
      • Title, URL, and description to draw high Click-Through Rates in the rankings
        • Thoughtfully considering article titles, the site’s URL, and description to make it compelling to someone, seeing it in a search, is very interested in clicking on the link and coming to the page.
      • Snippet/scheme markup to stand out in SERPs
        • Make the additional comments that show up on the Search Results Page engaging and encouraging the viewer to click over to the site.

What is SEO?

Carl Setzer
SEO Graphic

This quarter I studied SEO techniques, mainly working off of Moz’s “Beginner’s Guide To SEO”. Let’s take a look at some of my main takeaways. Today, let’s start with the basics: What Is SEO?

  • SEO is otherwise known as Search Engine Optimization. Essentially, this is a technique to strategize your website’s content to place better in the search results of Google and Bing. This requires deeply understanding your target demographics, what they are interested in, what sorts of things they search for, how they search, and the way they structure their searches. Also, you need to understand how search engines work. They crawl the internet, creating indexes of the content they find. Ultimately, SEO is about creating better organic search results, as opposed to pay-per-click (PPC) advertising campaigns. SEO has 20 times more traffic opportunities than PPC (via both mobile and desktop). SEO also pays off over a longer time.

Edit: corrected the link to Moz’s “Beginner’s Guide To SEO”. 

A Summary Of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines

Carl Setzer
Google Webmaster Tools

One of my assignments this week was to read through the Google Webmaster Guidelines and summarize their general recommendations.

  • Make sure your pages can get links from other pages. You will want to make sure you use crawlable links when you do that, which means using anchor tags (<a> with a href attribute).
  • Create a sitemap and ensure that it has links to all the important pages on the site. They also recommend having this as a “human-readable” list of links for those important pages.
  • Keep the number of links on a page to a “reasonable number”. They recommend “a few thousand at most”, which, to me, seems excessive.
  • Ensure that the hosting server supports the “If-Modified-Since” HTTP header, which is what informs the Googlebots when content has been changed since they last visited the page. It’s important as it saves bandwidth and, thus, networking overhead costs.
  • Use the robots.txt file well. It is important to ensure that the web crawler bots are not crawling non-important pages. Besides ensuring the robots.txt file has the right information, you also want to make sure that it is kept up-to-date. Doing these things ensures that your “crawling budget” is utilized well.
  • Another thing that you can do is manually submit your site to Google’s crawlers. This triggers them to head over to your site immediately, as opposed to waiting for it to be discovered crawling other sites.
  • Lastly, you should make sure that administrators of other relevant sites know about yours. Emailing an announcement, or posting such on social media is a great tool towards creating awareness of your site and garnering backlinks.

A Quick Piece Of Blogging Advice

Carl Setzer

One of the blogs I follow will, often, post a flurry of posts in one burst. So my email becomes laden with a string of 8, 9, 10 posts.

I want you all to be aware of a feature within all blogging platforms I’m familiar with: “Scheduling Posts”.

Below is a screen capture of the current layout for WordPress.

Annotation 2019-09-20 091109

 

This helps in a couple ways.

  1. You don’t flood your readers with content.
  2. Regular postings are better for you, SEO-wise. Scheduling 10 posts to occur over 10 days is better for your site in the eyes of Google.

So, one fast bit of blogging advice. Cheers!

My poetry site has been making me proud

Carl Setzer

I created this site a couple of years ago to be a focus for my poetry.

I didn’t think too much of it at the time. Just was following the advice to focus your content. My writings scatter across many interests, so I broke apart my stuff into more focused sites.

Well, A Poet’s Journey has done quite nicely. 1266 subscribers, and the most stable/solid stats (sessions, pageview, etc).

Funny that another experiment, Not Just Seattle, has taken up most of my vanity SEO. The Carl Setzer who opened a brewery in Beijing, getting featured by Fortune magazine, amongst others, has the lion share of SEO for my name. But my Keller Williams Realty page, and Not Just Seattle are on page 1 as well.

As of today, my namesake page, CarlSetzer.com, is on page 3. Crazy that an experiment took over the whole thing! And the site that’s getting the most action is down on page 3.

 

My Social Media Management Philosophy

Carl Setzer

I managed social media for several companies. My desire had always been organic growth. Most of my efforts are via thoughtful content and local engagement. My strategies do include the use of such tools as Google and Facebook ads, thatsbtgenlimit of paid reach. I never advise the buying of followers. 

I’ve known several folks that have done so. Now, ostensibly it looks great. Having thousands of followers looks like it grants you significant authority, makes you look like an influencer. More sophisticated eyes will see through it. When most of your followers are bots, for instance, the validity of your authority becomes suspect. 

With that, paid followers don’t provide meaningful engagement. We need to remember the why. Why did you start social media? Probably to gain customers. The likelihood any of those paid followers is going to turn into a client is pretty near zero. 

Don’t get wrapped up in the numbers. It’s better to have a few subscribers or followers who are fully engaged with you, than tens of thousands who don’t. Influencing is far more about engagement than about follower counts.