SEO FAQ

6/9/2020 SEO FAQ
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Contents
1. What Are Personalized Results?
2. How to Combine SEO with PPC?
3. Does Content Help SEO?
4. How does Google Rank Pages?
5. What Is Negative SEO?
6. How to Do Keyword Research? 

6/9/2020 SEO FAQ
7. Is User Engagement a Ranking Signal?
8. What is SEO?
9. What Are the Best SEO Tactics?
10. What is Local SEO?
11. How to Redesign a Website without Losing Traffic?
12. How to Build Backlinks Safely?
13. How to Do Corporate SEO?
14. What Is White-hat SEO?
15. What Works Today in Search?
16. Should I Hire an All-in-one Marketing Agency?
17. Is Website Speed a Ranking Factor?
18. Does Embedding YouTube Videos Increase Rankings?
19. Is it Bad to Duplicate Text in All Posts?
20. How to Get Backlinks from Local Contacts?
21. How to Get Traffic and Links from Sponsorships?
22. How to Get more Backlinks?
23. Should I Build Dofollow or Nofollow links?
24. What Are Internal and External Links?
25. Is WordPress Good for SEO?
26. Do I Need Long-tail Keywords?
27. What is Content Relevance in SEO?
28. What is Keyword Difficulty?
29. How to Optimize Metadata? 

6/9/2020 SEO FAQ
30. Is My Website Penalized?
31. Is Buying Backlinks Dangerous?
32. What is SEO Content?
33. Do Reviews Help SEO?
34. What Type of Content Generates Clicks?
35. What Are SEO Mistakes?
36. How to Rank my Site in Google?
37. What is Keyword Cannibalization?
38. Are Backlinks Enough to Rank a Page?
39. How to Build an Internal Link Structure?
40. How to Build Traffic to a New Website or Startup?
41. What Content Works for E-commerce SEO?
42. What Are the Most Common SEO Services?
43. What Is a Good Backlink?
44. What Are the Key SEO Metrics?
45. Are SEO Gigs any Good?
46. How to Do SEO for Large Enterprises?
47. What Are SEO KPIs?
48. What Are SEO Blockers?
49. Why Can't My Pages Rank?
50. How to do SEO on Wordpress?
51. How to Do In-house SEO?
52. What Does Google Want to See on a Page? 

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53. Do I Get Any Results with Cheap SEO Services?
54. Are Redirects Safe for SEO?
55. Does the Sitemap Help with SEO?
56. Does Navigation Affect SEO?
57. How to Block Pages from Search Results?
What Are Personalized Results?
Search engines tailor search results and content according to your search history, browser history, and clicks
just like the social networks do with your content feed. Google records your past search history if you're
authenticated as a Google user. Chrome records the clicks you do while searching for answers and the
content you view. Now that you're aware of the data they collect for each user, you can create content
grouped by target-audiences, get quality traffic, and optimize conversions. The bottom line is you have more
traffic channels to exploit and more opportunities to surface your content.
Skip to the contents
How to Combine SEO with PPC? 

6/9/2020 SEO FAQ
Running ads is not productive as you may have noticed already. Why is that? Because ads are being ignored
by people (almost 90%) when they use Google to run queries. People's behavior towards ads is like a blocker
that hides the organic results achieved with SEO, which people have associated with solutions to their
problem. Your prospects don't have much time to spend on the search engine. They will take the sites ranking
on the first page as the leaders in the niche and pick one of them to hire services. That is why your page
should be on the first page.
Does Content Help SEO?
Content is paramount to ranking in Google. It has been like that for years, but today if you know what to tweak
on-page, you can rank it with no backlinks for medium to low competition keywords! The statement above
works only for text content, as there are more forms, i.e., image, video, online documents, podcasts, etc. That
said, it is also possible to rank videos on YouTube and images, again tweaking their parameters. With
images, you will not get considerable traffic, but with text and video content, you will. The techniques have to
do with making the content relevant for a given query to matches the query’s intent. In simple words, it is
about offering the best answer to a given query regardless of the content type. Those who say that there are
no strict rules on how long the content should be, keyword density, headings optimization, clearly they have
worked so little in optimizing and ranking pages. There are hundreds of ranking signals, but content relevancy
to search query, and time on page (reader engagement) are the two most important in my opinion.
How to Improve Reader Engagement?
Topic clusters can improve reader engagement. You build a page (AKA pillar page) containing in-depth
information on a topic, a very long page, and you link it to relevant internal pages. The technique works great
with readers and traffic. The search engines will find the page as highly useful to readers and promote it in
their ranking systems. Google favors topic-clustered pages with its proprietary algorithm. In simple words,
topic clusters create the much-needed authority, which in turn benefits your site with higher rankings.
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How does Google Rank Pages?
Google uses RankBrain to rank pages in search results and predict answers to users' questions. RankBrain is
designed to improve its ranking system and learn through observations always. An example could be that
RankBrain has measured that a page currently ranking in the second page of search results offers a more
relevant and accurate answer to a query. It then goes ahead and moves the most relevant page to page one
so that users can get correct and satisfactory solutions. As a consequence, Rankbrain will demote a page
that ranked in the Top 10 but now considered less relevant because of the newcomer. It is a significant
change in SEO as webmasters and marketers need to understand and even predict user needs and offer
them helpful and engaging content with the best user experience (remember time-on-page is a ranking
signal).
Google looks out for in-depth and useful content written by experts. The policy prevents people from creating
content on topics outside their area of expertise, as it could be traffic manipulation or cause problems for
people looking for answers and help. With topic clusters (that show content depth), the content creators
present their expertise on the topic. The coverage of content reassures the search engines that the writer
knows very well the subject. It's a misrepresentation at times because even experts make mistakes, and
quantity does not equal quality. Plus, the search engines would need an expert on every topic to assess what
the website expert says, which is not practical.
What Is Negative SEO?
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6/9/2020 SEO FAQ
Negative SEO is an action taken from an individual (competitor, freelancer paid by a competitor, hacker) with
the intent to demote your search engine rankings. The most common practice is building backlinks from spam
websites or spam topics. Google has some ways to track and downgrade spam backlinks, but if they are en
mass or if the negative SEO campaign is advanced, the damage could be considerable. Google has no
resources to spare to save each victim of negative SEO. If the automated algorithms catch the spammy
actions, the damage will be lessened, but in most cases, it doesn't work in favor of the victims.
What Are the Signs of Negative SEO?
A spike in backlinks numbers could be caused by a new referral source that you need to investigate.
The other reason is that someone builds backlinks behind your back. Abrupt changes in numbers can
trigger automated or manual penalties, demotion, loss of tra c. It will help if you use backlink monitoring
tools in place that alert when the backlink pro le changes or in case of spikes within a short timeframe,
which are always harmful and suspicious. The monitoring tools don't catch every backlink. There are many
cases when they miss considerable numbers for various reasons (crawling budget, blocked by .htaccess).
The tools also have aws e.g., Ahrefs, Majestic SEO, Link Research Tools. Most of the tools report a spam
score, which is seldom accurate and, most of the time, computed out of averages. Google Search Console
has a backlink reporting tool, but it's not useful as it lags in reporting recent changes and doesn't catch
everything. The suggested x here is to manually clean the site pro le from unnatural, unwanted, low-
quality backlinks that come in large quantities. Sending removal requests to referral websites will be
ignored in most cases. There is a Google tool that disavows backlinks; I suggest you use that.
Websites use your content without permission and a ect your rankings negatively. If Google nds the
same content on di erent websites, it has a duplicate content problem. Google needs to decide which
content is the original, and importunately it doesn't always use the publishing date. Websites that are
stronger than yours may present themselves (in technical terms) as creators of the content they stole from
you (Content scraping) if they don't provide a backlink to your page.
A sudden drop in overall organic tra c that does not come as a result of changes that you did on the
page/site. Changes in organic tra c stem either from modi cations done by the webmaster, changes in the
Google classi cation system, or an external actor. A breach of Google guidelines causes automated or
manual action (penalty). If a manual action is taken, you will receive a message in Search Console with little
help of what the cause is. The only time they send a clear message is when your site is hacked. In any case, if
you didn't do anything, it is a clear indication that something in uenced your tra c negatively and you
need to x it.
A sudden drop in speci c keyword rankings. If it doesn't come as a result of your changes, there is
either a change in the algorithm or if the content in the a ected pages is of the same quality, there is an
external action.
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How to Do Keyword Research?
There are many ways to perform keyword research and a variety of tools to use to gather the data you need.
In Google Keyword Planner you can filter the keywords by monthly searches. You can also see search
volume is trending with a visual graph. It also depends on how specific the search query is in your industry.
Google Ads has a column in keyword planner called Competition, and is ranked High, Medium, or Low.
Competition is particularly useful for PPC data, but you can check this out for SEO to see how competitive
your area of business is in general, so this can drive overall strategy. If you are a smaller business, aim for
medium and low competition keywords.
Is User Engagement a Ranking Signal?
User engagement is the way to measure how a visitor coming from organic or paid search takes actions
on the site. It factors data like clicks from search results to visiting pages; the amount of time spent on
the page(s); the drop-offs after visiting only one page (bounce rate); the page relevancy to the query (if
they quickly returned to search to visit another result); the actions they took on page (buttons clicked,
subscriptions, add to cart, etc.). Now, Google has ways to collect the above data via Google Analytics,
Chrome Browser, cookies, etc. Still, they don't explicitly say that engagement metrics are ranking
signals, though they have admitted to using click data to modify SERPs for particular queries.
Experimentation, though, has shown that pages who score well in these metrics influence their ranking.
For example, a lower bounce rate has a positive effect, or clicks coming en mass during a short period
can push higher a page only to drop it when the trend washes out. On click data, the Google team
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6/9/2020 SEO FAQ
acknowledges that upon measuring clicks in the SERPs, they would demote pages with less
engagement in favor of others that get more clicks, albeit ranking lower. We have to consider that click
data is used on all Google products, so Google Maps with business listings, Google images, and
YouTube videos fall into the soup. The fun part is that engagement metrics affect rankings leaving out
the old-school hunt for more backlinks. That's why many professionals used to count on backlinks are
left empty-handed.
What is SEO?
SEO is the strategy of optimizing a web page for search queries. Search engines discover content on the
Internet and then rank it by relevancy to topics. When somebody searches for an answer, the results he
finds in the engine are called organic, and if he clicks and visits a page, this traffic is called organic,
natural or free. Today, depending on the search query, you may encounter different results formats like
videos, image carousels, video carousels, local pack (map), Ask boxes. Many pages are in the Top 10
results because they have worked one way (SEO) or the other (rankings manipulation). Note that organic
traffic exceeds all other traffic channels like social media, paid ads, yet it costs less money than those,
has lasted effects over time (retention) and attracts more clicks (paid ads in the USA attract less than
3%).
SEO is a marketing approach that focuses on improving online visibility. While the term is widely used, it
is also commonly misunderstood. One of the most significant trends for organic SEO is the importance of
advanced links. Advanced link-building strategies can increase your website’s Domain Authority (the
score given to your site between 0 and 100) and thereby improve your overall visibility online. Advanced
link-building goes beyond establishing generic directories, guest blogs, paid links, and web 2.0 blogs.
Each of these strategies involves placing content on third-party sites with backlinks to your website, but
some of them generate spam links. The more websites that point to yours with a substantial DA, the
more visible your site will become.
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What Are the Best SEO Tactics?
Secure your website with HTTPS (Google ranking factor). HTTPS encrypts information sent
between the visitor and server (the green lock icon on the address bar). You will need to install an SSL
certi cate on your server (the hosting can help you with SSL installation).
Build a fast loading website under 2 seconds (Google ranking factor). Google nowadays uses the
mobile index, so the speed is paramount for the best user experience and low bounce rates. Content
Delivery Networks (CDN), server cache modules, image compression, lazy-loading page elements,
responsive templates, and cache plugins can boost the speed.
Find low-competition keywords that match user intent. You need tra c today, and going for the
high-competition keywords will take months or years. If you match the search intent by providing
answers to less competitive queries, you will earn tra c in a relatively short time. Create content
round-ups, lists, any content that o ers well-researched information on a topic. Write naturally
thinking what the reader wants not what the search engine needs.
Create short descriptive URLs, o er content length above 1,000 words, optimize your post titles
and descriptions to earn clicks. Study your analytics, understand how people come and go, what works
best, and stick to it. Plug a responsive theme and optimize your images to load fast on all device
screens. Interlink your posts/pages without over-optimizing the link anchors.
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What is Local SEO?
Local, or map search, SEO has emerged as a distinct form of SEO over the last few years. Up to 4
customers out of ten, on average, now find local companies through maps. As such, strong map visibility
is crucial. Instead of a website, local SEO requires that you optimize your Google My Business (GMB)
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6/9/2020 SEO FAQ
profile with relevant text and links. The strategies for improving local SEO include NAP (name, address,
phone number) consistency, link-building, image geotagging, and more features. Ensuring consistency
and giving the appropriate time and energy to local listings is a critical factor for getting free traffic.
Local communities help a lot with local SEO. I will list some here; Chamber of Commerce, local
consultants, cultural groups, local events (sponsors), networking with locals businesses, and local news.
Note that the practice of trading links is a type of search engine manipulation (spam). Local news is an
excellent source of backlinks for local SEO. You provide useful content, earn local exposure, and a link
for your website that benefits local rankings.
Do you know that 46% of all searches in Google are with local intent? “Near Me” searches show 150%
growth compared to traditional local-based searches; 74% of local searchers walk into the physical store
on the same day of their search. Build some NAP citations, those online listings that offer fields with
Name, Address, and Phone Number. Local directories are the best places to get NAP citations. Google
My Business (GMB) is an excellent place to list your business as Google can verify your physical
address.
Search engine results are based on personalization that also includes the user's location down to the
street level. A host of services are pulling the user location from all devices to personalize the content
and ads they offer. It makes sense for a business that services customers in one or more areas to build
relevant content (landing pages) embedding location factors like business details, opening hours,
addresses, and maps of the physical store.
How to Redesign a Website without Losing Traffic?
Redesigning a site has a lot of challenges for keeping the earned organic traffic. A faulty redesign or
migration will no doubt result in loss of traffic and rankings. The right steps to take are: Audit the old
website in regards to content, structure, performance. It would be best if you found out what works well,
which pages to keep, how much material is required, and in what topics, how to structure the content.
Then it passes to doing the redirects (no more than a chain of 2), inserting the tracking pixels, setting
goals in analytics, taking extra care not to create duplicate content issues, etc.
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There should be no interruption in website operation for both visitors and search engines. Ideally, you
work on the redesign/migration project offline and, when ready, switch to the new setup in less than an
hour. The migration should happen in the less busy visiting hour of the day. It is best to put notification for
visitors that you're changing the looks of the site and share the news with your subscribers.
The biggest problems I've seen with website migrations are 301 redirects, content missing, tracking
pixels lost. 301 redirects are paramount to keeping some of the old rankings (not all link juice passes to
the new site) and traffic (due to their past positions about to be changed when Google reads the new
pages).
Additionally, you could better the site performance if you apply a responsive template to ease people
browsing from mobile devices, and help with the rankings in Google's established mobile index. Speed is
also a ranking factor so a responsive modern design with not many SEO blockers will help a lot.
How to Build Backlinks Safely?
First things first: there are no White-hat backlinks. If you try to manipulate your rankings, you have
already left the white space. I would suggest going for brand mentions, showcase your business,
differentiate your content (content type variety), provide a lot of useful information. Use a variety of
content types to present your business, i.e., articles, press releases, videos, infographics, images, slides,
PDFs. Introduce your brand and what you do better compared to your competitors. If it's an article or
blog post, make sure you put your contact details and homepage at the end of the piece or in the
designated author box. Offer value to the readers utilizing extra information, case studies, research data,
facts and figures, opinions, lists, roundups, something they can't find commonly online. Try to get a
reporter, blogger or influencer to interview you and profit from the extra visibility by adding your link.
Videos are a great way to showcase your services/products and have your landing page link in the
description.
Ranking well today is not about having the maximum number of backlinks, but having high-quality links
still helps a lot in Google. Getting free links is not as easy as in the past, and many from the old tactics
are now obsolete or spam (blog comments, bookmarks, forum profiles, etc.). But you can still earn links
with content marketing, and it's my opinion that this method will stick to building safe backlinks for years. 

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You still need a marketing budget to create and distribute content, but that's not changed a lot as old
methods (and their damage) costed money too.
Earning links with content is not an easy task. The content needs to be top class, very interesting, and
shared a lot before turning eyes and earning links. It is somewhat a similar tactic to ranking a website.
For the content to rank, it needs to have qualities that make it stand out from the fold. It works pretty
much the same way with a landing page; if your on/off-page SEO is outstanding, it will rank well.
Outreach plays a pivotal role in promoting content and can turn the game, but not any outreach method
produces excellent results. We want links from established websites in the same niche as the receiver. A
handful of such links will have more impact than large quantities of unrelated backlinks.
I get daily requests to link to content that supposedly offers value to my readers (an in-depth article or an
infographic), or it adds a resource that the creator thinks my website is currently lacking thereof. Do I link
to them? I don't. I prefer to give a backlink or publish well-researched content that offers full coverage of
the topic and remains close to the original creator, meaning somebody took from his/her time to create
an outstanding informative piece. I am talking here about the outreach that needs to offer an excellent
product and reach the right people. In the above examples, they have contacted me (the right guy to
publish their content), but their content wasn't good enough for publishing (failed outreach).
How to Do Corporate SEO?
Enterprises often run marketing in a way that throttles SEO operations and suppresses organic growth.
The SEO strategy needs to be shared and adopted across departments like web engineering, PR, and
marketing team in all activities and content production. To align all stakeholders on the same page, you
need data and results. It is a fact that only a few marketing managers have a basic understanding of
SEO, as you go up, it is a desert field. Talking to the management in SEO KPI terms makes sense
because they are easily measurable (keyword rankings, organic traffic, visits, and conversions). It is
worth doing some research to understand how the internal teams view SEO and how they work in-house
or with external agencies.
What Are the SEO Challenges in Big Corporations? 

6/9/2020 SEO FAQ
Big corporations tend to have many corporate domains, and the web engineers have little interest
and in many aspects lack of skills in detecting and fixing issues. Here is a list of issues that we
discover all the time: 500 errors, chain of redirects, redirect loops, soft 404s, AMP issues, structured
markup issues, crawl rate, missing tracking pixels and false statistics reported, spam backlinks,
page highjacking, canonical issues, missing internal linking, missing meta tags, duplicate content,
non-compliant URL structure, conversion issues, lagging page speed, non-optimized images,
outdated mobile versions, extensive use of javascript, thin page content, non-optimized AMP (if
available), lack of SEO outreach and producing quality content.
Organizational issues: lack of SEO understanding, low SEO budgets while outrageous spending in
more costly channels, understaffed and under-experienced SEO teams (if any), external agencies
spamming the corporate website and false reporting, lack or delay of adopting modern SEO trends,
failure to do competition research, confusing SEO with other channels, missing audience segments,
low-quality SEO reporting, failure to set and understand SEO KPIs.
Before any upcoming technical changes, the engineering team must get feedback from the SEO
team when making site changes, plan to migrate a site, or launch a new project. When I was
working as an in-house SEO Manager for a large corporation, I had to do damage control daily. The
engineering teams were such knuckleheads that not only ignored the repercussions to SEO
performance and marketing in general, but they wouldn't even bother to communicate them to the
other teams working on the same websites. The damage control involved tracking issues when the
tracking pixels were disappearing, duplicate pages found in search results that required weeks of
work to clean them, lack of proper redirection of old pages to new pages, etc. Some issues could be
fixed and prioritized; others remained unsolved for months as they had full website control; overall,
they created a mess. These fools considered themselves the upper caste (probably pulling from
their ethnic origin) in the website pyramid and were dumb enough to go down that road. There was
an asymmetrical relationship, which was primarily the fault of the management who didn't contain
the wild animals ravaging the crops. Even simple testing like A/B testing took weeks of discussions
to run. Despite the endorsements and, at times, direct orders from the management, the engineers
continued destroying our work.
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What Is White-hat SEO?
In principle (the way Google defines it), if you try to better the rankings of a website doing anything
more than optimizing on-page content, then you are manipulating the search engine results. White-
hat is more of a marketing term used by grey/black-hat SEOs or salespeople. There are SEOs that
are 100% white-hat but not efficient, meaning their rankings suck. If you run link-building
campaigns, content marketing targeting more inbound links, even if you are optimizing too much the
page copy, you are at least grey-hat. So, again, in principle, every SEO out there is manipulating the
rankings. The thing is what method you use that can produce results today without getting a penalty,
as there are so many factors at play and changes which likely will override in the future your current
method. It would be best to stay sharp, adjust your plan following the changes, and always produce
results, that's my approach.
What Works Today in Search?
Videos will continue to appear in the search results and drive more traffic. It's time to formulate a
video SEO strategy while YouTube remains still free and is owned by Google; hence its videos show
up in search results. To choose the topic or type of video does not require much effort and directly
depends on your niche and your offer. Many niches on YouTube are not saturated yet, so there's
plenty of room to exploit this free traffic source and the second largest search engine. Rich snippets
are also a thing together with voice search, so a modern business should research and optimize the
various schema types.
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Should I Hire an All-in-one Marketing Agency?
Marketing agencies that offer all types of digital marketing will not be able to help a business with its
SEO. They don't have specialization in SEO and rely on Paid search, Display Marketing, Content
marketing, and other channels. I had to deal with this issue when I was working as an in-house
SEO, and I was overseeing the services provided by external 'big' agencies. One so-called head of
SEO was only proficient in paid search, the other head was a spammer, and it goes like this. SEO is
an animal species on its own. It requires hard work, someone dedicated with lots of experience,
experimentation, and a working method, three virtues very rare to find.
Is Website Speed a Ranking Factor?
Website speed is one of the most critical aspects of SEO performance. If your website is just too
slow, you probably won't be ranking well because people abandon it quickly (high bounce rate).
With page speed being a ranking signal, you need to speed up your site by optimizing your images,
merging and minifying JS and CSS, removing unnecessary plugins, enabling browser caching, etc.
A website that loads below 4 seconds, ideally at two seconds, is the best user-experience. On
mobile devices, you have more room to optimize as pages require fewer elements, and there's also
the AMP feature, but people are less tolerant of delays. Page speed affects crawling times and
indexing quantities. On a slow website, you'll find fewer pages getting indexed, thus fewer rankings
and traffic.
Website speed plays a role as it shapes user-experience. Google would like to see the desktop and
mobile versions of websites load at about 2 seconds and users not dropping off for any reason. If
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reach the first page. Remember, the first page is only for the best. Website speed has been a
ranking factor in Google since 2018.
So, a high bounce rate caused by lagging websites will have negative effects. Plus, Google may
filter out the sites that lag in speed by not entering the first page. Not optimized images (size,
compression), scripts that burden the page, different files that get pulled by the page, and are not
merged into one, external fonts, old templates, many redirects, slow CDNs, coding formatting and
comments, all these affect website speed. The issue is even more crucial on mobile devices.
Remember, Google runs the mobile index as primary. If the mobile version is slow, good rankings
are over. My take is user experience is more important than Google. If you lose visitors at the
entrance, nothing can be done even if you're on the first page. Google recommends offering an
AMP version of your pages and using Google PageSpeed Insights as a tool to optimize your speed.
Does Embedding YouTube Videos Increase Rankings?
It will help by increasing the time-on-page, provided the videos have some value for the visitor. It
could work with any video hosted on your site, embedded from YouTube or other video sites.
Directly affecting page rankings, no, it won't help. So you have to factor in, if it is worth your time
insert and maintain those videos, as some tend to drop from YT (getting deleted or changed to
unlisted/private) and weigh in if you can achieve a better UX in other ways. It's not a given that
visitors will click to watch the videos just because they are on the page.
Is it Bad to Duplicate Content in All Posts? 

6/9/2020 SEO FAQ
It will affect in a small percentage the quality of all pages sharing the same chunk of text. It won’t
matter for a couple of pages, but if you replicate it on all existing posts or will do that in the near
future, the minor issue will grow. I’d suggest you devise ways that relate to the crawlability of the
disclaimer, e.g. insert it as an image or render it with a script (but images don’t require technical
skills or plugins).
How to Get Backlinks from Local Contacts?
Sharing experiences and content online is a new trend in generating traffic. Best results you get
when local celebrities, influencers, or news reporters mention your business. As to the type of
content shared, it could be a blog post, a video, a review, a Facebook or Instagram post, and more.
Strictly Google-guidelines speaking, it is manipulation when the celebrity or influencer asks for
money or any other compensation as it involves an incentive to leave a positive review (nobody
would want a negative review anyway) or endorse your business. So, technically you will be
manipulating your traffic, rankings, backlinks, but who cares what Google says. It makes sense to
use traditional marketing methods with a modern twist into online marketing.
How to Get Traffic and Links from Sponsorships?
Events are always seeking sponsors, and here's an opportunity to draw more visibility and
backlinks. Most of the time, local events are announced through their web page, and they dedicate
a prominent section to their sponsors. The event page draws attention and backlinks from local
media (social networks, newspapers, bloggers), so it will be a somewhat strong backlink. Secure
that the backlink (image or a text link) is a clean one, meaning not hiding in javascript, has nofollow
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tag, or is placed in a noindex, nofollow page. You may target events in other locations if you offer
services to many areas by entering in Google something like sponsor/s + city name.
How to Get more Backlinks?
Say no to unnatural links and yes to link-worthy content. One technique is to create detailed guides
and tutorials. I'm talking about long tutorials over 2000 words. Tutorials are so many in some niches
and only a few in others; now there's the opportunity. Long guides give readers everything they
need to know about the subject, and Google finds that the content is so useful that it has no other
option but to rank it above the fold. Bloggers may link to your tutorials because it of high-value or
reference it as a source to visit and read more about the topic. It is the same way I used to get a link
from Wikipedia without doing any outreach.
Should I Build Follow or Nofollow links?
It doesn't matter what type of backlinks you build. Both types pass link juice, and it's good to have a
mix. Google takes into account both types and gives extra credit, of course, to follow links. You don't
want to forget, though, that nofollow links are still a great source of referral traffic. You can find
nofollow links everywhere: in blog comments, sidebar links, footer links, forum profiles and signature
links, social bookmarks. Google suggests webmasters add nofollow or sponsored tags to all paid
links.
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What Are Internal and External Links?
It's good to have a mix. You build internal links when you connect pages from the same website
together (interlinking). It is always best practice when you interlink pages that talk about the same
topic.
When you give a link to a page outside your website for any reason, this is an external link. Usually,
blogs give external backlinks to other sites from their sidebar and their footer sections (these are
sitewide links and search engines don't give them much credit). When you insert links in the body of
an article, this is an editorial link and passes the most link juice because the writer considered it of
high-value to the readers.
Take care with external links; the quantity matters so much; if you give more than 20 from a page
that has only a few paragraphs, Google sees it as a low-quality page. If you extend the practice to
other pages of your site, again from pages with poor content, Google might think you are building a
link farm (spam).
Is WordPress Good for SEO?
WordPress is the best CMS for SEO. It combines SEO-friendly features, modern coding, plugins,
super user-experience, and speed. A large community of programmers secures its development,
and webmasters seem to like it a lot with millions of installs. After plain HTML, I put it second best in
SEO performance. It is fit for professionals and amateurs can host blogs, small e-shops, affiliate
landing pages, and more. Let's look at its SEO features now:
Permalinks make the URLs SEO-friendly allowing the insertion of keywords. Metadata and images
are easy to handle right from the first minutes of installation or allow more room for tweaking with
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the help of plugins like Yoast SEO. Cache plugins make WP load like a breeze lowering time to
load, so fundamental for better Google rankings. A host of mobile-friendly themes help WP rank in
the established Google Mobile Index. WordPress pings the search engines each time you publish
new content. WP is easy to integrate with a host of analytic tools. Lastly, you can raise the level of
security with its powerful plugins avoiding DDOS attacks, unauthorized logins, code insertion, and
more.
Do I Need Long-tail Keywords?
LTK is a group of three or four words making a phrase, very targeted to the user/buyer intent. We
use to call them transactional because they are on the spot of the buyer intent, used by searchers
who know what they're looking for and are ready to make a transaction. Generally, they are low
competition keywords and pretty easy to rank for. Mind you, the search volume that the tools show
is not accurate; usually, it is below the actual hits you get in the visits stats. The tools often research
and come up with a list of long-tail keywords. You can also look at the footer of the search results
page in Google, a small list of suggested long-tail keys shows up there. Additionally, you can look
up for threads in communities like Quora, Reddit, and the search function of YouTube.
A fundamental part of your SEO strategy should be around long-tail keywords. Don't mind the low
search volume that different tools give you. The benefit of incorporating long-tail keywords into your
landing pages is that they target prospects who know what they're looking for and are ready to buy;
these keywords are transactional. Another benefit is that only a few competitors will ever optimize
for long-tail, and most of them will do it the wrong way too! You need more targeted traffic and
respond to people's answers even in complex searches as people don't use simple phrases only
when they run a search.
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6/9/2020 SEO FAQ
What is Content Relevance in SEO?
Google tries to understand the page content and natural language better. The goal is to offer the
best answers to people using the engine and benefit its paid program (Google Ads). The BERT
algorithm focuses on content relevance via assessing the context of words in searches and
matching those queries with HQ results. BERT is a natural language processing NLP framework
trained on Wikipedia and tweaked with questions and answers datasets. BERT changes the way
Google interprets queries because people are using longer, natural, and complex questioning
queries. It will benefit international SEO when the datasets are ready to run in the algorithm. We are
way past the artificial copy used in SEO to game the rankings. To recap, creating content in natural
language, not focusing on keywords in a text that doesn't make sense, and writing in the current
language of the targeted country, are best practices.
What is Keyword Difficulty?
Keyword Difficulty is a metric that shows how much competition a keyword has. The quantitative
signal is relative to the niche state, and you can find it in various SEO research tools, like Ahrefs or
Ubersuggest. To note that modern SEO works with topics and not exact keywords like in the old
days, still, a lot of professionals use it, and clients wrap their minds around it so that I will say a
couple of words. If you accept the logic of the metric system, you can expect that elevated keyword
difficulty, makes the keyword more competitive and harder to rank for. For a domain with no strong
background in SEO, professionals tend to start with the medium to low competition keywords, or
even long-tail to exploit hidden opportunities. My approach is different. I like targeting topics that will
bring the most traffic and not just keywords. So, I write about a theme and provide as much
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information I can about it; not the other way around, taking a keyword and try to make the text
around it make sense.
How to Optimize Metadata?
I recommend inserting your main keyword in the title, the Meta Description, and the H1 heading.
The other headings below h1 can use a variation of the keyword in a way that makes sense for the
reader. Click-through rate (CTR) is a significant signal to Google. All the metadata above should use
natural language with the intent to attract clicks, not manipulate the search rankings. If you don't
have the best title and description, nobody will visit your page regardless of its rank. And even if
you're #1, but your page copy reads as unnatural, you won't be for long as you'll have many drop-
offs, high bounce rate, and Google will demote your page. So, CTR plays a significant role in
ranking a page. If you are on the first page, it is possible to take the place of the first website just
because people prefer your page (given that they bounce from your competitors and stay longer on
your page as more relevant to their search queries). I recommend you optimize your titles and
descriptions; the latter should show up entirely on the search page and not cut off. Experiment with
different sets of titles and descriptions to see what works best.
Is My Site Penalized?
There are two types of Google penalties, automatic and manual action. If the webmasters are
amateurs in SEO (a fact in the majority of cases), they will never have a clue and may never
recover from an automatic penalty. That said, the hit came because the webmaster did not
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comply with the Google guidelines. In the case of the manual action, the webmaster gets a
message in Google Search Console that he has violated Google’s Terms of Service. This time
the webmaster has done something intentionally, and has a hint of what to fix as the message
doesn't give any instructions. The cause of the manual action could be a redirect that went
wrong, schema portraying false data about the page, i.e., showing fake five stars reviews,
buying/selling/exchanging links (link schemes), doorway pages, malicious behavior (active or
passive, i.e., hacked site), thin content, keyword stuffing, hiding text, etc.
First do your research. Do you find any pages losing rankings abruptly or disappearing from the
index without you changing anything? Have you checked the Search Console for any
messages indicating a manual action taken from Google? Have you bought any SEO gigs
recently? Backlinks, blog comments, forum profiles, bookmarks, guest posts, exchanged any
links? All the above in large quantities can trigger an automatic penalty. Have you changed
your website content or sold any links from your articles? If none of the above, then
something's changed in the engine, and you've been affected. The best thing to do is go
through the recent Google updates for any hints or seek professional help. It's not a matter to
neglect as it may never go away and you can't afford losing business.
Is Buying Backlinks Dangerous?
Dangerous enough to get you a penalty. Amateur webmasters like to think of themselves as
experts in SEO, so instead of hiring an expert, they prefer to save the money and throw some
backlinks that they find very cheap online from third-world countries mostly. Bookmarks, forum
profiles, blog comments, web 2.0 sites, link directories, article marketing, guest posting, any gig
goes as long as the price is right, and if it doesn't work, no worries mate. Well, I see the
practice going on for years, and it has serious consequences. Despite the information that
Google discloses, the warnings, the increasing number of penalties, the AI, the innovations that
create new highways in search, despite our efforts to change the mindset, people still get hit by
penalties every day. There are fantastic gigs out there, but when it comes to backlinks or SEO,
gigs with backlinks blasts, comment blasts, web 2.0 sites, forum profiles, will get you in trouble.
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6/9/2020 SEO FAQ
What is SEO Content?
SEO content can be any digital material that operates within a content marketing umbrella and
serves the scope of SEO. I like to shift the focus from the way they created content in the past,
which was focused on one keyword with an optimized anchor text. Today the scope can be
served with different content formats and not always optimized to have a nice, natural content
soup. Let's take Press Releases (PR) for a moment. The traffic source of PR ended up abused
by people looking for fast gains. I remember the numerous gigs and landing pages built around
PR that could get you to the #1 spot within two weeks, for example. The catch was the ranking
boost, plus the quantity, plus the dream that the PR could be picked up from a big news
network. For some people in low competition niches, it worked as a good backlink source for
some time and offered some traffic, albeit for a short period. The presence of enough content
plus the established PR sites gave a ranking boost in non-saturated niches. Then Google
decided to crack down on the PR sites, and most of the hundreds became obsolete. Today if
you use PR for SEO purposes instead of business exposure, and without paying much
attention to the PR copy and the publishers, you will have negative results.
People love case studies, facts, charts, research data. If you have worked in any field, it's easy
for you as for me to gather some data and prepare a presentation of some sort. You may reuse
the data creating different content types, i.e., PDFs, slides, charts, lists, blog posts, videos,
infographics, etc. Don't forget to provide genuine and abundant information, mention your
sources, if they are many put a bibliography section, give dates, offer verification for your facts,
include stats.
Another example is expert interviews. Experts like to give short interviews and share the page
where their name can be seen among their peers; Make sure to make it easy for them to
answer your questions via phone or email, within a deadline and give them a citation. Pages
with interviews like those above tend to become viral, attract links, and we are talking about
very relevant content, the type you're looking to have on your blog. If the content is interesting
and you share it on the major networks, you will have evergreen traffic plus backlinks.
What type of content is best?
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Each type serves a particular scope. Prepare articles/blog posts on recent trends in your
industry, create facts roundups and infographics for people who like visuals. Collect statistics
from different sources, and give your interpretation. The key is to be useful to the readers, easy
to digest, and make sense. Don't rely on just one source, and don't copy content from your
sources without giving your take on the data. If you need to include the original piece of
information, use a quote, and mention the source. If you create content with the above
guidelines in mind, you will see other bloggers interested in linking to your content. It's an
excellent, white-hat way to increase traffic and get quality links with no outreach.
Do Reviews Help SEO?
My take is that they don't help and never have. Initially, people expected that review snippets
were ranking signals. It proved that it wasn't, and I also doubt if people see the stars and click
on the search results with five stars. Of course it attracts the eye but other than that, I believe
only the titles and description can influence the click-through rate. Reviews offered a helping
hand to legitimate businesses and ended up abused and rigged. Trustpilot built a whole
business around it, and it costs a lot of money to get in without any tangible benefit. For the
rest, people started building fake star reviews (schema spam), and most reviews from real
people are, in large part, incentivized. For all the above reasons, I'm sure Google will take them
down sooner or later. I don't see any point a business should work hard on getting reviews. If
the customers like to leave an honest review, they are free to visit the GMB page and leave it
there for as good as it is. Don't sweat on getting reviews; it's not worth it.
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6/9/2020 SEO FAQ
What Type of Content Generates Clicks?
How-to guides are a good source of traffic and backlinks. It could be a long article or a short
one with detailed steps easy to follow. Depending on the topic, a video might work better. If the
topic is programming, for example, the article works best as it gives the opportunity to pause
and copy the code, rethink, and digest the steps. If it's about software or handwork, the video is
more suitable, showing every step to follow. Both content types generate traffic and can be
combined; Embed the video into the article, or offer a transcription of the video to the readers
with hearing disabilities and the engines looking for written content.
You can boost your traffic further by organizing the guides into content stacks. The idea is to
group related content into article categories and offer a table of contents interlinking all the
relevant articles. With video, create a channel on the topic and interlink the videos. Google will
like the content stack and surface your articles; YouTube will suggest them to viewers even
when they watch a competing video.
What Are SEO Mistakes?
Duplicate content is a signi cant problem. There's a penalty named Google Panda that
penalizes sites with content quality problems. Among the causes could be poor or scraped
web page copy, thin content, duplicate titles, meta descriptions, headings. I've handled cases
like the one when I was working a landing page with the owner having built unbeknownst to
me 2,000+ pages with similar content, titles, descriptions to my target page.
Duplicate content is an SEO trap; throttles organic performance; reduces page indexation;
demotes the duplicate pages or the whole site if it's a widespread problem like the one
above. Canonical tags and backlinks can't save the day. I was creating content, building
backlinks only to discover an enemy within. The x is a technical SEO audit, di cult and
costly. The owner wouldn't consider spending money on doing a professional job, so he tried
to correct things by himself. I gave him a couple of guidelines, but the audit needs to be
thorough and run with an expert eye. Needless to say, after weeks of him changing pages
there was no progress.
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6/9/2020 SEO FAQ
Automatically generated content when you copy and paste content found on the
internet without curating it, or you have a software that generates articles that you upload
on your page. Another case is when you have an auto-translation widget on your site that
translates content from your original, natural language to whatever the result in the target
language.
Participating in link schemes when you buy or sell links. You could be exchanging links
with other pages, building a private blog network (PBN), selling links from within your
articles (contextual), or sitewide (sidebar, footer). The same stands when buying links from
external web pages (everywhere an incentive is found).
When you create thin content; pages that have no value and no reason to rank, or you
wish they would rank but don't invest time to put some quality on them.
When you misrepresent your business information, create fake addresses, PO boxes; You
abuse the positive reviews on and o -site like the Google My Business listing, Amazon
reviews, Trustpilot, Android Store, etc.; you buy links to raise the authority of your pages, and
even worse you use online forums, i.e., Fiverr.com, Freelancer.com, Upwork.com,
Thehoth.com, etc., that sell cheap backlinks not t to your website needs.
When you build a page for each location (wishful thinking) even though you don't have
the right amount of original content that meets the local needs; you are not optimizing for
your local area rst which would make sense given the fact that you are on a budget; you
target with a separate page every keyword phrase you nd in online tools.
When you are trying to compete with a slow website, especially on mobile devices, that
creates bad user experience; you serve pages on insecure HTTP protocol regardless of the
Google guidelines to o er HTTPS, so you are missing a slight ranking boost and never make it
to the rst page; you build your URLs with dynamic parameters that search engines cannot
follow and create duplicate content issues; you build a page for each keyword phrase that
looks shiny in online research tools.
When you abuse your link pro le trying to in ate the number of backlinks. Google can
take out your pages from its index.
Here are a few grave mistakes you can intentionally make: Showing di erent content to
search engines than your visitors to game your rankings (that's cloaking, a black-hat tactic).
Related to cloaking is when you hide text and links again for higher ranking purposes, for
example, you color the text with the same background color and you hide the links behind
images or other elements. Another black-hat scheme is the doorway pages, which aim to
occupy high positions but then redirect the visitors to the content they would not expect to
nd when they run the search. It is a common scheme mainly for unethical advertising
purposes.
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Here are some intentional but not so grave mistakes: Creating bigger titles and
descriptions than the average competitor has and stu ng keywords in them; Manipulating
tra c by buying social signals (likes, tweets, shares, comments); Over-optimizing page
content, schema markup, and image alt tags; Manipulating schema markup to show features
you don't have, i.e., ve-star ratings; creating thin content only for a liate purposes;
redirecting visitors to other properties or redirecting old domains with irrelevant content to
your pages.
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How to Rank my Site in Google?
When you don't see all your product pages in the Google index or the new pages you have
built, then you have indexation issues. Dynamic content or site search results don't work.
Problematic navigation and many filters that confuse search engine crawlers. You might have
an infinite loop, pages directing to a series of other pages without end. Suggestion: Trim as
much as you can the parameters (session ID, filters, etc.) in the URLs as they generate issues
for the search engines. Block them via robots.txt. Restrict product filters to an absolute
minimum. Avoid using query parameters or use the Google Search Console to filter them out.
Use canonical tags for each page. I avoid working with a website that appends parameters in
the URLs because search engines will have to deal with an infinite number of copies of the
page I try to rank. The developers didn't think there will be ever a need to do SEO when they
designed the shop. Inert internal links, broken links as we call them. You might have changed
something, or a middle page got deleted or unpublished for some reason. Suggestion: Run an
audit. There are desktop programs like Xenu (free software) that scan your website and identify
broken links. You might as well try to use one of the numerous online tools to look for broken
links.
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6/9/2020 SEO FAQ
What is Keyword Cannibalization?
It happens when more than one landing page targets the same keyword or topic. Once a client
had the urge to build one page for every keyword phrase with a decent volume pulled from the
Google Keyword Planner (Adwords). The result was 2,000+ pages cannibalizing the one page I
was working on. Do you want the best part? He didn't care enough to share it with me. Not all
those 2,000+ pages were competing with my page, but they were impeding its success. I have
also seen cases where the keyword cannibalization is live on Google. Two or more pages were
competing for the same query if you run repeated queries. The best practice before getting into
damage control is professional keyword mapping. If you're in between the mess then the
keyword map can serve as a guide to which pages you need to eliminate, merge, redirect, so
you end up with a solid plan that breaks into topics and not keywords (that's old school SEO
today highly problematic).
Are Backlinks Enough to Rank a Page?
No, you can have as many backlinks as you want but still, be ranking lower than your
competitors. Funny isn't it? That fact right there, tells you very clearly that backlinks are not the
main factor when it comes to ranking pages. Take a look at websites currently ranking on the
first page. How many backlinks do they have? Are backlinks the only factor for their prominent
positions? How do they present their content? What page elements, metadata, and structured
data markup do they have? Does Google prefer a content format that's different from your
page? Are there any featured snippets or knowledge panels on the first page? If you could you
imitate the format and present your version, do you think that you'd had a better chance?
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6/9/2020 SEO FAQ
Do your keyword research and then find out the best format currently used for the queries. See
if you can offer something elevated to the current state of the query, i.e., a FAQ page, current
facts with references, stats and case studies, video content, etc. The intent would be to help
Google present a better version of answering the search query. If you can help Google by
providing a quick and easy answer, it will reciprocate.
How to Build an Internal Link Structure?
Always provide the user with their location on the site (breadcrumbs, page titles) and give them
exit links to the homepage or the sitemap. Clean your navigation links from any Javascript that
impedes search engine crawlers. Interlink your most important pages (revenue) and trim
navigation bulk menus that confuse users. Build the navigation links for your visitors and not
over-optimize them for Google.
Stop for a couple of hours and think about what you can do better with your content. Build a
keyword map with the pages and maybe design a visual wireframe of the structure; it will help
identify your main landing pages, your traffic hubs. You might need to merge pages on the
same topic because your stats don't show they have much traction. Make sure you redirect old
to new pages to keep traffic and link juice flowing. If you need to build supplementary pages
(stats, information, blog posts, guides, etc.) with lots of content, do it without linking to them
from the homepage, but inversely, link those pages to the main topic page, interlink them, and
focus conversions on your main cluster page.
How to Build Traffic to a New Website or Startup?
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6/9/2020 SEO FAQ
Work on preparing posts on trending topics. If you have a brand new website, you can't beat
other people's evergreen content. For new websites, it is the best opportunity to rank fast
because the topic is not saturated. Google has an algorithm on content that's fresh (trending)
that "...impacts roughly 35 percent of searches and better determines when to give you more
up-to-date, relevant results for these varying degrees of freshness." Fresh content doesn't
mean new but trending and relevant to the search query.
Don't change your content to make it fresh. You can update it if it makes sense (correcting
facts, adopting a modern approach), but changing it for the sake of rankings, won't give it a
boost, rather the opposite. Make it relevant or build more content that's relevant to what people
seek today. Trending content is a reliable traffic source to make an entrance, but you will also
need evergreen content to keep the visitors coming back.
What Content Works for E-commerce SEO?
I don't believe that E-shops have a lot of opportunities to gain backlinks with their default setup.
For e-commerce, I would build an information cluster relevant to what the shop sells. Plus, e-
shops have a lot of issues with technical blockers to SEO like crawling, indexation, speed, and
content not organized correctly. For the technical issues, I would start with a technical audit and
fix the issues. In regards to the content, I would prepare a bulk of informative pages and
organize them (interlink) into topic clusters. Every page would play a role and support the main
topic page (landing page), where we would expect the sales to happen. I would also merge or
remove not effective content to raise quality. Only then it makes sense going out and start
building backlinks.
With supportive informational pages, you can also expect some link gains. People like linking to
more information regardless of the destination site. Do you know your sector well enough?
What secrets can you share? How useful can you be to your customers? How much
information do you keep in your drawers and in your head that could fill in pages with posts?
What is the best advice you can give to customers about what to buy and what to avoid? What
information can you share that's different from your competitors?
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6/9/2020 SEO FAQ
What Are the Most Common SEO Services?
Technical SEO deals with all setup and performance matters from website coding to crawling,
indexing, website speed, content auditing, fixing issues. Technical SEO is crucial for the
performance of the organic channel. A website that's lagging has redirect issues, or poor
content and navigation structure will have many drop-offs (high bounce rate) and never get
significant traffic.
On-Page SEO is about optimizing metadata from titles and descriptions to images and internal
links. It all starts with competition and keyword research, then passes to mapping keywords to
landing pages, and lastly, optimizes on-page content. On-site SEO is also about performance,
so it measures traffic and conversions from organic traffic. Researching and creating content
that responds to search queries is crucial to getting more traffic.
Off-Page SEO seeks to lead generation better and achieve higher rankings in the search
results. It's about creating content published off-site, increasing brand awareness (mentions),
and advertising the website offers. Of course, link building is fundamental to off-page efforts
and intrinsic is the need to monitoring the quality of backlinks to avoid search spam and
negative SEO (spammers, competitors trying to destroy SEO performance).
Local SEO is about optimizing brand listings in local search results (Google Maps, mobile
devices, 'Near me' results). Professionals give extra attention to customers finding them online
around their area. Research shows that 72% of consumers that did a local search visited a
store within five miles. I do the same, and I bet most of you are reading this do the same.
Video SEO is about optimizing videos for YouTube search results. Video SEO is not saturated
as Google SEO is, and there are many opportunities to rank videos in national or local results. I
offer this service with a brilliant method that delivers awesome results to my clients.
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6/9/2020 SEO FAQ
What Is a Good Backlink?
Nothing to do with PageRank as we know it. It has to do with the real PageRank, which has
just one secret. Pages that show up in Google's first results have the biggest PageRank, and
those are the best backlink sources. Simple, isn't it? But hard to get a backlink from such
pages, still the principle stands. The best source of backlinks for your target search query is
one of the ten pages that rank well. All the rest about Domain/Page Authority, outgoing links,
dofollow/nofollow tags, don't matter so much, but I will get into those. A good backlink is every
backlink you gain naturally; I got a good backlink from Wikipedia because my article is relevant
to the topic.
So there are plenty of tools showing you metrics and promise to help you rank your pages.
Opensiteexplorer, Ahrefs, SEMRush, Majestic, Link Research, Monitorbacklinks, Ubersuggest,
all are paid (important because they keep you on a subscription) tools that promise to automate
your work (note that all-in-one solutions never work without an expert eye). Domain/Page
Authority/Rating doesn't matter so much; it's just a metric. I prefer a tool showing me how
relevant a page is to my topic, not even a keyword. The spam score doesn't matter if the page
ranks well. If it's good for Google, then the spam score is not a reliable metric.
Outgoing/Incoming links again the same as above, Trust Flow same as above; if Google likes
the page, I do too. Page traffic would be a good metric if the tools had a reliable way to
measure it, which they don't have. Bottom line: start with pages that rank well or the websites
that show up in search. If you manage that there's no tool to do it better for you.
What Are the Key SEO Metrics?
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6/9/2020 SEO FAQ
The old PageRank, Trust flow, Domain authority, Citation flow don't mean so much. Why?
Because they don't put a page on the Top 10. What does? Clicks and low bounce rates, which
mean that the page has interesting content and people stop to read it. Even sharing interesting
content doesn't mean much to me apart from traffic. Take a page that has new content and
gets a lot of shares. It will see a traffic spike, and Google will probably rank it higher for a
couple of weeks if the page story is good enough. That's trending content. What happens next?
The page will compete with those pages that have evergreen content and use to occupy high
positions in search. Then the page will tank like the rest of them. Bottom line: don't look at the
metrics. See if you can create evergreen content and the metrics will come in their own time.
Are SEO Gigs any Good?
Here is an example. Fiverr gig costs $5 offering Page Trust Flow 10+, Page Citation Flow 10+,
Domain Authority 20+. Unlimited URLs and KEYWORDS accepted. All links 100% Dofollow.
High Trust Flow and Citation Flow. All comments stay on actual page. Manually submission.
100% Satisfaction Guaranteed. I will deliver my service as promised. Delivery Always On Time.
Plus 24/7 Support. Detailed Excel Report.
Here is my take. It says all comments stay on the page that means he's doing blog comments.
I doubt the 300 links are all dofollow since they come from blogs. Domain authority 10+ despite
saying below that he offers high trust flow; that's very bad. Such low authority creates spammy
backlinks. Citation flow 10+ despite saying below he's offering high citation flow. If he knew
what he's talking about, he should put emphasis on the low citation that means the sources
have low backlinks, but he doesn't know the sport that's why he's stressing the high citation
metric. I also doubt the manual submission, there are 300 backlinks promised and he would
need more than a week to deliver. One week working for five bucks doesn't worth the manual
work in any depreciated location on earth. So, he's using automated software to blast the blog
comments. Lastly, 24/7 support is a joke. The gig is spam, will get you into trouble. Blasting low
quality backlinks you can't expect your pages going up; the contrary will happen.
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6/9/2020 SEO FAQ
How to Do SEO for Large Enterprises?
Setting the correct KPIs is a key step that you will find in all future interactions with the
company stakeholders. Management and digital marketers are not experts in SEO, so you
need to break it down to them and make sense of it all. After all, you need these people to
approve your budget and act on your suggestions if they don't adopt the organic channel every
action you take will fail. Who are the stakeholders? Digital marketers who own the landing
pages, web engineers, the management, possibly one or more external agencies. Different
groups with low to zero understanding how SEO works and what it can bring; always focused
on revenue, and easy solutions like paid advertising which costs them a fortune to run
compared to organic.
Set reasonable goals for the KPIs, expect all kinds of issues ahead that will delay or block
organic performance and hope for the best. If you manage external agencies, you need to be
the corporation rottweiler, so they don't spam the company website, and they provide some
growth for the huge amount of money you spend. With web engineers, make sure they
understand that there are no second thoughts or alternatives to what you need and no time to
lose. Otherwise, they will bring up all kinds of excuses why this won't work or why they can't do
it now or in one year. Also, make sure they understand the need to keep you in the loop for
upcoming changes, releases, domain transitions, and other ingenious stuff they devise to keep
their salaries running.
What Are SEO KPIs?
Sessions (visits), page sessions, impressions, keyword positions on the first page, CTR based
on estimated position, revenue (current revenue per visit), campaign outreach referrals,
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conversions, direct traffic (SEO contributes at it over time with brand mentions).
Opportunities: discovery optimization (anticipating user intent), answer box positions, embed
Google Ads best-performing keywords into organic campaigns, optimizing Google Ads against
click fraud.
What Are SEO Blockers?
You may have crawling and indexation issues. Google sends its bot to read your pages and
then computes several factors, including technical parameters on the server and website,
metadata, page content, relevancy to the topic, etc. If you have a problem, you can visit Google
Search Console and check any error messages in the tab Sitemaps or if there are any pages
with errors in the tab Coverage. You may block crawling the page in your robots.txt file, or you
have a Noindex tag to the page. Remove the Noindex tag from the page and its reference from
your robots.txt file. You may let Googlebot repass on the page or submit the change to the tab
URL Inspection. Check also if the crawler can find your page or reports a DNS or 404 error. If
you still don't see the page indexed, then you need an expert to run an audit and identify the
issues. Problems like those won't ever go away, and you will be losing business not fixing
them. I see business owners still struggling because they wanted to same money and didn't
follow my suggestion of fixing the issues.
Why Can't My Pages Rank?
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You may have a slow website, so Google sees that you don't pass this ranking requirement.
Websites, regardless of their setup, desktop or mobile, should load in two seconds else the
user experience is bad. Mobile speed optimization is a must as Google focuses on mobile
devices. What that means is that they will probably bounce, and you've lost them forever.
Google has the Chrome browser and Google analytics installed, plus other services to see
whether you can attract clicks and keep the visitors engaged with a fast loading website and
interesting content. If you don't there's no point in ranking high, is there? Google has
introduced the AMP feature to help webmasters build faster websites, plus it provides a speed
measuring tool with its tool PageSpeed Insights.
Slower pages are all about bad user experience, meaning if visitors stay, they don't convert
well, they don't buy, don't subscribe, don't revisit. On the technical side, they are not friendly to
search engine crawlers, which might report errors and not index slow pages. Start with the
PageSpeed Insights and work your way into optimizing both website versions.
How to do SEO on Wordpress?
Wordpress in one of the best when it comes to being SEO-friendly. Start with Wordpress
security. Install an SSL Certificate, which gives a slight boost to SEO. You need to have a safe
website, and Google likes to list secure websites in its search results. Hosting companies offer
free SSL for the first year, or you may use the Free SSL service, Let's Encrypt.
Then you need to make sure you have SEO-friendly URLs. You can make the change to 'Post
name' from the Settings / Permalinks WP page. There are more steps to follow and require an
amount of work, but there is a plugin that can save you some time. Go ahead and install the
Yoast SEO Plugin that allows connecting your WP with Google Search Console. Yoast is a
must SEO plugin. It prepares automated sitemaps, offers title and meta fields to optimize for
each post/page, gives you recommendations when problems occur, manages taxonomies, etc.
Now that we have covered the basics, you can publish your posts, keep the titles relatively
short, fill in all meta fields, and do not forget to optimize your images with ALT tags.
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How to Do In-house SEO?
First, you need to make sure your site is accessible to search engines. I mean from the
technical side all content, pages, metadata can be crawled and indexed from the search bots.
Then you need enough high-quality content that can answer the niche search queries
adequately and even predict user intent. The next step is to optimize the content to surface on
the search engine's first page and is good enough to attract clicks. Here I should mention the
need to embed schema markup that will enhance the relevancy of the page. Don't forget to
optimize the user experience during their visit with a fast loading website suitable for all devices
and great design with strategically placed conversion elements.
What Does Google Want to See on a Page?
Google has some rules (webmaster guidelines) that would like everyone to abide by. They
have help forums and host live office hour hangouts for webmasters. Google guidelines are
relatively easy to follow. You design pages and create content for the visitors; you follow a set
of rules published on Google help forums, and ideally, you have no problems. In reality, you
bump into a lot of issues unbeknownst to you as you start with good intentions, but pretty soon
you discover that things don't work as Google says they do. So, you don't see your content
getting any first page positions or clicks, your website gets unnecessary visits and bots, the
money you spent building it, bring you zero return. I am sure you have understood that there
are limitations to what you can do, and the cheap services you buy are worth nothing. You
need an expert to start things rolling.
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Do I Get Any Results with Cheap SEO Services?
Of course, you do. You get all sorts of negative results that tank your traffic, maybe forever. It's
strange to spend money destroying your business page, but most people do. People like to
save money, don't they? Why pay hundreds or thousands of dollars to people with 10+ years in
SEO when you can do it for a couple of dozen bucks buying a gig? After all, everybody says
they are experts and all promise to get you to the first page. Buying cheap SEO services is the
most common theme in our industry, and it's been going on for years. Business owners get
burned every day, chasing the first-page dream. Scammers have no moral boundaries. They
promise to get them on the first page with unlimited keywords in 30 days for all-in-all $200 with
white-hat SEO. Makes sense, right? So, what have they got to lose besides a couple of
hundred bucks? Well, they will lose their organic traffic with no fixing, is that a small loss?
Are Redirects Safe for SEO?
The only SEO-friendly redirect is the 301 (permanent) redirect, and webmasters should
implement the 301 redirects on any page that is not under development. Old content should be
redirected to the updated version if it sits, points to a sitemap page with navigation links, or to
the homepage. As a last resort, it should point to a 404 page (Google does not like 404 errors).
Note that with a 301 redirect, you can retain the link equity (transfer page authority) to the new
destination. If there is no redirect, the link equity is gone, and eventually, the page drops from
the Google index. The 301 redirects should be done from page A to page B. Redirect chains of
more than two pages (A to B to C) are bad for SEO as it looks like a spammer hides the real
content and misleads visitors and search engines. 302 redirects are only viewed as a
temporary solution when in development and not designed for content that needs to rank (bad
for SEO).
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6/9/2020 SEO FAQ
Domain 301 redirects sit in the grey-hat SEO area. They may be beneficial for a while, but in
the long-term, they will lose the link equity they pass and even harm the receiving domain or
page. If the old domain has different content than the receiving page, it will have the above
negative effects for both. Do not waste money in buying expensive, high-authority domains
only to redirect them.
Does the Sitemap Help with SEO?
Googlebot uses the sitemap files (page sitemap and sitemap.xml) to discover content. The
pages discovered go into the ranking algorithm and then got their positions in the search
results. It is fundamental to offer at least the XML file as a map to content discovery. Google
Search Console has a tab where you can submit it, and Googlebot will prioritize the crawling of
pages. In the sitemap file, you get to include only those pages you want to show up in search,
and you may add more information like alternate URLs for the languages present on site.
When Googlebot crawls a list of prioritized URLs on a site (because it runs on limited
resources), it may encounter errors. Sometimes, there are also old URLs in the Sitemap that
don't exist anymore. Bad navigation, lack of interlinking, server errors, sitemap false page
reporting, all those things may confuse Googlebot and assign a low crawling priority to the site.
There are online tools that help with each error from lost links, missing pages, excessive
redirect chains or loops, and of course, Google offers the Search Console with some reports
that help webmasters identify the mishaps.
Does Navigation Affect SEO?
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6/9/2020 SEO FAQ
Google has four ways to discover your content. i) Crawling with their bots, ii) the Sitemap file,
iii) direct submissions you do through URL Inspection in Search Console, and iv) users visiting
pages through the Chrome browser. There are more ways we suspect they use, but that is not
the scope of the paragraph. When a bot crawls the site, navigation and links are the ones to
indicate there is more content to discover. They show the path guiding the Googlebot from
page to page. Pages not linked in any way may never be found, this I call buried content. It is a
white-hat way to hide your content from the search engines ;) Common mistakes are: Menus
realized in Javascript that hides navigation links, different menus in mobile and desktop,
serving personalized navigation to users, lack of navigation hierarchy that bots can follow; lack
of a sitemap page (different from the XML file).
How to Block Pages from Search Results?
You have three options: 1. You could block the page from being crawled in Robots.txt with a
'disallow' command to Googlebot and other bots (User-agent: name-of-bot Disallow: private-
URL). It does not mean that all bots will follow the instruction, Googlebot will do though, but
most of the others they will ignore it. Since everyone is using Google to search, it will work.
Some bots target specifically hidden or private content, so putting the command in Robots.txt
gives them a hint of where to find your private pages. The file is also available to anyone typing
its path (domain.com/robots.txt) so take note before disclosing private content there.
2. You can insert a noindex tag in the page header. If you don't want to give the bots a hint
where to find your content, use the noindex tag only, don't put anything into robots.txt. No
guarantees that your content will remain private though, except for Google which is the thing
most people care about.
3. If the page is already indexed, you can submit a request to Google to 'temporarily' hide the
page from the results (Google Search Console / Removals), and it will work immediately. No
worries about the 'temporarily' property, it will remain hidden from Google if you use the
robots.txt command or a noindex tag.
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