SEO - Express Writers

How Social Engagement Really Ties Into SEO Rankings

December 31, 2020November 5, 2015 by Adam Oakley

If you run a business, there’s no doubt you’ve been told you need to be busy on social media channels. But, essentially you need to know that your efforts on those platforms are driving traffic to your website and making it quicker for customers to find you online. In short, you need to know you’re getting a return on investment. The question is this: do social signals actually influence your SEO? Social Engagement and SEO: The Answer Is Indirectly Last year, Matt Cutts announced that social signals won’t directly affect SEO. Sounds pretty cut and dry, right? Wrong. The keyword in that sentence is “directly.” Social media allows you the chance to impact your business’s SEO in an array of indirect ways. How to Measure That Indirect Impact Just because you can’t tie the indirect impact of SEO and social signs doesn’t mean it’s time to pack up shop and shut down all your social profiles. While there may not be a very specific formula for directly connecting SEO and social, it definitely doesn’t mean your social effort are futile. Let’s say you have a ton of followers on Twitter. That doesn’t really guarantee that you’re going to enjoy higher ranks on Google and the other search engines. However, it also doesn’t mean that won’t change tomorrow. For instance, in 2013 Google said that they did include social signals. A year later in 2014, they said they did not. According to Justin Kirby, CaveSocial Co-Founder, if a business’s content tends to be drawing people from various social networks to your URL constantly, SERPS are going to view your content as respected and eventually your rankings will increase. Social Is Much More than SEO Rankings Increasing your business’s website rankings in search engines really shouldn’t be your only goal when it comes to social signals. Just look at these other benefits: Link building Increased website traffic Social profile growth Content visibility Each of these can, and will, contribute to increased rankings. Gone are the days of SEO just being about using keywords and link building. That’s exactly why Google’s algorithm continues to evolve. Now, SEO revolves around honest experiences and trustworthy brands which means your rankings get better as you provide quality content, delivered consistently from a variety of sources. When you create a marriage between your social and content, you’ll see how your ranking and website traffic will improve. Let’s not forget about social reputation and brand awareness, either. As stated in Searchmetrics’ 2016 Rebooting Ranking Factors White Paper: “The correlation between social signals and ranking position is extremely high, and the number of social signals per landing page has remained constant when compared to with the values from last year’s whitepaper. … The top-ranked websites in Google’s rankings displays vastly more social signals than all other pages…. This is primarily due to the overlap between brand websites performing strongly in social networks and being allocated top positions by Google.” Essentially, the more ways people are able to find you in search engines, the more you’re able to control your brands’ images. Simply open the first few pages of Google on a search of your product or brand. Be consistent in your efforts and you’ll be able to “own” some topics online with your killer content and, ultimately, your services and products. So Many Reasons to Be Active on Social Media While there may not be a clear recipe of what you should be doing on social for your efforts to affect SEO, that doesn’t mean social signals won’t affect SEO whatsoever. There are plenty of reasons to be active on social, like engaging one-on-one with customers and growing your community. All the growth and social activity to see on your networks will lead to increase website traffic, increased interest in your offerings and more content views. SEO Is Becoming More Dependent on Engagement Human marketing, that is, having an online presence and engaging with your community, is good for all sorts of reasons. It’s especially good for your bottom line. Search engines are hard at work building algorithms that are way more in tune with human thinking since at the end of the day, humans are the ones using the search engines. So the closer they get to being human, the better the results will be. But don’t just take my word for it. Searchmetrics created a list of correlating factors between social signals and search engine positions. What you can see here is that 8 out of 10 highest correlations between search engine positions and rankings are tied to social engagement factors. That means that those factors that tie in best with the search engine positioning is related to how people react to content on social media. Human beings’ reactions on social media don’t happen because of numbers or because you’ve created a perfect site (from a technical viewpoint). It does happen because your content appeals to your audience; it resonates with them; they can relate. They’re human! We could get into a whole heated debate about a link between causality and correlation. But there’s really one main thing we need to know: content that is likely to entice engagement has a better chance of higher rankings and content that ranks well will help your bottom line. Matt Cutt’s Viewpoint So, just how far is Google from using social media signals as factors for ranking? Can the SERPS use follower and engagement metrics from the likes of Facebook and Twitter to evaluate an individual’s authority? The answers to those questions were certainly buried in the headlines in Matt Cutt’s video. Supporting what Matt had to say, Google’s John Mueller has categorically stated Google doesn’t use social signals in its search ranking factors. Okay, so let’s go in depth into Matt Cutt’s comments to try to understand why Google doesn’t do so. Do Twitter and Facebooks Signals Play a Part in Google’s Ranking Algorithms? That’s what Matt Cutts answered in the video. Let’s break it down. 1. Twitter and Facebook … Read more

Q&A Interview With The SEMrush Team: Talking SEO & Online Marketing

December 31, 2020September 2, 2015 by Adam Oakley

Last week, we sat down with a few members from the SEMrush team. In a nutshell, SEMrush is today the world’s leading provider of competitive intelligence and keyword research for professional digital marketing campaigns, with versatile, affordable plans. And yes – we use and love their software. We talked to Tara, Michael Stricker, Michael Isaac, and Tyler in our Q&A session. (Bios of the team members are at the end of this post.) We asked them how SEMrush came to be, common marketing problems to be faced today, SEO insights for website owners, among other things. It was a great session, with a lot of useful knowledge shared from their team – read, enjoy, and share! Tell us a little about how SEMrush was started (what’s your founding story)? Michael Stricker: “It was a dark and stormy night…” – Oleg and partners are the only ones who can answer this… they concocted something to aid their SEO data-gathering, and their peers were so taken with the result that they offered to pay for it… and the rest is history. Tyler: Oleg and Dmitry were tech guys working for a marketing firm with the task of creating “cool tools” (as Oleg puts it) for their company to run more efficiently. The point wasn’t profit; just create something cool and useful for the industry. They got so into it that they spun off the tools to create SEOQuake then SEMrush. Tara: Please see this for quotes directly from Oleg. What kind of daily problems does SEMrush answer for online marketers? Michael Stricker: Questions arise regarding what keywords your market is using most frequently. SEMrush enables astute marketers to get inside their prospect’s heads for a minute. The fact that it also affords an X-ray into what is working best for one’s online competitors is the icing on the cake. Add to that keywords, ads, clicks and spend for AdWords and you’ve got a chocolate layer cake. Sweeten that with Google Shopping data regarding keywords and prices and you’ve got a tray of high-converting cupcakes on top. Now, consider mobile search terms, visibility tracking and then specify local search down to the city and state, and you’ve got a tiered wedding cake for SEOs married to the data. Roll out the SEO Audit to help find and fix link errors and such that can trap search spiders and prevent your site from being fully indexed and you’ve got confections fit for a Technical SEO. Do that in 28 countries worldwide and Bing U.S. and you’ve given the world a slice of the pie. Michael Isaac: When people use SEMrush, they are constantly looking for answers. “What will be my next keywords?”, “Who should I be looking at the closest as a competitor?”, “What are the next errors I should fix on my site?”. We help our users find out all of this information every time they log in. We can tell them who is ranking for the same keywords they are, what issues we find with their site through our Site Audit tool, what keywords they should target next through their SEO and multiple other reports that can contribute to their overall success. We have users that are logging in every day fully utilizing the data we have in our database to improve themselves and find new information that will grow their online marketing efforts. Tyler: Prospecting clients with overview report and site audit. Which keywords to optimize for and which to stay away from. Who’s linking to me, what kind of links, and which links I should no-follow. Who’s spending what and how much in ads? Tracking and reporting SEO/PPC progress. Tara: While we market SEMrush as a competitive intelligence tool, there are many other things it can do for digital marketers. As a content manager and writer, I appreciate the insight SEMrush offers in editorial direction. I can use it to see which topics we’ve covered thoroughly or where we need more content. SEMrush allows me to combine instinct and data to produce informative content our readers enjoy. You’re not just competing with others, you’re competing with what you’ve already done on your own website. How would SEMrush benefit a typical marketer looking to analyze or boost their SEO rankings? Michael Stricker: Market insight comes with crowd-sourced data about what it is that web users are actually searching for, and the words and phrasing they use indicates just where they are on the “path to purchase”. Competitive insight gleaned from understanding your keyword strengths (unique, well-performing content and keywords), weaknesses (gap analysis), opportunities (popular keywords unique to competitors), and threats (keywords that are very competitively shared by commercial foes) all feeds into a holistic picture of what works and what does not, so that experimentation and attendant risk is minimized and positive SEO results can be accelerated and maintained. Knowing when to avoid pursuit of steeply-competitive keywords can preserve working capital for small or new domains. Gaining knowledge of competitors who invoke your brand to gain traffic for themselves is like a suit of golden armor. Forewarned is forearmed. Michael Isaac: Typical marketers are always looking for ways to improve their SEO and watch their competition closely. We believe here at SEMrush that we have came up with the perfect tool to conduct this research. We have tools that will provide insight on possible keywords you are looking to target or have been keeping an eye on. We offer multiple tools and reports that will assist you with tracking your competition and adding their SEO/PPC campaigns to determine where they have been struggling the most. Tyler: How wouldn’t they? Unless they feel like wasting a million hours manually crawling SERP results then they need SEMrush. They probably won’t need every feature, but life without a tool like SEMrush is like setting yourself up for failure– as a digital marketing. Tara: One of my favorite features about SEMrush is the position tracker report. I have my personal website set up in SEMrush and the … Read more

Citations: What They Are, And Why You Should Be Using Them

December 31, 2020June 18, 2015 by Adam Oakley

If you’ve been hanging around blogs over the last year or so, you’ll realize that citations are a big thing. Citation is a skill that bloggers need to learn in the twenty first century in order to see their pages rank well. Think of these like high quality backlinks that affect the overall rank of your blog and also create a pretty large impact on how your audience perceives your blog. What exactly is this citation thing anyway? What are Citations? Citations can simply be thought of as a means of presenting another website as a link within the body text of your own. The term stems from the academic field where extensive literature reviews usually result in citations that are lengthy and reference a large number of topics on the subject at hand. Similarly, citation in a blog or website references relevant topics so that readers who are interested in these topics can get further information if they so desire. Citations make up the major part of creating backlinks for your site in the modern era of search engine optimization. Why are Citations Important? Citations allow for the building of backlinks. The higher the quality of a backlink, the better your page ranks in search results and the more authoritative your own page is in comparison to others on the same topic. Citations are important for two major reasons. Firstly, they allow you to share contact with another, higher-impact blog. If enough traffic comes from your link to their site you may be able to form a suitable link sharing agreement, thereby increasing your traffic. Alternatively, and more importantly, a good backlink foundation allows your website or blog to rank well in relevant search results. The basis of your citations comes from proper use of something called the anchor tag. What is this “Anchor Tag”? Basically, it’s an HTML tag that replaces an actual HTML link with actual words. Thus instead of a URL, you can have a short description that, upon being clicked, sends the user to the URL hidden beneath it. Search engines utilize anchor texts to figure out the content of the site you’ve linked to. This means that proper use of anchor tags can affect both your linked-to sites and your own site. The use of the anchor tag represents a particular metric that search engines have taken to tracking termed link relevancy. Link relevancy is determined by what content is on the source page and what the anchor text attached to that source page represents. Link Relevancy Search engines cleverly utilize human beings penchant for linking relevant things to figure out exactly what the source page is relevant regarding search terms and keywords. Link relevancy indicators utilize this particular inclination along with complicated natural language processing in order to generate an idea of how relevant the link in question really is. Google’s Penguin update started being more specific in its determination of natural search terms and this allowed the algorithm to determine with a good degree of accuracy when it was dealing with non-organic links by determining if the same anchor text yielded the same link results each time. To this end, links should be made throughout the body of a page with as much variety as possible while still remaining relevant to the source page. How Does Anchor Text Affect SEO? As we said before, anchor text allows the building of links that raises the search rank of a page. After understanding search relevancy, we can now form a picture of what our anchor tags should contain to be proper examples of good SEO link building, from Backlinko. Remember that you’re trying to have different anchor texts that lead to your external page in order to create more organic content. To this end, what you should do is to brainstorm possible options that you may have for the creation of alternative anchor texts for your outbound links. It is important that you keep these thoughts in mind when developing your anchor tags: Do NOT create zero-anchor situations such as “Click Here…” Do NOT overuse anchor text. Overuse of anchor text makes a search engine look at your linking suspiciously and may actually hurt your search rank rather than helping it. 5 Types of Anchor Text Anchor text comes in many types and each type has their own particular use. The most common anchor types that you are likely to encounter during your time building SEO type links are: Zero Anchor Text: These are the text anchors that simply come with a “Click Here” appended to them via anchor tag. Not recommended at all. “Naked” URL’s: This also defeats the purpose of the anchor tag as some URL’s are usually made up of non-words and incomprehensible strings of letters. On the off-chance that the link is actually made up of good keywords (as is the case in many links from WordPress blogs), the link might end up helping itself out. Exact Match Anchor: One of the best anchor tags to use in a localized anchor tag strategy. These give a geographical area and a relevant keyword. In some SEO strategies, they allow for more localized searches which can lead to a much higher conversion rate. Partial Match Anchor: This depends upon the ability of a search engine indexing bot to determine the relevant location and other information from the surrounding words in order to rank the link. It has the benefit of allowing you to be freer with your anchor text and helps you create more natural outbound links. Highly recommended. Hybrid Anchor: These are a combination of links that associate different anchor tags with each other allowing for a more targeted strategy, while at the same time giving you the freedom to create links naturally. The links usually relate branded items with non-branded items and are also highly recommended. The flavor of anchor text that you use can make it more difficult for search engines to rank the link and therefore affect … Read more

Re: Matt Cutts, Is Guest Blogging Dead?

December 31, 2020January 21, 2014 by Adam Oakley

This is a direct reply written by Julia McCoy in response to The decay and fall of guest blogging for SEO. If you’re up on the game in SEO, you know a big name in it is Matt Cutts. The leader of the “webspam” team at Google, he’s a proclaimed “voice” in SEO and all things rankings. When he talks, people often listen; retweet; share; and reply. The latest buzz from Matt Cutts was posted on January 20, 2014—just three days ago. And already it’s been viral in the Internet world. The reason for the intense, instant feedback was the topic he wrote about. Matt’s blog was entitled “The decay and fall of guest blogging for SEO” and posed the statement, guest blogging is dead. “Google Will Take a Dim View” …The Worst The Blog Got The blog basically stated that all who were guest blogging should stop, and that guest blogging has gone from respectable to totally spammy. He said to stick a fork in the whole opportunity and don’t rely on it for SEO. Note, he never said it was entirely dead, not once in his whole blog; his most distinct ending words were that “Google will take a dim view of guest blogging going forward.” Matt Takes It Back? Matt actually added an “add-on” within 24 hours of writing his blog (possibly affected by the huge amounts of noted blogger voices on Twitter and other platforms denouncing his view) saying that he didn’t mean to “throw the baby out with the bathwater.” He stated very plainly that he did not mean to discount high quality and multi-author blogs, that he stated are “compelling, wonderful, and useful.” He Actually Has A Point About The Spam OK, so just like everything good, anyone—and on the Internet, seriously, anyone—can take it and turn it into something bad. Dirty, grimy hands have touched things like articles, blogs, press releases, web pages, and of course—guest blogging. I recently received a LinkedIN invitation to join a guest blog. I’ll put their name out there: SEO Libra. The invitation read, “Regarding For Free SEO Guest Blogging. Add Guest Posting for Free. Regards.” Ugh, it makes me shudder again. Grimy fingers like these turn content into spam, spin and trash it, try to recycle it, and overall give content a bad name in various avenues. But does that mean content in general stops working for everyone? Of course not. It only stops working in the wrong hands. In the right hands, content becomes well-written. It is original. Creative. Powerful. It has the possibility to go viral and make a positive impact on the web. Case Study Express Writers started blogging on SocialMediaToday about 5 days ago. We’ve had over 300 social shares on each post that was a featured guest blog on SocialMediaToday; new followers on all our social media platforms; connections from other writers and peers; and more than 10 new client inquiries. Guest blogging, my friends, is powerful. It works. What Did You Say, Cutts? Don’t forget, Cutts has said other things in the past that were discounted. A couple years ago, Cutts said a statement in a Google forum stating that press releases no longer held value for SEO. He was since proven wrong by SearchEngineLand experts, who did an actual case study with screenshot results that showed exactly the opposite of Cutts’ statement—that in fact, PR links were being counted by Google. Copyblogger’s CEO Weighs In The CEO of Copyblogger, Brian Clark, said it best on Twitter: Why change because Matt Cutts said something? Build quality, no matter what. (For more, read Copyblogger’s blog on why guest blogging isn’t done yet.) Excellent advice. Don’t change what’s working because one person said something. Keep it up, and always maintain quality—and you’ll always see results.