“There Is Nothing In This World To Fear, But Change.”

WRONG!

Change is necessary. Change is beneficial.

CHANGE IS THE FUTURE.

Why do we say all this? We live in a world that undergoes drastic transitions with each ticking second.

In business, you need to stay updated and in line with the latest trends. To stay on top, you need to embrace change ahead of your competition. We know, to stay on top you need to stay updated. Why?

SEO’S have changed the digital marketing strategies ever since renowned search engines like YAHOO, Google, Bing, etc. changed their algorithms to favour a much more AI perspective.

Google’s announcement of the use of Rank Brain, as their artificial intelligence system aids in finding pages that don’t have the exact keywords mentioned in the search query.

In short, multiple factors now determine SERP, which makes the conventional ones such as keyword density, linking, and various other norms outdated.

CHANGE, get it? They did, so why can’t you?

Yet, not everyone stays updated and some prefer relying on age-old SEO tactics that were once or sometimes never a success. Hence, they falter from what was once a successful venture during one time, to an abysmal debacle.

The reputed British Broadcast Corporation, BBC was slapped with a penalty in the year 2013 for having unnatural links pointing towards a particular webpage.

In February 2011, Forbes.com was caught in the act of selling links on its own website, without a second thought of adding ‘no follow’ attribute.

 

You certainly don’t want that, do you?

 

Wrong SEO strategies prove to be a bane than a boon, and rightly so, they need to be avoided at all costs.

So which ones are outdated; how do you know which ones to stay away from and if there’s a diamond in the haystack, should you embrace them? Will it actually helpful?

 

 1. Plagiarism:

There’s this huge misnomer in everyone’s mind that replicating the traits of successful companies or anything for that matter, guarantees success.

Nope.

While it’s good to owe inspiration from either the structure of the page or even the contextual combinations, blatant plagiarism is a huge demeanour.

No one wants to see the same thing twice.

Visitors who notice them jump to the conclusion that the webpage (propagating it to the business itself) isn’t inventive enough, and lacks knowledge, and prone to neglect.

 

 2. 3^rd party “Paid” Links

What are you actually paying for?

Matt Cutts says “The vast majority of the time things are incredibly clear: people are paying money outright for links.”

“Ninety-nine percent of the time it’s abundantly clear that these are links that are being bought and paid and sold and all that sort of stuff.”

Not only is it like taking the easiest route, these links may possess a stagnant structure that may have been replicated countless times.

Google and various other search engines have always been on the lookout for such stagnancy and they remove quite a few of them too.

Google banned Google Japan from buying paid links.

Now isn’t that enough to stop you?

 

3. Keyword Stuffing :

It’s one of the oldest tricks in the box still underuse. Not for anything good, at least.

So obviously, for your content to be recognized by the search engine the keywords need to stand out. Everyone knows that.

But stuffing a hundred keywords or so into it?

Not only is it unnatural, but it also hinders a certain level of user-friendliness, making it a     viable technique to actually lose customers than anything more. Search Engines don’t like it either and you even stand the chance of being penalized and possibly banned.

It might’ve worked in the past when things were very simple but now, both the search engine algorithm and the visitor’s mindset are different.

How different?

Enough to not fall prey to gimmickry.

 

4. Bots, Spam, Ads, and ClickBaits :

A deadly dozen, to say the least.

Gone were the days when all the content on the web were tailor-made to the needs of the business or the website, and a writer painstakingly sits and writes each and every portion of the text.

With automation and artificial bots come not only the luxuries of having loads of contents prepared by the minute, but also a multitude of problems associated with it.

Why?  Even they go crazy sometimes.

If a certain word repeats all over the content or maybe a similar structure elsewhere was already there, something could smell fishy.

Even if people may miss that, Search Engines do not and it may incur penalties or even less traffic than expected.

Clickbaits take use of flashy yet misleading headlines that would seem to be inviting to the visitor’s eye, particularly to gain traffic through visiting the links and even unknowingly sharing them.

There’s nothing much to say about ads and spam either. Who loves them? Want to make extra money? Improve the content and not resort to stuff like these.

 

5. Cloaking:

Cloaking is merely “sophisticated hiding”.

It’s like presenting a rigged version of the actual webpage such that it satisfies the algorithm of the search engine and hence can be called upon when the visitor searches for the particular keyword.

Doorway pages, there are called which are specially optimized for specific keywords. The page altogether may be entirely different, and may even serve another purpose probably with even questionable content.

Google has banned Cloaking of any form, need I say more?

British Motor Works (BMW) was penalized for cloaking in 2006.

 

6. Article Spinners :

Similar to spam, they were created to produce variants of the same keyword, to establish an alternate version of the same page.

This in turn gave rise to numerous low-quality articles and Search Engine algorithms like Google Hummingbird got updated to further filter out unnecessary variants.

 

7. Spam Comments

Most of the blogs and websites have a dedicated comments section that allows users to post their views on the corresponding content.

However, this was prone to misuse since a lot of bloggers put website links as well, along with the comments – a genuinely false move to induce traffic.

More or less- SPAM.

 

8. Automated Link Building:

Marketers took use of generic software that built links that were embedded in blogs, comments sections, forums etc. They would mostly be redirected to numerous articles that were generally very poorly written.

An ultimate time waster, especially since they might seem to contain information we think we might actually need but often end up as a huge disappointment.

Rap Genius, the famous lyrics-based site fell prey to Automated link building; they faced consequences from Google for allowing users to post links alongside lyrics content resulting in an unnatural hike in traffic.

 

9. Interlinking Websites :

The wrong thing here would be striking the perfect balance between what’s useful and what’s abuse.

Many websites require interlinking them with others for a steady flow of information and even to redirect the user according to their wish.

The problem lies in its misuse. In most cases, arrays of unwanted websites are interlinked of which none might be relevant.

The Google AI has the skill to notice patterns within interlinking spam for its use and it efficiently curbs the rise in low content irrelevant links.

 

10. Short /Thin form Content:

Most of the websites used to get away with this technique where a short word pertaining to nothing specific other than the use of the same word 2-3 times would allow search traffic for their site.

The content may be unrelated to the topic and may not even have other words at all.

 

11. Link and Article Directories :

The Panda Update for Google’s AI bought to a close, the misuse of these directories which basically allowed websites to be categorized based on the needs of the user.

However, misuse crept in especially due to the simplicity of installing the software which powers them, allowing them to create multiple irrelevant links.

Article Directories were even worse.  They were rewritten and became bloated with low-quality content.

 

12. Exact Match Domains :

Matching the domain with the exact keyword phrase allowed microsites such as these to rank up higher than the actual domain for multiple days.

 

13. Paid/ Spammy Guest Blogging

This went out of hand mainly due to its uncontrollable nature.

 

While guest articles were featured on multiple websites, these “guests” took shape of marketers who posted links of completely unrelated subjects along with the content.

A wide flurry of such tactics furthered the need to retrospectively control the content before posting it on the website, and with AI alterations they were taken to their traditional grassroots, favoring the actual content developers.

 

 14. Online Press Releases :

Wannabe website services mimic real journalists by shooting out online press releases with the desire to be scraped up by other websites to induce traffic for their own venture.

Not only is it a genuine time waster, but these releases would also be sold out by sub-standard websites with less visibility that doesn’t offer anything to the client sites which buy them as well.

 

It’s a known fact that Google loathes to confirm any kind of its search engine updates, so it’s always a guess-and-play strategy until there’s an official announcement.

While dealing with SEO marketing, there are some things about which Google has been constant throughout all of its updates, like, spammy links, low-quality content, keyword stuffing, over-optimized anchor text, etc.

Although page content quality is a necessity to remain on the web now, that’s not going to give you page rankings unless you build quality links.

Google’s webmaster guideline is getting strict day by day and this why you need to change your game-plan if you want to stay longer in the game.

Google’s search engine updates have now even started to look after things like the mobile-friendliness of your site, and the fact that improving UX will also increase your page rankings says a lot about how

Google is making it hard for SEO to work on. You need to put in efforts to get in page rankings through other ways too.

As we’re witnessing revolutionizing changes in the mobile industry day by day, mobile phones are proving sufficient in all forms when the user is away from his desk.

The web is now rapidly being optimized for the mobile view, and you should do it too before you start losing mobile users. Just by keeping few factors in mind you can increase your customer to a wide extent, increase your page speed, fix mobile-friendly errors present on your site.

Figure 1:

 

However, the Google updates have never stopped the search engine marketers from developing ways to rank up their pages. Link building is coming up as the most important skill in SEO and that’s why you need to master it now. In this post, I’ll be going in brief through all the possible link-building strategies one should know by now.

 

What are the most effective link-building strategies of 2017?

 

1. Create Linkable Assets

Content Marketing is the new Link Building!

This is one of the oldest techniques being used even before SEO came into being. No content is perfect and you can always approach your audience with better, fresh, and updated content.

Come up with content that would appeal to your audience so that you could generate links.

Pretend you’re an online seller of body-building supplements, for example. For your business, a typical linkable asset could be something like a blog post about 10 side effects to be aware of while taking supplements.

Clearly, it offers valuable insight to your readers and displays your concern towards them without getting too self-promoting. You might as well catch the attention of other websites when they come across your post and if your content is great, that they will gladly post it on their website.

Resource guides, infographics, tutorials, visual content, etc. can serve as linkable assets that fetch you the quality links you want for building a great link profile.

 

2. “Ask the Experts”, Panels, Interviews

Whatever industry you belong to, you can always create these types of posts. Frankly speaking, experts love to be featured on the web because even they need to create an audience for themselves and set up a reputation. With these, you are helping them as much as you’re benefitting yourself.

The first task in the line would be to structure a list of experts in your field of business.

According to their level of comfort-ability, you can outline a panel discussion, interviews, “ask the experts, or an expert round-up on any particular issue.

Sketch ideas for content, and then put together the group of experts suitable to answer the topics in your content.

The primary benefit from these posts is that you’re getting multiple links instantly because all the experts will share your post on their websites, which will again give you immediate access to their audience.

Once you are ready with your content, always make a clear plan about how to promote your post later. Remember these are busy people you will be dealing with, so keep in mind that you might have to remind them a few times before they take action on your content.

 

3. Unlinked Brand Mentions

There must’ve been times where you’d forgotten to give a link back while mentioning a particular product/service in your posts.

And chances are that if you have been online for some time, there could be many other websites that might have mentioned you in a post or article and forgotten to give a link, there’s simply no reason why you shouldn’t have a link back.

You can always use tools like Google Alerts, Mention.com, and Moz to keep a track of such unaccredited mentions. You can reach out to the website or individual whenever you get an alert for your mentions and turn those mentions into links. If you keep doing this for a good period of time, these mentions can cumulate into a massive boost to your page.

 

4. Broken Link Building

There must be pages on your website which you’d have taken down or have shifted to a different URL. While you’re aware of this, it could be possible that there must be sites that’d be still linking to your older links; which are now 404 probably, if I’m not mistaken.

Since users are getting a 404 now, you’re losing them within clicks.  Use tools like Ahrefs, Moz to find those broken links on your website and, send the updated link to the webmasters.

Another technique you could also do is, find broken links of your competitors by scanning their websites in Ahrefs. Since those pages are long dead, you could probably rebuild similar pages on your website and reach out to people who are still linking to those old dead pages, with your fresh and updated pages on similar content.

You will be surprised to notice, how many people will happy to replace those old links with yours, and thank you for it.

 

5. Snatch Links from Lower Quality Content

This is one of the steps from the Skyscraper Technique, which I’ll tell you about later in the post. When you’re out there searching for ways to build links, it’s often right under the nose.

If you’re aware of the competitors in your field, go through the posts where they’ve been mentioned on the internet. When you go through the content, try to spot instances where you think you’ve got a better content on your blog/website.

Let’s say you’re browsing blog posts about how to make soap at home, and you end up on a super boring 400-word blog post about the soap industry and whatnot. If you already have a crazy insane post on this exact topic, ping the webmaster and pitch your content.

Since you have a better and thorough resource they’ll definitely link to your post, because they have clearly demonstrated a liking for such posts in the past, and you are only offering them something better.

 

6. Create Educational Resources

Backlinks from .edu domains are a serious ranking boost, right? Well, it’s not that hard to get them as it sounds.

Educational resources result in high-quality links all the time. Tutorials, extensive how-to guides, manuals or other contents that teach students something valuable instead of promoting your brand are very well appreciated and prove valuable to the users at the same time.

These days most universities have resource pages, with links to different sites, for their students and faculties.

Pretend you’re an event planner, for example. You could structure an insightful guide explaining the dos and don’ts while organizing a small-scale event/fest in the University.

Then pitch your content to the universities and spread the guide among students. If the university lists it in their resources, there you have earned yourself an .edu link, and most importantly you’ll end up getting tons of new audience and potential clients for your business – Thanks to your newfound glory!

 

7. Scholarship Opportunities

It must be clear by now how important Edu links are in terms of boosting your page rankings. Although it might not be clear how to get it, it is easier than the normal convention. If you can create something to which universities might like to link, you’re golden.

Here’s how it works: Build a page on your website describing the scholarship (like this one), with necessary information like where to apply, etc. When you’re ready with the scholarship page, it’s time to find the Universities that usually Link to Scholarships.

You can manually search or use inurl:.edu “scholarships” as well. When you come across a scholarship page that seems like a good fit, approach them with your requirement list for the scholarship. Do not forget to give them an estimate of the # of scholarships you have.

 

8. Visual Assets

Visual assets like images, diagrams, infographics, charts, and other visual-oriented pieces of content are proven ways to gain attention from your users. Mostly it is because visual content is easier to grasp as they produce quick info on the topic.

Visuals assets are really easy to link to. For example, when you publish a graph on your site, you get a link anytime someone shares that graph on their site. This powerful “share my infographic and link to me when you do” relationship simply doesn’t go well for text-based content.

 

9. List Posts

List posts, or listicals, are a numbered list of techniques, tips, reasons, myths…or just anything on a particular topic. Again, list posts are liked by users as well as bloggers.

List posts have come across as on the most valuable assets now. In fact, after analyzing 1 million articles, it was discovered that list posts generated more backlinks than any other content formats, and even outperformed quizzes, videos, and infographics.

 

10. In-Depth Ultimate Guides

These in-depth ultimate guides are comprehensive resources that cover everything one should know on a given topic and a little bit extra around it. Ultimate guides have an insane amount of information in one place. This is why it is loved by the readers who are out there in search of answers.

11. Email Outreach

Link building has now moved from the comments section to personal inbox now and this is why it’s getting easier and convenient day by day. The sooner you grasp that link building is not limited to just the internet anymore, the better for you.

The first step of any email outreach is targeting the right people. And for that, you need to use tools available on Ahrefs and Buzzstream, and other websites built for SEOs. Use hunter.io or anymailfinder.com for getting the emails of your webmasters from their posts/pages.

Find the people who’d probably like to link to your post and then comes the important task. If you don’t want to end up in the trash of your target webmasters, personalize your email as much as possible, but don’t forget to lose the corporate touch. Most importantly, build scripts for email but again, don’t forget to personalize.

 

12. Resource Page Link Building

Resource pages are like yellow pages on the internet. They exist solely for the purpose of putting all the web pages on one topic in a single place. This is why they make the perfect spots for link building.

One simple way to search for resource pages would be: “Keyword” + inurl:links

The audience you gain on resource pages are genuine, primarily because this is the audience that is trying really hard to grasp the topic, and secondary there is no “buy now” button on the resource pages which makes them completely trustworthy.

 

13. The Skyscraper Technique

The Skyscraper Technique is the most awesome of all the techniques devised ever. In this technique, you can steal audience from right under the nose of your competitors. How?

 

Step 1: Find the outdated pages on your competitor’s website.

Step 2: Create updated and extensive content on these topics and outreach to the webmasters who’ve linked to the outdated posts from your competitor’s website.

Eventually, it’s content that matters, and if you’ve managed to create something better, people will link to it.

 

14. Give Testimonials

Everyone providing any kind of product/service on the web loves to display testimonials. So, if you happen to use a service/ product that you love, try sending the owners a testimonial.

Just add subtly that if they want to display the testimonial on their posts, they can do that as well. Most people would take the offer and probably boast about their new review to their Social Following as well, letting you leverage some of their followers who see your brand.

 

15. Blogger Reviews

If you’re someone dealing in a software product, consulting service, information product, or anything for that matter, you have a golden opportunity to turn that into high-quality backlinks.

There’s a simple trick here, offer your product to bloggers and in return ask them for reviews. If you’re charging a particular fee for the product, waive it off for the blogger and they’ll happily to the rest.

Keep a mild tone and talk about getting mentions on their blog, the rest is self-explanatory. Now, don’t ask them upfront about giving a link/review, which will then violate Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.

 

16. HARO (Help A Reporter Out)

There are a million reporters looking out for sources every day and by registering on HARO. When you register yourself as a source, wait until you receive queries from your field of expertise, I’m sure there must be developments in news from your industry often.

All you need to do is, sign up as a source at Helpareporter and thereafter follow the guidelines accordingly. Once your register, you will start receiving emails from HARO with requirements from reports who are actively looking for news sources.

While providing your response to reporters, you have the choice of staying anonymous but obviously, that’s not why you’re there. You will get mentions for your website once the news is published online.

It is one of the best ways to get rich backlinks from authority news sites.

 

17. Submit Your Site to Website Feedback Sites

This is totally off the board, but a source for getting links anyway. There are a lot of sites that are designed to give you feedback on everything that is there on your website.

The thing to note here is that most of these sites will give a link back to your site.

All you need to do now is send your site with a brief description of how you intend to improve it.

 

18. The Moving Man Method

As there is a number of websites growing every day on the web, there are also many websites shutting down every day. The moving man method is all about utilizing the opportunity created thereafter.

You can use Google to find out the shutdown websites by using keywords like these:

your niche + shut down

your niche + closed

your niche + not working

 

The next step would be to find the webmasters linking to these broken/closed links. Personally, I’d suggest you go for the webmasters with higher authority sites first.

When you outreach to the webmasters with an updated and possibly better replacement from your website, they should be glad about it. However, make sure that your content is really good.
Watch it in action in the video below  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lVMaSvTVmGI

 

19. Guest Posting Gigs on Twitter

On Twitter, there are sites sharing guest posts on a daily basis. That’s your cue, you can reach out to them through tweets/DM and do a guest post.

Although it is a time taking process, then it is a new source of the untapped audience for you actually. If you succeed at getting few guest-post gigs, you can work around and there’s no end to possibilities.

You can always rely on Twitter to get a constant flow of such new gigs. Few examples for your Twitter hunt could be:

 “your niche” + guest post

“your niche” + guest article

“your niche” + write for us

“your niche” + guest author

 

20. Transcribe Videos

Video transcription is a very new source of building links as the video boom is still new on the web. Hence, this can be used as a flexible link building strategy. In every industry, there are experts who have established a major audience base with their video channels. On the internet today, you’ll find a good number of videos uploaded daily, varying from Webinars, Presentations, Tutorials, Q&A’s,Hangouts or Vlogs (video blogs). You can always associate with these video-makers and generate new traffic and audience for yourself.

Video transcription is another way to make link-worthy content because you are getting original content directly from experts in your field. You can also aquiret links by associating with them as they always provide transcription with their video.

Here’s how to do it: First, search on YouTube for key experts/bloggers, and find videos without transcriptions and ping them that you’d like to make transcriptions. Send them when you’ve it done.

It also helps you stand out from the rest of your competitors as you’re helping the influencers. Whatever relationships you build this way will last longer and give you a permanent audience. You get a targeted audience on your page when influencers share your transcripts.

 

21. Hacking Quora

In recent years, Quora has emerged as a last-end solution platform for everyone on the web. There is major traffic on Quora of people looking for answers to every sort of thing and this is the untapped audience you have right there in front of you.

Here’s how to get referral traffic from Quora:

Look for the threads getting maximum traffic on Quora, using Ahrefs. Put in keywords of your niche and find out relevant threads with good traffic and high rankings. Publish answers to these threads with traffic. You’ll find high-traffic questions with low-quality answers or even without any answers.

The most important factor here is that Quora lets you reference sources in the answers and hence it’s easier to link back to relevant websites. However, keep in mind that you do not go over the top and appear too self-promotional. There’s always the chance of getting blocked/banned from Quora if they ever suspect you constantly promoting any particular thing.

 

22. Build links with blog comments

In this technique, it’s all about utilizing the blog comments on your own blog and outline a list of prospective links.

In most of the blogging mainframes, you’ll find the name, website (if they’ve one) and email address of the commenters. Once these people have commented on your blog, it clearly indicates their liking for your stuff. So, now all you’ve to do is make a list of those commenters who own a blog themselves in the same field as you do.

Run a scrapper to collect the websites of all such prospects and check if you could find any content on their website that could relate to you. If so, start an outreach campaign to build links with their website/blog.

The key thing to keep in mind while outreaching is to personalize your outreach emails. Because always keep in mind, there is a human on the other end of your email.

 

23. “Ranking for Links” Technique

There are millions of blog posts getting published daily on the internet. Bloggers need to put references from different sources to back up their points.

How do they get these sources? On Google, right?

So there is a huge probability that your blog/website could be one of those reference pieces. All you need to do now is rank up your pages containing these pieces, “reference” terms.

Note down a list of topics/keywords from your industry with a high probability of getting cited.

You must probably have content built already on these keywords/topics. In general, these kinds of keywords/topics are usually queries or informational terms. So, first of all, make a list of such queries for your niche.

Next, run these keywords through SEO tools and find the terms with low Keyword Difficulty and high search volumes. Now, all you need to do is, just put together contents around these topics and rank up for them.

If you succeed in ranking for these kinds of “reference” terms, there are chances that you’ll get backlinks on a consistent basis from these bloggers seeking references for their own content.

 

Summing up!

The methods which I’ve mentioned above are tried and tested and are backed up with various case studies. However, in the field of SEO, keep in mind that there are a lot of factors contributing to your page rankings. Even while link building, it is important to have a positive approach and keep attempting unless you reach the top.

Link Building is getting personalized day by day, and I cannot stress more on this. Never lose hope, if you have confidence in your page content, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t outreach to even the top players in your field. As a cautionary step, be wary of spammy links and avoid links from sites with low-trust authority lest you could get reprimanded and lose ranking.

Great! Now you’re ready to hunt. All the best!

If you’ve any doubts or suggestions, feel free to mention those in the comments.

The first impression might be your only chance foray impression.

Almost every business boasts of a website that furthers its reach to the ever-increasing online community. However, not all of them truly prioritize the importance of website performance optimization, which undermines the capabilities of defining the reach of their franchise.

Adding to that, website visitors grow impatient and much more demanding especially with online competition growing by the day.

FEVAD (Federation of E-Commerce and Distance Selling) in 2015 says almost 57% of the internet users require the website to be loaded in 3 seconds or less.

It’s common sense actually, a website that takes a longer time to load will be given the least preference by any user, right?

Ask yourself that question.

Businesses rely heavily on customers, the building blocks of any enterprise and they need to know that the brand favours them. They don’t want to wait.

Unpleasant impressions generate unsatisfactory reviews that spread particularly fast, resulting in losing traffic and most importantly MONEY.

Amazon says a site being 1 second slower may lead to about a $1.6 billion loss a year in sales.

Tech giant Google paid for half a second delay in its loading time with a 20% downturn in traffic.

Time surely is money, isn’t it?

With the internet flooded with websites almost serving similar purposes, the need of the hour would be to strike the perfect balance within your site, which can please the audience, generate traffic as well as serve their purpose.

Everything in this world is subject to change and so, why not websites?

Statistically speaking, a 15.4% increase in download was recorded when Mozilla upped their page speed by almost 2 seconds.

Kinsta says “People prefer fast loading trivial pages rather than slow relevant ones.”

This doesn’t present itself as a huge conundrum at all since you simply need to outpace your competitors to stay on top.

Somebody call Usain Bolt!

HOWEVER! 

You certainly don’t need the Jamaican’s strategies to code a website for you whatsoever, because we have presented a few TIPS AND TRICKS for you to stay ahead of the competition and boost your page amongst the global audience.

You can thank us later.

Here we go:

Implementing all these in one go might be a cumbersome task, so it’s better you go by each step one by one and analyze the difference in loading time.

It’s essential that you do not blatantly copy them for its sake, understand first and then implement.

 

01. Go Minimal

Organize your webpage such that it stays soothing to the eye- as lean as possible. Extra lines, line breaks, images, and other unwanted paraphernalia go down the drain.

Draw inspiration from the homepages of multi-billion dollar companies like  Apple, Audi etc. and analyze their structuring methodology.

I’m sure you’d understand the fine line between inspiration and plagiarism.

 

02. Image Optimization

A picture is essentially worth more than a thousand words and it certainly weighs that much too.

An HTTP Report in 2016 reads “64% of the weight of a webpage lies solely on its images.” That certainly puts things into perspective.

You would’ve noticed too, images take more time. Now I didn’t have to tell you that right?

 So what can you do?!

• Choose to insert pictures only where it actually matters – in JPEG if you prioritize quality and PNG for lesser significant ones like logo etc. BMP’s and TIFF’S are a NO GO!

• Properly sizing the image based on the corresponding requirement inhibits unnecessary junk data formation that burdens the bandwidth.
• Tools like Smushit, JPEG/ PNG Stripper allows effortless optimization at the click of a button.

 

03. CSS Delivery Optimization

Not long ago, the optimum size of a web page was considered to be around 30KB, including all elements like images, text, and so on.

The advent of CSS and JavaScript modernized and broke this 30KB barrier and provided users with much more enriched experience.

By reducing the cycles of reading code by using “shorthand” method, the speed of delivery can be optimized. Basically, just leave redundancy out of the question.

Preferring an external style sheet, which can load before rendering the page to an internal style sheet helps too. It all depends on how the “coding specialist” works his way through.

Reduce complicated scripts and redundant lines of code. Seems fair enough, right?

 

04. Compression techniques

CSS and Javascript can be optimized in more than one way, actually. We discussed the delivery system before.

Now, let’s look at how we can compress them as such.

• Minify the CSS and JavaScript to compress them by subsequent combination of CSS and JavaScript removing blank spaces in between.
• Others include CSS Optimizer, Clean CSS and a lot more.( Hey don’t get lazy Google them and find out)
• GZip compression aids by finding elements of code similar and temporarily exchanges them with shorter characters.

Caution: Using Gzip to compress images, PDF etc may lead to the new file being larger than the previous version; also old browser support may not be guaranteed. (Who uses old stuff too, btw?)

 

05. The “404 Error”

This might be familiar among coders and something they dread as well. It pops up in the case of missing files or pages.

Although it may seem to be simple, a typical 404 error requires about 50-100 MB of memory to get delivered. Seems hard to digest? I said it’s something people dread.

 

Plugins offer numerous ways to check and debug errors of this kind but they stay in the server for too long, which wastes the resources of each corresponding server.

So it’s preferred to use tools like Screaming Frog to crawl, identify error pages and fix them so that they don’t waste too much bandwidth and reduce visitor wastage.

There’s Visual SEO Studio and WildShark SEO Spider Tool, which are freeware alternatives for Screaming Frog.

 

06. Offloading Assets

By this, we mean separating contents like CSS, images, etc from the main server and relying on other servers to load them.

This, in turn, reduces the reliance over a single main server, by offloading it to others thereby reducing the time take to load the page.

Sharing is indeed caring.

We also suggest a few offloading sides for your needs:

• Flikr, Smugmug, 5– Images
• Google Feedburner – RSS
• Surveys – SurveyMonkey, there are just to name a few.

You can also make use of dedicated hosting, which is a little pricier but offers way more speed than shared ones.

 

07. Server Optimizations

Choosing better servers with more RAM and cache sizes would necessarily improve the performance index.

Regular software updates and creating mirror serves helps balance the load between serves allowing faster access times.

 

08. Plugin Usage

Unnecessary plugins not only fall prey to multiple server crashes, and it takes longer time to load.

That “awesome” transition or element you saw in “that” website might not always be the right choice for you.

 Choose your elements wisely.

 

09 Debugging

Coders beware!  You guys would completely relate to this.

Even the smallest mistake, estimating to a semicolon may result in a memory dump problem that may crash both the site and server.

Render codes repeatedly until you’re positive that the lines would not cause issues and using debugging applications like Microsoft Visual Studio would help you in the long run.

 

10. Speed Tests

Multiple platforms offer speed tests that rate the loading speeds of websites and determine how fast your site loads, in comparison with others.

They also help provide necessary information as to where the problems exist and some may even offer advice to change aspects of the site.

Sites like Pingdom, GTmetrix and some to name a few.

If you’re feeling overwhelmed, just take a deep breath. The Developers at multibillion-dollar businesses like Dropbox, Apple, and Microsoft etc have gone through the same thing.

It’s true, like really!

They make amends even now, with optimizations occurring by the minute. They don’t want to replicate a success mantra, they want to create more.

Of course, for the non-tech savvy people, we introduce you to a platform where you can outsource work related to webpage optimization and a lot more too.

Our company Prime One Global will take care of this and in the end, you can boast of a website catering to the needs of the client as well as the customer.  To learn more, connect with us [email protected] or ping us on our Facebook Page.

 

Before You Go!

All these might sound complicated, but that’s how the websites work. You need to know the technicalities involved in enhanced optimization.

Rounding off with the important points, customers require loading speeds to be at optimum and for that, stick to a minimal design and select the image formats based on their use.

Just think from the perspective of a prospective visitor. Would you wait a long time for a website to load?

Of course not.

Patience still is a virtue these days, but then as we live in a world digitized in almost every aspect within it, to stay ahead we need to embrace change.

Social Bookmarking sites have become a favourite with bloggers these days. If you are thinking that social media doesn’t have the same reach it had previously, think again. Social Bookmarking drives the traffic to the blogs when users on different social media sites share interesting videos and posts with their friends.

Before we get into the advantages and disadvantages of Social Bookmarking, we need to understand what Social Bookmarking is.

What is Social Bookmarking?

Social Bookmarking is nothing but an online portal that enables users to share, add, and edit different web documents. Every individual spends a large portion of their day online and when you read something interesting that you want to share with your friends and family, you bookmark it and save it online. It’s as simple as adding a bookmark to a book. Social Bookmarking allows the user to return to the page later and access it from different sources since it is available online.

With Social Bookmarking, you save the webpage online instead of copying the URL in a notepad or document. Social Bookmarking also helps the user to organize the best content that they come across on the web in one particular area, so that it is easily accessible.

After the know-how on Social Bookmarking, we need to understand the different advantages of the same. Social Bookmarking is highly popular these days.

 

Advantages of Social Bookmarking

 

Helps You Go Viral

You might have used a lot of codes to increase the SEO of your blog. While some may find success in this technique, there is a lot that you often lose out on. This is where Social Bookmarking comes in. When you make post a link of your blog post as a bookmark on different Social Bookmarking sites, the users will automatically be redirected to your blog when they view the same. Once you interest the new visitors with your blog, they will automatically bookmark your posts on different social media sites. Thanks to a large number of backlinks, you will get more traffic. However, make sure that your content is interesting and unique or else you will not be able to attract new visitors.

 

Increase Traffic

Once your blog goes viral on social media thanks to Social Bookmarking, you will see an increase in traffic. Make sure that you don’t stop at posting your bookmarks on one site. Post on multiple sites to increase the inflow of traffic. Post on Social Bookmarking sites like Google+, Reddit, Technorati, Delicious and Digg. Posting on these sites are free, so you don’t have to spend any money. Once these Social Bookmarking sites contribute to your blog traffic, view the analytics of your page and determine which of these sites contribute more than the others. You can tweak your bookmarking accordingly.

 

Build Your Brand

With Social Bookmarking, you get targeted traffic. When you get the targeted customers, you automatically help your brand grow. Once the new users find your blog appealing, they will subscribe to it. Social Bookmarking sites often allow users to review the different sites. Depending on user preference, some posts are buried while some get more coverage. When you are one of the most preferred sites, you automatically build trust and new users show interest in getting a better idea about your brand.

 

Improve SERPs

 Social Bookmarking is a convenient way to build one-way links. Bookmarking sites have a positive impact on the ranking of the bookmarked sites. They eventually improve the PageRank and SERPs of the sites. Since Google is planning to make SEO social, Social Bookmarking is a convenient way to improve search engine ranking.

Like everything in life, all good things come with their own disadvantages and problems and similar is the case with Social Bookmarking.

Disadvantages of Social Bookmarking

 

 

SEO

While bookmarking can help you with your SEO and SERPs, it can also create a lot of subsequent problems. There are multiple sites that will use your bookmarks to create backlinks for their website, without generating any new content. These bogus websites will simply add junk and hope your bookmarks help them to improve their ranking.

 

Tag Structure

Since Social Bookmarking is still a new concept, there isn’t a lot of information on the same. There isn’t any formal way to regulate how the different Social Bookmarking sites tag the different links. This gives rise to discrepancies that might often create problems. Since it’s individuals who tag these bookmarks, there’s the possibility of human error as well. Such errors create problem inconsistency and organization.

 

Collusion

Scammers are everywhere on social media. There can be scammers who get a large group of people to submit bookmarks and control their votes. They can trick other users into thinking that this highly bookmarked content is worth seeing and trick them to visit pages that might set free a virus or force them to make a payment.

 

Spamming

Since individuals have the freedom to create their own tags and bookmark contents, there is a high risk of spamming. This is the problem has further increased since individuals view bookmarked content from people they aren’t connected to. Spamming can also prevent the user from finding the actual website or page.

 

Conclusion

Social Bookmarking has both its advantages and disadvantages. There are two sides to a coin and like everything, if you are using Social Bookmarking, you have to weigh the odds and go ahead. If you keep aside the disadvantages, you will realize that the advantages are crucial and they can help you to a great extent. The competition to improve page ranking is getting tougher with every passing day. It is easy to make blog posts online and there are over millions of such blogs. If you want to stand apart and expand the number of visitors, you have to do something unique and since Social Bookmarking is still a new concept, it is the best option.

How does social bookmarking help you? Do let us know in the comments below. 

Image optimization is the building block of SEO. It’s no longer a secret that if you want to drive organic search traffic to your website, your SEO game needs to be above the fold. With more competing websites emerging every day, it is important for you to get higher search rankings and improve your traffic. However, majority of the people overlook one crucial resource for raking in all of that organic traffic: Google Image Search. And, to get that traffic, you need to know about the basics of image optimization. Here are few ideas for image optimization.

The relevance of an image on a website is the most basic factor for SEO.

Images must be pertinent to the content of the webpage. If your page is about Panasonic TV, use images of that TV from different angles. Users are likely to get interested if they are provided with ins and outs of the product through images.

An Alt tag or alternate tag is a fundamental part of image optimization.

Alt tags become indispensable because a large number of search engines are text based i.e. they are incapable of reading our images. . An Alt text will be displayed when the image uploading failed. It contains a concise description of the image.

Example:  A description about a Persian cat can be,

Tip: If it’s an image of a product, include the model number in the alt tag.

Read:  Google’s image publishing guidelines.

Images must be compressed or otherwise, the page will take time to load and netizens will not wait for a slow site to load.

A research says that users will not wait for more than 3 seconds for a webpage to load. Try to compress your image to low bytes. The following sites will help you to squeeze extra bytes out of your images.

1. smush.it!
2. compressor.io (can reduce size up to 90% while retaining image quality)
3. WP Smush
4. CompressJPEG (for JPEG images)
5. TinyPNG (for PNG images)
6. EWWW Image Optimizer

Note: Use images with the same dimension as it will be displayed on your site.

If you do not have time for uploading your unique image, there are thousands of sites from where you can get free images.

While in some cases you have to credit the source of image, other sites have no such requirements! The following sites will come handy for choosing images.

1. Pixabay
2. 500px
3. Flickr
4. Pinterest
5. Unsplash
6. And more 20+ websites to download Free Stock Royalty Free Photos

Image name plays a key role in gaining search visibility and relevance.

Therefore image name has to descriptive and should have succinct information about the image.

For example An image about the Smoky Mountains during the fall season could be

Smoky-mountains-fall-season.jpg and not IMG_0076.jpg

Selecting the right file type is another important factor for image optimization.

Source: June mango Design Boutique

 

Commonly used file types are JPEG ( Joint Photographic Experts Group), GIF (Graphics Interchange Format) and PNG (Portable Network Graphics).

You can make the best use of each type and here is how:

1. Use GIF format for creating amazing GIFs
2. Use JPEG format for high-color and still photographs.
3. Use PNG format for images with few colors and logos (which involve fading and transparency)

Including images in XML sitemaps further increase the chances of your image being found during Google search.

You can use <image:image> or <image:loc> tags in your XML sitemap.

Tip: Yoast SEO Plugin is one of the best plugins. It automatically adds images to the XML sitemap. You can check the best SEO WordPress plugins here.

If hundreds of other sites use your unique image without giving you credit, your relevance will be reduced and that can be detrimental to your site.

You can use Image Raider for reverse image search. All you need to do is upload your image on the catalogue and whenever a site uses your image, you will be notified.  If you are not given credit, you can always ask the creator of the site for it.

 Image captions will help you to reduce your bounce rates.

Bounce rates are now considered by ranking algorithms, particularly after Panda update.

• What is a bounce rate?

When a user, while looking for a particular thing clicks on your page and quickly goes back to the search page, it increases your bounce rate which is not desirable at all. It means the user found the content of your page unsatisfactory.

So if you include a crisp caption next to your headline, it arrests the attention of viewers as they get to know about your page at a glance. It invokes further reading.

Backlinks are one of the leading factors for improving your visibility and organic ranking.

They help search engine bots efficaciously crawl your site.

• What do I mean by backlinks?

When a webpage links to another page, it creates a backlink.

For example, a photographer took pictures of Coldplay at a concert and uploaded them on his website. If the official website of Coldplay links to that site, it creates a backlink. Now search engines will consider these two sites to be connected which in turn will improve the visibility of the photographer’s page in all searches related to Coldplay.

You need not to worry if you do not have Photoshop, there are several editing tools available online.

You can choose from below.

1. Pixlr (I find it most useful)
2. Photopea
3. Freephototool
4. Freephotoeditor

Thumbnails are very convenient because they reduce cramming and a lot of images can be displayed at once. But beware!

So the best option for you is to reduce the size of thumbnails, even though the quality could decline.

To compress your thumbnail, use the code:

add_filter( ‘jpeg_quality’, create_function(”, ‘return 60;’ ) );  with your functions.php file.

While WordPress uses 90 as default settings, you can safely set any value from 60 to 80 as there won’t be any noticeable slide in image quality.

In a nutshell,

Image optimization can be time-consuming but not difficult. If you inculcate the ideas covered in the article, you’ll be able to see for yourself that your website’s visibility has improved.

Have any more tips for image optimization? Share with us by commenting below! I’d love to know your thoughts!

Good Day!

Given the vast reach of the internet, there is no doubt when it comes to the power of a website for a small business. The first step to setting up a successful website would be search engine optimization or as it is more commonly called SEO. SEO was and still continues to be one of the most powerful internet tools to date.

Reports suggest that over 3.5 billion searches are carried out over the internet every single day. Out of these 94% people click on the first page results of their Google results. When you set up your own website, you want your business to attract more traffic and in order for that to happen, you will have to be at the top in SERP.

There are a large number of small businesses that have their website and hence the SERPs are usually overcrowded. When you set up an online business or open a website, you can be found in three ways:

1. Directly, where the person will enter the address manually.
2. By referral, where the person finds out about you from a link
3. Organically, where the person will search of words related to your business and come across the page.

Given the importance of SEO, it is essential for the success of a website. However, there are several new businesses that beginners make when it comes to SEO. Here are five common SEO mistakes that you need to be aware of and avoid.

 

Not Investing Adequate Time On Keyword Research

 

Keyword research is a simple practice where you have to look into tools like Google’s Keyword Planner and find out the list of keywords applicable for your website and rank them. The process might sound easy, but experts claim that this is where new business owners make a mistake. The process of keyword research is difficult. While the owner might look into keywords relevant for their business, it isn’t the same for the customers. They look for keywords relevant to them and their queries. Consider different intent that the customers might have for looking up for your website and incorporate those keywords in your list.

Expert advice: Place the important keywords in your URL and in the different pages. Make sure that the keywords make sense and aren’t out of context.

 

The website isn’t “Crawlable”

 

Crawling is a technical term that describes the process of search engine robots going through pages in your website. For the search engine spiders to crawl through your website, you need to link each page. When you sit to design the pages for your website, apart from making them attractive and user-friendly, make sure that they are all linked internally. If you skip this part, the pages on the website will not appear in the SERP.

Expert advice: Make all the subsequent pages of the website three clicks away from the homepage. This ensures that they are linked properly.

 

Not Using Relevant Anchor Texts For Internal Links

 

An internal link is crucial and you need relevant anchor texts within the website content for the same. Make sure that anchor texts used for linking different pages together in relevant and is a part of the content. They shouldn’t seem jarring and stand apart as texts that have simply been inserted for the sake of linking. The manner in which you use your anchor texts also reflects your credibility as a business.

Expert advice: Try to use anchor texts that are single words. If you are using phrases, make sure that they aren’t more than three words.

 

Poorly Written Meta Description and Title Tags

 

Meta description would be the information that you find in the SERP page. This grabs the attention of the reader, so make it crisp and interesting. Title tag is the first page that appears in the Google search results. This will be the first page that potential customers read and see. Make sure it is well written and that the tag includes the subject of your website. There are many websites that look attractive but have poorly written on long and monotonous tags.

Expert advice: Keep the Meta description within 160 characters and the title tag within 60.

 

Not Making The 404 Page Interesting

The website that you create should not only provide the customer with all the information about your website, but also provide a great user experience. Most marketers do not realize the importance of the 404 page. Studies have shown that a customized and interesting 404 page improves the customer’s experience manifold. The 404 page shouldn’t stop the user from exploring your website, but convince them to continue going through it. Make the design interesting and unique so that remains with them.

Expert advice: Add some humor and emotion when designing the 404 page.

 

Now that you know the basic SEO mistakes that beginners make, you can learn from these and start on with a successful online business venture.

Choose keywords carefully, make your site crawlable, use relevant anchor texts, optimize meta description and title tags, tweak 404 page and keep your SEO game on point!

I’d love to hear from you. Let me know which mistake sounds most familiar to you? Don’t be hesitant. Leave a comment right now!

There is no denying that Local SEO can be quite a challenge. However, local SEO can make all the difference in your business and can script a success story for the same. It is a known fact that every online experience starts with a search engine. Statistics reveal that almost 93% users start their work online with a search engine. It should also be kept in mind that majority of the users never look beyond the first few results when they search for something online. It might be surprising to know, but search is the primary force behind pushing the individual to content websites. Search beats social media in this sphere, hands down!

 

What Are The Primary Factors That Affect Local SEO?

Google ranking factor makes it evident that localizing ones business is highly crucial. It is clear that no singular factor is related to local SEO. There are certain primary factors that can make a difference to your Local SEO ranking.

1. On-page Factors: If you want to rise above your competitors and get the traffic to your site, it is time to work on the titles, descriptions and tags. These three aspects matter in local and international environments, and if you want to make your mark in a particular area or city, you will have to localize these.
2. Citations: It is crucial for your website to be cited in local resources. Even in international SEO, the quality of your reference matters. You should include mention in directories and digital media as part of your strategy to get better traffic.
3. Keywords: Keyword is crucial for local SEO. When you are trying to make a mark in a particular locality, make sure you use ample geographical keywords. Add relevant keywords that include names of the area or district that you want to reach out to.
4. NAP Consistency: Make sure to include your business name, address and contact details in a place that is accessible to all the customers. It is crucial to make sure that the name and address is available via search engine robots. These have to be in text format and not image format, for them to turn up in Google search.

If you are clueless about how to use local SEO to your advantage, we are here to help you out. We have compiled a list of tips offered by the leading SEO experts in the market, to help you start.

Save Money and Time by Outsourcing

Local SEO is both tricky and time consuming. SEO experts suggest the one should use tools and outsource the task of citation-building, back links, on-page content and even technical crawl health to outsiders. This way, you can focus on your business, something that you know about and let the experts tackle the local SEO. This aspect of the local SEO doesn’t require much skill-set and can be a tad bit tedious, hence it is easier to outsource the task. This gives the client more time and money to focus on aspects that are more challenging in local SEO.

Decide on the Number of Landing Pages

While there isn’t any hard and fast rule on the number of landing pages you should add to your website, it should to some extent depend on your location and your target market and customers. If you have multiple locations, then it helps in having multiple landing pages. On the other hand, if your company focuses on a small area with a large population then a large number of landing pages could spoil the venture. Experts suggest that sticking to one page for one city is the smartest way to go about it.

 

Be Smart While Selecting the Domain Name

When you are first choosing your domain name, you should pick it carefully since this will be the first point of contact with your customers. The domain name will also have a huge impact on your SEO. While selecting a domain name with a keyword was the easiest way to earn SEO ranking, things have changed now. Google prefers uniqueness and authenticity. Try to market the business with your domain name. Make sure it is easy to remember and catchy.

 

Go For Quality Content

Another easy way to boost your SEO ranking is through good content. Get inspiration from the top-ranked sites in the industry and fashion your website accordingly. Good content should include images and testimonials along with reviews. Be sure to mention all the products and services.

 

Take Advantage of Directory Submission For Link-Building

Directory link-building is crucial for boosting SEO ranking. It requires a lot of time and patience. You can save your time by outsourcing it to relevant web directories.

Use these tried and tested formulas to build your brand. Take the help of SEO to gain an edge over your competitors.

Effective ways of Link building without content?

Of course, content plays a crucial role in link building, and we all know that. The nature of the content, makes the link builder’s job easier. However, we have learnt not to generalize things when it comes to marketing strategies. Content is important, but it isn’t necessary to build links. In fact, experts suggest that there are more tactics than content that goes into helping you acquire useful links.

Link building is no rocket science. All you have to do is find a relevant link and convince them to link. Now comes the next question, and an important one at that. Why would the other site link to yours? The other site might link to you for a variety of reasons:

1. Because there is a relationship between these two sites
2. Because the site is talking or discussing about your product
3. Because you are valuable to their customer base and they don’t want to miss the opportunity to connect with more customers
4. Because you are involved in the same community events.

While its known that content doesn’t necessarily play the key role when it comes to link building, it should be kept in mind that you need to work on existing relationships and connections if you want to build links without creating content. You will have to provide some value if you want to earn links. It will be difficult to earn links if the other site doesn’t feel you are valuable enough for them and their online business.

Remember, link-building tactic can be easily abused and you shouldn’t inculcate relationships with other websites solely for securing their links. When you pursue links only for the SEO value, you get yourself into a strained relationship, which could go on to damage your brand’s reputation. Subsequently, you end up with low quality links, which does more harm than good for you.

The key here is to first deliver value when you are looking to build links without content. When you do so, you are guaranteed of good links as an added benefit.

Given below are 10 great ideas to build links without content.

Mentions

The easiest and most convenient way to secure links without new content is to resort to online mentions. People need to be talking about your company and your offline marketing and PR will have to come up with strategies to build the brand further. Brand mentions are the most common form of mentions. Your business brand, executives, products and services will have to be frequently mentioned online. Mention opportunities are derived from:

• Well-known products
• Prominent employees
• Company buildings
• Proprietary images
• Sponsored events
• Brand representatives and spokespeople
• Slogans, taglines and catchphrases

It should be noted that even controversies with media coverage will help build links. If someone makes a reference to your company online, in any way, it creates a link opportunity for you. These references are usually ignored and this is where your PR and marketing team plays a crucial role. You can take the assistance of Google Alerts, Rankur and similar tools to find relevant mentions.

 

Relevant Niche Directories

Before the existence of search engines, directories were used to navigate the web. Directories focus on websites as a whole, rather than specific parts of the content and hence you don’t need to create new material. When you link your website to a directory, you can get valuable traffic. While directories have fallen in relevance because of their diminishing quality and assurance, you can still build links when you connect with relevant directories.

 

Partnerships

Meaningful partnerships with other companies that include referral business, cooperative marketing, product collaboration, lead to link opportunities. Another effective way to use partnerships would be to co-author content. Your offline partners can also help you in link building online, without creating new content. Making your company part of a professional network or association also helps in building links. Offline partners already have a connection and it helps to make it evident online.

 

Reviews and Testimonials

Before Google came into prominence, online reviews were the place to cite useful information and credibility. When you get a review somewhere it automatically becomes a great place to link your website. You also get the opportunity to show your users the positive review that the company received. When you become reviewed, you not only build links, but also get credited as a reputable company.

Make sure that you provide testimonials only if you believe in the company that you are endorsing and not just for the purpose of building a link. Yes, writing a testimonial or review is considered as content creation, but adding a short quote or description requires less number of resources than writing an infographic or blog post. You can get potential reviews and testimonials from:

• Distributors
• Merchandise suppliers
• Local Vendors

 

Community Involvement

If you want to build links without content, becoming a part of the community is a great place to start. The moment you become a part of the community, helping it better, you get the chance to partner with other brands in the industry and this increases the visibility. Partnerships forged while giving back to the community is a great way to build links.

While relationships and community activities are a great way to build links, make sure that you don’t give preference to your needs more than that of the company and the society.

Here are some ways in which you give back to the community and earn your right to build links:

• Scholarships to students
• Charity work
• Hosting local events
• Sponsorships

You can also become a part of an online community like Quora, Reddit, Google+ Communities and other social network platforms.

 

Contests

Another great way to build links is to associate with the marketing activity of another company, be it in the form of content creation, and authority building. Contests are another great way to do so. They are ideal in boosting your online engagement since you get social media shares and mentions. These go a long way in building good links. If you are thinking of interesting ways to acquire more links, then you cannot miss out on the contests.

 

Roping in Outdated Resources

Outdated resources would be the sites that had a niche like yours, but stopped updating their website and changed their brand names, or dropped the product or services similar to yours, or have completely shut their business down.

There is a high chance that many sites are using the outdated resource to link, without having any idea that they are no longer updated or that the business has closed its shop. If you end up using the outdated link, you automatically link to these pages.

 

Broken Link Building

Broken link building is the best tactic for building strong links. The practice involves finding broken links that point to pages and sites that are similar to yours. You can then connect with them and tell them that you would want to showcase the broken link on your website. You can also use broken links to reach those who are linking the old link and show them your latest and superior content. Using broken links is extremely popular right now.

 

Image Links

If you have images that have found their way into other websites, it is time to stop being angry. Instead use the incident to your benefit. When you find out that the website with your images and logos is worth linking with, ask them to convert these images on their websites to links. There are different tools you can use to track down-convert these images into links.

 

Help A Reporter Out

Help a Reporter Out is a website that helps reporters find quotes and sources. HARO helps by alerting a company if a journalist is looking for a quote in your field. You can immediately respond and provide the journalist with the quote that they are looking for. There is no denying the power of the press and the resulting publicity that you would get. You need to work with HARO if you are looking to secure yourself as a strong contender in your industry.

 

Before You Go!

The guide with the ten ideas to help build link without content has been tried by different companies. You have to consider the option of building links without new content critically. The content will never fade out in importance, but the published content can be a great way to boost the brand.

You have put in your time on to the content and there is no need to rush and change it every time you want to build links. Content promotion is as crucial as writing a new piece of content and you need to explore different strategies for the same. Make sure that marketing your content generates more lead and increases your index so play it smart when it comes to content. Check out our link building packages at much affordable and reasonable rates.

Rewriting isn’t always the clue to success.

Do you think these 10 strategies can help you build links without generating fresh content? I’d love to know your thoughts.

Drop me a comment below or contact us via our Official Facebook Page.

In this blog, I am essentially going to discuss Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for your wix websites. If you are unaware of what SEO means for a website, it is the process of improving your website’s rankings in Search Engine Results.

Managing your websites Search Engine performance is one of the most important and cost effective ways you can go about promoting it.

Being able to rank for Industry Specific keywords will give you an edge over other competitors in your niche, bringing in a recurrent inflow of highly qualified traffic that is interested in what you have to offer i.e., your core services.

But Before I Talk About Wix SEO…

I would like to clear a big misconception about the Wix vs. WordPress war. WordPress is undoubtedly one of the most popular website building platforms on the Internet, the primary reason for this is, it being an open-source platform, which introduces the possibility of crowd sourcing.

However, this popularity doesn’t contribute to any Search Engine Ranking Factor. To put it clearly, I haven’t come across any clear evidence yet that WordPress websites are given more priority in Search Engines than Wix Websites.

And neither is this fact true that, Wix websites are impossible to rank in Search Engines. I see numerous webmasters complaining about the fact that Wix Websites never rank. The fault, my dear friends, is not in the website builder, it is in the website optimization.

To give you some food for thought, I have found some great websites built using the Wix platform. I will show you the websites, along with some very popular keywords that they rank for…

Here They Are…

The first website on the list is www.bakeuhappy.com

Here is the built report of the website to prove that it is a Wix website.

Now, that you can see the website is using a Wix builder. Let me show you some of the keywords for which it is ranking on the serps..

Keywords	Position In Search Engine
cake jars for sale	3
jar cakes for sale	3
mini cupcakes near me	3
cupcakes santa clarita	4
bakeries in santa clarita	5
mason jar cakes for sale	7
custom shortbread cookies	8

In total, this website is ranking for over 500+ Organic Keywords. And that’s not too bad, is it?

If you have a Wix Website, and are wondering how to get traffic from Search Engines irrespective of your efforts, then you must be doing something WRONG, the thing that these successful businesses have done right.

I am going to walk you through some of the Search Engine best practices that these websites are following…

First and foremost, (refer point 1), Provide Your Contact Information and Business Hours Clearly

Firstly, Never Use Pre-Designed Logos or Text Logos for Your website that are provided in the Wix repository.

By using such images that are publicly available, your website will be lost amongst a pool of thousands of other websites who are using the same graphics for their business as well.

To be found by search engines, you need to differentiate your business from the rest, you need to do what others aren’t doing, and show effort.

Always use Custom Designed Logos for your website, and don’t forget to give an appropriate Alt-text to your Logo Image, which will help search engine robots understand more about your business.

In this case.. BakeUHappy Uses The Alt Text “Bake You Happy – Cupcakes, Cake Pops, Custom Cakes, and Cookies,” which clearly tells search engines that their Business Website is about CupCakes, Cake Pops, Customized Cakes and Cookies.

Takeaway:  Remember to use Alt Text For All Important Images On Your Website, Not Only Your Logo Image. Alt Text Helps Search Engines Decipher the Topic of The Images and add value to the keywords or niche that you might want to rank for.

Secondly (refer to point 2), Link Out To The Most Important Inner Pages On Your Website From Homepage.

You will notice that I have ignored the Main Menu Bar of the website.

I do not consider that as a part of advanced optimization because it is taken for granted, any website, be it Wix, or WordPress or Joomla, Opencart anything, must always have a clear and concise Navigation Structure, with all pages of the site being accessible in not less than three clicks from any location.

With, that being said, I will move onto the second point. BakeUHappy has clearly provided links to all its important inner pages. Some of which ..Cupcakes Santa Clarita, Custom Shortbread Cookies…it is already ranking for, and I can bet my last penny that these Homepage Links are a major contributing factor to those rankings…

Takeaway:  Remember to link to your most important inner landing pages from the homepage that will get home the bacon at the end of the day. As the Homepage is undoubtedly one of the most linked-to pages on your website, sending links to inner pages helps pass the link juice your website acquires overtime to these important pages as well.

Third and Fourth (refer point 3 and 4), Provide Your Location, Contact Information, Email Address and Working Hours (if applicable) on your homepage…

Doing this not only fetches you SEO benefits, but it also helps build credibility for your website in the eyes of your visitors.

When curious visitors who are looking for services that you offer come to your website, your Physical Address, Working Hours, Phone Number and Email Address, work as a trust signal about the integrity of your business operations.

Along with that, this information is also at times picked up by search engines in this form…

Takeaway:  Provide Clear Contact Details and Working Hours On Your Homepage. This builds trust and credibility for your brand, not only in the eyes of Search Engines, but also for your actual visitors.  

Fifth, Provide All Your Contact Information In The Footer Of Your Website,

This maybe a re-iteration of the 3^rd and 4^th point, but there is a slight difference. The above contact Information was provided in the main area of the page, which helped visitors instantly get all the information they need without scrolling to the bottom of the page.

The Contact Information here, is provided in the Footer Section, You can ideally also include your Working Hours in the footer section as well, as skip having it in the main content area altogether.

The bottom line is that you should provide these details on each and every page on your website, not only on your contact us and homepage. So Footer is the best route to go, because putting this information in the footer will help you make it available site-wide.

Takeaway:  You can provide Contact Details and Working Hours in the Footer of your website, which makes it available site wide, so that people can access this information from any part of your website.   

Sixth, Add Social Icons to Your Website to Connect Your Wix Site to All Your Social Profiles…

Doing this not only adds a bunch of colorful icons to your website and makes it visually appealing to visitors, but it also links all of your Business Social Profiles to your website. Meaning, whatever activity you do on your social profiles, contributes in one way or the other to the rankings of your Wix Website.

Being Active on social media is a powerful ranking signal for any website, and it is no difference for your Wix website. Search Engines want to display those types of results where the website owners also care about their visitors, and are not just bent on selling their services.

By including links to your various Social Profiles, you show search engines that your business is based around discussions, engagements and betterments, instead of mindless sales pitches.

Takeaway:  Don’t forget to Add Social Icons To Your Website, preferably in the Secondary Header Menu or your Footer Menu. This not only let’s visitors reach your social profiles faster and be able to interact with your business, but is also a major ranking signal for Search Engines.

Let me show you a few more examples of Wix Websites nailing their SEO Game…

The second website I am going to show you is a bridal boutique… http://www.ladiesoflineage.com/

This website is also made with Wix, here is the built report screenshot.

Another great example of a Wix website,

Let’s take a look at some of the keywords this website is ranking for in the serps..

Keywords	Position In Search Engine
charlotte bridal	3
wedding dress shops in charlotte nc	5
bridal shops in charlotte nc area	6
charlotte nc wedding dress	6
charlotte bridal shops	7
bridal boutiques charlotte nc	8
wedding dress boutiques charlotte nc	8

Pretty amazing, eh? This website too ranks for over 800+ Keywords in search engines..

Apart from the afore-mentioned points that BakeUHappy is following. Let’s take a look at another important point that should be taken into consideration when making your website SEO Friendly…

And this example I will give you with the help of our Bridal Boutique website… Ladies of Lineage.

When you type Bridal Dress Shop in NC, their home page is ranking on the 3^rd spot. Needless to say, they have done a fantastic job at including their Primary Keyword in their Homepage Title.

That is one of the reasons why their website is ranking for such a high qualified Buyer Intent term for customers in NC looking for Bridal Boutiques in their area. Right?

Takeaway: Every page on your website, or at least the most important landing pages on your website should have a properly optimized Header Title, which is also displayed in the search engine results pages. These titles should not target more than one or two Page Specific Keywords.

Now.. moving onto..

And the Last One for Today…

…is a restaurant website… www.chiles-grill.com, apart from doing their Mexican Food right, they are also doing good SEO!

Here are some of the 600+ Organic Keywords that they rank for…

Keywords	Position In Search Engine
mexican food tokyo	3
mexican restaurant in japan	5
mexican restaurants tokyo	10
japanese mexican food	6
harajuku food	7

You get the idea, right?

Now let’s take a look at some more ranking signals, but this time with the help of our Mexican Food search winners!

When we type, Mexican Food Tokyo in Google Search, guess who pops up? You guessed it right.. Chiles Grill,

And they are not just ranking for the term, they are doing it in style. Chiles Mexican Grill is ranking on the 4-5^th spot for Mexican Food Tokyo (a hot search term), which has over 4 Million Results.

I checked their Website and found they have everything in place,

• Image Alt Tags, Check
• Contact Information, Check
• Inner Page Links, Check
• Social Profile Links, Check
• Optimized Header Titles, Check.

Well you can confirm this by going to their website itself. Take a look at the Screenshot of the Search Results page, they have got their Hearder Titles Optimized, and also their Meta Description.

This is what it reads..

“Chiles Mexican Grill – Mexican Food in Tokyo!

Mexican Food in Tokyo. Chiles Mexican Grill brings the fresh and authentic taste of Mexican home cooking in Harajuku. Mexican Food in Harajuku, Tokyo!”

They have properly optimized their meta description for the Keyword Mexican Food in Tokyo, Mexican Food Tokyo, Harajuku Food, and they are successfully ranking for all these terms.

You can do a reverse check for these terms in the Search Engine, but be sure to conduct the search in an Incognito Window, so that Google doesn’t display you results based on your location and tracking.

Takeaway:  You should write a proper Meta Description for all the important landing pages of your website. This not only assures your chances of Ranking Higher in Search Engines, but will also insure a higher click through rate than other unoptimized websites when you do.

Secondly, Don’t Forget To Use Page Specific Keywords, and Target Not More Than One – Two Keywords Per Page…

This above screenshot is taken from their homepage. I have highlighted some terms, which they have used on their homepage, to make their website rank for them.

Takeaway: It is not only important to use your Primary Focus Keywords in the Title Tags and Meta Descriptions of every page, but also inside the content of the page. Don’t over use the keywords, or stuff them in the pages as it might do more harm than good to the readability and rankings of your website. Instead focus on evenly spreading them across the page, in the Titles, H2, H3, H4 Tags, Paragraphs, Bulleted Points etc.

So, that’s about it for my Advanced Guide to On-page Optimization for Wix Websites. I hope you take inspiration from these examples that I have given and use it to better the rankings of your websites.

Before You Go…

Let’s do a quick recap of all the things that we learnt and I will also include some basic things that I did not mention in this post. To be able to properly on-page optimize a Wix Website, you should focus on doing these things:

1. Select right URL
2. Tailor Google Titles for Your Pages
3. Create descriptions for each page
4. Employ anchor text
5. Add alt text to all your images
6. Use right headers
7. Write Quality Content
8. Use Page Specific Keywords
9. Use a 301 Redirect

If you are wondering what a 301 Redirect is, it is a form of redirection that is used to direct (maybe) your old website, to your newer version, to retain its SEO juice. This is primarily used by businesses who change their domain name or delete some old pages of their websites that were essentially getting a lot of traffic or ranking on Search Engines.

You should also know that On-page Optimization is just one side of the SEO Coin. Most of the things in On-page optimization can be done by a webmaster (such as yourself). The other side of the SEO Coin is the Off-page optimization, which holds a little more emphasis in the Search Engine Ranking Algorithms.

Off-page Optimization requires a lot of industry knowledge, depth, research and expertise, all of which my SEO Team can provide for you. In case you have a Wix Website, and are stuck on the SEO process, we will help you get stuck.

You can reach out to me on our Official Facebook Page, or drop a message in the comments section below and I can help you make a complete Online Marketing Plan for your Wix Website, that will help you get targeted visitors and convert them into successful leads of your business.

I hope you have success in your Online Business Venture, till we meet again! Stay Healthy and Have a good day!