5 SEO Strategies That Will Still Work in 2015
Thanks, Google! Its algorithm updates continued unabated in 2014, leading to panic among some search marketers and dread among many more. Now that Google has been on a mission to reduce the visibility of low-value pages, especially those that are over-optimized for keywords, does it seem like there are hardly any optimization techniques left that won't get you dinged? There are, in fact, some strategies that will still work in 2015. Here's how to stay BFFs with the algorithm:
1. Widen the Net for Hummingbird-Friendly Keywords
Hummingbird brought a change in the way Google parses queries. Instead of matching up separate keywords to pages, it's now looking for actual search intent.
Keywords still are important, but now you should look for larger buckets of niche-specific word combinations. To do this, first, determine various conversational phrases people are likely to use when searching for your services. For example, instead of flowers, try phrases like Valentines bouquet,same day flower delivery, or inexpensive flower arrangement. When possible, target conversational phrases just as they are, for example, target where to buy flowers in bulk.
Next, classify these phrases into three categories: informational, navigational, and transactional. To address informational queries, create educational content that then links to your product or sales pages. Navigational queries are already looking for your brand name, product name, or website.Transactional queries signal commercial intent. To rank for these, include words like buy, coupon,discount, deal, review, or hire.
2. Hone Your Website's URL Structure
Websites that have a streamlined URL structure often are ranked higher than websites with messy structures and confusing content organization. URLs and links are the building blocks of your website, so make sure that they are consistent and search-engine-friendly.
Dynamic URLs - the ones that end in strings of characters likeid=13579&color=4&size=2&session=754839 - are usually too long, contain no keywords, and have lower click-through rates from search-engine results, because searchers have a harder time understanding what the page is about. With this in mind, it is better to use static URLs than dynamic ones.
Broken links and 404 errors also will harm search rankings. Use a broken link checker to find these and fix these.
Pages with too many outbound links are generally considered to hurt search rankings, although exactly how many is too many remains debatable. Google no longer sets a limit of 100 links per page, advising instead that the links be relevant to readers of that page. You should focus more on building at least two paragraphs of original content per page with a few outbound links to quality sites. If you really have that many relevant links to offer your site visitors, consider dividing them up among several pages of content.
3. Focus on Fewer, Hard-Earned Links
It's much better to have multiple links from several niche authority sites than hundreds of single links from second-rate sites. You can build these three ways:
- Editorial Links: These are the gold standard for links, coming from mentions of your company by the media, as well as via op-ed or thought-leadership articles you write and publish on third-party sites. To succeed with the latter, you must understand the site's audience, find a topic that's interesting and not too promotional, and, when it's published, share it on social media.
- Co-Citation: Each time your brand or a link to your site appears along with competitors or similar Web resources, it serves as a hint to Google that your firm and those other companies are related. If the competitors are already authoritative in your business niche, your site for Google now also seems a weighty niche representative. One tactic to achieve co-citations is to perform a Google search for lists such as top 10 [generic term for your business], or best [generic term for your product] of 2013. If your business isn't there, reach out to the publishers and ask them to put you on the list. Be sure to make the case for why you should be included, and make it easy for them to do so by writing suggested copy that aligns with the rest of the list.
- Broken Link-Building: This is a laborious but very useful tactic in which you hunt for broken links on those authoritative niche sites, and propose that the publishers substitute your link instead. Start by reverse-engineering competitors' backlink profiles to see which niche resources link to them. Next, check all the links on those resources to find broken ones.
4. See Beyond Personalized Search Results
Because Google search results are so highly personalized, it can be difficult to get an accurate idea of how a page ranks for customers who have never been to your site before and for searchers in various locations. Using your own computer and browser won't give you the answer, because Google is personalizing your search, too, based on your own search history.
Tracking location-specific rankings may be biased by your IP address and the location set under Google Search Tools. Both of these must match your target location in order to see true, local results. For example, if you're in Seattle and want to check how a Houston restaurant ranks, even if you set your location to Houston, Google will assume from your IP address that you're someone in Seattle searching for this restaurant in Houston and return different results than it would for someone on the ground in Texas.
A similar problem can occur when you're using Web-based tools for SEO. These tools do let you tweak the location settings, but they check the rankings via their own IP addresses. To get truly accurate, unbiased results, choose a tool like
Rank Tracker that automatically returns de-personalized, unbiased results and also allows you to set both location factors.
5. Consider Secure Encryption
A few weeks ago Google officially announced that HTTPS would now become a ranking signal, meaning that websites using secure encryption may get a certain boost in Google rankings. HTTPS is a secure method of exchanging information across the Web that uses several extra means to protect the transferred data. For now, Google says, HTTPS is a "lightweight signal," but it may become stronger over time.
Ever since the "HTTPS ranking signal" announcement, fears spread that not having an SSL certificate could push your site down in Google results, making many website owners start moving their sites to HTTPS without proper research and understanding.
For transactional sites, HTTPS has long been a standard. It's a good practice to also use it for any site that collects personal information, including account logins and email subscriptions, and using it can help you build user trust – in addition to Google love.
But there are costs. For protecting transferred data, HTTPS uses SSL technology. So, to enable HTTPS for your website, you need to get an SSL Certificate, usually on a paid basis, and install it on the server. In addition to this cost, all HTTP URLs would have to be permanently redirected and any absolute internal links would need to be edited into HTTPS URLs or into relative URLs.
If transitioning to HTTPS would be relatively easy for you or important for your business, then by all means make the switch. However, if it would be quite difficult to convert to HTTPS, it may not be worth the burden. And for a purely informational website that doesn't handle any consumer data, at this point there's probably not enough SEO value to make it worthwhile.
Conclusion
As you can see, most tactics described here are quite common sense and simple, yet they’re not easy. They all require time and effort, but, if handled well, they'll pay off in the end. To get the best return on your efforts , base your SEO decisions on accurate SEO data, like the one you can get with SEO PowerSuite. And remind yourself, while you're at it, that anything that's good for searchers is, ultimately, good for search marketers.
People define negative SEO in a variety of ways. Some consider it the malicious efforts of your competitors to either build unsavory links to your website or steal the best links from your website. Others would add website hacking, content theft, brand impersonation, and similar strategies to the list. I consider negative SEO anything that could harm your reputation, visibility, or traffic in search. With that in mind, here are some tools and services you can use to monitor negative SEO activity and the harm it does to your website and brand.
Google Webmaster Tools
Google Webmaster Tools (GWT) is a must for any website owner. Once you have set up and verified your website(s), you can sign up for email alerts under Webmaster Tools Preferences.
GWT will alert you to evidence of malware on your website. When someone hacks your website, Google will mark it as infected in search results. You need to be alerted to any suspicious activity immediately so you can take care of the problem and have the warning removed from search results.
GWT will also alert you to manual link penalties. If someone has launched a negative SEO campaign against your company using low-quality links, this will be the result. The sooner you know Google has penalized your website, the sooner you can start disavowing the links (also done in GWT).
Monitor Backlinks
Whether you suspect someone has launched a negative SEO campaign against your website through low-quality link building or you want to keep tabs on a link building agency you hired,
Monitor Backlinks can help. This tool will email you a daily report of new backlinks for your website.
In addition, you will also get an email noting changes in status for backlinks.
A change in status can alert you to a link being stolen by your competitors, or the loss of a strong link that you will want to follow up about.
CognitiveSEO
If you fear you already have a collection of bad links in your website's backlink profile,
CognitiveSEO can help you quickly identify them.
Once you identify unnatural links, you can choose to take preemptive action by having them removed or disavowed before they can harm your website's reputation in search.
Authority Labs
The result of any form of negative SEO is the loss or visibility in search.
Authority Labs can alert you to changes in your keyword rankings via weekly email or historical changes in their dashboard.
While not all decreased rankings can be traced back to negative SEO, they are worth investigating so you can work towards reclaiming your rankings.
Trackbacks
Stolen content can harm your website's search presence if that content manages to outrank yours. You can find out who is stealing your content through the use of internal links and trackbacks from your CMS platform. When you write a new blog post, simply link to an older blog post within it. WordPress, for example, will notify you that you've received a trackback to the older blog post each time someone republishes your new blog post.
You can then follow up to see if the site will take your content down. If a friendly warning doesn't get the job done, you can take further action by
submitting the offenders to Google.
Ubersuggest
Curious what people are searching for in relation to your business? Try searching for your name, your business name, or unique product names in
Ubersuggest.
You might find some negative queries in the mix, the result of spamming Google's autocomplete results.
Google Alerts
Even if you don't suspect that anyone is targeting you in a negative SEO campaign, you should still have some basic reputation monitoring in place.
Google Alerts will email you or update an RSS feed each time it finds brand mentions you are monitoring in search results.
Use this to stay on top of any mentions of your brand, including reviews, discussions, and uses of your name in a negative light.
Cyfe
Chances are, you're busy and don't want to take the time to go from one tool to the next to monitor your presence in search. That's where
Cyfe comes in handy. Instead of logging into Google Analytics, Google Webmaster Tools, and your keyword ranking tool, you can get all of the details in one dashboard.
This tool is especially convenient for those who are monitoring multiple websites and multiple clients. You can set up a dashboard that allows you to see the status for every website at once.
Rival IQ
Rival IQ is a competitor research tool that allows you to monitor your position in search for the keywords that drive traffic to your website.
You can also use this tool to see what competitors are doing to get ahead in search. You will be able to analyze the keywords that drive traffic to their websites, their landing pages, their on-site optimization, and their paid search strategy with data provided by
SEMrush.
Fruition
Ultimately, if someone is using negative SEO against your brand, you might feel the sting when Google updates its algorithm. The
Fruition Google Penalty Checker will allow you to check whether your website has been affected by a specific Google algorithm change or penalty using your website's Google Analytics data.
Again, this is a good tool to invest in regardless of whether you suspect you are a victim of negative SEO. You can also use the free
Website Penalty Indicator tool that will use public data from SEMrush to determine whether your website has been affected by Google Panda or Penguin.
In Conclusion
Negative SEO is real. Even if you don't believe someone will target your website, it never hurts to monitor your presence in search. Now it's your turn. What tools do you use?
