Digital marketing

I had someone who was reading my previous entries in my Learning SEO series ask about using forums to learn SEO. I promised that I would write a post about the value of forums in learning SEO. Back in 1998 I became a moderator of a couple of forums on small business and website promotion on Yahoo Groups. Those lead to me becoming a moderator at Cre8asiteforums , joining forum owner Kim Krause Berg along with a number of other moderators such as Ammon Johns and Jill Whalen . Cre8asiteforums was (and still is) a tremendous place to talk about SEO and web design and usability and accessibility. One of my favorite individual forums on the site was one called The Website Hospital , where people would bring their site’s URL and concerns about it, and ask questions. That was were I learned a lot about auditing sites, and seeing what worked well on them, and what might need some help. This thread is a good introduction to it: Getting Started in the Website Hospital . Here’s a thread I sta...

You’ve probably heard us talk a lot about structured data, Schema.org and JSON-LD. Schema structured data on your site can result in highlighted search results. In this article, we’ll show you how to implement structured data using the JSON-LD Schema.org markup on the pages of your site. Here, we’ll take a closer look at how to implement structured data with Google Tag Manager. We’ve just launched  a brand new training on structured data and SEO . This training has an introductory price of $119. On July 2, this will jump to the regular price of $149. Want rich snippets for your site? Try our Structured data training » $ 119€ 119 - Buy now » Info Structured data with Google Tag Manager Google Tag Manager is a tool that can take your marketing to the next level without the need of a developer. It’s a tool that can easily add scripts or pieces of code to a page. There are several advantages to using Tag Manager to implement structured data . For one, you can generate tags,...

Campaign tagging is an important aspect of your analytics setup. It’s one of the critical elements in reducing your dark traffic . But sometimes, the tags on the url don’t pull into Google Analytics perfectly, and require a little finesse on the back end to populate your reports properly.… http://ift.tt/2sl1pIx

Have you ever wondered how people get noticed by their idols? By influencers that normal people can only look up to from afar? Well, wonder no more. Here’s a little secret strategy that I myself used when I was just starting out and it’s worked out well for me so far. Links are undeniably one of the main components of an SEO strategy. It does not matter if it is an external or internal one – your link building campaign is as important as your site’s generated content. The majority of successful SEO campaigns have three kinds of links in use. 2 out of these 3 can be attained by having your content catered to influencers or authoritative websites. Today, I will be enumerating some tactics that will help you generate the content that you need to have digital influencers and other authoritative sites link to your site or pages. This will also help you gain the attention and boost that you need to reach your goals. Let’s get started. The Three Types of Links As an SEO practitioner f...

If you want your search results to stand out from your competition’s, you’ll need rich snippets . You’ll want to pimp your results with 5 star reviews, stock information or location, for example. To get a rich snippet, you have to learn to implement structured data . Our latest SEO course will teach you exactly how to do just that! If you buy the online structured data course now, you’ll receive a major discount. You’ll only pay $119 instead of $149 . $ 119€ 119 - Get the Structured data training now! Want rich snippets for your site? Try our Structured data training » $ 119€ 119 - Buy now » Info Practical course The structured data course is a very practical course. We’ll first teach you some theory about SEO and why structured data is important, but then we’ll quickly dive into the practical implementation. If you buy our course, you’ll receive lots of screencasts and step-by-step examples on how to implement structured data on your own site. We’ll teach you the fancy (but hard...

Maybe you’ve heard about the concept of rich snippets. SEO experts seem to think everyone knows exactly what rich snippets are. But, for SEO newbies, a rich snippet is a really vague term. What are rich snippets exactly? Time to explain what rich snippets are, why they’re important for SEO and how you can get them for your site. What are rich snippets? A snippet is a result Google shows to the user in the search results. An example: I was searching for a good recipe for homemade ice cream and googled it. Google showed me a results list with normal snippets and rich snippets. A normal snippet usually looks like this: Google shows the title in blue, the URL in green and a description of what the page is about. This is what we call the snippet, the thing Yoast SEO helps you to optimize with our snippet preview . A rich snippet shows extra information between the URL and the description. A rich snippet looks like this: In this snippet, a picture of the ice cream is added, y...

SEO isn’t just for large companies. As a small business or local business, there is actually a lot you can do to achieve local goals yourself. Many of these things relate to focus. In this ultimate guide for local and small business SEO, we’ll tell you about finding your niche, optimizing pages and social media efforts. Way back in 2014 we promised you in our post on local SEO that we’d be writing a bit more about local and small businesses. Considering that local SEO is basically the optimization process for the local results in search engines, we can say that local SEO is often closely related to small business SEO. This is why we decided to discuss both in this article. In this article, you’ll find a variety of related topics: Finding your shop's niche Low budget branding Share your content on social media Local ranking factors that help your small business SEO Adding ratings and reviews Links from related small businesses Near me searches In conclu...

Knowing and understanding Javascript, and its underlying potential to affect your SEO campaign is an essential skill that a modern SEO expert should have. Javascript – among other components – lets search engines crawl and analyze a website. Hence, if a webmaster fails to properly incorporate Javascript into their website, it will lead to a failure of indexing and ranking. The most important part about Javascript’s impact on SEO is whether the search engines can locate the content and understand its meaning. Also, webmasters should be mindful of their website’s ability to be indexed in mobile platforms . If search engines could not, then what should you do? But, before we get into optimizing your Javascript, let’s start with the basics. Back to Basics When webmasters are creating a website, there are 3 major components that they need to take note of, namely: HTML Also known as Hypertext Markup Language, it serves as the structure, backbone, and the “skeletal system” of the web...

Redirects serve multiple purposes. For every occasion there’s a specific redirect that works best. Some redirects seem quite similar though, for instance, the 302 or 307 redirect. You can both use them to temporarily point users to another URL. So we’re not surprised some people wonder what’s the exact difference. Let’s clarify this here! WordPress specialist Marcel Bootsman, also known as Nostromo on Twitter , has send the following question to Ask Yoast: Can you explain when to use a 302 or a 307 redirect when temporarily redirecting a URL? Watch the video or read the transcript further down the page! Become a technical SEO expert with our Technical SEO 1 training! » $ 199€ 199 - Buy now » Info When to select a 302 or a 307 redirect? Let me explain when to use which one, if you need a temporary redirect: “Well it’s actually quite simple. If the URL is really, really temporary please do use a 307. Only use a 302 if you want the URL that you are redirecting to show up in t...

If you take your SEO – and users – seriously, you’ll be working on a kick-ass site structure. Setting up a decent site structure is rather hard. Maintaining a solid site structure if your site is growing is even harder. Mistakes are easily made. In this post, I will share 5 common site structure mistakes people often make. Make sure to avoid all of these!  Learn how to structure your site well with our Site structure training! » $ 99€ 99 - Buy now » Info #1 Hiding your cornerstones Your most important articles – your cornerstones – should not be hidden away. Cornerstone articles are the articles that your most proud of, that most clearly reflect the mission of your website. Some people forget to link to their most precious articles. If an article receives no or few internal links, search engines will find it less easily (as search engines follow links ). Google will regard articles with few internal links as less important, and rank them accordingly. Solution: link to tho...

Do you want to increase chances people click on your page in the search results? Want to learn how to get those awesome rich snippets? Next week, we’ll launch our  Structured data training . In this new training, you’ll learn how structured data can influence the appearance of your pages in the search results. After completing this course, you’ll be able to add structured data yourself, so Google can show a rich snippet. Why take our structured data training? A normal snippet of a recipe looks like this: You see a title, a URL and a description of a page. If you add structured data to your page, Google (or another search engine) can transform your snippet into this: So the structured data you add can show up in the snippet. For recipes you can add ratings and reviews , cooking time, calories and an awesome picture. Not only for recipes, but also for books, movies, articles, products etc. structured data exists. Rich snippets let your page stand out from the other search re...

Google Search Console is an incredibly important tool for website owners. This tool shows you how your site appears in the Google search results. It also shows you what to improve to make the most of your listings in the results. One of the many cool features of Search Console is the structured data analyses found in the Search Appearance section. Let’s dive into that! In this post, we’ll cover the  Structured data tab in GSC, the  Rich Cards tab and the  Data Highlighter . If you don’t have Search Console yet – and you really should -, sign up on Google’s website . Search Appearance First, log into Search Console. On the left-hand side of your screen, you’ll find the Search Appearance menu item. This tool gives you insights into how your website appears in the search results. You can click any item to see how Google treats your site. Structured Data Optimize your site for search & social media and keep it optimized with Yoast SEO Premium » Buy now » Inf...

Normal SEO practitioners will start their projects with keyword research which is basically them looking for targeted keywords that fit their niche. Afterward, they will try to get ranked for their target keyword. Sound familiar right? Because this is what EVERYONE is already doing. Let me tell you a little-known secret: I bet you didn’t know that you can also rank for multiple keywords right? The better method starts with looking for “related” keywords with your target keyword. These are the keywords that are the same concept which is technically a variant of the targeted keyword. So, how do you find these “related” keywords? Well, it starts with: Knowing what your subject matter is, then looking for related topics. Afterward, you can use tools such as Keyword Explorer to look for keywords with the best possible qualities like difficulty, opportunity, search volume, and relevance. Here’s an example: Let’s say my subject is: “Why are dogs such loyal creatures?” Some related topi...