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Showing posts from April, 2018

Get ready for our FREE training: SEO for beginners

Want to know what makes your site rank higher in Google? Understand how Google works? This is your chance to learn it… for free! For the first time ever, we’re launching a completely free course: the SEO for beginners training. In this course, you’ll take your first steps in the world of Search Engine Optimization, also known as SEO. The course will be launched on May 7 and is easy, fun and free! So what’s stopping you? Learn what to do to make your web traffic grow.  Create a My Yoast user account  now and we’ll give you access to the course on May 7! Why take this course? You want to rank higher Whatever your expertise is, whether you’re a hairdresser, a consultant or a plumber, you probably have a website. And you want it to rank on top in Google. But what if the competition is outranking you? You can beat them through search engine optimization or SEO. SEO is the art of creating a website that search engines and users like. This can give you a head start on the competiti...

GDPR: What You Need to Know

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On May 25, 2018, the General Data Protection Regulation will now take effect, and will look to change the way people use and protect data for the foreseeable future. This regulation is seen as one of the biggest steps towards data control and protection on the internet, which has been one of the biggest issues on various websites that require user information and private data. The passing of the GDPR is seen as a timely event, especially with Cambridge Analytica controversy, which affected millions of Facebook users and saw important data being misused. This case also sparked the need for stricter data regulations, and the GDPR aims to become the starting point for future data regulation laws worldwide. The Beginning The first proposal for GDPR was released in 2012. This was created as a response to the need to improve the existing data regulation law, which was the 1995 European Data Protection Directive. The 1995 law is one of the earliest data protection policies that were enac...

Best Top Sample Basic Local SEO Presentation 2018

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The people at  The BDX Summit were nice enough to invite me to Austin to speak to a group of homebuilders about SEO. While I gave my presentation, Graphic Recorder & Illustrator  Katherine Torrini  drew this poster. It was an amazing thing to see. It reminded me of when my mother would sometimes take me to children’s concerts at Lincoln Center and a woman would stand in front of the orchestra drawing pictures of what the music represented. If you want to see more of Katherine’s work check out the gallery on her site, Creative Catalyst . I particularly dig  Coke CMO Summit Be the Brand . “If Barbie can change…YOU can change.” https://ift.tt/2r4ppNq

Nest Video Door Bell VS Ring Video Doorbell

 Nest Video Door Bell VS Ring   https://ift.tt/2KjUuEN  Whenever a new model comes into the market, it is expected to have an edge over the existing range of products in one or many aspects. Similarly, the video doorbell reviews brings in many of the features in its functionality, security, compatibility, and scalability factors. In this https://ift.tt/2Hy6sZH

Duplicate content: causes and solutions

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Search engines like Google have a problem. It’s called ‘duplicate content.’ Duplicate content means that similar content is being shown on multiple locations (URLs) on the web. As a result, search engines don’t know which URL to show in the search results. This can hurt the ranking of a webpage. Especially when people start linking to all the different versions of the content, the problem becomes bigger. This article will help you to understand the various causes of duplicate content, and to find the solution for each of them. What is duplicate content? You can compare duplicate content to being on a crossroad. Road signs are pointing in two different directions for the same final destination: which road should you take? And now, to make it ‘worse’ the final destination is different too, but only ever so slightly. As a reader, you don’t mind: you get the content you came for. A search engine has to pick which one to show in the search results. It, of course, doesn’t want to s...

Content is king – 20% off our SEO copywriting training

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Today is King’s Day! At least, it’s King’s Day in the Netherlands. April 27 marks the 51st birthday of our King Willem Alexander and is a national holiday for all Dutch people. This year, we wanted to share our celebrations with all of you by giving you 20% off on our SEO copywriting course ! Although Willem Alexander is king of the Netherlands, content remains king of SEO. In this post, I’ll explain why content is so very important for SEO, I’ll share the three most important aspects of content SEO and how you can benefit from that 20% discount. Learn how to write awesome and SEO friendly articles in our SEO Copywriting training » $159.20 - Buy now » Info Start ruling your rankings and grab this 20% discount now: Get The Yoast SEO Copywriting Training Now $199 $159.20 (ex VAT) Only today - April 27! Why is content king? Content SEO is crucial because search engines read your website. The words you use on your site determine whether or not your site will rank on their results p...

Customers Don’t Want Content – They Want a Better Path

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I’m in the business of helping companies use tech to drive better customer interactions. I help companies earn more customers. The most common way people employ me is to help them build content marketing projects, expand their existing ones, or in general, turn their marketing, sales, and communications efforts into something more effective. Well guess what? https://ift.tt/2HtS7S1

Optimize Your Instagram Marketing with These Strategies

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Despite being one of the “younger” social media sites, Instagram has become one of the most popular platforms. With millions of active users, among them some of the most popular brands and personalities, it has become a viable marketing tool that can become viral with the right strategy. After being integrated into Facebook , Instagram has gotten much bigger, which made a lot of big brands to take notice of its potential to capture the audience’s interest. The impact and importance of Instagram as a marketing tool have been well-stated, and there are a good number of ways you can make it work with your brand. Here are some of the most effective strategies you can use to optimize your brand’s Instagram account. Take Advantage of Instagram Stories A feature that allows users to post photos and short videos that last over a 24-hour period, Instagram Stories has now become the most used feature in the platform. This helps keep users updated on current events and happenings of their fe...

9 Reasons Why You’re Losing Freelance Writing Gigs

What are the most frustrating words you can hear (or read) after spending hours writing a proposal? “You’re too expensive. We’re going to go in another direction.” ARGH! But, here’s the thing… We’ve all gone beyond our budget and spent more than we’ve expected. We buy a slightly more expensive car because it has better safety ratings. We buy organic produce https://ift.tt/2HsGoiI

PageRank Updated

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A popular search engine developed by Google Inc. of Mountain View, Calif. uses PageRank.RTM. as a page-quality metric for efficiently guiding the processes of web crawling, index selection, and web page ranking. Generally, the PageRank technique computes and assigns a PageRank score to each web page it encounters on the web, wherein the PageRank score serves as a measure of the relative quality of a given web page with respect to other web pages. PageRank generally ensures that important and high-quality web pages receive high PageRank scores, which enables a search engine to efficiently rank the search results based on their associated PageRank scores. ~ Producing a ranking for pages using distances in a web-link graph A continuation patent of an updated PageRank was granted today. The original patent was filed in 2006, and reminded me a lot of Yahoo’s Trustrank (which is cited by the patent’s applicants as one of a large number of documents that this new version of the patent i...

Personal configuration review: Train your skills and get our feedback

Today we’re launching the Personal configuration review : an extra personal assignment you can add to the Yoast SEO for WordPress plugin training. You can now test if you’ve understood the subject matter of our training well and do an extra assignment – on your own site! When you’ve configured Yoast SEO on your site, we’ll check it for you and give you personal feedback. This assignment is only available in combination with our plugin training. Buy them together now for only $99! Get The Yoast SEO Training + Configuration Review Now $99 (ex VAT) for training and assignment What is it? The Personal configuration review is an extension of the existing Yoast SEO for WordPress plugin training . In this new assignment we’ll take you by the hand and guide you through the settings of Yoast SEO, like the Search appearance section, the integration with Google Search Console and the Social tab. For instance, we’ll help you decide which content you should have indexed and which not. Get ready t...

We researched longer meta descriptions: here are our findings

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A few months ago Google changed the length of the meta description from 160 to 320 characters. This caused quite a buzz in the SEO community and a lot of people wanted to know whether they should change their own crafted meta descriptions. In the meantime, we already changed the length of the meta description in the Yoast SEO plugin, but we also wanted to investigate this change more thoroughly. So, we started our own research! It appears that Google very often creates a meta description by itself, based on the first paragraph of your article. What did we do? For this research project, we picked 100 of the most visited pages on our site. Before we made any changes we did a baseline measurement, by gathering data from our Google Search Console account. We wanted to know how high these pages ranked before we changed the meta description with Yoast SEO , in order to compare it to the rankings afterwards. We divided the 100 pages into 4 groups and created four types of meta descriptio...

Google, SEO’s and ‘Quality Content’

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Whoa, Dan! How did you get a time machine back to the late 90’s to show us this rockin’ GeoCities site (personally, I was an AngelFire guy)? Well, easily surprised reader you are wrong! This is slammin’ retro site is so totally tubular that it ranks on the first page of Google searches for a query bucket that has 250k monthly searches! Wait, what? Yup, you read that right. This site was previously ranking 3rd/4th for all variations of “wish promo code” (though now it’s settled in comfortably at #8). Check out the search volume, per keywordtool.io : I think 250k monthly queries related to a major brand makes this a pretty competitive query wouldn’t you say? Not only that, it came out of nowhere and is rapidly ranking for more and more search queries. Just check out the organic keyword report from SEMrush: Seriously, you should check out the site, it has no main navigation, it’s written very poorly for the language it’s in (English), and it doesn’t have a meaningful link p...

What is keyword research?

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Keyword research is your first step in optimizing your website for certain keywords. Without keyword research , you might find yourself lost in your own lingo and battling giants in your industry that can’t be beaten in the search result pages just like that. There is a variety of factors you have to take into account when doing keyword research and setting up your keyword strategy. In this article, we’ll discuss your mission, your audience and your competition.  Learn how to write awesome and SEO friendly articles in our SEO Copywriting training » $199 - Buy now » Info What makes your company unique? Before you do anything, and this is key, you need to know what makes your company unique. You need to have a clear concept of the mission of your company. You need to determine exactly what you have to offer. Because that’s what’s going to make you rank. It’s that simple. SEO is just like regular business. If you’re doing everything on the same or inferior level as your co...

Elements of a Viral Social Media Campaign

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Social media has become the world’s most popular digital platforms over the past few years. With billions of registered users in all platforms combined, this has helped create an interconnected world in which communication, interaction, and promotion has now become much more efficient and accessible. The rise of social media platforms not only changed the way people communicate, but it also helped various companies and their brands to find new ways to communicate with their audience as well. With digital marketing becoming the new standard in promoting businesses, the use of social media has been a game-changer, as it can help obscure brands become household names in a short period of time. The increase in popularity of these brands is a result of viral social media campaigns. Becoming “viral” on the internet means that a topic or brand is popular over a certain period of time, being mentioned on multiple websites and social media platforms. Creating a social media campaign that c...

Google My Business Reviews From The Web Rate 0 ⭐

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I was checking out LSG’s GMB description after Colan Nielsen had posted about them showing up in GMB Knowledge Panels the other day (They’re gone again btw) when I noticed in the “Reviews from the web” section we had a lousy 3/5 rating: Like any business owner, I wanted to see where these reviews came from and what I could do to turn those three stars into five. Imagine my surprise to find the source was that well-known business reviews site CMac.ws: Isn’t that a beauty? Hard to imagine the site even has four users let alone that all four of them would bother to rate LSG. Besides the fact they are using a screenshot of our homepage that is 2 years out of date, you don’t even have to sign in to click the star rating. And of course you can open the URL in a private browser, vote, open the URL in a new tab and vote again ad infinitum. Not that anyone would ever do such a thing: I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that this site is getting such prime placement. After all, as Google sa...