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Showing posts from May, 2018

How to Choose the Right Domain Name

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In SEO, all of the important elements must be aligned in order to generate positive results. Factors like finding the right keywords, creating quality content, and optimizing backlinks all help create a successful strategy. However, all of these can crumble down when one element does not meet the standard. You might have quality content , and the right keywords, but this would all be put to waste when you do not have the right domain name. Surely, users will be able to find you through keywords, but not having the right domain can greatly affect the amount of traffic that you would be able to receive. This is why choosing the right domain name matters a lot, as users would be able to identify your brand much better, which helps improve your visibility and authority. We at SEO Hacker ensure our clients that they get the right domain name for their brand, and here’s how you can do it too. Make it easy to spell and remember The goal of promotion and advertisement is having your audi...

Media / attachment URL: what to do with them?

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In our major Yoast SEO 7.0 update, there was a bug concerning attachment URL’s. We quickly resolved the bug, but some people have suffered anyhow (because they updated before our patch). This post serves both as a warning and an apology. We want to ask all of you to check whether your settings for the redirect of the attachment URL’s are correct. And, for those of you who suffered from a decrease in rankings because of incorrect settings, we offer a solution that Google has OKed as well. Is redirect attachment URLs set to “Yes”? You need to check this manually : unless you have a very specific reason to allow attachment URLs to exist (more on that below), the setting should be set to “Yes” . If the setting says “Yes”, you’re all set. You can find this setting in Search Appearance, in the tab Media. Is your attachment URL set to “No”? If your attachment URL is set to “no”, there are two different scenario’s which could apply to you. You could intentionally have set this setting t...

Time-saving SEO Practices You Should Try

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SEO is one of the world’s fastest growing industries over the past few years. With a growing amount of companies looking to improve their presence and branding, it is best to look for the best and most effective SEO strategies and techniques that would help save your time. Time-saving practices are present in different industries, especially in SEO, where complex processes can be simplified to generate quality results much faster. Here at SEO Hacker, we always aim to look for these types of practices, as it helps us find the best solutions that help our clients grow and establish their branding and presence. With that in mind, here are some of the best time-saving SEO practices that you should try out. Shift Focus on Long-tail Keywords Keywords are the most important elements of a good SEO strategy, as it is the key to getting more traffic to a website. With the rise of AI assistants and voice search , long-tail keywords have become more effective in generating more search traff...

Enhanced Tracking for Analyzing Your Content’s Impact

If many people view life’s value in relation to its impact on others, what if you viewed the content your company creates in the same way? How does your content actually impact your end users, and what value does it provide to their decision making process?… https://ift.tt/2L2ElTV

What is Google Tag Manager and What Does It Do?

If you don’t have organization when working with analytics, you’re gonna have a rough time. Analytics tracking at its core is largely technical and this can elevate the barrier to entry for those that are unfamiliar. However, tools like Google Tag Manager  (GTM), make the tag management process much, much simpler.… https://ift.tt/2L1P4xB

How to Win With Guided Selling, Part 5: Organic Promotion

Outreach to bloggers and influencers is one of the more obvious tactics for organic promotion, as it can be very effective. However, the space is becoming more and more competitive as bloggers are becoming more aware of the opportunities available to those with a following.… https://ift.tt/2ks3En0

How to Win With Guided Selling, Part 4: Paid Social Media Promotion

After you spent all the time creating a great piece of content , you want to make sure it gets in front of your target audience. Before putting any dollars behind promoting your content, you should sit down with your team and plan out key considerations for promotion such as defining your audience, determining KPIs, setting a budget, and the duration of the project.… https://ift.tt/2s7Kffq

How to Win With Guided Selling, Part 3: Design & Creation

The first thing we do before kicking off the detailed design work on any project is a thorough review of the existing audience research. We then combine it with competitive and visual research to get an overarching view of what we need to solve with the design.… https://ift.tt/2LwuZ3w

How to Win With Guided Selling, Part 2: Audience Interviews

We all have experience in our industries, but that can sometimes give us blinders into thinking we know everything about our audience. It’s important to get the audience’s perspective and see what they’re really looking for and need. Sometimes, we can also have the tendency of cycling one anecdote or another any time a subject comes up, but it’s good to get new perspectives to refresh what we know about people and expand our understanding of them, their journey, and their needs.… https://ift.tt/2JabZtH

How to Win With Guided Selling, Part 1: Prioritizing a Topic

Choosing a category from a million possibilities for your digital asset is more than enough to drive us crazy. But it doesn’t have to be! Follow these six steps to making sure you’re choosing a category that’s inspired by data, has high success potential, and most importantly is in line with your whole team’s goals.… https://ift.tt/2IJUGjp

Is Your Site Leaking User Info into Search Results? Get GDPR Ready

What do you do when your site is leaking user information into search results? Well, let’s take a step back and look at what kind of personal information this could be: Form information that contains first name, last name, email address Actual address information, including zip Unsubscribe confirmation URLs that contain email addresses and/or names Online ordering information like what recently happened to Panera There are a number of ways this information could be seeping into Google’s index.… https://ift.tt/2xeeCFO

How to Master Meta Descriptions With the Google Snippet Trick

The more things change, the more they stay the same. Last week, I came across a Yoast article discussing Google’s longer meta descriptions (Google doubled the room we have for meta descriptions last year — from 160 characters with spaces to 320.) The first paragraph contained a sentence that made me laugh: “It appears that Google very often https://ift.tt/2s2fXL6

Why You Should Bid on Your Own Brand Terms

It’s a challenge for a business to achieve the performance and reach the goals you set for yourself in such a competitive PPC space. Who doesn’t want to increase ad performance and see the most value possible for the money spent on paid search?… https://ift.tt/2sa4Z5w

How to Optimize for “Near My Area” Search Results

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Search has been evolving over the past few years, with numerous updates and new applications that helped enhance the experience and provide users with the best results. 2018 is another year of many changes, with Google shifting its focus to mobile and voice search and testing out new AI technology in the form of Google Duplex. These Google updates aim to not only optimize search results but also make search more accessible across all devices. With the development of AI technology, voice search will also be optimized, which means that we will be seeing more exact and phrased search terms that enables AI assistants to look for the best results on search engines. “Near Me” One of the most popular voice search terms that people use is “Near Me” or “Near my area”, which allows voice search to look for the places near your immediate vicinity. When it comes to using voice search and AI assistants, this is one of the most convenient ways to receive the best local results. When using Go...

Is “Near Me” SEO Moving Farther Away?

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Local SEO Twitter was slightly a flutter yesterday after my bud John Mueller apparently mentioned you should avoid placing “Near Me” in titles if you want to rank for “Near Me” searches: Want to rank for ‘Near Me’ searches? Avoid placing ‘near me’ in your titles, make sure your address is on your site and get your Google My Business profile setup and verified… results are predominantly based on the users location. Confirmed by @JohnMu #LocalSEO #Google pic.twitter.com/MvdUvJ70Al — Daniel Brooks (@seodanbrooks) May 15, 2018 Back in the day when Google reps were a bit less vocal, we crazy SEO types had to come up with ideas based on what we were seeing on Google and test them. Sometimes, to our surprise, they worked wonders. For example, I discovered that putting phone numbers of local businesses in the title tags of their yellow page profile pages would reliably generate an extra 2-3% traffic lift as it would help that page rank for phone number queries. That one worked for ye...

SEO Hacker’s Guest Blogging Guide for 2018

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Guest blogging is one of the fundamentals of an effective content marketing and link building strategy. If you have a website that is looking to get more traffic, starting out by guest blogging is usually one of the best ways to go. This helps expand your online presence, promote useful content, and establish quality and authoritative links. The practice of guest blogging has become standard for various websites all over the internet, and with 2018 being a year that will bring in more changes to how we all do search and SEO, there are some new techniques and strategies that will help you get ready for the year. The main goal of guest blogging will always be helping a website gain traffic through quality content, and while this objective has remained the same for quite a time, here is a handy guide that will help your content become relevant and visible in 2018. Quality above all A guest post brings in a good amount of traffic, but only when the content is something that is releva...

Make Me Feel Smart

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It’s amazing how many opportunities we get as buyers to feel dumb. Imagine you need a new laptop and maybe it’s been a while since you last purchased one. What would you look for? You’d probably glance at things like processor speed and storage capacity and hope you got what you needed. But a company could make you feel smarter if they said, “This is a great laptop for most people’s business needs.” Or “If you’re doing any video editing or want to play games, this would be the best laptop for you.” Make Me Feel Smart It’s not any one technology that helps us feel smart. An airport with lots of great signage can help us feel smart because we can navigate ourselves through the process. When you order food at a restaurant, if the menu describes any uncommon words, you’ll feel better about knowing what you’re thinking of getting. An air conditioning and heating expert can sell the right sized unit and services for a company by walking the prospective facilities management team through ...

Yoast SEO 7.5: Привет, Россия

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The Russian language is huge; 265 million people have Russian as their first or second language, making it the world’s eight most used language. What’s more, according to W3Techs Russian is the second most used language online — following English by a huge margin. As of today, all of the Russian language WordPress users can get their content checked thanks to new language support in Yoast SEO 7.5. Optimize your site for search & social media and keep it optimized with Yoast SEO Premium » $89 - Buy now » Info Russian language readability analysis and internal linking We’ve been steadily growing the number of language we support in our readability analysis and internal linking tools. We started out with English, but now support a rapidly expanding roster of some of the world’s most used languages, like French, German, Spanish and Italian. The next language to join that club is Russian. Now, Russian is a complex language that has its own set of rules and needs to be addresse...

Don’t Be Content with the Content Analysis Bare Minimum

If many people view life’s value in relation to its impact on others, what if you viewed the content your company creates in the same way? How does your content actually impact your end users, and what value does it provide to their decision making process?… https://ift.tt/2L0CQGF

A Look Into the Upcoming Google Maps Update

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One of the notable updates announced during the past week is for Google Maps, which will be having new features in the upcoming months. Maps is one of the most popular Google services, as it provides users with a platform that allows them to navigate and travel more conveniently than before. It is also an essential local SEO tool that helps businesses and important locations become more visible. Being one of the most important services that Google offers, it is fitting that it receives some of the most important updates that will help improve its user-friendliness and introduce new features that help expand its functionality. Explore One of the updates will be a newly redesigned Explore tab, which allows users to browse new and nearby locations conveniently. The explore tab is already one of the integral features of Google Maps and seeing it receive an update will help make improve its performance, and provide users with the best choices. The current explore tab has options that...

Annelieke’s analytics: What are dimensions and metrics in Google Analytics?

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Anyone who has browsed through Google Analytics should have come across a whole lot of variables in the reporting stats. The reports consist of dimensions and metrics; Google Analytics calls these the building blocks of your reports. And if you want to create a custom report in Google Analytics or Google Data Studio, you have complete freedom in what dimensions and metrics you put in this report. But be careful, you might create a useless report. In this post, I’m going to explain what the difference is between dimensions and metrics. And what to look out for when combining these two yourselves. Free course! Learn what makes your site rank with our SEO for beginners training » Get access now Info What are dimensions in Google Analytics? All the data you see in Google Analytics, all variables in reports is either a dimension or a metric. Google explains dimensions as: Dimensions are attributes of your data. So in a way, a dimension is a description, a chara...

Ask Yoast: Canonical for PDF magazine

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There are many occassions when you may want to put a PDF on your site. For example, when you’ve made an online magazine, when an article you wrote was featured in a book or magazine, or when you’ve written detailed instructions for a DIY project. So far, so good. But things can get a bit more complicated when you also have the content from this PDF somewhere else on your site, or on another website. To avoid duplicate content, you need to set a canonical URL. But how do you do that for a PDF document? And what is the best way to do that? Let’s discuss in today’s Ask Yoast! Karen Schousboe emailed us her question: I plan to publish a PDF magazine under medieval.news. Some of the articles in each issue will also be freely available on a sister website. How should I handle that? Do I link canonical from the articles to the PDF magazine or from the magazine to the website?” Watch the video or read the transcript further down the page for my answer! Canonicalization and PDFs “Well, ...

Google Duplex

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At college, after getting demolished in squash against, Mike, a hyper-competitive pre-med, he asked me what I planned to do for a career. I told him I wanted to get into television. He sneeringly countered how he was going to become a surgeon and extend his patients’ lives by many years. The implication being I was wasting my life with something as trivial as TV. “That’s awesome Mike,” I responded enthusiastically, “You know what your patients are going to do with all that extra time on Earth you so generously bestowed them? Watch fucking TV.” Google Duplex is rightly the talk of the tech town at the moment. It’s pretty amazing. Sundar Pinchai closed his talk on Duplex with the following (emphasis mine): “A common theme across all this is we are working hard to give users back time . We’ve always been obsessed about that at Google. Search is obsessed about getting users to answers quickly and giving them what they want.” We all want more time to do the things we really want to do...

What If B2B Keyphrase Research Doesn’t Work?

Looking for B2B keywords? What do you do when conventional keyphrase research tools do you wrong? Here’s what I mean. Last February, I spoke during AWAI’S Web Content Intensive (woot — what a fun event!) During my presentation, a woman asked how she could find reliable keyword research metrics for her niche B2B. Her problem? Conventional research tools, like https://ift.tt/2KaFWX9

Why Google Assistant Can Be The Most Intelligent AI Assistant Yet

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It is no secret that Google optimizes all of their services on a regular basis, with 2018 being a year that has been introducing another set of updates. Some of these updates include the implementation of infinite scrolling on Google mobile search , removing the “View Image” option , along with the addition of title tags on Google Images, and the addition of Google Speed in the next few months. Another major Google service that will be receiving updates in the near future is Google Assistant, which is one of the best AI assistants currently available. While this app can already perform functions such as open applications, search for nearby locations , and respond to search queries, Google demonstrated what else it could possibly do in the future. At the I/O Developer’s conference on May 8, 2018, Google CEO Sundar Pichai presented some of Google Assistant’s upcoming features. One of the most notable features is the ability to make a phone call, which was met with awe from the audie...