16 Common But Toxic On-Page SEO Practices

When it comes to achieving that coveted 1st position on search engine rankings, you know that search engine optimization (SEO) plays an important role. After all, SEO helps ensure that search engines properly index your website, thus ensuring your website is shown to the right people at the right time.

But beware: Not all SEO practices are created alike. In fact, there are some common but toxic SEO practices that could actually sink your site’s rank, making it less likely that potential customers will find you.

When SEO Hurts: 16 Common but Toxic On-Page Practices

Surprised that there are SEO practices out there that hurt, rather than help? They didn’t always start out that way; in fact, many toxic on-page practices were once crucial to boosting a site’s positioning in search engine rankings. However, search engines have become smarter over the years. Now Google, Yahoo!, and Bing aim to provide the best content possible to their users, which means that your SEO practices will need to reflect a better user experience.

Want to avoid the search engine black hole? Avoid these 16 common but toxic SEO practices:

1. Using thin content: If you’re copying and pasting content from page to page on your site, you’ll end up killing your search engine rankings. For example, if you’re using the same paragraph CTA on each page or using product descriptions that your supplier has provided hundreds of other sites, change up the content to improve your SEO rankings.

2. Refusing to be mobile-responsive: Not only is this bad news for your sales – more customers than ever are shopping with their smartphones – but many search engines will punish your site if it’s not mobile-responsive. Invest in working with a website designer who can create a mobile-friendly website, and watch as your SEO rankings skyrocket.

3. Over-optimizing your content: Back in the day, a common SEO practice was to stuff as many keywords as humanly possible into your site’s text. Search engines have become much smarter, as they realized plenty of websites did this without offering valuable content to users. Optimize your content, but don’t go overboard!

4. Using identical title tags: If you’re using the same title tags across multiple site pages, you’re missing out on the chance to capture more search engine traffic. Use specific and unique keywords for each page’s title tag to increase the odds of getting more visitors to your site.

5. Purchasing links: While many people are still getting away with this bad SEO practice, search engines are getting smarter about identifying natural linking, and when links have been purchased. If someone reports your site as spam, Google will manually review your website, which could quickly unveil your shady link-building strategy. I know, this isn’t technically and on-page issue, but we had to mention it as the ensuing penalty would affect ALL of your pages!

6. Using vague CTAs: If your button copy says “Click Here” or “Search Now”, you’re missing out on an opportunity to use your CTAs to rank your site. For example, if you’re an auto insurance broker, use “Search Auto Quotes Now” rather than a simple “Search Now” CTA.

7. Not optimizing your meta description: Like title tags, each page of your site has a meta description that can be optimized for better indexing. Avoid stuffing the description with keywords, as it needs to make sense to human readers as well as search engine crawlers.

8. Using irrelevant keywords: If one page on your site is dedicated to a keyword that is irrelevant to the rest of your site, you’re going to get penalized by search engines. Remember, relevancy is the most important ranking factor!

9. Purchasing One-Off Domains: This can be an excellent SEO strategy – but only when performed by the right hands. If you have dozens of one-off sites designed solely to point visitors back to your main page, you may get penalized by Google.

10. Using your competition as a keyword: If you’re hoping to get away with stealing some traffic from your competition, take note – search engines are on to you. Worse still: you could open yourself up to copyright lawsuits.

11. Speaking in “Spamglish”: If your site’s content doesn’t make sense simply because you’re stuffing as many keywords as possible in there, you’ll get penalized. Remember, search engines prioritize their users’ experiences with your site.

12. Using “doorway” pages: These webpages are exclusively designed just for search engines, rather than humans. Search engines frown on this practice, so make sure every page is useful to your site’s visitors.

13. Hijacking high-performance pages: Otherwise known as “pagejacking”, this refers to the practice of ripping off content from another high-performing site and using it on your own site. You won’t just get in trouble with search engines; you could also get in serious legal trouble.

14. Using poor guest posts: When done correctly, guest posts can be a great way to build credibility and recognition from search engines. However, if your guests are posting poor, irrelevant, or spammy content – just for the sake of a link back to their own site – your site will be the one that ends up getting penalized.

15. Placing too many ads above the fold: The fold is the part of the site page that’s visible without requiring any scrolling. If you have too many ads above this fold, you’ll be penalized by many search engines – especially by Google.

16. Having a slow site: Does your website take longer than five seconds to load? Guess what – that can count against your SEO ranking! Make sure you use a good hosting provider to ensure your site loads quickly and easily.

Have you ever worked with a company that used these dated and harmful tactics? Have you accidentally made one of these mistakes? Let us know in the comments below!
Source : business2community


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5 Key Aspects of Local SEO

Operating a local SEO campaign can be a challenging adventure in the marketing world, leaving many small businesses feeling like a fish out of water. Often times, local businesses miss out on potential online successes; simply because they are not sure on where to begin. There are a lot of on and off-site factors that play into a local SEO campaign’s success and it is important to implement them throughout the campaign. But what are these factors?
Let’s talk about these key factors that drive success within a local SEO campaign.

Name, Address, Phone Number (NAP)

One of the more important on-site tactics within a local SEO campaign is including the business’s NAP within every page of the website. It is vital that this information is displayed in the exact same format across the website. Including a consistent NAP within the website will allow Google to index the necessary information to include the website within the local pack in the SERPs.

Mobile Optimization

With the rise of technology within the recent years, nearly everybody has a smartphone or a tablet. Due to this, Google has finally updated their algorithm to include a website’s mobile optimization within their ranking factors. This means it is vital for a website to be optimized for viewing on desktop, smartphones and tablets. However, this study conducted by Rizolt shows that implementing mobile optimization can yield enormous online successes for a business.

Google My Business

Acquiring a Google My Business listing can give a local business an enormous leg-up in the competition. This allows a business to be shown within a variety of Google’s services (Search, Maps or Google+) when potential customers are searching for the services that business provides. Keep in mind that it is important to fill out the listing with very detailed information about the business.

Local Link Building

Yes, high-quality, authoritative links are always an incredible win for link building, but when running a local SEO campaign, acquiring relevant links on local websites that are engaged within your potential customers is just as important. Moz put together a directory of local citation opportunities, and earning these NAP citations on local websites will assist Google in understanding how to put the website in front of the individuals looking for its services.

Reviews

Earning local reviews is one of the more important local SEO tactics, since studies have shown they are a driving factor within Google’s carousel rankings. Aside from reaching out to existing customers for reviews, simply Including a link for a website’s viewers to quickly leave a review can be an easy way to acquire online successes, while building a positive image behind a business’s overall brand.

Source : tech

Expert Tips on Multilingual SEO to Boost Your Online Findability

So you’ve created a beautiful, compelling website that wows your home audience. The time is ripe for adapting it for key markets around the world.

But how valuable is your excellent website to your intended audiences if they can’t find it online?
Enter multilingual SEO. Done well, SEO practices for each of your website versions can illuminate your site in the search engine spotlight—right before your customers’ eyes.

Here are some tips from experts on dealing with common challenges arising from multilingual SEO.

The right content for the right market
The biggest challenge by far is making sure your content reads well in all languages. Having native speakers write this for you is of upmost importance. I once saw a native English fashion client describe their range of leather jackets as “skins,” which was hurting their visibility as well as their conversions. Understanding the subtle changes in culture is important for marketing as a whole, so it’s definitely important for SEO as well.

Also important is earning coverage and links from native-speaking sites to the relevant language/locale URLs. This is what will build textual and link relevance for search engines that will associate the content of the page that links to you with your business.
–Shreedhan Vaidya, head of SEO, Engage Interactive

Different domains
With multilingual SEO, each country needs to be targeted separately. I would recommend creating different TLD (top-level domain) websites with 100 percent different content. Each domain should end in the countries’ ending domain. So for France, it would be: http://yourwebsite.fr.
If this cannot be done, then creating sub-domains on the main website is preferable with the country’s language. This will help separate everything.

In the end, this is completely worth the effort.

Also, do not use Google translate for your website. It creates duplicate content issues, which Google and other search engines do not like.
–Todd Jirecek, president/SEO director, Website Marketing Pros LLC

More on duplicate content: Avoid getting dinged by search engines
Always be mindful of the menace of duplicated content. This can make or break your long-term SEO efforts.

To deal with duplicate content-related SEO dangers, you can use any (and I recommend all!) of the below tips:

1) Set up a verified Webmaster Tools account and enable Google to notify you if they detect a duplicate content issue via internal message. Another easy way to find duplicate pages is by checking your duplicate meta descriptions under the WMT > HTML improvements tab.

2) Watch your parameters. When you have one page in multiple languages, each language with various tags for your analytics or marketing can cause unwanted duplicate page creation. So consult with your Web team on the best solutions before you switch your multilingual site on.

3) Use website audit tools like Screaming Frog or similar. They have dedicated options especially designed to sniff out duplicated content. When you find those pages, be sure to add a rel=canonical tag on them so you can show the search bots what the original page is. Not doing this can result in massive SEO damages.

4) Non-translated areas of your website. If you have a larger website, some parts might be left untranslated. This is bad news for the SEO for that specific language. Be sure to have less than 10 percent (I`d even recommend 5 percent, but 10 percent is the standard) of your website without translation.
–Martin Milanov, digital marketing lead, FairPoint

Ready to roll with multilingual SEO?
Consider working with a language service provider who’s heavily experienced with website translation and other global marketing initiatives. Expect tailored guidance with multilingual SEO and an overall roadmap to help you expand your online reach.
Source : business2community

Google Targets Intent With Email, YouTube And Search Matching And Universal App Campaigns

As Ad Week rolls into New York, the tech giants are rolling out their ad product news. Today Google announced moves further into Facebook-style targeting territory, with a new product called Customer Match that will let advertisers upload lists of emails and match them to signed-in Google users on Gmail, Search and YouTube. Google is also upping its game in app promotions.

Meanwhile, Facebook has announced a new service that itself is competitive with yet another platform: Twitter, and specifically in the area of nabbing more TV ad dollars. The social network will be working with Nielsen on a new metric and ad buying option to let advertisers more closely link their TV ad spend with Facebook video spend.

Google’s Customer Match — which will be getting rolled out in the next few weeks — will let advertisers build campaigns based around email address lists that they upload and match against Google’s own database of signed-in users across some of its biggest properties — including Gmail, YouTube and Search.

In an example given by  Sridhar Ramaswamy, SVP of Ads and Commerce at Google, a travel brand can upload the names of people in its rewards program, who will then be served ads from that travel brand the next time they are searching a relevant term. Similarly those ads (or others like them) can then follow a user when she or he visits YouTube or checking email on Gmail.

On top of this, Google will also be giving advertisers the ability to use that same data to find similar audiences — that is, signed-in users who may not be on your own lists but match profiles of those who are and are therefore more likely to be interested in your products.

If you think all of this sounds familiar, it’s because it is: Facebook has been letting advertisers run similar styles of campaigns based around customer databases for years already. Why has Google been so slow to come around to this? Regulatory scrutiny seems to be one key reason highlighted by Digiday, which had reported that targeting plans were in the works before Google made the news official: the search giant has been happy to let others take the lead on this kind of ad tech first because then Google appears as the competitor when it enters the market.

There could be other reasons, too: You could also argue that Google has been so successful with its core search products that the idea of adding new features may have been put on the backburner. Similarly, it may only be now that advertisers are showing so much interest in targeting and ad tech in general that Google has felt the push to roll out similar products itself.

The push from the wider market, and competition from Facebook, it could be argued, may also be behind the new Android app promotion tools that Google is also unveiling.

This is not the first time that Google has leveraged its larger networks in areas like search to promote apps: Google unveiled some initiatives in this space back in May during its big I/O developer conference. Now we have a more complete picture in the form of Universal App Campaigns.
Essentially, what this is is a new type of AdWords product focused specifically on targeting app users across different Google platforms such as Search, Google Play, YouTube, and the Google Display Network, which Google says covers some 2 million websites. Some of this is similar to the intent that Google is trying to capture with Customer Match: a search for adventure gaming apps will yield an ad for, say, an adverture game. What’s less clear is if that intent then follows you to other platforms, or whether Google creates separate intent-based ads in, say, YouTube based on what you are watching.

As with other app-install networks, Google says a developer sets a cost-per-install in order to set up a campaign across different platforms. Source : techcrunch

Facebook’s video ambitions

If Google is wading deeper into Facebook’s territory with app install ads and email-based advertising databases, Facebook is also dipping its toes elsewhere, too.

Earlier today, Facebook, which says it now works with 2.5 million advertisers (up from 2 million in February), announced that it would work with Nielsen to develop and introduce a new metric that it calls the “total rating point” (TRP) to measure how Facebook video ads perform alongside corresponding TV ad campaigns. “Marketers can plan a campaign across TV and Facebook with a total TRP target in mind, and they can buy a share of those TRPs directly with Facebook,” Facebook notes in a blog post about the new product.

As with Nielsen’s early moves to work more closely with Twitter to measure and match up Twitter users with TV consumers, the idea here is to create a stronger link between the old platform and the new in order to encourage more advertising on the latter platform. Video is huge on Facebook, and the social network killing from video ads in its news feed (which are increasingly also going mobile). Making more products to align those even more closely, and with TV advertisers’ budgets, makes a lot of sense.

Other new Facebook products today include brand awareness optimization bidding; polling services coming to mobile; and — in one more push to enhance and expand video inventory — adding videos to the carousel format Facebook introduced earlier this year.


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Watch scientists send brain signals between people over the internet

A new study has demonstrated that it is possible for people to transmit brain signals between one another over the internet – watch how it works here.

You may not believe in psychics’ self-proclaimed ability to read minds, but new research from the University of Washington suggests that telepathy may not be as farfetched as it once seemed. According to a report from Eurekalert, scientists were able to create a direct connection between two brains that allowed people to play a question and answer game without using words.
The researchers were able to allow participants to play the question and answer game by transmitting signals between the two people over the internet. The experiment, published in the journal PLOS ONE, is the first to show that two brains can in fact be linked to allow one person to perceive what the other is thinking.
According to the study’s lead author, Andrea Stocco, “This is the most complex brain-to-brain experiment, I think, that’s been done to date in humans.” Stocco is an assistant professor of psychology and a researcher at the University of Washington’s Institute of Learning and Brain Sciences. The experiment uses peoples’ consciousness through visual signals, and relies on the collaboration between people.
The brain interface is actually relatively simple. It works with the first participant, the respondent, donning a cap collected to an EEG machine that logs the electrical activity in the brain. The respondent is presented with an object, like a dog on a computer screen, and the second participant is presented with a list of potential objects they can guess the first person has seen. The second person, or the inquirer, sends a question to the respondent, to which he can answer either yes or no by looking at one of two blinking LED lights on the monitor that flash at different frequencies.
An answer of either no or yes will send a signal over the internet to the inquirer. This signal activates a magnetic coil placed behind the inquirer’s head. However, only a “yes” answer will generate a response that stimulates the visual cortex in the inquirer, causing him or her to perceive a flash of light called a “phosphene.” This flash appears as a blob, waves, or a line, and is created by briefly disrupting the visual field and letting the inquirer know that the answer is a yes. The inquirer is then able to deduce the correct item through a series of these yes or no questions without actually speaking to the respondent.
The researchers performed the experiment in dark rooms in two different labs at the University of Washington, which were nearly a mile apart. They tested five different pairs of participants, each playing 20 rounds of the game. The sessions were structured to include ten real games and ten control games to compare results.
The scientists made sure that the participants couldn’t use any additional clues besides the direct brain communication. The people asking the questions wore earplugs so they couldn’t associate the sounds produced by the different stimulation frequencies with specific responses. Similarly, the researchers took care to slightly alter the simulation intensities due to their ability to travel as sound waves through the skull that could be used as clues in the game.
The team also made sure to change the position of the coil near the inquirer’s head at the beginning of each round. For the control games, they added a plastic spacer that blocked the magnetic field from the inquirer’s head so that there were no phosphenes generated in response to the answers. The inquirers were not told if they had guessed the correct item, and were unaware if the game was a real round or just a control round. Stocco reiterated that they wanted to ensure that people were not cheating in the games.
The results of the study suggest that the researcher’s method for transmitting information was quite successful. The participants correctly guessed the object in 72 percent of the real games, and just 18 percent in the control games. There could have been many reasons why people guessed the incorrect object in the real games, likely due to difficulties in detecting whether or not a phosphene had actually occurred. Interpreting a new phenomenon is not always easy; many of the participants had never seen a phosphene before.
The respondents could have confused the signals before they were transmitted as well, contributing to a number of incorrect answers. The brain signal was subject to interference from hardware issues as well, so there was bound to be some variation in the actual results. According to Chantel Prat, a staff member at UW’s Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences and an associate professor of psychology, “While the flashing lights are signals that we’re putting into the brain, those parts of the brain are doing a million other things at any given time too.”
The experiment’s roots date back to 2013 when the researchers first figured out they could create a connection between peoples’ brains. Other researchers have successfully linked the brains of rats and monkeys, and even transmitted a brain signal from a human to a rat using electrodes directly implanted into their brains. The UW team was the first to figure out a way to transmit brain signals without invasive technology, by sending them over the internet to control the motion of another individual’s hand.
The experiment was born out of the research of one of the study’s co-authors, Rajesh Rao. Rao is a professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Washington, and has spent years working on interfaces that allow people to activate devices with their brains. He began collaborating with Stocco and Prat to design an experiment that would show how far two linked human brains could go in 2011.
The team of researchers received a $1 million grant from the W.M. Keck foundation and got to work designing the games that the linked participants would play in 2014. Their current goals involve seeing whether they can transfer brain signals from healthy brains to developmentally impaired ones, what they call “brain tutoring.” They are also trying to see if they can influence a brain that was affected by an external factor like a stroke or an injury. It could even be used for normal educational purposes between teacher and student.
The research team is close to being able to transmit entire brain states, which would involve sending a signal from an awake person to a tired one to see if he would suddenly enter a state of alertness. This could be used to help people suffering form attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD, to focus.
The research has huge implications for the way we communicate. We already use the internet to send messages, recordings and videos, but we stop short of communicating without physically logging in. If researchers could reach an understanding that would allow people to directly transmit brain signals at massive distances, it would represent a massive step in the evolution of communications technology.
It could have huge implications for medicine, cognitive therapy, and could create massive efficiencies in the economy. It will likely be some time before this technology is available for use on a large scale, but the work of these three researchers at the University of Washington could very well change the way we live and interact with each other.

Source : babwnews

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SEO HACKS: 3 Bad SEO Habits You Need To Break Today

Here’s the thing about SEO (search engine optimization): Whether you’re a marketer or a business owner managing your own web presence, it matters. A lot. But trying to define what it means to “be good at SEO,” can be a challenge. Rules are constantly changing, and the algorithms used to place and rank pages in search results continue to evolve as Google and other search engines out there adapt how they determine whether or not a page is “relevant.”

As a marketer, this is what used to terrify me about SEO. Bad SEO can make or break your website, and there is a finite amount of space to get it right.
So that’s what I’m here to talk to you about today because I’ve learned over the past year that SEO doesn’t have to be that scary. Yes, the rules will continue to change, but there is one simple strategy to help take your SEO game up a couple of notches – knowing what are the bad SEO strategies out there that you should be avoiding like the plague…

Bad SEO Habit No. 1: Keyword Stuffing

What is keyword stuffing? It’s when you overload a page with an unnatural proportion of short or long-tail keywords, phone numbers, and other information, in an attempt to game the system to get a better search engine ranking. I have some bad news for the smartypants out there who think this strategy works. Google knows about this practice, to the point where they have a dedicated support page about it.

This kind of practice may have worked back in the day, but now Google actively considers content relevancy, as well as user experience, when calculating a website page ranking. That’s why back in April 2015, Google shared it was going to demote the ranking of websites who did not have a responsive website design. Why? Poor mobile user experience.
The moral of this story is that nailing a particular keyword or content percentage is not going to be what gets you the SEO results you want. In fact, it could have the opposite effect. Which leads me to my next point…

Bad SEO Habit No. 2: Feeding The Robots First

Google, Bing, Yahoo…instead of little ones and zeros, I like to imagine these brands as great big robots who stand guard at the gates of the Internet. When I want to know how long to bake a chicken in the oven, I call upon these Internet Robot Gatekeepers. And when I need to know how to put out the fire in my oven from me over-cooking said chicken, back to the Internet Robots, I go.
This is what bugs me as a user: When I go to a search engine to figure out how to put the fire out in my kitchen, and then the page with the great ranking ends up being awful. It either doesn’t have any valuable information on it, or the information is minimal like, “If your kitchen is on fire, you should probably put it out,”
Best case scenario, I’m annoyed and inconvenienced. Worst case scenario, well, my kitchen is still on fire.
This is the result of something called “feeding the robots first.” Meaning you create a page with the idea of nailing a particular keyword first, and then thinking about the content for the user second. Maybe you did need that page, but maybe you didn’t. Who knows? When you build a page on your website that exists purely to grab the attention of a robot to get a higher search ranking, instead of creating something that provides valuable information to potential customers, someone is going to end up unhappy.
Instead, focus on developing a design and sitemap with purpose that is then further supported with meaningful content geared toward serving the people you’re trying to reach. Then optimize that content for SEO value. Because you can lead someone to your website, but they won’t stay if what you lead them to stinks.

Bad SEO Habit No. 3: Not Considering Page Content An Asset

One of my favorite tools that I use for SEO on WordPress websites is the Yoast SEO plugin. (A tool I learned about when I first started working here at Quintain!)

What I like about it is that it clearly lays out the elements that you need to focus on to make sure you nail your website’s SEO: URL, focus keyword, SEO title, and meta description.
But what I also like is how it includes content as one of the defining factors. If you’re a marketer or an old SEO pro, you probably know how important content is. But if you’re not, well, it’s time to shift your perspective. One of the biggest mistakes I’ve seen made in the past is when someone creates a page chock full of content – including images! – but then the keyword, URL, page title and meta description is where they focus ALL of their efforts.
They don’t realize that getting found online hinges on the synergistic relationship between an SEO keyword strategy and valuable content. You can’t SEO your way out of bad page content with a killer meta description, because content is your biggest SEO asset. This is especially true as Google continues to give more weight to the relevancy of on-site page content, in addition to any other optimizations you may make.

Final Thought

When it comes to bad SEO strategies, the worst out there is thinking there is a magic bullet that will help you win at Google. Instead, think of a good SEO strategy being one that relies on many moving parts, with your content serving as the backbone of everything you do. Is it a difficult balancing act? Absolutely. You can’t have a website that gets the SEO results you want without good content as a foundation. And you certainly won’t see the site traffic you want without doing some keyword research and optimizing your content and search result fields.
But just the simple act of permanently shelving your “gaming the system” tactics can serve as the first step toward having a great SEO strategy.
Source : business2community