8 Essential Steps for SEOs in Planning Online PR

Just sending out a single press release now and again is not going to get you very far in gaining publicity and editorial links. If you really want to tap into the benefits of online PR, you’ve got to take a long-term view and build your credibility with the media, and your clients.

That single press release might get you coverage, but such success is the exception rather than the rule. Your target journalist may just miss your message, may not have a slot to fit you in, or maybe they meant to write about you but just plain forgot.

But send newsworthy press releases out regularly and journalists will start to remember you and recognize your work - and your probability of getting coverage will increase. However, finding newsworthy stories is also hard - you’ve got to have a plan and this article will explore the essential steps.

1. Build Trust With Your Client

Public relations is one of those industries where clients have got their fingers burnt on occasions. So they can be skeptical and you need to build trust.

Using HelpAReporter.com is a good place for SEOs to start with online PR, and can be a great way to build confidence and trust in your ability. The service gives you:

• experience of what journalists are looking for
• an opportunity to pitch and interact with journalists
• editorial coverage and links when your pitches are successful

While it’s an extremely useful adjunct to link-building, you can’t build a PR campaign on HARO alone.

Source : 8 Essential Steps for SEOs in Planning Online PR

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How to Ensure Your SEO Strategy Delivers the Right Traffic

When it comes to SEO, achieving first page rankings and getting more traffic is one thing, but what about ensuring those rankings deliver the right type of traffic to your website, traffic that will actually convert into new customers?

Here are three steps to ensure that your SEO campaign delivers the right traffic to your website.

Step 1: Identify Your Target Audience

You know your customers. So, identifying your target audience should be the easy part, but when it comes to SEO, this isn't always the case. If you offer different service or product lines, your target audience may comprise of a number of different segments. This makes identifying your target audience for SEO purposes much more difficult.

If you attempt to go after every possible customer in one fail swoop, your SEO strategy will most likely fail. Instead, methodically carve away the different segments, and target them incrementally. When you achieve success with one segment, then move onto the next. This is necessary because depending on the type of business you're in, each segment may have very different needs and wants.

How do you identify which segment to target first? It's a good idea to start with your most profitable and least competitive segment, so you can quickly start generating a return on your investment.

Source : http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2356679/How-to-Ensure-Your-SEO-Strategy-Delivers-the-Right-Traffic

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How to Perform the World's Greatest SEO Audit

Now that tax season is over, it's once again safe to say my favorite A-word... audit! That's right. My name is Steve, and I'm an SEO audit junkie.

Like any good junkie, I've read every audit-related article; I've written thousands of lines of audit-related code, and I've performed audits for friends, clients, and pretty much everyone else I know with a website.

All of this research and experience has helped me create an insanely thorough SEO audit process. And today, I'm going to share that process with you.

This is designed to be a comprehensive guide for performing a technical SEO audit. Whether you're auditing your own site, investigating an issue for a client, or just looking for good bathroom reading material, I can assure you that this guide has a little something for everyone. So without further ado, let's begin.

SEO Audit Preparation

When performing an audit, most people want to dive right into the analysis. Although I agree it's a lot more fun to immediately start analyzing, you should resist the urge.

A thorough audit requires at least a little planning to ensure nothing slips through the cracks.

Crawl Before You Walk

Before we can diagnose problems with the site, we have to know exactly what we're dealing with. Therefore, the first (and most important) preparation step is to crawl the entire website.

Crawling Tools

I've written custom crawling and analysis code for my audits, but if you want to avoid coding, I recommend using Screaming Frog's SEO Spider to perform the site crawl (it's free for the first 500 URIs and £99/year after that).

Alternatively, if you want a truly free tool, you can use Xenu's Link Sleuth; however, be forewarned that this tool was designed to crawl a site to find broken links. It displays a site's page titles and meta descriptions, but it was not created to perform the level of analysis we're going to discuss.

For more information about these crawling tools, read Dr. Pete's Crawler Face-off: Xenu vs. Screaming Frog.

Crawling Configuration

Once you've chosen (or developed) a crawling tool, you need to configure it to behave like your favorite search engine crawler (e.g., Googlebot, Bingbot, etc.). First, you should set the crawler's user agent to an appropriate string.

Popular Search Engine User Agents:

Googlebot - "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)"
Bingbot - "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; bingbot/2.0; +http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm)"
Next, you should decide how you want the crawler to handle various Web technologies.

There is an ongoing debate about the intelligence of search engine crawlers. It's not entirely clear if they are full-blown headless browsers or simply glorified curl scripts (or something in between).

By default, I suggest disabling cookies, JavaScript, and CSS when crawling a site. If you can diagnose and correct the problems encountered by dumb crawlers, that work can also be applied to most (if not all) of the problems experienced by smarter crawlers.

Then, for situations where a dumb crawler just won't cut it (e.g., pages that are heavily reliant on AJAX), you can switch to a smarter crawler.

Ask the Oracles

The site crawl gives us a wealth of information, but to take this audit to the next level, we need to consult the search engines. Unfortunately, search engines don't like to give unrestricted access to their servers so we'll just have to settle for the next best thing: webmaster tools.

Most of the major search engines offer a set of diagnostic tools for webmasters, but for our purposes, we'll focus on Google Webmaster Tools and Bing Webmaster Tools. If you still haven't registered your site with these services, now's as good a time as any.

Now that we've consulted the search engines, we also need to get input from the site's visitors. The easiest way to get that input is through the site's analytics.

The Web is being monitored by an ever-expanding list of analytics packages, but for our purposes, it doesn't matter which package your site is using. As long as you can investigate your site's traffic patterns, you're good to go for our upcoming analysis.

At this point, we're not finished collecting data, but we have enough to begin the analysis so let's get this party started!

SEO Audit Analysis

The actual analysis is broken down into five large sections:

Accessibility
Indexability
On-Page Ranking Factors
Off-Page Ranking Factors
Competitive Analysis

(1) Accessibility

If search engines and users can't access your site, it might as well not exist. With that in mind, let's make sure your site's pages are accessible.

Robots.txt

The robots.txt file is used to restrict search engine crawlers from accessing sections of your website. Although the file is very useful, it's also an easy way to inadvertently block crawlers.

As an extreme example, the following robots.txt entry restricts all crawlers from accessing any part of your site:

Robots.txt Example

Manually check the robots.txt file, and make sure it's not restricting access to important sections of your site. You can also use your Google Webmaster Tools account to identify URLs that are being blocked by the file.

Robots Meta Tags

The robots meta tag is used to tell search engine crawlers if they are allowed to index a specific page and follow its links.

When analyzing your site's accessibility, you want to identify pages that are inadvertently blocking crawlers. Here is an example of a robots meta tag that prevents crawlers from indexing a page and following its links:

Robots Meta Tag Example

HTTP Status Codes

Search engines and users are unable to access your site's content if you have URLs that return errors (i.e., 4xx and 5xx HTTP status codes).

During your site crawl, you should identify and fix any URLs that return errors (this also includes soft 404 errors). If a broken URL's corresponding page is no longer available on your site, redirect the URL to a relevant replacement.

Speaking of redirection, this is also a great opportunity to inventory your site's redirection techniques. Be sure the site is using 301 HTTP redirects (and not 302 HTTP redirects, meta refresh redirects, or JavaScript-based redirects) because they pass the most link juice to their destination pages.

XML Sitemap

Your site's XML Sitemap provides a roadmap for search engine crawlers to ensure they can easily find all of your site's pages.

Here are a few important questions to answer about your Sitemap:

Is the Sitemap a well-formed XML document? Does it follow the Sitemap protocol? Search engines expect a specific format for Sitemaps; if yours doesn't conform to this format, it might not be processed correctly.

Has the Sitemap been submitted to your webmaster tools accounts? It's possible for search engines to find the Sitemap without your assistance, but you should explicitly notify them about its location.

Did you find pages in the site crawl that do not appear in the Sitemap? You want to make sure the Sitemap presents an up-to-date view of the website.

Are there pages listed in the Sitemap that do not appear in the site crawl? If these pages still exist on the site, they are currently orphaned. Find an appropriate location for them in the site architecture, and make sure they receive at least one internal backlink.

Your site architecture defines the overall structure of your website, including its vertical depth (how many levels it has) as well as its horizontal breadth at each level.

When evaluating your site architecture, identify how many clicks it takes to get from the homepage to other important pages. Also, evaluate how well pages are linking to others in the site's hierarchy, and make sure the most important pages are prioritized in the architecture.

Ideally, you want to strive for a flatter site architecture that takes advantage of both vertical and horizontal linking opportunities.

Flash and JavaScript Navigation

The best site architecture in the world can be undermined by navigational elements that are inaccessible to search engines. Although search engine crawlers have become much more intelligent over the years, it is still safer to avoid Flash and JavaScript navigation.

To evaluate your site's usage of JavaScript navigation, you can perform two separate site crawls: one with JavaScript disabled and another with it enabled. Then, you can compare the corresponding link graphs to identify sections of the site that are inaccessible without JavaScript.

Site Performance

Users have a very limited attention span, and if your site takes too long to load, they will leave. Similarly, search engine crawlers have a limited amount of time that they can allocate to each site on the Internet. Consequently, sites that load quickly are crawled more thoroughly and more consistently than slower ones.

You can evaluate your site's performance with a number of different tools. Google Page Speed and YSlow check a given page using various best practices and then provide helpful suggestions (e.g., enable compression, leverage a content distribution network for heavily used resources, etc.). Pingdom Full Page Test presents an itemized list of the objects loaded by a page, their sizes, and their load times. Here's an excerpt from Pingdom's results for SEOmoz:

Pingdom Results for SEOmoz

These tools help you identify pages (and specific objects on those pages) that are serving as bottlenecks for your site. Then, you can itemize suggestions for optimizing those bottlenecks and improving your site's performance.

Source : http://moz.com/blog/how-to-perform-the-worlds-greatest-seo-audit

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SEO, Your Website & You: 5 Myths & 10 Tips

Have you ever had a call like this?

Client: So I heard Google's Matt Cutts said links are [dead/bad/over], so I stopped all my link building, fired my SEO agency, and wanted to ask you what we should do next.

Mind BlownMe: (long pause) Umm, you did what? Were you penalized or positioning badly?

Client: Oh no, ranking in the top 3 for most of our keywords, great traffic, but you know I have been reading a little and then I saw Matt said to stop all link building, so I thought I better do that.

Me: Ummmm. OK, no...

Amazingly, even in 2014, many people have heard bits of information about websites and search engine optimization (SEO) that are either no longer relevant, completely misplaced, or simply erroneous. These all need to die really horrible deaths.

SEO Mythbusting

Myths can start so easily and quickly become pervasive. Listening to them can do some serious damage to your site or business. So let's review five of the most common myths.

Myth 1: If You Build it, They Will Come

This is a favorite mantra of the content marketing. Just build an amazing website with even more amazing content and watch the traffic roll on in.

Really? Well, no.

If it were that easy, all SEO professionals would be writers or out of work. Unfortunately, while great writing and great content is a large part of SEO and something your site definitely needs, it also needs links, a strong technical base, fast page downloads, and the list goes on and on.

Create content, but other SEO tactics are needed unless you want to be sitting all alone in a big field.

Myth 2: Link Building is Dead

While Cutts would prefer you never build another link to your website, this isn't "Field of Dreams". You can build it, but it doesn't mean traffic will come to your site.

First, Cutts never said links were dead. In fact, it's quite the opposite.

Cutts said Google has tried excluding links from the algorithm and the results were "much worse." So while I don't think it will stay forever this way, we have years before it potentially could go away, according to Cutts.

Links aren't dead. You need links. What do you do?

You don't want to go to a link farm and buy links and get your site potentially penalized because that method is dead (unless you really, really know what you're doing or using "churn and burn" domains).

However, you can hire someone with experience to go create a strategic link acquisition plan and help you implement it. This means that you use strategic methods to acquire links in a way that would appear natural.

For example, let's say you sponsor a charity event every year, making sure to tie that in with local news, press coverage, and maybe the charity's own news release. All tied back to you. This is a very obvious way you can acquire natural links to your site that are part of a link building campaign, but NOT a link buying campaign.

A link builder will have many more inventive and fantastic ways to do this and the best part, it will all appear completely natural because basically they are, just with a little push. Most important to note, this is the most highly scrutinized area of SEO right now, so hire well.

Links are alive. Just some of the methods died.

Source : http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2339605/SEO-Your-Website-You-5-Myths-10-Tips 

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New Title Tag Guidelines & Preview Tool

Google's recent SERP redesign may not seem like a big deal to the casual observer, but at least one change could have a real impact on SEOs. This post will explore the impact of the redesign on title tags, and define a new, data-driven length limit, but first, a new tool...

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Title tag preview tool (2014 edition)

Pardon the reverse order of this post, but we wanted to put the tool first for repeat visitors. Just enter your title and the search query keywords (for highlighting) below to preview your result in the redesign:

Enter Your Full Title Text:

Enter Search Phrase (optional):

I'm really happy for you, and Imma let you finish, but Beyonce has one of the best

www.example.com/example

This is your page description. The font and size of the description has not changed in the latest redesign. Descriptions get cut off after roughly 160 characters ...

Note: Enter keyword phrases as natural queries, without commas. This preview tool only highlights exact-match text (not related concepts) and is only intended as an approximation of actual Google results.

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How the redesign impacts titles

Google's redesign increased the font size of result titles, while keeping the overall container the same size. Look at the following search result both before and after the redesign:

The title on the top (old design) has a small amount of room to spare. After the redesign (bottom), it's lost six full characters. The old guidelines no longer apply, and so the rest of this post is an attempt to create a new set of guidelines for title tag length based on data from real SERPs.

Read more: http://moz.com/blog/new-title-tag-guidelines-preview-tool

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Why SEO is About Pull, Not Push

The best advice for executing SEO in 2014 is to always be open to new ways of thinking about the industry. Over the past few years, SEO has been forced to evolve and segment into several distinct practices: content marketing, public relations, reputation management, technical consulting and so on.

While these segments are often divisive – geeks shunning community managers, web analysts dismissing copywriters – their presence forces both generalists and specialists alike to be more introspective, to question the services they offer, and to push the industry to evolve at an excitingly disruptive pace.

Recently I've been contemplating whether SEO should be considered a marketing service at all – and I've been meditating on the fact that it is undeniably closer to being a "feature" of web development, rather than a way of marketing a brand to an audience.

Thinking about SEO in this way unlocks a new approach to search optimization. It distances the SEO folks from other marketing channels and allows them to adopt a vocabulary that imitates developers and designers.

When we start thinking about SEO as a feature of a product, instead of a marketing service, it aligns efforts with innovative methodologies found elsewhere in digital: lean/agile development, responsive operating systems and user-centric design.

Though SEO is admittedly still – at its heart – a way of optimizing a marketing channel, I've always found it productive to think about our service offering through alternative or unconventional lenses.

How to Improve Upon the Product

Historically, search optimization comes as an afterthought for many businesses.

Once the site has been built, the SEO team is usually brought on to "push" the website out into search engines, and execute tactics in hopes of bringing more visibility and traffic to the website.

 

 Many SEO professionals subscribe to this methodology. They encourage and educate clients to perceive search optimization as a way to better market their website within the search marketplace. They use marketing-speak, such as share of voice, to describe the hold or presence of a brand within a vertical.

Read more : http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2331206/Why-SEO-is-About-Pull-Not-Push

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Link Building With a Healthy Dose of Marketing: 8 Ways to Solve Problems for Free

Show of hands: who likes working for free?

Let's be honest: no one really likes working for free.

I'm not talking about volunteering. I volunteer around my community when I have the time. I enjoy it, and believe everyone should give back. That's different though. I'm one of the 13 percent, but I wouldn't do my job without a subsequent revenue stream.

Link building is hard work. It's one of the few SEO tasks you can't have total control over – it consists of convincing other people that it's in their best interest (or their audience's best interest) to link to you. Convincing people to do you a favor is never easy.

Another reason link building is so difficult: it's never a singular marketing task done within a bubble.

We have a number of other marketing concerns within our link building campaigns that must be addressed as we're working to build links. These concerns include:

• Are we positively and accurately representing our client and their brand?
• Are we fostering positive relationships and impressions as we build our links?
• Are our methods sustainable, and adding to the betterment of the web?
• Are we excited to show our links to the client, and would we hesitate to show other link building professionals?

One link building method that doesn't produce links 100 percent of the time, but helps us ensure we're meeting other marketing concerns, is solving problems for free.

Solving problems for free is the core of what Rand Fishkin of Moz calls "investing in non-measurable serendipitous marketing."

The concept is to recognize and solve a problem for a targeted group of people within your niche. If this is done consistently, eventually there will be a serendipitous, or unexpectedly large, payoff.

Solving problems for free can result in branding opportunities, foster positive relationships, boost your authority, and even help establish your company as a thought leader within your space.

However, solving problems for free shouldn't be your only link building (or marketing) strategy, as it's unpredictable. There's no reliable input>output. Fishkin recommends 20 percent of your time/budget be allocated into serendipitous projects.

Read more : http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2326400/Link-Building-With-a-Healthy-Dose-of-Marketing-8-Ways-to-Solve-Problems-for-Free

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6 SEO Predictions for 2014

For those that thought that the digital marketing landscape would see dramatic change in 2013, the year didn't disappoint. Last year I made 6 predictions, and it is time for me to give it another shot. But first, let's see how I did last year!

Scoring My 2013 Predictions:

1. We'll get confirmation that steering anchor text in links you get is bad. Score a full point for this one. Google now discusses this in their Webmaster Guidelines
2. The relevance of a linking page will carry increasing weight. Well, no proof of this one. I maintain it is true, and that belief certainly is impacting the content marketing work we do with our clients. I will take a half point here.
3. People will finally accept that +1's aren't treated by Google like a link. I think the proof of this one is available, but there are still more people who believe that +1's are a ranking factor than not. With some reluctance, I will take a half point for this one, too.
4. Rel=author will become a ranking signal. Another area that people debate heartily. Many will say that I should take a full point here. However, I will take a zero instead, because I don't think it has become a ranking signal. For people who think I gave myself too much credit on #2 or #3, we can call it even, OK?
5. Google+ will begin to show some of its true influence in search results. Definitely happening. I take a full point here.
6. The industry will start to talk about the role of landing page optimization in SEO. People have been talking about bounce rate for some time, but that isn't what I mean here. I was talking about real management of the customer experience. Well that has in fact begun to happen. The driving factors for this one will be Semantic Search and Hummingbird. However, not as broadly as I had thought it would, so half a point.

Read more : http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2325063/6-SEO-Predictions-for-2014

Author Bio :

Mr. Peter Doguly is an energetic and enthusiastic digital marketer who loves to write about seo,sem and clone scripts like kickstarter clone, thumbtack clone, etc... 

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