Louisville Facebook Marketing Tips: Meta’s Ad Policies for 2024
Author: Gideon Harrington
Digital advertising is always changing, and staying informed about platform policies is important for creating impactful and compliant ads. For Louisville marketing teams looking to leverage Meta’s platforms effectively as we move into 2024, understanding and adhering to these policies is key to avoiding ad rejections and fostering customer engagement. In some cases it can also help increase your impressions.
Three essential Meta ad policies to keep in mind
Avoid Nonexistent Functionality in Ads Ensure that your ad creative is honest and functional. Ads should not contain deceptive features like “fake” video play buttons or other elements that suggest functionality that doesn’t exist. Familiarize yourself with Meta’s guidelines on nonexistent functionality to craft more trustworthy ads.
Respect Personal Attributes It’s important to create ads that are respectful and inclusive. Ads must not imply or make assumptions about a person’s race, ethnicity, religion, beliefs, or age. By following Meta’s personal attributes policy, you can create ads that resonate positively with diverse audiences.
Be Mindful of Personal Health and Appearance When promoting health-related products, it’s essential to do so in a way that doesn’t foster negative self-perception. Ads should be supportive and empowering, aligning with Meta’s policy on personal health and appearance. This approach not only ensures compliance but also builds trust with your audience.
Troubleshooting Rejected Ads: A Two-Step Approach
If your ad faces rejection, here’s how you can address it:
Edit and Resubmit Your Ad: Review the ad content for compliance with Meta’s policies. Update the imagery or text as needed to meet the guidelines. Once revised, resubmit your ad through the Ads Manager for approval.
Request Another Ad Review: If the reason for rejection is unclear or you believe it’s incorrect, don’t hesitate to request a further review. This step can provide clarification or potentially overturn an incorrect rejection.
For Louisville marketing teams, adapting to these policies is not just about compliance; it’s about crafting ad experiences that are effective, respectful, and engaging. By keeping these guidelines at the forefront of your digital advertising strategy, you can create campaigns that resonate with your audience while maintaining the integrity of your brand.
Avoiding Common Violations: A Guide for Louisville Marketers
To ensure your advertisements are both compliant and effective, it’s essential to recognize and avoid common pitfalls. Here’s a deeper dive into some frequent areas of confusion and how to navigate them:
Personal Attributes Ads should not assert or imply anything about personal attributes. This includes avoiding direct or indirect references to a person’s race, ethnicity, religion, beliefs, or age. Example of Violation: Using phrases like “Are you disabled? We can help!” directly addresses the user and implies a personal attribute, which is not allowed.
Personal Health and Appearance Avoid creating a negative self-perception in your ads, especially when promoting diet, weight loss, or other health-related products. Example of Violation: Using before-and-after images to display idealized outcomes can be misleading and is discouraged.
Low Quality or Disruptive Content Ensure that your ads do not lead to external landing pages that offer an unexpected or disruptive experience. This includes avoiding misleading headlines or prompts for unnatural interaction with the ad, and avoiding landing pages with minimal original content or an abundance of unrelated or low-quality ads. Example of Violation: Ads that use excessively cropped images or force users to click to view the full image can be considered misleading.
Nonexistent Functionality Ads should not contain images with fake functionalities like play buttons, notifications, checkboxes, or other interactive elements that don’t actually work. Example of Violation: Replicating a play button in an ad image is a typical example of nonexistent functionality.
Unrealistic Outcomes Ads must not make promises or suggest outcomes that are unrealistic, particularly in areas like health, weight loss, or economic opportunities. Example of Violation: Claims about cures for incurable diseases or guaranteed financial success are considered unrealistic outcomes.
For Louisville marketers, understanding these common areas of violation is essential. By creating ads that are respectful, truthful, and aligned with Meta’s policies, you can build a more trustworthy and effective advertising experience. This not only helps in avoiding ad rejections but also enhances your brand’s reputation and engagement with your audience.
Google’s Helpfulness Core Update: Write for People, Not for Robots
Author: Reddit
Google’s latest update, known as the Helpfulness update, is reshaping the landscape of SEO and content creation. Danny Sullivan, Google’s Search Liaison, has shed light on what constitutes ‘unhelpful content’ in the eyes of the world’s largest search engine. As an advocate for user-centric content, Sullivan underscores that the primary red flag for Google is content created with the intent to rank well in search results rather than to genuinely serve end users. While creating content that search engines can find is important, what is more important is remembering your true audience: people.
Stop writing content for search engines
Sullivan’s guidance is unambiguous: content written for search engines rather than human audiences is considered unhelpful. For instance, creating a list of “20 SEO Tricks to rank on Google” that are just common knowledge with the main goal of ranking for “SEO Tricks” instead of providing real value to readers exemplifies content that Google would label as unhelpful. This pivots the focus from search engine optimization to the actual value and relevance for the audience. This will likely have a serious negative impact on sites and pages that employ sketchy methods for keeping people scrolling, for example, recipe websites that bury the actual recipe under a deep bed of search engine bait text. This move is nothing new. We have seen similar updates to search ranking that target and derank unhelpful page designs to falsely increase SEO and SERPs while annoying visitors. The infamous slideshow article trick may immediately come to mind for SEO specialists who suffered through the age of the click-through wars. In the end, the message is simple: write for people, not for robots, because the goal is to create content that helps real people, and keeps the ‘robot’ of AI and SEO tools as a passive intermediary instead of the main target.
Highlights on the Google Helpfulness Core Update:
Danny Sullivan’s Warning: Google’s Search Liaison, Danny Sullivan, highlights the issue with content created mainly for search engine rankings rather than for human readers.
Criteria for Unhelpful Content: Writing content like top 10 lists mainly to rank for keywords is considered unhelpful by Google.
Content Creation Tools Caution: Using tools to find content topics might lead to content that Google deems unhelpful if the focus is on scoring rather than genuine content creation.
Guidance on Useful Content: Sullivan emphasizes creating people-first content that answers questions and provides value as opposed to search engine-first content.
Signals for Helpful Content: Google uses web signals to determine content helpfulness, favoring content that addresses user queries effectively.
Content and Quality Questions: Google suggests self-assessment questions regarding originality, comprehensiveness, insight, value, and credibility of content.
Expertise Matters: Questions surrounding the expertise involved in content creation are crucial for establishing trustworthiness.
Page Experience Significance: A good page experience across various aspects is important for high rankings in Google’s systems.
People-First Content Approach: Content should be created primarily for people, with a focus on expertise and satisfaction from the reader’s perspective.
Avoid Search Engine-First Tactics: Google discourages creating content solely to gain search engine rankings, warning against practices like keyword stuffing or chasing trending topics without genuine expertise.
SEO and Content Creation: While SEO is essential, it should complement people-first content rather than dominate the creation process.
Understanding E-E-A-T: Google uses E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) as a framework to identify high-quality content.
Quality Rater Guidelines: Google’s quality rater guidelines help creators understand how their content may be perceived by Google’s algorithms.
Content Evaluation Tips: Creators are encouraged to ask “Who, How, and Why” about their content to align with what Google’s systems reward.
Disclosures on Automation and AI: Transparency about the use of AI or automation in content creation can aid in establishing trust with readers.
Sullivan points out that relying excessively on tools to determine content topics can inadvertently lead to the production of unhelpful content. He suggests that content creators should prioritize the “who, how, and why” of content production over merely aiming for a high ‘score’ that would supposedly please search engines.
Answers a user’s question effectively
Responding to a query from Simone de Vlaming about how Google discerns the intent behind content, Sullivan explains that Google’s algorithms look for signals that align with what people generally consider helpful. Content that answers a user’s question effectively is likely to be seen as ‘people-first’ and, therefore, helpful.
crackdown on high-domain-authority news site exploits
The Helpfulness update has implications for SEO strategies. ‘Parasite SEO,’ which exploits high-domain-authority news sites for quick rankings, might take a hit if it dilutes the site’s primary focus. The use of AI in content creation could also be under scrutiny, especially if it leads to content that lacks firsthand expertise or appears automated without clear disclosure. For example, this article employed Ai to design the post image! (Which we are disclosing to you here, but also in our metadata.) ‘Tool-Optimized Content,’ like that created using SEO tools for research, (think SEMrush or AHREFS) will most likely not be at significant risk, since the bulk of research and content development is still person first, and provided it also caters to user needs and offers genuine value.
Focus on Topical Authority
Strategies likely to benefit from the update include building ‘Topical Authority,’ which entails creating focused content around a specific niche. Google favors sites with a clear primary purpose, and a concentration on topical authority aligns with that preference. For example, we allow guest posts but only from a select few and under a limited number of topics that we know our Louisville-local audience of website owners have an interest in. Additionally, content optimized for user metrics, such as minimizing the need for users to search elsewhere for better information, may gain traction. This speaks directly to E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) page and site structure goals. Make it easy for people to find what they want on your site and you will do well with the new helpfulness update.
Navigate the Helpfulness update successful
To navigate the Helpfulness update successfully, Google advises content creators to ask themselves key questions about the originality, comprehensiveness, and trustworthiness of their content. These questions address factors like spelling and stylistic issues, mass production, expertise, and the overall page experience. In plain terms, do you enjoy reading your own content? If not, you may want to rethink your content strategy.
People-First Content is essential
The main emphasis, if you have not already noticed, is on ‘People-First Content.’ Google encourages content creators to craft material that serves their intended audience with depth and expertise. Conversely, ‘Search Engine-First Content’ should be avoided, as it is made primarily for ranking purposes and could lead to penalties. The good news is this is a “if you know you know” situation. If you are not sure what that means there is a good chance you are already doing the right thing because your content is guided by human interaction and your very real experiences that you want to share. If however you are using so many SEO tools to create content that becoming a cyborg is starting to appeal to you, I would strongly suggest taking a step back and taking a “Touch Grass” approach to your content strategy. Slip on your real-world experience and write from the heart. You don’t have to produce The Lord of the Rings or the Magna Carta for each new post, but try to come at it from a perspective that what you write needs to be engaging and influential in a real and authentic way.
A call to action for content with integrity, authenticity, and audience Focus
Google’s Helpfulness update is a call to action for creators to produce content with integrity, authenticity, and a focus on the audience. By aligning with Google’s guidance, content creators can ensure they are contributing positively to the vast pool of online information and standing out in the digital arena.
Helpful Links and resources on Raising the Bar for Content Quality:
6 SEO Trends That are Bound to Rule the Coming Decade
Author: Hazel Raoult
Optimizing and ranking your website pre-2010 era was pretty easy. You’d just have to follow simple steps like getting your website up, throwing in a bunch of keywords, writing a bit about the topic, and Voila! Google would start ranking your website on top.
However, that’s not the case anymore. Also, due to the internet revolution, the number of websites that compete with each other to rank higher exploded. Due to these reasons, it started getting difficult for search engines to crawl and index the massive database of the internet.
Today, the Google search index contains hundreds of billions of web pages and is well over 100,000,000 gigabytes. Thus, it needs a formidable way to evaluate and rank each page.
The evolution of Search Engine Optimization as seen in the last decade that ended with 2020 was, if described in one word, stellar.
Search Engines, especially Google have improved their quality and user experience by shifting their focus from keyword-oriented to quality-oriented results. And as the days pass by, SEO will keep getting evolved as and when new trends emerge.
Meanwhile, let’s see some of the SEO trends that are bound to rule the coming decade.
6 SEO Trends That Will Dominate the SERP Ranking for Coming Decade
1. Content Quality & User Intent
Yes, content quality has long been here and affects significantly on the SERP rankings. However, many websites haven’t adopted this as their SEO mantra. They are still focused on short-term SEO gains through building backlinks, optimizing technical SEO, or doing digital PR.
However, these are not suitable for long-term SEO gains. Also, due to the massive size of the database, the Google algorithm will only rank pages that offer remarkable quality on a consistent basis.
Websites creating generic content will have lower chances of ranking than the ones that publish unique, quality content on topics not covered by others previously.
One way to adopt this in your competitive content marketing strategy is by researching well for the user intent of your target audiences to scour unique topics. Now, organize and prioritize these notions by relevance and cover them one by one.
The quality content doesn’t necessarily have to be SEO-friendly but it must fulfill the users’ intent and their expectations. And if the industry leaders are to be believed, Google has long been working to detect the intent behind every search users make.
Thus, considering the value of content quality and user intent it encapsulates, this trend is bound to rule the coming years as a SERP ranking signal.
2. SEO Automation
From admin workflows to IT services and marketing, automation has proven its effectiveness. SEO practices such as website audits, competitor analysis, search intent detection, and many others have already been automated. And from 2022 onwards, it’ll become more widespread as more SEO professionals around the world increasingly adopt automation with open arms.
Driven by AI and machine learning, SEO automation can intelligently do technical audits to scour issues by content type. Also, many SEO experts utilize SEO automation as quality assurance for their SEO services.
Moreover, AI-powered automation tools monitor potential SEO issues in real-time and warn as soon as possible to eliminate and resolve them beforehand. The SEO automation trend is continually picking up the pace. And it has gone from ‘nice to have’ to necessary when dealing with larger and more complex sites.
3. Mobile & Page Experience
Not so recently, Google had announced the mobile-first indexing for the whole web. And recently, it has started implementing a page experience update that aims to rank sites with better user experience scores for both mobile and web.
Thanks to this update, the entirety of the mobile and web, from the discovery phase to engagement, everything will correlate and be in sync to offer the best possible page experience.
The ripple effects of mobile-first indexing and page experience updates will cause a massive re-organization in the SERP ranking that we all can witness in the coming years. Thus, brands should start preparing their website from the onwards to not lose any significant SERP rankings.
4. SERP Localization
As per Brightlocal’s Consumer Survey, consumers that use Google for local business evaluation increased from 63% in 2020 to 81% in 2021. Also, the following graph shows that 21% of consumers use the internet every day to find information about local businesses and 99% have done so in the last year.
From these statistics, we can idealize that Google will focus more on presenting localized content in the SERP results over the next few years. Already, the location-specific pages or content is outranking those who ranked at the top and focused more on global reach.
This will keep on picking up and become more obvious in the coming decade. Thus, websites with global target audiences will have to necessarily form a local presence to rank higher on localized SERP.
5. Metaverse Marketing
Metaverse marketing may seem like a new trend in the marketing sphere that’s thought to fade away with time. However, it has come a long way from being just another buzzword to a revolutionary strategy for marketers.
Metaverse can be conceptualized as the successor of the internet that we enjoy today. It brings the capabilities of the internet, virtual reality, and augmented reality together. As per Statista, there will be around a billion AR active users in 2022, which is supposed to cross the 1.7 billion mark in 2024.
Just like how brands optimize their web presence to get found on the current internet, they’ll have to find different ways to optimize their presence on the next generation of the internet i.e. Metaverse. A visual content strategy will play an important role in getting found on the Metaverse.
Audit your content strategy to find and optimize it with new content types and can implement AR, VR, and 3D experiences to leverage Metaverse marketing.
6. Voice & Visual Search
As mentioned in the previous point, visual as well as voice search will take precedence over the normal search approach.
As per one report, more than one-third of Americans use a voice search feature while 71% of consumers prefer making a voice search over typing. Another report projects that Google Smart Speaker Sales will hit 140 million in 2025.
This foreshadows that Google will prioritize the sites optimized for voice search and will feature them in the snippet results or show/speak when searched using smart assistants.
The same will apply for the visual search. After the introduction of Google Lens, the search engine giant is becoming better at interpreting SEO-optimized images day by day. The image recognition software will enable users to search for products and other things on the web.
Also, Google Discover uses images for tailored results. Thus, it’s predicted that normal search may start to resemble a lot more like Discover results filled with visuals.
Conclusion
Trends are known for their quick appeal when they appear first in the market. Many of those trends become obsolete after a certain period or when they are no longer relevant to the market. However, the above-mentioned SEO trends have been here for a few years now and we believe they’ll continue to be relevant in the coming years.
As more research and development are being conducted in the same direction, many of the trends listed in this article will go mainstream and rule the coming decade. Thus, brands need to sharpen their knowledge horns to drive sustainable and meaningful growth in the near future.
Author Bio
Hazel Raoult is a freelance marketing writer and works with PRmention. She has 6+ years of experience in writing about business, entrepreneurship, marketing, and all things SaaS. Hazel loves to split her time between writing, editing, and hanging out with her family.
7 Ways Coding Can Help Your SEO
Author: Jasmine Gordon
Nowadays, the world of digital marketing is a competitive battlefield. Like any battlefield, it’s crucial to be fully equipped, which means having a strategic content plan and effective marketing tools.
Indeed, content is king. However, some strategies must not be missed to ensure optimized search engine rankings. Coding is one of them.
For many webmasters, search engine optimization (SEO) is about boosting specific on-page variables to maximize the chances of being ranked for keywords or soliciting backlinks from qualified sources to strengthen off-page SEO. However, coding also plays a critical role in your site’s optimization. By harnessing coding for SEO, you are like building something on a robust foundation.
To help you understand why coding is essential when doing SEO, we’ll walk you through their relationship and how the former can boost your SEO. Let’s dive right in!
Does one need coding skills for SEO?
SEO doesn’t essentially require hands-on coding. But learning to code is a huge plus.
With coding skills and knowledge of technical SEO, one has a significant advantage in better optimizing a website and understanding technical issues that need addressing. A good understanding of SEO source code can also help a professional determine how to display a webpage content and peek at your competitors’ website source code.
To make the most of SEO practices, it’s crucial to have a good technical infrastructure, which includes programming. This programming is essential to optimize a site, especially for Google and cross-platform compatibility.
How coding helps SEO
SEO and coding are profoundly linked, thus providing benefits to each other. To know more about these benefits, let’s discuss how coding helps SEO.
1. Coding facilitates a seamless page experience for users
Page Experience involves a set of factors that measures how satisfactory it is for users to interact with a page beyond its pure information value.
Search engines like Google favor what works for the users better. So, with proper and well-written code, you ensure hassle-free webpage interaction. This means having a technical front that complements your user interface. With this, your website becomes more favorable for Google, thus resulting in improved search rankings.
2. Coding makes indexing easier for the web crawlers
Many say that SEO professionals must have even a little knowledge of HTML and CSS. This may be primarily because making changes to or improving the HTML tags, microdata, and website architecture, allow search engine algorithms to locate, understand, and rank the website faster.
3. Code validation allows for search engine spider accessibility
Search engine spider programs usually have serious limitations in terms of crawling and indexing your website. Given that they only effectively read text, other elements on your site—image, video, audio, and script files—can avert important site text from being crawled and indexed properly.
Should you notice that many parts of your text are missing from your web pages, if you have code validation skills, you can better cross-check if search engines can find your data.
4. Create SEF URL rewrites with coding
Making search-engine-friendly (SEF) URLs, which you can rewrite with coding, is advantageous for both SEO and user experience. To reduce the number of inapposite characters and codes in your URL, you’ll have to modify your website’s codes. But this depends on the specific platform your site runs on. If your site uses WordPress or another content management system (CMS), you will have access to internal dashboards or plugins that will permit you to make important changes. When it comes to open source e-commerce platforms though, you may need to address your permalink structure within your hypertext access file.
5. Coding allows you to establish 301 redirects for proper PageRank flow
When it comes to setting up proper 301 redirects, From an SEO perspective, there are two coding situations to consider in terms of setting up effective 301 redirects. First, you utilize this code to notify search engines that both world wide web (www) and non-www URL versions should be treated equally. Second, should you ever move content within your website, you establish a 301 redirect to inform search engine spiders of the action. By doing so, you reduce the potential loss of PageRank that may occur when backlinks can no longer resolve to your previous URLs.
6. Accelerate loading times with combined code files
In recent times, site loading speed has been considered as a huge search engine ranking factor per Google’s stated desire to reward swift sites in the search results. Unfortunately, if your site is built using many different scripts for additional functionality purposes, loading all the various code files will significantly bring down your site’s performance. To minimize long loading times due to excess script demands, it’s best to combine these individual code sheets into a smaller number of files. This way, you also improve your site’s overall SEO.
7. Utilize “rel=canonical” to deal with duplicate content issues
You may have duplicate content issues if you use a CMS program like Magento, Joomla, or WordPress to build your site. Every time you generate a new post for your website, these systems may automatically create any or all of the following options:
Yoursite.com/post-name.html
Yoursite.com/category1/post-name.html
Yoursite.com/archive/date/post-name.html
Since these different URLs redirect to the same page, search engines may subject you to duplicate content filters within their platforms, especially if you don’t specify exactly how each URL should be regarded or treated. To instruct search engines to better handle your URLs, you can use the “rel=canonical” tag. You can add this feature to your website’s <head> section and tell the search engines to disregard, redirect, or index a specific page for the URL.
In a Nutshell
SEO and coding altogether may be a complex concept, but by considering the best practices and benefits above, you can effectively optimize your search engine rankings and achieve your marketing goals.
How To Make Your Images SEO-Friendly
Author: Frank Hamilton
Every business owner should define what strategy they’ll follow to promote their products among the users, engage more customers, and promote the website’s ranking on search engine rates. However, sometimes it can be challenging to choose an exact approach that will be effective for your venue.
Before finding a proper strategy, business owners go through trial and error in increasing their services’ brand awareness by trying various experiments and marketing techniques. Only after many attempts will they succeed in finding out what strategy fits your local business prosperity.
Link building as a key approach for personal brand enhancement
Link building and backlinks implementation are the most useful approaches to creating a great local network and boosting your SERP position. You shouldn’t underestimate the significance of link building and backlink profile creation; indeed, it can bring a high ranking on Google and increase your clients. So, if you want to get a spot among the top tens, consider link-building efficiency.
If you don’t know how to launch a campaign for local link building, entrust this process to SEO geeks who will promote your website authority and engage more potential clients. Using an efficient tool for link building for a local business called linksmanagement.com, a website owner will receive a strong backlink profile with relevant links from credible sources that will bring even more users locally and worldwide. So, it’ll result in leads and sales increase.
LinksManagement is a good platform for effective link building for local businesses. Getting high SERP for your website means receiving more organic traffic and clients. Also, don’t forget that when dealing with local link building, consider your geolocation for more details and enable Google to define it correctly. Such a technique aims to engage more users and profit.
Creating a competitive and client-oriented brand is an effective way to outshine opponents in the niche. But, to do it smoothly, an entrepreneur should know well what steps to follow to be a leader in their area. The key point is to know your target audience, its needs, interests, and what information people expect to get from your source.
To succeed in personal brand creation, you need to carefully study your audience, your niche’s peculiarities, and nuances. You need to clarify what you can offer your client and surpass competitors. To promote your brand recognition, it’s crucial to work on your product appearance. You also need edited photos to make your brand memorable and outstanding.
Search Engine Optimization for Images: What Methods to Use to Increase Your Visibility
To climb up Google ranking, you need to arrange a solid SEO strategy. To catch the audience’s trust is also crucial to optimize images for SEO that will inevitably get more views for your source. So, each brand owner and marketer should know which tips to adhere to to make SEO-friendly images:
Name images properly to separate their naming via keywords with hyphens.
Apply consistent alt text that will provide a description for images.
Use captions to provide relevant information to the image.
Lower the used images’ size to make loading time fast.
Index your images by adding them to XML sitemaps.
Apply standard image resolution that is 72dpi.
Add images relevant to an article.
So, don’t neglect each aspect of image SE optimization to make your content more catchy, informative, and accessible to a broader audience. Learn how to improve images to speed up page loading and ranking. Image SEO optimization brings considerable benefits to your website promotion, such as enhancing users’ activity and rapid page loading time, resulting in superb ranking.
To make your SEO image strategy work, it’ll never be over to apply clear SEO best strategies in 2022. They’ll prove your professionalism in generating high-quality content making it user-centered and attractive to social media algorithms. This standard, but highly efficient practices will bring you profit and the audience’s interest:
Stellar content with trusted backlinks.
Choosing proper keywords and phrases.
Avoid click-baiting to boost your ranking.
Getting backlinks using white hat SEO principles.
Creating unique articles referring to credible sources.
By sticking to the above-mentioned careful SEO techniques, you’ll gain a positive reputation without using blackhat SEO and images copying without modifying them at all. Instead, implement proper keywords, include them smoothly in articles metadata, and place captivating images to increase a complete, useful, and well-optimized website.
Which Links Are Best Not to Use for SEO
Author: Rebecca Shinn
SEO Links Every Website Owner Should Avoid
The success of your marketing campaigns depends on the quality of your SEO site links. From internal tags to inbound and SEO outbound links, link-building benefits your business in many ways. For starters, it increases your credibility to boost traffic and SEO scores. Italso increases the value to readers, grows revenue from SEO affiliate links, and reduces bounce rates. However, not all SEO linksare good for your website. Some attract search engine penalties and affect your rankings. Here are some SEO links that the best dating sites avoid.
Press Release SEO Links
Press release SEO links were once popular because they were easy to get. After publishing a press release, all you needed to do was syndicate it to distribution websites and get numerous SEO links.
However, website owners abused press release links, pushing Google to consider a link scheme method. This is especially true for SEO links that target the main keyword with over-optimized text. To be safe from Google penalties, ensure your press release SEO links don’t pass PageRank. The best alternative is adding nofollow to press release tags.
Blog Comments
As long as you use them cautiously, blog comment links aren’t entirely discouraged. You can get natural traffic when you offer helpful advice redirecting readers to a blog. However, search engines will detect keyword-stuffed SEO tags going to one site.
The same applies to chat forum spam. It’s not uncommon for users to stuff their discussion forum signatures with links. These schemes are common across different platforms, from social boards to niche websites. Remember, you can still earn readers’ trust by having constructive discussions on the comment section without manipulation moves.
Substandard Guest Posts
Some website owners write low-quality guest posts to boost their ratings with backlinks. Google can disregard guest posts if they don’t provide value to readers or your marketing campaign. Search engines are also against too many guest post backlinks since they manipulate algorithms.
The key to escaping Google’s wrath is avoiding rich anchor texts in your guest posts. Remember to use anchor text variations. Using only one keyword format puts you under the radar of search engines.
Unrelated Niches
The best SEO backlinks come from sites in your industry. For example, you can link to travel blogs if you write restaurant reviews. Think of backlinks as academic citations; you need an expert to verify the information on your website. Moreover, aim for high-authority backlinks. Readers may lose trust in your brand if the linked site:
Is new;
Has low traffic;
Promotes clickbait;
Is biased.
One irrelevant backlink may go unnoticed by search engines, but using too many of them increases the risk of penalties. When most of your keywords come from other niches, search engines will use unrelated keywords instead of those that matter.
Don’t Force It
Your SEO anchor links should occur naturally. If you have a bad feeling about them, chances are search engines won’t understand them either. How do you improve your site with SEO backlinks? Share some strategies in the comments.
Authors bio
Rebecca Shinn is a freelance writer and dating and relationship expert with a psychology degree. Her field of expertise is relationship, dating, and marriage. The important part of Rebecca’s practice is to help couples with communication skills, problem-solving skills, stress management, and financial skills.
Rebecca started writing 2 years ago to inspire and help people to have a better dating life, healthy relationships, or find a way to keep a marriage strong for long years.
With all said above, Rebecca is proud to be a mother and a wife so she doesn’t only use her knowledge for helping others but keeping her family strong and happy.
The Benefits of Technical SEO
Author: Christopher Oldman
Nowadays, having a fully functional website is of the utmost importance.
Modern consumers have high expectations, needs and demands. If the website they’re currently browsing cannot meet those expectations or needs, consumers will simply bounce right off.
Fortunately for web owners, there are ways to provide their potential customers with whatever they want.
This is where SEO (Search Engine Optimization) comes in. SEO is a marketing strategy that allows companies to meet consumer needs when it comes to a seamless browsing experience while promoting their businesses online.
You’re basically hitting two birds with one stone. The process in charge of meeting consumer demands is called technical SEO. As its name suggests, technical SEO covers every aspect of a website’s functionality, such as page speed, security and so on.
That being said, most consumer pain points are related to website performance and functionality. For example, pages that take too long to load irritate consumers and force them to bounce.
Technical SEO takes care of such issues and ensures that search engines, such as Google, look favorably upon websites that have consumers’ best interests in mind.
With that in mind, here are a few benefits of technical SEO.
As mentioned above, page loading time is one of the major pain points for consumers. If your pages aren’t loading fast enough, you will lose a lot of traffic and potential customers. The main reason is that modern consumers simply don’t tolerate sluggish websites.
That said, even if it takes one second longer for your pages to load than what consumers expect it will result in a 16% decrease in customer satisfaction, 11% decrease in page views and 7% decrease in conversion rates.
This can have a huge negative impact on your bottom line. Page loading time and overall website speed are part of the technical SEO domain.
There are plenty of things you can do to improve your website speed using technical SEO techniques alone. Here are a few examples.
Server file compression.
Code minification.
Browser caching.
Image optimization.
Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) for mobile optimization.
With technical SEO, you can eliminate all the issues that can slow down your website and page loading time. This will improve customer experience and give your rankings a much-needed boost.
After all, website speed is, in fact, one of the major ranking signals. The fact of the matter is that page loading time affects user experience the most.
Search engines, such as Google, want to provide consumers with the best results possible. That means that they’ll check not just the accuracy and value of information but also factors that will affect browsing experience like website speed does.
2. Mobile optimization
As you already know, the number of mobile users has grown significantly over the past few years. As of 2021, the number of mobile users worldwide reached 7.1 billion. That number is expected to reach 7.49 billion by 2025.
It’s safe to say that most online consumers are browsing the web using a mobile device. Search engines, such as Google have been aware of this trend for some time now. This is why Google released their mobile-first indexing update which will give favorable rankings to mobile-friendly websites.
Once again, technical SEO can help you optimize your website for mobile devices. One of the ways it can help you is by ensuring that your responsive design is properly implemented and fully functional.
Some of thebest marketing companies advise that all companies should focus on optimizing for mobile, especially if they are leveraging SEO. The main reason is mobile-friendliness will not only benefit your SEO efforts but also help your company acquire more leads and more organic web traffic.
Technical SEO makes sure that your website features and content are performing well on mobile devices. That way you guarantee an exceptional browsing experience to all customers, regardless of which devices they might be using to browse your website.
Technical SEO will also help you test various other features on your website to help you determine if they are mobile-friendly or not. It can even also help you implement the best practices that will ensure that your entire website is, in fact, mobile-friendly.
One of the main benefits of SEO is improved online visibility. However, search engines must be able to crawl and index your pages so that they can rank them properly.
Moreover, search engines must be able to understand the context of your pages so that they can match them with user intent. That’s why you must ensure that search engine crawlers can do their job so that you actually benefit from SEO. Technical SEO is also responsible for this part.
Every time you add a new page or an individual piece of content, you have to ensure that those pages and content are properly indexed.
In addition, you want to avoid redirects, errors, broken links and other inconveniences that will prevent search engine crawlers from doing what they do best. That’s why technical SEO is mandatory.
Here are a few ways technical SEO can help you with page indexing and other factors.
Help you track and fix server errors.
Help you prevent loop redirects.
Helps you identify URL blocking by robots.txt files.
Helps you identify “noindex” tags.
Helps you fix 404 errors.
Helps you locate and fix duplicate content.
When you eliminate or fix the most common problems that hinder search engine crawling, you can boost your rankings and allow search engines to properly index your pages.
4. Website architecture
Website or simply site architecture is very important to both your users and search engines.
From the user’s point of view, site architecture represents website navigation and content hierarchy that allows them to seamlessly browse your website and find what they’re looking for with ease.
On the other hand, search engines use your site architecture to navigate the pages and determine should the page be indexed or not. It also helps search engine crawlers understand the connection between your internal links.
The more pages your website has, the more important site architecture becomes.
Technical SEO can help you create an ideal architecture that will meet the needs of both users and search engines. Here are a few examples.
Categorizes and organizes the pages on your website.
Helps create SEO-friendly URLs for seamless navigation.
Focuses on creating sitemaps to help crawlers with page indexing.
Creates internal link hierarchy to point search engine crawlers towards pages with more authority.
This allows you to retain your audience’s interest by providing them with additional content that’s easy to find. It also creates breadcrumbs that enable seamless navigation for both users and search engines. That way your pages get properly crawled and indexed while your audience enjoys high-quality content.
Website security is an important ranking factor and it’s also vital to customer experience. This is especially true if you process consumer-sensitive information, such as names, addresses, emails, credit or debit card information etc.
To ensure that websites will take security seriously, Google made having HTTPS (Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure) a major ranking factor.
Websites that don’t have HTTPS would get penalized by Google. To transfer from HTTP to HTTPS, a web owner would have to purchase a TLS/SSL (Transport Layer Security/Secure Socket Layer) certificate from their hosting provider.
However, this migration can and does cause a lot of issues with your website. Fortunately, technical SEO is there to ensure everything is working as properly as it should. Here are a few things technical SEO can help you with.
Ensure that the same functionalities remain after the migration.
Monitors the changes in URLs and uses canonical tags to remove duplicate content.
Helps you test everything after the changes have been made.
Having proper security measures is vital. It prevents your website from being blacklisted and it shows your customers that your website is, indeed, trustworthy.
Technical SEO is there to ensure that your security measures are in place and that everything is working as it should.
Closing words
Technical SEO is a big part of on-page optimization. It ensures that your website functionality and performance are up to the task. Many of the factors that technical SEO deals with are also ranking signals.
These factors affect user experience in more ways than one. That’s why Google considers technical SEO to be an essential aspect of your overall SEO strategy, alongside on-page and off-page SEO.
After all, Google wants to ensure that they’re matching search queries with the best results possible.
By optimizing your technical SEO regularly, you’ll be able to ensure that your website is highly functional and that it performs exceptionally well. This will meet the needs of both search engines and your customers.
In other words, your website will not only end up on the first page of search results due to favorable rankings but it will also be able to provide your users with everything they want or need.
Author’s Bio
Christopher is a Digital Marketing specialist, Project Manager and Editor at Find Digital Agency and a passionate blogger. He is a dedicated and experienced author who pays particular attention to quality research and details. Focused on new web tech trends, he starts the day scrolling his digest on new digital trends while sipping a cup of coffee. In his free time Christopher plays drums and Magic: the Gathering.
Google is slowing down your life
Author: Sean H.
This is of course absurd with all the speed of search and efficiencies Google has brought to our modern lives, but is it? For decades, Google has been rewarding web pages with higher ranks for forcing you to spend more time and click more buttons to get what you wanted before you leave the site.
This has given rise to some of the ubiquitous and annoying web trends throughout history.
Endless slide shows, recipes that only come after clicking buttons and scrolling to the end of what I can only assume is the author’s life biography and the complete unabridged history of this particular recipe are in opposition to a successful interaction. The proof in the pudding shows an exasperated shopper standing in the baking aisle for 5 minutes, endlessly scrolling through just to see if they need baking soda or baking powder. Another user surfs and scrolls through a gauntlet of unnecessarily garrulous content just to get a simple answer to a question.
When I tell my clients the minimum word volume is 500 words, with 1500 words as best practice on a landing page, they glaze over. They balk and say, who is going to read that?!? No one, I explain, just Google. It’s for SEO. No human wants to read that volume, but Google does, and if we want your media to reach human eyes we must first please the algorithm.
Google, you are hurting us with your endless maze of SEO tricks, through 1000 paper cuts into our time and our efficiency.
So much weight is put onto time spent on the page, it’s become an obstacle to actual function. The best websites I visit are the ones I leave with the highest bounce rate because They serve me what I need and send me on my way. Can we start rewarding that? I know you are capable of doing this without rewarding high bounce spam pages. I know this is a possibility. No, go get your most promising Googlers to fix this mess
Yours in frustration, Tired of scrolling
Why Every Business Needs SEO? – 5 Ultimate Reasons
Author: Jessica Smith
Over the last few years, the digital marketing world has expanded exponentially. Currently, every business is rushing to rank higher in the Search Engine Result Pages (SERPS). Think of the last strings of words you Googled last – it might have been for service, information, or a planned purchase. There’s a greater chance you went for the top results for your search query.
Search engines like Google scour through the web to bring you what they believe to be the best, as per your query. It’s what search engine optimization – SEO is all about. With 81% of people searching online to find products or services according to data from the Global Web Index through Datareportal, soon, you might need to optimize your site using a solid SEO strategy.
Your business can snowball with exposure and generate more leads with an SEO strategy when managed and implemented correctly. Besides this, there are various reasons businesses need SEO. But, in the following sections of this article, we’ll look at the five ultimate reasons every business needs SEO. So, let’s begin.
To attract more customers to your business, you must ensure that they find you. As stated above, more and more online users search for services, products, and companies before purchasing. According to a Google study, 70% of smartphone users used their devices to do online research before making an in-store purchase. Therefore, even if your primary plan is to drive traffic and acquisitions for your marijuana business, an excellent digital presence is still vital in helping you reach your goal.
So, how can SEO increase your online visibility and help your CBD or Marijuana business connect to a larger audience of potential customers? SEO includes various ways of accomplishing one goal-improving your business ranking in the SERPS. When potential customers seek products or services like yours by entering specific search queries into the search engine, you’d want your business to rank as high as possible for the keywords. You’re more likely to receive more traffic the higher you rank.
Imagine walking into a fast-food joint. Once you get seated, the servers ignore you for over five minutes, and once they do, they hand you a 20-page menu that looks disorganized. There’s a greater chance you’ll get up and walk away, never to come back. You then find a more organized and welcoming place.
If your potential customers come to your site and have to wait over ten seconds for it to load, the site isn’t readable on a smartphone, or you have to click over five pages to find your service page, they will leave your website and look somewhere else.
Search engines favor delightful and valuable websites like the ideal customer-fast loading websites that are easy to navigate on any device. If you create effective SEO strategies for your site like weedsmart.co , you’ll provide your visitors with an excellent user experience. It will lead to them trusting, liking, and choosing to do business with you over the less SEO savvy competition.
SEO Offers Higher ROI and Conversions
Every business aims to maximize its ROI and conversions. As organic search traffic is free, it provides greater volume for a significantly smaller investment in contrast to paid search campaigns where you’d have to pay for every click. Your business doesn’t have to seek funds for monthly ad spending. All it requires is time.
This time commitment might include building an SEO strategy, researching its basics, or creating optimized content. It directly contributes to higher ROI, but the benefits don’t end there. It also offers a higher conversion rate, established trust, and ease of discovery.
Online marketing works best when there is a connection. For instance, if your social marketing campaign supports your SEO initiatives, you poise your business for success. So, both channels claim this advantage.
You can use organic search to complement several other marketing strategies, including:
Paid
Social
Video
Email
If your company launches an informative blog series, you can reuse that content on social media. A Facebook post, for example, could include a pull quote accompanied by an eye-catching statistic that will pique users’ interest and direct them to your article.
You should align these marketing channels. Hence, if one team member runs your social media campaigns and another executes your content marketing efforts, they must collaborate so that your campaigns are as effective as possible.
SEO Builds Loyal, Engaged Audiences
Relationships with customers should not end after a sale – instead, it’s best to keep them for a lifetime. Your goal is to keep your customers loyal, buy more products from you, and tell their friends about you.
You can accomplish this through SEO. You create a sense of value by sharing helpful, customer-centric content and keep customers coming back to you.
Conclusion
One excellent way of improving consumers’ user experience is through SEO. You can place your business as an authority within your respective industry through SEO for various reasons like building a loyal, engaged audience, getting higher ROI, and conversions, among other reasons mentioned. These are the ultimate reasons every business needs SEO.
The limitations of owning a small business were significant two decades ago. Large corporations could reach millions of people worldwide thanks to a substantial financial pool that allowed them to open brick and mortar stores in countries all over the world.
Things are different these days. If you dream of owning a small business, then this is your time to shine. Technology makes it possible for anyone to reach millions of people worldwide and make an impact, even if you are a small brand. The following are some significant ways technology can transform your small business.
Technology allows businesses to find their niche.
If you sell a highly unique product, there will only be a limited number of local people who want your products. Technology allows you to find your niche clientele thanks to a bigger pool of potential clients. You can be anywhere in the world and ship your products to others on the other side of the world.
SEO brings the right people to your door
Even if you are selling a unique product, you will still have competition in the market. Thanks to search engine optimization (SEO), technology can help your business stand out from the rest and thrive. Small CBD brands have taken full advantage of this technology to get more people to understand the benefits of CBD and buy their products. Sunday Scaries CBD sleep tincture is an excellent example of a product that grew in popularity thanks to SEO.
Analytical tools leave nothing to chance.
For as long as the existence of businesses and marketing plans, business owners have had to leave certain things to chance because they could not determine the exact factors that made people buy their products. These days with analytical tools accessible to anyone globally, business owners don’t have to leave anything to chance.
Google Analytics is one tool, you as a small business owner, should use to understand the patterns of your customers. What are they buying? From which countries, age groups, and gender? What is keeping them on your website? Are ads, social media, or search engines bringing them to your website? Understanding these patterns is critical for your business, and it helps you shift focus on the things that are delivering results. It might only cost a minute to figure out how analytical tools work, but it is not an impossible task. Use YouTube videos, invest in workshops, or get an expert to join your team so you can make the most of these exceptional tools.
Build a community of support
Community is vital for any business but especially for the smaller ones. You can interact live with your customers and get to know them through regular visits to your shop. Technology can help you create a similar vibe as well. You can interact with clients and potential customers through social media to make your business come across as a community rather than just a place where you sell things.
Technology allows you to spend less.
Reaching a vast audience without technology requires a substantial sum of money to open different spots for your business. With technology, you don’t have to spend money on bigger premises. What your business does need is a premium website where people can browse efficiently and have a positive shopping experience so they will want to come back.
Find the best employees.
Besides finding potential clients in every corner of the world, technology allows you to find the best talent, regardless of where the person is. From brand managers to graphic designers, account executives, and social media gurus, these days, many professionals are choosing to work remotely, making it that much easier for small business owners to find the right talent for their company.
Not only does technology help you find the best talent, but it also enables you to communicate with them most efficiently. Tools such as Trello make communication a seamless endeavor. Your employees do not even have to be in your same time zone if you don’t need them to be.
Keep an eye on competitors.
Competition is healthy for any business. As a small business owner, you must know who your competition is and keep an eye on their next move so you can remain relevant in the market. Technology can make your life easier. You can keep an eye on anything your competitors do through analytical tools. The same goes for social media and websites.
Conclusion
Ultimately, what technology is doing for small business owners is providing efficiency across a spectrum of elements. Technology enables you to spend less on the things that don’t matter to you, such as rent and utilities. Instead, you can invest the money in more important elements like pay-per-click ads, branding, social media, ads, and all the other components that help your small business thrive.
Author Bio
Jessica has been closely studying the Health industry trends for quite some time. Intrigued by the booming growth of this sector, she takes interest in penning down her views, providing quality insight on current Trends in the Health industry.
