I am not going to talk about Panda, Penguin and even Platypus!

This post is about us SEO workers who work diligently to make our sites visible and usable, who monitors every Google Update change and fine-tune sites to comply with Google guidelines.

If you do not recognize yourself among the following SEO beasts, feel free to add your own description. I’ll be happy to update the post and I promise to link to your site (we are all sharks at SEO ).

SEO Foxes

SEO Foxes are people who can apply insights from several fields: they can gain insight simply by chatting with the barista in their favorite café.  They come to SEO from any background. I know one SEO fox with an English literature degree.

SEO foxes bring a diverse set of experience and an ability to adapt to new circumstances easily.  They are curious and always ready to experiment, they trust only data they’ve verified themselves. People with a foxy style always bring new ideas and they smell genius solutions like a fox!

For SEO foxes looking to harness their ability to experiment with new SEO strategies, WebCEO’s Online SEO tools can provide a wide array of resources to test their innovative ideas.

SEO Ants

SEO ants have years of experience, they’ve gained deep knowledge in SEO through years of experience. Usually you can find SEO ants among in-house SEOs. They’ve gone through the SEO process millions of times and they’ve tried every SEO technique known (and even invented a few new ones).

SEO ants are great at solving one set of problems or delivering one set of outcomes in a pinch. If you are an SEO ant, try to apply your wonderful SEO knowledge to a new site or start a blog, because you have a lot to teach newbies.

 SEO Unicorns

Everybody has heard these creatures exist but nobody has seen them. SEO unicorns can easily move any site to the top and speak about it at the next big conference, inspiring us with their incredible wit and tact.

SEO unicorns can turn a client into your brand evangelist, they can create content that is viral, they get links while they sleep and their site rankings grow all the time. I have a strong suspicion they’ve sold their souls to Google.

If you have a person who generates working SEO solutions and it feels like Google informs him/her about all feature update, you can be glad because this means there’s an SEO unicorn on your team.

Who is missing? Feel free to add.

The post SEO Bestiary: What Kind Are You? appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

We fielded an interesting SEO question recently. “Is it really important to create more and more content to rank high?” – asked one of the WebCEO users on our Facebook page. By the way, we love to talk and are happy to discuss everything web-related (or not ;).

Why do search engines like fresh content?

The quickest answer is “yes.”

Almost two years ago Google rolled out the Freshness Update that prioritized recent and timely results to improve search experiences. Since then it has been vitally important to update your website to meet search engine quality standards.

There are two ways to show search engines that you care about your content freshness and keep it up-to-date:

1. You add new relevant pages. The easiest way to implement this approach is to start a blog on your domain. A blog kills two birds with one stone: it widens the semantic core of your website (which is great after the Google Hummingbird update) and gets you more visibility with the help of freshly added content (that is always great). Dive deeper into crafting compelling content with WebCEO’s SEO Content Assistant, designed to elevate your content strategy.
2. You update your most important pages. Here the amount of the updated text comes into play. For example, the change of a single sentence won’t have as big of a freshness impact as a large change to the main body text.

These two approaches work the best when used together.

Note: Search engines are clever enough to understand that the newest result isn’t always the best. Consider a search for “Hamlet” for example. An older, authoritative result may be the best here. In this case, having a well-aged document may actually help you.

Feel free to leave your questions to be answered on our SEO-in-Brief Fridays on our Facebook page, on Twitter or just leave a comment here.

Have a nice weekend and think of some great content ideas so you can make them go live on Monday!

The post Content Freshness: I Want Moar Content! appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

If you’ve been working at least half as long in the SEO industry as we’ve been, you should know about the KEI acronym. KEI stands for keyword effectiveness index. It was created as a statistic that reveals the most effective keyword phrases and terms to use in optimizing your web pages.

The Keyword Effectiveness Index compares the number of searches (demand) a keyword gets per month (its popularity) divided by the number of pages in a search engines index (supply). The higher the KEI, the more popular your keywords are, and the less competition they have. This means that, for a keyword with a relatively high KEI, you ought to have a better chance of getting to the top in the search engines and receive a good number of searchers for your effort.

This plain formula has stood the test of time, since the earliest days of SEO.

KEI is an important metric to rely on when you chose profitable keywords. However, the old formula has needed to be tuned slightly for the modern competitive Web. We at WebCEO updated the KEI formula to help you choose the best keywords for your sites with our Keyword Research tool.

Our KEI uses the number of global searches for a keyword divided by its bid competition coefficient to get a great estimate of the effectiveness of that keyword. We use bid competition instead of the number of pages in a search engines index, because bid competition reflects a keyword’s popularity better. A keyword that you wish to bid for can’t be unpopular by definition.

The higher the KEI the better, because this indicates that the search number is relatively high while the competition is relatively low.

The post KEI: A Fossil or An Essential Metric? appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

Spring is in the air and we’re here to give your old stuffy marketing efforts a spring cleaning with the latest in website promotional technology.

Nobody loves to do cleaning. That is why WebCEO wants to do it instead of you! All you need is to sign up for a 14-day Free Trial at WebCEO, if you still don’t have one and add a website you want to analyze.

On-page issues cleanup

A webpage can’t rank high if it has on-page optimization issues. The Web CEO Content Optimization tool will check whether you have on-site SEO problems like missing or duplicate Titles and Descriptions, a missing XML sitemap, an excessive number of outgoing links, H1 stuffing or non SEO-friendly redirects.

The Landing Page SEO report will analyze your most important pages and check if the most SEO-valuable areas are optimized properly.

What you’ll get: a report listing on-site SEO issues and pages on which the issues were found and a detailed analysis of how well specific pages of your site are optimized for chosen keywords.

Internal links house keeping

This step needs more actions from you than the previous one. However in the age of the Google Hummingbird update it is vital to optimize your internal links structure. The WebCEO Page Authority Analysis report will show you what pages look important to search engines with your current site structure. Mark your landing pages and proceed to the Landing Page Analysis. Here you will get a list of your own pages that may, with better internal links, help you improve the authority of your more important landing pages.

What you’ll get: a list of the pages to link your landing pages from to improve your landing pages authority.

Backlink profile sweep-up

Rank drops are the biggest SEO nightmare. To prevent your website from any possible penalty, you should remove all signs of search engine results manipulation. The WebCEO Backlink Quality Check tool will analyze your backlink profile and point out toxic and suspicious backlinks. You can even define the parameters that define what “toxic” means.

What you’ll get: a list of low quality links you may want to remove to protect your rankings from the Google Penguin algorithm.

These 3 easy steps performed with the help of the WebCEO tools will give you a direction to move with your SEO. We hope your rankings (and your conversions of course!) will grow this spring as every plant should.

The post Spring-Cleaning: 3 Things You Can Do for Your Site Right Now appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

Our Support Angels were asked an interesting question recently: can low quality but absolutely organic links ruin SEO and decrease rankings.

To answer the question we should first understand what is the difference between “low quality” and “low authority” backlinks.

Low quality links are the links that can ruin rankings. These links are usually created to manipulate search engine results and can’t be called organic. These links are usually created for search engines, not human searchers and are placed on sites no real people visit. These links can and probably will hurt your rankings if the majority of your backlinks are low quality.

Low authority links are the links you can call organic. These are links that real people put on their websites but they don’t have much link juice to pass on. If the content is unique and well written, these links are not harmful and can bring you traffic and link juice later.

If you start working on a site that was previously optimized by someone else, be sure to check the quality of the site’s backlink profile in order not to risk your search engine positions. Use the ‘Toxic Links’ report located inside the WebCEO Backlink Quality Checker and detect low-quality links so you can report them to Google in time.

The post Can Low Quality but Organic Links Hurt Your SEO? appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

Q: After the Google Panda and Penguin updates my rankings decreased. I am afraid that this Hummingbird algorithm will bring nothing good too. Isn’t it better to forget about rankings and concentrate on social media?

First of all, remember that rankings don’t matter so much as conversions. You get conversions when your site receives targeted traffic. Below you can see the main sources that can bring traffic to a website.

SEO, social media and referring links are the traffic sources that are (relatively) free for you. Let’s stop on SEO and rankings. The higher the rankings you have for the keywords that people search with, the more traffic you will receive that converts well.

Today Google uses Universal search that blends listings from its news, video, images, local and book search engines among those it gathers from crawling web pages. This means you should be present in all these vertical search results to get higher visibility and receive more targeted traffic that will convert at a higher rate into customers. You should check rankings regularly to know how you are doing in the Universal Search results and tweak your pages to get into the maxium number of positions in each type of result.

The Web CEO Rank Checker helps you monitor your positions across  the Universal Google search results (organic results + paid results + vertical results you’ve chosen) or across the vertical search results only (e.g. Google Places, Images, etc.).  The Rank Checker “Google search results” settings help you configure ranking reports to provide maximum information value and for your convenience.

You should also check the visits these positions bring. This data is vital for improving your conversions. If you connect your Google Analytics with your WebCEO account, go to the Rank Checker Settings, click on ‘Display’ and check ‘Visits brought by search engines’. Now you’ll be able to analyze what positions bring you prospects and how you can improve your conversions.

To summarize, I want to admit that it is too early to say we don’t need organic rankings anymore. Organic search will still bring you a lot of visitors who will convert into your customers.

The post SEO in Brief: Is Ranking Still Important? appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

Google Keyword Tool is no longer available for public use; you can use Google Keyword Planner Instead. The new feature that all local businesses like about this new Google Planner is the ability to target by city, region or country. That is why we’ve decided to talk about local optimization more.

Local optimization is all about being where your prospects are. This means you should remember that a large portion of your potential clients search for products and companies in local directories. Modern local directories grew from old-school yellow pages and now have rather solid brands and budgets to get targeted traffic. They also do well in organic search. If you tried to get high rankings for a specific local term, you should understand why your business needs to be in as many local directories as possible.

Local directories help you in link building and also generate citations. A citation is a reference to your local business that includes your business name, address, phone number and other information relevant to your business. The citations help you to rank better for local search queries even if they do not have links back to your site.

The WebCEO Content Submission Tool lists the best local business directories to help you in your SEO efforts. We have chosen only those that are really important and worth your time. While you can see tools that promise “250 local directories to submit your site to,” WebCEO Online provides you with the local directories that have the largest amount of traffic and authority. Be present in these directories and your business will be exposed to a wide audience of local searchers.

The post SEO in Brief: Be Where Your Prospects Search For You appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

Q: I think my website was hit by the Google Panda update because of low quality articles we had. How can I remove the URLs from a search engine index?

First of all you can use the Noindex Metatag, which is understood by most search engines. To implement it, place the following code on the page you want to remove:

<META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW”>

The Noindex Metatag prevents the page from being indexed. The page itself will still be crawled, though the search engines may visit it less often over time.

The following method of removing a web page may be better from the SEO point of view:

If you do not specify “nofollow” with this tag, then the page will still pass PageRank to other pages both on and off your site (i.e. use <META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOINDEX”>).

You can also use the URL removal tools, that are provided by search engines themselves (Google and Bing). However, you should be very careful with these tools, because doing this incorrectly can take your entire site out of the index for extended periods of time.

Alongside these technical methods, it’s crucial to address the underlying issues that led to the Panda penalty. WebCEO’s Website Audit tool can be invaluable in this process. It can help you identify and fix your site’s SEO weaknesses, including content quality issues, which is a significant factor in Google’s Panda algorithm.

The post SEO in Brief: How to Remove URLs from Search Engine Indices appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

We hope you use the rel=canonical tag to tell search engines what version of duplicate pages (eg. http://yoursite.com, www.yoursite.com) you prefer to be indexed. This tag is supported by all major search engines: Google, Bing and Yahoo. However it’s sometimes rather tricky to configure this in a proper way. In this article we put together some good questions about rel=canonical, that have been asked by Web CEO users.

Should I use rel=canonical, if I have several product pages that differ only by a sentence or two (different colors and sizes)?

Yes, we think it’s appropriate to use a rel=canonical tag on very-near duplicate pages. For example, do this if you have several URLs with very similar products on them. However, you shouldn’t abuse this tag, because search engines may just ignore your tags.

What happens if I put several canonical tags on one page?

If there’s more than one rel=canonical tag on a page, Google will ignore all of them.

Should I use re=canonical for articles with pagination (multiple pages for one piece of content)?

In cases of paginated articles Google recommends that you use a rel=canonical tag that you either rel=canonical to a “View All” page or that you use rel=prev/next.

Should I use rel=canonical or 301 redirects?

While a rel=canonical tag and a 301 redirect behave similarly from an SEO standpoint, they serve different purposes. A 301-redirect takes a human visitor to the canonical URL and a rel=canonical tag does not. The canonical tag just tells the search engines what page to use in search results. Humans won’t be affected by this. You will use a 301 redirect if you want to permanently consolidate two pages and remove the duplicate page. You will use a rel=canonical tag, if you want to keep both pages for visitors, but only one of them should be considered by the search engines for search results.

The post SEO in Brief: How to Use Rel=Canonical Properly appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

We are often asked what a webmaster should do after unwanted pages are deleted; whether the URLs should be 404 or 301-redirected.

First of all let’s understand what 404 and 301 redirects are.

A 404 Not Found means that the client was able to communicate with the server, but the server could not find anything matching the request. The web site hosting server will typically generate a “404 Not Found” web page when a user attempts to follow a broken or dead link. A 404 error implies that the requested URL may be available again in the future, but not necessarily with the same content.

A 301 Moved Permanently redirect is used when a requested resource has been moved permanently to a new URL and any future references to this resource should use one of the returned URLs. Google recommends using a 301 redirect to change the URL of a page as it is shown in search engine results.

You should use a 301 redirect if a web page you remove has a suitable alternative page on your web site. If there is no suitable page (“suitable” here means a page with very similar content), then 404 the page. And remember to customize your 404 page to help people find useful links and information there so they stay in your sales funnel, for instance.

Also, you can use WebCEO’s Website Audit to ensure you have no redirect chains on your website.

The post SEO in Brief: 301 vs. 404 appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.