Current chess engines are able to defeat even the strongest human players under normal conditions. However, when computers were less powerful, a human always won because a human chess player can intuitively determine what moves are worth paying attention to.

I have promised that I will spend less than 10 minutes a day with site analytics. It is safe to say that I am really fulfilling the promise. The WebCEO dashboard helps me to determine what data is worth paying attention and where I can outgame search engines.

There are three levels of dashboards in WebCEO, each giving you more details about the current situation with your sites.

1. Main Dashboard

You will see the Main Dashboard when you log into your WebCEO account. It’s a helicopter view of all the sites you are working on with WebCEO.

Here you can get the quickest idea of how your sites are doing. A quick tip is: if you see something in red – pay attention fast. Click on the cell with red numbers or arrows and you will be taken to a detailed report showing what has happened.

You can select a compact, standard or extended view for the most comfortable experience. The extended view is the best for mobile devices, you can easily surf the data with your fingers. The compact view helps you quickly scan dozens of sites and see where your attention is needed. The standard view is something in the middle

Another great thing about the WebCEO Dashboard is the ability to perform bulk actions. SEO agencies love this! Click the “Bulk actions” link right below the view icons and you will be able to rescan all selected projects simultaneously, change their properties and scan schedule at once, and even delete several projects at once, if you need.

The WebCEO product managers researched how professional SEO experts prefer to set their SEO dashboards. The results of this research were used to create the default Dashboard view. However, you can fine-tune Dashboards to fit your needs. Go to the Settings and check the columns you need. You can use different Dashboard views on your desktop and mobile, and you can add different columns on that different view. So you can have different Dashboards on your different devices!

The most interesting part of the Dashboard settings is the “Advanced tool settings” tab. Here you can polish data representation to perfection.

With the advanced settings you can set different presentation for starred and non-starred projects (I hope you know that you can click a star icon near a project/website in the Main Dashboard and this will mark the website as important).

Set Your Perfect Dashboard Now

2. Project Overview

To dig into more details about a specific project (in WebCEO we call your websites “projects”), click on its name in the Main Dashboard or select it through the Select project button at the top.

The Project Overview dashboard consists of widgets that summarize the information from all the tools you use. You can use the predefined widget sets: brief, standard or extended, or create your own sets.

Tip: if you work on client websites, create different widget sets to use for work and to use for reporting.

The Project Overview is great for reporting, because it is a summary from all tools. You can add and delete widgets, drag them in order to rearrange them, change their size or view to represent the information in the best way. The Project Overview can be printed, downloaded as a PDF or sent via email (check the Export button in the top right corner). You can also add it to the automatic consolidated report.

Customize Project Overview to Fit Your Client’s Needs

3. Tool Summary

The third and the most specific in the WebCEO dashboard family is the Tool Summary. You can see the Tool Summary for almost all of the WebCEO tools.

The Tool Summary dashboard consists of a widget set just like the Project Overview does. The only difference is that in the Tool Summary you will find only information from the specific tool in question. For example, you can use the Rank Tracking Tool Summary to investigate the ranking health of a site.

As with the Project Overview, the Tool Summary is great for client reporting because most clients do not want to forge through dense ranking tables. Beautiful graphs and diagrams will attract them and show that you are a professional who knows what is worth paying attention to. Remember that chess metaphor at the beginning?

Try the WebCEO Dashboards for Free

The post WebCEO Dashboard Anatomy appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

Giving birth to a new-born website is much like giving birth to a child. You want to shout out its name to everyone and spread it all over the web. And this is the moment you should be really careful in order to avoid common mistakes. The main mistakes are trying to speed up website indexation and trying to gain too many inbound links too quickly and in an unnatural way.

Over the past decade, one of the more popular SEO practices has been to promote sites by means of the submission of websites to all kinds of search engines and directories. This is now considered a passé SEO tactic. Google, after all, understands and is scornful of site owners who manipulate and control their incoming links in an “unnatural” manner. In some cases, submitting a website to directories is considered bad manners and a spammy black hat tactic. Commonly, Google doesn’t even pass any credit to links from many online business directories and search engines. In 2014, Yahoo went ahead and withdrew its own directory submission service.

Here are some grave website submission mistakes you should avoid in order to keep your website from being de-indexed and penalized.

1. Getting a website submitted to low-quality junk directories.
2. Generating links on free irrelevant web directories.
3. A massive automated submission of a website to dozens of directories or search engines in a short span of time.
4. Choosing a wrong or irrelevant category in a web directory.
5. Business listings on multiple directories submitted with the exact anchor text and description.
6. Business descriptions of a website on directories which are keyword stuffed and which look too promotional.
7. Massive link submission to the home page of a website.
8. Submitting a website to reciprocal exchange directories.
9. Submitting invalid or broken links.
10. Massive article syndication via article directories.

In the next few months we will enter a new, real-time Penguin era and we will have to review our strategies of link building and content marketing. The first thing you should reconsider is the submission of all kinds of content, which was traditionally considered to be a fast and easy SEO tactic to boost your rankings and build backlinks to your site.

If you want to stay ok with the search quality guidelines when submitting your website, URL or website pages to third-party listing or directory sites, you should be aware there are light and dark sides of content submission. Your SEO future depends on what side you will choose.

Common sense recommendations on how to stay on the light side of website submission.

The best mantra for a profound website submission strategy would be: Go an inch wide and a mile deep.

Sitemap submission. If you want to speed up the discovery and indexation of all your website pages by search engines, start with generating and submitting an XML sitemap to the major search engines like Google, and Bing.

Human editors review and verification.  Penguin-proof link building should imply a mostly human-edited process.  Consider only those submission sites which approve submissions via editor verification and approval.

High PR and niche specific submission platforms. To boost your brand awareness and referral traffic with no harm to your site rankings, select high PR and niche specific business directories. Choose a relevant category, subcategory. There are several trustworthy and SEO-friendly business directories like DMOZ, OPN, etc that are still used by people and bring referral traffic.

Content submission with the Nofollow attribute. By assigning a rel=”nofollow” attribute to links you submit on third-party submission sites, you give a deliberate signal to search engines not to give a weight to these links. This will keep your site in line with search quality guidelines.

Local submission. In the post-Pigeon era of local search, promotion of your local business via business listing and review sites like Yelp have become crucial. Local directories can now be a pushy helping hand for driving referral traffic to your site, increasing social proof for your product and bolstering your local SEO campaigns on a local level. If you are present on the most authoritative local business directories like Yelp, TripAdvisor and Google My Business, then you are more likely to hit the first page of local search results.

ECommerce submission. If you have an eCommerce website then being presented on the leading high converting shopping search engines will bring you the most bang for the buck. There are no penalties for spamming shopping search engines. Each of the platforms has its own strict requirements for product listings submission.

Social Bookmarking. This is a good alternative to search engine or directory submission. The biggest SEO advantage of social bookmarking is that the links are generated by users. Content that is massively distributed and shared with rich anchor titles, tags and description has much more quality, trust and relevance in the eyes of search engines. Social bookmarking sites are great from the perspective of content promotion and traffic generation. Usually social bookmarking platforms generate NoFollow links and don’t pass any value and strength to your link profile.

What makes the WebCEO Content Submission Tool different from other free or paid website submission tools?

If you are looking for an automatic tool for all-in-one website submission within 24 hours, then you will be disappointed. Our Content Submission tool is not a magic wand. We at WebCEO care about your ranking consistency and our reputation. That’s why we do not provide tricky SEO tools for an all-at-once search engine and directory submission. What we offer is a laborious manual selection of high PR and trustworthy third-party platforms that are split into categories in accordance to your business needs and the region your business is based in. We provide categorized lists for:

• Automatic submission to a very small number of respected directories that still carry link juice. Here we automatically submit your business details once you click on the Submit button in the Automatic Submission tab.
• Standard submission. Here you will find all the major SEs and directories for sitemap submission and manual submission.
• Local submission. Here we provide the best local listing directories in your local area. (Check the region you need in the submission tool settings).
• eCommerce submission. Here we provide a list of the major paid shopping directories and search engines.
• Content submission. Here you will find all the needed platforms for promoting your content, including bookmarking sites, press release submission sites, download sites, affiliate program directories, infographic submission and photo and video sharing sites.
• Blog submission. Here you will find only high PR and SEO-friendly blog directories and RSS feed directories.
• PPC outlets. Here you will find the list of advertising platforms and search engines for your paid search and social media marketing campaigns.

We allow you to control the process of submission and we recommend that you don’t do everything at once. If you forget or fail to submit your site or content to some of the sites, you can resubmit it again any time. There are checkboxes to show what you have and have not completed.

*The Content Submission tool is available for all plans.

Remember: We highly recommend that you not submit your content to all sites and directories at once!

A Final Word on Staying Informed

Are you still doing content submission without quality content marketing, editorial link building and user experience optimization? Then you’d better monitor your rankings on a regular basis, because you might get into big trouble with the upcoming Penguin 4.0 Update.

The post How to Stay On the Light Side of Website Submission appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

WebCEO Software as a Service has, as one of its missions, the delivery of an extra special SEO experience to every of our customers in the most convenient and comfortable way. With the customer-as-a-host concept in mind, your will be provided with branded SEO Reports, White Label SEO tools and other B2B features like Lead Generation Automation that will help you to impress your clients. With all these solutions on board digital agencies and other B2B stakeholders can scale their growth with us.

According to stats and facts from “Provide Support”: [Tweet “5 Powerful Facts About Customer Service You Should Consider”]

• 70% of buying experiences are based on how the customers feel they are being treated
• 55% of consumers would pay more for a better customer experience
• The probability of selling a product to an existing customer is 60-70%, while the probability of selling a product to a new prospect is only 5-20%
• A 5% increase in customer retention can increase a company’s profitability by 75%
• 80% of your company’s future revenue will come from 20% of your existing customers.

The WebCEO team now wants to share some secrets on how to provide white glove SEO service.

Provide your prospect with a test drive option

Allow your potential clients to test-drive your service. A quick test drive will help you to create an unforgettable first impression for your client and will ease the first prospect’s interaction with your service, as well as inform, educate and nurture them. This will communicate the value of your product. You should become a mentor and a butler for your client in the process of her first interaction with your SEO service.

A DEMO that is supported by a real person is the best way to demonstrate your product’s possibilities and show a personal approach to the prospect.

An Express SEO Audit widget provided by WebCEO can be embedded on your website as another powerful option for you to provide your potential customers with a quick inside view of your SEO reporting world and make them want to order your services.

Pro Tip: The demonstration of your service potential + a personal approach to the customer’s pain points and needs is the best driving force for an off-hand purchase decision.

Dumb down and automate the management of multiple SEO projects

 Your SEO company reputation and customer experience heavily depend on your ability to implement effective management, scaling and control of hundreds SEO projects at a time. To fine-tune the workflow of all stakeholders involved in managing multiple projects is difficult and challenging.

Effective project management tools should perform the complex of SEO processes:

• Allow limited and full access to projects for multiple users
• Optimize the progress of dozens of projects with the help of quick batch project actions
• Manage your employees’ workflow and assign them roles
• Set project scan limits
• Customize and automate report scheduling and mailing

 Pro tip: Effective and timely SEO project management is the yellow brick road to customer brand loyalty and the accumulation of positive experiences.

Establish a well-grounded liaison with your customer by means of white labeled SEO report delivery right to the doorstep.

The SEO report is the means for showing the results of your work and the way to make a good impression to your end user. A professional SEO report is the combination of an easy-to-read, well-designed and clean layout plus accurate, sensitive data about top-level KPIs and metrics including backlink quality, keyword rankings, traffic changes, landing page optimization etc. With so many good SEO report providers nearby, why would they want to stick with you? Because you are the one who will not just remove symptoms, but you will heal a client’s pain points.

Pro tip: You should show a client’s website progress in detail.

Anticipate your customer’s pain points.

Ok, you have pills that are supposed to kill your customer’s website SEO sores. But sometimes this is not enough. If you really care about your customers you will probably want to anticipate problems and exceed their expectations. By nipping issues in the bud you will provide excellent customer care and take a load off your future SEO workflow. You can use our early warning system that will notify you about SEO issues that may be developing on one of your clients’ sites.

Pro tip: Don’t put SEO issues off indefinitely if you don’t want your customer’s website to get penalized by Google and your reputation tarnished by a badass user’s review.

Now you know that a positive customer experience and brand loyalty is far from flipping coins and hoping for heads. It heavily depends on your hard work and on human factors that you should take into account when doing SEO for others.

The post How to Leverage the Exclusivity of Your SEO Services appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

Do you have superpowers? If you want to be a powerful SEO master, you need them. The good news is that, to get SEO superpowers, you don’t have to be born on Krypton or get bitten by a radioactive spider (not that there’s anything wrong with that). No, in this case you must only apply yourself and equip yourself with knowledge and tools in order to beat your competitors. Let’s talk about three SEO superpowers you should develop inside yourself:

Lightning Fast Reaction

In the rapidly changing world of the Internet, delay is a danger. That is why you should keep your eyes on any changes your sites experience or news that portends a change. You should react to any drastic changes in a site’s rankings, backlinks and technical quality. The technical quality and backlink profile are important ranking factors. When they worsen, the site may lose rankings and traffic and you will likely lose revenue in the end.

Equipment: Instant Email Alerts       

Configure email alerts so you can be instantly notified if a project faces negative ranking changes, technical issues like broken links and missing important backlinks. Email alerts will be sent after the tool scanning is complete, if a problem is found.

Animal Control

On the Internet plains where Pandas and Penguins now rule, dangers are lurking around every bend. That is, unless you know how to turn these animals into helpers. As you know, the Google Panda update was meant to stop sites with low quality content from working their way into Google’s top search results. The Google Penguin is aimed at websites with poor backlink profiles. You can give yourself a force-field that makes you invisible to these hungry predators.

Equipment: SEO Roadmap

The most important weapon you can use against Pandas and Penguins is knowledge. Use the SEO Roadmap created by WebCEO to be sure you won’t violate Google guidelines and get bitten by penalties. Remember, the best place to hide a dead body is on page 2 of Google. Try not to keep that guy company.

Technopathy

Technopathy is the ability to make technology work for you. This is the most sensitive superpower in every profession. In the SEO industry you have to provide your clients with great SEO reports to show their progress. It is crucial to delegate this routine task to a machine.

Equipment: All-in-on SEO Report

With the WebCEO online SEO tools, you can provide your clients with reports about the various keywords you’ve researched, keyword rankings, backlinks, website errors, site SEO issues, social media buzz, etc. Once the automatic scanning of a client’s website is scheduled, you can add a client to the Automatic Report Mailing tool and configure the delivery of the white label SEO reports. You can also allow clients to logon to your own website (usually a sub-domain) to see read-only SEO reports or use what appears to be your own SEO tools.

If you can use technology to effectively communicate progress to others, and make them happy in the process, you will at least be seen as Clark Kent or Lois Lane (if not their alter egos).

The post Three SEO Superpowers every Super SEO Must Have appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

Local SEO clients easily become loyal, if you find the way to impress them. We know 3 EFFICIENT WAYS to their hearts!

 1. Optimize Landing Pages for Local Search

Landing page optimization for local search has some special aspects we covered in the Local SEO Guide previously. To summarize I’ll name the most important:

• Make sure your landing pages are unique and informative.
• Add local signals like your address, telephone, map, etc.
• Optimize your Google My Business listing.
• Get more positive reviews on your Google My Business listings.
• Get some great citations. Great means that the quality matters much more than quantity.
• Use social media to interact with your customers.

Tip: Use the Local Search Optimization tips from the Web CEO SEO Roadmap.

2. See SERPs as Real Local Visitors Do

With the Web CEO Rank Tracker you can get exactly the same results as real local searchers do. Go to the ‘Search Engines’ tab of the Rank Tracker settings. When adding a search engine, select a country you want to target – you can also add a target language – and set the location to be sure you get the exact results.

Then go to the ‘Google blended results’ tab and enable vertical search results you want to monitor. The Google Places are a must for local search optimization.

One more way to have your finger on the local search pulse is to add the local social profile. To see how your social profiles are ranked, add them on the ‘Social profile URLs’ tab of the Rank Tracking settings.

3. Reports in Multiple Languages

Recently we’ve added the ability to use WebCEO on your native language and to provide your clients with the SEO reports they would understand. Add languages you want to use through the My account –> Languages menu. Then go to the Client Reporting Settings, choose a specific task you want to change the reporting language for, go to the Message settings and select a PDF report language.

Besides, when exporting any Web CEO report you can briefly change the language of your interface (the language icon is also on the top right hand corner of the main interface) and then export or mail a PDF in that language, before switching back to your regular interface language.

P.S.: Remember that most local searches are done via mobile devices – 50% of all mobile searches are conducted in the hope of finding local results. So make sure your client’s local site is ready before 4/21, which is when the major Google Mobile Update is set for.

The post 3 Ways to Impress Your Local SEO Clients appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

In 2015, Search Engine Land has featured WebCEO in its famous Enterprise SEO Tools Guide. This is quite an honor! Here is a synopsis of key features that got our service listed as best-of-breed enterprise-level SEO tools software.

The growing complexity of Internet Marketing has encouraged the SEO industry to shape up. Its savvy stakeholders have kept their expertise up-to-date and fine-tuned. Their on-going strategies now include well-integrated marketing automation software. More and more companies have created enterprise-level online brands with thousands of pages of content to optimize and hundreds of external and internal links to keep control of. The use of marketing automation software, especially SEO tools, is now critical. Here are some questions you should ask when choosing the right enterprise SEO tools provider.

When we say Enterprise SEO we mean the type of SEO campaigns that need to be implemented and maintained by enterprise-level companies. Enterprise-level companies usually have multilingual websites with more than 1000 landing pages organized in a thoughtful URL hierarchy with multiple hosting servers, consistent content creation, a digital marketing strategy, strong reputation management and a dynamic online community.

Enterprise SEO campaigns will include a basic and advanced approach to search engine optimization.

A Basic SEO approach would include:

1. Setting business goals based on a potential customer persona analysis.
2. Configuring a business traffic and performance tracking system (integration with Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools.
3. Evaluating and fixing crawl/audit issues (i.e.: duplicate content, slow page speed, server access errors, broken links, improper 301 and 404 redirects, multiple redirects, poor mobile user experience, non-search friendly images, Flash/Ajax issues, canonical tags issues).
4. Keyword research, categorization and landing page mapping
5. Internal link structure implementation and optimization
6. Link-bait content building (blog posts, infographics, case-studies, guides etc.)
7. Visual content ideation, creation and optimization
8. Micro-format optimization

An Advanced SEO approach would include:

1. Inbound link building (including directory and review site submission, guest post campaigns, native advertising etc.)
2. Social Media Marketing
3. Cross-channel integration between SEO, content marketing and social media marketing
4. On-site and off-site performance monitoring (i.e.: country-specific, city-specific and mobile search rank tracking, earned backlink analysis, removal and acquisition, landing page SEO analysis, website traffic analysis, social signals tracking).
5. Competitor performance research and analysis
6. Website performance reporting
7. Ongoing adjustments to existing on-page and off-page optimization based on delivered data.

Only enterprise-level SEO software allows you to integrate, scale and improve all of the basic and advanced approaches to your SEO, content and site performance data in order for you to dominate organic search results.

Here are the hallmarks of proper enterprise-level SEO accurately as practiced by Web CEO’s SEO Software:

Real-time built-in diagnostic tools to parse and identify site-wide and off-site issues with easy-to-follow checklists and recommendations.

Third-Party Analytics Data Integration to inform and evaluate keyword discovery, backlink analysis and site monitoring data integrated with Google Webmaster Tools, Ahrefs, Google Analytics and other third-party partnership services.

SEO Workflow Automation to schedule and deliver easy-to-customize reports with user-friendly dashboards and widgets.

Competitive Analytics provided in the form of informative widgets driven to gauge how well you perform against your competition.

User-Role Task Management System to build vertical and cross-functional collaboration between CEOs and their employees and contractors, such as webmasters, marketers and content managers.

Easy-to-Access Branded SEO Reporting to provide well-designed and individually branded PDF and CSV reports that can be easily shared to any user on your own sub-domain or emailed on a schedule to any client.

Single Sign On API Integration to provide remote access for and to third-party services. With API you can easily create, manage and export SEO data generated in your Web CEO account in order to combine and build your own SEO tools and offer branded SEO reports to your own clients.

White Label Program to provide large-scale digital agencies, web hosting companies & CMS developers with the ability to host their own branded SEO tools or show read-only reports on their own custom domain.

Using enterprise SEO software like Web CEO, you can get more BENEFITS than from a single-function solution:

• Run 14+ SEO tools within one interface
• Get unlimited access to SEO data, analytics and web performance
• Keep up-to-date with SEO algorithm changes
• Benefit from an efficient SEO team collaboration workflow within your organization
• Get real-time data with automated reporting

Sign up for any of the cost-effective WebCEO Enterprise-level SEO Plans and save time while managing your enterprise SEO campaigns.

The post How to Succeed In Enterprise SEO With WebCEO appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

If you’ve been in business for more than 2 days, you already know that the key to success is to understand the needs of your target audience. If you own a crystal ball, great for you! You can always be informed about what your audience wants and how they feel when interacting with your site. If not, A\B testing (also called ‘split testing’) exists to bring knowledge into your guessing.

A/B testing is a great way to find out what type of proposal works best with your audience. To perform an A/B test, you set up two variants of a landing page and send an equal amount of traffic to each. Tested pages should be online simultaneously, so you can be sure there won’t be any variables that may change between today and tomorrow. Then you measure the level of conversions for each landing page, and determine the winner according to which one generates the most conversions.

Why should I test?

There are two ways to earn more money from your online business. The first is to drive more traffic, and the second is to convert more visitors into customers.

When you double your conversion rates, then you cut your cost per acquisition in half.

That is why you should test.

What should I test?

• The headline. Usually the main headline of the page contains your product core value proposition. The headline should correspond with the page Title and Description (if the page is meant for organic traffic) or your ad copy (if the visitors come from paid search or ads).
• The call to action (CTA). The call to action represents your page’s goal. The CTA is your final instruction to your visitors. Great CTAs encourage people to act right away and don’t give people much of an option to wait and think about it.
• Required fields in your web form. Try varying the amount of information you try to gather with any form on your landing page. You may find it best to minimize the number of fields that visitors are required to complete.
• The copy length. For some products and services, more product details may be important for decision making process. Test what copy length works best for you.
• Design. Button color, arrows, hero shots, contrast and other design decisions your designer is great at. Test what landing page design brings you more conversions.

How can I track results?

1. Use Google Analytics

With Google Analytics you can test what landing page variant performs best. You can conduct your experiments in Google Analytics from the reporting sidebar. Select Behavior, then Experiments. Select Create Experiment and follow Google’s instructions.

If you are testing changes to a page that already exists, use it as the Original (Control page). For entirely new content, pick the URL you will eventually want to use for the winner. Now you will only need to install the experiment code snippet just inside the <head> tag of your Original Page.

2. Use the ‘Landing Pages Overview’ report

If you are testing landing pages that bring you organic traffic, than you can get a quick overview with the help of the WebCEO Landing Pages Overview report. Check how well your landing pages load on mobile devices, compare their avg. position on Google and know how much traffic they get.

If you haven’t started yet, consider running your first A/B test as soon as possible. It will help you to optimize your conversions and outrank your competitors.

Glossary

Control Page

Your control page is your original page, your A page. The one that existed first that you are going to start running tests against.

Landing Page

Any web page that a visitor can arrive at and perform your desired action is a landing page. Usually you will have different landing pages for organic traffic and for visitors who come via advertising.

Winner Page

A page that gets a higher conversion rate during the A/B test is called a winner page. It proves a testing hypothesis and may be used for further experiments (improvements).

The post A/B Testing as easy as ABC: Improve Your Landing Page Conversions appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

Happy Halloween our dear SEOs!

All Hallow’s Eve is destined to bring a lot of frightening fun. With all those jack-o’-lanterns, trick-or-treating and dressing up in freaky costumes, being an SEO you should keep your eyes open. This year SEO Halloween is accompanied by a real SEOmbie Apocalypse. Yes, you heard me right! If you run an online business, the SEOmbie Apocalipse may come to you as well. Horrible SEOmbie monsters like a shambling Panda, a crawling Penguin, a peaky Hummingbird and a spooky Pigeon are crawling in pursuit of your site rankings’ freshness and your traffic savor. Are you equipped enough to protect your site against SEO-mbie attacks? We have prepared the SEOmbie Survival Guide for you to stay BOO-tiful and keep your site safe.

Moreover, you can use WebCEO’s Website Audit tool to fend off these ghastly creatures by keeping your site’s SEO health in top condition.

The post How to Survive the SEO-mbie Apocalypse With the WebCEO Survival Guide appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

Negative SEO can be a lot of things—and it’s more than just black hat tricks. In fact, you might be the victim of negative SEO attacks and not even know it if someone has launched a campaign against you and your site. The good news is that it’s very risky to undertake a negative SEO campaign, so most people won’t take that gamble. However, if you are a target, then that means whoever’s behind it has some serious beef with you. Negative SEO encompasses just about anything that’s “illegal” in terms of SEO best practices. Since Google is the largest search engine, it’s often used as the basis for what’s “good” SEO and what’s not allowed. For example, using duplicate content (such as buying multiple similar domains, then copying and pasting the information) is a huge SEO no-go and, while this is technically considered to be negative SEO, it often happens as an oversight and not intentional.

There are some negative SEO strategies that are purely down and dirty. Here are some of the most common strategies and how to know if you’re a victim. 

1. Pointing bad links your way.

One of the best and most organic ways to improve your search engine ranking is by developing a good quantity of quality inbound and outbound links. You have total control over the links present on your website, but what about other people who link to your site? Most of the time it’s a huge compliment when someone links to your site, because it means they feel it is worth linking their name with your reputation. However, someone who has negative SEO on the brain can pay for poor links or find them by hand and then point them in your direction. You may not even realize you’re being connected to sites that will drag down your SEO. These sites might be spam sites or simply unrelated to your content. Either way, your SEO will suffer.

How to avoid:

Use the WebCEO Backlink Checker Tool in order to see a full and a clean picture of the sites linking to you. With the WebCEO backlink quality reports you will keep control of:

• The percentage of toxic links out of all links to your site or the percentage of nofollow links from linking domains.
• The status of pages linking to you.
• The diversity of linking texts.
• Toxicity of incoming links.

Here is an example of the backlink profile clean-up report made with the help of our Backlink Quality Check tool and provided by one of our clients.

2. False accusations

Google and other search engines have stringent policies in place to ensure that any reports made against you are carefully vetted. However, a false complaint that appears legitimate to Google might linger longer than desirable, or it might require substantial effort to address. If someone is upset with you, it’s relatively easy for them to report you to Google, alleging black hat SEO tactics. Of course, this is also easy for a search engine to cross-check. Surprisingly, it happens more frequently than one might expect, even though it’s straightforward for a search engine to identify potentially false reports.

This kind of situation can occur like a “crime of passion,” where the person targeting you may be unaware of the consequences they might face, or they might not care. In these scenarios, being proactive about your website’s SEO health is crucial. Regularly using tools like WebCEO’s Website Audit can help ensure your site adheres to white hat SEO practices and is compliant with search engine guidelines. This way, if you are falsely reported, you have a solid foundation to dispute any claims.

Moreover, maintaining an up-to-date audit report can serve as evidence of your compliance and good practices, which can be invaluable in disputing any wrongful accusations. It’s also a good idea to regularly check your backlink profile using tools like WebCEO’s Backlink Checker to ensure that your site is not associated with any dubious or harmful websites, which can be a common area of concern in false reports.

Being wrongly accused of black hat SEO practices can be distressing, but with the right tools and a proactive approach to website management, you can swiftly address these issues and maintain your site’s integrity.

3. Review bombs

Review bombing actually sounds like a good thing at first blush. It’s when someone saturates the most popular review sites with glowing reviews about your business—sweet, right? However, that’s a huge red flag that makes it look like you’re either doing it yourself or paying people to do it. Either way, that’s not an appropriate SEO best practice. However, it can be tough to figure out who’s behind it. Alternatively, someone might pepper sites with negative reviews that are false. This is reverse review bombing and it can be even more dangerous. Some review sites make it nearly impossible to remove reviews unless they’re abusive, so your only tactic is to bury them under genuine and organic reviews. This can be a laborious process and it’s often too much for a website to manage.

How to avoid:
Go to the WebCEO Web Buzz Monitoring tool and use it as your Reputation Management tool. Enter your branded terms together with product names and keep tracking mentions of your site, product or company on various review platforms. If you see negative reviews, join conversations in order to redeem yourself.

If you suspect negative SEO, work with the search engine of your choice. If you know who’s behind it and it’s safe, try approaching them (either with legal help or not). Sometimes misunderstandings can be blown way out of proportion.

The post 3 Examples of Negative SEO and How to Defend Yourself appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

Gone are the days when all that you needed to drive new customers to your local service was great customer service and your address in the Yellow Pages (book). People stopped trusting services that were listed at the top of yellow page listings just because their names start with the first letters of the alphabet. People now look for tried-and-true services with detailed descriptions, contact and location details, timely offers, awesome photos and reviews from third parties that seem trustworthy. The tired old yellow and white pages have been replaced with Google local search results. Google now understands the user’s intent and returns only the best, most relevant results. Your challenge is to optimize your website to fit the most conversational and complex search queries like: “Where can I eat the best Italian pizza in Boston.” Our challenge is to help you optimize your website properly.

Our Post-Pigeon Local Business SEO Guide has been written with the latest Google Pigeon Update in mind and targeted to improve your rankings in organic local search results. Click the image to download the local SEO Guide.

The post Move Your Site to The Top With The Web CEO Local Business SEO Guide appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.