Where web design is concerned, there is one truth about internal linking that can’t be denied: it’s unavoidable. After all, hyperlinks are the primary means of browsing the Internet and hopping from one web page to another. It affects more than just SEO; pages that aren’t connected with links form a site that cannot be used by humans nor machines. Search engine crawlers can only index the pages they can find, and in order to find them, they need links – not that different from humans. (Why are we entrusting our future to robots again?)

This fact alone should motivate any webmaster to put effort into developing a proper internal link structure each time they create a site. Because so much depends on it, internal linking is one of the most potent weapons in SEO. Now, how do you hunt the fattest and tastiest game with this weapon?

1. Keep Paths Between Pages Short

Make your web pages easy to find. Whether you are still Googling or have already arrived at your destination, looking for the page you need should never take too long. The rule of thumb is, two pages on the same site should never be further than three clicks away from each other. No matter which page is opened in your browser at the moment, there has to be a short path to a different page. Keep this principle in mind when you are planning your site’s structure.

Keep them close like this.

Of course, exceptions exist. For example, forums often have long-running threads with dozens and even hundreds of pages’ worth of comments; in cases like this, finding where you left off the other day can be a real hassle even with a search feature. If your site is such a monster, it’s understandable if a three-clicks path isn’t possible. Still, don’t give up on making it as short as you can wherever possible.

2. Create Lots of Linkable High-Quality Content

Internal links are needed to spread authority between pages. What’s the best way to have many internal links that can do just that? Having a lot of great content, of course!

The union of on-page and off-page SEO gives your site as many high-authority pages as you can earn. Once you have them, it’s only a matter of strategically placing your internal links and letting them do their job.

3. Direct Link Juice Where It’s Needed

A link acts as a channel that allows link juice flow from one page to another, increasing the latter’s authority in the eyes of search engines. It’s true both for external links (from another domain to yours) and internal links (those within the same domain). The amount of ranking power owned by your site’s pages should always be a factor in your internal linking strategy. Which pages could use a bit more link juice in order to be more visible in search results? And which pages would make good providers of that juice?

You’re going to need an SEO tool to look up a page’s authority value. In fact, WebCEO has a Page Authority Analysis tool that does just that.

4. Don’t Make Excessive Links

It’s easy to get carried away and create too many internal links where they don’t necessarily have to be. The idea behind an internal linking strategy is to build a structure that allows the more important pages to have more authority. See that you don’t shoot yourself in the foot by directing link juice away from the page that needs it.

Besides, too much blue in a text is distracting and confusing.

You can’t get away with this unless you are Wikipedia.

5. Make Sure Your Internal Links Are Relevant

You know how backlinks from unnatural sources may put your site’s position in search results in danger? The same is true for internal links. Going from a place to buy summer shorts online to an article about quantum physics without any context will do nothing but confuse the user (although in this case, I doubt context will help much). And while Google is unlikely to send you an email about what you’ve been doing with your internal links, they’ll still pick up on the quantum physics article’s increased bounce rate and lower its rankings.

Internal links on your site should be useful to your visitors, first and foremost.

6. Mind the Number of Links on a Page

Here’s a fun fact about search engine spiders. The number of links they can crawl on a single page isn’t infinite: it’s roughly 150 tops. Depending on the kind of site you have, this number can be either too low or high enough that you’ll never have to worry about it. In any case, links that exceed this limit are effectively invisible to crawlers. If you intend to have that many on a single page, you might want to consider their order and decide which to sacrifice to obscurity. Some of them will end up passing no link juice even if they are dofollow links.

7. Don’t Put Too Many Links in Site-Wide Footers

Footers are useful, no disagreements here. They offer quick access to every major page on a site, no matter where the user is at the moment. However, footers overstuffed with links look like a mess and make it difficult to find what the user needs. And there’s the crawl limit per page to consider, too. Link number 151 and the rest in line will be ignored by spiders.

8. Use Anchor Texts Correctly

Anchor texts do more than just signal the user where to click in order to open a new page. They are also treated by search engines as keywords for pages they link to. Optimizing multiple pages of your site for the same keywords is called keyword cannibalization, and it’s as unpleasant as it sounds: it makes it hard for search engines to decide which page should be ranking for the keywords in question. As a result, the pages don’t rank as high as they could.

Avoid keyword cannibalization by not using the same anchor text while linking to different pages. You can use WebCEO’s Link Text Analysis tool to bring up all the anchor texts on your site and see if any of them are used in a way that compromises it.

There’s also the matter of having several identical internal links on the same page. Let’s say you run an online clothing shop and one of its pages has links to where visitors can buy men’s pants. Those links have anchor texts saying “the best pants for men”, “black trousers, men’s clothing” and “men’s skinny joggers”. What happens when you use them all at once on the same page? Here’s what: search engines will count only the first anchor text as a keyword. Sure, the links after the first will still be clicked on by users and pass link juice, but their anchor texts will lose their power.

9. Don’t Make Your Internal Links “Nofollow”

You can put a rel=”nofollow” attribute inside a link. Doing so will tell search engine crawlers not to visit the linked page, and no ranking power will pass through it. Some webmasters are tempted to mark their internal links as “nofollow” and exert more control over the flow of link juice on their sites.

They are making a mistake.

He sure showed them.

Matt Cutts has commented on the subject, and his words should be a good reminder to those overly enthusiastic webmasters about what rel=”nofollow” does. It tells crawlers to ignore the link when you want them to find the page it points to, and then it won’t appear in search results! That’s why you shouldn’t “nofollow” internal links unless there are pages you don’t want indexed. Even then, you could use the robots.txt file for that.

10. Make Your Links in HTML Format

Hyperlinks are made like this:

<a href=”https://url-address.com/”>anchor text</a>

It’s one of the first things you learn when you want to create your own website. However, HTML isn’t the only language which can be used to write a link; for example, JavaScript can do it, too.

var str = “anchor text”;

var result = str.link(“https://url-address.com”);

Problem is, links made in other languages can be uncrawlable by search engines or pass less authority, depending on how they are used. That’s why it’s better to stick to HTML links.

11. Be Aware of Links That Can’t Be Crawled

It is possible to put a link where search engine spiders will never find it. Places where a link is doomed to never be crawled include:

• Flash, Java, or other plug-ins: links inside them cannot be accessed by spiders.
• Broken JavaScript code: when the code doesn’t work, neither does the link.
• Submission forms: crawlers won’t attempt to submit a form on your site.
• Internal search boxes: crawlers don’t perform searches on websites.
• Pages with hundreds of links: spiders have a crawl limit of 150.

Search engines also typically can’t crawl links inside HTML frames and inline frames, although workarounds are available to experienced webmasters.

Lastly, the robots.txt and the robots meta tag can be used to prevent spiders from accessing any page of your choice. Internal links to blocked pages will only be of use to visitors.

12. Avoid Orphaned and Dead-End Pages

A page with no internal links on it is called a dead-end page. It doesn’t point to any other pages on a site, meaning it’s a dead-end for search engine crawlers. It’s bad for users, too: they can only leave such a page by pressing the Back button or manually typing a new URL. Neither is a comfortable way to navigate a site.

The opposite of a dead-end page is an orphan page. They are invisible to crawlers and are unlikely to be found by visitors. If you made such a page intentionally (maybe to test a feature), it’s okay. Otherwise, you risk losing a lot of traffic. Make sure that pages with good, rankable content always have inbound links pointing to them.

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The post 12 Tips to Ace Your Internal Link Building Strategy appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

The following SEO Guide is not a Bible, but rather a list of recommendations and SEO trends listed in our actionable Semantic SEO Strategy guide. You can download this for FREE and use it alongside the 14+ free SEO tools which you will need for your website optimization and promotion in 2017.

What you’ll learn from this step-by-step handbook:

In the free 19 page handbook we’ve collected some up-to-date practical advice and how-to’s backed by 14+ free SEO tools hand-picked by our editors which will help you understand and implement the latest Google search optimization trends:

Chapter I. How contextual (semantic) search will change the way you manage your Content SEO Audits, and what tools will help you create user- and SEO-friendly website copy.

RankBrain forever changed the way we optimize website content for search engines. If, in 2015, RankBrain was used to interpret 15-20% of search queries, Google now uses RankBrain as a part of its core algorithm. Moreover, it applies its AI system for re-ranking search results. RankBrain doesn’t punish websites, but rather elevates or demotes them by relevance. How can you optimize for RankBrain? Ideally, you will need to learn how to read your targeted audience’s minds. But in real life, you will need to optimize your website for LSI keywords and contextual clues instead of standalone keywords.

In this chapter you’ll learn how to:

• Improve your website user experience by fixing on-page technical and content SEO issues.
• Contextualize Your Keyword Research and Optimization
• Improve visitors’ engagement and your content search visibility with a proper Internal Links structure
• Improve your website SERP clickability by optimizing your structured data with relevant and descriptive copy.

Chapter II. Step Up Your Mobile-First Search Index Game

Given the fact that Google, in 2017, is planning to launch a separate mobile search index which will eventually become the primary one, you should give mobile SEO your best shot…

Chapter III. Help Tools to Improve & Measure Your SEO Performance

When you plan something for tomorrow, you should play upon your previous experience, taking into account what worked best of all and what didn’t bring any benefits. You want to measure; we have the tools…

Sign up for a 14-days Free Trial and get exclusive access to a full guide and 14 professional SEO tools to help you apply our recommendations to your SEO strategy.

Words of Cheer

You never know what you can do til you try. You have a website and, if you work hard on it, you will be rewarded by Google. Our SEO strategy is a little leg-up for you to get this reward in 2017.

The post Semantic SEO Strategy: How to Do SEO in 2017 appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

Have you heard about the Pareto Rule? This principle was named after Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto, who analyzed the Italian land market and found that 80% of Italy’s land was owned by 20% of the population. Eventually people started to apply the Pareto principle to other spheres of life, including business, technology, culture, education, management etc. The rule helps in balancing your business inputs-outputs in the most effective way: set business priorities, find the 20% of the most profitable segments of your business, what your business is good at and minify your spends on the aspects which take a lot of your time and resources and bring less profits.

Here are some common 80/20 rules which construct a paradigm of success in the Business and Digital Marketing world:

• 80% of your website traffic come from 20% of channel sources
• 80% of searchers visit 20% of website pages
• 80% of traffic is generated by 20% of your content
• 80% of profits come from 20% of your clients
• 80% ofsales come from 20% of your products
• 80% of social traffic come from 20% of social media sites

What about the Pareto rule when applying it to SEO and Internet Marketing? Considering the correlation 80/20, the key objective that most of the webmasters face is the optimization of SEO activities in order to reach the perfect correlation – 20% of inputs should bring 80% of outputs.

Let’s focus on what 20% of your inputsthat result in 80% of outputs. The aspects uncovered below are not absolute numbers of the formula of success, but a rough concept that can help you set priorities for a successful SEO Strategy.

20% of Your Niche Keywords Drive 80% of Traffic

Mighty content dandelions grow from little keyword seeds. You should focus on the best…a few dozen keywords in order to build a strong and authoritative blog pieces or landing pages. If you have not yet performed detailed Hummingbird-friendly keyword research or did it too long ago, give it a second wind.

 Keyword Research 

Start with keyword research of your niche in order to pick a list of keywords and phrases that is highly descriptive and relevant to your website theme.

Help tools: the WebCEO Keyword Research Tool → Get Suggestions

 Competitive Research

Dig into your competitor keyword analysis in order to narrow your list of targeted keywords and enrich your keyword basket with the most popular terms you want to compete for

Help tools: The WebCEO Keyword Research Tool → Spy on Competitors

 Search Queries Analyitcs 

Strengthen your keyword pattern with the search queries your website is mostly searchable for.

Help tools: Google Analytics → Search Engine Optimization → Queries + Google Search Console → Search Traffic → Search Analytics.

Update your content and research new keywords once you see a decrease in traffic or once you see your competition performing better than you. Don’t bother to post 7 days a week. Focus on producing the 20% of helpful, creative and timely content that will bring 80% of targeted traffic, quality leads and loyal customers.

20% of Landing Pages Drive the Attention of 80% of Users

When optimizing your website, you should bear in mind that only 20% of your website pages will drive 80% of overall traffic. These 20% of pages are your landing pages, – targeted pages which are critical to the buying process. Landing pages are a kind of accelerant for users to take actions and the efficiency of this depends on the transparency of the areas that users interact with in order to complete actions. That’s why you should focus on optimization of key aspects of your landing pages such as user experience and on-page SEO (keywords and internal links).

Landing Page SEO

If your website already receives some traffic, sit and analyze what pages of your website perform better than others. As soon as you find the pages visitors are mostly engaged with, dive deep into their on-page SEO

Help tools: Google Analytics → Search Engine Optimization → Landing Pages + Google Search Console → Search Traffic → Search Analytics.

Bonus tool: Web CEO Google Search Analytics provides you not only with analytics on your top pages found in search, but also allows you to mark the best performing pages as landing pages in order to further work with them in the Landing Page SEO tool of WebCEO.

User Experience Optimization

The interface and design of a landing page plays a critical role in the customer acquisition process. In order to find what 20% of page areas cause 80% of user actions, conduct the visualization and optimization of a page heatmap with the help of website heatmap tools.

Help tools: Crazy Egg.

Internal Links Analysis and Optimization

The Internal Links Structure of a website is critical both in the context of user experience, search visibility and SEO. An in-depth and user-friendly internal links map can significantly improve your landing page click-through rate, help search enginesindex and understand deeper pages of your site quickly, and thus increase your visibility and rankings.

Try to improve your website navigation in order to tie visitors to each of your landing pages and help them take actions on your site with the help of a robust internal links optimization.

Help tools: the WebCEO Internal Links Optimization tool

20% of Your Inbound Links Pass 80% of Link Juice

The quality of content is responsible for the quality of your backlinks. The better the content, the better the backlinks. But you should be aware of the fact that only 20% of your backlink profile passes the 80% of link juice that really affects your SEO. Of great importance is the type of backlink, its placement, anchor text and the source it’s put on.

In order to gain more benefits from the backlinks you build, you should first examine which of your external links bring the most value to your website. Then you can try to earn more of this type of backlinks. Analyze your competitors’ backlink profile for further link prospecting

Help tools: the WebCEO Backlink Quality Check tool + the WebCEO Competitor Backlink Spy tool + Ahrefs

Sign Up for the WebCEO all-in-one SEO platform in order to minify your SEO inputs.

If you have applied the 20/80 system to your SEO and marketing strategy and are ready to share your experience, feel free to share it using the comments section.

The post Pareto Rule in SEO: What 20% of Your Inputs Bring 80% of Outputs appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

What is the biggest challenge for today’s website owners and digital marketers? It is to keep your target visitors as long as possible on your site and direct them softly to the end point of the conversion funnel that is a call-to-action. To evaluate the rate of visitor engagement you can use the Google Analytics Behavior insights such as the Bounce Rate and Average Time on Page. The higher the bounce rate and the lower the average time on page, the lower the conversion rate is. What is the best SEO technique you can use to improve the score for these SEO variables and make people dive deeper into your website? –Highlighted hyperlinks in the body of pages can bring a reader to other important pages where he can find additional relevant info, then sign up for your service, buy your product, subscribe for a newsletter or leave his contact details. In SEO we call all this internal links map or structure.

What are the types of internal links to use for effective internal links optimization?

Links are the doors that search engine crawlers and users pass to find each of your pages. It fully depends on you to open or close your internal link doors for search engines and your potential clients. A good internal links structure includes a complex system of interlinking on a site that that includes different types of internal links:

• Navigational links serve to put a website’s navigation into a structured order. These can include menu links, sidebar links or breadcrumb links.
• Footer links are often sitewide links that serve as a sitemap and help new users find quick access to the most valuable pages on a site.
• Contextual or editorial links are links located in the body of a page and surrounded by relevant copy.

Editorial links are the most valuable types of internal links from an SEO and user experience perspective. While navigational links are just the static anchors on a site, editorial links are dynamic beacons which help users and search engines drift your website easily from page to page. If properly optimized, internal links are the best SEO technique to establish a website’s theme for better indexing and crawling by search engines and for increasing your landing pages’ ranking power and authority. The most important part in the structure of the internal link is a visible and clickable area of the link which is most often anchor text, the descriptive keyword or phrase that is pasted in the HTML link after the targeted page URL and before the closing link tag.

Here is an example of a perfect, SEO-friendly internal link with properly optimized anchor text:

<a href=”https://www.webceo.com/blog/find-and-neutralize-toxic-links-with-the-web-ceo-backlink-quality-checker/> Web CEO Backlink Quality Check</a>

Here, the anchor text with relevant explanatory long-tail keyword in bold clearly points to the target page.

Here is another example:

<a href=”https://online.webceo.com/?aw=ranker/detailsbyse/>monitor keyword rankings</a>

Here, we use an internal link as the call-to-action that not only describes the target page (which is the page of the tool for tracking site rankings), but induces people to sign up for our service by clicking on the registration page. Being a part of the post, it serves as an organic call-to-action button.

What are the benefits from internal links optimization?

There are several positive effects you can achieve via internal links optimization.

• Make the website easy-to-navigate for new visitors.
• Make the website theme clear in the eyes of the search engines.
• Increase the number of page views.
• Reduce the bounce rate.
• Benefit from visitor responses to organic call-to-actions.
• Spread the link juice throughout your website.
• Internal Links are much more easily controlled and optimized than external backlinks.

What are the best SEO tips to strengthen your internal links structure and spread SE ranking juice all over your website?

1. Make sure your internal links are not broken or blocked by the Robots.txt file. To check the accessibility of your internal links, use the Landing Page SEO report of the WebCEO SEO Analysis tool for free.
2. Avoid any Java, Flash, IFrames and other plug-ins when building your internal link map.
3. Associate (or tie) the most authoritative landing pages with less authoritative ones. Ranking for hundreds of targeted terms within one single page (be it the home page or another top landing page) is a mission: impossible. You are better off mapping targeted keywords on other relevant internal landing pages.
4. Diverse the anchor texts of your internal links. With Post-Hummingbird SEO, it is essential to make your content user-friendly and theme-focused. For the most effective optimization of anchor texts of your internal links, use the Internal Links Optimization tool for free (no limitations in the Free Plan).
5. Improve the page speed score for the landing pages where your most valuable internal links are displayed. If your site is loading longer than 3-6 sec, this means it may cause a bad user experience. In this case, there is no need to optimize your internal links at all, because people are likely to leave it immediately (or stop trying to load it), especially those who use mobile devices. The page speed score is one of Google’s SEO ranking factors, so proper page speed optimization is a must for the better performance of your landing pages.
6. Orchestrate a great mobile user experience on your landing pages. Make your internal links thumb-friendly and easy-to-click without zooming. Starting on April 21, mobile friendliness will be officially added to Google’s ranking algorithm and, if your website is poorly optimized for mobile, don’t expect to keep high rankings. Check your landing pages now for any mobile optimization issues with the Mobile Optimization report from WebCEO. Be prepared for spring.

The post 6 SEO Tips to Improve Your Internal Links Structure and Tie Visitors to Nearly Every Page of Your Site appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

Marketers tend to be obsessed with high rankings but the final goal of good content marketing is traffic.  Targeted traffic shows up at your door when you’ve optimized your site for the right SEO keywords. What helps you to find the right keywords? Detailed keyword research is crucial. Then, instead of being obsessed with high rankings for your targeted keywords, think of the conversion rate for each of them and optimize for that. It is conversion that helps you to pay the bills.

When you do research for high converting keywords you should focus on a “cluster,” not on a “core”. Having a very limited targeted keywords cloud can cause you to sink in competition bog and miss your chance to attract targeted and high converting traffic. Richard Jacobs (an Attorney Marketing Specialist at Speakeasy Marketing Inc.) likened a keyword to a dandelion in his Dandelion Keyword Theory:

This concerns both SEO and PPC efforts. When you are bidding on a particular phrase or long-tail term…you should not bid on that particular keyword but on patterns surrounding it. Think of your targeted  SEO keywords as a circle tangent to a larger area outside of your circle; the bigger your circle of keywords, the larger will be the number of search queries related to your selected SEO keywords realm.

As soon as you realize that keywords are not only about rankings, start to build a semantic core from your main keyword’s fluffy halo. With special thanks to the Zamurai Blogger, here are some types of keywords that can convert extremely well if optimized and implemented properly:

1.  User Intent keywords. These are mainly long tail question phrases and conversational terms real searchers use. Examples would be “Who’s the best lawyer in Dodge City” or “I want to buy a wedding dress in downtown Seattle”. Most of us ask concrete questions and type in detailed queries to reduce the time and efforts on searching of what we need. Your task is to reduce your competitor chances to appear higher than you in search results.
2.  Local Terms. These are keywords and phrases that include a nearby location. If your business has a physical location than this type of keyword is a must if you want to drive high converting searchers to your site.
3.  User Decision Making Analysis Keywords. Many people will not only type in “What is the best product in XYZ Category” or “What is the best pizza place in Manhattan” but they will search for “Review Products XYZ Category” or “Comparison of Manhattan Pizza Places.” You can post a review or comparison of your product with another product to handle such queries. Searchers may be looking for case studies with which to make their decisions such as “Customer experiences XYZ Category,” so you will want to write about some of your satisfied customers as case studies. Other customers are specifically looking for special offers and discounts, so you will want to have active landing pages with some special offers going most of the time and visible on search engines. Then build your anchor texts around all these ”decision making” keywords and see how your conversion rate starts to grow.
4. List Keywords. People love structured lists. Write posts and optimize landing pages for keyword phrases like “Top 10 of…”, “6 reasons why you should…”, “A list of…” etc.
5. Thought Leader Keywords. Some product categories have been made famous by or are associated with a celebrity or thought leader and their actual or potential endorsement of a product would be important for a buyer to make a decision. You may want to optimize some pages for keywords like “What is Sean Connery’s favorite hotel in Scotland” or “What Martini Brand would James Bond prefer” even if your product wasn’t specifically recommended by them. As long as your content doesn’t lie and is very interesting to readers, it can provide you with a lot of targeted traffic. For instance, if you owned a hotel in Scotland, you could provide a list of a few hotels Sean Connery would probably like and playfully state that he is welcome anytime at your hotel. Optimally, you will want to write about how you got the real attention of someone whose opinion would be valued for your product category.

Here are several places where you can do research for high conversion keywords:

• Google Analytics →Acquisition → Search Engine Optimization → Queries report. These are the real intent-based keywords that have brought folks directly to your site. If you really want to increase your conversion rate this is the first place you should look for high converting terms.
• Keyword cluster provided in the WebCEO Keyword Research tool suggestions. The key features of this tool allow you to select the most effective keywords thanks to our keyword parameter range filters of global searches, local searches, bid competition and KEI (Keyword Effectiveness Index).

• Google search related suggestions. This is the easiest way to look for searches typed in by other users. Type in all possible questions and conversational phrases that are relevant to your site. As soon as you click on a search button, Google will provide the most relevant and popular combinations closely related to your search query at the bottom of the first page. Another option is the Google Autocomplete predictions that are enabled when you type in some query and see all possible suggestions dropped down from the search box.
• If your site is complex and  you don’t have an on-site search option installed on your website yet, you’d better implement this because Google Analytics will retain this data and you can then get more alternative keyword clusters that you can focus on for better SEO and PPC campaigns. An internal search data analysis allows you to see the search terms that greatly differ from the external search queries provided in Google Analytics. The point is that user search intent on Google is more generic while onsite user search intent is more specific.

Don’t forget to give extra attention to your high conversion keywords and thematically optimized landing pages.. Give your content, that is rich in targeted converting keywords, a boost via social channel sharing and link building.

Tip: Your content theme and keyword clusters should be supported by diverse internal link texts. WebCEO Internal Links Optimization Guide will help you to analyze your link texts and fine-tune a strong semantic field for your landing pages so you can get higher rankings for your targeted search queries.

The post 5 Must-Have Keywords to Increase Organic Conversions appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

Recently, I came across an article about the supposed obsolescence of rank tracking tools. This caused me to think about the latest issues with rank checking. It is true that Google is getting more and more personalized and returns only the most relevant results based on specific algorithmic variables:

–  Personal search history of logged in users;

–  Geolocation of searchers;

–  Specific devices searches are made on;

–  Social connections weight.

An old-school one-way focus on your targeted keywords will no longer always bring your website to the top search engine positions unless you have turned back the hands of SEO time, when all you needed to do is to stuff your site with: “Click here to order pizza and get your tasty pizza delivered in 30 minutes” and so on and so forth. It was a time of spam links and exact match anchor text jungles. But Google is no longer a wild place. It is now a civil, organized and user-friendly search medium with strict rules for a better user experience. If you want to live in this new civilized world, “pay taxes” to Google in the form of relevant and quality links, relevant and useful content etc.

Yes, search has become more personalized and smart about user experiences. But now we have the Google Hummingbird Algorithm that helps understand the users’ intent. What you need is to detect all the possible search queries used by qualified searchers in order to reach your site. Google Analytics and Search Console are great at providing detailed information about the traffic to your site and your content’s performance. Website analysis is also tightly bound to some internal and external parameters, like internal links, backlinks and competitor metrics, which are not presented in Google Analytics and Search Console reports (there is an external links report in GSC).

WebCEO is a great value-added SEO platform for comprehensive website SEO analysis, including:

• Keyword Research that provides a list of terms and phrases based on Webmaster tools suggestions and selected competitors’ targeted keyword bases.
• Internal Links Optimization with an in-depth analysis of your internal site links and anchor texts.
• Backlink Quality Check with the Toxic Links clean-up reporting tool.

As for the WebCEO Rank Checker, it serves all the requirements of SEOs. It provides the opportunity to monitor site rankings from any place in the world. You can narrow keyword tracking from a country to a city level and run local rank tracking. Go to the WebCEO Rank Checking Tool in order to monitor keyword rankings on a regular basis and receive clean and awesome SEO reports on:

–  Your average rankings trend;
–  Ranking positions detailed, by page or by tag;
–  Historical ranking results;
–  Competitive rankings.
Shortly, you will be able to track rankings for mobile search results.

Real SEOs and Internet Marketing pros know that Rank Tracking is not a final goal. It is a means towards an end, which is a conversion. Stop being obsessed with your rankings, pay attention to all the aspects of your online marketing: content (not just standalone keywords) creation and distribution, link building, social media marketing, competitive metrics research and analysis etc.

The post Is Rank Checking Useless For Today’s SEO? appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

As you know, Panda is a Google filter that seeks to stop spammy (low quality) sites from ranking high in the SERPs.

In late May the Google Panda 4.0 update was discussed all over the SEO community. The web is full of theoretical advice on how to avoid the Panda penalty. We have some practical tips.

Avoid Exact Match Link Text

Part of any site development is planning how users will navigate the content. In terms of SEO it means that your internal links structure should be well-optimized. Internal links optimization is often ignored, although it is a great method to improve landing (important) pages’ search visibility and to broadcast your website’s theme.

However, if linking is implemented incorrectly, it can attract Panda’s attention. The first thing Google Panda may react badly to is if you have an excessive number of exact matching link texts. The exact matching link texts can set off alarms with Google that you may be trying to manipulate the algorithm and get higher rankings.

How to avoid this:

Go to the WebCEO Internal Links Optimization tool and check the “Link Text Analysis” report. The numbers you are interested in are highlighted on the screenshot below.

Analyze how diverse the internal link texts are. If you see that an exact link text is used with more than 20% of all your internal links, consider changing some texts to diversify you internal links profile.

Decrease Site Wide Links

When building a site’s navigation it is typical to create site wide navigational links to a domain’s most popular pages. Very often these links are found in the side bar or footer and are completely irrelevant to the topic of most of the pages that the link falls on. These links do not improve your page’s authority and should be minimized.

What to do:

Use the Page Authority Analysis report of the Internal Links Optimization tool to identify your most important pages for now. Are your landing pages (the pages you use to convert visitors into customers) the most authoritative pages?

View the details of a page you want to improve the authority of. You will get the list of the pages that are still not linked to your landing page. Use this list to find the best link donors. Remember that the best links are contextual links with natural link text places on the relevant pages, as opposed to links found in the footer of the page.

Avoid Duplicates

Panda uses multiple factors to identify your site’s quality. One of them is the absence of duplicate content pieces. You should use only high quality unique content; this is not even a point of discussion. However, sometimes duplicate Titles and Descriptions make their way to your pages and that can be very bad. It’s an easy mistake to make however.

How to avoid:

The On-Site SEO report of the Content Assistant tool will help you. Scan your website and get notified about all duplicate Titles and Descriptions found. Besides you will know if your site has other optimization issues preventing you from getting high rankings.

After you’ve discovered the duplicates, consider rewriting the Titles and Descriptions to be unique. Remember, that the Titles and the Descriptions are the pieces that prompt a searcher to click your link on a SERP. Make them descriptive and appealing.

Bonus tip: Ensure that your backlink profile is sound. Use the Toxic Links report of the Backlink Quality Check tool to find and remove harmful links.

The post How to Avoid the Google Panda Penalty with the WebCEO tools 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.

We are often asked why the home page of a website ranks high in the search results, while inner pages appear deeper in results. Sometimes, inner pages don’t appear at all because they seem to be invisible to search engines for some reasons. What are those reasons? We are here to approach these reasons and make them clear for you.

First off, the link building strategy you have chosen may have taken a wrong tack. Backlinks built through article submission directories, guest post blogs etc, are now looked at poorly by Google. Google has recently been penalizing article directories and guest posting blogs for manipulative link techniques. One of the most authoritative guest post platform, MyBlogGuest has just been penalized. Though Ann Smarty (founder of the MBG) says that this is just a PR game run by Matt Cutts, the fact is no one will find salvation from Google’s “eagle eye” if it looks to them like you might be playing link-building games.

So, in light of recent events, a primary focus on backlink building is not a good and safe strategy for your website promotion. Besides, building backlinks is out of your control.

You can’t keep an eye on all the backlinks built over the internet. A great number of your inbound links are built automatically and a mass of them often point to your home page. This is one of the reasons why only your home page has high rankings. You should be careful, if too many backlinks point to the home page with the same anchor text, search engines may start to wonder if a link manipulation is going on and penalize your website. The only thing here that you can do is to track and analyze your backlink profile with the help of SEO reporting tools.

This is what WebCEO toolset was built for: our Backlink Quality Check and Competitor Backlink Spy with the Toxic Links reporting tool provide a comprehensive up-to-date analysis of your backlink profile and those of your competitors.

There is another side of this issue. Poor internal link structure is what makes search engines love a home page and ignore inner pages of your website. Let’s make it clear, a well-structured internal link map of your website helps Google to determine the most important landing pages of your website. Internal linking enables search engines to better understand what the theme of your website is.

The good news is that internal link building is something that you can and should take under control. And WebCEO has developed a control device for you to analyze and manage your website internal link optimization. Make use of our Internal Links Optimization tool to perform a detailed internal link text analysis, page authority and a landing page analysis of the links that connect your site pages. With this tool you can easily see how your pages are linked, and analyze the performance of link text. As a result you will find ways to better optimize internal links all over your website.

I strongly recommend that you analyze the authority of your landing pages to improve their internal links structure and make them relevant to the goals of the website.

As soon as you have analyzed page authority, open your Landing Page Analysis report to discover what pages are not yet linked to this or that landing page. This is a great opportunity for the “underestimated” pages to get additional link juice.

You will get so many “bonuses” after internal link optimization being applied:

• stronger visibility for internal pages in search results;
• authority and link juice spread throughout your inner pages;
• searcher/visitor engagement increase.

These efforts are just one of the heats in a marathon race. Keep your eye on the ball even if your pages rank well. Don’t forget to do an SEO audit of your website on a regular basis. There are always things that need your improvement.

Download our guide to find out how to optimize your internal site structure and get more search engine visibility.

The post How do I make landing pages rank as well as my home page? Listen to WebCEO’s suggestions and solutions! appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.