Some editors-in-chief want pictures of Spiderman. Others just want as much publicity for their news as possible. Whichever type you are, there’s one undeniable truth: if you run a news website, SEO is required to conquer the world of online journalism.

And this post, which describes SEO for news sites, is the lottery card you’ve been looking for. Are you ready to start winning the traffic sweepstakes? Read on.

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1. Make your site easy to browse

News sites take in the info about every interesting event in the world. As a byproduct of this mission, they end up with thousands of pages, all of which need to be organized. What happens when they aren’t organized? Visitors get lost, link juice doesn’t flow, the site doesn’t rank, and your employers hire a more competent SEO specialist. Nobody is left happy!

So the first milestone is to avoid making a mess on your own news aggregator. You can do it by ensuring the site has the following things:

• Search bar. This is a must-have on any site with a great number of pages. Help users quickly find articles on the topics that interest them.
• Pagination or infinite scroll. Each is better than the other in its own way, but you can’t run a news site without one of the two. You will have so much content that you’ll need to display it to users in bits.
• Categories and tags. Use them to group together articles on related topics. They are also good for SEO: links to category and tag pages have anchor texts relevant to your site. You can also include those links in a navigation bar.
• Breadcrumbs. A line with two links – one to the home page, the other to the news category – is enough to make browsing a bit easier.

These will ensure your visitors can quickly find any content they want and jump between the site’s pages. What else does your news website need?

• Create a sitemap. All your news articles must be indexed by Google or they won’t appear in its search results. Use WebCEO’s Sitemap Generation tool to create one and be sure it’s updated regularly.
• Link your articles between each other. If users see a link that catches their attention, they’ll click on it and spend more time on your site, which is always good. It will also help your articles gain authority and push them higher in Google’s SERPs.

2. Optimize your news site

On-page SEO for news sites is pretty straightforward. All you need is high-quality articles that are optimized both for users and search engines. A news portal is essentially just a very big blog. Do you remember how to optimize blogs? There you have it.

If SEO is all Greek to you, don’t worry! This post is meant to help with your news site optimization, after all.

Find keywords, pronto!

“Strike while the iron is hot” applies to news like nothing else. You have to act quickly, or other sites will report first and steal your audience. Be fast when writing your articles, and be even faster when optimizing them!

Fortunately, if you need keywords for a news website, WebCEO’s Keyword Research tool is a solid choice both in terms of speed and quality.

Find high-ranking keywords for your news articles: Sign Up Free

Keywords are to be placed in:

• Page titles. And since they are titles of news articles, they need to be eye-catching, clickable and contain power words. Fortunately, this niche thrives on clickbait titles, so you have a lot of room for maneuver.
• Meta descriptions. They work as follow-ups for titles, so they should fulfil the same purpose and be just as eye-catching.
• Page URLs. A link you can read and understand looks much more trustworthy than a random string of symbols. Many content management systems automatically generate default URLs for new pages; instead of using those, write your own URLs.
• H1-H4 headings. These help both Google and the readers to understand the content of your news articles.
• Images’ filenames and ALT attributes. Filling these out helps your site to be found in Google image search, and properly written ALT attributes can be used as an alternative for images.
• Anchor texts of links to other articles. It will help the articles rank for those keywords a little higher.

Use shareable images

Text-only news sites are a thing, and they are more popular than one would expect. However, pictures are an indispensable part of the user experience and, in fact, the Internet as a whole. Should you sacrifice the user experience for a boost in website loading speed? You be the judge.

If you decide to keep images on your news site, then you better incorporate them in your SEO. You will be using a lot of images, and you don’t want them to be a strain on your loading speed. Keep their file size to a minimum.

• Save them in the right format
• Adjust their height and width to fit the page
• Merge consecutive images when appropriate
• Compress them

It’s usual for different news sites to use the same hero images, but you’ll do much better with unique ones. Users are more likely to share your article in social media when it has a hero image they’ve never seen before.

Avoid duplicate content

Duplicate content is the bane of news websites. Google filters out plagiarized content from its search results; if your articles aren’t original, users might never find them organically. The temptation to publish news as soon as possible may be strong, but you just have to fight it and not copy news articles from other sites.

But let’s say you couldn’t avoid it. How do you recover from the damage?

• Edit your content to make it unique
• Set up 301 redirects leading to the original article
• Use the rel=”canonical” attribute to point to the original

And for the last content-related tip: when news receives an update, don’t create a new page. Add the new information in the existing article instead.

3. Keep your site operational

If you want to keep your readers updated on the world’s hottest events, your site needs to run like clockwork. Every bug, every error takes away from user experience and makes readers less eager to be your users. How do you avoid the embarrassment and help your news site run smoothly?

Improve your site loading speed

Speed converts to heat. Therefore, fast news is the hottest! Be the first to tell users about the latest events, both figuratively and literally: Google ranks fast-loading sites higher.

Increasing your loading speed is a matter of doing many small things, each with only a minor effect on its own. If you want to make a noticeable difference, you will need to do them all. In no particular order:

• Optimize your images;
• Minimize your page code;
• Use fewer redirects – or better yet, don’t use them at all;
• Host your news site on a fast server or a content delivery network;
• Use Accelerated Mobile Pages to create very fast-loading versions of your articles.

Test your site with WebCEO’s Speed Optimization tool and see what you can improve.

Hot news need hottest loading speed: Sign Up Free

Make your site mobile-friendly

Even though reading on a handheld device while scrolling with your finger feels more like reading a book than a newspaper, news still goes quite well with mobile. And it has to, because Google’s mobile-first index is as unforgiving as its desktop predecessor. If your news site can’t provide a good mobile user experience, don’t expect high rankings.

Fortunately, optimizing your site for mobile isn’t too hard. You will just need to make it display well on small screens.

• Implement a responsive design;
• Use large fonts – 16 pt. or larger;
• Say no to obstructing popups (exceptions: sensitive content warning, age verification, asking permission to use cookies);
• Leave space between lines and paragraphs of text, images, buttons and other page elements;
• Load quickly.

Scan your site with WebCEO’s Mobile Optimization tool (which can be found right next to the Speed Optimization tool) and see if you could make your news portal more mobile-friendly.

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Fix technical errors

Depending on how many articles you plan to release daily, your news portal could be a very prolific source of user traffic; traffic that you risk losing, if you get technical errors and just leave them unchecked.

At least once a week, audit your site for errors with WebCEO’s Technical Audit tool. Once you’ve found the errors, fix them.

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4. Build relevant links

Your news portal is going to need backlinks, same as every other site. Where can you get them?

• Blogs. Another easy way to make a backlink is to cite your news article somewhere as a source. It can be your own blog, or you can write a guest post for somebody, or just post a non-spammy link somewhere in comments. Same as above, mind both quality and quantity.
• Content directories. You can submit your news articles to specialized directories. They tend to have a high domain authority, so backlinks from them can give you a tremendous ranking boost. Some of those directories can be found in WebCEO’s Content Submission tool.
• Forums. It’s hard to find a forum that doesn’t have a section for news threads. Easy all-you-can-have backlinks! Just be mindful of their quality and try not to make too many of them at once. Keep an eye on your link profile in WebCEO’s My Backlinks tool.

Check who links to your news: Sign Up Free

Note that Google expects you to have at least 20% nofollow links to look like a natural website, so it’s definitely not a waste of time to show Google you’re getting nofollow links from authoritative sites.

5. Use social media

Can you imagine running a news site and not posting news on your own social media channels? That just screams incompetence, doesn’t it?

Social platforms are very news-friendly. Coupled with news portals, they almost always form a healthy, mutually beneficial relationship – especially with their owner’s help. So what can you do to help it grow?

The most basic rule is to post often and consistently. Here are the other rules, each of which deserves a detailed explanation.

Be present everywhere

How many social platforms can you name from the top of your head? That’s how many you should use for sharing your news articles – and then some more. The most popular platforms like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube would be anyone’s first choice, but of course, there are plenty of others.

Bottom line: cast a wide net and build your presence everywhere you can. You should be getting at least 25% of your traffic from social media anyway.

Once you’ve made the social media pages and have been using them for some time, you’ll want to know how well they are performing and if your social media strategy needs improvement. You can judge this by the user engagement: the more upvotes, comments and shares you get for your posts, the better. Count them all quickly with WebCEO’s Social Engagement tool.

It helps to compare your pages’ performance to that of your competitors’ pages in social media, too. If they are getting more engagement, you might want to take a look at what works for them and start doing that, too.

Measure your competitors’ social engagement with WebCEO’s Competitor Social Citations.

Find the best times to post

Your readers aren’t online 24/7. If you post to social media whenever, your updates will most likely get buried in the readers’ feed under countless other posts.

Fortunately, the best times to post have been thoroughly studied. For news portals, these are the best hours (in your local time) and days to post on some of the most popular social platforms.

Facebook:

• Best times: 8 AM – 1 PM
• Best days: Mondays through Fridays

YouTube:

• Best times: 2-4 PM on weekdays, 9-11 AM on weekends
• Best days: Friday, Saturday, Sunday

Instagram:

• Best times: 8 AM – 1 PM
• Best day: Wednesday

Twitter:

• Best times: 9 AM – 12 PM
• Best days: Wednesday, Friday

LinkedIn:

• Best times: 10 AM – 3 PM
• Best days: Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday

TikTok:

• Best times: Tuesdays 2–3 PM, Wednesdays and Thursdays 1–3 PM
• Best days: Wednesday, Thursday

Of course, there’s always a chance it might be different for your own site. Better play it safe and look through your Google Analytics data for the times you are getting the most visitors – and then post at those times.

Link to your social pages from your site

Make it easy for readers to find you in social media. The easiest way is, of course, through your news portal. Most sites do it by putting links to their social pages in the footer or upper corner. Despite often being placed at the very bottom of websites, those links work: people are used to them being there, so they will scroll down without hesitation. If they find no social media icons, they may decide you aren’t seriously in business.

Remember to put icons of social platform logos next to the links – or just use the icons themselves as the links.

Implement buttons to share your articles in social media

Copying the post’s URL, opening a new tab for Facebook, pasting the URL… Call me lazy, but don’t you think there are a tad too many steps? If sharing a news article can be done with a single press of a button, that’s certainly the more preferable choice.

If you want readers to share your articles (and you do), make it easy and quick.

Sites made in WordPress have it nice: just install a plugin, and the job is done. Easiest part of WordPress SEO hands down. Something like WP Social Sharing will make it look like this:

It might be more difficult for non-WordPress sites, but those buttons are worth the effort to put up.

6. Get featured in Google News

Ranking high in Google is already a huge victory. News articles may be granted an even greater honor: being featured in Google News. What makes it such a big deal? Simply the fact that Google News articles often appear in featured snippets, as well as get over 380,000,000 visits per month.

In order to get a slice of that monster pie, you will have to fulfil a long list of requirements.

1. Be a news site. Quite obviously, news is the sole type of content accepted by Google News.

2. Submit your site to Google News. This is the next step that must be done before all other steps in this list! Once you’ve submitted your site, verified your ownership and requested inclusion, you can begin to optimize it for Google News.

3. Descriptive URLs. The majority of articles featured in Google News have URLs you can read. They tell users what your content is about straight away.

4. No errors in the text. Always proofread your articles to ensure their grammar, punctuation and syntax are perfect.

5. Post about events in your country. If an American news portal reports about something in California, Google News will show it. The same article from a British site won’t be so lucky. Incidentally, this step happens to be local SEO-friendly.

6. Use images and video. At the very least, your article should have a hero image. Additional photos and videos increase your chances.

7. Be mobile-friendly. It shouldn’t be a surprise that Google News favors content that can rank high in Google’s mobile-first index.

8. Fast loading speed. A low page load time is always a plus, besides the fact that it’s a ranking factor. It’s also crucial for articles you want to submit to Google News. You’ll have even better chances if you make your site load quickly by using the next point in our list…

9. Accelerated Mobile Pages. AMP is a Google-run project, so they naturally approve of sites that are using it. Indeed, many news articles in Google News are made in AMP.

10. Follow Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. When in Rome, do as the Romans do. Respect Google’s rules, and you will receive respect in return.

11. Follow Google’s Content Policies. Google News prohibits certain kinds of content: graphic, hateful, illegal and others. See the full list here.

12. Post news on your site under a subcategory. The subcategory can be anything the news article is related to, such as /politics/ or /sports/, or even plain old /story/ or /article/. In other words, your articles should have URLs like https://newsportal.com/news/article.

13. Create a unique sitemap for Google News content. Google has detailed instructions for creating and validating news sitemaps, which you can view on their site.

14. Use appropriate article structured data. Schema.org has markup for every kind of content, and news is no exception. With snippets code in each article, you can wind up at the coveted Position Zero with the first paragraph of your article and your hero image displayed on the Google results page itself, above the first organic result for a keyword and often above even the Google ads.

Google starts reviewing your news site for inclusion as soon as you submit it. The majority of the steps in the list above are for making your site a more viable candidate. But even if you aren’t accepted, this instruction is meant to raise your site’s visibility with Google and its content’s overall quality, which is always a good thing for your rankings.

The post How to Do SEO for News Websites in 6 Essential Steps appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

Ecommerce is huge all over the world. Wanting to sell things online is a healthy ambition, with more than just a promise of making you richer. However, because ecommerce is so massive, your competition is going to be just as enormous. You will probably compete against titans like Amazon, and even smaller stores may provide a challenge.

It certainly helps to be an ace businessman – even better when you have an expert business consultant, but it won’t be enough. Your online store will never make it big if it can’t be found on the first page of Google. That’s why ecommerce and SEO go hand in hand – and that’s why we’ve made this giude about how to do SEO for ecommerce websites. Are you excited? Then let’s proceed!

1. Find keywords that sell

In the beginning was the keyword. Where do you start looking for keywords? Try the names of the products you are selling and their categories. There are two requirements your keywords should fulfil:

• Act like a magnet for potential customers;
• Give you a decent chance to outrank your competitors.

Obviously, not all keywords will be up for the task. Some will be too short and too vague to attract the kind of users you need (i.e. buyers). Smart SEOs rely on keywords that both sound specific and are searched in Google often enough to attract a large number of visitors. This awesome breed of keywords is called long-tail.

Where can you find long-tail keywords?

• The first place to look is WebCEO’s Keyword Suggestions tool. Simply type in your own ideas for keywords, and you will see their search volume – the higher, the better. The tool will also display a list of keywords similar to yours. You can even receive a list of searched-for keywords that have the same common root words. Choose the suggestions that suit your goals the best.
• Keyword-finding sites like Soovle and AnswerThePublic offer a wide variety of long-tail keywords, although they don’t measure search volume.
• Big competitor sites like Amazon and Shopify are the ecommerce giants, as they have the largest audiences and more searches on their sites than anyone else in the business. That’s why you can use their search bars to check the auto generated phrases based on what customers usually type in before buying. Here’s an example: let’s say you sell pillows on your site. Go to Amazon.com, type “pillow” in their search bar, and voila!

Once you’ve prepared a list of keywords, it’s time to optimize your site. In order to make your pages rank high, use keywords in these places:

• URLs
• Title tags
• Meta description tags
• H1-H4 header tags
• Image titles and ALT tags
• Product descriptions

Make sure your site’s pages have those places! If search engines can’t scan them for keywords, those pages will sink lower to the deepest bottom of search results. Audit your site with WebCEO’s On-Page Issues tool to avoid squandering your SEO potential.

Also, product descriptions need special care. Each of them has to be unique if you want them to appear in search results; if they aren’t unique, Google will filter them out. The descriptions should also include words and terms that are often used with the page’s subject (i.e. what you sell). And last but not least, write product descriptions in such a way that will convince the visitor to make a purchase after reading.

2. Interlink your store’s pages

To say that ecommerce sites tend to have a lot of pages is an understatement. For example, Amazon’s product selection is measured in hundreds of millions. That’s why online stores must be a breeze to navigate, or else customers will find a more user-friendly place. In order to make your site easy to browse and use, its pages need to be linked between each other in the most efficient way possible.

Most ecommerce sites are structured like this: main page -> product category -> subcategory -> product. As a rule of thumb, the “link distance” between any two given pages shouldn’t be more than three clicks, and this example of an ecommerce site layout follows this rule (even better when you don’t have subcategories). You can make your online store even easier to use if you follow these tips:

• Put a link to the main page on every other page. The best place for it is the store’s logo in the top part of the page. The logo’s ALT tag will be considered as the all-important link text to the home page.
• Create a navigation bar. Online stores benefit the most from navigation bars that collapse into menus, providing users with fast and easy access to product categories.
• Use breadcrumbs. They take little space and help users avoid getting lost on your site. Breadcrumbs for websites look like this:

• Don’t use pagination. Many online stores have pagination, and it’s often generated automatically by the platform used to create the store. However, it isn’t the most user-friendly option because it takes time to load new pages. Instead, make a “Load more items” button that will add more products on the page when pressed. This option is better than infinite scrolling, too.

There’s also the matter of products that permanently go out of stock. Don’t delete pages belonging to such products; they can still be of use. One option is to redirect these pages to their categories or similar products. Another is to replace their content with a message that will convince visitors to keep browsing. The same kind of content will prove useful for your 404 error page.

3. Enhance your site with schema markup

No ecommerce SEO strategy can do without structured data. Why does it matter so much? Structured data helps Google understand the content of web pages better. When a page is marked up with a schema, Google can display additional information about it in search results, which is immensely useful for potential customers. Marked-up pages receive many more clicks from users than ordinary ones, so I highly recommend you learn how to use structured data.

Review schema is especially important for an ecommerce site. It displays customer feedback right in search results, convincing users about the quality of your products.

4. Make your online store secure

How important is online security? You’ve probably heard about the scandal surrounding Facebook and its data leaks. Incidents like this are a disaster for all parties involved: users are put in danger when their sensitive information falls into the wrong hands, and the website’s stock and reputation may tank beyond recovery. Take online security seriously – especially when it comes to SEO for online stores.

Customers must feel safe when they use your website; make it as safe for them as possible. Here’s what you can do to make your site secure:

• Switch over to HTTPS. If you haven’t done this already and your site is still on HTTP, you should see to this as soon as you can. Security isn’t the only reason: when browsers display a page with the HTTP protocol, they mark it as “not secure” next to the URL address bar. Users see that and prefer to leave the page rather than risk their information being stolen.
• Use a content delivery network. Many CDNs have safeguard measures against dangers like cyber-attacks and server failure. Many, but not all! Be sure to choose the most secure CDN you can afford.
• Keep your plugins up to date. If you use plugins on your site, you should update them as soon as their new versions are released. This is because older versions of plugins tend to have vulnerabilities that hackers may exploit to gain access to your site. Of course, that doesn’t mean the newest versions are completely free of holes. But they are still safer because their weaknesses might not be known to hackers yet.

5. Index your ecommerce site’s pages

One of the most embarrassing mistakes you can do is forget to check if your site’s pages are indexed by Google. If they aren’t in the index, they will not appear in search results, period. Naturally, this means customers can’t find you online, and all the work you’ve done on your site will go to waste. Make sure this never happens to you by generating a sitemap of your store and submitting it to Google.

The fastest way to create a sitemap is with WebCEO’s Sitemap Generator tool. If you haven’t made one yet, follow these steps. If you’ve made a sitemap but haven’t submitted it yet, skip to step 6.

1. Click on Settings.
2. Choose Create the sitemap file from scratch.
3. Press Start. The tool will now begin scanning your site.
4. Download the sitemap file when the tool stops scanning.
5. Upload the sitemap file on your site.
6. Return to WebCEO’s Sitemap Generator and click on Settings
7. Choose Submit to search engines the already existing sitemap file.
8. Type in your sitemap’s URL address.
9. Press Start.

Done! Now search engines know about the pages on your site and will show them in search results.

Here’s a very important part: a single sitemap can list up to 50,000 pages. It isn’t rare for ecommerce sites to go above this limit. If your site has more than 50,000 pages, you’ll need to create multiple sitemaps to index everything. Fortunately, WebCEO’s Sitemap Generator automatically creates multiple sitemaps when necessary. Be careful not to miss any when you are submitting them.

6. Make your store mobile-friendly

Mobile Internet has the majority of search queries, and now it’s been reinforced with Google’s mobile-first index. How does this affect SEO for ecommerce sites? Simple: if your online store isn’t mobile-friendly and works fine only on desktop PCs, you’ll miss out on a massive crowd of customers. What can you do to keep them on your site?

• Use a responsive design. A website designed in this way will automatically shuffle and size its page elements around to fit any screen.
• Use large, easy-to-read fonts. Zooming in and out on a mobile screen is easy, but it wastes time the users would rather spend viewing the content.
• Use negative space. The smaller the screen, the worse cluttered pages look on it. Shorter paragraphs are easier to read, and some room between elements will prevent users from accidentally pressing a wrong button or checkbox.
• Avoid using intrusive interstitials. That includes advertisements, banners and popups that cover too much on the screen, making the site unusable. If you need to have interstitials, they should be small and easy to close. Some types of intrusive interstitials are A-Okay: content warning, age verification and “use of cookies”.
• Make sure your redirects work. If your site’s mobile version is on a separate URL, be careful while setting up redirects between them. A desktop web page should always lead to its mobile counterpart, and vice versa.
• Make your website load fast. Users like it when you don’t keep them waiting. Improve your website speed, and they’ll be more eager to look around on your site and become your customers. Page load time affects a site’s rankings, as well.

Run a test on your site in WebCEO’s Speed Optimization tool (in the Mobile tab) and see how well it’s doing.

7. Start a blog on your site

SEO aside, a good ecommerce site must be able to close a sale quickly. If a page takes its time to convince a visitor to buy, it’s not going to work; visitors would rather just get what they came for and move on. That’s why it’s better to leave long-winded descriptions of your products to pages that aren’t directly involved in sales. That’s right: this part of online shop SEO is better suited for a blog.

A blog post with interesting and valuable information can be a prolific source of extra traffic, especially when written by a marketer who knows how to sell her product. Social media may amplify the effect even further, so enable the option to share your posts.

8. Build links to your online shop

Link building does more than just move your website up in rankings. Backlinks bring you users from other sites. They also help you grow your store’s authority and reputation. That’s only if they are quality backlinks, of course. So what can you do to earn them?

• The obvious way: Create valuable content on your website. Google’s goal is to make the best pieces of content easy to find, so only this kind of content gets the most backlinks. Prioritize value for users when you work on your site’s pages, and you are off to a good start. An example of valuable content on an ecommerce site is a discount offer or a tutorial.
• The most powerful way: Share your content on social media. Although links made on social platforms don’t usually pass authority, they get tons of views there – and that means they are so much more likely to become dofollow backlinks on other sites. Social media captures 30% of the time users spend online. Let that number sink in and start using it to your advantage.
• The easiest way: See who links to your competitors and look for opportunities there. You can bring up a full list of your competitors’ backlinks with WebCEO’s Competitor Backlink Spy tool.
• The expert way: Help reporters write articles. Ecommerce, business and online shopping are popular topics, and you can get your site mentioned in some of them. Sign up on Connectively and similar websites as a source to find reporters in need.
• The friendly way: Find unlinked mentions of your store. Use WebCEO’s Web Buzz Monitoring tool to find out who says your good name. If you find a mention with nothing but bare text, contact the person who wrote about you and ask them to include a link.
• The real-world way: Set up listings on business directories. This helps when your store is not just a website on the Internet, but also an actual place where customers set their feet. In this case, you’ll want your store to be easily found online, and that’s where the business directories come in. Create listings on Google My Business and other directories that are relevant to your line of work. Going local can capture an extremely large market of online buyers even if they don’t care where products will be shipped from.

And don’t forget that not all backlinks are good for you. Scan your backlinks with WebCEO’s Toxic Pages tool to keep your website safe from any bad apples.

9. Audit your site for errors

If there’s a niche where you cannot afford to let your users down, that’s ecommerce. Site errors may paralyze your business or even hurt your customers’ wallets. That’s a lot of responsibility on a single website! Fix technical issues of any sort as soon as you notice them.

Find errors on your site with WebCEO’s Site Audit tool. It can help you detect problems ranging from a broken image to server malfunction. Stay vigilant and scan regularly – or use the WebCEO Alerts tool to get emails whenever something on your site breaks.

10. Monitor your rankings and traffic

Since you’ve already done so much SEO for your online store, there’s no point in stopping halfway. Aren’t you curious to know how well you’ve performed? You may have improved your rankings, but they are a fickle thing. Every SEO worth their salt knows that rankings should be checked regularly.

That’s why you have SEO tools. There’s no better way to keep track of the changes in rankings. Boot up WebCEO’s Site Rankings tool, punch the keywords into the Settings and enjoy the view.

Why watch your rankings at all? For one, to feel proud of yourself. If you are driven by more than just optimism, then you might also expect the rankings to fall at some point. It might indeed happen, many times. A drop in rankings is a certain signal to double down on SEO; in a worst-case scenario, it could be because Google gave you a penalty. So spend a few minutes at least once per week to scan your site.

The exact same things can be said about user traffic. Keep an eye on its fluctuations with WebCEO’s Web Analytics toolset.

BONUS Tip. Convert your organic traffic like a pro

Quick refresher: conversion means the users visiting your page AND performing the action you want, like buying. Conversion rates are measured in percentage. For example: number of buyers divided by number of visitors times 100%.

As you can imagine, online stores live or die by their conversion rates. Naturally, you want yours to be at their highest, and that’s a good reason to invest your effort into conversion rate optimization (CRO for short).

Conversion rate optimization benefits any site where users perform money-making actions. In case with ecommerce websites, you want to focus on these points:

• Making your pages more user-friendly. Less headache for users means they’ll be more likely to place an order. Make sure your site displays everything a user would need in the first scroll, especially on mobile devices. By the way, is your ecommerce site mobile-friendly?
• Well-placed, eye catching calls-to-action. Strong colors are encouraged, but don’t overdo it. And if you have special offers? Even better.
• Well-placed user testimonials. Words of praise from other customers will make newcomers feel safer. Their experience is the fruit of your labor – share it.
• Simple forms with few form fields. Less is more, at least at first. If you need a ton of information from your customer to prepare their order (which is often the case), don’t hit them with a dozen fields to fill out at once.
• Use online chat software on your site. If you feel lost, here’s the Top 10 Best Live Chat Software Solutions Compared.

Google Analytics remains the best (and completely free) tool for tracking your campaigns’ conversions. It’s even integrated in WebCEO – and we absolutely recommend connecting your Google Analytics account to your WebCEO project. You will receive the same data faster and in a much more user-friendly interface, plus quick access to other SEO reports for your ecommerce site.

Now you’ve ensured high search engine rankings and targeted visitor traffic to your site. Congratulations, you’ve nailed SEO for ecommerce websites!

Engage visitors on your site and convert this traffic well. Otherwise people will come and go, and Google will think that your site is not relevant enough to the queries that have brought people to your site organically.

Begin Your eCommerce SEO Sign up Free

The post SEO for Ecommerce Websites: 10-Step Guide for Your Online Store appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

SEO is a harsh, never-ending road. The Internet is a ruthlessly competitive space. The moment you relax is the moment some other website swoops in to steal your rankings and traffic. And you have no choice but to do the same to others. You know you’ve become good at it when your site:

• Looks great on all devices
• Works like a charm
• Loads quickly
• Ranks high for your major keywords
• Is well-known on the Internet
• Has lots of backlinks

You can’t go wrong with the technical side of SEO. Unless you are lazy, this part is fully in your control. Now, the other factors in the list above make up a different story. Off-page SEO will require you to involve outside forces and get approval from people. That’s every bit as tough as it sounds, and then some more.

Fortunately, a lot of off-page SEO is centered around the same task: building links to your site.

And that’s the purpose of this guide.

Here you will find 20 Tactics Used by Experts to Build Links in 2019: tactics that work, tactics that you can and should use for your own site. What are they?

Let’s start with some of the easiest ones.

1. Turning broken links into your backlinks

Have you ever visited a site and noticed a broken link on one of their pages? If the circumstances are right, the next time that happens could be a link building opportunity for you.

Here’s how you know the stars can be aligned in your favor:

• It’s a site in the same niche as yours;
• The page’s content is related to what you have on your site (even on just one of your own pages);
• The broken link is used to point to a resource that’s similar to something you have on your own site.

The page on the other side of that link might not exist anymore for any number of reasons; the why doesn’t matter. You are lucky to have found that broken link because the site owner might soon decide to have no link at all in that place. Be sure to act quickly!

Send a message to the site owner and explain the situation. If you say your site has content that fits what that broken link describes, the owner might very well agree your content is a worthy replacement. You’ll score a link and make a new friend!

2. Turning unlinked mentions into backlinks

This tactic is similar to the previous one and a bit easier, too. Instead of broken links, you comb through other resources for mentions of your site – specifically those that are just plain text without a link. As specific words are much easier to find on the Internet than specific links, you can use this link building method with just Google and nothing else. Of course, specialized tools will make this job even more of a breeze.

Like our Web Buzz Monitoring tool, for example.

Once you’ve found an unlinked mention, the next step is the same as with broken links: reaching out to the person who can put a link there.

3. Guest posting

Someone has a blog, but is temporarily too busy to write a new post? That’s where you come in.

Of course, there can be other situations when people can agree to accept an article from you. Maybe you have a really good topic idea. Maybe they are in a writing slump. As long as your content contribution is really valuable to them, they won’t mind putting a link to your site on theirs in return.

4. Infographics

Visual information tends to be more interesting than plain text. That’s why infographics keep standing the test of time and don’t go out of trend. And, of course, they attract plenty of links when used wisely.

Create an infographic that looks fantastic and has lots of useful information. Submit it to content directories which accept infographics and offer it to sites that might be interested in it, too. You’ll have greater chances of hearing “yes” if your infographic can positively impact those sites’ reputations – for example, by having well-researched, hard-to-collect information that will make anyone who posts it look like an expert.

5. Viral content

You can make amazing content, but predicting whether or not it will spread across the Internet like wildfire is a completely different matter. It’s easier when you are already a popular brand. Not everyone is, so what kinds of content can give you an edge?

To name but a few:

• Hilarious
• Controversial
• Sensational
• Interactive (like games)
• Shocking

Just remember the rule about not making people regret they shared your content. They should be glad instead, even if it’s at your expense.

6. Participate in group projects for links

If a single guest blogger deserves credit for a post they wrote, the same is obviously true for larger projects with more people. When the final product (whatever it may be) is released, everyone involved can expect accolades. Why not accolades in the form of backlinks?

So if you’ve got skills that could be useful and you have your sights on a team who might need help with something, this might be your chance. Do the job they give you and ask for a link in exchange.

7. Speak at events, meetups, conferences

If you host an event yourself, you are guaranteed to get backlinks from interested parties. If you aren’t the host, you can be one of the speakers instead – it’s just as good for the purpose of link building.

It’s the same as participating in group projects. The only difference is that you will be more visible to the crowd. No pressure!

8. Interviews

Taking or giving interviews – either is fine when your goal is earning links. It may at first be easier to interview someone, since you probably aren’t famous enough yet for others to care what you have to say (but this can change quickly). Find someone who has an interesting story to tell  and whose opinion your audience would like to hear.

Once your interview is ready, you probably won’t even have to ask the other party for a backlink. Remind them to share it in their social media as well.

9. Comment on blogs and forums

This is the low-hanging fruit of link building, but it still has its uses. A well-chosen blog or a forum can connect you to your target audience better than a million posts in social media. Be careful not to come off as a shameless self-promoting spammer, though, or you’ll lose any links you make there.

This tactic can be especially good for local businesses. Users would rather dig through a hundred forum posts than a hundred Google search results.

10. Simply ask someone you know

Or you could just rely on the old proverb: “a friend in need is a friend indeed”. Got any friends or acquaintances who own websites, too? Will backlinks from those websites be good for you? Then it won’t hurt to ask. I’m sure you’d help your friends if they asked you.

This tactic is only as good as your ability to make friends, as are many things in the world. SEO can be one of those things, too.

Want the rest of the tactics, numbers 11 to 20? Of course you do. All you need to do is sign here and transfer to us the rights of ownership of your soul… What do you mean, we don’t do that anymore? Then how are we supposed to take over the world!? Oh well. It seems like the new protocol is signing up and getting the guide for free. Then you’ll get all 20 link building tactics at once. Neat-o!

The post 20 Link Building Tactics Used by Experts [New Guide for 2019] appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

It’s a new year, everybody! Today might not seem that much different from yesterday, but we all know real change is slow in taking place. When it does, you find yourself shocked at how sudden it was. That’s how I know 2019 is going to be a completely new page – both in our lives and in what we do. Have you set your work goals already? Then let’s start with an easy question.

SEO vs. PPC: which side are you going to take this year?

Here’s some cold, harsh truth. If you still plan to win the Google ranking game this year, there are two things you will need to do: make good friends with search engine optimization and be in the know of the latest SEO trends. Even now, nearly twenty years into the 21st century, nobody has come up with a better way to stay in the top Google positions long-term. PPC ads, effective as they may be, stop working the moment you quit paying for them… Unlike SEO.

That’s the true beauty of SEO: slow and steady does win the race.

And we, the WebCEO team, want you to win that race. It’s our job to make it real – with our SEO tools and everything else we’ve got. That’s why we are giving you this nice present to celebrate another year with us: an SEO Strategy Guide that will help you master the SEO trends!

Are you curious about what’s inside? Only the steps for everything you need to make your SEO a success.

1. How to find and use the best keywords to get the highest site rankings;

2. How to design a site structure that is user-friendly and maximizes your rankings;

3. How to make your site mobile-friendly (and why it matters now more than ever before);

4. How to optimize for local search and make customers show up at your doorstep;

5. How to make your site appear in voice search;

6. How to lower your page load time to the minimum;

7. How to create content that users will love more than any other;

8. How to boost your site rankings by using social media;

9. How to protect your site and user experience from technical errors;

1o. And how to use competitors’ websites to your own advantage.

This SEO Strategy Guide is completely free for every WebCEO user – as is signing up to download it. Now is the time to take the first step towards befriending SEO trends. Together, let’s make 2019 the year you will take control of Google’s top ranking positions for your niche!

The post Your SEO Guide for 2019: How to Master SEO Trends appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

Sign Up FREE and Get Your SEO Guide

It’s good to own a website. Even better when you can make it easy to find online. Few things can beat the feeling of pride and accomplishment when you type a phrase on a random computer, and your site shows up in Google right away, on the very first page. It’s proof of a job well done! And your reward will be more new visitors and customers than you expected – sometimes so many you will need an extra hand to deal with them all.

So how to get on the first page of Google? Three things can take you there:

• Paid ads where you pay for every click made by others;
• Cosmic levels of luck not found in mortal men;
• Or a detailed search engine optimization guide that tells you how to do it yourself.

Relying on PPC ads alone will only get you so far, and our supply of luck potions just recently went dry. But we do have a complete guide to SEO, and it’s all yours!

But wait! I’ve heard SEO is incredibly hard!

Is it? Sure, it takes many factors into account, and Google likes to stir things up by tweaking its algorithm every now and then, such as right before Christmas or the 4^th of July. But when you know what you are doing and use WebCEO Online Tools, getting your site on page one is more than just a dream – it’s a definite possibility. Top positions in SERPs are for webmasters who know how to secure them and give it their all on the way.

This SEO guide contains a strategy aimed at placing your website on the coveted Page #1. Nothing less is worth trying. What are the questions answered in the guide that make this strategy work?

• How to choose keywords that will bring you the most user traffic
• How to optimize your website to work well on mobile devices
• How to build links from authoritative sources
• How to make your business easy to find online through local search optimization
• How to make your brand unique, recognizable and well-reputed
• How to create content that will get your users hooked
• How to interlink your site’s pages in a way that will maximize their rankings
• How to ensure your site is operational and free of errors at all times

Website optimization is no more complex than driving a car. If you’ve never done it before, even starting it may seem like a challenge – then you get used to the steps, and before you know it, you are going places! Our Ultimate SEO Guide for 2018 is your driver’s manual. Its purpose is to help you optimize your website for search engines, to ensure the success of your business goals, and to make you confident in what you will accomplish this year.

The post The Ultimate Guide for SEO in 2018 appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

Today we are going to talk about a crucial component to on-page SEO tactics — keyword optimization. After the Hummingbird Update you were told to optimize for long tail keywords. Then the semantic SEO strategy changed and all they talk about are LSI keywords.

Let’s see what the difference is between long tail and LSI keywords and find out which you need to use, and when, to get higher rankings and get more traffic.

What is LSI?

LSI stands for Latent Semantic Indexing. Latent Semantic Indexing is a method used to determine the relationship between terms and concepts in content. It means that LSI keywords are words and phrases that are semantically related to each other. They include not only synonyms or keywords with similar meanings. They are often keywords that are commonly found together.

How the Google algorithm works

We’ve investigated some of Google’s patents and found that the sophisticated Google algorithm expands the received search query and then uses this extended query to search the Google index.

You can easily see this in action: go to Google and enter a rare term that has more common synonyms. Google will highlight either your search phrase or the more popular one. See my example below. I’ve searched for my cat’s color with the term “tabby point siamese” but the more popular search term for this is “lynx point siamese”. As you can see on the image, both terms are in bold and most results do not even contain “tabby point”.

So what’s the difference between LSI and long tail keywords?

LSI are semantically related words, while long tail keywords tend to be lengthened versions of a keyword combination that searchers often use. Long tails are search terms we all use which often show a searcher’s intentions like “top”, “how”, “what”, “why”, etc.
Having long tail keywords in an optimized website provides better rankings for those exact search terms and you will have boost in your website traffic. LSI keywords help search engines understand what your page is about.

Why optimize for topics instead of targeting individual keywords

The proper use of your best keywords is still a core component of good web page SEO, especially when supported with good LSI. It helps Google to know the relationships between elements of your text. It helps Google to understand your content.
Optimizing for topics (LSI keywords) will help you to:

• Remove ambiguity and near homonyms. When you write about python, do you mean a snake or a programming language? LSI keywords will help search engines understand what your python is.
• Create more natural texts. Today keyword-stuffed texts irritate both readers and search engines.
• Get higher rankings. Search engines are looking for relevant content for a particular search query. The better Google knows what your page is about, the more chances to rank well.

How to Find LSI Keywords

1. Google search query suggestions

Google search is one of the best and absolutely free tools to find LSI keywords. When you enter a search term in a search query field, it automatically fetches and shows the keywords related to the particular query, both in auto-suggest and the results themselves.

2. Google related searches

When you search for a keyword, you can see searches related to the term in the “Related searches” section at the bottom of the search engine results page. These “related searches” are a good source of LSI keywords.

3. LSIGraph

LSIGraph is a free LSI Keyword Generator tool. This generator is as simple as “plug and play”: enter your keyword, press generate, and it will give you up to 50+ of the latest LSI keywords.

We’ve discussed what LSI keywords are, why they are important in the era of Hummingbird, and how to find keywords you should concentrate on. Some keywords get more searches by users than others. Only SEO tools can help you find the most wanted keywords, and they are only one click away from you!

Find long-tail and LSI keywords with WebCEO's Keyword Tool! Sign Up Free

The post Long Tail vs LSI Keywords: Which Do You Need to Increase Website Traffic? appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

This autumn the James Bond movie franchise turned 50! Not bad for her majesty’s Secret Service agent with a licence to kill, philogyny and an undeviating loyalty to shaken (not stirred) martini. You would probably ask how the heck James Bond will help me with my SEO strategy for 2016. We mean to say that you should serve your customers like James Bond serves her Majesty.

Download our step-by-step Download the SEO Strategy Guide 2016  in order to succeed in digital marketing in 2016.

Moreover, using WebCEO’s Rank Checker to monitor your rankings is always a wise strategy:)

The post On Her Majesty’s Secret SEO Service 2016 appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

There are 3 major types of landing pages and each serves its own goals.

Let’s imagine you own a huge supermarket. First you can segment this into departments, i.e. canned goods, boxed goods, produce, home supply department etc. This is a must because, when people visit a supermarket, they go straightway to a specific department because they have specific shopping needs.  This is how your website should be built. Your home page is a showcase of your site and the landing pages that describe your product features and solutions are specific departments which attract targeted traffic that is generated from specific search queries. If a visitor’s search intent has a transactional character (she wants to buy a specific item over the Internet), you wouldn’t want to send a visitor to your cluttered home page but, instead, you would send her to a product description page with pricing and a clear call-to-action in order to get more conversions.

The key objective of landing pages optimization is to narrow down and capture targeted visitor traffic and turn this into prequalified leads and ready-to-pay customers. But messages and the ways to attract traffic with the help of landing pages are different.

For example, if you have a website dedicated to online marketing services, you can build a specific internal website page that will cover one of the solutions you provide, be it SEO, or email marketing, or social media marketing. These internal website landing pages, if optimized properly, will show up in organic search results.

If you launch a PPC campaign via Google Adwords, Social Media ads, or via email marketing campaign and your goal is to provide a sales pitch, you can create a PPC landing page with sales-dedicated copy with a clear offer and above-the-fold call to actions.

And finally, if you launch a free content giveaway campaign or a viral campaign via a blog post or social media and your goal is lead generation, your landing page should have rich copy with unique and helpful content and with link incentives for users to share their contact details or get in touch via an inquiry form. This type of landing page is called a lead capture page.

Anyway, all roads lead to Rome. No matter what the goal, how much money you spend and what way you choose to bring targeted traffic to your site, your landing page should convey a high value, strong incentive with solid benefits.

Bite on this: According to Omniture: [Tweet “Marketing campaigns that use landing pages as target pages improve conversion rates by 25%.”]

To give your landing pages high conversions, follow these step-by-step recommendations.

1. Do keyword research to match a searcher’s intent with the topics of your landing pages.

Whatever type of landing page you choose, the first thing you should do is find user matched and SEO-friendly keywords. Users have short attention spans; it takes about 2 sec for them to click your result or not in the SERPs. So you should definitely use the keywords that closely match a user’s search intent with the key concept of your landing page.

An effective action plan for your landing page keyword research includes brainstorming and the refinement of a complex list of keyword phrases and long-tail keywords based on:

• Brand terms
• Generic terms
• Closely-related terms (synonyms)
• Competitive terms

There are a lot of useful keyword research tools on the web, like the Google AdWords Keyword Planner (great for PPC keyword search and analysis), the Bing Keyword Research Tool, KeywordTool.io, the WordTracker Keyword Research tools etc. Most of them provide in-depth keyword suggestions and estimates of their search volume.  Most keyword research tools fail to easily integrate your work on your keyword lists with what necessarily must follow: landing page optimization and keyword rank tracking.

Unlike these great but insufficient tools, the Web CEO Keyword Research Tool embraces four stages of keyword research:

Shape keyword suggestions

Sign up to Web CEO, add your website to our Add New Project wizard and start with finding the most relevant and profitable keyword suggestions in the Keyword Research tool → Get keyword Suggestion tab

With the help of special filters you can narrow down your suggestions in order to pick only those with 100+> global searches and low bid competition. Add your selected keywords to the Keyword Basket

Add terms used by your competition

Spy on your competitors targeted terms by adding a competitor’s domain or even specific landing page URL. Then add newly selected keywords to the basket.

Back this up with Google data for your website search queries

Use the search keywords that searchers have already used to reach your site. You can see how many impressions, clicks, CTR and the average position they had on Google over the past month (note that the WebCEO Rank Tracker tool itself provides fresh ranking data). Add them to the basket as well.

Refine your keyword list and assign tags

Once, you have selected your keywords, go to the Keyword Basket in order to get them in taxonomic order. With the help of the tag manager in the Web CEO keyword research tool, in every stage of keyword research you can assign tags to keyword family groups by, for instance, landing page goal and intent, language, or relevance and significance. It will be much easier to optimize you landing page content, once you have shaped your keywords spreadsheet into topical clusters via tags.

2. Put in order your keyword-to-page relationships

When you’ve finished grabbing and tagging the most profitable terms and long-tail keyword tag clusters, you can start to align them with your landing pages to make them SEO-friendly. You should focus on using 2-3 primary keywords for each page. No matter what the length of your landing page copy is, the goal is to add your targeted keywords wisely and match them with the topic of your page. Focus keyword mapping on sensitive SEO areas in order to establish your landing page theme and match your message to a user’s search intent. Sensitive areas are:

• URL: fill your landing page URL address with your 2-3 targeted keywords for that page in order to communicate the landing page’s semantic core to search engines.
• Title: put the targeted keywords (phrases) at the beginning in order to communicate the message of your landing page content (its offer). The Title tag should not exceed 55 characters;
• Headings: put keywords in H-tags to improve their search value, be sure to not have more than one H1 tag per page;
• Image name and its ALT attribute: use a targeted keyword in both the image file name and ALT tag to get additional ranking power, especially in image search, and make visual content SE-readable;
• Meta description: transmit your landing page message and value to search engines and searchers with a keyword-rich description tag (it should not exceed 160 characters).

3. Check your landing page SEO for weak spots and fix them

 Ok, your obedient keywords are now in their places. Before it’s too late and you lose your targeted traffic, make sure that you have properly conducted keyword mapping within your landing pages.

The easiest way to do this is to run your Landing Page SEO Analysis with WebCEO at hand:

Run a Landing Page Overview that will help you take a quick view of all your landing pages’ SEO performance (i.e.: critical SEO issues, page speed score, Google mobile friendliness, broken links, backlinks and social citations)

The more specific Landing Page SEO report will provide you with a detailed look at your keyword placement within any given page as well as other SEO issue details for that page. If you see a low keyword optimization score, you can either reconsider what keywords the page should be optimized for or go into your HTML and properly add your chosen keywords into the proper meta tags, etc. All the SEO issues you will find will come with detailed advice on how to get them fixed.

4. Match your landing page copy with design elements and layout

 A well-designed landing page with a logical structure flow is crucial. It takes only several seconds for a visitor to fall in love or not with your site (plus the time to load a page).  When you come to the design of a landing page, your key objective is to make it simple, short, uncluttered and persuasive. When you give too many visual focuses, you will cause them to get distracted and uncertain on their way through the conversion funnel. So, you need to give them one task and provide them with logical grounds for their decision making. Here are 5 must-have design elements that will help you tell your story and grab a user’s attention in order to make him or her complete your desired action.

• Your company logo at the top that builds strong brand awareness.
• A proposition-focused headline that tells what your product focuses on.
• A sub-headline that explains what your product can do for users.
• A topic-related image that transmits and supports the message of your proposition.
• Benefit bullet points for your proposition.
• Relevant and prominent call-to-action buttons that clearly describe what will happen upon clicking.
• Lead capture form use where appropriate
• Social-proof accolades (testimonials, case-studies, embedded social media posts and social media buttons that open to your popular social pages in separate browser tabs)

While you put the main focus on the simplicity of your landing page visual and content elements layout, you should avoid any negative distracting clutter such as:

– Menu navigation with too many sidetracking links

– Too many call-to-actions per offer

– Too much text

– Freakish hard-to-read fonts

– Lack of white space

Keep in mind that the biggest enemy of your landing page conversion tally is the browser back button. You should put all your effort into making users click on your call-to-action buttons instead of the dreaded browser back button.

If you are in a startup and have no designers to help you build and customize landing pages, Instapage would be of great help to you. It allows you to create mobile responsive landing pages from scratch or based on existing templates, publish on your domain, integrate with a CRM, conduct email marketing and work with other third-party tools, as well as monitor your performance and conversion analytics and run A/B split tests.

5. Streamline your landing pages with the Google mobile-friendly guidelines

In 2015, mobile searches officially surpassed desktop searches. Unless you into business suicide, you will want mobile-friendly versions of your landing pages with a slightly different message in some cases. The fact is that mobile users are more goal-driven, while desktop users are more benefit-driven in their intention. It’s in your power to make your landing pages kindly welcome mobile users with a positive user experience. Meet the following requirements for a better mobile-optimized landing page in order to increase your mobile landing page conversions:

Content

• 3-4 word succinct headlines
• Short actionable call-to-action buttons

Design

• Orderly single-column page layout
• Negative (white) space between clickable elements
• Legible fonts (16 pixels)
• Color contrast between text and background

Usability

• Light-weight page size (less than 20KB)
• Top-oriented and clickable call buttons
• Content accessibility (no flash, frames and plugins)
• Thumb-friendly touch targets (eliminate zooming)

Read more about Google’s requirements for mobile-friendly content in this mobile issues checklist

Tip: Plan your landing pages with mobile search in mind, so you don’t have to scale down your content and layout after the fact.

6. Verify which landing page layout works best with A/B testing

No one likes landing page bounces and exits. You will experience them until you find out why you fail to convert visitors who come to each landing page. A/B testing is a great trial-and-error method for landing page conversion rate optimization.

Set up your original landing page as a control and start running experiments against it. There are five elements of a landing page you can control and test to improve your landing page performance.

• Headline + subheadline
• Copy length
• Image
• The call-to-action
• Form fields
• Explicit directional cues (arrows, pathways etc.)

Read more about some of the aspects of A/B testing for landing page optimization in this post written by our Product Manager and regular WebCEO blog contributor, Helen Vozna. 

Secret hack from WebCEO: With the help of the WebCEO Rank Tracker you can spy on your competitors’ organic and PPC landing pages. Go to Competitor Rankings by Keyword and click on a keyword that is related to your landing page topic. You will see the SERP cached results with the links of your competitor landing pages. Analyze competitor landing pages and find hidden opportunities for your headline copy or call-to-action A/B experiments.

The post 6 Actionable Steps to Build a Top-Selling Landing Page appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

We are often asked how to best promote a website and get targeted traffic. We have an answer. It consists of 7 easy steps you should follow. We have created a step-by-step DIY SEO guide that covers every optimization stage and type of activity that will make your online marketing effective, even if you are new to the promotional process.

Inside the WebCEO Step-by-Step SEO Guide

The WebCEO Online step-by-step SEO guide consists of 7 important stages of the online promotion process. Each stage consists of tasks you should perform. The best thing about our guide is that we support the latest SEO community best practices with the WebCEO tools and the professional SEO articles provided by Search Engine News, whom we partner with.

1. A successful online promotion campaign starts with keyword research. The WebCEO DIY SEO checklist provides you with 6 tasks that show you how to build effective keyword lists using different methods of keyword research.
2. At the search engine optimization stage you will optimize the content of your websites that are visible to search engines and improve the structure of those sites to get more search engine visibility. This stage includes basic SEO milestones, site structure optimization, black-hat SEO control, local search and social media optimization, and a competitor analysis.
3. Now when your website is optimized for high rankings, you can create an XML sitemap to inform search engines about your website and submit your content to the most popular content directories. In this section of the step-by-step SEO guide you will find the best advice on press release writing and distribution and learn how to do guest blogging wisely.
4.  The link building stage is full of reliable white hat methods of getting relevant backlinks. Here you will get practical advice on using link baiting and social media marketing.
5. An online business promotion can’t be complete without a blog. A blog is the best way to produce fresh content that search engines love. Complete the blogging activity SEO checklist in order to promote one the best way.
6. The latest social media optimization and promotion best practices are highlighted at the social networking stage of the DIY SEO checklist. You will get an up-to-date social approach to web promotion that includes the proper way to work with LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, G+, Quora, Pinterest, Community Answers, news.
7. The paid advertising section shows how to use PPC advertising, on-site and on-network advertising, mobile ads, email marketing and affiliate marketing to grow your business’s online presence.

The WebCEO Do It Yourself SEO Checklist is available to the users of any WebCEO plan (Free, Silver, Gold or Pro) with no limitations. It can be found as one of the widgets in the Project Dashboard. Sign up for free to promote your website for yourself.

The post 7 Easy Steps to Get Highly Targeted Traffic appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.