Tag Archives: seo

You Asked: Top 10 Questions about SEO from our webinar

Posted on August 29, 2019 by Hosting

The post You Asked: Top 10 Questions about SEO from our webinar appeared first on HostGator Blog . When you think about Search Engine Optimization, you probably think about how to increase your website’s ranking in Google. While that’s correct, it’s not as simple as it may sound, and there’s a lot that goes into the practice of SEO.  HostGator offered a free webinar about the 5 Steps to SEO Success to help website owners get started with optimizing their website for search.  We focused on on-page SEO and covered the following steps:  Implement keyword research  Set up metadata on all pages Create quality content Format URL structure and links Use schema, if appropriate  Missed the webinar? No worries. Check out the recording below. Here are the top 10 questions about SEO that our webinar attendees asked.  1. Once you have a website, what is the #1 thing you should do to immediately increase your rankings?  The easiest thing you can do to quickly impact your search results and rankings is to register your business with Google My Business. Google My Business is the official business profile listing from Google that integrates with Google Maps and Google search. GMB is Google’s way of allowing you to control what shows up in search by giving you the space to provide as much information as possible about your business. You’ll want to make sure that your Google My Business listing is accurate and matches all your listings online.  2. I don’t have a physical address or storefront. Do I still need a Google My Business account?   Yes! If you want to be found online you should definitely have a Google My Business account even if you don’t have a physical address or storefront. In fact, when you set up your Google My Business account, you can note your business as a “ service area business ,” meaning you serve a certain cities or zip codes.  When you set up your account, one of the first questions will be ‘do you have an address where customers can visit you?’ Follow these prompts to indicate that you do not have a physical location. If you already have a Google My Business account, you can edit your physical location from the dashboard. You will see that “service area” and “storefront address” can now be edited separately. 3. How important are sitemaps? Do I need one?  Sitemaps help Google identify and crawl all of your site’s pages and URLs. Without a sitemap, Google might not be able to index all of your pages – meaning you could be missing out on a lot of organic traffic.  A lot of CMSs automatically generate sitemaps; or if you use the Yoast plugin for WordPress, it will create your sitemap for you. Manually creating a sitemap is a fairly intensive process, especially if you have a lot of pages. So if your CMS has the functionality to create a sitemap for you, take advantage of it!  It’s important to note that when SEO’s refer to “sitemaps” we’re typically referring to sitemap.xml not HTML sitemaps that you might find front-of-site.  4. How important are good Google reviews for SEO?  Google reviews are important for SEO! Essentially, Google reviews show Google that your business is real and that people have interacted with it. Additionally, reviews frequently contain relevant keywords which add to Google’s understanding of your business. The more context you can provide to Google about your business, the better.  5. For SEO purposes, is it more important to update existing content or create new content?  This is a great question and one that we debate at HostGator as well! You should do both! As content gets old, it may no longer be relevant, which then causes it to not rank well anymore (don’t forget, you want your content to be timely!) For example, an article about ‘top web design tips of 2015’ only holds value during 2015 because people always want the most current tips. To improve your rankings of that article, you should update the content to make it more evergreen and relevant to your readers no matter when they find the article.  Updating older posts is great because they typically have more SEO value, since they have been indexed longer and have more backlinks. If you do have to delete a post or page however, you’ll want to do a 301 redirect to a new, highly-relevant article. A 301 redirect indicates to Google that the page has permanently moved and allows you to pass 90-95% of SEO value from the original article to the new one. 301 redirects allow you to both maintain your rankings and update your content.  If you can, we recommend that you publish new articles on a regular basis to indicate to Google that your website is current, relevant, and active.  6. How many keywords should I have? And where do I put them?  The number of keywords you need is really dependent on your business. You should have a mix of both long-tail keywords (phrases or questions that are fairly specific) and head terms (general keywords with high search volume). For HostGator, our head terms include our products, such as web hosting and shared hosting, while our long-tail keywords include phrases like what is web hosting, how expensive is web hosting, and how to keep my website secure.  If you are a local business, be sure to include the city or state in your keywords to target people in your area. We covered keyword research in detail during the webinar – go back and watch from minute mark 7:05-12:45. As a reminder, you can target three to five keywords on any given page and the biggest tip we can offer is this – use your keywords naturally.  Finally, think about keywords like topics. Don’t just “say” them, talk about them. Write as much as you know about the topic and make the conversation natural. 7. How do I get backlinks?  Essentially, a backlink is when another website links to yours. The absolute best way to get backlinks is to develop quality content, like blog articles, and wait for other websites to link to your articles. If your content is helpful and original, this should happen naturally.  If you want to take a more proactive approach to building backlinks, you can find a website that might find your information helpful for their readers and actually ask them to link to it.  If you are a local business, you can consider partnering with another business on a promotion and exchanging links in return. Think of this like networking in real life – meet people who have similar interests and ask them to link to your articles, specifically if the content is helpful for their readers.  8. What are the best SEO plugins for WordPress?  Yoast is well-known as the best SEO plugin for WordPress. With a few short configurations, Yoast will manage your metadata, canonicals, sitemaps and your robots.txt. While Yoast automatically selects certain configurations for you, you also have the ability to fully customize your selections. Check out this article for eight more awesome SEO plugins for WordPress .  9. If I’m working with a contractor for SEO, what questions should I be asking my SEO person each month?  I always want to see metrics. While it’s important to note that SEO changes usually take a long time to see results, there are still analytics your SEO contractor could be sharing with you. Things you might be interested in seeing are:  Month over month, or year over year keyword changes The number of keywords you have ranking on pages one and two Organic traffic, transactions and revenue Top organic landing pages Chances are that your SEO contractor is already pulling this information to guide their strategy, so it shouldn’t be too much effort to share that information with you.  You and your SEO contractor should also be monitoring your competitors and any changes they may be making to their sites that could impact their rankings and therefore affect your organic traffic.  10. Are SSL certificates important to being found on Google?  An SSL certificate is very important for a few reasons! To provide context, an SSL certificate prevents a “middle man” from stealing information as it is passed through to your website. This is especially helpful for eCommerce websites where customers are entering their credit card information. Even if you don’t have an online store, an SSl certificate can protect the contact forms on your website.  SSL certificates are also essential for ranking highly in the SERPs. For many years Google has indicated that the presence of an SSL certificate will help your site rankings. Google further proved this statement in July 2018 when Google Chrome started flagging websites without SSL certificates; as of last summer, website visitors started receiving notifications when they visited a site without an SSL certificate. Obviously when visitors see this alert, they will quickly leave your website, which will increase your bounce rate and decrease your rankings.   Luckily, HostGator offers free SSL certificates with all hosting plans . Follow the steps to set yours up today! Want to learn more about SEO? Check out our SEO blog articles or download our free ebook , the Beginner’s Guide to SEO.  Find the post on the HostGator Blog Continue reading →

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On-Site vs. Off-Site SEO: What’s the Difference?

Posted on August 21, 2019 by Hosting

The post On-Site vs. Off-Site SEO: What’s the Difference? appeared first on HostGator Blog . Search engine optimization (SEO) comes in many shapes and sizes. It’s not limited to one technique or a single tool. If you’re just getting started with SEO , you will want to know the difference between on-site and off-site SEO. Each type offers benefits to help your business acquire more website visitors. While some strategies take a few hours to execute, other tactics will involve extra time to plan. Take this opportunity to attract people to your site. Learn the difference below. On-Site SEO Strategies On-site SEO focuses on optimizing individual pages to earn organic search traffic. By implementing these techniques, it’s easier for search engines to categorize your content.   1. Keyword Research All businesses desire more website traffic. To gain those visitors, it starts with understanding keyword research. Consumers enter keywords in search engines to find specific information. They search for everything from holiday gift ideas to cute puppy videos. Knowing your potential customers’ search intent will help you craft content with targeted keywords. That way, you receive qualified visitors, not just every curious person online. Keyword Planner and Moz’s Keyword Explorer are effective platforms for conducting keyword research and keeping track of trends. Garnering this insight gives you an edge over your competition. Stay away from broad terms. For example, if you sell women’s clothing, stick to distinct, longer-tail keywords that describe your products. Aim for “high-end winter plaid skirts,” rather than “women’s skirts.”   2. Internal Linking When an individual lands on a web page, it’s quite likely that she will want to learn more about the specific information mentioned. Internal linking gives you the chance to act as a tour guide, sending the visitor to another appropriate page. Linking boosts your SEO performance. Serial entrepreneur Neil Patel outlines the advantages: “One of the corollary benefits of internal linking is that it improves user engagement on your site. When a user sees an informative link that truly matches the context of the content, they are likely to click on that link. It can be an external link, as long as it’s something that the reader will be interested in.” Internal linking helps search engines crawl your site. So, direct visitors to another relevant page on your site.    3. Page Speed A few years back, search engines announced that a site’s page speed would impact its ranking. This guideline still influences SEO today. As a result, you should monitor your pages’ load time. According to Google , it takes on average 22 seconds for a mobile landing page to load.  However, “53% of mobile site visitors leave a page that takes longer than three seconds to load.” Their free PageSpeed Insights  tool analyzes the content of your web page and generates suggestions to make your page faster. It’s user-friendly and only takes a few seconds to receive your speed score. Large image files can negatively impact page speeds. You can solve this problem by using a tool like TinyPNG to reduce the file size and following image SEO best practices . Consider the number of widgets connected to your site, too. Excessive social buttons, comment areas, and pop-up ads can slow down page speed.   Off-Site SEO Strategies Off-site SEO is the process of improving your search rankings through referral traffic. These techniques include driving brand awareness and creating remarkable content.   1. Public Relations The perception of your business informs customers’ decisions. Public relations coupled with SEO serves the purpose of increasing your inbound links and brand recognition. Earning coverage in online publications and news outlets starts with developing an enticing story around your business. Jeremy Knauff , founder of Spartan Media, explains: “[Public relations] focuses on getting real humans who work at legitimate, authoritative publications genuinely interested in and talking about your story. It’s about truly adding value, which in turn tends to generate inbound links, as opposed to simply producing garbage links on websites that no one visits.” To catch an eye of a journalist, you’ll want to highlight a newsworthy activity. Maybe you’re partnering with a charity to donate funds, or you’re releasing groundbreaking research that supports your brand. You can generate buzz by writing a press release and initiating a social media campaign with a unique hashtag.   2. Guest Blogging Content writing is another way to obtain backlinks for your website. Through guest blogging, you can become a thought leader in your industry as well as maximize your SEO potential. Guest blogging involves crafting content for non-competitive sites with similar audiences. You’ll gain powerful relationships and site traffic. When guest blogging, it’s key for you to follow the rules described by the specific website. Below is an example from Mention , a social media monitoring tool. You’ll also want to choose a topic that will resonate with readers. If possible, tell a narrative about a recent experience, spotlight a customer story with humor, or even grab people’s attention with stunning statistics. Guest blogging is a perfect time to add your expertise to a larger conversation. You should aim to satisfy the publication and its readers.   3. Influencer Outreach You’re only as good as the community around you. To upgrade your circle and earn inbound links, influencer outreach offers a step in the right direction. Influencers are individuals who shape consumer buying habits. They can persuade people to visit websites, try products, and join social communities. For businesses, this engagement transforms into a huge benefit. Michael Quoc , founder and CEO of Dealspotr, gives his insight: “When your business engages with a new social audience, it unlocks the potential for more followers and engagement. This can lead to more site traffic, backlinks, and other factors that improve SEO.” Do your research when selecting influencers. It’s important that their values match your brand and their audience possess some interest in your products. Influencer partnerships will build your brand reputation faster. Plus, it gives bloggers another reason to link back to your website.   Focus on SEO Knowing when and how to apply on-site and off-site SEO strategies matters. Each type holds a different solution for your website to attract more visitors. Find the post on the HostGator Blog Continue reading →

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How to Improve SEO

Posted on July 26, 2019 by Hosting

The post How to Improve SEO appeared first on HostGator Blog . Your website can only do its job if people can find it.  SEO (search engine optimization) —a collection of tactics website owners can use to increase your ranking in the search engine results—is one of the best ways to make sure your audience can find you.  But on-page SEO is challenging. And many website owners struggle with the question of how to improve SEO for their websites.  The search engines are fairly tight-lipped about how the algorithms that determine how search engine rankings work . But between the information they have shared and an analysis by SEO experts of what the ranking web pages have in common, we have a pretty good understanding of how to improve Google search results. Improving SEO involves a mix of things you can do on your own website and offsite strategies.  How to Improve SEO on Your Website On-site SEO is mostly about two main things: making sure Google can tell what your website is about, and ensuring the site has a good user experience for users. To do that, there are eight main steps you should take.   1. Review your website analytics. If you already have a website, then your first step is to review your website analytics to better understand how people find and interact with your website now. If you haven’t set up Google Analytics for your website, do that now! You won’t have any data to review to start, but you can come back to this step once you do.  In Google Analytics, you’ll learn how much traffic you’re getting now, and what share of it is coming from Google (labeled “Organic Search”). The Acquisition section gives you an easy snapshot of how often people are finding you through Google now. In addition, you can find a list of any keywords you rank for now and what your average ranking is. Click on Acquisition, Search Console, and then Queries.  This gives you a good understanding of where you are now in terms of your SEO strategy. That’s helpful in setting goals for where you want to be, and working out a plan to get there. And any relevant keywords you rank for now (even if you’re not on page one) are a good place to start your optimization efforts, since you already have a headstart.  2. Identify your keywords. Keyword research is the cornerstone of SEO. Before you can do any of the other steps involved in SEO, you need to know what keywords to target. Sit down and write every word or phrase you can think of that’s relevant to your business and products. Once that’s done, use keyword tools to figure out how valuable the terms on your list are, and build out your list further.  Google’s free Keyword Planner provides data on the average number of searches a keyword has, and how competitive it is. It also provides suggestions for long-tail keywords relevant to your website that you can use to build out your list. To get new ideas, start by plugging either your URL or a starter list of your main keywords into the tool. You can export the list of long-tail keywords they suggest to better organize it based on relevance, popularity, and competitiveness. Using these keywords throughout your website or a blog post will help tremendously when trying to drive organic traffic.  Google’s tool may give you enough information, but many businesses that have an SEO strategy go further and use paid SEO tools that provide more detailed keyword information. With these, you can learn what keywords your competitors rank for, and get more analysis on the value of a keyword based on factors like the search engine results page (SERP) features, level of competitiveness, and the number of clicks the top results are likely to get. 3. Optimize every page on your site for SEO. Once you know what keywords to target, it’s time to get to work on your website. For each page and blog post of your website, determine the most relevant keyword from your list you want to rank for. To optimize the page for the selected keyword, look for natural ways to include it in these parts of the page: The URL – Always edit your URL so it’s relevant to the content of the page and uses your primary keyword.  The heading tags – Using headings and subheadings (in the HTML, these look like , , etc.) break up your page copy for readability and provide more opportunities to naturally get your keywords onto the page. The image names and alt tags – Before you load an image to a page, give it a name that includes your keyword. Then add an alt tag that includes it as well.  The title tag – Write a short title for each page (50-60 characters) that uses your primary keyword.  The meta description – The meta description is what shows up underneath your link on the SERP. Like your title tag, they don’t directly affect rankings, but they can increase your click-through rate (CTR). Write a meta description for each page that describes what’s on the page in under 160 characters, includes your keyword, and has a call to action that encourages people to click.  The page copy – Look for opportunities to use your keyword in the words on the page where it makes sense naturally. Google wants to deliver relevant results for every search. All of this helps signal to Google what the page is about so they know what keywords it makes sense for it to show up for.  4. Create relevant content. Creating and publishing content on your website accomplishes a few important things for SEO: Fresh website content signals to Google that your website is current and active—they don’t want to show outdated results. It gives you a chance to create more pages optimized for more of the keywords on your list. It gives your visitors a reason to stick around, and time on site is a metric that signals to Google that people like what they see when they visit your site. When you publish valuable content on your site, it gives other websites more of a reason to link back to you. Creating high-quality content that’s relevant to your audience is therefore an important part of good SEO. Use your keyword research to help guide your content strategy. Knowing what topics people are searching for tells you what your audience is interested in.  Before you write a piece of content, do some research to learn what’s on the SERP for it. Seeing what’s ranking there now shows you what Google likes for that keyword and what you need to beat. In addition, if there are rich results on the SERP for a term, you want to know so you can optimize your content to claim them.  5. Update your old content. This is a step many people skip, but a regular content audit can be really valuable for improving your SEO. Make a point of returning to your old content to update it periodically. Google likes content that’s fresh and up to date, so changing outdated information can go a long way to making sure the search engine (and your visitors) still see an old piece of content as valuable.  6. Use internal linking. An internal link is any link on a page that goes to another page on the same website. Google’s algorithm factors a link’s anchor text into its analysis of what a page is about. The anchor text is the words that are hyperlinked, the part that usually shows up in blue with an underline.  For internal links, you get to choose the anchor text. That gives you another opportunity to use your primary keyword and signal to Google what keywords to associate with your page. 7. Make your website mobile friendly. While Google keeps a lot of the details about its algorithm under wraps, one of the things they’ve been upfront in telling people is that mobile matters . For the sake of both SEO and your visitors—many of whom will be visiting your website on a mobile device— make your website mobile friendly .  8. Improve your site speed. Speed is another ranking factor Google has told people about outright . They know people care about how fast a website loads, so Google does, too. Taking steps to improve your site speed will both improve the user experience of your website, and improve Google search results for your site.  How to Improve Google Search Results Using Off-page SEO Many of the steps involved in on-site optimization require a lot of work, but the harder part of SEO happens offsite. In order to determine a web page’s value, Google pays attention to how often other websites link to it, called backlinks . A link is seen as an endorsement of what’s on the page. When a lot of websites with authority link to a particular page, it suggests that whatever’s on it is useful.  Building backlinks is challenging because you can’t control the decisions other people make about what they put on their websites. But there are a few strategies you can use to encourage other websites to link to yours.  1. Promote your content. Publishing great content is only worth the work if you get people to read it. Make promotion part of your content strategy. Share your pieces on social media. Send them to your email list. Highlight industry influencers in your content and let them know when it’s up. Consider paid promotion like pay-per-click (PPC) or social ads if you need that extra boost.  2. Sign up for relevant directories. This is one of the easiest ways to build links, but it’s important not to abuse. Add your business information to sites like Yelp and Google’s My Business. Research industry organizations that have member directories, and consider joining local organizations like your Chamber of Commerce that have one.  Only sign up for directories that are legitimate and relevant to your business. A lot of links from low-quality directories will look spammy and could hurt rather than help you.  3. Guest post. A guest post on a blog in your industry is a good way to bring awareness of your brand to a new audience and gain a backlink to your site at the same time. Identify blogs that cover topics relevant to your business that accept guest posts, and start pitching. It takes time, but it can pay off in both links and new traffic.  4. Become an expert source. Whatever your business does, you’re an expert on it. When a blogger or journalist is writing a topic that relates to your expertise, providing a quote or interview will often result in a link back to your site. You can hire a PR consultant to help you find these kinds of opportunities, or sign up for email alerts from Help a Reporter Out to find opportunities yourself.  5. Develop industry awards. People (and businesses) love getting awards. The recognition feels good and is something they’re likely to talk about on their own website. Handing out awards for your industry is therefore a good strategy for earning more links. It’s one employed by successful internet businesses like TripAdvisor: Figure out what categories to include in your awards. Research businesses doing good work in each of them, or open them up to nominations. When you’ve decided on nominees and winners, alert them to the award. Create a badge they can share on their website to encourage them to post about it with a link back to the awards page on the website.  6. Create a relevant certification program. This requires a lot of work, but is a good way to position your business as an ultimate expert on what you do as well as a strong link building strategy. Anyone who completes your certification program will want to let others know they’ve done so. As with awards, create a badge people can add to their websites to show they’re certified.  7. Do broken link building. Some SEO tools will help you find links around the web with your target keywords in the anchor text that no longer work. These are a link-building opportunity. If you track down the website owner, you can alert them that there’s a broken link on their website that needs fixing, and propose the content you have on the topic as a replacement. Because you’re helping them fix a problem they have at the same time that you’re asking something of them, it increases your chances of getting your desired response.  Improve SEO with Less Work SEO is difficult and time consuming. You know you want better SEO results, but reading over a list like this may have you feeling hopeless. How will you find the time for all this? While there’s no good shortcut to getting better Google search results—someone has to do the work—that someone doesn’t have to be you.  You can hire the skilled SEO professionals at HostGator. We know how to implement all these SEO strategies and more to get your website to start showing up for your target keywords. It saves you time and work, and will also net better results since they come to the job with more knowledge and experience.  Find the post on the HostGator Blog Continue reading →

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What Are Backlinks?

Posted on July 12, 2019 by Hosting

The post What Are Backlinks? appeared first on HostGator Blog . Your website is up and you’ve started the hard work of trying to increase your organic traffic. You’re learning the ropes of SEO and think you have all the on-page work down, but now you face the hardest part: building backlinks. What Are Backlinks? A backlink is any link on another website that points back to yours.  Backlinks are one of the most important components of SEO (search engine optimization) . Google’s algorithm is carefully designed to try and deliver the most authoritative, valuable results in every search a person does. To do that, the search engine algorithm weighs a number of different ranking factors all meant to help determine how credible each website and webpage are. Using a link building strategy helps to boost your organic marketing efforts and is one of the influencing factors that contributes to your search engine ranking.  Each time another website includes a link to yours, it’s like telling their visitors that there’s something useful on your website. It’s an endorsement of the content on the page. When a lot of websites with authority link to the same page, Google sees that as an indicator that what’s on the page is valuable.  Generally speaking, websites gain authority in the search engine’s eyes by having more backlinks. And the more authority a website has, the more valuable backlinks on that website are for the website being linked to.  For any website owners that care about SEO, backlinks are the main currency of the web. In other words, if you want to improve your SEO , you need to know about backlinks. 9 Types of Backlinks You know what backlinks are now and you’re ready to go out and get them. As you start to work on your strategy, you may be thinking the more the better, right? Not so fast. Not all backlinks are created equal.  To build backlinks effectively, you need to understand the different types of backlinks and the relative value they have for your brand. Dofollow Backlinks When someone adds a link to a webpage, by default, it will be a dofollow link. That means the search engine algorithm will see the link and count it toward the authority it assigns the website. For a link to have any direct value in how the search engine algorithm measures the website, it must be a dofollow link. Nofollow Backlinks Many of the backlinks around the web are dofollow, but in some cases, websites opt to tweak their HTML to label a backlink nofollow. This is a simple change that involves placing rel=”nofollow” in front of href in the HTML code.  Why would a website do this? There are three main reasons websites use nofollow links: To combat comment link spam – This is the reason the nofollow attribute was created to begin with. Lots of black-hat link builders were spamming websites with comments meant purely to gain links. By giving websites the option to make all links in the comment section nofollow, websites could avoid inadvertently endorsing spammy websites because of links included in the comments. To alert Google to links they’ve paid for – The other main use of nofollow links is for signaling to Google when a link on your website is from an advertiser who paid for the placement. Since ads are legitimate, but paying for links is against Google’s guidelines, this gives websites a way to continue making money from ads, while staying in Google’s good graces.  To avoid having to vet all the links included on the site – Originally, nofollow was meant for the two cases above. But several major websites have opted to make all links on the website nofollow, presumably to save them the trouble of figuring out if every link published on the site is to a high-quality website they’re OK endorsing. For website owners who publish a high quantity of content from a lot of different sources, this is a way to cover their bases when implementing a link building strategy.  Nofollow backlinks can still have value for your website by introducing your site to new visitors and sending organic traffic your way. And some SEO experts are convinced they deliver some SEO value as well. But for anyone working on building backlinks, understanding the distinction between dofollow and nofollow is important.   Directory Backlinks These are one of the easiest legitimate types of backlinks for businesses, especially local businesses, to get. Directory listings such as those for professional organizations, local Chambers of Commerce, and review sites like Yelp and Google My Business almost always offer the option of including a link to your business website.  You can easily build links by listing your website on legitimate review and directory sites, and joining relevant professional groups that include a directory.  Brand Mention Backlinks Anytime another website mentions your business, that’s an opportunity for a backlink. Often bloggers that talk about your products, business publications that cover your business news, or third-party websites that mention you in reviews or product roundups will include a link to your website when they mention your brand.  A common link building tactic is to find brand mentions around the web that don’t include a link, and reach out to the website owner to ask them to add one.  Industry Publication Backlinks These are a valuable type of link that can be earned through PR and guest posting. This includes any link to your website that comes from an online publication in your industry. An example of this would a company that sells gardening supplies earning a link on the Better Homes and Garden website. These are challenging to get, but worth a lot to your website (especially if they’re dofollow). .Gov and .Edu Backlinks Backlinks on .gov and .edu website are notable because many SEO experts are convinced they’re worth more on average than .com or .net websites. This isn’t an absolute rule—gaining a link on a .com website with a lot of authority is probably better than a small and largely unknown .edu website. But they’re valuable enough that many SEO consultants put special effort into finding legitimate ways to earn a link on these types of sites.   Blog Backlinks Between business blogs, personal blogs, media blogs, and entertainment blogs—a lot of the backlinks on the web live on blogs. Blog backlinks are often easier to build than some of the other backlink types we’ve described, but how valuable they are depends a lot on the blog. Any blog that covers topics relevant to your industry and has a high SEO authority is a worthwhile target for building backlinks. Blogs that have few readers and don’t have much of a reputation, or those in completely unrelated industries, aren’t usually worth your time.  Some common strategies for building blog backlinks are through guest posting , contacting bloggers to share valuable resources relevant to the topics they cover, or being an expert source for a blog post.  Forum Backlinks Forums are a popular type of website that allow users online to connect with each other and form a community. There are thousands of forums online that focus on a wide array of topics—from business industries, to product-focused forums, to fan forums about an entertainment property. Because forums are made up of user-generated content—any member can post—it’s easy to create forum posts that include links. If you’re strategic in how you build forum backlinks, meaning you don’t overdo it and only publish in high-quality forums when you have something useful to add to the conversation, this can be a good link-building tactic. But as with anything that’s easy to do, forum link building is easy to abuse. If you do it badly, you’ll create low-quality links that make your website look worse to the search engines.  Spammy Backlinks The different types of links described above have different levels of value when it comes to how much they’ll help your website’s SEO. But this is the category that not only won’t help you, it will actively hurt you. Google’s algorithm penalizes websites that have a lot of spammy backlinks pointing to them.  This category includes paid backlinks, links in low-quality or irrelevant directories, and spammy forum or comment links. Basically, if a link is unlikely to deliver traffic back to your website, it’s probably spammy. Google gets better everyday at recognizing which backlinks are built using SEO schemes that are only about gaming the algorithms, so if you don’t want to get penalized, avoid any tactics that feel sleazy.  How Do I Get Backlinks? Unlike the parts of SEO you can do on your own website, which you have control over, link building requires getting other people to add your link to their sites. That makes it a lot harder.  How to get backlinks in ways that are legitimate and white hat is probably the biggest question in SEO. We mentioned some link building strategies in passing in talking about the different types of backlinks, but there are a number of legitimate techniques a business can use to get relevant backlinks that are both good for SEO and for driving new traffic to your website.  eCommerce businesses can build links by offering free products to bloggers for review, sponsoring industry events, and publishing original research (bloggers love linking to statistics). Local businesses can earn links by working with local charities, hosting local events, and giving out awards.  And any website can potentially earn links by creating useful content that’s good enough that other websites want to link to it.  Building backlinks requires creativity, but there are a lot of tactics worth trying that won’t get you blacklisted by Google. Just make sure the links you aim for are actually valuable to your audience and the website you work with.  Backlink FAQs That covers most of the basics about backlinks, but you may still have questions about how backlinks work. Here are answers to some of the most common questions.  Why are backlinks so important? There are two reasons backlinks are important, even though one of them gets a disproportionate amount of attention: They signal to Google and the other search engines that your website is authoritative and should rank higher in the search results. They’re widely considered one of the most important SEO ranking factors.  They help new people learn about your business and drive relevant traffic back to your website. People spend a lot of time focusing on the first benefit, which definitely matters. But the end goal of SEO is making your website easier to find for the people looking for what you sell. A good link that shows up in a relevant context can help with that part, even before you consider the extra SEO authority it provides.   What is backlink anchor text? Most of the links you see around the web show up as a few words underlined in blue. To follow the link, you click on the words. Those words are the backlink anchor text.  Google pays attention to the anchor text of your backlinks. Along with the keywords you use on the page, it uses the anchor text to better understand what your page is about. When a backlink on a high-authority website uses the anchor text you want the page to rank for, it’s an SEO jackpot. A link that uses different anchor text than the keyword you’re targeting is still valuable, especially if the wording is related to your target keyword, but it’s not worth quite as much.  What is an example of a backlink? There are examples of backlinks all across the web. In this blog post alone, you can find two examples of backlinks to other websites in the Nofollow Links section:  One to a page on SEO-Hacker.com with the anchor text “several major websites” One to a page on the SEMRush website with the anchor text “some SEO experts” We are linking to these pages from the HostGator blog, so while these are backlinks for SEO-Hacker and SEMRush, they are actually outbound links on our site. Quality content often links out to content that in some way supports or expands on the points being made in a piece. That creates opportunities for a more passive type of link building, where by simply creating content of value, you gain links from bloggers who use your content to illustrate their point (as happened in both these examples). There are also examples in this post of something that’s distinct from a backlink, but looks similar at first glance: internal links. The link with the anchor text “How to get backlinks” in the section on the same topic is a link to another blog post on this website, which makes it an internal link.  Internal links are another important part of SEO, but different from backlinks. They’re valuable because they’re an opportunity to use relevant anchor text to further signal to Google what a page is about, because they help create connections between different pages on your site, and they drive traffic to other parts of your website.   What is a bad backlink? A bad backlink is any link that comes from a low-authority website, or that signals to Google that you’re using spammy link-building practices. Google doesn’t just pay attention to individual links separately, it also notes when your backlink profile shows a pattern that suggests you’re trying to game the system. Any backlinks that suggest that kind of pattern are bad badlinks. Can backlinks hurt your site? Yep! Many websites have been penalized due to having spammy links. You could incur a Google penalty that essentially blacklists your website. Or you could drop suddenly in the rankings due to an algorithm update that catches more of your low-quality links. Either way, you lose traffic and visibility, and recovering can be difficult. It’s important to only seek out quality, relevant backlinks.  What is a good backlink? A good backlink is one that comes from a website that has SEO authority and covers topics relevant to your website. SEO tools provide information on how much authority different websites have, so you can tailor your link building efforts to those that are worth it. The best backlinks don’t just deliver SEO authority, they also deliver relevant traffic to your website.  How can I remove backlinks from my website? If you made the mistake of hiring a black-hat SEO firm in the past and realize that you now have a lot of low-quality backlinks that are hurting your website, you can take steps to disavow them. SEO tools will help you identify the low-quality links out there that are hurting you. Then you can use Google’s disavow links tool to remove them from your backlink profile so Google no longer counts them against you.  Building Backlinks is Hard If reading up on what backlinks are and how they work has you overwhelmed, don’t worry. You don’t have to do all the work of learning different backlink strategies and executing them all on your own. If you hire the skilled SEO consultants at HostGator, they can use their years of experience to identify the backlink opportunities most valuable to your brand and earn you those links.  Contact our team today to learn more. Find the post on the HostGator Blog Continue reading →

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SEO vs. PPC

Posted on July 1, 2019 by Hosting

The post SEO vs. PPC appeared first on HostGator Blog . After all the hard work you put into designing and launching your website, now you get to the even harder part: getting people to visit.  A website can be a powerful tool for driving more awareness of your business and convincing people to buy, but it can’t do any of that unless people find it. And in an overcrowded online marketplace, getting noticed by the people you want to reach is a serious challenge. Once you start looking into online marketing tactics to promote your website, you’ll notice two marketing options get a lot of attention: search engine optimization (SEO) and pay-per-click advertising (PPC) .  Often, new website owners with a limited budget try to figure out: “In the argument of SEO vs PPC, which should take dominance?” Before you can determine which tactic makes the most sense for your business, you need to understand what they are.  SEO and PPC are the two sides of search engine marketing (SEM). They have one main thing in common: they help you get found by people searching for what you do on the search engines, especially Google.  But they also have some notable differences. What is the Difference Between SEO and PPC? The difference between SEO and PPC is all about where on the search engine results page (SERP) you show up and how you get there.  What is PPC Marketing? With PPC, you buy spots on the SERP that show up at the top of page (if you pay enough), at the bottom, or to the side. PPC results often have the word “Ad” next to them, or show up in an image carousel with shopping details at the top of the page.   Brands get those spots by paying for them. Search engine ad platforms use a pay-per-click bidding model to sell ad results. The businesses willing to spend the most, get the best placements for the keywords they bid on, but they only pay when someone actually clicks on the ad, hence the name “pay per click.”  An SEO strategy operates differently. What is SEO Marketing? With SEO, you work to earn spots in the organic results—that’s the term for all the results on the page that haven’t been paid for. For many search terms, that means they show up below PPC results, but not always. Sometimes organic results can claim a rich snippet , like the answer box that shows up at the top of some SERPs. SEO results can’t be bought, they have to be earned. You claim organic spots by practicing a number of SEO tactics , including: Working to optimize your website for relevant keywords you want to target. Making sure your website provides a good user experience, especially when it comes to things like site speed and mobile friendliness.  Working to build authority for your website by earning backlinks from other sites.  Those are the basic differences between SEO and PPC to be aware of, but what does that mean for website owners? SEO vs PPC in 7 Categories Small business owners don’t have a lot of money to spend on an online marketing strategy, so what you really want to know about SEO vs PPC is how they shake out in comparison to each other in terms of things like cost and performance.  Here’s how the two SEM tactics compare in seven main categories.  1. Cost This is a tricky category for comparison. While it may seem like there’s an obvious answer, since PPC is paid advertising and SEO must be earned with work, you may assume PPC is more expensive. In reality, measuring SEO vs PPC in cost is complicated, as which costs more will really depend on how you approach each. To truly see results with SEO, most website owners will need to hire an SEO expert to help. A recent survey found that SEO consultants charge an average of around $500-$1,000 a month . While technically, you can spend nothing on SEO but time, more realistically, you should expect to spend around this amount.  One benefit of PPC is that costs are within your control. You can set a maximum daily spend within Google Ads , and the network will stop running your ads once you’ve gotten enough clicks to reach that amount. That means you can name your budget and never go over it. But if your budget is too low, you’ll run through your maximum spend too early in the day to get the results you want, and it will take longer to accumulate the data you need to build better campaigns.  According to one survey , small businesses that do PPC spend an average of $9,000-$10,000 a month. That doesn’t mean you’d have to spend that much, but it probably means that’s the amount others have found gets the best results. Winner: SEO, usually 2. Control SEO is all about doing your best to signal to Google the keywords you think you should rank for, and proving you’re authoritative enough to gain those rankings. While you can target specific keywords, you ultimately have very little control over what terms you’ll show up for, where you’ll show up in the rankings, and how your website will show up on the SERP.  For that last point, you can provide your own meta descriptions and use schema markup in the hopes that Google will display the information you’ve provided on the SERP. But it’s still up to the search engine how your website shows up—if it shows up at all.  With PPC, on the other hand, you have much more control. Paying for ads means you can decide: Which relevant keywords your ads show up for   Who sees your ads , in terms of categories like demographics, geography, and consumer behavior What your ads look like , since you decide on what the ads says, and can include elements that increase clicks like images, or ad extensions that provide useful information such as special deals and delivery information. Winner: PPC 3. Speed of results SEO is a long game. Expect to spend months, or even years, practicing SEO tactics before you start to see results. And even then, your first results won’t be for high-competition keywords.  For example, a small business that sells hot sauce will see results for long-tail keywords—the SEO term for keywords that are less competitive—like “hot sauce shop san antonio” or “ghost pepper hot sauce” long before it has the chance to claim a broad term like “hot sauce.” That doesn’t mean SEO isn’t worth doing. It absolutely is! There are plenty of benefits to SEO . It just requires patience.  With PPC, by contrast, you can start showing up on page one and getting new traffic the first day you launch a campaign. PPC is often a smart choice for businesses who are doing SEO, but want to start driving traffic faster while they’re waiting for SEO results to pay off. Winner: PPC 4. Amount of work Both SEO and PPC require ongoing work. With PPC, you need to complete keyword and audience research to figure out the best targeting for your campaigns. Then you need to set up your campaigns, monitor them to learn what’s working, and make updates to improve your results and make sure your budget goes further.  As with PPC, SEO should start with keyword and audience research, then you have a list of tactics to stay on top of: Optimize each page of the website for your chosen keyword by including it naturally in the title, headings, page copy and meta tags of the page. Consistently create high-quality content to keep your website fresh and target more of the keywords on your list. Undertake link building strategies to get other websites to link back to yours.  Maintain a SEO-friendly web design On the whole, doing SEO well usually requires more work than PPC. Winner: PPC 5. Trust As you’d expect, people generally trust the results that have earned top spots more than those that paid for them. 46% of people said they consider organic results more trustworthy than PPC ones, and 65% said they were more likely to click on an organic result for product-related searches. SEO is therefore a better way to earn the trust of people searching for the kind of products you sell. That said, a sizeable portion of the population— around 57% — don’t even register the difference between the paid and organic results on the SERP.  Google’s always changing how the SERP looks, so that number is subject to change, but there’s a certain type of consumer that won’t think any less of your PPC ad than if you earned that top organic spot. Winner: SEO 6. Click-through rate Recent data shows a clear winner in this category, but also shows that a lot depends on the type of device people are using. The click-through rate (CTR) for organic results on desktop computers is at over 65%, as compared to a little under 4% for PPC ads. On mobile devices, organic results get around a 40% CTR, with mobile earning a little over 3% (many searches on mobile don’t result in a click at all).  Either way, organic results get more clicks, making SEO rankings more valuable for traffic once you get them.  Winner: SEO 7. Analytics Analytics give you the power to consistently learn from everything you try, improve your campaigns based on that knowledge, and get better results over time. With both SEO and PPC, you can tap into valuable analytics.  Google Analytics , which is entirely free, provides a lot of data on how much of your traffic comes from organic search, where you rank for target keywords, and which pages people are finding through SEO.  And you can supplement all that free information with the additional data included in paid SEO tools that helps you clearly identify how your website compares to your competitors in rankings and what they’re doing differently to achieve the rankings they have, such as their backlink profile and the keywords they’re targeting. While SEO tools can provide a lot of useful information, ultimately there’s still a lot of guesswork behind why certain pages rank higher than others.  By contrast, the analytics provided in PPC campaigns can tell you exactly which ads perform well. And because you control every part of the ad, you can do A/B testing to gain insights into what your audience responds to—providing information you can apply not only to your future PPC ads, but also to every other part of your online marketing campaigns.  Winner: PPC SEO vs PPC Frequently Asked Questions Even with that extensive rundown, you may still have some questions. Here are answers to some of the common questions website owners have about the difference between SEO and PPC. Which Is Better: SEO or PPC? It depends on your priorities.  PPC drives faster results. You can start getting visibility and traffic on day one, but you have to continually pay for every person it sends to your website.  SEO is slower, but once you gain relevant rankings, the results last longer. A good ranking will continue driving traffic for as long as you stay near the top, and you can count on getting more traffic from a good SEO ranking than a PPC one. And while there’s a cost to the work involved in getting on page one, once there all the traffic it sends your way is free.  Does PPC Traffic Help SEO? Not directly, but some of the metrics SEO experts commonly believe to be ranking factors require getting more relevant traffic, which PPC sends your way.  For example, when people click on your ad and like what they see long enough to stick around, it results in a lower bounce rate and longer time spent on site—both metrics that signal to Google that people are happy with the page they land on.  You can’t buy SEO results with PPC ads, but getting traffic from relevant visitors is one of the first steps to doing a lot of things that do pay off in SEO. How do PPC and SEO Work Together? Good question! While the framing of this piece has pitted SEO and PPC against each other, for most businesses the goal should be SEO and PPC working together.  PPC helps you get the initial boost you need in visibility and traffic when your website’s new, or when it’s underperforming based on your goals. It’s a good strategy for short-term wins while you’re waiting for your SEO work to start coming through. SEO is the long-term strategy that delivers bigger and more reliable results once it starts working. But it’s hard when you’re starting from scratch, and PPC can bring some of the initial traffic and attention you need to get your SEO efforts off the ground.  For the Win: SEO and PPC Integration A good online marketing strategy combines the two tactics. If that sounds like a lot of work, well, it is. But you don’t have to learn both SEO and PPC from scratch to start getting more traffic for your website.  You’ll get better results, faster if you outsource the job to someone who already knows what they’re doing. HostGator offers both SEO and PPC services. Our team includes skilled professionals with years of experience in both types of SEM. If you’re ready for your website to start delivering bigger results, let us help . Find the post on the HostGator Blog Continue reading →

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