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Difference in SERP rank and keyword rank checker tools

Hi, Can anyone tell me why does google SERP and keyword rank checker tools show different positions or ranks of the keywords ?… | Read the rest of http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1762874&goto=newpost Continue reading

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What Are Google Ads and How Do They Work?

The post What Are Google Ads and How Do They Work? appeared first on HostGator Blog . Getting noticed on the web is an uphill battle. The entire complicated industry of online marketing has grown around the difficulty of getting people to visit your website, stick around once they’re there, and take the actions you want them to. A good portion of online marketing revolves around a site almost all of us use, that regularly sees over 3.5 billion searches a day: Google. Because of how ubiquitous Google is, it plays a significant role in how people experience the web and find the websites they visit. For most websites, it has the potential to be the biggest referrer of new visitors to your website by a long shot. But showing up on page one of Google in the natural results is extremely competitive and out of reach for a lot of websites that are either fairly new or in an especially competitive space. A faster and easier way to get traffic from Google (and traffic in general) is with Google Ads . What Are Google Ads? Google’s advertising platform, Google Ads (previously called Google AdWords ) powers all the ads that show up on the search engine results page (SERP), as well as on many of the other sites around the web. For many types of search terms, ads increasingly dominate the SERP. You’ll see ads that look a lot like the natural results at the top of the page, along with ads that include images either above the other search results or on the side of the page. In addition to the valuable real estate these ads provide on the Google results page itself, Google Ads also show up on other popular Google properties like YouTube and Gmail, as well as over 2 million other websites and apps included in Google’s massive display network. In other words, the reach of Google Ads is about as broad as you can get. They’re all over the web – you’ve probably already seen a few today without realizing it.   Should You Use Google Ads? Google Ads are a powerful way to get your website in front of a targeted audience. While it’s only one of many online marketing tactics you can use, many of the other best tactics require playing a long game. Seeing results from SEO, social media, and content marketing often takes months or even years of ongoing work, while investing in paid advertising with Google Ads can start earning you traffic faster. Most businesses will be better off using a mix of online marketing tactics than just sticking with one, and if you want quicker results and have the budget for Google Ads, then it’s a solid choice to include in your marketing mix .   How Buying Google Ads Works The first step for anyone interested in Google Ads is to set up a PPC account, which is a pretty simple and quick process. Once you’re able to access the Google Ads platform, you can start setting up ad campaigns. Check out this guide to getting started with Google Ads .   The Bidding Model Google Ads uses a bidding model for ads, meaning that you’re competing with everyone else on the platform who’s interested in the keywords and ad placements that you choose to target. When you’re creating a campaign, you’ll be prompted to provide a maximum daily budget, along with a maximum bid amount. The higher you’re willing to spend, the more often your ad will show up. You can set your bids manually, but Google Ads also offers an automatic bidding option wherein you trust the platform to decide the best amount to bid within the budget you’ve provided. Their program aims to make bids that will bring you the highest number of clicks possible for your budget.   Pay-per-click Pricing One of the biggest benefits of Google Ads is that most campaigns on the platform use a pay-per-click pricing model. You only pay when someone clicks on one of your ads. Unlike many advertising options where you pay for general exposure, here you only pay when someone takes the main action you want them to: visiting your website. While it’s not used as commonly, Google Ads does also offer the option of setting up campaigns that use a cost-per-impression pricing model. If your main goal for a campaign is building brand recognition rather than getting clicks, you can choose this option and pay for every 1,000 times your ad shows up.   Targeting Options One of the other main benefits Google Ads offers is relevance. When you put up a billboard, you’re paying to show your ad to loads of people in order to reach the few who are actually in your target audience. By comparison, Google Ads makes it easier to more effectively reach those people. The main type of targeting they provide for ads that show up on the SERP is keyword targeting . You can choose which keywords you want to bid on to ensure your ad shows up when people are searching for precisely what’s on the page you’re promoting. By choosing highly relevant keywords to target, you increase the chances of getting clicks from people likely to be interested in your page. In addition, Google Ads allows targeting by geographic area and demographics . If you sell products that primarily appeal to a specific age range or gender or if you want to reach an audience in a specific city or region, then you can tell the platform to just show your ads to them. Google can use its extensive user data to help you reach the precise audience you want visiting your site. Being seen on the web is hard and your website can’t do its job until people find it. Google Ads is a relatively affordable tool for increasing your online visibility and driving more traffic to your website. Get started with Google Ads now. Find the post on the HostGator Blog Continue reading

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Why Is Structured Data Important For SEO?

The post Why Is Structured Data Important For SEO? appeared first on HostGator Blog . Why Is Structured Data Important For SEO? You’ve been creating great content, optimizing your web pages, and building links. You thought you had all your SEO bases covered, but now you hear there’s something else you have to learn all about for SEO: structured data . SEO evolves and one of the biggest changes in recent years has been the rise in rich search results.  In the early years of Google, the search engine results pages (SERPs) mostly included a couple of ads at the top and ten links with a brief description under each. It was simple and straightforward. Over the past couple of years, the SERPs have increasingly started to include results that provide information beyond that brief description. Beyond the links, you get information like the number of calories in a recipe and the amount of time it takes to cook, or pricing information for a product and how many stars customers have given it on average in reviews. And for many searches, you’ll now see a knowledge box on the right side of the page that provides additional helpful information for searchers. All of this has changed what matters most in SEO. While website owners are limited in what you can do about these changes, structured data is one of the best tools you have to gain more control over how your website shows up in Google.   What is Structured Data for SEO? Structured data is information you include in your html that provides search engines with more details on what your page is about. In order for search engines to properly understand that information, it needs to be structured in a way the algorithms are designed to understand. In practice, that usually means using schema markup to add the proper code to your page. Schema markup allows you to tell Google what type of content is on the page (e.g. that it’s a recipe, product page, article, etc.) and provide details specific to that content type that would be valuable for people to know (e.g. calories for a recipe or ratings for a product). Why Structured Data Is Important for SEO Structured data isn’t a ranking signal, so it won’t directly help you rank higher, but it’s still important for SEO for a number of reasons:   1. It can help search engines determine relevance. A lot of on-site optimization is done precisely for this purpose: Google needs to know what’s on a webpage to decide what kind of searches it should show up in. And you only want your web pages showing up for relevant searches – a pet food brand doesn’t need to show up when someone’s looking for shoes. By providing more information to Google about what’s on the page, you make it easier for the algorithm to figure out what searches your content is right for.   2. It makes your website more competitive on the SERP. Showing up high in the results is important for visibility, but even once you’re on page one, the person searching still has a lot of other options to consider. Anything you can do to give your website an edge in getting that click is worth it. Structured data can add images and helpful information that draws more attention to your webpage on the SERP and makes it more competitive.   3. It improves your click-through rates. The whole point of showing up in the search engines is to get more people to visit your website. At the end of the day,CTR matters more than where you rank. SEO professionals have found that structured data can improve click-through rates by anywhere from 5-30% . Structured data can indirectly help you improve your rankings by getting more of those clicks. Adding structured data to your web pages is a relatively easy way to improve how your website appears in the search engines and drive more traffic. For anyone that cares about SEO, that makes it worth doing.   How to Use Structured Data for SEO One of the first things you learn when you start doing SEO for your website is that it’s very competitive. Trying to figure out what you can do to make your website stand out when so many others in your niche are doing the same is an ongoing challenge. Well, it turns out structured data is one thing that not everyone is doing. In fact, only 17% of marketers were making use of schema markup as of last year. The main thing stopping people is probably quite simply that it sounds hard. But it doesn’t have to be. Google helpfully provides a Structured Data Markup Helper that makes it easy for you to input the details relevant for structured data and automatically generates the html code you need to add to your website. Even if you’re not great with html, Google’s tool means you really just need to know how to copy and paste to add the code to your website.    If you have a large website, adding structured data to all of your pages may be a big project, but if it brings up your click-through rate, the time spent will be well worth it.   Get Help with Structured Data If using structured data for SEO (or any other aspect of SEO) is feeling overwhelming, you may benefit from outsourcing the work to skilled professionals who can take it off your plate. HostGator’s SEO services can take the stress out of dealing with all this stuff yourself, while helping you on the path to better rankings and results over time. Find the post on the HostGator Blog Continue reading

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How to Write the Best Meta Descriptions for SEO

The post How to Write the Best Meta Descriptions for SEO appeared first on HostGator Blog . SEO 101: Writing the Best Meta Descriptions In our first post about SEO Basics, we talked a bit about the different search engine ranking factors. Now we’re going to go a little bit in a different direction to talk about meta descriptions.   What Is a Meta Description? Meta descriptions are the most important part of SEO that technically don’t have anything to do with rankings. On the search engine results page, every result is made up of at least three main parts:      The linked title of the page      The URL that shows up under it in green      A line or two of text that describes what’s on the page That text is the meta description. In most cases, you can make sure the description here says what you want it to by using the meta description tag in your html. This looks like:  and you can see it in the html for the website below: If you use a WordPress site and have an SEO plug-in , you can skip dealing with the html entirely and simply look for the “Description” field when filling in SEO information for each page. When you add a meta description to all your pages, it makes it easy for Google to decide what to display in the description section of the SERP for your webpage. It’s important to note that Google doesn’t pull from the meta description you provide 100% of the time . In some cases, it will pull from text on your webpage instead. Nonetheless, providing your own meta description is still a valuable part of on-site optimization for the search engines.      Why Meta Descriptions Matter As we established before, meta descriptions aren’t given any weight in how search engine algorithms decide which websites to rank for certain terms.  Getting that meta description just right won’t make any difference in terms of the search engine algorithm – so why is it still so important? Because your ultimate goal isn’t rankings, it’s clicks . The whole point of getting a good ranking in the search engines is to drive more clicks to your website, and your meta description gives you the opportunity to persuade searchers to click on your website instead of your competitors’. A good meta description can increase your click-through rate (CTR). And while Google doesn’t admit outright that CTR is a ranking factor in the search results, most SEO experts are convinced that CTR does influence rankings . If that is the case, then a strong meta description can directly increase traffic and indirectly increase your rankings – both goals that make spending time on your meta descriptions well worth it.   8 Tips for Writing the Best Meta Descriptions You don’t have a lot of space to work with for your meta descriptions, so you’ve got to make what you have count. Here are some of the best rules to follow to write meta descriptions that will get the job done.   1. Write a unique one for every page. Don’t write one meta description for your website and copy-and-paste it on every page. While that might be easy, it would mean wasting opportunities to sell what’s on each individual page to the people searching for precisely the information it provides. Commit time to writing a unique description for every page on your website based on the content that’s on it and the primary keyword the page is targeting.   2. Pay attention to length. In late 2017, Google increased the number of characters it displays for meta descriptions on the SERP from around 160 to 320. Then, in May 2018, they shortened them back to 160 . That’s the maximum number of characters you should use, or part of your description will inevitably be cut off.  For each page, consider the most important message you should convey to get people to click through to the page. If you only need 100 characters to really sell what’s on the page, then don’t awkwardly prolong your meta description to use the full space. But in a lot of cases, having 160 characters to work with will give you more room to say what you need more persuasively, so take advantage of it where needed.   3. Use your target keyword naturally. When you look at the meta descriptions  in the Google search results, you’ll notice that anywhere the words included in your search show up, they’re bolded. For the person searching, this can help you more quickly spot which results are most relevant. For the websites showing up in the results, that bolding is a way to stand out and draw the searcher’s eye to your result. While you can’t predict every specific term your website may end up ranking for, you can increase the odds of having bolded terms in your meta description on the SERP by making sure you include your target keyword in your description. But make sure you use it naturally – don’t force it. Keyword stuffing can make your meta description more confusing than helpful and end up hurting you.   4. Emphasize the value on the page. The whole point of your meta description is to work as a sales pitch for the web page. For each page on your website, carefully consider the biggest benefit it provides to visitors. That’s what you want to emphasize in your meta description. Make sure you think about it from the visitor’s point of view here. What problems does your web page content solve for them? What questions do they have that it answers? And importantly, what makes your page better than the similar results they’ll see alongside you on the SERP?   5. Represent the page accurately. Make sure your meta description accurately portrays what visitors will see when they click through. Gaining a click because you oversell or misrepresent what’s on the page is never worth it. You risk losing the visitor’s trust and will likely gain an increased bounce rate out of the deal. So make sure that your webpage can deliver on any claims you make in your meta description.   6. Use an action-oriented CTA. Calls to action often work best when they encourage people to do something active (hence the name). Use some of the characters in your meta description to urge people to click with action terms like “learn how,” “read more,” or “discover.”   7. Use schema markup when appropriate. One of the biggest changes to the SERPs since Google started has been the rise of rich snippets .  While they don’t show up for every search, for a number of types of searches, you’ll now see additional information included in the SERP listing, such as pricing for products or calories for recipes. Get familiar with the different types of rich snippets and make a habit out of including schema markup on any web pages where the extra information is relevant and valuable to searchers.   8. Proofread! Hopefully. you already know to proofread all your web pages and content before they go live, but make sure you remember to do the same for your meta descriptions. If you’re writing dozens or hundreds of meta descriptions, it can be easy to forget this simple step, but if your big sales pitch on the SERP includes an embarrassing error, it could lose you clicks and hurt your reputation. Meta descriptions are important, but they’re just one small part of doing SEO well on your website. To strengthen your website’s chances of landing those coveted top spots in the search rankings, check out the rest of the articles in our SEO 101 series: How Do Search Engines Work? How to Write Compelling Title Tags What’s the Best URL Structure? Best Practices for Website Architecture Contact  HostGator’s expert SEO team   for more ideas on how to improve your website’s SEO. Find the post on the HostGator Blog Continue reading

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10 Ways to Optimize Your Blog Posts for SEO

The post 10 Ways to Optimize Your Blog Posts for SEO appeared first on HostGator Blog . How to Optimize Your Blog Posts for SEO Blogging for SEO is pretty much a no brainer. Publishing regular blog posts gives you opportunities to target a large number of long-tail keywords, keeps people on your website longer, and gives other websites something to link back to. Getting your blog up and producing content for it are both important steps, but you can make that work go much further for your SEO efforts by taking a few extra steps to optimize your blog posts for SEO. While you should generally prioritize writing for your audience rather than search engines, that doesn’t mean that there aren’t useful steps you can take to make your posts go further with the search engines. 1. Do Keyword Research. Keyword research should be one of the first steps you take in developing a blog strategy for SEO because it helps you figure out the types of topics your audience is interested in. For each blog post you write, it’s smart to have a primary keyword or two in mind, along with a few similar or related secondary keywords. You’ll want to use these in the post where relevant, but only when it makes natural sense to do so. Don’t ever try to force a keyword in where it doesn’t work –the search engines frown on keyword stuffing and you could be penalized. And with Google’s use of latent semantic indexing (LSI) , it’s less important than it used to be to use exact keywords in lieu of synonyms or similar terms. But having those keywords in mind and using them as you write is still worth it, as long as you don’t go overboard. A couple of useful tips for doing blogging keyword research: Go for long-tail keywords – One or two-word phrases are often very competitive and hard to rank for, so relevant longer phrases or questions are more worth your time. As an example, targeting a broad keyword like “seo” in a blog post makes less sense than getting more specific, like “small business local seo.” Think about voice search .  As more people use Siri and Alexa, optimizing your content for voice search becomes more important. And since voice search is a newer development in SEO that not all businesses are thinking about, it’s a good way to be competitive.   2. Check for Rich Results in the SERP. Once you have your target keywords in mind, head to Google and do some searches for them. Many types of searches now include rich results on the search engine results page (SERP). If a search for your target keyword produces a featured snippet above the organic results, or if many of the organic results include images, video thumbnails, or other rich information, then you want to make sure you’re optimizing your content to compete for those things. In some cases, that means adding schema markup to your webpage. In others, it means changing the way you structure your content to try to compete for the featured snippet .  Either way, you need to know what you’re competing for and against in order to create the right kind of content to be competitive.   3. Choose Your Post Title Well. One of the main parts of the page the search engines pay attention to in trying to understand what the page is about is the title. That makes it an important opportunity for you to communicate your topic by using your primary target keyword. Make sure you include it in a way that makes sense. If you shoehorn it in so that it’s confusing for your human readers, the lack of clicks you get will hurt your SEO chances more than use of the keyword will help them. But since your post will be covering the topic of your keyword, finding a natural way to include it shouldn’t be too difficult.   4. Include the Keyword in Your URL. The page URL is another important place to include your target keyword. It’s another part of the page search engines look at to figure out how to understand what the page is and, as such, is an important ranking factor. Always customize the URL before publishing. A blog post on how to find good winter boots should therefore have a URL like www.shoewebsite.com/blog/winter-boots. 5. Optimize Your Headings. You may be sensing a theme here. Your page headings are another part of the page that search engines give weight to in figuring out what your page is about. That means that, once again, you want to look for opportunities to (naturally) include your keywords in the page heading. That includes anything that has a , , or tag on the page. Headings are often a good place for those secondary keywords you have in mind, since it probably won’t make sense to use your primary keyword in every heading on the page.   6. Use Your Image Text. Another page element that search engines pay attention to is the text behind your images . The name of your image (e.g. keyword.jpg) and the alt text you can fill in are two more places you can include your primary keyword on the page. 7. Use Relevant Internal Links. Links are easily one of the most important ranking signals for the search engine algorithms. Getting other websites to link to yours is a challenge, but you have the power to do as much relevant internal linking on your own site as possible. Each time you write a new post, think about any blog posts you’ve already published that are relevant to what you’re writing now. Wherever it makes sense to do so, add in those links and, if you can do so naturally, use anchor text that relates to your target keyword for the older post you’re linking to.   8. Write a Meta Description. While meta descriptions don’t affect how your website ranks, they do influence what people see when they’re browsing their options on the search engine results page. If they’re trying to decide between a few links on the page, a strong description that uses the keywords they searched for (which show up in bold on the SERP) could make the difference in their choosing to click on yours. Google will display up to around 300 characters on the SERP in the description field, so figure out how to describe what’s on your page (using your target keyword) within a couple of lines here.   9. Link Your New Post to Old Posts. For all the same reasons you look for opportunities to add old links from your blog to new posts, you should periodically review your old posts to look for opportunities to link to posts that were published later. One way you can do this is by doing a search of your own site for the target keyword of each new post you create. When you find uses of that keyword or similar terms in your old posts, you can add in a link to the new.   10. Choose Tags and Categories Strategically. Blogs allow you to create tags and categories that help you group related posts together. This is both a useful navigational aid for people browsing your blog and a tool you can use strategically for SEO. Every category or tag you use creates a new page that will include the name of the tag or category in the URL, along with a lot of relevant content and links on the page. As with keyword stuffing, you don’t want to overdo it here and create tons of tags with similar keywords, but you should think carefully about which keywords and tags will be the most valuable to readers and for your SEO strategy. Come up with a list of a few based on the most important keywords you want to rank for, but making sure they each represent different types of topics (e.g. don’t have categories for synonyms or slight variations on terms) and use them whenever they’re relevant to what you’ve written.   Optimize Every Blog Post for SEO   Your blog is one of your most important and powerful SEO tools. Every blog post you publish presents a number of opportunities to strengthen your website’s search authority. Don’t waste any opportunity you have to use your posts to their fullest SEO potential. Find the post on the HostGator Blog Continue reading

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