The Importance of Link Building

3 Key Factors of Link Building:

 

Link building is a task combined with creating good content. Within your content there should be links to certain areas of your website. If you are talking about web services in your content piece, why not promote your own web services with a link.

A key aspect of content creation is that if it’s good, then it will get shared and linked freely by those who liked it. This is where Social Media comes in helpful for sharing content easily with your audience. You can’t however rely solely on other people linking your content so here are the 3 key aspects of link building you should incorporate into your content;

 

1) Anchor Text:

The anchor text is the textual representation of a hyperlink, for example the anchor text for this link is “this link” with the hyperlink being “www.webresults.ie”. Anchor text is important because most major search engines use it to determine what keywords are relevant to a page. For example, if you want to rank for the term “coffee shop,” then you should try to get as many links as you can with “coffee shop” as the anchor text.

 

2) Authority of Linking Domain:

The ultimate goal in link building is to get as many inbound links to your site as possible. This is important for your SEO strategy as it shows search engines that your page is of importance and offers valuable content. The more inbound links you have, then the more likely you are to rank for a certain keyword.

Having a lot of inbound links is all well and good, but having inbound links from domains that have a high authority is even better. Having inbound links from sites with high authority such as The Irish Times, is much better than having links coming from your mate Dave’s blog.

You can check the authority of a page you wish to apply an inbound link on with tools such as moz.com

 

3) Focus your links on specific pages within the website:

When building links to your website, you should focus bringing the readers to a very specific page of your website, otherwise the link is pointless. If in your content piece you are talking about a new coffee bean which will blow both your mind and taste buds, then maybe you could place a link within this piece to a page on your website explaining the variety of coffee products you have in your cafe.

After a while you will begin to see which pages on your site are getting the most visits or showing up for searches, once you see which is doing the best, continue promoting them and building more links to have it climb the rankings.

If you have any enquiries about link building, or any other digital marketing services, then please contact us.

How to Solve The “Not Provided” Problem in Google Analytics

Google Analytics: The “Not Provided” Problem

Google analytics is a fantastic tool for viewing visitor trends and behaviour. It helps you to figure out what your website is doing right or wrong, and to see how effective your current SEO strategy is performing.

The one problem many people have with the service is its organic search terms report. In this report, you can see what search terms are giving you the most visitor traffic. However throughout this report the term “not provided” regularly appears and the content is not accessible to the business, although this information is available to those who have a paid premium account.

Why is this data hidden?

 In 2011 Google updated their privacy settings, focusing on protecting those with a Google account (Gmail, Google+ etc). If a person conducts a web search through Google whilst they are logged into a Google account, then their search is conducted over a Secure Socket Layer (SSL), therefore the referral data relating to that search is hidden.

This referral data contains some very useful information, such as the keywords used to perform that search. This data is however only viewable to Google and those with a premium analytics account.

There are ways around this for you with basic accounts. One such way involves analysing landing page results. This involves mining through Google Analytics for other information that will reveal more about who your visitors were and what they were doing on your site. This involves 3 steps;

1. In your Analytics account, head to Admin, then Profiles.
2. Click the name of the profile you want to work with, and select the Filters tab.
3. Create a new filter in your Analytics account and follow the guidelines in  the image below:

After applying this filter, future keyword reports while provide some more useful information. Instead of “not provided” appearing in the report, it will be presented as

 “np – / landing page”.

 While this doesn’t reveal the actual search term used by the visitor, it does show you what page within your site appeared in their search result. This can give you the information  of which pages within your site are appearing on search results. This new data will only be presented like this for future reports.

Why use Google Analytics?

Measure Your SEO performance:

With Google Analytics you can analyse your current SEO strategy and see what keywords are working for you. It will also show which pages on your site are most popular. You can assess the amount of traffic coming into your site, and quantify goals and conversions. If you have any questions regarding Google analytics, please contact us.

Getting Past the Penguin Update

The Penguin update has been live for a whole month since yesterday and many search executives are still asking what to do to overcome the update. This update occurred because Google wanted to let businesses know how important SEO will be in the future and what activities they shouldn’t be implementing.

Google are advocating relevance to constantly improve the quality of their search results and expect all website owners to adjust their content and SEO practices accordingly. For businesses that haven’t yet made a change but have felt a change on their website there are measures that you can employ to overcome the Penguin update.

We have outlined the issues that search marketers may be facing as a result of Penguin and outline the necessary tools to regain any losses you may have experienced on the search engines.

Read our full article to see how these measures can help get your rankings back on track.

Finding Your Must-Have Links

There is it seems an endless amount of link building tools and link intelligence software available for us to explore when testing and checking the quality of our links. The majority of these are free however many apply a restriction on usage, some request account upgrades and some return utter useless information.

Nevertheless we have a list of tools that have been tried and tested by industry experts. Tools that can help you build links, find new link sources and create new unique content. After all discovering quality links that are relevant to your site is no easy task. Read our full article to see how these tools can help you discover ideal links for your site.

SEO Analytical Tools – Sheer SEO

SEO Analytical Tools

Sheer SEO is a useful SEO Analytical Tool that can be used by website owners and SEO professionals …and it’s free up to a point. I find this to be the easiest way of quickly assessing who is linking to a website and how valuable the links are, i.e. what PageRank boost does each link offer.

Read more about SEO Analytical Tools on our website.

WebResults.ie offer Analytics training. For more info call us on 01-2071872

10 Ways To Improve Your Site Content

When writing content for your website it can be difficult to keep your information relevant. Getting the balance right between keyword enriched content for a high index and providing quality information for your user is a difficult task.  As after all these are two very different audiences who process information in different ways.

The only solution is writing content that keeps both the visitor and search engine interested.  By writing SEO-friendly content you can lead people to your site, and by writing content that is relevant for potential visitors you can encourage them to stay there. Read our full article to find out how you can implement a 10 step strategy that will allow you to create search engine friendly content.

SEO For Small Business Owners

There is no point investing in a website for your business or for any other purpose if nobody actually finds it. Equally important is that your site be found by targeted visitors, not just by random traffic which won’t lead to any conversions.

Search engine optimisation therefore is an essential part of your online marketing strategy for your business because if your site ranks well in the SERPS for the best keywords and phrases for your business you will be guaranteed a steady pipeline of potential leads and new business.

If you have a small business and want to find out how you can improve your page ranking click here and read our full article.

SEO Checklist

SEO is not about individual tools and activities but is about combining a set of techniques that will all work together to improve your websites performance and rankings.

Listed below is our checklist of SEO tools that we at WebResults use to ensure that all are clients websites are optimised:

1. SEO keyword research
2. Google Analytics account
3. Goals & Funnels
4. Page titles and meta descriptions
5. Webmaster tools accounts 
6. XML sitemap
7. Canonical tags
8. Submit to paid directories 
9. Optimising on-site content 
10. Additional content

To find out more information on these tools and activities on our SEO Checklist click here to read the full article.

SEO Moz Pro

SEO Moz Pro is a SEO & Social Software that combines SEO Management, social Media monitoring, actionable recommendations and so much more form one simple platform.

This SEO Platform provides the following:

• Weekly Crawls & Rank Tracking 

This tool crawls your site each week, notifying you about issues that may impact your performance. It also monitors rankings for all the keywords that are important to your product offering. This create less work for you and allows you to have more time spent optimising.

Term Extractor Tool – See how Search Engines view your Webpages

The Term Extractor Tool is a tool offered by SEO moz. This tool analyses the content on a web page and it then extracts the terms that appear to be targeted by the search engines. It applies certain weight to HTML elements and other on-page factors to determine what it thinks are the targeted terms for the page entered.

The Term Extractor Tool is a free tool and can be quite handy when analysing and assessing keywords for a website. Any url for any page on the website can be inserted and the tool will generate the top ten terms and phrases. These keywords and phrases provide a good overall picture and insight about which words the search engines find important / relevant on the web page. If these do not reflect the subject matter of the page, then you will know that action needs to be taken.

The data is presented in detail with each term and where exactly it is found on the page and its importance as a percentage. This is really beneficial as it will actually specify if the keywords are appearing in the important meta title, description, alt and Headings tags and if not, then this will highlight where it should be implemented.

Another great use and benefit of this tool is