Category: SEO Blog

When you are first launching your website you will find that it is going to be very difficult to rank in the search engines at times. This is when you should know some tips to help you in performing the best SEO for your website.

Today HP Sangha SEO Toronto discusses Some secret ranking methods for your website. By knowing these tips it will be very easy for you to find the right help that you need to have in ranking your website and know that it is going to help you increase your income.

Without this, you could end up having some issues in getting your website to rank high or even rank at all because of the way it is looking to the search engines.

Tips For Better SEO For Your Website

• Target Main Keyword

The first thing you need to do is make sure you are targeting the proper keywords. You may have never thought about this before, but the main reason why your website may not be ranking is you do not have the right keywords being targeted.

So you will want to make sure you are looking at the keywords properly and targeting them correctly. Then you can know for certain that you are going to have the right results for your keywords and know it will help you in increasing your rankings.

• Keyword Density

Making sure you have the proper density of the targeted keywords is another factor that you should consider. The main reason keyword density is important is to avoid over-optimization.  Search engines are looking for relevant information to maximize the likelihood that the information ranked is useful and will penalize websites for keyword stuffing.

For the main targeted keyword, you would want to keep your density around the three percent mark for all the words. However, you should do some research on the keywords as well and look for the latent semantic index keywords. This way it will make it easier for you to rank your website for the keywords and even in the different keywords that are present as well.

• Optimize Images

Look at the images that are on the website and make sure they are properly optimized. By doing this it will be easier for you to rank your website on the search image results pages. While this does not help draw in a lot of search engine traffic, it will make it easier for you to get the results that you want to have.

However, you should make a note that you need to be careful with over-optimization of the images as well because it can easily make your website look slanted towards specific keywords.

• Silo ( Interlinking)

Silo (Interlinking) on the website is going to be something else that is helpful as well. Normally you would never think about this aspect, but you will want to make sure you are getting all of your website pages linked together.

This way you can start to get the rankings that you want to have, but also know that you are going to have the link juice that is coming to each page spread out a little bit inside of the website as well. This in turn will help you in ranking your entire website.

• Social Share

Allow for social media sharing of the different posts to your website is something else you should consider doing as well. When you are ranking a website you will want to have your pages shared around the Internet on social media.

That way you are going to have a chance to get to see the information that you are putting out there, but also know that you have a chance of producing some of the viral content that you want to have.

Without this, you could end up having some problems in getting your website to rank high in the search engines or even in getting traffic from what people are sharing.

• Quality Linkbuilding

Most importantly, building up quality backlinks for your website to niche and location-relevant content/sites will help your site authority and overall rankings.

Being able to have a high-performing website can be a good thing. When a site is new it takes time to build the positive framework that search engines look at to determine your website’s ranking.

By knowing about some SEO tips it will be rather easy for you to carry out the best search engine optimization possible. Then you will finally be able to have a great-looking website that is getting traffic and making you money.

Without this, you are going to end up having some problems and that can easily lead to you not ranking at all.

Every SEO expert has come across misconceptions about our industry. This is just part and parcel of this job, so today we are going to debunk 6 shocking myths about SEO.

SEO is just a scam!

Sorry, can you speak up I couldn’t hear you over the sound of all the traffic coming to our sites! This is one of the most painful myths for SEO professionals. As with any industry, not all SEO companies are created equal. The best thing you can do as a business owner is to ensure you are getting a quality product and understand what you are purchasing. You cannot pay for a Nissan and walk out with a Ferrari. If you are purchasing 500 links for $5 then it’s likely to not be a good product. But good SEO is worth its weight in gold and can have a positive impact on your revenue.

Link building is dead

Dramatic sigh.

There is nothing dead about quality link building, however, spamming the web with random backlinks that add no value for users is probably something you should avoid. This has never provided value to users and each day Google gets better and removing sites that engage in this practice

Links and relevant anchor text are still signals to Google that your site and content are relevant and popular in your niche. If we shift our thinking and remove the concept of SEO from link building we will see that many of the activities are tried and tested digital marketing tactics.

Here is a breakdown of ranking factors from Moz.

We need our focus keyword to rank in position 1 within a week.

This one is popular with clients. There is this misconception that ranking for one keyword will solve all of your marketing problems. These focus keyword clusters tend to be broadly focused and although related to the offerings of the business they may not be the kinds of terms that would bring in a purchasing customer.

Client education about keyword focus is extremely important, many are misinformed about how keywords fit into an effective SEO strategy in 2016. Our job as digital marketing and SEO professionals is to guide and educate them about keyword research and keyword focus.

I can get good SEO for $100 a month

This one is way off the mark.

Most times you can’t even get good SEO services for $100 an hour! The reason many people get themselves into penalty hell is that they don’t see the value in SEO and engage in services that utilize automated activities.

Google continues to expect more value from websites for their users, therefore to be visible we need to give users and Google more! You simply cannot do the activities necessary to have a positive impact on your visibility by taking the cheap route. To ensure long-term success you need to alter the way you view SEO and respect this field as an extension of marketing, PR, and web development disciplines.

Google will find you on their own

If you build it, they will come?

Unfortunately, this isn’t a field of dreams and it is going to take much more than that. Having a great online presence in today’s market takes strategy, consistency, and expertise. There is nothing set and forget about SEO.

Many people who take the DIY approach will be implementing tactics that fall into spammy categories, such as building out multiple pages with overly keyword-stuffed content. They expect that Google is going to see them as an authority.

Every search engine strives to provide the most relevant and valuable results to users. Proving that you are valuable to your audience means you need to work on the visibility of your site, for the lifetime of your business maintaining a website.

Google hates and penalizes SEO

This is a great one! Google loves QUALITY SEO, the kind that incorporates different quality marketing disciplines and provides users with unique and valuable content. Google advocates the use of good SEO for its users. What Google hates is black hat and manipulative SEO, spammy backlinks, and algorithm manipulation to get rankings for keyword terms. It goes against Google’s central goal which is to provide the very best experience for its users.

This misconception was born from not being able to distinguish between spammers and high-quality strategies. Again this goes back to ensuring you are engaging experts who can provide solutions and strategies that will help you reach your long-term goals.

Good quality SEO will never die! The industry will evolve as it always has and will continue to be an integral part of the online marketing strategies for brands for as long as the internet exists. If you want to discuss how our Toronto SEO experts can help you or if you have any questions about high-quality SEO feel free to contact our team today.

Today SEO expert Hp Sangha discusses the 5 Off-Site (Off-Page) SEO Strategies to Ditch. Follow these Basic rules and improve your website ranking and organic traffic as well.

Here Are Off-Site SEO Strategies No Working in 2024

• Buying or selling links

Google clearly states that buying backlinks to approve your rankings is against their webmaster guidelines. Google views links as a vote of authority for your site and as such it’s not ethical to be paying for these votes. This doesn’t stop bloggers from charging for links or SEO companies from paying for them.

Often bloggers will try to charge you for a blog post and use the justification that Matt Cutts called guest posting for SEO DEAD! So they put a price on it and call it a sponsored post. But no matter what your reasoning is or what you call it, paying for links is your ticket to ride the Google train to Penaltyville. Population – your website!

• Large-scale article marketing with keyword-rich anchor text

While it is great when people write about you and link back to your site, they need to be natural. As Google continues to change and improve its algorithm it is slowly weeding out the sites that engage in these poor techniques.

Stuffing the anchor text with your keywords on a large scale is not going to look natural and is sure to get negative attention at some point down the track.

• Excessively adding links to poor link directories

Adding your site to any website directory for that backlink will hurt your rankings and visibility. Most website directories provide little to no value to users and Google often excludes them from the SERPs. You don’t want your website to be there too.

• Placing optimized links in unhelpful forums or blog comments

Adding non-relevant links in blog or forum comments and overusing your keyword-rich anchor texts is the wrong way to gain valuable links. It is ok for your links to be there as long as it is relevant and add to the user experience.

• Link exchanges

Exchanging links with other websites for the sake of reciprocal linking will only land your website in hot water. For example, you have a plumbing website and you link to a dog groomer and that dog groomer links back to your website essentially, you have just created a worthless link that has no SEO value. This kind of behavior can result in a Google penalty.

High-quality link building is no easy task. Creating that is valuable to both users and your website takes a lot of time and effort. Never buy your backlinks or create worthless links. Focus on creating content and links that will benefit users and your online visibility will increase in the long term.

With a startup, you should look to outsource as much as possible. The reason is that you have far too much to do as the CEO and need to focus on the core services that your business will provide. To try to create a whole suite of reliable SEO services in-house is tough to do even for a new agency, let alone a company whose primary role is not that of an SEO agency.

Accordingly, here are some SEO outsourcing tips to use when going this route as a startup.

Don’t Fight That Putting Together an In-house SEO Team Takes Time

Starting an SEO team from scratch, you’ll need to seek out and interview potential SEO employees, build out a team, install a team leader or department head, and hope it will all gel together. The whole gelling together / working as a team process takes time and won’t happen overnight either. Also, if you’re trying to put a complete team together, you’ll need a collection of people where everyone is a specialist instead of a generalist which takes longer to arrange.

As a startup, you already have far too much to do. Just putting together the right people to provide core services or create products to sell is hard enough. Trying to create internal processes for too many departments can quickly lead you astray.

Understand, It’s Less Risky to Use an Agency

Working with an existing SEO agency is a far better prospect in the early years. They’ve been in business for years already. They know what they’re doing and have established processes to follow. They’re not making it up as they go along!

There are also talented people on their team who can be relied upon. Usually, each person is a specialist with some degree of overlap to cover responsibilities that get busy and need a second person to help out. Structuring it this way means the agency can handle extra business on demand.

Seek Out Proven Past Results and Validate Them

What separates acceptable SEO agencies from ones that are worth their price is demonstrated in their past SEO results.

Results like search page bump upwards and/or more search keywords ranking for what their clients wanted are results that take 6-12 months to achieve in most cases.

Look at the before and after information. See if you can access tools like SEMrush or Ahrefs to check on the previous traffic and ranking and where their clients rank today. Use a proxy tool or a VPN that supports Google to perform US-located lookups on current positions to check claims about ranking positions made by agencies. They’re easy to validate and you can also see if the position has improved or declined recently too.

Select Between Providers Based on SEO Techniques and Policies Used

It’s important to decide ahead of time what types of SEO techniques are acceptable and which are not. This can fall into a few categories:

• White Hat Only

Largely speaking, the white hat can mean either no manual links being sought after or created or only links that are done in the most natural-looking way possible.

For instance, with white hat linking, backlinks are only sought at a time when it makes sense. This might exclude a brand-new site from getting links pointing to its review pages as this is unlikely to happen unassisted. However, links pointing to informational content that’s genuinely useful appearing in the first few months make perfect sense! Links to more commercial content can be sought at a later date when there’s a nice backlink profile created for a new site and it has a bit of age at that point.

• Grey Hat

Grey hat is where most website is today. There are varying degrees of this type of linking. On the upper level, you may see links from sites with traffic coming to them, making the links more likely. On the lower end, you may see backlinks originating from websites with no organic search traffic and basic, short articles used just for linking purposes.

It is up to your company to decide what its priorities are within the grey hat realm of link building. Some links are less powerful but pose less risk of getting a penalty from Google. Others, such as private blog network links from zero-traffic sites pose a greater risk.

Choosing an agency with the in-house capabilities to produce the type of link-building campaign that is decided upon is crucial. Not all agencies can handle different types of SEO adroitly.

See How the SEO Agency Handles Google Algorithm Updates

Discuss with any Best SEO agency you’re considering how the past Google algorithm updates have affected their clients’ sites.

It’s extremely unlikely that they’ve not been affected at all. Most sites are seeing regular movements in search ranking and traffic volume attributed to these frequent changes.

Ask questions about what actions the agency took on behalf of clients who owned sites that were impacted by an update. This provides some indication as to how they’ll handle your site in such a situation.

Talk Timeframes

The timeframe for ranking improvements or other changes as a result of the agency’s work is something to enquire about too.

Whilst you may be under pressure to deliver ranking improvements within the quarter or six-month period, that’s not always realistic. Discuss with the agency to see what their impressions are about the website and the possibility of better ranking. Check how they plan to do that and what their plan of action will be should better rankings fail to materialize.

If anything, an SEO agency should be given more time at the outset to deliver results; not less time. Google is intentionally slowing down responses to changes to thwart any attempt to manually make improvements to ranking. As such, more patience is required to get sustainable results compared with the past.

SEO agencies making bold claims about rapid ranking improvements, especially over unrealistically short timeframes and/or providing guarantees of such should be looked upon with suspicion. Good results take time and hard work to achieve them.

SEO (or search engine optimization)is the process of attempting to rank higher in Google and other search engines for chosen search terms (referred to as keywords). These keywords reference topics or products that are of most interest to that small business.

For instance, a Toronto travel agency might wish to rank highly for ‘cheap flight to Malaysia’ because they already sell many such flights to walk-in customers or have particular expertise In Malaysia as a vacation destination. SEO can help with that intention.

Here are some of the reasons why SEO is important to small businesses:

• Free Organic Search Traffic

When it comes to traffic, there is freely generated traffic and paid traffic.

Free traffic is termed that way because the business doesn’t have to pay a provider for said traffic, i.e. when ranking well in Google for ‘cheap flight to Malaysia’ no money is paid to Google if ranking in the top 5 search results.

Paid traffic such as spending on paid advertising across travel websites or Google, Twitter, or other websites costs money for small businesses. They have to run an ad campaign and make more from the profits on the new customer deals than the advertising costs, labor & other related costs associated with the activity. A significant percentage of paid ad campaigns lose money when factoring in all the very real costs involved.

• Brand Visibility

Brand visibility is important, especially for small businesses that lack the funding to pay for ongoing ad campaigns to build brand awareness through TV and magazine advertising methods.

By ranking well for topical search terms, potential new website visitors (and eventually new customers) get to see the brand perhaps for the first time. As such, ranking high in Google & Bing search engines through the use of SEO can massively increase brand visibility over a short 12-month period.

• Site Optimized for Readers

While it’s possible to optimize a site for SEO purposes, these days the best approach is to design and optimize a site for the visitors. While the site must be accessible by automated services like the Googlebot spider that crawls the web to find new sites and content, the main consumer of content is still humans.

When optimizing a site to make it better for usability, fast to load, with good navigation and clear links to relevant internal (and external) pages, the visitor is encouraged to stay for longer. And when visitors look at more pages and remain on the site longer, this is a significant ranking signal to Google and other search facilities. It says that their initial recommendation about the site was correct and it’s proving popular. In response, they often boost the ranking of the site once they see the time on site is significant, and rising created a virtuous circle of rising benefits.

• Return on Investment

While organic search traffic appeals to some small businesses on a limited budget because it’s free, for others they’re looking more to the medium and long-term. The news is also good for the ROI with search compared to other sources like social media or paid traffic in all its forms.

The time and financial investment in SEO are significantly less but deliver a healthier return when viewed over a 1-3-year period. Growing traffic figures and rising income from gradual increases in ranking positions starting usually when the site is out of the Google Sandbox (a delayed ranking process that continues until 4-8 months post-launch) provide a meaningful ROI. Indeed, traffic growth can double or more within a short time once the site begins to take off.

• Conversion Rates

Conversion rates are only usually important to e-commerce websites. That’s a mistake. Every new visitor arriving because of SEO should be provided with an optimized experience. It’s necessary to capitalize on every free visitor or the opportunity created by SEO will be lost.

Business owners and their teams must look at what they earn per customer and per 1,000 customers. Compare this to industry averages. Track data points week to week; month to month. Whilst there will be seasonal differences and holiday surges too, it’s possible to look for trends.

Consider using a heatmap on your site to see what areas visitors spend time on. Look at those pages to see how they can be improved. Perhaps adding better quality content or expanding it. Include images, slideshows, or video content that all appeal to both visitors and search engines.

SEO assists business owners in getting as much free traffic as possible. Without a focus on SEO, businesses lose potential visitors some of whom would have become new customers. Instead, businesses spend money on expensive advertising to locate new customers pushing up their customer acquisition costs. With SEO Toronto, the customer acquisition costs are close to zero. For small businesses trying to survive the early years or grow their customer base, they should be emphasizing SEO to boost traffic levels. It’s a hugely cost-efficient way to operate, especially in the early years.

Building backlinks pointing from someone else’s website to your brand-new site is more challenging than with an older site. For one thing, you must be careful about the kind of links you get. Also, it’s necessary to be wary of both the quality and the link velocity (the speed at which new links are acquired). They must be spaced out to look natural. As such, building backlinks for new sites requires a different discipline than for older websites.

Here Are Some Tips On How To Build Backlinks For a New Website.

• Guest Posting the Right Way

Guest posting is the act of getting another website owner to accept a guest post – an article – on their website. The benefit for them is a decent piece of content essentially for free and the benefit for your site is a new inbound link. You may also receive some referral traffic from people visiting your site from the site with the guest post published on it too.

Most SEO Agencies do guest posting incorrectly. It must be particularly relevant to the audience where it will be published. The content must speak to their audience and not your own. While there’s often some overlap between the two, that’s not always the case.

The guest post should be a reasonable length. Usually 1,000 words or greater. It’s not likely that a detailed post can impart useful information when it’s only 500 words. The article will barely touch the surface of any topic that it covers and provide poor value for the readers’ time.

• Using Broken Link Building

The broken link-building method isn’t new, but it still works incredibly well because it involves helping another website owner with a problem they didn’t even know they had and providing a ready-made solution too. Sounds good? Dig in!

The broken link-building link-building plan works around finding links on other websites that are no longer valid. In other words, a website is linking out to a page/post on a website that’s no longer there. Perhaps they deleted the page and failed to set up a 301 redirect or the website is no longer live.

Using scanner apps that can check sites for broken links on a website, it’s possible to find pages or posts with outbound links that go nowhere. Once a list has been built, a plan can be devised. Either you already have a published article that would be a great replacement for the link, or you can have one written, publish it and then get a link to that news article put in place of the one that isn’t resolving any longer.

• See What Your Competitors Are Doing

Finding good backlinks to go after is never easy. But if you look at what your competitors have already done, it gives you a leg up. Let’s say that you have a similar post to theirs where you’re reviewing an almost identical collection of products. They could have one or more links pointing to their review and that same site might be willing to link out to your review too.

Using a tool like Ahrefs, it’s possible to enter the full URL of the site and post directly. The online SEO tool will then spit out information about how many inbound links that post has. By looking up the backlinks page, it’s possible to get a full list of all the visible backlinks pointing to the page. At that point, an assessment can be made as to which links are valuable and worth trying to get the same or similar link for your post, and which are low-quality and best avoided.

Don’t reinvent the wheel if you don’t have to!

• HARO

Help a reporter out (HARO) is a network for journalists who need reputable sources. When you read an article in Forbes where they’ve gotten quotes from people in the industry that the article is reporting in, these usually use established contacts. The reporter gets new information and the brands mentioned received a bit of promotion and often a backlink too.

The benefit of HARO is that articles by journalists tend to be published on good reputation websites like newspapers where they have a high domain authority and page authority. This makes these links very valuable. Google also pays attention to brand mentions within an article even if their site wasn’t linked to it.

• Reddit & Industry Sites

Reddit and other conversational sites are good places to get links pointing to your site.

Not every link needs to be a do-follow one. After all, most websites have 60% do-follow links and 40% no-follow links that supposedly Google ignores. Therefore, it’s necessary to get a good bunch of no-follow links so that your new site looks natural to avoid getting penalized for unnatural link building.

A Final Word

When adding backlinks to a new site, it’s important to space them out. Too many too fast look unrealistic and risk a penalty from Google. Rushing to rank too soon is just as bad as not bothering with backlinking at all.

In terms of the anchor text – the text within the link itself – it should only have a low single-digit percentage of relevant terms. Mostly, links should be brand or site-related. This is normal and expected. Therefore, most backlinks will have the name of the site, the URL, and a bunch of mixed terms that don’t help rank the site for valuable search terms. And then a few powerful links that do help rank for commercial terms. It’s all in getting the balance right.

Anyone who doubts the importance of social media when it comes to marketing need only read this one stat: 1.3 billion people use Facebook every day. The fact that they need to be online to do so also speaks to the relevance of Facebook and other social media entities to the marketing efforts of online businesses. They’re in cyberspace; you’re in cyberspace. It would behoove you to hook up.

Benefits of tying the marketing efforts of your online business to social media.

1. Increased Conversions – Every time you create a social media post you’re creating an opportunity for readers to become new customers. Every tweet, post, image, video, or comment is a chance to catch someone’s attention which could potentially lead to a site visit and a conversion. These customers don’t have to go anywhere. They just follow the digital breadcrumbs you lay in social media posts to your virtual door.
2. Lower marketing costs – Social media accounts don’t cost anything yet they open up a world of potential customers you were previously frozen out of. Each time someone reacts to one of your posts or clicks a Facebook link to find out more about your product or service you’re expanding your potential customer base without writing a check. Why pay for radio or web banners when you can gain access to billions of consumers for free through social media?
3. Increased traffic – Before social media exploded into the marketing consciousness the only way to drive new traffic to your site was by ranking for relevant keywords and creating and uploading engaging content regularly. Or you could pay Google to put your link at the top of search results. With social media, however, every free post, picture, and tweet is a potential traffic generator.
4. Improved Search Engine Rank – SEO is all about improving your ranking with search engines and social media is becoming an ever more important part of SEO strategies worldwide. Google has made significant tweaks to its algorithm lately that give added weight to your social media presence. To them, a robust social media presence is a signifier of brand legitimacy and a reason to bump you up in search results.
5. Valuable Feedback – Until now if you wanted to find out what your customers thought of your product you could hire a marketing agency to convene focus groups on your behalf or ask people to fill out questionnaires. With social media, you can track people’s opinions of your product or service through comments, “likes” and “dislikes”.

Social media marketing is the final piece in the puzzle of a comprehensive marketing strategy for your online business. In very real ways it can be the glue that brings everything related to your product or service together. Building a robust social media presence around your online business allows you to set up your own “off ramps” on the information superhighway so that scores of people who were previously unaware of your brand can stop by your website for a look around.