April
Anchor Text Optimisation Best Practices
- Variation: synonyms, plural/singular, adjectives, combine keywords, natural language,
- Branded keywords
- Natural links: click here, go, link, url
- Onsite: self-explanatory title tag, URL, h1 tag
Ultimate Guide to Increasing Ecommerce CR
- Great product presentation: HQ images, copy, videos, customazation
- Free shipping(!)
- Clear sales and special offers
- Make it easy to buy: no registration required, fast support, etc.
- Persistent shopping cart
- Offer live chat / support
- Process indicators: 3 easy steps, for example
- Offer multiple payment options
- Improve your search(!!)
- Create better filters
- Product reviews
- Test: UX, A/B, MVT
- Content creation became very important
- G+ is become more important thanks to rich SERPs
- Schemas, XML Sitemaps and Site speed
- Product can be content: esp. customization, product hacks, APIs, UGC, etc.
- Videos
On-Page Optimization of Ecommerce Websites
- Customer reviews: collect them, negative reviews are great
- Q&A content
- Incentivize social sharing; think about affiliates in an other way
- Breadcrumb navigation
- Phone number as trust and support signal
May
- Your highest anchor text distribution should be branded
- Use share of voice to calculate possible financial impact of higher ranking
- Special content
- Egobait: crowd sourcing, best of, interviews, awards
- Data viz, e.g. infographics, videographic – precontact influencers
- Ebook and guest post
- Blog contest
- Throw an event: meetup, conference, party, dinner
- Learn about your audience: social listening, Facebook, prospecting
- Quick wins
- Ask for links
- Profile links
- Directories
- Local organizations: BBB, Chamber of Commerce, etc.
- Joining the conversation: boards, blog commenting, Q&A
June
How to perform a great SEO Audit
- Start crawling the website as bot (no css, cookies, JS)
- Accessibility
- Robots: .txt, meta tags
- Errors
- XML Sitemap
- Flash / JS
- Site performance
- Indexability
- site:example.org vs. actual counts
- Are you ranking well for branded searches?
- Penalized? Check first, if the page is really penalized
- On Page Factors
- URLs: short (<115chars), relevant keywords, subfolders, use hyphens instead of underscores
- Check for duplicate content (parameters in URLs)
- Content: at least 300 words, it is valuable?, keywords?, easily readable?, indexiable?
- HTML: Markup, titles, meta-description, h1, frames, canonical?
- Images: alt tag and file name
- Outlinks: trustworthy sites, relevant, anchor text, links broken?
- Off Page Factors
- Popularity: gaining traffic, compare to others and backlinks
- Trustworthyness: Google’s safe browsing, siteadvisor, hidden keywords
- Backlinks: how many unique root domains? What percentage if nofollow? Natural anchor text distribution? Relevant backlinks? How popular/trustworthy/authoritative are the backlinks?
- Social Engagement: retweets, +1s, fb likes, etc.
- CI (see next section)
- Questions:
- What is their link building strategy?
- How do they use social media?
- SWOT their strategy
- How do these elements work together, i.e. digital strategy
- Backlinks
- Top Backlinks: What can are they?
- General Backlinks: Content marketing, guest blogs, etc?
- Anchor text: distribution, coupled terms, branded?
- Link Building
- Press releases
- Directory submissions
- Blogger outreach
- Content marketing
- Infographics
- Social bookmarks
- Local influences
- Social Media
- Where are they active?
- How do they promote their estate?
- Observe continuously: google alerts, twitter search, etc.
Guide to Link Building with Local Events
- Event page on your website: info about the event, etc.
- Find event directories for your city
- Look out for event data providers
- Always do CI
- Search for local blogs / groups who could be interested in your event
- Advanced: 2nd tier linking the event site, citation building with your local address, schemas, search for external speakers
- Build a email list, create wrap-ups, ask for links
- My tip: encourage attendants to blog and twitter about the event