SEO Guide 2022: Complete Strategy To Rank On Google

What Are The Positioning Factors In Google?

In this guide we are going to start with the main Google Positioning Factors (GPF), those signals that we send to Google and that depend on different factors, which together will enhance your website and increase your ranking in Google.

Trust, Authority And User Experience

First of all, I will start by talking about the “Page Quality Rating”, a way that Google has to evaluate the quality of a page for searches.

Page Quality Rating

Google published a document explaining what it evaluates to assess the content of a web page, what is called in English “Search Quality Rating”.

The most important factors that Google takes as a reference to assign your website a quality ranking in searches are the following:

Quantity and Quality of the main content.
Information about who is responsible for the website.
Website reputation.
Experience, authority and reliability.

I am going to explain to you the three concepts that concern us in this book, which are Trust, authority and the level of expert, and that I will quote them from now on in their names in English, trust, authority and expertise.

Authority of a Page (Authority):

Maybe we get into a loop, but the best definition for a page that has authority is that the site is reliable, the users who visit you trust your website, your market or industry trusts your website, they trust other websites and therefore, trusts the search engine, Google in this case.

The strength of the Authority of your site will depend on the strength of the Authority of the content that is on your website.

That is, the more authority your website content has, the more authority your website will have. But there are also many other areas where your website can “Build” its Authority, we will now see how to do this with the Architecture of your website.

Website Architecture:

Your website needs a logical site structure. The web page must be accessible from all pages and all categories must be grouped thematically to improve navigation by subject.

Allowing searches with a “search box” will improve the visitor’s experience and help visitors find specific information. If the page search engine does not find something specific, make sure it offers a similar, thematic or related result.

All categories must be accessible from the main menu. All pages must be tagged with the most relevant category.

On your website it should be easy to locate the contact page. All the necessary information for an appropriate contact must appear in it: email, address, telephone.

Your contact information must match the contact information you entered when you purchased the domain, you can check it with this tool:

https://who.is/

The “about us” page (I know, it’s recurring but very useful) should explain the purpose of the website and your business activity, your history, who are the owners, the employees… this information will help your visitors to trust you. your website.

Your website must clearly represent and identify who is responsible for it and what is written there. If it is an individual blog, if it is part of an organization if it is written by a person or a group of people, who creates the content (the author).

Trust:

If you are a company, it can be a very good idea to write in a blog, I have already made it clear before. A Blog will keep your website with fresh content and will increase the frequency with which your users return to consume your content. If a person periodically returns to a website, the trust that the search engine assigns to your website will increase.

The comments or testimonials of clients that you upload to your website will almost certainly be ignored by Google. On the other hand, you can use third-party pages to show them to your customers and that is where they think about your products or services. Social recommendations are a very strong signal that increases a positive reputation.

A small number of negative comments will not affect your Page Quality Rating much, especially if you have a lot of comments of all kinds. Google can also check the content of the ratings themselves rather than the numerical rating itself. But of course, if your ratings are usually negative, the least you should worry about is Google, you should rethink your product or service.

You must include the Privacy Policy and the legal terms of the service you provide, of course the cookie policy, all of this is mandatory under European and US law, but Google also takes it as a reliability reference. Another thing is that you decide not to index them, that will be a good practice if, like 90%, you install a third-party plugin for cookies and/or use copypaste legal terms changing your data, in this case it will be a good practice not to index.

Expertise:

If your website is an expert page on something in particular, surely there will be many writing about you or your page and they will link to you, that is, they will put a link to your page. This is the best indicator that your website and your content are taken as a reference in your market or sector. There will be users writing about what you write, they will want to link to you, quote you, your information will be shared.

Don’t worry if you don’t have a university degree, or a master’s degree, Google doesn’t value it directly to consider you an expert, if you have a lot of experience this will make you an expert on the main topic you usually write about on the blog, the key is that other sites (of a certain relevance) take the initiative to put a link in their content since they consider you a reference to what you write, this signal is decisive for Google.

Keywords, Contents and Latent Semantic Indexing

If you want to position your web page you need to use the right number of keywords, so far so good. But where should these keywords be placed? In what quantity so as not to overoptimize your content?

What keywords should I use to be found?

The answer is simple, investigate. You must investigate What keywords do your customers use to find what they are looking for? These are the terms that you must use in your texts in an organized way to be able to position yourself in Google.

Google reads like you do, from left to right and from top to bottom, which means that it gives keywords more relevance due to the location on the page where they are placed.

But Where Should These Keywords Be And How Often Should You Use Them?

In Page Content
You must be sure that your target keyword or phrase must appear in the first 100 words of your article.
Where the keyword is placed, and whether the surrounding text is consistent is more important than how often or how often you use it.
Keyword stuffing or excessive use of keywords is penalized by Google, study carefully how many times you use a keyword and use it naturally.
Google prioritizes keywords like this:
Goal and Header.
Body or Body.
Sidebars and footer or footer.

The keyword that you have chosen as the target of your article is the one that should appear most frequently, this is the “Keyword density” or keyword density, if you exceed an acceptable amount of density, Google will penalize you for it, it will consider that you do not you are writing for “People”.

You must also put the focus on your keyword, putting it in the H1 tag, in the meta description, in the article text and finally, that it is present in the H2 tag.

Take care that the keyword matches the most used term to find your product or service, so if your goal is to “sell” web pages in your area, use the exact term that most people are using to find this service, which in the case of Stealth SEO Solutions is “Stealth SEO Solutions Web Design”. You shouldn’t focus too much on a single keyword or you’ll get a penalty.

To audit or discover keywords that they use to find products or services similar to yours, you can use tools such as Semrush or other similar tools such as, keywordtools.io or simply investigate what keywords your competition has positioned.

A very good option to consult the Long Tail Words or phrases that are used in a certain market to reach certain content is the web answer the public: http://answerthepublic.com

Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) Keywords.

LSI is the use of terms or words that have a related meaning, that is, semantically related.

This parameter is used by Google to determine if the repetitive use of a keyword is excessive and therefore deserves a penalty, or it will be considered an appropriate use that enriches the content.

For example, if you are describing a kitchen, semantically related terms are plates, glasses, pans, scissors…

Latent Semantic indexing does not mean that you should use synonyms for a word. LSI terms are close and related words, never different words with the same meaning.

Google scans the web to know the topic you are writing about, so using keywords that are included in the same area of meaning puts the search engine in context to better hit the ranking of the web, let’s say it puts your web page in context.

You must discover your LSI to contextualize your website and use these well-placed keywords, in the correct place on your page, they must be:

In the first paragraph of your article.
In the body of the post.
In links with adequate Anchor Text.
Semantically close or complimentary words should also appear in the last paragraphs.
Use LSI keywords in the metadata of your page.
In the title.
In the H1 and H2 tags.
in the URL.
In the Meta Description.
In the Alternative Text of the images (Alt).

Fresh Content – Content Freshness

The publication date of an article is a signal that is taken into account to determine a position. Unfortunately, it is not the only one, but it is combined with the other ranking factors that Google takes into account.

However, for different searches the Freshness signal is taken into account differently, that is, different searches have a different need for freshness.

Google checks the freshness of the content of web pages by monitoring the following types of searches:

Latest Events or Current Topics: If a user does a search on this type of search, they expect to find the most up-to-date information, therefore the level of freshness expected from these articles is high.
Regular Events: If an event occurs on a regular basis, conferences, football matches, courses, etc. the user doing a search is likely to expect the most recent result, so the freshness factor is important for such an article.
Frequent Updates: This is when information changes often, but it’s not a recent event or a regular occurrence. For example: high-tech products, car brands…

Google checks search volume spikes on a topic and if people start writing about a topic, they also check media and social networks.

This gives you a chance to get traffic and ride a wave of recent content because if you write first on a topic that hits the scene with a bang, it is possible that the Freshness Factor will make you appear in a high ranking.

You can also get to surf on the crest of the wave of Google rankings by regularly updating content that remains fresh, that is, you regularly work on it to keep it up to date.

Seven Best Practices to Optimize Ranking Factor: Freshness.

A very good practice that is not included in these seven best practices, because we all already know them, is the frequent updating of old content.

Create new content regularly.
When you make updates, focus on the main content, do not introduce secondary or unrelated content.
Note that minor changes will be ignored, if you are going to change a link you must also make changes to all the content around it.
Steady link growth is better than inconsistent spike growth.
All else being equal, linking to fresh content is often a better signal than linking to good but stale content.
Engagement metrics are your best friend. Work to increase clicks and user satisfaction metrics.
If you change the theme of a page too much, older links can lose their value.

Duplicate Content

Duplicate Content refers to web content that appears on different sites on the internet. If you copy content from another web page and paste it on your website, you will be creating duplicate content.

It can also be duplicate content, the one that you publish several times on your website, or that inadvertently appears on your website on two different sites (in WordPress, for example, it is very common to duplicate content by having the same article in two different categories or tags).

This of copying texts and pasting them on your website, being one of the deadly sins of web positioning, is one of the most widespread practices because creating content is the most expensive part of a web page and unfortunately many web designers prioritize the beautiful over the effective, without looking for something balanced.

Google does not want to penalize duplicate content, instead it decides which result appears in the searches and which one sinks in the non-existence of the fifth page of search results or simply deindexes.

Indexing is the key.

Original content for Google is the one that is indexed first, that is, the one that is saved on Google’s servers for the first time.

Therefore, it is important to get your content indexed in Google as fast as you can.

How To Avoid Duplicate Content

The first thing you should know is that you should not copy the content of another website without asking permission first. It’s bad for you and bad for the site you copy it to.

If you use elements or small quotes from another website, put a reference in the article, it will give you extra credit in the eyes of Google and your readers.

If you have duplicate content on your website, you should do a 301 redirect, so Google won’t index it.

Configure Search Console so that only your preferred content is indexed. That is, if your preferred domain is stealthseosolutions.com, Google should not index your domain as www.stealthseosolutions.com, this could be taken by the search engine as a duplication of your entire website.

You can duplicate your website if you use separate mobile and desktop versions, use a responsive version of your website to avoid this problem.

If you accept guest posts, check the content thoroughly with a plagiarism tool (this is a good option: https://smallseotools.com/plagiarism-checker/).

If it is the first time you write on your blog, do a double check, it may not be done with malicious intent, but you must protect yourself from duplicate content.

Avoid Duplicate Content In Content Syndication:

Syndicated Content is content that is republished from the original content or from another website to yours.

This is often part of a small blog that wants to grow its audience with related topics and syndicates content from other blogs to reach more topics that its audience might find interesting.

By definition all this content will be considered as duplication, and this is bad for you and for the referring site.

Luckily, there are SEO methods that will help you avoid this problem on your website, Rel=Canonical is a very good practice

Label as rel=canonical

This is the safest method, it will not give you any problem for the syndicated content that you publish, they will never be considered duplicates.

Simply with this tag we tell Google what is the original content that is being syndicated on your blog, you will have many benefits for using this tag.

Meta tag NoIndex

This method has the same principle as the rel=canonical tag, with it you give instructions to the Google robot so that it does not index the content, so you will never have a duplicate as it does not exist in the index.

I personally prefer Rel=canonical and use NoIndex when it’s not possible to implement it.

Crawl Budget Or Tracking Budget Of The Google Spider

Google says that the crawl demand and the crawl rate make up the GoogleBot crawl budget for your website.

Google’s Gary Illyes wrote a blog post titled What Crawl Budget Means for Googlebot. In it, he explains what crawl budget is, how crawl rate caps work, what crawl demand is, and what factors influence a website’s crawl budget.

First, Gary explains that for most sites, the crawl budget is something they don’t need to worry about, so you should, a lot.

For really big sites, it becomes something you should consider.

“Prioritizing what to crawl, when, and how many resources the server hosting the site can allocate to crawling is more important for larger sites or those that automatically generate pages based on URL parameters,” Gary explains.

Here is a brief summary of what has been published, but I recommend you read the full post.

The crawl rate limit is designed to help Google not crawl your pages too much as this can hurt your server.

Crawl demand is how much Google is going to want to crawl your pages. This is based on the popularity of your pages and how fresh the content is in Google’s index.

The crawl budget is the sum of the crawl rate and the crawl demand. Google defines “crawl budget as the number of URLs Googlebot can and wants to crawl”.

Google’s post goes on to explain what factors influence the crawl budget and then some frequently asked questions on the subject.

Crawl Rate Limit

Crawling is Googlebot’s top priority, making sure it doesn’t degrade the experience of users visiting a website.

We call this the “crawl rate limit”, which limits the maximum fetching rate for a given site.

In a nutshell, this represents the number of simultaneous parallel connections Googlebot can use to crawl the site, as well as the time it has to wait between each crawl.

The Crawl Rate Can Go Up And Down Based On A Couple Of Factors:

Track Health – If the site responds very quickly for a while, the limit increases, meaning more connections can be used for tracking. If the site slows down or responds with server errors, the limit decreases and Googlebot will visit you less.

Limit set in Search Console: Website owners can reduce Googlebot crawling of their site. Please note that setting higher limits does not automatically increase crawling.

Crawl Demand

Even if the crawl rate limit is not reached, if there is no indexing demand, there will be low Googlebot activity.

The two factors that play a major role in determining tracking demand are:

Popularity: URLs that are more popular on the Internet tend to be crawled more often to keep them fresh in Google’s index.
Staleness: Google’s systems try to prevent URLs from becoming stale in the Index.

Additionally, events such as site moves can trigger increased crawl demand to reindex content under the new URLs.

Factors That Affect The Crawl Budget

In my own experience many, low value added, URLs can negatively affect a site’s crawling and indexing.

I find that low value-add URLs fall into these categories, in order of importance:

Navigation and session identifiers by facets.
Duplicate content on site
Minor error pages
hacked pages
Infinite spaces and proxies
Low-quality and spammy content

Wasting server resources on pages like these will deplete crawling activity on pages that actually have value, which can cause a significant delay in discovering great content on a website.

Crawl Budget FAQ

Is Tracking A Ranking Factor?

An increased crawl rate will not necessarily lead to better positions in search results. Google uses hundreds of signals to rank results, and while crawling is necessary to be in results, it is not a ranking signal.

Do Alternate URLs And Embedded Content Count Towards My Crawl Budget?

Generally, any URL that Googlebot crawls will count towards a site’s crawl budget. Alternative URLs, such as AMP or hreflang, as well as embedded content, such as CSS and JavaScript, may need to be crawled and will consume a site’s crawl budget.

Similarly, long redirect chains can have a negative effect on crawling.

Can I Control Googlebot With The “Trace Delay” Directive?

Googlebot does not process the non-standard “Crawl Delay” robots.txt directive.

Does The NoFollow Directive Affect The Crawl Budget?

Depends. Any URL that is crawled affects the crawl budget, so even if your page marks a URL as NoFollow, it can still be crawled if another page on your site or any page on the web doesn’t tag the link as NoFollow.

For information on how to optimize your site’s crawl, take a look at Google’s 2009 Crawl Optimization blogpost which is still current.

Outbound Links

An outgoing link is a “vote of confidence” for the site you link to.

Part of the “strength” that a page has is transferred to the web that you link to, let’s say that part of the power that a page has is sent with the link to the content that you link to.

However, when the link is of the “click here” type, the link loses part of its value, that is, it does not optimally help the site you are linking to, nor your own website.

Linking to the URL of the type https://stealthseosolutions.com/seo-articles/is a safe bet if you don’t have a clear Anchor Text to link to, for example: SEO Blog in the UK

It is more reliable for the user to click on a URL than on a linked word like the example above. The user knows exactly what will happen when clicking on the URL, so the usability of a “naked” link is greater than an unrelated Anchor text.

Using an anchor text that is too optimized can lead to a penalty from Google, especially if the website receiving the link is trying to rank for this exact term. Manipulating Google positioning can have catastrophic consequences.

However, if you are confused about whether or not it is good to link with an Anchor text, a naked link or simply not linking, ask yourself this question, ignoring what Google thinks or does not think about it: Is it useful to complete my content?

What is a Backlink?

A BackLink is a link from a third, party website that goes to your website.

They are also called “inbound” or “incoming link”.

How Can I Check The Links That Come To My Website?

Google puts a free tool that allows you to know who is linking to your website.

To use this tool, you can go here:

Google Search Console

Why Are Backlinks So Important?

If you link to a web page, you trust that the content that the user will find there complements your content, adds value to the reader, so taking this maxim forward, that other websites decide to link to yours gives your content added value. of trust, relevance, authority…

Of course, this factor is in principle easy to “bypass”, ask to be linked, pay for it, get links and in principle, the theory says that this reflects a high value of your website, but no, friend, that SEO is a dangerous road, let’s see how Google does to check that no one deceives you with this, backlinks.

15 Points That Google Values In A Link To Rank Your Website

The number of individual domains that link to your website is a very important factor for Google.
The Authority of the domain that links to you is also key, usually a single authority domain is more important than many links from different sites without authority.
An authority website is not always a page on the internet that has great writers or a lot of fame, a website that has achieved great quality in a certain market niche is also an authority website for this specific topic.
The age of the websites that link to you are also more relevant than if the links come from a new site.
One link from a relevant website for a certain niche market is much better than many links from different sites that are not relevant.
If they link to you from a website with low visibility or low quality, it will not do you any good. In fact, it can be considered that it is part of a link scheme, spamming, a practice that can harm your position because it is Black Hat SEO.
Context matters, that is, if your link is part of a valuable text surrounded by important keywords for your ranking, it will be much better than being linked from a part without the content of a website, a widget, a plugin, a footer without content that contextualize the backlink.
If a website links to you with the “NoFollow” meta tag, it will not pass the full force to your website, although there are trials that show that they somewhat improve your position by indirect SEO. We have already discussed above that a “NoFollow” link is reserved for sponsored or paid posts, for example.
Links from a wide range of websites is good, many links from a single domain is not only not good but can be considered a bad practice worthy of a penalty.
A link with a 301 redirect does not make you lose PageRank.
An Anchor Text or Anchor Text influences the way Google classifies a link or backlink. If you sell shoes online, an Anchor text of the type “buy shoes in New York” linked to a page where you can buy shoes in New York it will be more relevant than a simple “buy here”.
The text anchor to a web page must be descriptive and very concise in order to benefit from this link.
I already explained in another positioning factor that Google gives importance to keywords depending on the place they occupy on a website, therefore, a link at the top of a website will be more important than at the bottom.
If the link to your website is placed in “Evergreen” content, content that does not go out of style and does not depend on trends, content that always remains “fresh” will be more valued than an expired content or with less than 1000 words.
Links from .edu or .gov domains may be more relevant than other types of domains, this is because educational and government top-level domains are considered high authority, regardless of other factors.

I have already explained before how to discover websites that are linking to your website, but with a list of domains…

How Do We Know If The Links We Have From Other Websites Are Positioning Us Or Are Toxic?

This is what I follow when doing an initial audit for a new client, this is not to say that it is the best or the only thing to do, there may be other methods, even free.

I resort to professional tools, of course paid, but that save my most precious asset, which is undoubtedly time.

Sistrix is a great help, it has a tool that values with positive or negative numbering what the backlink of your website is giving you.
SemRush is great, it tells you how many “Toxic links” and that’s it, it’s time to eliminate them and the problem is over.
Ahrefs without a doubt, is the most complete on this subject, capable of discovering more links than any other.

In the next point we are going to talk about what to do when you discover backlinks considered harmful to your web positioning.

What To Do With The Toxic Backlinks That Link To Your Website?

Actually, the last update of the Algorithm called “Penguin” has brought a great controversy about this, since according to Google this update manages in real time not to take into account, or even penalize toxic backlinks, so the option that I am going to tell next It might not be necessary at the moment, I still use it until Google disables it, which is usually the clear sign that something has stopped working.

We are talking about the tool to disavow incoming links to a website, of course, from Google.

With the links that you have discovered with the tool of your choice you can now go to the search console and disavow them.
If you are already registered in Search Console you just have to click on the tool to disavow links or disavow
If you only have one website in the search console, all you have to do is click on the red button: “Disavow Links”. (Make it look because you should have at least two, with and without www.)
If you have more than one domain, select the one that receives the toxic links that you want to disavow and you will be able to upload a text file with all of them.
It only remains for the search giant to agree to the disavowal and these links will no longer count for it.

However, if the Penguin 4.0 update works, the value of these links will have already been discounted, but it is a good practice that you, as the owner of the website receiving these toxic links, disavow them as soon as possible.

What The Experiments Say About The Use Of Outbound Links

The most complete study on whether Outbound Linking works or not is this one (in English) by the Reboot Agency, which I am going to write more about here.

Reboot created 10 websites each targeting the same keyword and linked half to high authority sites, good quality outbound links to authoritative sites.

He waited 5 months and wrote the article explaining the results he obtained where he concluded: Outgoing links to sites considered to be authoritative if they are taken into account by the Google algorithm, also have a positive impact on the positioning of the web from which the links come.

With these conclusions you should take into account the following recommendations so that this good practice of integrating outgoing links in your articles does not penalize you.

These Are 7 Good Practices To Insert Outgoing Links On Your Website

So that outgoing links do not “dilute” your web positioning, you must link to authoritative sites, that is, reliable, safe, relevant to what you link to…
This does not mean that a small blog does not have authority, it means that you must link to quality content that provides added value to your content, not only are the large content creators an authority on the subject, but there are also blogs of small creators that have a high value.
PageRank retention will not be affected. In other words, the link juice that we SEOs talk so much about will not be lost because good links on your website.
Any outbound link building scheme is considered “Black Hat”, so regularly linking to a website that has little to do with your page or your market will penalize you, because the link is irrelevant and because Google will think that you are selling outbound links. on your website.
Broken links either internally or externally are a bad sign. This means that your site is unattended, it is not working, make sure the links work. You can use Search console to find out errors in your own links and a tool like Screaming frog for outgoing ones, I use SEMrush to monitor all the errors in my clients’ websites and it works great.
Affiliate links (that is, links that are placed in some post that take you to a website where you can buy something, if you buy it they will pay a commission to the website that has linked) should always go with the meta tag “NoFollow”, thus respecting Google’s best practices.
They should also go with the “NoFollow” tag when linking to promoted or sponsored content, advertising, or if you are a blogger doing a product review and getting paid for it.

Internal Links

An internal link is one of the best weapons that an SEO has to do his job.

What is the internal linking of a web page?

They are the links that are inside the articles and that take you to related content.

This is an SEO tactic that has a content writer, who does not need the computer support team to make changes to the web and that gives SEO control of a website to the person responsible for the content.

Why is internal linking important?

The importance of internal links lies in the fact that with this SEO technique you can tell Google, but especially the people who visit your website, that a page is important.

Here’s an example.

In almost all new projects we looked into at Stealth SEO Solutions, when we analyze the positioning of each page of a website, we found that the “legal notice” page, “cookie notice” are the ones that have the best position in Google.

Think about this for a moment.

Do you know why it happens? We are telling Google that there is a page (cookies policy for example), that all pages of the website have a link to it, it is present in all web browsing, it even has a pop up on each page with a button to accept it.

What can Google do in the face of so many signs of the importance of Cookies? easy, it will position it above the rest.

Why Is The Internal Link System Of A Website So Important?

Help the visitor to discover or expand related content.
Increases the reading available for each visit.
It makes visitors to your website read more, therefore they spend more time on your website.
It assumes that a user can be reading content on your website, browsing it without having to leave, which also reduces the bounce rate and increases engagement.
Search engines index it better since it offers the Google bot a good signal of usability and trust in your website.
Increase the level of authority of your website if your internal links add value to each visit.

One of the signals that you send to Google through internal linking is that you consider it important for the reader to expand the information on a topic or a keyword and then you make a link so that they expand the meaning or read related content.

To consider the importance of this link and the relation to the content it sends to, Google uses the Anchor Text of the link.

Anchor Text

Using anchor text (highlighted words that are links) helps improve keyword rankings.

For example, if I want this article to be considered relevant by Google for the keyword “internal linking guide”, then I will link to it from other posts related to this topic with variations of the quoted text.

This will tell Google that this article is relevant to people searching for “internal linking guide”.

But be careful not to go too far. If you link words with the exact text too often, in unrelated content, you will be cheating Google, and this is penalized harshly.

My best advice: help your users find the content you think is related and important, naturally, for the sake of reading, and forget about Google (ok, look at it out of the corner of your eye, but not head-on).

Avoid “cannibalizing” search positions, you must be very careful about sending signals to position the same keyword to different pages within your website, or you will put them to compete for the same keyword.

Google does not usually give two positions for two different pages of the same domain on the main page, so what you will be doing is an effort to position two pages when only one has the possibility of doing so.

Hub Pages

Using a “Hub page” to avoid the cannibalization of keywords and Google positions is a very good practice.

A Hub Page is a page that you use to concentrate all your internal linking efforts for a specific topic.

You can use a Category, a tag since these are updated continuously as the content of the web increases, although a piece of advice, take good care of the use of categories and tags since you can see yourself involved in a penalty for duplicate content.

The best thing about using a hub page is that the content that grows under its influence keeps the content “fresh and valuable”.

Content Quality (Quality Content):

Quality Content is one of the factors that is most aligned with the user, because quality content makes a person keep coming back to a blog, read the articles and interact more with the post.

It is very interesting how an algorithm learns to assess the content of a page and with increasing efficiency is able to determine if it is spin content, duplicate content, if it is good or not in short.

“Spun content is content that is not original, programs are used that are capable of changing single words in the text, changing them to synonyms and semantically close words in a sufficient percentage so that the text has the original appearance”.

What the algorithm cannot do is judge content like you and I can, but there are some signals you can consider determining whether or not you and I like the content on your website.

It is very important to write for humans, Google is increasingly efficient in knowing my “opinion” about content by analyzing my interaction with it, so stay away from writing for a robot and write for people. The search engine is using less, one keyword for ranking priority, instead it is using the “User Experience”.

How To Get This?

You should not over-optimize your content for keywords, instead use as many variations or related keywords as it is natural to use for a given text, write for a reader who can enjoy the text, participate or learn from it.

Grammar and spelling are fundamental, it is vital to review the texts and complete them by means of a test reading, a pair of eyes different from yours will help you to ensure that your texts do not have errors.

Google is capable of detecting multiple errors, but the most important thing is that your visitors will trust your well-written text more than one that has several typos.

Some Basic Tips To Keep The Texts Within Legibility Parameters:

Keep sentences short.
Do not write more than 25% of the sentences with more than 20 words.
Keep the paragraphs short.
You should not exceed 150 words per paragraph.
If you use subtitles do not exceed the text that follows, about 300 words.
Make sure about 50% of your sentences have a transition word.

Long Term Google SEO

In most cases, explaining the value of the work of an SEO Consultant when the results can take weeks, months or even years is complex.

A few days ago, I wrote a post where I explain how knowing the factors that are involved in the price of a web positioning project is expensive for an SEO consultant, but it can also make the client see their expectation of results frustrated.

At the end of the post, it occurred to me that the factors are difficult to explain and demonstrate to a client, so I am writing this to try to explain how I show my clients the value of SEO.

If you search the Internet for “price of an SEO project” or a quote for web positioning or simply the question: What does SEO cost? you will find countless messages with price lists, plans and prices, from $100 right through to $10,000 per month or more, depending on various factors.

But, how to put value on something that for the client is ethereal? that is at the whim of a private company (Google), that can change the rules of the game, that can make you disappear, that you can climb a mountain Russian in which today you are up, tomorrow you are down and the day after you are up, the results are seen in the medium term, how do I put a value on it today?

This is where we must be clear that seo is a continuous effort and that the results are usually long-term.

What Is Long-Term SEO?

It is search engine optimization that requires a long period for you to see clear progress in your ranking.

This includes, for example, changes in the architecture of a website, campaigns to create natural links, application of HTTPS security…

We know that HTTPS has an impact on the positioning of the web for different reasons.

One of them is that users feel more comfortable and trust the web page they are visiting, but it was not until Google admitted that it is a positioning factor that all SEOs have thrown themselves into SSL as if it were the last widget in the supermarket.

The idea is very simple, you install a certificate that encrypts your website so that communications become more secure.

But if we are talking about implementing this security in a medium or large website, the technical implications of this migration make the budget skyrocket.

How Do We Explain To A Client That This Will Give Him A Return In The Medium Term?

But in addition to the fact that Google has declared it an important factor and now you will have to spend a lot of money to fix something that cannot be seen, smelled or felt… it is a real problem to explain this issue.

And we must explain that in the project evolution reports we can notice a downward peak in the positioning before it begins to grow (a moment of nerves and a subsequent respite).

That is why the work of an SEO Consultant requires a high dose of trust on the part of the Client.

What Can We Do To Explain That Long-Term SEO Work Is Profitable For Your Company?

The only thing I can think of is to explain success stories to show the value of a long-term SEO strategy.

Study Cases Or Success Stories:

One of the good things about the market I find myself in is that there is a lot of information available, there are people everywhere testing everything you can imagine.

In addition, I myself have my own domains that I call little gardens where I put into practice everything that I would never try on a client’s website.

This gives you the ability to demonstrate and explain real cases that can be applied to another project.

It is possible that everything you plan to do on your website someone has already done, even more than possible it is a sure thing.

So, to explain a project to a client there is nothing like explaining something that has already happened and has had a positive or negative result.

It is difficult to emulate the same result but surely if you do all the good practices that your competition’s websites have, I assure you that you will get good results.

Take a look at what your competition is doing, see what is working best for them, now you have an SEO product to sell to a client.

I Sell The Small Victories:

I am in love with pay per click, or pay per impression, or paid social traffic. Maybe this goes with my anxious spirit, I want the results now, today, yesterday, now it’s too late. That can only be offered by a tool like Google Ads or Facebook Ads.

When you have to make a report on the analytics of a web page and there are no results to offer, it is a moment that causes me a lot of anxiety, I do not know how to explain that the results will come, patience must be maintained, we are on the right track.

That is why I used part of my analysis time in the search for small victories that are showing us the way.

A simple thing to understand for a client is the positioning of a keyword, which means that although you are not in the first place in Google, you are getting more visibility and what a positive impact it has on a local business that customers see. your business.

That’s why I love Google’s search console, it’s the perfect tool to show user interactions with the web page such as impressions, clicks and which keywords are improving or appearing in almost real time.

A Search Console search analytics report is a powerful tool that a very high percentage of clients I’ve shown it to have clearly understood, buying some time to wait for long-term seo results to kick in. to produce conversions.

Another tool that I use a lot is SEMrush.

Keyword visibility reports are very useful to explain to the client how the seo work is progressing compared to the competition.

With these two tools you can demonstrate how a keyword campaign supported by quality content is flourishing, how it is evolving and how organic growth is growing around this keyword.

Something very important that Search console provides is evolution, you can compare how you were 3 months ago and what has been the evolution so far, here you have partial victories that reinforce your content strategy, and what they pay you for it.

Conversion Rate.

Sometimes in the organic fight for a position, it leaves aside the conversion rate of the traffic by positioning.

It may be more complex for you to measure the conversion rate in the organic, due to the structure and sections of a website, but if you break down the traffic well, it can give you very useful information about conversions.

Sometimes it may happen to you that you change the objectives for more qualified ones, targeting new keywords that produce less traffic but higher conversion, what about this?

It is the case that with less organic traffic, the conversion rate grows, but if your “yardstick” is organic traffic, that is, your client has an expectation of quantitative growth in traffic and an increase in position in the ranking, you’re screwed.

It’s up to you to explain your strategy, even better, why having less traffic is beneficial to achieve sales goals.

Explain, argue, demonstrate and convince.

One of my biggest challenges is the pedagogy of executing a long-term SEO plan.

The challenge is to show the value of the SEO strategy in the long term, so remember the keys that I have given at this point:

Success stories.
I sell small wins.
Conversion rate is King (content is the medium).
and I am calmer.

Local SEO on Google

Local SEO is nothing more than the specific techniques that we can apply to the position in a geolocated way. It is very interesting because if you are a business in a specific city, it will not help you to appear first in cities where you do not offer your products or services, this is what Local SEO in Google is for.

If your company has a physical presence in a certain place, local SEO positioning is essential for the success of the business. A good Local SEO company can help you to obtain the best position in the search results on Google. However, Google is not the only search engine that can drive traffic. Bing can also drive large volumes of leads for your business and a good local SEO expert can help drive your rank in Bing as well.

Investing in Local Positioning begins with the design of your website, in which you must take into account a series of factors that your Web Designer cannot ignore:

You must adapt your website to any device, the user is multiplatform and your website must be too.
It must clearly describe the objective of your website, if you are in a physical store, you must clearly inform of the telephone number, physical address, hours… with an optimal structured data markup.
Your services or products must have a clear description that reinforces your positioning as a brand, a specific service and must also have reference to how it is purchased, shipping times, stock in the store, hours of purchase in the local store…
Images are a ranking factor that we are not going to discover now, but also optimize them for search engines (alt attribute, file name, context, file size, exif data, long description, image sitemap and links with an optimal anchor text towards this image)
The location of your hosting is one of the most powerful local positioning factors, so you should require the company that is in charge of your Web Design to optimize the purchase of hosting to locate it as close as possible to your target audience. (Example: If your store is in Newport Beach, you can ask your web designer to find a hosting in Newport Beach or nearby, where the IP of your hosting will help you position yourself in this place.)
The programming of your website should help positioning, without excessive load of CSS or elements that penalize the loading speed of your site.

The best advice I can offer you, is that you find a specialized and recognized company in your city so that your web design, in addition to nice, be effective, because one without the other will not get the result you are looking for in the web presence of your local business.

I am not going to tell you today how important it is to be well positioned on the internet, we have already talked about it a lot on my blog.

Being well positioned means more customers for your business, so without further ado I am going to tell you 6 things that will make your business more visible locally.

3 out of 4 people use Google (or other search engines) to find products and services near where they are.

These are the 6 keys, check if you have them and if you don’t have them… get on with it!

Do You Know Your Name?

NAP stands for Name – Address – Phone. Always use the same way to publish this NAP wherever you publish it, that is, on Facebook, on your website, on Google Business Profile...

Do You Know What City You Are In?

Yes, it is obvious, but it is no less important for that, you are in Newport Beach (for example). You must incorporate this information with a schema markup, microdata, rich text, labeling the information so that the Google robot understands it.

At a minimum you must include:

Meta title tag: for example, “Bakery in Newport Beach: Open 24 hours”.
Meta Label Description: “Enter here to find a Bakery in Newport Beach, we open every day with a wide variety of Bread”
In Heading H1: “The Bakery in Newport Beach that you are looking for, we open all day so you can enjoy Hot Bread, we serve at home.”
In the url: this is the browser address, for example: worldsbestbakery.com/newport-beach
Write well: Here I am going to over-optimize, Write Well, if you can’t do it, write Very Well, useful texts for the reader of course using the city where you are and writing LSI terms, but above all try to be useful, or they won’t read you nor Googlebot.
Images: Use the name of the file, the description, the title of the image to include terms close to the location where you are, and you know, do not overoptimize.
Videos: The social networks of your business, your blog, video blog… geoposition the video in the place where it was recorded (without overoptimizing…) place your location where you think it is useful for your audience.

Use Google Maps (From Google Business Profile):

Google Business Profile is a tool that gives you the option to appear several times on the first page (more visibility, more possibilities):

You will appear on the Map, in the Local result and in the organic result.

Get Reviews and Comments.

If there is something that has always worked for a local business, it is word of mouth. It is still the most important stated reason for them choosing you.

On the internet, this is achieved by having your customers review and comment on your products or services.

Reviews or comments can be encouraged on many platforms, for example, if you are a in hotel, it is worth investing in having your (satisfied) customers send reviews to TripAdvisor but if what you are looking for is a local positioning strategy you should invest in getting reviews written on Google’s own platform.

You can boost these reviews using promotions, discounts or offers, Google allows this type of activity. Some good practices to get more reviews are the following:

Put a link to Google Maps on your website, where with a simple click your customers can rate your business with 5 stars.
Set yourself a small goal, for example, get 10 reviews, once achieved go for more.
You have direct and daily contact with your customers, openly ask them to give you a review, you can reinforce it with cards explaining how it is done.
Use negative comments as an opportunity, always respond and try to double check that your criticism has been taken into account.

Put A Map, It’s Free And Cool.

Putting a map on your website of where you are, or how to get to your business, is cool. It has two functions: one is to help those who want to go to your business to find you on the map or get directions on their mobile to reach you.

The other function is SEO, think like Google, if it helps someone improve their search experience (i.e find what they are looking for), it will help you rank.

Rich Snippets, Rich Text Snippets.

Uff, we get into places where you may need help from a code expert, so I’m going to try to explain it to you as it has been explained to me a thousand times (and another thousand that it will take for you to understand it…

To find an example of these Rich Snippets, it is best to search for a recipe on Google, there are results that have ratings of stars and thumbnail images, and on the right the recipe from Wikipedia appears, all this is achieved through the text enriched.

I’m not going to go too far into this explanation, I know enough about code to call in an expert at this point. Just to get you started on structured data, check out this tool: https://search.google.com/structured-data/testing-tool

With this structured data testing, tool you will see how you can order the information to make life easier for Google and therefore for the users of your website.

Your “computer” will structure the content to enrich the content with extra information, the Google robot understands the code very well, knows how to read html and displays extra information.

Ways To Eat The Competition With Local SEO

New to local search? You should know that local searches on Google are the ones that represent the highest percentage of purchase intent, so dominating local searches is a good starting point for your business to take off online.

We are going to see 5 simple ways to improve your local SEO strategy so that you “Eat” your competition.

If you have read the section of the blog where I write about SEO strategies, you will have already seen that there is something that is constantly repeated, SEO is changing all the time.

When it comes to local SEO, it’s more important than ever that you optimize your OnPage and OffPage SEO strategies for customers who may be searching for your local business.

Local competition is heating up, and if you’re not at the top of Google, you can bet on your competitors if they are.

Here are five strong local SEO tactics you can use this year to help your business rise to the top for local search terms:

Title And Description Tags, Still Matter

Title and description tags are HTML elements that you can customize to reflect the content of your web page. The text of the title and description tags are displayed in search results.

Think of this text as a “mini-ad” that you need to treat carefully.

Last year, Google increased the width of the main search results area to 600 pixels. The generally acceptable length for title tags is approximately 50-60 characters, and description tags can be approximately 160-200 characters. Take advantage of this space and use it wisely, and make sure to check that your titles and descriptions don’t get cut off in search results.

If you’re not sure what your title and meta description tags will look like, or how many characters you can use, try using an emulator like the one from SEOmofo or the Yoast SEO Plugin for WordPress.

Writing Titles And Descriptions Is An Art In The SEO World.

In a sea of competitive search results, if this text isn’t unique, compelling, and descriptive, your click-through rate will suffer.

Also, an extra word or character could cut off your text, this may not be a real tragedy, but it looks unprofessional, especially when displayed in the middle of a sentence, making your title or description less impactful.

This space is precious, and every letter counts. Here are some tips on this:

Never waste space that doesn’t provide useful information.
If you want to reach local customers, include the name of the city where you are located and/or the area of influence of your business (for example, “Newport Beach – Florist for Weddings and Events | Shipping and Store”).
Focus on using a targeted keyword and carefully place that keyword as close to the beginning of the tag as you can.

Remember, if your business appears in the search results, you have a chance for that person to click on your link. Don’t mess it up by wasting characters that won’t help convince a potential customer to click on your result.

Want To Know How Many Clicks You’re Missing Out On By Not Drawing Enough Attention To Yourself With Your Headline?

Go to Search Console, if you do not have it installed yet, you should know that it is very easy to Install Search Console in WordPress.

In the “Google Search Console”, you can see how many times your result has been displayed and the position in which it appears. To know how many clicks you are missing, look at the CTR rate, this tells you the number of times your result has been clicked divided by the number of times it has been displayed.

For example, if your CTR is 2% and it has been displayed 1,000 times, well, you know, your competition has received 980 more clicks than you.

Internet Directories And Citations

According to Google, about four out of five consumers use search engines to conduct local searches. However, many small businesses have not claimed their local business on Google Business Profile, which is a huge, missed opportunity.

It is important that your business is listed correctly and consistently in online business directories such as Yelp, Merchant Circle, Citysearch and others.

You’ll also want to search for “reputable” local directories to list your business. Check with the website of your local newspaper, with the Chamber of Commerce to see if they have a local business directory where you can get listed. You can also do a keyword search like “[your city] directory” to find other business listing sites or directories.

It’s also important to get your business name, address, and phone number (NAP) from major data aggregators. Always make sure your company’s NAP is consistent across as many of these directories and citation sites as possible. Discrepancies like misspellings, abbreviations, missing street number, and wrong phone number can create havoc when Google can’t determine what information about your business is correct.

If Google isn’t sure, it may show the wrong information or not show your business at all in search results.

Google Business Profile: Claim And Optimize

Google Business Profile (formerly Google Business Profile (GBP)) is considered a directory, but it’s a big problem if you don’t take good care of it, so it deserves its own section. It is very important that local businesses claim their Google Business Profile page (and also Bing Places for Business). It’s free, and you can get incredible exposure if it’s optimized enough to show up in local Google searches in three ways:

To claim your Google Business Profile page, visit Google.com/business. There is a verification process where Google will send a postcard with a PIN to your physical business location. Then simply enter the PIN to verify your business.

This verification process is necessary because Google wants to confirm that your business is legitimate and that you are in fact the owner of the business. Please note that according to Google’s terms of service, only the business owner can claim a GBP page.

If you are working with a digital marketing agency on your SEO efforts, you can grant them permission to be an admin of your page, that way you will remain in control when you stop working with this marketing agency. (You will avoid many problems).

The next step is to optimize your GBP listing with a strong description, categories, business hours, accepted payment types, and so on. Also make sure to upload your logo and photos of the business, products or services. (Usually uploading at least three photos is recommended.)

Each section matters, it is relevant for your list to be complete. If you are a service business and you don’t have a location where customers can visit you, don’t worry; You can choose to hide your physical address during the setup of your Google Business Profile listing.

As I’ve mentioned several times, Bing also has a page for local businesses called Bing Places for Business. The process is very similar to GBP, and you must have your business listed in the local Bing directory, too.

Opinions On The Internet Matter

Companies are finally starting to realize the importance of their customers’ online opinions.

According to a recent survey, 84 percent of people trust online reviews as much as a personal recommendation, and seven out of 10 customers will leave a review for a business if the business asks.

There are several software tools and marketing tools that you can use to proactively track, manage, and try to get reviews.

Additionally, many social media platforms, such as Hootsuite and TinyTorch, allow you to monitor and get alerts whenever your brand is mentioned. Whenever a review of your business is left, positive or negative, be sure to respond.

That shows other people reading the reviews that the business owner cares about what their customers think.

Two places you should focus on getting feedback are your business Facebook page and Google Business Profile page. These are the big ones.

Many people turn to social media to see what their friends and family think about a business, so having good reviews on your business’s Facebook page can help attract customers. Getting positive reviews on your Google Business Profile page is crucial because these reviews show up on Google when someone searches for your business.

Google also notes that “high-quality, positive reviews from your customers will improve your business’s visibility”, implying that reviews could be a factor in rankings in the local search package.

Use Local Structured Data Markup

Structured data, often referred to as “markup” or “schema.org markup,” can be added to your website code to provide search engines with more information about your business, such as the products you sell, services you offer and so on.

Only 20% percent of websites are using this markup and most are only using the basics. You can make your local business stand out (and possibly rank higher than your competitors) by adding structured data markup to your website where appropriate.

Google wants you to use structured data markup because it helps their spiders better determine what the content of your website is. Google even offers a structured data testing tool so you can check if your markup is implemented correctly.

If the idea of code, programming, scares you, you can also use Google Data Marker to mark content without too much knowledge.