Matching the Appropriate Keywords to Your Website’s Pages

Chances are during your keyword research, you ended up with about 5 – 10 main keyword phrases that you want to target. For example, a digital marketing agency may discover the following keywords and match them as follows.

Once you have done this exercise, you should have listed the top keywords for your homepage and main pages on your website. List the keywords in the order of preference, ie. the first keyword should be the main one you want to target on each page.

On-Site Optimization

Now you will go through your homepage and the main pages on your website to optimize them for the related keyword as follows.

Title Tag

The title tag is one of the most important elements of optimizing a page on your website for a particular keyword. Title tags should be 70 characters or less – any characters past 70 will be cut off in search results.

Meta Description

While the meta description doesn’t help with keyword rankings, it does show up (in most cases) beneath the title of your website and the link in search results. If someone has searched for a keyword phrase that appears in the meta description, it will be bolded. This will help your website stand out. Consider the meta description (up to 160 characters) your chance to convince people to click on your link in search results.

URL Structure

If possible, try to set up your website with a URL structure that uses keywords. The URL yourcompany.com/digital-marketing/ is more likely to help with search rankings than the URL yourcompany.com/?p=123.

Header Tags

You can use header tags (H2, H3, H4) in the content on each page to break up text and emphasize particular keyword phrases. For example, if you have a main services page for your digital marketing company, you could use H2 or H3 tags to create a header for each of your main services. Then include a short description of each service and a link to the page for that service.

Internal Links

Internal links are links within your content to other pages on your website. You can use specific keyword anchor text to help optimize these internal links for specific keyword phrases you are targeting. On the same services page example, you could have summery text about each of your services, then a line that reads “Learn more about our social media marketing services.” By linking social media marketing services to your social media marketing services page, you will have a perfectly keyword optimized internal link.

SEO for Images

Having at least one image on each page of your website can help your page rank for particular keyword phrases. As an added bonus, that image can also rank well in Google Image search which can be another huge traffic generator.

To ensure your image will rank well for particular keywords, simply use those keywords in the filename of your image as well as in the ALT text when you add the image to your page. The image on your social media marketing services page should have the filename social-media-marketing-services.png and the ALT tag in the HTML code should include social media marketing services.

Keyword Density

Your main goal should be to make your text enjoyable and informative for people. That said, you should mention your targeted keyword phrases throughout the text in a natural way. Aim to mention it at least once, preferably in the first paragraph of the page.

Avoid Over Optimization

Google likes pages that are optimized for viewers, not search bots. Make sure that any keyword optimization you do (title tags, meta descriptions, headers, internal links, etc.) flow naturally for visitors to read. Avoid stuffing keywords left and right to the point it makes your content not friendly for readers.

Local Search Optimization

If you have a local business with one or more physical locations, you will also want to optimize your website for local search. For starters, you will want to incorporate your location into your keyword phrases. So instead of just digital marketing company, you could add your city to make it digital marketing company london.

Next, you will want to help your website rank in the local search section of Google. If you have one location, just add your street address and local phone number (not a 800 number) in text format on each page throughout your website. Most do this in the footer. Also create a contact us page with that information and preferably a Google map.

If you have more than one location, create individual pages on your website for each location that includes the street address and local phone number.

Content Optimization

The earlier mentioned on-site optimization elements (title tags, meta descriptions, etc.) should also be applied to content on your website such as blog posts, press releases, and articles. You can expand your keyword research to include longer keyword phrases in order to receive more visibility within search. For a company that offers social media marketing services, they may want to also rank for Facebook marketing, Twitter marketing, and similar keywords. This way, they will attract customers interested in social media marketing.

Social Profile Optimization

Some would consider your social profiles as off-site optimization, but they are important in terms of optimizing your own online properties to be discovered for particular keywords. The keys to social profile optimization are as follows.

• Use your real name or business name as the name / username for your social profiles.
• Use your main keyword phrases in the tagline, bio, description, introduction, and about information for your social profiles.
• Use your real name or business name as the filename of the image you upload for your profile photos. Use keyword phrase in the images that you upload to your photo albums and wall posts.
• Use keyword phrases (when appropriate) in status updates.

Once you have done all of the above, you will be well on your way to being discovered in search engines for your desired keywords!

Let me structure the new release so that you can easily see what we added to the system and how it will benefit you:

1. MajesticSEO Partnership
2. Important Links and Rankings Upgrades
3. Simpler Credit System
4. New Pricing

1. MajesticSEO Partnership

Satisfying our customers in terms of Professional and Best in Class Service is top priority for us, here at cognitiveSEO. That is why we decided to add, one of the most powerful link data providers, as a new link data-source to our platform. Until now we used Ahrefs + Blekko + SEOkicks as our raw link data providers (and MajesticSEO and SEOmoz for metric data).

We now added the MajesticSEO dataset in our link data offering, and now you will get raw link data from

all in one place, aggregated, de-duplicated and re-crawled on demand, with no requirement of an account on any of the above mentioned providers.

The new integration allowed us to process more links and to add a range of new features to the toolset that will benefit all our customers and increase the value of the plans that we offer.

2. Important Links and Rankings Upgrades

A lot of small things have been tweaked, while some really important additions have been done. Here they are:

1. Daily Link Updates - We moved from Weekly to Daily updates and now we show New/Lost links on a daily basis. We also kept the complete weekly re-crawl for all your site’s backlinks, so that you get the most fresh and complete link data possible.
   
   
   
   
2. Anchor Text History – We live by our motto, which is “Cutting-Edge SEO Tools”, and that is why we strive to innovate SEO technology with the aim to ease your SEO Professional life. This time we added the ability to historically track anchor text evolution. No other SEO tool allows you to do this. Here are a few things that evidentiate why this is a very important addition to your Professional SEO toolset:
   
   
   
   
   1. You keep a close eye on how your Commercial vs Brand anchor text evolves so that you can easily correlate this evolution to a potential unnatural link penalty or ranking increase/decrease.
   2. You can track the growth of your anchor text portfolio and understand where you need to make strategic moves to influence a particular anchor text trend.
   3. You monitor you competitors anchor text velocity and understand their link building strategies from a historical point of view.

    

3. Link Velocity – with the new MajesticSEO partnership we have access to a plethora of new data. Link Velocity data is of great importance to anyone that is serious about SEO. You will be able to view the monthly link evolution, since the existence of a site.
   
   
   
   
4. Link Quality Metric – we created a unique metric that is computed based on various aggregated metrics and features. We mix a wide range of metrics into a unique formula, and classify links in:
   
   
   
   1. High Authority – links that provide a high degree of quality and relevance to your site. (not that many usually)
   2. Good Authority – links that are really good for your site. It is great if you have a high distribution of these types of links.
   3. Average Authority – links that provide some quality, but nothing spectacular.
   4. Low Authority – links that don’t really provide value to your site or rankings.
   5. No Authority – links that have no particular importance in your linking campaign influence to your rankings of traffic.

   A similar metric is applied to the referring domains also, so that you can easily classify authoritative referring domains.
   
   

5. More Keywords Tracked – A lot of our customers asked for more keywords to be monitored in the rank tracking module, at the cost of less frequent tracking. We added the ability to switch your account from Weekly to Daily Rank Tracking (and vice versa).
   1. Daily will give you more insight, as we track the keywords on a daily basis.
   2. Weekly will allow you to track more keywords at a lower frequency.

You can choose whatever option suits your needs. Simple and flexible!

3. Simpler Credit System

Until now we used a rather complex site credit system that would allow you to run more in-depth analysis if you required, by selecting multiple site credits, or analyze more sites with fewer site credits. Based on the customer feedback, we concluded that the site credit system created a lot of confusion and frustration.

We have carefully analyzed the situation and decided to replace the site credit system with a much simpler and more natural way of counting analyzed sites.

This is how we improved it:

• 1 site credit means 1 site now with a maximum number of links analyzed per site that is mentioned in the plan specs (PRO is 10k links per site for example and ELITE is 50k links per site).
• No more confusion by using multiple site credits for a site analysis, as the concept has been removed.
• Import is not limited by site credits anymore, but by the actual links analyzed for the site. Do as many imports as you want, with the condition to be under the maximum links per site quota.

Here are a few examples of what it was and what it is now:

Before - 1 site with 10k backlinks had an analysis cost of 4 sites credits (each credit was the equivalent of 2.500 links).

After - 1 site with 10k backlinks has an analysis cost of 1 site. (the sites’ maximum link allowance for the new PRO plan is 10.000 links)

…

Before - 1 site with 20k backlinks had an analysis cost of 8 sites credits (each credit was the equivalent of 2.500 links).

After - 1 site with 50k backlinks has an analysis cost of 1 site. (the sites’ maximum link allowance for the new ELITE plan is 50.000 links)

…

The analysis completeness was increased by 400% to 2.500% and the campaign creation process was also simplified.

We were able to keep the costs down, by increasing our dynamic cloud infrastructure that can now support even more on-demand crawling.

To put it simple you get more links analyzed, with an easier to use campaign wizard and simpler to understand system.

If you have bigger or more sites you can easily upgrade to the plans listed on the site, or ask for a custom plan (if it is the case). The plans are differentiated based on the volume of sites, links and keywords you need to analyze and track. All current plans have all the features included.

4. New Pricing

Based on the additional new features, tools and partnerships, we improved our subscription plans so that we provide a much better balance of Quality vs Cost to our customers.

You can find our new pricing structure here. Best fitted for maximum ROI!

Some of our previous plans were taken out from the current offer (the $19 and $49 plans), while the remaining plans have been altered to provide the best possible ROI.

To conclude, cognitiveSEO provides you with an average monthly cost of $3 to $5 per analyzed site,

which is the most affordable cost you will get anywhere. This includes the unique in-depth link analysis, rank tracking, social visibility analysis and link management, all done on-demand for your sites and competitors.

Usually this kind of report or analysis is billed to a client in the range of $XXX per month.

Your ROI is in the XXX% – X.XXX% range! Pretty neat wouldn’t you say?

If you are not a customer yet, you can easily try the system by using our Free 14-Day Trial.

All our current customer accounts are grandfathered, meaning that nothing will be changed in the pricing on the plans they already have, until the account is cancelled or the billing fails for whatever reasons.

I invite all our current customers to check the new offer and switch their plan if they consider the new plans provide a better value to their business. If you have any question drop us a line at support@cognitiveseo.com and we will get back ASAP.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, than an Infographic is worth more than that. How it combines complex data to form graphical representations which demands immediate attention and helps in the understanding of an intricate topic quite effectively! Sounds good?

Having said that, I feel that the concept of Infographic is underestimated and it has lost its charm in the hardcore world of link building strategies. Strangely, it seems that they are created for the sake of thrusting links into them.

Infographic creation is an art. Ideas could get ripped apart during the initial process itself if not managed properly. Below, I have mentioned some basic tips to get started with your Infographic campaign. Hope it works for everyone!

1. Put Your Thinking Caps On!

The concept of Infographic should not be taken for granted. Undoubtedly, it is the best medium to express facts and data graphically to convey our ideas. As an Infographic creator, you should creatively surpass your own limits each time you create a new one. This requires high levels of innovative ideas on a regular basis. Agreed, that Infographic is just one of the ways of promotion in content marketing. But, we can’t neglect the fact that a graphical representation attracts more readers and stays in their mind for many years to come. Don’t ever compromise with the quality of your content and when it comes to Infographic, just make sure it has a catchy concept.

2. An Infographic Has To Be Eye-Catching

The design should be such that the visitor should consume the information as quickly as possible. The whole idea should be perceivable in a few seconds. Design has much more to it than merely fonts and colors. Design is the creative foundation, presentation of information with a goal of generating interest. The following points should also be taken into consideration while creating the almost perfect Infographic:

1. The Flow of the Infographic: The viewer should feel like he is walking through a story.
2. Colors: Infographics should have attractive colors, but again they should justify the theme.
3. Clarity: Make sure the points are mentioned precisely that covers the whole explanation.

3. Push Your Infographic Through A Distribution Plan

“Content will not become Great until it is distributed at the right places”.

The same stands true for Infographic. It is evident that we need to bring on more light on the ideas for distributing Infographics. However, I could jot down a few ways of effectively distributing your wonderful creation; create a blog post, find influential sources who could push the Infographic through their network, submission with article/press release, promotion through YouTube and other video hosting services, submission to sites like www.dailyinfographic.com, www.visual.ly, www.infographicsarchive.com, www.infographicjournal.com, to name a few.

Basically, one of the best ways is to approach the masters of your industry niche with an honest aim of getting their feedback. Find some more influencers and post your Infographic to your social media profiles thanking them for their valuable support. They will reply to your posts, eventually spreading the reach of your Infographic.

4. Show Only Facts and Figures

The obvious reason for creating an Infographic is to give information about a particular topic or issue. One of the major pre-requisites for an effective Infographic campaign, is having accurate information on hand. The Infographic design should be such that it provokes others to talk about it. Don’t overwork on the design so that it hides the message to be conveyed. A design should give justice to all the statistics and information that you want to share.

Having said that, you also need to make sure that the facts and figures are accurate and are not manipulated as the credibility of your Infographic depends majorly on the information shared through it.

5. Infographic Should Be Thought Provoking

How often do we feel the urge to buy a product instantly when we see the commercial on TV? Similarly, the design, the content, the color, the pictures in the Infographic should be able to trigger the senses of the viewer so that they could take your desired action instantaneously. Infographic is a content, and all the rules of writing a good content also applies to this. You have this big idea in your mind and you need to demonstrate the same in such a manner that it generates excitement, force people to think and would like to share with others.

Again, as it is a content, it should be unique, high-quality and relevant. It should attract the attention of the visitors in a way that it makes them think and propel to take action.

6. Make A Clear Call-To-Action

Our goal, admittedly, is to get more and more people to our marketing circle. Sometimes, achieving this goal becomes one helluva task. One of the simplest reasons for this failure is that the Call-To-Action is not loud and clear. Of course, we design the Infographic to share some information. However, we couldn’t overlook the fact that all our perseverance is targeted towards getting more traffic. You will certainly miss the peak if the CTA is not clear.

Make your call-to-action visible enough at the bottom of the Infographic. It could be asking your viewers to follow your company on twitter, entering their details, or downloading some more information of their interest. Make it attractive enough for prospects to complete some kind of your desired action & engage with your organization.

7. Develop The Habit Of Saying Thank You

One phrase that is taken for granted not only in our day-to-day lives, but also in the business world is saying “Thank You”. This practice has become extinct.

Keep a check on the URL’s where the Infographic was published and also the title of the same. You can do this with the help of Google Alerts or also you could use TweetDeck. These tools will enable you to get all the updates when your Infographic is shared, commented on, pinned or liked. Keep this habit of thanking each time you see that an action has been taken by the viewer. This increases the interactivity which in turn will help in expanding your circle.

7 out of 10 viewers might not have the idea on who created the Infographic. However, if you acknowledge their support, you may increase the count of your followers. Give them a reason to follow you!

Here, I have covered some of the basic points required to create and distribute your Infographic.

Be a little more realistic about your Infographic campaign as improper distribution could lead to a failure and all the efforts and time invested in creating a great Infographic will go in vain. Start networking and find influencers who will definitely help you in distributing your content to the right people in their social circles.

Here are some cool SEO related infographics from cognitiveSEO:

• Black Hat vs White Hat SEO
• What in the name of Google is a “Panda” 
• 14 Facts (& more) about Blekko

This is a Guest Post by:

Sanket Patel is the Founder of Blurbpoint.com. Leading SEO Company since 2006 specializes in Advance Guest Blogging Services, SEO Services, Link Building, Online Reputation Management, Social Media Marketing, Content Marketing and many more.  He deeply researched upon Panda/Penguin ultimate recovery process which is working successfully.

This detection technique can to be used for any site, even if it did not receive a penalty or unnatural link warning. It is a good technique that you can use to understand and manage the risk that you might be exposed to when the next unnatural link update comes.

Lovely site BitsofLace - Unfortunately Bad Linking Used …

This case study presents the story of a penalized site and how an unnatural links detection process should be approached. (mention – the site was brought to our attention by one of our customers asking for help in segmenting the unnatural links pointing to this site)

The site is operating in the “Lingerie” niche (BitsofLace.com) and has received several unnatural link warnings in the past. Their rankings have dropped significantly because of the unnatural links that were built in the past by several agencies or individual SEOs.

Let’s start with the conclusion so you can quickly understand what was wrong with the links of this site.

To put it simple, this site lost rankings because of an often seen, boring and un-creative link building strategy that combines a deadly mix of:

• Paid blog posts
• Web Directory links
• Forum & Article Directory links

So how did I find all this out? Here is the entire process described.  You can apply it to any site.

I started with a full link profile analysis. Looking for big distributions of links I notice the following:

• A high density of blog, article directory and web directory links
• A high number of commercial anchor texts versus brand related.

These signals guide me to look further at the webpage type distribution.

1. The story of the Paid Blog Links

Blog links are not unnatural usually, neither web directory or article directory links (or any other type of link … just to clear this out) … but it all comes to the distribution, volume and how they were acquired.

I check the deeper profile of these blog links.

We have them split in:

• Blog Post links
• Blog Comment Links
• Blogrolls and similar link types

Let’s dig deeper. The majority of the links are coming from blog posts. This could be a natural thing.  Content Marketing, customers writing about the service etc.

This isn’t the case unfortunately.

The first unnatural links signal is the low quality of the linking pages.

If I order by link quality, the most important link looks like a paid blog post. Natural links (expos, trade shows, real reviews etc) are also found but these are a tiny fraction (max 1%).

I should have looked at the commercial anchor text distribution for the blog links segment first of all.

A 55% commercial anchor text ratio is totally unnatural for sure.

I am looking at another 3-4 links and I can profile them all based on the similar footprint.

Here are some screenshots so that you can get the idea.

Content written around commercial anchor text posted on these blogs. All of these blog post links are unnatural from Google’s point of view. They were built with the sole purpose of influencing Google’s rankings. They do not provide any value to the user!

The same can be said about the other links coming from blogrolls and blog comments.

~21% Unnatural Links Detected on Blogs.

 2. The story of the “old and dirty” Web Directory linking technique.

How natural can Web Directory links be you should ask yourself? Last year Google even started de-indexing directories.

Let’s be frank for a moment, you put those links there with the sole purpose of increasing your rankings.

Rarely we see high quality web directories sending real traffic to your site via the link posted there.

With such a high distribution of 23% links coming from web directories I should mark all as unnatural without even looking at them. But let’s be accurate and methodical and make an informed decision.

Having such a high percentage of 93% links DoFollowed, highlights the intention of the people that “optimized” this link profile to have the site rank higher with Web Directory links.

I tried inspecting these links in various forms so that I could find a quality link from a web directory.

I couldn’t!

I checked the most powerful links ordered by Domain Trustworthiness and Link Trustworthiness. All the top links are low quality web directories (from the user’s experience point of view) by any metric you choose to filter.

Here’s a quick preview on some of these low quality unnatural web directory links.

~23% Unnatural Links Detected on Web Directories.

 3. The story of the Forum “Personas”

Normally you get people talking in forums about your product. They might be mentioning your brand, talking about your service etc. When you have a high distribution of forum domains sending links to your site we can only have two options:

1. The site is a “super super” successful brand.
2. The site is promoted by a “super” proactive forum spammer.

Again we have a lot of DoFollow links. Raises a red flag!

In the forum links segment I searched for the word “profile” in the title or link and this is what we got as a visual link profile.

Why I searched for the word “profile” you might ask?

Because this represents the fingerprint for forum profile pages or “personas” as some SEOs call them.

Fake Forum profiles created with the sole purpose of generating unnatural links to the promoted site.

We do have some natural links generated by real people on the forums but these are like 10% out of the entire dataset. The rest are “personas” generating links both on profile pages and inside forum discussions.

~17% Unnatural Links Detected on Forums.

4. Article Directory Thin Content can Sink your site.

As a link building strategy this is an old one, that once worked and now it doesn’t anymore. As with any other link building strategy, the more it is abused by SEOs worldwide, the less it is going to work on a long term, as it is something that is generated unnaturally with the purpose of influencing the search engine’s rankings.

Here is the type of thin content linking in with commercial anchor text that was used for this site.

Natural Link?

Not at all!

Human generated content posted on a mass scale on 95 article directories. Variation of the anchor text and content is found on all of these sites. The problem is that Google can fingerprint this as it has a big proportion of the link profile and it raises a red flag for Google to check.

~11% Unnatural Links Detected on Article Directories.

Let’s recap:

• ~21% Unnatural Links Detected on Blogs.
• ~23% Unnatural Links Detected on Web Directories.
• ~17% Unnatural Links Detected on Forums.
• ~11% Unnatural Links Detected on Article Directories.

Total 72% Unnatural Links Detected

And this is not all!

We can go even deeper and check the other type of pages, and I am sure we will find more unnatural links. I just wanted to showcase how easy it is to spot these unnatural links by segmenting the links by webpage type.

The website type segmentation gives you the macro view on the link building strategies used.

The analysis was done in 5 minutes + 10 minutes to have the cognitiveSEO system crawl and analyze the entire dataset of links so that we have fresh data on the links analyzed. It took me 5 hours to finalize this article though . I hope you will enjoy it!

Here are some other articles that are of great help when it comes to identifying unnatural and low quality links:

• Identify Low Quality Links [how to]
• Surfacing Unnatural Links > Why You’re Doing it Wrong [how to]
• Backlinks Analysis Case Study [video training]
• Google Penguin Case Study [video training]
• Google Penguin Crashes Wedding Site’s Shady Link Building Strategy [case study]

What do you think about the unnatural link building strategy used by this site?

What other methods do you apply to segment unnatural links?

In-House SEO Team

Choosing an in-house SEO team for your small business has one major advantage. Your SEO team will be dedicated to your business. They will know the ins and outs of your products and services, they will be readily available to discuss strategies for your business, and, depending on their skillets, they can be utilized for other tasks within your business.

Of course, then there are some things you have to consider. First off, depending on the size of your business, you may or may not have need for a full-time SEO person or team. If you’re just getting started from scratch, then maybe. But on-going SEO after the base elements have been implemented (on-site optimization, local search optimization, etc.) may not require the attention of someone 40 hours a week.

You also have to think about educating your SEO team. Even if you bring in one or more experienced SEOs to work with your business, each person will need to maintain on-going education about the search marketing industry. You don’t want to hire someone who is using the same tactics from one year to the next because of the constantly evolving landscape of search. What works one year may not the next. Worse yet, what worked last year could get you penalized this year. Education can range from time each day to read the top SEO blogs to sending your SEO team to search marketing conferences throughout the year.

Your best bet if you go this route is to hire people who can perform SEO for your business alongside other tasks. Just be careful that you don’t overwhelm your SEO team with so many client deliverables that they never get a chance to actually work on your SEO.

Freelance Consultants

If your business isn’t able to hire an in-house SEO team or to afford a monthly agency contract, a freelance consultant may be the right fit. While they might not cost as much as an agency, you shill should expect to invest in someone who knows what they are doing. Get ready to grill the individual about how they help clients rank in search engines, what they do to avoid sending their clients into the Google penalty box, and how they will report their progress.

Remember that Google is constantly working to improve the quality of the websites in search results. You get what you pay for is especially true in the SEO industry – if you don’t pay for a knowledgeable consultant who strives to deliver quality work, then you might not like the results.

Agencies

There are lots of great small to medium sized agencies who are willing to work with small businesses. One of the nice parts about working with an agency is, assuming you do your homework and choose a good one, they have the resources to help you with every aspect of your search marketing campaign.

For example, if you have an in-house SEO team that decides an infographic is a good way to market your business, then you will have to figure out who to outsource design and research. If an agency decides you need an infographic, they will handle everything on their end once they run topic ideas by them.

Just because you are choosing to work with an agency doesn’t mean you should trust them wholeheartedly. One way to see if an agency knows their stuff is to look at their blog. Most agencies will blog about topics that relate to the services they offer. If they don’t, then you can go back to the grill ‘em method of seeing what strategies they use to help customer rank, how they stay up to date on the latest things that are working (or not), and so forth.

SEO Packages

The other SEO option you may run into when researching is a link building package. If you see a package (or anything) that guarantees you will rank #1 for your desired keyword, think twice. While you can be guaranteed improvement in search rankings, no one can guarantee you’ll get the #1 spot without knowing what your keywords are and what your business has to offer on their website.

Also, remember that quality links tend to be expensive. If you see a package of 500 links for $99, then beware. They are probably not quality links and they could get you penalized by Google. And while we’re talking about low quality links, avoid services that promise hundreds of links for $5 through Fiverr. Even if they say they are getting you PR 8 backlinks, what they really mean is they are getting links on PR 8 social bookmarking networks or blogs. Chances are, for a large quantity of links, they are using some sort of automated program that does not guarantee quality.

How did you choose between an in-house team or outsourcing for your search engine marketing? Have you had good results with SEO packages? Please share in the comments!

Let me ask you 3 questions and if at least one of them is a question that you asked yourself in the past then this new module will be of great help to you.

1. Have you ever wondered how your Link Building correlates to your Social Media Marketing?

2. What are my competitors’ most socially shared pages?

3. How should I track my competitors’ sites and get notified when one of their pages starts to gain social popularity?

Pretty simple and natural questions that any SEO professional should ask himself, I would say. The problem with any of these questions is that you would like to get an answer as fast as possible without having to trouble yourself on how exactly should I run such complex tracking and analysis. For this reason the Social Visibility module was born.

And now, let me quickly give you the simple solutions to those 3 questions:

1. Have you ever wondered how your Link Building correlates to your Social Media Marketing?

A page can get a lot of links and few social shares or vice versa. Either way there is a growth correlation between the social shares and links pointing to a site. To be able to understand how your shares influence your links, or how your links influence your shares, you need to have a way of visualizing this data in an easy to comprehend format. Here you have a set of charts that does exactly this.

The “Average Tweets” spline shows you how your Tweets correlate to your Shares. Each dot represents each page on the site. We see most of the pages are in the low left quadrant, meaning that most of the pages on this site have less then 30 tweets and less then 10 referring domains. As the pages tend to get more shares it seems that they tend to get more links also, looking at the trend given by the spline.

2. What are my competitors’ most socially shared pages?

Super Easy. Just look at this chart. It tells the whole story of the most shared pages for any page on any site.

3. How should I track my competitors’ sites and get notified when one of their pages starts to gain social popularity?

Looking at the “Pages with Share Increase section” shows you the links that got increase (or maybe decrease) for the date interval of your choice. You can easily spot growth patterns by selecting different date intervals.

It even tells you what social media shares increased and since when. Pretty handy to spot marketing techniques that your competitors use.

The charts above answer only the 3 questions that we featured here, but there is much more to the Social Visibility module.

Here are some other features that you will find inside the cognitiveSEO Social Visibility module:

• Complete social footprint competitor comparison.
• Social share distribution among the tracked social media networks.
• Social share velocity for any site on the tracked social media networks.
• Advanced anti-noise technology for the exclusion of duplicate shares on the tracked pages.
• and more …

Take the new Social Visibility module for a spin by signing up for a free trial here.

*Social Visibility is available on any package from $99 inclusively and up.

Find Infographics in Competitor’s Top Linked Pages

If you know your competitors are using infographics for link bait, then your best bet is to start by doing a little digging into their backlink profile to see which infographics make a dent. You can start with the inBound Link Analysis tool’s list of top linked pages to see if infographics make the cut of the top 20 linked pages on the domain.

You can also use the Visual Link Explorer to see top linked pages and hover over them to see which ones are infographics.

The Visual Link Explorer will let you know which infographics have the strongest backlinks based on the dot size.

It can also help you quickly find the types of sites that would be likely to link to your infographics. Make sure to note these as you might want to pitch them your infographic once it’s published. The site owners may even appreciate it if you let them know that you’re sharing your infographic with them because you saw that they published something similar in the past.

See Infographics Published on Mashable

Another way to find out what infographics are likely to get the most amount of attention (and thus, the most amount of backlinks) is to look at the infographics published over at Mashable.

Since they changed the layout, you can keep scrolling down to continue loading older posts. Then use your browser’s find option (usually CTRL+F or command+F) to find infographics on keywords related to your industry. You can even hover over each of the posts to see the social sharing summary.

Another top site to find infographics that are popular? Holy Kaw! They don’t have an infographics category, so you might just want to use Google search (site:holykaw.alltop.com infographic) to see if they’ve published infographics on a specific topic.

Want to get your infographic published on a site like Mashable or Holy Kaw? Start building relationships with the people who write the infographic posts through blog comments, social shares, etc. Then you may be in a good position to just “let them know” about your infographic in hopes that they will publish it.

Identify Trending Topics Related to Your Niche

If you have access to a designer, then one way to make sure you get lots of social shares and links is to create an infographic based on a trending topic. You can see what Google considered a trending topic at Google Trends. You can also watch the top news blogs in your industry too see if they all start talking about a specific topic.

The key to trending topics is timing. The sooner you can get your infographic published, the sooner you can start getting links to it. Once you publish it, you should use keep an eye out on all the blogs that are writing about the topic. Then contact them to see if they want to add an informative infographic to their post. If your infographic is good and has lots of relevant information, you’ll likely get your link.

SeoQuake in Google Search

Speaking of Google Search, you can use SeoQuake to find out how many backlinks each page in search results has. You can then sort the pages by number of backlinks.

In some cases, you’ll probably find posts with a collection of infographics. These are good pages to research as you’ll see what kind of infographics bloggers love. Getting your infographic published in one of these posts can lead to a strong backlink since collections get linked to often.

What other ways do you research infographic topics that will be great link bait?

Is Google evil? What is the big search engine up to?

In their constant effort to make the search engine a better place for its users and (AdWords) customers, Google’s team has strict Guidelines for webmasters and bloggers.

Anybody who wants to serve up content and rank an article or page on their search engine, needs to follow these rules… Or, they risk getting their rankings penalized or even various pages removed from the index all together.

When it comes to SEO, things have drastically changed in the last 12 months, and they don’t seem to stop. Both, on-page and off-page ranking factors have suffered repeated updates.

You remember Panda, Penguin, Page Layout and EMD, right? These updates were stimulating everybody to create better, more targeted content, avoid black hat techniques and provide site visitors with a pleasing reading experience… in order to boost the return rate and lower bounce back ratio.

Google is not your enemy!

Google wants (just like you and me) to provide its users with nothing but quality content (and relevant ads) so their searchers can spend quality time on each site or landing page. This helps both the search engine users and advertisers return more often to Google, and grow their business – you win, Google wins, and their clients win.

These changes and updates are required in order to keep everybody happy, and at the same time, disallow spammers and mass link-builders to take advantage of or control the Google SERPs.

Dangerous SEO Technique #1

Low Quality Content and Ads Filled Sites

You remember the famous MFA (made for AdSense) websites, and how they got penalized?

Google Panda updates revolve around thin content sites that provide less articles, and more ads for their users. Do you feel like these one page advert filled sites don’t deserve to appear on the first page of Google? I think alike.

2013 is said to be the year of high quality content-packed sites. With great content, you won’t be forced to overly optimize your page, which is another issue that might trigger Google to give you a warning.

What does quality mean?

Google has their definition. Pro bloggers have theirs. I would say that quality content (regardless its length) is first of all information that helps the user get things done (solve a problem) in their life, or business, faster, better or easier than before.

Want to write quality content?

Due diligence is required.

In depth research is a must.

Look up the top 10 blogs in your niche or industry. Target the ones publishing the best content. You know what best means from a mile away, right? It’s not general, it’s specific. It does not share theory, but gives personal insights, case studies and anecdotes.

Analyze the best featured articles, and try to grasp, what makes them hot, viral or high quality.

Then imitate the writing style, and content ideas. I am not saying to blatantly copy-cat your competitors, otherwise how will you stand out? The key is to innovate. Surpass your competitors’ content, or, at least, talk on subjects they’re not covering, or they’re often overlooking. That’s how you become visible, for both your users, and the Google radars.

Dangerous SEO Technique #2

Link Schemes and Black Hat Techniques

Google Penguin updates go against sites not abiding by Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. They frown at black-hat methods including but not limited to cloacking, keyword stuffing, duplicate content (having the same page identically appear on multiple domains which you own or control), or blatant linking schemes.

A recent example would be the Interflora penalty. Their “advertorial” marketing approach was caught by Google. How they operate was simple: they paid other people to write reviews and post them on other (non relevant) sites, in hopes that they would boost their Google rankings and search engine dominance.

Matt Cutts, recently, sent his followers a Twitter reminder, emphasizing the fact that Google’s guidelines on paid links passing PageRank (PR) apply to “advertorials” as well.

What we can learn from this case study is essential. While low quality back-links might lower your rankings or not count at all, paying for ads or links to boost your PR is against Google’s policy. This does NOT mean you are not allowed to advertise or link-build. Google is against this approach on non relevant web sites, but they like to see value pointing to value.

If you do advertise or insert paid links on targeted websites, at least, avoid keyword stuffing. In fact, diversify your hyperlinks and make them look natural. That means you have to blend in the ad or link within the content, and at the same time, do it on a small scale.

From what I understood, Interflora got penalized because of doing this paid advertising on a major scale, and targeting non relevant sites. That’s like spending your advertising budget on all kinds of TV and radio commercials, expecting to increase your brand awareness and generate sales.

That’s a dumb, and now dangerous marketing approach, as sales are generated when you’re targeting a relevant crowd of buyers or prospects, not a pool of individuals who don’t want to hear from you, yes?

Dangerous SEO Technique #3

Back-Linking Networks and Guest Posting

LinkVana and other similar networks have been hit hard by Google. And that’s well understood. Imagine you’ve been working hard, for the last few years, building a good linking profile, abiding by Google rules, writing good content, and attracting quality links, naturally.

And here comes, some guy, out-ranking you on Google SERP, because they’re using some shady linking farms and networks. The approach was quite simple. You hire someone who could throw up low quality (or even good) articles. You post them on the network, along with all kinds of non relevant sites and articles. Within a month, you’ll have gained probably hundreds of back-links. And the next month, you’re out-ranking sites which have spent years working hard and building a natural linking profile.

Don’t you think Google has to stand out and punish this irresponsible practice? We know Google like to create fear among webmasters and are a known propaganda machine, but they are smart. Make no mistake…

Thanks to them, we now may be able to benefit from all the hard work we have done for all these years, and still remain on the Google radar and get organic traffic. However, this does NOT mean you should overlook the latest Google changes, if you want to stay on top of your game.

Spammers and black hat link builders have caught on to these updates, and now are using the Google Link disavow tool to remove bad links from their site, and some of them are going to take the web by storm with a new method: mass guest posting. This is a new twist on the back-link network method.

You target (more or less) relevant blogs in your industry, you write (good or bad) content for their site, and do this on a large scale. Within a month, you could have 10… 20 and even 50 articles back-linking to your web site or page.

The approach in general is not good or bad. It depends on how you use it. If you guest post with the sole aim to increase your rankings, then Google will hunt you down, and manually or automatically penalize your site. And there you go again, you’ll have to start all over again, from scratch.

These are the top 3 most dangerous SEO techniques we have to avoid for 2013 and beyond.

Be smart, have patience, and outsource (wisely) your content marketing. It’s time we revamp our game, and be friends with Google, or they can easily spray out our web sites from the SERPs. If you really want to get a penalized website site back on the radar, learn how to clone your old domain (and remove the offending domain hosting account) to a new domain. However, seek to build new natural links and learn from past mistakes… In no time, you’ll be ranking again. But remember, visitors first – search engines second!

Guest post by:

John Gibb is a top super affiliate in the health industry and known SEO addict. Download his free super affiliate handbook: “The Road to Success” ($197 VALUE) and learn the free techniques he used to generate 109 sales in a single day.

*Photo via Roku

In this post, we’re going to look at how these article directories are doing today as well as the top directory that was never affected by the Google Panda updates. Plus you will get some tips on how to approach a quality link building campaign through article marketing.

Article Directories Today

Curious about the state of the top article directories? Here’s what you need to know.

EzineArticles.com

EzineArticles.com currently maintains a Google PageRank of 6 and Domain Authority of 93. Since being struck by Google Panda, they have given their website a facelift and emphasize that they accept high-quality, original articles only. They have also revamped their guidelines to specify that articles cannot be rehashed (aka, spun), must be a minimum of 400 words (with a suggested length of 400 – 700 words), and should include proper HTML formatting throughout. Overall, their guidelines want to gear articles towards being reader friendly vs. just SEO friendly.

Authors get special treatment on EzineArticles with a complete bio page that includes multiple links to business websites, a blog, and a personal site. You can also get links back to your main social profiles including Google+ in order to claim authorship of your articles.

Now, let’s look at the traffic EzineArticles receives. The below graph shows their traffic prior to the first Google Panda update and after.

This shows that traffic from search has not recovered their traffic since the original Panda update. Since Google hasn’t given EzineArticles their rankings back, it is questionable whether links from these artless will hold any as much weight as they used to as far as Google is concerned.

In terms of traffic generation, SEMrush shows that out of 190K keywords they ranked for in January 2013, almost 2,200 are at the number one position. This means that you can still generate a good amount of traffic from EzineArticles depending on the keywords your article ranks for and their search volume.

Hubpages.com

Hubpages currently maintains a Google PageRank of 6 and Domain Authority of 90. After they were hit by Google Panda, they revamped their website in a big way. Author profiles and articles were moved from the main domain to personalized subdomains (author.hubpages.com). Unfortunately for the authors, all of their articles and profiles lost any PageRank and Page Authority they had gained. And while author pages are nicer looking, authors have lost the ability to place links with keyword anchor text in their bio. They can only link to one website and their social profiles using icons.

The major changes that Hubpages made did work in regaining them their rankings in search about six months after the first Google Panda update.

Although their search engine traffic has been slowly declining again, they still rank for over 2 million keywords which is much better than EzineArticles. Over 10K of those keywords are at the number one position. One of the keywords in the number one position receives 22K searches per month and outranks 24 million other items in search – including a result from Wikipedia! One can assume they are still in Google’s good graces and that links from their network count.

Squidoo.com

Squidoo.com currently maintains a Google PageRank of 7 and Domain Authority of 95. It was one of the article networks that was not affected by the original Google Panda update. In fact, their network has only seen a steady growth in rankings.

In terms of strategy, they have a similar setup to Hubpages when it comes to content. They allow you to add text, video, images, and other Squidoo type widgets. Ironically, they allowed for more spam within their articles than Hubpages with a widget that allowed visitors to Squidoo articles to add links at will – some dofollow, some nofollow.

They currently rank for over 5 million keywords.

Article Marketing the Right Way

So how can you take advantage of article marketing for links and traffic – the right way. Here are some tips!

• Reserve your best content for your own website, then for guest blogging opportunities. Regardless of how great an article network is, you will want your best content to be on your own website first. Your next best content should be focused to guest blogging efforts in your niche. If the latter doesn’t exist, then you can apply that content towards article networks.
• Create unique content geared towards readers, not search engines. While optimizing your articles for search is a good thing, they shouldn’t just be written for search engines. Imagine your next client was going to read an article you posted on Squidoo as their first impression of your business. Write your articles with an end goal to actually drive a visitor back to the website you link to in your article or or your author bio.
• Skip automated spinning software. This includes any service that offers to take one piece of content and syndicate it across article networks. It goes back to unique content, and spinning software creates anything but.
• Build up your author profiles. Most of the good article directories allow you to create a strong author bio. Be sure that yours includes important information about you and your company as well as links to your website and social profiles.
• Claim Google authorship. Assuming you’re creating quality, unique content, you won’t mind sharing it via the authorship link between your articles and your Google+ profile. Having a picture by your articles in search could result in more clicks and more traffic back to your website.

Do you still use article marketing in your search marketing strategy or to generate traffic? What networks do you use and what additional tips would you give?

Taking in consideration all the unnatural link penalties lately and the new ones to come, Google surely does not only look at the individual links, but it also looks at the Anchor Text Profile naturalness.

Google tries to understand if the anchor text pointing to a site looks natural or not. This can be easily done by the search engine, if they are comparing anchor text distributions for the sites ranking on a specific keyword or for the sites ranking in a specific niche.

Usually people tend to link to your site with anchor text that contains:

• the brand name
• an url
• navigational queries such as : click here, visit etc
• random words

Rarely you will see unbiased people linking with commercial keywords, because it seems that it is not in the human nature to link to a product or site with a “keyword rich” anchor text. (unless the site has an EMD or a partial EMD for a commercial keyword which kinda of explains also the value of an EMD).

Google knows this, and it tolerates it, because it still needs this signal in its ranking algorithm. It is still an important signal, until Google will be able to completely understand conversation, and I am sure this is one of their main technical challenges. Co-citation is another signal that Google started using, but the search engine is still relying heavily on anchor text as a signal to guide Google in ranking a site on a specific set of keywords.(one signal in over 200 signals)

Google already has keywords classified as being Commercial or Not (think about the PPC data they have). Brand terms are also easily spotted by Google. (sample: cognitiveseo/cognitive seo or any other derivation from that).

Knowing that Google does this, I am sure that everyone’s desire would be to have access to similar data.

To make your “SEO life” easier we upgraded our service with a feature that allows you to view the same anchor text distributions based on Brand and Commercial anchor text.

As a quick case study I did an analysis on two niches:

• payday loans (very spammy)
• buy flowers (almost natural)

This is how the Brand vs Commercial anchor text distribution looks like in each of these niches.

Payday Loans Anchor Text Ratio

Buy Flowers Anchor Text Ratio

In the first graph we can spot a very high ratio of commercial anchor text 61% to 94% for the first two sites. The Brand anchor text ratio is somewhere around 6% to 20% for those two. If we compare it to the third site, we can see a very high brand anchor text ratio of 53% and a commercial anchor text ratio of 22%. This signals Google a difference in patterns, which means that it is highly probable that either the first two sites or the third site is doing some shady stuff.

Looking as the second graph we can see that big brand sites have a high Brand Anchor Text ratio. One of those 5 sites has a difference in patterns though. This again might signal Google a potential issue and the algorithms will go deeper to investigate it. In certain cases this might be a false alarm, but in most of the cases big differences in anchor text profile distribution means something is unnatural.

Keep in mind that there is no secret distribution ratio like 60% Brand / 20% Commercial and 20% Misc. The ratio is related to the specific niche of the site. In some niches 70% Brand anchor text might be natural while in other niches 40% Brand anchor text might be natural.

To put it simply:

Brand Anchor Text is one of the signals that Google takes in consideration when deciding if a site should be “trusted” or not, while the Commercial Anchor Text tells Google what keywords might the site be interested in ranking.

Using this new cognitiveSEO feature you will be able to:

• Understand the overall distribution of Brand,Commercial and Misc Anchor Text ( Misc keywords are navigational keywords or keywords that do not fit in the first two categories)

• Browse over the Anchor Text Cloud to easily comprehend “What is What” (actionable also. click the keyword and you get the links using that anchor text)

• Filter by Brand Flag and be able to segment your link profile the way you need it for your backlink analysis.

Here are a few other interesting articles on the anchor text distribution topic:

• Anchor Text Analysis: Post “Penguin” and EMD
• How to Use Varied Anchor Text and Still Rank Well for Targeted Keyword Phrases
• Anchor Text Distribution in the Payday Loans Niche
• How and When to Diversify Your Anchor Text

What do you think on the Brand vs Commercial anchor text distribution ? What are the numbers that you see in your niche?