how do i rank higher in search engines?€¦ · and optimizing your website for search engines can...

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Answers to the 26 SEO Questions You Were Too Afraid to Ask

How Do I Rank Higher in Search Engines?

How do I rank higher in se

Contents: PG 04 How does Google search work?

PG 05 What ranking factors does Google consider?

PG 07 What’s the most used search engine? Google vs. Bing vs. Yahoo?

PG 08 How long does it take Google to index my new website/article/post?

PG 09 What is the difference between indexed and crawling?

PG 10 Do keywords matter?

PG 11 How many times should I use a keyword?

PG 12 What is keyword stuffing?

PG 13 Does my domain name (URL) matter?

PG 14 What are backlinks and do they matter?

PG 15 What are meta descriptions and do they still matter?

PG 16 Does having a mobile-friendly website matter?

PG 17 What is the robots.txt file?

PG 18 What is the sitemap.xml file?

PG 19 Why do you need to add alt text to your images?

PG 20 Subfolders vs. Subdomain: What’s better for SEO?

PG 21 Does social media impact search engine rankings?

PG 22 Does “fresh content” matter?

PG 23 What is duplicate content?

PG 24 What will get my website penalized?

PG 26 What’s a manual penalty?

PG 27 What’s the deal with the Panda algorithm update?

PG 29 What’s the deal with the Penguin algorithm update?

PG 30 What is Google’s Knowledge Graph?

PG 31 What are Google’s Answer Boxes?

PG 32 Okay, so how do I rank higher in search engine rankings?

PG 34 Sources

How Do I Rank Higher in Search Engine Rankings? | TABLE OF CONTENTS vtldesign.com / @vital_design

Your website’s rankings in search engines are a major contributor to the

number of leads you get from your website.

The trouble is search engine algorithms are complex. And optimizing your

website for search engines can be a frustrating experience if you don’t know

where to start.

This ebook is intended to give you a starting point — a framework to better

understand how search engines work and how you can increase your

website’s rankings.

So you want your website to rank higher in search engines? Of course you do, and you should.

PG 03 | How Do I Rank Higher in Search Engine Rankings? | INTRODUCTION vtldesign.com / @vital_design

A: It’s complicated.When a user enters a query, Google’s machines search the index for matching

pages and return the results they believe are the most relevant to the user (based

on Google’s algorithms). And how do they determine relevance you ask?

For a typical query, there are thousands, if not millions, of webpages with

potentially helpful information. Algorithms are the computer processes and

formulas that take your questions and turn them into answers. Today Google’s

algorithms rely on more than 200 unique signals or “clues” that make it possible

to guess what you might really be looking for. These signals include things like the

keywords on websites, the freshness of content, your region and PageRank.

How does Google search work?

PG 04 | How Do I Rank Higher in Search Engine Rankings? | QUESTION 1 vtldesign.com / @vital_design


What ranking factors does Google consider?A: Google considers over 200 ranking factors. Here’s a list of ranking factor correlations from Moz.


A: Google. Hands down.Over the past couple of years, comScore reports have declared Google to be at a

65-68% market share, with most of the remainder divided up between Bing and

Yahoo. Yet, these numbers don’t seem to align with what most webmasters see

in their analytics reports and with survey data.

What’s the most used search engine? Google vs. Bing vs. Yahoo?


In a survey conducted by Search Engine Land, on the

question of which search engine respondents considered to

be their primary search engine, Google was the big winner:

80%8%

6%

A: It can take Google several days to over six weeks to index your new content. This depends on a variety of factors including how many pages are on your site, what

your domain authority is, how deep on your site the new pages are and how often you

update your site.

How long does it take Google to index my new website/article/post?


A: When search engines look through the content on your website, they are crawling your site. As they crawl your site, they index content that will appear in the search engine.

However, an important thing to remember is that not all content is indexed. Search

engines pick what content they will and won’t index as they go through the crawling

process.

What is the difference between indexed and crawling?


A: Yes. But not as much as they used to. It’s important to do keyword research and to use keywords in your content, just don’t

overdo it. Using keywords helps tell Google what your content is about. This is important

when Google is trying to match relevant content to a searcher’s query.

Thanks to recent updates to Google’s algorithm (see Hummingbird mentioned later in this

ebook), the user’s intent is increasingly more important than the actual keyword alone.

Do keywords matter?


Replace keyword research with user intent research. Keywords are still an integral part of content strategy. But what’s

more important is to determine the intent behind those keywords.

What did the searcher intend to find when they typed in the

keywords? Create content others will share with users’ intent in mind,

not the algorithm.”

A: Google has become very sophisticated and doesn’t need the keyword repeated 50 times on every page. In the old days, (say, 2008), the metric “keyword density” was important, but now having

too much keyword density will get you in trouble.

So what should you do? Use the keyword in your headline, your URL, your meta

description, a few image alt tags, the first paragraph of your content and then a few

more times in the body copy—if it comes up naturally in the flow of the writing.

How many times should I use a keyword?


https://vtldesign.com/inbound-marketing/16-marketing-kpis-to-measure/

A: “Keyword stuffing refers to the practice of loading a webpage with keywords or numbers in an attempt to manipulate a site’s ranking in Google search results. Often these keywords appear in a list or group, or out of context (not as natural prose).

Filling pages with keywords or numbers results in a negative user experience, and can

harm your site’s ranking. Focus on creating useful, information-rich content that uses

keywords appropriately and in context.” — Google

Examples of keyword stuffing include:

What is keyword stuffing?


Repeating the same words or phrases so often that it sounds unnatural

Blocks of text listing cities and states a webpage is trying to rank for

Lists of phone numbers without substantial added value

Using keyword few times is good keyword use. Using keyword too

many times is not good keyword use but bad keyword use. Using too

many keywords is bad keyword use as it is keyword overuse, keyword

kill or keyword stuffing. Bad keyword use, keyword repetition, keyword

stuffing, keyword kill or keyword overuse is bad keyword use.

— Paul Agabin

A: Not really. Not for search engine rankings. It matters for your brand. This used to be an easy way to rank in the old days (again, say, 2008), but ever since

Google rolled out a filter called the “EMD Update” we’ve seen the use of keywords in the

domain name matter less and less to rankings.

“The EMD Update — for ‘Exact Match Domain’ — is a filter Google launched in

September 2012 to prevent poor quality sites from ranking well simply because they

had words that match search terms in their domain names.” — Search Engine Land

That said, for branding purposes having a domain that represents your brand and

works well on marketing materials will have value to your company, just not to search

engines.

Does my domain name (URL) matter?


http://www.awesomebrand.com

A: When other websites and blogs link to your website, those are called backlinks.They help with SEO because Google and other search engine algorithms see them as

“signs of approval,” or third party votes for your website. It is important to remember

that Google and other search engines hold diversity of links in high regard. They see it

as a broader way of reaching more people.

Google will reward companies that possess these qualities with better rankings. These

links can also be effective from a user experience standpoint. Users might wish to find

out more about a company’s partners or affiliates. A link provides easy navigation to

the site they are looking to explore.

What are backlinks and do they matter?


A: A page’s meta description is the text that appears below your page in a search engine result that explains what the page is all about. Meta descriptions used to be a place to optimize for keywords so crawlers would know

more about your page contents; now, it’s more important that you write something

compelling that makes readers want to click so you can improve conversion rates from

search engine results to your website.

It’s important to note that your meta description, in most cases, needs to contain the

search query (or something close to it) in order for Google to use it in search results. If

it doesn’t, then it’s possible that a random few sentences from the text of the page that

DOES contain the keyword will be used in place of your description.

What are meta descriptions and do they still matter?


A: Yes. On April 21, 2015, Google expanded their use of mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal. This is the most significant mobile algorithm change to date. The algorithm analyzes

mobile compatibility on a page-by-page basis (rather than a website-wide basis).

Think about it. Google wants to provide the most relevant results to their users, right?

And if their users are searching from a mobile device, the most relevant results will be a

page/website that is, at the very least, mobile-friendly.

Does having a mobile-friendly website matter?


60% of cell phone owners use their cell phone to access the Internet.

- Pew Research Center

A: This is a file that gives Googlebot, as well as other web crawlers, directives as to which areas of your server you want crawled, and which you don’t. The robots.txt file, in most cases, can be set to allow any bot to crawl your whole site.

In some cases, such as when using WordPress, you can use a robots boilerplate that

tells Google to no-index certain directories that have no value in search. Its important to

have this file, as Google is looking for it in Webmaster tools, but it should be noted you

can seriously hurt your rankings if it is not done properly!

What is the robots.txt file?


http://www.website.com/robots.txt

A: This file is an index of all the pages on your site and content on your site.This file allows you to tell Google which pages, PDFs, images, etc., should be indexed,

and also allows you to tell Google how often you expect your site to be updated. Google

uses this info in Webmaster Tools to identify critical issues with your site. If you’re using

a CMS, there is probably a plugin you can use to update your sitemap automatically. If

not, you’ll need to do it each time you add a new piece of content.

What is the sitemap.xml file?


http://www.vtldesign/sitemap.xml

A: First and foremost, the alt tag is for accessibility. People who can’t see use tools that read the alt text aloud to describe what is on the

screen. The alt tag should also contain your targeted keyword because it is considered

one of the core on-page attributes. Plus, if a page doesn’t load for some reason, people

can still find out what the image is by reading the alt text.

Why do you need to add alt text to your images?


<img src= “https://vtldesign.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/

The-16-Marketing-KPIs-You-Should-Be-Measuring.jpg”

alt= “The 16 Marketing KPIs You Should Be Measuring” />

https://vtldesign.com/inbound-marketing/16-marketing-kpis-to-measure/

Subfolders vs. Subdomain: What’s better for SEO?


A: Subfolder. To clarify here’s the difference:

Subdomain: blog.yourwebsite.com

Subfolder: yourwebsite.com/blog

While Google’s official stance is that it does not matter, repeated tests by SEO experts

have shown that putting content in a subfolder will add to the overall value of the

domain and will help content placed in that subfolder rank better.

yourwebsite.com/about yourwebsite.com/products yourwebsite.com/blog

yourwebsite.com

ABOUT PRODUCTS BLOG

A: No. Yes. Maybe. Facebook and Twitter signals are not part of Google’s ranking algorithm officially. However, retweets containing links have been shown to increase rank in search,

generally for a short period of time. There are a few big case studies out there showing

this data.

On January 22, 2014, Google’s Matt Cutts released a video saying that social signals—

metrics such as Facebook likes and Twitter followers, which indicate a profile’s authority

and influence—do not affect search rankings.

Interestingly, Bing’s Webmaster Guidelines state that social media does contribute to

ranking in search engines through influence, and that being influential in social leads

to a higher organic search ranking over time. Bing went on to state that social media

should still be included as one part of a comprehensive SEO campaign.

While social shares may or may not affect a webpage’s position in search listings, social

profiles do rank in search results. Additionally, the traffic sent via social contributes to

on-page user engagement metrics like pageviews and time on site, so by improving

those with relevant social media traffic you can send signals to Google that users find

your site relevant.

Does social media impact search engine rankings?


yourwebsite.com

Does “fresh content” matter?


A: Sometimes. Search engines love new (fresh) content when being new is relevant to the user’s search query.

The context of why the content is new is important. Basically Google feels only certain search

queries deserve fresh content to be served as a result.

From Search Engine Land:

“Google does have a ‘Query Deserved Freshness (QDF)’ signal. If there’s a search that is suddenly very

popular versus its normal activity, Google will apply QDF to that term and look to see if there’s any fresh

content on that topic. If there is, that new or fresh content is given a boost in search results.

“The best way to think about this is a term like ‘tornado’.

“If there’s no active tornado, then the search results will likely contain listings to government and

reference sites. But if there’s an active tornado, results will change and may reflect stories, news and

information about the active tornado. Sites can take advantage of this freshness boost by producing

relevant content that matches the real-time pulse of their industry.

“You can’t just update your pages (or the publish date) every day thinking that will make them ‘fresh’

and more likely to rank. Nor can you just add new pages constantly, just for the sake of having new

pages, and think that gives you a freshness boost. It won’t.”

A: From Google: “Duplicate content generally refers to substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely match other content or are appreciably similar. Mostly, this is not deceptive in origin.“However, in some cases, content is deliberately duplicated across domains in an attempt

to manipulate search engine rankings or win more traffic. Deceptive practices like this can

result in a poor user experience, when a visitor sees substantially the same content repeated

within a set of search results.

“Google tries hard to index and show pages with distinct information. This filtering means,

for instance, that if your site has a ‘regular’ and ‘printer’ version of each article, and neither

of these is blocked with a noindex meta tag, we’ll choose one of them to list.

“In the rare cases in which Google perceives that duplicate content may be shown with intent

to manipulate our rankings and deceive our users, we’ll also make appropriate adjustments

in the indexing and ranking of the sites involved. As a result, the ranking of the site may

suffer, or the site might be removed entirely from the Google index, in which case it will no

longer appear in search results.”

This is why you can’t just take an article, publish it to multiple other websites and think

that your article will rank (in search engines) on all of them. It won’t.

What is duplicate content?


What will get my website penalized?


A: The are many reasons why your website could be penalized.

A Google penalty is the negative impact on a website’s search rankings based on

updates to Google’s search algorithms and/or manual review. The penalty can be

an unfortunate by-product of an algorithm update or an intentional penalization for

various black-hat SEO techniques.

Keyword Stuffing — A very high keyword density is a flag for poorly written content. If

Google detects a weirdly high number of keywords in a page, it may penalize you.

Paid Links — These are simply links that people place on their site for a fee as they

believe this will have a positive impact on the search results. The practice of paid links

was very popular prior to the Penguin update when companies believed they could add

any types of links with impunity since Google claimed prior to that time that they simply

ignored such links they detected instead of penalizing websites.

Article Spinning — Spinning works by rewriting existing articles, or parts of articles,

and replacing specific words, phrases, sentences, or even entire paragraphs with any

number of alternate versions to provide a slightly different variation with each spin

and posting them on other websites, linking back to your website. This process is often

completely automated and is obviously a clear violation of Google’s guidelines.

Duplicate Content — Any duplicate content on your site makes it less useful in

Google’s view, and that could result in a penalty. Make sure your content is unique and

well-written.

Scraped Content — Sometimes website managers pull content from other sites in

order to bulk our their own pages. Google sees this as pointless duplication.

Hidden Content — Less ethical optimization tactics include disguising text on a page to

manipulate the theme or keyword weighting. The old trick used to be using white text

on a white background. Don’t do it.


Blog Networks — Blog networks are a collection of sometimes thousands of blogs that

aim to appear unconnected, which then link out to those prepared to pay for such links.

Google has typically targeted blog networks and once detecting them has penalized

thousands of sites who benefited.

Over-Optimization — Google doesn’t like to see too much of a good thing. An over-

optimization penalty usually means you’ve gone a step too far in your bid to obsessively

out-SEO everyone else in your industry. Cool it and publish some natural content

before your rank suffers.

Bad Domain History — You may have innocently purchased a domain with a bad

history, and that could cause you problems when you try to build a new site around it.

You may be best cutting your losses and buying another domain rather than throwing

more money at the problem.

Keyword domains — While domain names aren’t that risky in and of themselves,

domain names with keywords in them might be. Consider the anchor text linking issue:

if we repeatedly link to that domain, Google might see that as anchor text manipulation.

If you do use an exact match domain, make sure it has plenty of great content on it,

otherwise Google will assume you’re trying to fool people into clicking.

Excessive Reciprocal Links — The old “you link to me and I’ll link to you.” Swapping

links was once an innocent marketing tactic until it started to be abused. If you’ve been

exchanging lots of links with clients, it could be seen as a manipulation attempt.

Buying Links — Buying links could certainly be seen as an attempt to manipulate

PageRank, and therein lies the controversy. If you’ve been buying bad links (and lots of

them), your actions could catch up with you.

Internal 404s — Google wants to know that you tend to your content and weed out any

errors and problems. If you’re delivering 404s inside your own website, it’s a surefire

signal that your users aren’t getting the information they ask for.

yourwebsite.com

A: While Google relies on algorithms to evaluate and constantly improve search quality, they’re also willing to take manual action on sites that use spammy techniques, such as demoting them or even removing them from search results altogether.If your site isn’t appearing in search results, or isn’t performing as well as it once did,

we recommend checking the Message Center of your Webmaster Tools and seeing if

you’ve been notified of a manual penalty taken against your website.

What’s a manual penalty?


yourwebsite.com

What’s the deal with the Panda algorithm update?


A: First rolled out in February 2011, Panda is a Google algorithm update aimed at fightin low-quality content.

This update aimed to lower the rank of “low-quality sites” or “thin sites” (sites using

keyword stuffing and duplicated or stolen content), and return higher-quality sites near

the top of the search results. It also made webmasters realize how much duplicate

content could hurt their websites by holding them down in rankings.

Unlike PageRank, Panda, which Google runs quite regularly, ranks the entire site or a

big section of the website so all pages must be optimized and free of duplicate content.

Panda likes to read original content.

To know whether your site content is low quality or not, here are some helpful

questions asked by Google Webmaster Central Blog to aid you in determining what is

low quality content:

Does the site have duplicate, overlapping or redundant articles on the same or

similar topics with slightly different keyword variations?

Is the content mass-produced by or outsourced to a large number of creators, or

spread across a large network of sites, so that individual pages or sites don’t get as

much attention or care?

Are the articles short, unsubstantial or otherwise lacking in helpful specifics?

Are the pages produced with great care and attention to detail vs. less attention to

detail?

Does this article have spelling, stylistic or factual errors?


And here are the questions Google says you should ask to determine if the content is

actually authoritative:

Would you trust the information presented in this article?

Is this article written by an expert/enthusiast who knows the topic well, or is it more

shallow in nature?

Is the site a recognized authority on its topic?

Would you recognize this site as an authoritative source when mentioned by name?

Is this the sort of page you’d want to bookmark, share with a friend, or

recommend?

Panda updates are continually rolled out, so it’s important to make sure you’re creating

the most relevant, unique content possible.

A: First announced on April 24, 2014, Google Penguin is an algorithm update aimed at fightin web spam. The update is aimed at decreasing search engine rankings of websites that violate

Google’s Webmaster Guidelines by using now declared black-hat SEO techniques

involved in artificially increasing the ranking of a webpage by manipulating the number

of links pointing to the page. Such tactics are commonly described as link schemes or

link farms.

What’s the deal with The Penguin Algorithm Update?


website1

website2

website5

website4

website6

website3

Link Scheme/Farm

What is Google’s Knowledge Graph?


A: It is the knowledge base used by Google to understand facts about people, places and things and how these entities are all connected. The Knowledge Graph manifests in an information card that shows up to the right of

search results. These information cards don’t always appear, only showing up when Google

deems them relevant. With the Knowledge Graph, Google can better understand your

query, so they can summarize relevant content around that topic, including key facts you’re

likely to need for that particular thing.

For example, if you’re looking for Frank Lloyd Wright, the information card will

tell you when he was born and died, but you’ll also get details on his architectural

accomplishments and books. This is an example of one entity within the Knowledge Graph,

which Google now claims has over 200 million entities.

“We’ve always believed that the perfect search

engine should understand exactly what you

mean and give you back exactly what you

want. And we can now sometimes help answer

your next question before you’ve asked it,

because the facts we show are informed by

what other people have searched for. For

example, the information we show for Tom

Cruise answers 37 percent of next queries that

people ask about him.” — Google

A: Its Google’s way of providing answers, not just links.An “answer box” is a SERP feature, usually displayed in a light-gray box that appears

above the organic results (left column) and tries to directly answer a question. Most of

these answers come directly from Google’s Knowledge Graph, though some answers

are pulled from other authoritative websites.

For example, if you were to ask Google, “What is the Declaration of Independence?” it

will show an answer, pulled from Wikipedia (see below).

You’ll notice you don’t have to actually visit a website to get the answer.

A recent study found that almost 20% of search results had rich answers in some

format (Knowledge Graph panels or Answer Boxes). For the business that counts on

website traffic from Google, that’s a lot of traffic these rich answers are taking away by

serving answers (without requiring the user to visit the website).

What are Google’s Answer Boxes?


Okay, so how do I rank higher in search engine rankings?


A: That is the question. You need to think about it from Google’s standpoint.

They want to provide the most relevant results to their users. This is Google’s entire

value proposition, If their search engines start providing a bad experience they’ll lose

their users who will just go elsewhere (Bing or Yahoo).

Understanding #1: Google Considers Searchers To Be Their Users (Not Your

Potential Customers)

This means that they are direly concerned with their user’s experience and the

relevance of the results that Google serves up. They always want to provide their

users with the most relevant and helpful results possible.

Therefore you should always create content that is relevant and helpful to their

users (your target audience), as opposed to content you think will simply rank well

in search engines.

Understanding #2: Google Ranks Pages, Not Websites

This is a common misunderstanding. You’re not working to get your entire site to

rank. Instead you should be working to get specific pages from your website to

rank in search engines.


This is why having a content marketing strategy is so important, and why a blog

post/article is such a powerful tool. Each new blog post added to your website

counts as a brand new page, and once it gets indexed it has the opportunity to

rank. The more pages you create on your website, the more opportunities you have

to rank.

Understanding #3: There Are No Shortcuts

There are shortcuts to improving your website’s rankings.

You can’t game Google. You can try, and it might work for a little bit, but eventually

they’ll notice. And when they notice, they’ll slap you with a penalty and remove your

website from their index. We’ve seen it over and over again. Google continually

slams the door on any attempt to cheat the system.

Panda and Penguin (mentioned earlier) were two updates from Google that had a

devastating impact on sites who were using spammy practices. Nowadays having

your website removed from Google’s index and thus tanking your traffic can

literally put you out of business. It’s just not worth it.

The path to improving rankings is based on discipline and fortitude — the discipline

to consistently create relevant content and the fortitude to not give up when you’re

not ranking on page 1 by next week. Improving your rankings in search engines

is a long-term strategy, requiring patience, an expertise in continually following/

understanding the latest updates from Google and the ability to create relevant

content for their/your users.


Sources:

PG 34 | How Do I Rank Higher in Search Engine Rankings? | SOURCES vtldesign.com / @vital_design

Google http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/

Moz

http://moz.com/blog/seo-value-knowledge-graph-answer-boxes-whiteboard-friday

KISS Metricshttps://blog.kissmetrics.com/penalized-by-google/

Search Engine Land http://searchengineland.com/library/google/emd-update

Search Engine Land http://searchengineland.com/whos-really-winning-search-war-204651

Search Engine Land http://searchengineland.com/google-launches-knowledge-graph-121585

Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_penalty

RavenTools http://blog.raventools.com/social-media-impact-seo/

HubSpothttp://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/seo-faqs-list-ht

Josh Bachynski http://moz.com/blog/panda-41-google-leaked-dos-and-donts-whiteboard-friday

how do i rank higher in search engines?€¦ · and optimizing your website for search engines can...

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